BOOK REVIEW:
Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work. Edited by John W. Stewart and James H. Moorhead. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002. 375 pp. ISBN 0802847501.

To rehabilitate Charles Hodge for contemporary readers is tough work, but John W. Stewart and James H. Moorhead have assembled some of American history’s finest interpreters to do it. Even more to the editors’ credit, the contributors to Charles Hodge Revisited almost succeed. Hodge, the longtime professor of systematic theology who lived from 1797 to 1878 and for most of his life defended Calvinist orthodoxy against all comers including Germany’s biblical critics and Charles Darwin, is indeed a difficult thinker to domesticate for modern tastes. Stewart admits that the trouble may be Hodge’s sheer literary output. He wrote on practically everything and his positions on politics and society, not to mention his defense of biblical inerrancy and total depravity, are generally associated with fundamentalism. Still, Stewart insists that it is inappropriate to continue to dismiss Hodge as a squinty-eyed scholastic or a Presbyterian curmudgeon (p. 39). Whether defining the improprieties surrounding the study of Hodge will revise his reputation is another matter.

The cast of historians assembled here to reassess Hodge’s place in American religion and culture is indeed impressive. Stewart and Moorhead at least deserve credit for persuading reputable scholars to go into print on a man who was arguably the nineteenth century’s most prolific Calvinist (remembering that H. L. Mencken placed Calvinism in his cabinet of horrors but little removed from cannibalism). The essays in turn cover Hodge as an intellectual, interpreter of science, theological educator, critic of European theology, commentator on public life, and a man with specific attitudes toward the status of women. In sum, as Moorhead concludes, the essays in this book do not require that one jettison the image of Hodge as a theological and social conservative, but they do point to complexities that commentators, whether friendly or hostile to the Princeton professor, often miss (p. 333). Just as important for the history of American Presbyterianism is Moorhead’s useful point that Hodge’s legacy resides not solely with J. Gresham Machen and the conservatives who established Westminster Seminary in 1929 to replace the Old Princeton. Those conservatives, Moorhead argues, held on to Hodge’s theology while those at Princeton Seminary sustained Hodge’s broader concerns with modern thought and culture (p. 333).

In the end, this collective effort of reassessment runs up against not Hodge’s readers but the man himself. Here it is somewhat ironic that Moorhead claims for modern-day Princeton that part of Hodge’s legacy the social and political engagement that Stewart introduces as among the most difficult aspects of Hodge to update. After all, Hodge was first and foremost a theologian, employed by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. for the purpose of training Presbyterian pastors. This part of Hodge’s career merits only two essays in the book. Part of the reason for this neglect may be that Hodge’s doctrines have as little resonance with contemporary academics as his views on slavery or women. If Hodge could have accomplished what Jonathan Edwards did, the verdict might have been different. But according to Bruce Kuklick, one of the volume’s contributors, Hodge was a failure as an intellectual.  He did not demonstrate the ability to juxtapose the sacred texts of his tradition with his own life experience and the knowledge of his culture. Accordingly, for Kuklick, Hodge was a biblicist and dogmatist. Theologians have been called worse and readers may disagree with Kuklick’s verdict. But in either case the considerable merit of this book is to raise the question of how to reckon with figures like Hodge. It is at least a fascinating intellectual exercise. 

D. G. Hart
Director of Honors Programs and Faculty Development
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Wilmington, Delaware