Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy, by Paul C. Gutjahr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xl + 477. $54.00 (softcover). ISBN-13: 978-0199895526. [Reviewed by David J. Engelsma.]

Charles Hodge is everything a good biography ought to be. First and foremost, the subject is one of great importance in history—in this case, the history of the church. Charles Hodge was the most prominent and influential Presbyterian of the nineteenth century. His work of both teaching—at Princeton Seminary—and writing guided the large Presbyterian Church, influenced multitudes of Presbyterians and other Christians, and defended the Christian, Reformed faith against numerous heresies. Concerning this last, Hodge was a controversialist, even though personally a mild-mannered, kindly, and peace-loving man.

Second, the biography teaches not only about the subject of the book but also concerning many other important theologians with whom Hodge had contact—in many cases continuing contact— and concerning a number of fundamental truths of the Christian religion. The Reformed Christian in the Dutch Reformed tradition usually has little knowledge of his Presbyterian cousins and of their struggles on behalf of sound doctrine and the true church. What do we know of Transcendentalism; of the “Old School/New School” divide of the early 1800s; of the “Second Great Awakening” of the middle 1800s and its threat to the Calvinism of the Presbyterian Church; of the controversy in the Presbyterian Church over recognizing the validity of Roman Catholic baptism; of the titanic debate between Hodge and Thornwell over the nature of the church at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 1860; of the influence of Charles Darwin upon Presbyterianism; of the struggle in the Presbyterian Church over the biblical or unbiblical nature of slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War; and more?

Third, the book is pungent, excellent writing, carrying the reader into all of this doctrine, controversy, and other features of the life and labor of Hodge.

Hodge devoted his entire ministry to teaching theology at Princeton Seminary. He taught from 1820 to his death in 1878. He never pastored a congregation. Princeton Seminary began in 1812 in the home of Archibald Alexander, founder of the seminary a mere eight years before Hodge came on the scene. For many years it was the only seminary of the Presbyterian Church. During the tenure of Alexander, Miller, Hodge, and their immediate successors, it was orthodox, deliberately according to the standard of the Reformed faith set forth in the Westminster Confession and Catechisms. In large part, the abiding orthodoxy of the seminary was due to the reality that Hodge himself pointed out when he famously declared that “a new idea never originated in this Seminary” (363). Hodge taught thousands of Presbyterian pastors and missionaries, as well as a large number of ministers from other denominations. By an influential theological journal that he founded and by his other writings, he defended and spread conservative Calvinism, not only throughout America, but also throughout the world. Hodge had contacts, students, and friends throughout Europe.

His best known and most influential book was his commentary on Romans. The book was occasioned by a popular commentary on Romans by a fellow Presbyterian, Albert Barnes, who made the epistle to the Romans an Arminian gospel. In his own commentary, Hodge made the fifth chapter of the book, with its teaching of the imputation of Adam’s sin and of the atonement of Christ, truths that Barnes denied, his emphasis.

Much of Hodge’s controversial writing contended with a powerful movement of unsound and misguided evangelical fervor within the churches. The movement minimized sound doctrine (mere “head knowledge”) in favor of passion and enthusiasm on the part of the revivalist (“knowledge of the heart”). Charles Finney was having his Arminian and Pelagian way in the Presbyterian Church in the name of “evangelism.” Finney began his career as a Presbyterian. The theological thinking that Hodge opposed was expressed by one of the liberals in these words: “True Christianity [is] found not in cold doctrine but in ‘a heart that breathes kindness and love’” (353).

The issue of Arminian evangelism was at the heart of the “New School” schism in the Presbyterian Church. The socalled “Second Great Awakening” contributed to the schism. “Tensions continued to flare around particular issues in the mid-1830s, one of the most pronounced being revivalism” (162). George Whitefield, who in some circles is revered as a Calvinistic evangelist, found no favor in the eyes of Charles Hodge, as indeed he ought not find favor in the eyes of any Reformed theologian. Not only was Whitefield a “free-lancer,” operating on his own, under the authority and supervision of no consistory, but also his evangelistic methods were unsound, if not absurd.

