Christians like to write books about themselves, and although sales do not necessarily mean readers, presumably somebody out there is at least looking at the books. The purpose of this survey is not to highlight the best-sellers; they receive enough publicity. Instead we want to call attention to books published during the last six months of 1975 and the first six months of 1976 (with a few exceptions) that librarians, students, and readers should know about if they are interested in what’s being written on the Church—past and present—and its members. Apologies for unintended omissions and for questionable judgments are hereby tendered.
GENERAL Franklin Littell has prepared a major aid to the study of the Church’s past in a large-format book, The Macmillan Atlas History of Christianity (Macmillan). Nearly 200 maps and almost as many illustrations are presented with accompanying text. The sixteenth through nineteenth centuries are stressed. For a general overview of the whole course of human events that gives recognition to the religious dimension, see Arnold Toynbee’s Mankind and Mother Earth (Oxford). Reprints by Gale Research Company of two lengthy one-volume reference works are worth noting: The Encyclopedia of Missions edited by Dwight Small et al. (1904) and The Church Cyclopedia edited by A. A. Benton (1883).
A compilation from the works of Christopher Dawson, a leading Christian historian, has been issued as Religion and World History (Doubleday). Essays on the educational philosophies of twenty-six men (only six of whom flourished before 1500) have been compiled by Elmer Towns in A History of Religious Educators (Baker). A less edifying and poorly organized hodge-podge of Jewish and Christian extremists parades before us in The False Messiahs by Jack Gratus (Taplinger). Much more sharply focused is Christ’s Glorious Church by Derek Hill (London: SPCK), a history of Canterbury Cathedral. The role of women throughout Christian history is surveyed by Robert Kress in Whither Womankind? (Abbey) and by Edith Deen in Great Women of the Christian Faith (Harper & Row; reprint of a 1959 work).
A massive study in five volumes by Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England (Princeton), has finally been completed with the volume covering 1603–90. The set as a whole covers 1534–1965. A related, more narrowly focused study is Methodist Worship in Relation to Free Church Worship by John Bishop (Scholars Studies Press). The larger church-historical context is set by Marion Hatchett, a liturgies professor at an Episcopal seminary, in Sanctifying Life, Time, and Space (Seabury). His chapters move from “oral tradition” to “paperback liturgies.” A comprehensive study from a Roman Catholic stance is provided in The Mass: An Historical, Theological, and Pastoral Survey by Josef Jungmann (Liturgical Press).
ROMAN CATHOLICISM Numerous specific studies of Catholic interest are scattered throughout this survey. Of general interest is Where Peter Is: A Survey of Ecclesiology by Edward Gratsch (Alba), in which the development of the papacy from a Roman perspective with divergent eastern and western views is admirably summarized. A Pope For All Christians? edited by Peter McCord (Paulist) includes mostly affirmative essays from representatives of six non-Roman communions. The Catholic Rediscovery of Protestantism by Paul Minus, Jr. (Paulist) focuses largely on twentieth-century developments.
The Triple Crown by Valerie Pirie (Consortium Books) is a detailed but, as the author admits, not highly serious history of the politics of papal electioneering from the fifteenth through the nineteenth century. More contemporary developments are reported journalistically in The Runaway Church by Peter Hebblethwaite (Seabury), which surveys the divergent trends since Vatican II, and, briefly, in Pentecostal Catholics edited by Robert Heyer (Paulist). A historical overview (even including chapters on ancient Greece and Islam) is combined with a long bibliography of the Catholic charismatics, 1967–75, in Perspectives on Charismatic Renewal edited by Edward O’Connor (University of Notre Dame). Three collections of articles from the New Covenant, the leading Catholic charismatic magazine, were compiled by Ralph Martin and published by Paulist: The Spirit and the Church, Sent by the Spirit, and New Wine, New Skins.
