372 - Training God's Army: The American Bible School 1880-1940

Training God's Army: The American Bible School 1880-1940

By Virginia Lieson Brereton

Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1990. 212 Pp. $27.50.

This book is a noteworthy contribution to the growing literature on fundamentalism and conservative evangelical Protestantism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historians have long noted the fracturing of evangelical Protestantism which followed the Civil War, but until the last two decades, little attention has been paid to the theology and institutions spawned by the conservative wing of American Protestantism.

Prior to the Civil War, evangelical Protestants founded liberal arts colleges. After the war, they founded Bible colleges and schools. Little was known about the Bible schools until Brereton's book, and with a deft pen she describes the leaders who founded them, the theology that shaped their curriculum, and the development and changes in their curricula.

She focuses on the best known of the schools-Moody Bible Institute and Biola (Bible Institute of Los Angeles)-although she also notes the precarious fate of less successful enterprises. Several themes predominate: the entrepreneurial character of the ofttimes mercurial founders, the emphasis on missions and evangelistic activity, the commitment to training lay people, and, of course, the fundamentalist commitment to biblical inerrancy and doctrinal precision.

Brereton's book does not shed new light on fundamentalism itself, but she does provide a valuable glimpse at the institutions that embodied and perpetuated the fundamentalist credo.

John M. Mulder, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Louisville, Ky.