Theology Today - Vol 43, No. 2 - July 1986 - BOOK REVIEW - Reformed Theology in America: A History of Its Modern Development

292 - Reformed Theology in America: A History of Its Modern Development

Reformed Theology in America: A History of Its Modern Development
Edited by David F. Wells
Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1985. 317 pp. $19.95.

This volume is a collection of seventeen essays devoted to major movements and figures of Reformed theology in America. It focuses on five traditions with an introductory essay on the movement followed by essays on two of its major representatives. The five are the old Princeton Theology, the Westminster School, the Dutch Schools, the Southern Tradition, and Neo-orthodoxy. An opening and closing essay complete the volume, which is dedicated to Roger Nicole.

George Marsden's chapter "Reformed and American" helpfully proposes three types of Reformed people in America: doctrinalist, culturalist, and pietist. These overlap and all three groups usually embody the dominant traits of the other two. Marsden traces these from the Puritans through Old and New School Presbyterianism, the Dutch Calvinists who followed Kuyper, the Fundamentalists, and the Neoorthodox. Thus, the major categories for this volume are established.

The essays that follow-by Mark Noll on Princeton, Robert Godfrey on Westminister, James Bratt on the Dutch, Morton Smith on the Southern Tradition, and Dennis Voskuil on Neo-orthodoxy are competent expositions of the various traditions. The stories often overlap, as one expects when the approach is so varied. The other essays focus on both nineteenth and twentieth century figures, including Charles Hodge, B. B. Warfield, J. Gresham Machen, Cornelius Van Til, Louis Berkhof, Herman Dooyeweerd, Robert L. Dabney, James H. Thornwell, Reinhold Niebuhr, and H. Richard Niebuhr. As a one-volume "Who's Who" of Reformed theology in America, this does it.

But this strength is also the book's weakness. While the editor makes much of the "diversity" of Reformed theology in the twentieth-century, and while the traditions discussed are certainly the major ones, the selections do not go far enough. They are silent, for example, on the continuing Reformed tradition of America's major Presbyterian body, the Presbyterian Church (USA). Wells' readers would have no idea this church has as its doctrinal standard a Book of Confessions that includes a number of Reformation documents. A wider Reformed theological tradition is embodied here than in the Presbyterian denominations associated with the traditions the volume describes-the Orthodox Presbyterian Church with the Westminster School; the Presbyterian Church in America, associated here with the Southern tradition and Old Princeton. The Presbyterian Church (USA) is currently writing a new Brief Statement of the Reformed Faith. To ignore this, or simply to write off this denomination as "liberal in persuasion and direction," as Morton Smith does in "The Southern Tradition," is also to ignore what

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this book in its subtitle purports to present about Reformed theology, namely, "a history of its modern development."

The least satisfactory essay is the final one, "The Future of Reformed Theology," by James Montgomery Boice whose own sympathies lie with the old Princeton tradition. But this prevents him from being completely candid in assessing the breadth of the Reformed tradition, even in America. An example of this is his description of what "balanced Calvinism" entails. He states that "a high view of Scripture as the inerrant Word of God is not in doubt among genuinely Reformed people." To equate "inerrancy" with the only view of Scripture that can be held by "genuinely Reformed people" is not only theologically to erect an unarticulated concept upon Reformation confessions (since the term "inerrant" is never used in these sixteenth-century confessions), but it is also to be less than honest historically. That is, not all who in actuality are or have been "genuinely Reformed" subscribe to "inerrancy" as understood by Boice, who presides over the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. Boice himself knows this. In the same section, he describes the "Confessing Church" in Germany as "a church of the Book" in opposition to Nazism. But the Confessing Church was influenced by Karl Barth and expressed its faith in the Declaration of Barmen, where a high view of Scripture was confessed-but not a seventeenth-century theory of inerrancy. To identify the inerrancy position as the needed badge to be "genuinely Reformed" is historically irresponsible.

This book is a helpful store for understanding some of the "leading lights" of the American Reformed tradition. But it can also give a skewed perception that Reformed theology today is being done only in those institutions and denominations identified here as "Reformed."

Donald K. McKim

University of Dubuque Theological Seminary
Dubuque, Iowa