THEOLOGIES The most recent volume to appear in the Fathers of the Church series of Consortium Books—number sixty-seven out of a projected one hundred—contains the writings of Novatian, the first Roman theologian to write in Latin. (Can we assume that the nihil obstat and imprimatur appearing in the front of the volume invalidate his excommunication by the then bishop of Rome?) Blanche Boyer and Richard McKeon have teamed up to produce in fascicles a critical edition of Peter Abailard’s Sic et Non (University of Chicago), which will be of interest to scholars. Veteran church historian Ford Lewis Battles gives us a translation of and introduction to the first edition (1536) of John Calvin’s Institution(sic)of the Christian Religion (John Knox), making it available in English for the first time. Banner of Truth has issued in two volumes the long-out-of-print Works of Robert Traill (1642–1716). The first of thirty or more volumes of The Works of John Wesley to be published by Oxford University has appeared under the title The Appeals to Men of Reason and Religion, edited by Gerald R. Cragg; it contains the writings in which Wesley attempted to answer the critics of his ministry and movement. The Theological Papers of John Henry Newman on Faith and Certaintyedited by Hugo M. de Achaval and J. Derek Holmes (Oxford) continues the definitive edition of his writings.
THE EARLY CHURCH A Short History of the Early Church by Harry Boer (Eerdmans) offers the layman an excellent overview of the course of Christianity in the first few centuries of our era. It would be an ideal text for an adult Sunday-school class. At the other end of the scale is Christ in Christian Tradition: Volume One, From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon by Aloys Grillmeier (John Knox), a thoroughly revised and expanded translation of a work written in German and intended primarily for scholars and advanced theological students. Despite the large price-tag, this is an indispensable volume for theological libraries. The University of Chicago is to be commended for reprinting in paperback Jaroslav Pelikan’s The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition.
Documents in Early Christian Thought edited by Maurice Wiles and Mark Santer (Cambridge) offers fresh translations of a selection of extracts from the writings of the early Christian Fathers covering the main areas of Christian thinking. Treating one area of the subject, Ethical Patterns in Early Christian Thought by Australian scholar Eric Osborn (Cambridge) focuses on the New Testament, Clement of Alexandria, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, and Augustine. God Being History: Studies in Patristic Philosophy by E. P. Meijering (Elsevier) is a collection of twelve essays of a technical nature.
Perhaps the most important book published recently in this area is the first full-scale biography of Jerome to be published in English. The author of Jerome is Oxford theologian J. N. D. Kelly, well known for a number of standard works in patristic and New Testament studies, and the publisher is Harper & Row. Certain to be the standard book for many years to come on the life and ministry of this influential, interesting, and often cantankerous early Christian scholar, Kelly’s study is based on solid scholarship and is unusually well written; it will be of interest to scholar and non-specialist alike. Fathers of the Church by Donald W. Wuerl (Our Sunday Visitor) is a popular introduction to the lives of fifteen early church leaders and is slanted toward the Roman Catholic laity. The Rule of St. Benedict, that most influential of all documents relating to monastic life, has now been translated into modern English by Anthony C. Meisel and M. L. del Maestro and issued as a paperback (Doubleday). Unordained Elders and Renewal Communities by Stephen Clark (Paulist) is about the fourth-century ascetic movement and its parallels with today’s charismatics.
THE MIDDLE AGES Church history and European history were essentially one during the Middle Ages; therefore the student of the history of Christianity will welcome the several excellent handbooks that have recently appeared to provide an orientation to this period. Probably the most helpful of these is Syracuse University’s Medieval Studies: An Introduction edited by James M. Powell, which deals topically with ten important areas of study. At a more basic level is One Thousand Years: Western Europe in the Middle Ages edited by Richard L. DeMolen (Houghton Mifflin). A classic in the area that has recently been reissued in two paperback volumes is The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History edited by C. W. Previte-Orton (Cambridge).
Of more narrow interest are The Birth of Popular Heresy by R. I. Moore (St. Martin’s), a collection of annotated documents relating to the rise of religious dissent during the eleventh and twelfth centuries; The Norman Fate: 1100–1154 by David C. Douglas, a discussion of the influence of the Normans on European history and culture during the first half of the twelfth century; and Saint Francis: Nature Mystic by Edward A. Armstrong (University of California), a study of the nature stories in the Franciscan legend. A slender but very attractive booklet entitled simply The Book of Kells (Humanities Press) contains a selection of illuminations from the famous manuscript of the Gospels, edited and annotated by G. O. Simms, and should be of interest to almost anyone.