Aside from their blatant disregard for ministerial decorum [with reference to their sheer independency and disregard for the instituted church-DJE], Hodge looked askance at how Whitefield and Davenport credited vibrant, bodily manifestations of the Holy Spirit as signs of true conversion. He saw their preaching as too often bent on encouraging outward signs when they had little or no correlation to true conversion. He found offensive Whitefield’s comment that “he never saw a more glorious sight, than when the people were fainting all around him, and crying out in such a manner as to drown his own voice.” Violent shaking, shouting, hysterical convulsions, fainting, and wild laughter had little to do with Hodge’s precious sense of order. He very much doubted whether the Holy Spirit could be the force behind such chaos. Hodge went so far as to characterize such phenomena as belonging to a “whole class of nervous diseases” (191, 192).

The church political antics by Presbyterians of both the Old School and the New School at a General Assembly in 1838 defy the Reformed imagination (183, 184).

One can only regret that he was born too late to listen in on the eight-day debate between Hodge and James Henley Thornwell, outstanding theologian of the Presbyterian Church in the South, at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 1860. The issue was the doctrine of the church (288-292). At that time, there were ecclesiastical giants in the land, and broader assemblies carried on lengthy, solid debates on significant issues. A speaker was not told at his rising to debate that he had six and one half minutes to present and argue his case.

One aspect of Thornwell’s doctrine of the church was his contention that church and state are separate: “Thornwell taught that the Church was a spiritual body that should abstain from joining itself to secular institutions or causes” (289). Thornwell argued this contention in the setting of the onset of the Civil War. He held that the Presbyterian Church in the North had no right to speak out on the issue of slavery. Hodge, who himself had slaves (whom he treated kindly and about whose slavery he had misgivings), argued that the church may pronounce on social issues in the name of Jesus Christ.

As a sidelight on Hodge’s slaveholding, Gutjahr notes that in 1989 narrow-minded, liberal (but I repeat myself) seminarians at Princeton Seminary took down Hodge’s picture from the wall of the seminary in protest that Hodge did not sufficiently oppose slavery (389). These are the same prospective ministers who genuflect at the feet of professors who deny the deity of Jesus.

Thornwell defended the secession of the South from the union of the States as a matter, not of slavery, but of states rights—a defensible position in theory, but not so much in hard reality. Hodge exerted himself to preserve the denominational unity of the Presbyterian Church in the South and of the Presbyterian Church in the North, to no avail.

A philosophy that Hodge held in tandem with his Calvinistic theology undid him in the important matter of the doctrine of creation. The philosophy was Scottish Common Sense. Roughly, it amounted to the idea that every human has a genuine common sense reception to the truth, not only as found in Scripture, but also as found in nature. Implied is that there is an authoritative revelation of God in nature that must be allowed to determine the belief of the Christian with, and in some cases overriding, the revelation of Scripture. This philosophy betrayed Hodge into accepting the seeming finding of science that the world is very old, contrary to the revelation of Scripture. Hodge, therefore, was open to the theory that the age of the earth is millions, if not billions, of years. This theory demands what we now call “theistic evolution.” This opened the way in the Presbyterian Church to an evolutionary explanation of origins, with all the compromise of other fundamental doctrines that this theory entails. Hodge allowed scientific “findings” to explain the days of Genesis 1 as ages (367, 368).

However, this same Hodge wrote a vigorous, popular attack on Darwinian evolutionary theory at the time that Darwinian evolutionary thought was threatening the Presbyterian Church (371).

The Presbyterian Church of Alexander, Miller, and Charles Hodge is no more, that is, it is no more the Presbyterian Church of the Westminster Confession of Faith. It is a false church, denying every fundamental truth of the gospel of grace. The Church became fertile in conceiving and giving birth to “new ideas.” But its heritage did not die with the death of that institution. It lingered in the person and work of B. B. Warfield. It passed on to J. Gresham Machen and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (377-385).

Space would fail me to refer to all the instructive, fascinating, and delightful aspects of this superb biography, including that Hodge wrote all his many and often lengthy works with a fountain pen—“old faithful pen” (350).

Sixteen pages of pictures and brief biographical data identifying Hodge’s family, colleagues, correspondents, and doctrinal adversaries give visual reality to well-known names, including Mrs. Hodge, the many Alexanders and other Hodges, Miller, Finney, Nevin, Park, Schaff, Schleiermacher, Tennent (son of the Log College), Turretin, Warfield, and many more.

Our Presbyterian cousins were a theologically and educationally gifted and lively lot. It is gratifying and rewarding to get to know them.