Present and Not Yet

I have vivid memories of the 1947 Gordon Divinity School faculty family Christmas party. My missionary father, on extended health leave as he recovered from four years as a pow in China, was filling in for Paul King Jewett, then completing doctoral studies at Basle. That day as the children gathered for party games played out incongruously in the parlor of the Brookline mansion that was the home to the seminary, I was aware of a dark and brooding presence in a corner. Father of a boy not much older than I, he did not seem to be having much fun. Turns out, according to John D’Elia’s biography, that Professor George Eldon Ladd (1911-1982) never did have much fun.

A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America

John A. D'Elia (Author)

Oxford University Press

304 pages

$80.22

A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America is a gripping account of a man who was an integral part of the renaissance of postwar evangelical scholarship. That rebirth was accomplished, as is becoming evident from an increasing number of “tell-all” accounts, at great personal cost. (Whatever happened to fundamentalist hagiography?) Rudolph Nelson’s 1987 classic The Making and Unmaking of an Evangelical Mind: The Case of Edward Carnell comes to mind. Edward John Carnell, Ladd’s colleague and erstwhile boss at Fuller Seminary, likewise self-immolated. What was it about these men that drove them on in such intense psychic journeys?

The title of Ladd’s biography answers the question: for his obsessive commitment to establishing his place at the table of scholarly and academic discourse, George Eldon Ladd paid a high price. D’Elia, senior pastor at the American Church in London, is to be commended for patient and well-documented research (the book began as a doctoral thesis with David Bebbington at Stirling). It is a story that needed to be told, though one hopes Ladd’s deserved reputation will not be obscured by details of his tempestuous personal struggles, now fully disclosed.

Today, as D’Elia notes, no fewer than six George Eldon Ladd titles are still in print. This biography may be disquieting to some for whom Ladd was a pivotal figure in their educational and academic development. And there are many of them: he left an impressive number mentored over a quarter of a century of teaching at Fuller Seminary. Their names, as they are cited in the book, are a veritable who’s who of contemporary evangelical scholarship. D’Elia’s ultimate conclusion is that “George Ladd remains a pivotal figure in the postwar evangelical resurgence in America, and its most important Biblical scholar.”

Ladd’s story began with an unhappy childhood, summarized in the nickname he was given as he grew up: “Freak.” He was born in rural Alberta, where his parents briefly alighted. His father was an itinerant doctor who, on return to New England, never settled anywhere for long. He found awkward young George an embarrassment. It would have been useful to know more about Dr. Elmer Ladd, a Yale medical school graduate. George’s mother dealt with constant sickness and later was forced by economic necessity to work in a mill. His younger brother was everything that the father wanted and that Ladd wished he was.

At least that is the explanation that Ladd himself later provided for his complex personality. In a 1967 Fuller School of Psychology integration seminar presentation, Ladd spoke of growing up in “a home where there is no love,” without “the security of parental affection.” He described himself as “a lonely introvert who never can relate to people.” An unsuccessful marriage, a son who was physically and psychologically damaged, and a daughter who kept her distance, compounded the family’s dysfunctionality. Ladd’s relationship with his wife limped along, with predictable guilt when she died. There was also an accelerating decline into the abyss of alcoholism, a disease he shared with his son. (In researching the life of C. Stacey Woods, I concluded that fundamentalist commitment to strict teetotalism provided little familiarity with the effects of alcohol when that taboo was broken.) D’Elia’s use of the word “alcoholic,” as well as his description of Ladd’s marriage as teetering on the edge of divorce, will be challenged. But his portrait, as it unfolds, is carefully substantiated.

All that wreckage still lay ahead when Ladd was converted as a young man in rural northern New England. A woman named Cora Cash, schooled in the Scofield dispensationalism of the day, discipled young George and sent him on to her school, Gordon College of Theology and Missions. There, gifted both academically and athletically, he appears to have excelled, a “Freak” no longer. Gordon was no hotbed of dispensationalism: the statement of faith spoke simply of Christ’s “triumphant return.” And the faculty—particularly in the Divinity School, to which Ladd returned for his theological training and at which he later taught—included several amillenialists. George Murray (1895- 1956), an autodidact with no academic qualification except a bought DD from a degree mill, taught the history of theology. His 1948 Millennial Studies (as I state in my George Murray of the U.P.) hit a raw nerve in New England and beyond with its claim that dispensational premillenialists were as heterodox as any liberal or Unitarian.