THE REFORMATION Books on Martin Luther continue to rival those published on Paul for number. Luther’s Theology of the Cross by Walter von Loewenich (Augsburg) is the translation of a seminal German work that has long been influential among scholars and is a must for all serious students. Wrestling with Luther is an introduction to the thought of the Reformer by John Loeschen (Concordia), who finds himself attracted to what is popularly known as “process philosophy” and seeks to reread Luther in this light. Luther and the Mystics by Bengt Hoffman (Augsburg) seeks to redress the balance of many earlier studies, including Von Loewenich’s, which tended to underestimate the creative influence of the writings of the medieval mystics upon the writings of Luther.
The Reformation in the Cities by Yale professor Steven Ozment (Yale) argues that it was the psychological and social freedom offered by Protestantism that largely accounted for its appeal and subsequent success in sixteenth-century Germany and Switzerland. Dealing with the other side of the Reformation is a nontechnical account of The Counter Reformation by G. W. Searle (Rowman and Littlefield), in which the author attempts to show that the Roman Catholic Reformation was not simply a reaction to the Protestant movement. Christianity and Revolution edited by Lowell Zuck (Temple University) centers in the third force of the Reformation, the so-called radicals or Anabaptists, though it also includes the mainstream reformers, two Roman Catholic writers, and the English Puritans. The book itself is a collection of miscellaneous documents testifying to a religiously based concern for human freedom and political reform. Tolerance and Movements of Religious Dissent in Eastern Europe edited by Béla K. Király (Columbia) transcends the historical boundaries of the Reformation, where it begins. Here is documentation of the fact that religious persecution in Eastern Europe did not have to be invented by the Communists.
Four important studies of the lives and thought of various reformers have appeared recently. Pride of place goes to John Calvin, a biography by T. H. L. Parker (Westminster). If you do not have a good biography of the Geneva theologian in your library, consider buying this one. John Ruth has written a new biography of an Anabaptist reformer in Conrad Grebel, Son of Zurich (Herald). John Bale: Mythmaker for the English Reformation by Leslie Fairfield (Purdue) introduces the ex-friar turned reformer-historian-propagandist who is affectionately remembered as “bilious Bale,” an important though lesser-known figure. Evangelical historian John Bray offers a study of one aspect of the theology of another important reformer in Theodore Beza’s Doctrine of Predestination (Nieuwkoop, Netherlands: De Graaf). The two latest additions to the sixteenth-century bibliography series published by the Center for Reformation Research are Thomas Miintzer, a bibliography by Hans J. Hilderbrand, and Caspar Peucer’s Library by Robert Kolb.
POST-REFORMATION EUROPE The pastoral and devotional heart of the English Puritans is laid bare for the general reader in two new books. The Genius of Puritanism by Peter Lewis (Puritan Reformed Discount Book Service) concentrates on the preaching and pastoral care of these seventeenth-century divines, while The Valley of Vision edited by Arthur Bennett (Banner of Truth) gathers together a selection of prayers and devotional comments by both the earlier and the later Puritan writers. Puritan’s Progress by Monica Furlong (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan) deals with John Bunyan, who is in a class by himself. Written by a journalist rather than a literary critic or a theologian, it is a generally reliable biography and provides a highly readable introduction to this important Christian writer. Roughly contemporary to Bunyan was Blaise Pascal, an evangelical Christian whose influence on French literature was similar to Bunyan’s on English. Strange Contrarieties by John Barker (McGill-Queen’s University Press) opens up new vistas by tracing the influence of Pascal in England during the Age of Reason; a concluding chapter touches on North America. Two books of interest primarily to scholars are Freedom and Authority: A Study of English Thought in the Early Seventeenth Century by Gerald R. Cragg (Westminster), which makes it clear that the seventeenth century was just as revolutionary as the age in which we live, and A Great Expectation: Eschatological Thought in English Protestantism to 1660 by Bryan W. Ball (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill), which documents the fact that there were as many Christians in the sixteenth century who expected Christ to return very soon as there are today. Ball’s study should (but probably won’t) serve as a warning to contemporary prophetic speculators. A similar lesson could be learned from the eschatologically motivated Great Trek of the Russian Mennonites to Central Asia, 1880–1884 by Fred Richard Belk (Herald Press).
