Joe

Thomas Kidd: “Maybe the most illuminating book I read this year. Like many Christians, I have always been puzzled by the creedal statements that Jesus descended to hell, or to the dead. Emerson’s book offers great insight into what the creeds mean by this statement, and how the doctrine may fit into evangelical theology of Christ’s death and resurrection.”

Ballsy reporting of the infiltration from Europe of the most prominent left-wing street milita into America. While his subjects cowered behind masks, he stood in the open and documented the crap out of his story with 429 endnotes.

Meandering civilian re-acclimation for a late 20s vet without much of a plumbline until he invests hope in an ephemeral internal encounter. I found the narrative flat and wasn't impressed with the resting point at a sort of self-creation. Immersive description of mid-20th Century New Orleans.

Deeply-sourced critical biography of the American church's fleet admiral of antimodernism. He lived a tragic hero, having first embraced modern German approaches to Scripture early in his studies. He then saw them as a needed push against the American church's parochial confinement. But the eventual Wilsonian deluge of modernity that followed forced Machen into defending ground he had earlier belittled.

Burnett's unique contribution is to show that Machen the Prophet did not spring forth fully-formed, but developed over time, paradoxically from some positions he would later reject.

Though he carried a hale-fellow-well-met disposition, his convictions increasingly demanded a willingness to stand alone throughout much of his professional life. The personal agony of his course makes him a paradigmatic figure for the despondence following the extinguishing of the long 19th Century's faith in Progress and Institutions in the ashes of WW1.

The most interesting part of the biography was the finding that the hinge in his scholarly life may have been provided by the popular mass work of working-class evangelist Billy Sunday, who quipped that he "knew as much about theology as a jackrabbit knows about ping-pong." His personal participation in Sunday's events ushered him over a threshold at which he had been lingering for a while.

Thorough at 750 pages, it will stand as the subject's critical bedrock for decades. Chronologically, it rushes through the end of Machen's life, eliding the institutional drama around bootstrapping of Westminster Seminary, and with a slight stutter, some facts are repeated in different chapters. D.G. Hart's biography remains a more concise and inspirational first look at Machen's life.

Much hope died in the early 20th Century, but looking back, one finds a bright beacon in the conviction of a man bound to the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Thomas Kidd: “Russian history has long been fascinating to me. This gripping book gave me a new appreciation for just how unlikely it was that the Leninists could have taken over the Russian government, and just how disastrous it was that they did.”