Rosell on Evangelicalism

I'm just finishing Garth M. Rosell's very readable book, The Surprising Work of God: Harold John Ockenga and the Rebirth of Evangelicalism (Baker).   It's essentially a biography of Ockenga, with particular focus on his role in the wider post-war American evangelical renaissance.

Of special interest to me is the role he notes for early members of my own institution's early faculty.  While he doesn't take the story as far back as the young Machen's youthful pleasure at the invitation of Billy Sunday to preach at Princteon (Ned B Stonehouse, J. Gresham Machen: A Biographical Memoir, p. 187-89), he does note the significant role played by Cornelius Van Til, and the Ned Stonehouse, at the Conferences for the Advancement of Evangelical Scholarship, an idea conceived at a meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals, between 1944 and 1947.   It reminded me of the important role played in the UK by founding faculty member John Murray in other evangelical organizations, such as the Banner of Truth Trust, the Banner of Truth Leicester Conference, the Reformation Translation Fellowship, the Lord's Day Observance Society, and the Inter-Varsity Fellowship (now U.C.C.F.).  I remember at university hearing older Christians, who had been students in the sixties and early seventies, talk in glowing terms of Murray's addresses to various university Christian Unions in the UK, and of good advice he was always willing to offer the young people who ran these campus groups.  It reminded me of comments by my colleague, Dick Gaffin, to the effect that, of all the early faculty, his father-in-law, E. J. Young, probably spoke in more contexts, scholarly and evangelical, than any of the others. 

Numerous thoughts come to mind.  The materialist in me wants to point to the fact that institutions such as Westminster are always implicated in constituencies wider than their own confessional basis: faculty depend upon the evangelical publishers, evangelical money, and evangelical students, to disseminate their views, keep the budget healthy, and have people to teach in the classroom.  That creates a hidden, but real dynamic which even ecclesiastical-linked seminaries face in the real world.

The second thought is that the relationship between creedal institutions and broader evangelical organizations is never an easy or straightforward one at an ideological level.  It can blow hot and cold; it can present great opportunities and major challenges (see, for example, the tensions between Murray and Lloyd-Jones in the early days of the Banner of Truth); sometimes the relationship is fruitful, sometimes it goes nowhere; but, as far as Westminster and evangelicalism goes, there is surely a fascinating history here which, for rather obvious reasons, lies neglected as it does not fit the neat and tidy models which have come to dominate Westminster historiography, left and right.   It does not seem that the early faculty were as separate from, or opposed to, all involvement in all evangelical organizations as selective readings of some of their statements and actions may suggest.

For those interested in the theological side of this, I recommend Murray's `The Creedal Basis of Union in the Church' in his Collected Writings, vol. 1, as a good starting point for reflection on the doctrinal and ecclesiastical questions involved.  Interesting, though, that this was delivered not to a church or denominational gathering church but at an evangelical jamboree: the Banner of Truth Leicester Minister's Conference.