Also directed primarily toward the world of scholarship are Contemporary Perspectives on Pietism edited by Donald Dayton (Covenant Press), containing four essays on this German movement that contributed so much—though often misunderstood—to the evangelical heritage, and The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 1757–1765 by Dale Van Kley (Yale). Centering in important personalities who were Christians but whose lives and writings transcend the bounds of the Church are four recent books. Oxford historian A. L. Rouse, combining scholarship with lucidity, offers Jonathan Swift (Scribner’s), a biography of the man best known as the author of Gulliver’s Travels but who also was dean of St. Patrick’s Anglican Cathedral in Dublin. William Paley (1743–1805) was an Anglican philosopher-apologist who had an enormous influence on English thought for more than a century and whose books remained standard texts at Oxford down into the present century. Readers of The Mind of William Paley by D. L. LaMahieu (University of Nebraska) will discover the unacknowledged roots of much of contemporary evangelical apologetics. “Between God and Devil” is an appropriate subtitle for James Wyckoff’s biography of that strange figure whose name is the source of the words “mesmerism” and “mesmerize.” Fritz Anton Mesmer (Prentice-Hall) makes interesting reading, though it is doubtful that the author’s rather extravagant claims for his subject can be sustained. Wordsworth’s ‘Natural Methodism’ by Richard E. Brantley (Yale) is a much needed study of the poet’s indebtedness to evangelical Anglicanism, labeled by the author “the most vital manifestation of the Christian mainstream in late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century England.”
MODERN EUROPE A large number of worthwhile biographies have appeared in recent months. My Love Must Wait by David Bentley-Taylor (InterVarsity) is the story of Henry Martyn, a British missionary who died at thirty-one and whose life continues to challenge scores of students in English universities to devote their lives to missionary service. A man of a later generation who perhaps exerted an even greater influence upon British evangelical life is the subject of George Müller, a new biography by Roger Steer (Harold Shaw) that is appropriately subtitled “Delighted in God.” Charles Kingsley (1819–75), who as churchman, historian, scientist, Christian socialist, and author exerted a profound influence on English ecclesiastical and political life, is the subject of Lady Susan Chitty’s The Beast and the Monk (Mason/Charter); here we have still another example of why “Victorian” has come to be nearly synonymous with “hypocritical.” Albert Schweitzer, who represented a radically heterodox interpretation of the Christian faith, has been served well by biographer James Brabazon (Putnam); even those who deplore his theology have much to learn from this great man’s life.
Do you know that the author of Gulliver’s Travels was dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin? Read about the fascinating Jonathan Swift in a scholarly and lucid biography.
Three new books take their place in the ever expanding bibliography of the life and thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Dissent on Bonhoeffer by David H. Hopper (Westminster); Bonhoeffer: Exile and Martyrdom by Eberhard Bethge (Sea-bury); and The Last Days of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Donald Goddard (Harper & Row). Hopper suggests that Bonhoeffer has been overrated as a theologian because of the historic situation surrounding his death and that people read their own views into his writings because he was not a consistent thinker. Bethge, close friend and biographer of Bonhoeffer, would not agree; rather, he suggests in his latest book that too little attention has been paid to Bonhoeffer’s critical significance. Goddard offers not a theological evaluation but rather an attempted reconstruction of the last two years of Bonhoeffer’s life, and writes with the general reader in view. An author of numerous studies of mysticism who was also something of a Christian mystic herself is the subject of Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941), an excellent new biography by Christopher Armstrong (Eerdmans). Leslie Weatherhead (Abingdon) is “a personal portrait” of the popular English Methodist preacher by his son, A. Kingsley Weatherhead, a professor of English literature at the University of Oregon. Teilhard de Chardin by Doran McCarty (Word) presents yet another “layman’s introduction” to the famous Jesuit scientist and mystical poet whose cult shows some signs of subsiding nowadays. Two well-known Christian writers have recently published their autobiographies; William Barclay, A Spiritual Autobiography (Eerdmans), and Basilea Schlink, I Found the Key to the Heart of God (Bethany Fellowship). Suenens: A Portrait by Elizabeth Hamilton (Doubleday) is the biography of the charismatic Catholics’ highest-ranking supporter to date.
