Joe
Hobsbawm argued that nations emerged only recently with modernism and, writing in 1989, that globalism fated them to imminent obsolescence. History has not looked kindly upon this thesis, and he offered some begrudging caveats in a 1992 edition. Contrasting historians like Smith (1986) have correctly foreseen nationalism's persistence and proliferation because few other non-religious constructs meet human needs for identity, continuity, and collective immortality that an ethno-national myth provides.
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.”
Fed by the Second Great Awakening, cheap communication, and a crew of passionate disciples, the early national period witnessed a revolution in religious possibility. Old traditions and networks that narrowed the spread of religiosity melted away, and the common Christian grasped anew the possibility of unmediated, electric communication with God Himself. More than the politics or technology of the era, the religious upheaval shaped the self-understanding of America as passionate, free, and divinely-orchestrated.
Howe's work is an apex achievement for a historian. It covers a vast, complex period (US early national) while skillfully condensing it. Undertakings like these are too easy to leave important clippings on the floor or to produce an unreadable multivolume tome. Considering some subtopics I knew well, he displayed mastery at consolidating the thick details into a few need-to-know paragraphs. It is a generational standard like Genevese's or Foner's.
Howe uniquely excels at sketching out topics which first demand a deep internal grasp before explaining them to others, like evangelical Christianity (the complexities of millennialism) and judicial hermeneutics.
The greatest limit to this work is a relentless moralizing tic, even though I agree with most of his judgments. But he is too eager to evaluate what he narrates, and often comes off as the uncle who cannot eat a single dish at Thanksgiving without offering his critique of it afterwards. I found some explanatory peace from reading his concluding chapter in another book on the Victorians, where he calls for a re-Victorianization of life, including heavy use of moralization.
One of the fresh narrative arcs for me was the transformation of John Calhoun's early buoyant Unionism at the start into the hardened defensiveness of nullification at the end. One of Howe's touchstones is Americans' constant hopeful embrace of the "shrinking of distance" sprouting from technical breakthroughs (like the telegraph and railroads). Yet by the end of his telling, Howe paints a picture of a nation brought closer together only to discover that familiarity has led them to question the wisdom of having done so.
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.
Evangelical preachers in the southern part of new national America faced the updraft and challenges of disestablishment. Their initial precarity aligned them with complex counter-cultural relationships opposing slavery and white disenfranchisement which ebbed as they gained a lasting toehold into local cultures.
Powerful text for the therapeutic school termed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), applied to the detachment of imparted meaning from the experience of chronic pain. However, the author discloses late in the book that it is written as a religious book from his Buddhist priors. That provides context for his call to make commitments based on what he sees as subjective values. Outside the grammar of transcendence, these become flimsy over time because they are based only around a metavalue of rejecting meaning in the face of experience.
This volume of 35 essays from from contributors looking for points of engagement across denominational lines orbits around a central challenge of testing the fundamentalist-modernist dichotomy that frames most 20th century histories. Lutheran Mark Granquist challenges the grasp of the ecumenical movement in assuming only one legitimate historical course championed by another contributor, his doktorvater Martin Marty. Granquist points out similarities between the confessionalism of Lutherans and that of OPC/Machen in that they sought an internal adjudication of questions of authority, not that framed by ecumenism. He boxes out the Lutheran embrace of language around biblical authority as chiefly the sublimation of their confessional principles. My only critique would be to suggest history shows more of a genuine two-way interaction, not necessarily that Lutherans used evangelical language around biblical theology as a weapon in a deeper internal discussion around a theology of the Word.
Landmark missiology text of the late 20th century. Best enduring contribution is the concept of a "people group." Absolutely descriptive is the "homogenous unit principle," which is the limiting radial span of cultural distance between people groups. Biggest missed insight is that there are people groups who want to expand their span.
This volume (OUP, 2025) finds that the 1st Century document The Testimony of Flavius was likely authored by the period’s most reliable historian, Josephus. Based on textual criticism, Josephus likely drew on the first-hand knowledge of people who participated in Jesus’ trial and the “first men” who participated in his crucifixion. In this document, Josephus upholds the scaffolding of the New Testament witness and disproves theories that the resurrection was bolted on much later beyond the apostolic witness. It finds a Jesus of history aligned with the Christ of early faith.