When Ladd came to Fuller Seminary in 1950, the school was dependent for much of its support on the constituency that the iconic radio evangelist Charles E. Fuller had gathered. His popular Old Fashioned Revival Hour consistently espoused the fundamentalist dispensational orthodoxy. And Harold Ockenga, the absentee president, went along with Charles Fuller for the greater good of fulfilling his vision: continuing the tradition of Princeton Seminary in the new school. But the old Princeton had generally hewed to traditional Reformed amillenialism. Meanwhile, Ladd—increasingly distancing himself from premillenial dispensationalism in favor of historic or classical premillenialism—found himself isolated from scholars with whom on every issue but eschatology he would have been in complete agreement. Exchanges with Dallas Seminary president John Walvoord, defender of dispensational orthodoxy, became more and more pointed. Finally, all communication ceased.

As D’Elia explains, Ladd’s career at Fuller fell into three phases, in each of which he jousted with different adversaries. Never a man secure enough to be a combative controversialist, Ladd felt these conflicts with increasing impact: first with John Walvoord as the self-appointed defender and representative of dispensational orthodoxy; then with his non-evangelical fellow theological academics; and finally with himself as his life spiralled out of control and he found himself unable to cope emotionally with the bruising effects of academic and theological controversy. Fuller, as George Marsden points out in his magisterial Reforming Fundamentalism, was struggling with its own theological issues, including its view of biblical authority. Ockenga’s protracted absences from the school meant that the community lacked its center, gaining a reputation, deserved or undeserved, as a galaxy of stars rather than a cohesive community of scholars, such as Machen had formed in the early days of Westminster Seminary. Ladd needed accountability for his massive but restlessand temperamental intellect. It was only with David Hubbard, who became Fuller president in 1963, that he had someone who demanded an explanation for his increasingly erratic behavior. But by then it was too late.

So it was that Ladd’s passion for the kingdom of God as “both present and not yet” led him to attempt to discourse with fellow (but generally non-evangelical) academics. Here his experience at Harvard came into play. He had been one of a dozen or so evangelical doctoral students at Harvard in the immediate postwar years. (Most of them studied in the Divinity School, but D’Elia says Ladd’s PhD was from the graduate school, an important distinction.) Significantly, Ladd’s thesis was on the Didache; this evangelical cohort stayed away from the third rail of historical biblical criticism. Ladd, it appears, emerged from Harvard astonishingly naïve about the wider academy’s level of tolerance of positions regarded as intellectually untenable.

That naïvete was shattered on May 19, 1965, when Ladd—on sabbatical in Europe—read an abusive review of the book he had deeply invested in as his magnum opus. The review of Ladd’s Jesus and the Kingdom: The Eschatology of Biblical Realism appeared in Interpretation, a publication that had rejected earlier articles of Ladd’s. The reviewer was Norman Perrin, raised English Baptist, the son of a pious Northumberland mill-worker. According to D’Elia, Ladd never recovered from the review: his whole “psychological house of cards” was blown down, in spite of subsequent favorable reviews. None of his friends and colleagues, not even the numerous academics he had himself mentored, could console him. “If you don’t belong to the ‘club,’ you just don’t rate,” he is quoted as saying. So the final fifteen years of Ladd’s life were marked by what D’Elia calls “a process of emotional, physical, and spiritual disintegration.” He had discovered, he said, “that sectarianism and critical orthodoxy” were endemic in American scholarship. Some of the books for which he is best known appeared during this period: The New Testament and Criticism (1967) and The Theology of the New Testament (1974). Many of his graduate students honored him in a festschrift.

John D’Elia has done all of us a service in this biography. A rising generation of young evangelical scholars should particularly profit from it. The book raises important questions. How can evangelicals engage the academic community? How does one judge the “success” of that engagement? Is the evangelical world mature enough to allow its scholarship to face the real and pressing issues of our society? Biographies of this caliber are an excellent entry-point into the discussion, because they incarnate the issues.

A. Donald MacLeod teaches at Tyndale Theological Seminary in Toronto. He is the author most recently of W. Stanford Reid: An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy (McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press) and C. Stacey Woods and the Evangelical Rediscovery of the University (InterVarsity Press).