A major scholarly presentation of the social teachings of the Church of England is provided by E. R. Norman in Church and Society in England, 1770–1970 (Oxford). He offers evidence to show that church leaders bucked the establishment more than they backed it.
The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century by Owen Chadwick (Cambridge), professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge, offers a fascinating study of the way the Christian Church lost whatever intellectual influence it may have once had at the very time it was spawning the modern missionary movement and evangelical influence in Protestant Europe was at its greatest heights—a fact that contemporary evangelical hagiographers have failed to grasp. More limited in scope is James C. Livingston’s The Ethics of Belief (Scholars Press), which concerns the crisis of religious belief and institutional commitment in Victorian England from a philosophical point of view. Religion and Atheism in the USSR and Eastern Europe edited by Bohdan R. Bociurkiw and John W. Strong (University of Toronto) and Antireligious Propaganda in the Soviet Union by David E. Powell (MIT) are scholarly studies of the attempt of the present Soviet government to destroy the religious institutions and beliefs of the various religious groups under its influence. Powell’s study is the more systematic of the two, though both are important.
AFRICA There are four welcome additions to the comparatively sparse scholarly literature on African Christianity. African Apostles by Bennetta Jules-Rosette (Cornell) is about the church of John Maranke. Kimbangu: An African Prophet and His Church by Marie-Louise Martin (Eerdmans) is about another of the larger indigenous denominations. G. C. Oosthuizen, a professor at the University of Durban, has written Pentecostal Penetration into the Indian Community in Metropolitan Durban, South Africa and also Moving to the Waters, a more detailed study of the Bethesda group, which is the largest of the dozens of Pentecostal denominations among people of Hindu background in Durban.
LATIN AMERICA The sole entry for this region is a very important one. Protestantism in Latin America: A Bibliographical Guide edited by John Sinclair (William Carey) originally appeared in 1967. The 2,000 classified entries in the first edition are now supplemented by nearly 1,100 more, many of them annotated.
ASIA A major country-by-country survey is provided in The Church in Asia edited by Donald Hoke (Moody). Most of the contributors are missionaries. Asians themselves speak, and reveal the same kinds of differences as their Western counterparts, in Asian Voices in Christian Theology edited by Gerald Anderson (Orbis) and Voice of the Church in Asia edited by Bong Rin Ro of the World Evangelical Fellowship-related Asia Theological Association.
Books on particular countries include Christianity and the New China (William Carey); The Dragon Net by Silas Hong (Revell), a brief treatment of contemporary China; A History of Christianity in Japan by Otis Cary, an 800-page work first issued in 1909 and now reprinted by Charles E. Tuttle Company; Korean Catholicism in the 70s by William Biernatski, Luke Jin-Chang Im, and Anselm Min (Orbis); and Fire in the Philippines by Jim Montgomery (Creation), about the rapid growth of a Pentecostal group with little missionary aid.
Autobiographies of Western missionaries include The Good Hand of Our God by Ruth Hitchcock (David C. Cook), who served in China; At the Foot of Dragon Hill by Florence Murray (Dutton), a Canadian surgeon in Korea; and Zeal For Your House by James Walsh (Our Sunday Visitor), a Catholic bishop in China who was in prison there from 1958 to 1970. Also noteworthy is Misi Gete on John Geddie, pioneering missionary to the New Hebrides, written by R. S. Miller and published by the Presbyterian Church of Tasmania.
NORTH AMERICA Canadian historian J. E. Chamberlin in The Harrowing of Eden (Seabury) surveys the sad history of relations between European immigrants and the American Indians, a story in which Christians figured prominently.
Two collections of thoughtful essays on the American experience are The Nation With the Soul of a Church, seven essays written over the past decade by Sidney Mead (Harper & Row), and America in Theological Perspective, thirteen papers, most of which were presented at the 1975 meeting of the Roman Catholics’ College Theology Society. The editor is Thomas McFadden (Seabury).
Two studies of music are worth noting: Songs of Faith, Signs of Hope: Our Heritage of Religious Music by David Poling (Word) and Soul Music Black and White: The Influence of Black Music on the Churches by Johannes Riedel (Augsburg).
As usual, denominational histories and chronicles were numerous. The Christian Churches/Churches of Christ weigh in most heavily with Journey in Faith by William Tucker and Lester McAllister (Bethany Press), written from the perspective of the ecumenically oriented Disciples branch of the movement. A smaller companion is We Call Ourselves Disciples by Kenneth Teegarden (Bethany Press). H. Eugene Johnson of the middle branch looks at The Christian Church Plea and focuses on the history of the movement’s ministry in Duly and Scripturally Qualified (both by Standard).
The Lutherans in North America edited by E. Clifford Nelson (Fortress) is a large volume to which several specialists contributed. The tilt is away from staunch confessionalism.
A book we failed to notice when it was first published but one that belongs in any theological library is The History Behind the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod by George Hutchinson (Mack). Although of necessity concerned extensively with splits and mergers, it is a useful counterpart to the histories of the larger Presbyterian bodies.
The Story of the Latter-day Saints by James Allen and Glen Leonard (Deseret Book Company) is lengthy, documented, and very much an “authorized” story.
Piety and Patriotism edited by James Van Hoeven (Eerdmans) contains eight essays on the interaction between the (Dutch) Reformed Church in America and the larger society.
A major history of the second-largest branch of Mennonites is Open Doors: A History of the General Conference Mennonite Church by Samuel Floyd Pannabecker (Faith and Life). This branch should not be confused with the (Old) Mennonite Church (though they frequently cooperate), whose missionary outreach is popularly related in Being God’s Missionary Community (Mennonite Board of Missions). Mennonite Disaster Services draws from a score of the movement’s branches; a brisk account of its ministry is given in Day of Disaster by Katie Funk Wiebe (Herald Press).
Five books get down to specifics on some doings of the country’s largest Protestant grouping, the Baptists. Rhode Island Baptists by Katharine Johnson (Judson) tells about the state where they began. Baptists in Kentucky, 1776–1976 edited by Leo Taylor Crismon (Kentucky Baptist Convention) is to be commended for including groups other than the sponsoring Southern Baptists. We Were There by Robert Hastings (Illinois Baptist State Association) is about only the Southern Baptists in Illinois (who are much larger in the state than the older Northern [now American] Baptists), whose association was formed in 1907. The story is told through interviews with nineteen representative Illinois Baptists, old and young. It is a way of doing history that should be more widely used; stories told through the lives of real people are much more interesting than interminable lists of dates and meetings and organizational details. Eleven essays on specific aspects of Baptist history honor Robert Baker in The Lord’s Free People in a Free Land edited by William Estep (Southwestern Baptist Seminary). Finally, History of Free Will Baptist State Associations edited by Robert Picirilli (Randall House) is on the subdivisions of the National Association of Free Will Baptists, which has some 2,350 congregations.
One of the most distinctive aspects of American religion is the complexity of the relations between church and state. Church-State Relations: An Annotated Bibliography by Albert Menendez (Garland) is a must for libraries. Only full-length books are included, but there are hundreds of them. Although Menendez is a staunch separationist, the bibliography will serve all interests. A readable overview of developments in America is provided by Glenn Miller in Religious Liberty in America (Westminster). This is perhaps the best recent book on the subject for the general reader. Two major scholarly studies of court decisions over the past couple of decades are The Wall of Separation by Frank Sorauf (Princeton) and Church and State: The Supreme Court and the First Amendment edited by Philip Kurland (University of Chicago). The colonial Baptist contribution to religious liberty is popularly related in Baptists and the American Tradition by Robert Newman (Regular Baptist Press).
COLONIAL AMERICA As usual a number of fine studies appeared. The most difficult but generally well received is The Puritan Origins of the American Self by Sacvan Bercovitch (Yale), who in the tradition of Perry Miller and others teaches in a literature rather than a history department.
Also significant is Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (Norton). Even more explicit on the religious involvement in the nation’s greatest shame are Lester Scherer’s Slavery and the Churches in Early America, 1619–1819 (Eerdmans) and, with balanced attention to Wilberforce and other British evangelicals, Roger Anstey’s The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (Humanities).
Two popular accounts of a well-known migration are Douglas Hill’s The English to New England (Potter) and Francis Dillon’s The Pilgrims (Doubleday).
The Birth of Missions in America by Charles Chaney (William Carey) is a thoroughly documented account of attempts to evangelize the Indians.
The Great Awakening by Joseph Tracy, a major history stressing the New England phase, was first published in 1842 and is now reprinted by Banner of Truth. Two scholarly studies of one of the key figures of the Awakening are Carl Bogue’s Jonathan Edwards and the Covenant of Grace (Mack) and William Scheick’s The Writings of Jonathan Edwards: Theme, Motif, and Style (Texas A and M University).
Thought-provoking essays by Jerald Brauer, Sidney Mead, and Robert Bellah compose Religion and the American Revolution (Fortress). More detailed late-colonial studies include: Notebook of a Colonial Clergyman by Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (Fortress), a Lutheran leader; Bible and Battle Drums by Truett Rogers (Judson), on Baptist minister David Jones; John Witherspoon: Parson, Politician, Patriot by Martha Lou Lemmon Stohlman (Westminster), on a major Presbyterian figure; and From Wesley to Asbury by Frank Baker (Duke), eleven studies on the beginnings of Methodism in America.
NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA A fair number of major biographies appeared, chief among them being Lamy of Santa Fe by Paul Horgan (Farrar Straus Giroux), an award-winning study of the Catholic archbishop who was a prime figure in the far southwest. High scholarly standards combined with readability are also met in Fanny Crosby by Bernard Ruffin (Pilgrim Press). She is known today for countless hymns but in her own time was widely influential. Elizabeth Seton by Leonard Feeney (Our Sunday Visitor) is a popular-level account of the first native-born Catholic saint. Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White by Ronald Numbers (Harper & Row) treats with considerable documentation the health writings of the Adventist leader.
Four more books on slavery to continue the story of the three mentioned earlier are Harriet Beecher Stowe by Noel Gerson (Praeger), now best remembered for Uncle Tom’s Cabin;The Truth About the Man Behind the Book That Sparked the War Between the States by Frances Cavanah (Westminster), showing that Josiah Henson was no “Uncle Tom”; Levi Coffin and the Underground Railroad by Charles Ludwig (Herald Press); and Major Themes in Northern Black Religious Thought, 1800–1860 by Monroe Fordham (Exposition), well documented from the primary sources.
Rebuilding the Christian Commonwealth by John Andrew III (University Press of Kentucky) investigates the role of the early New England missionaries to Hawaii, 1800–1830.
Four specialized studies indicate the diversity of American religion: The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815–1865 by Jay Dolan (Johns Hopkins); Carthage Conspiracy: The Trial of the Accused Assassins of Joseph Smith by Daniel Oaks and Marvin Hill (University of Illinois); The Kingdom or Nothing: The Life of John Taylor, Militant Mormon, by Samuel Taylor (Macmillan); and Pioneer Preacher by Gordon Spykman (Calvin College), on A. C. Van Raalte, a leader among Dutch immigrants to the midwest.
Two major and sympathetic studies of Protestant developments that continued into the present century are The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism by William Hutchison (Harvard) and The Social Gospel by Ronald White, Jr., and C. Howard Hopkins (Temple University), the latter of which contains excerpts from numerous primary sources. See also Rauschenbusch: The Formative Years by Klaus Jaehn (Judson).
TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA Theologies emanating from the academic world have had a major influence on church life in this century, but it can be claimed that the grass-roots experiences of which tongues-speaking is the most prevalent have been far more significant. In the past few years academic studies of the Pentecostal movements have been appearing in increasing number (along with, it should be added, a deluge of first-person testimonies). Aspects of Pentecostal-Charismatic Origins edited by Vinson Synan (Logos) collects eleven scholarly essays, mostly by advocates, that point out the diverse strains that fed the movement(s). All Things Are Possible: The Healing and Charismatic Revivals in Modern America by David Edwin Harrell, Jr. (Indiana University) features the “name” healers and evangelists since World War II. The New Charismatics: The Origins, Development, and Significance of Neo-Pentecostalism by Richard Quebedeaux (Doubleday) gives a thorough overview of the movement organizationally, practically, and doctrinally. The author’s purview includes Britain as well as America, and he offers a well-documented guide to what is from any perspective an organizational thicket. Admirably summarizing social-scientific and ecclesiastical studies on the impact of tongues-speaking on both Protestants and Catholics, both earlier and more recently in this century, is Kilian McDonnell’s Charismatic Renewal and the Churches (Seabury). He concludes that most research has been prejudiced. For still more information, see a 1974 classified bibliography by Watson Mills, Speaking in Tongues, issued by the Society for Pentecostal Studies (Box 23027, Houston, Texas 77028). Of related interest is Keswick: A Bibliographical Introduction to the Higher Life Movements by David Bundy (Asbury Seminary Library).
While Pentecostalism burst afresh upon this century, older institutions continued, but rarely in settled routines. Division in the Protestant House: The Basic Reasons Behind Intra-Church Conflicts is by Dean Hoge (Westminster), a sociologist who presents data from the United Presbyterians with suggestions of counterparts elsewhere. Another United Presbyterian study. In But Still Out by Elizabeth Howell Verdesi (Westminster), shows how women gained and lost power bases—twice. Uncertain Saints by Alan Graebner (Greenwood) studies the laity of the Missouri Synod Lutherans, who, despite Luther’s talk about the priesthood of all believers, have generally taken a back seat to the clergy in the affairs of their denomination. Black Church in the Sixties by Hart Nelsen and Anne Kusener Nelsen (University Press of Kentucky) is basically sociological. So is the study of the generation in Gastonia, North Carolina, that followed the one made famous in Liston Pope’s 1942 book, Millhands and Preachers. The restudy of religion and social change is, with a similar coupling, entitled Spindles and Spines and was written by John Earle, Dean Knudsen, and Donald Shriver, Jr. (John Knox). (Other sociological studies of recent years are listed in a chapter on religion in Sociology of America: A Guide to Information Sources by Charles Mark [Gale Research Co.]. The lengthy American Studies Information Guides series, of which it is the first to appear, is to have a whole volume devoted to religion and philosophy.) A less turbulent but interesting story is the centennial history of Calvin College, Promises to Keep by John Timmerman (Eerdmans).
Of the numerous more or less biographical studies we mention Never Look Back by John Sheerin (Paulist), on John Burke, a Washington-based Catholic leader in earlier decades; Graham: A Day in Billy’s Life by Gerald Strober (Doubleday), which is really on a composite day; To Tell the World by Rex Humbard (Prentice-Hall), an autobiography: Martin Luther King, Jr. edited by Flip Schulke (Norton), movingly illustrated; Let Our Children Go! by Ted Patrick (Dutton), the man who deprograms allegedly brainwashed cult devotees; The Death and Life of Bishop Pike by William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne (Doubleday), who find a lot to admire despite his adultery and alcohol abuse (not to mention his various doctrinal aberrations); and The Happiest People on Earth by Demos Shakarian (Revell), the leader of the Full Gospel Business Men.
The provocative essays reflecting on recent developments in evangelicalism that have been appearing in Carl Henry’s Footnotes column in CHRISTIANITY TODAY are available in book form as Evangelicals in Search of Identity (Word).
The WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES The organization’s official report on its activities between its two most recent major conclaves was published as Uppsala to Nairobi: 1968–1975 edited by David Enderton Johnson (Friendship). The fifth assembly itself was reported briefly in Nairobi 1975 by James Kennedy (Forward Movement) and officially at length in Breaking Barriers edited by David Paton (Eerdmans).
