More than 150 years have passed since the death of Alexander Campbell, whose religious descendants include the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), independent Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, and the acapella Churches of Christ. Together, these groups number eight million believers worldwide. In addition, Campbell's dream of restoring apostolic Christianity and uniting all believers on the foundation of the Bible has helped to inspire various ecumenical movements. Yet only now has someone produced a book-length, critical biography of the reformer. With the publication of A life of Alexander Campbell, Douglas A. Foster has filled the gap in fine style. Foster, Professor of Church History at Abilene Christian University in Texas, spent more than a decade on the project. The unique status and high quality of this volume will make it the standard on the subject for years to come.

In a preface, Foster explains that he set out to write ‘a critical biography that assesses principal parts of Campbell's life and thought to discover something of his significance for American Christianity and the worldwide movement that emerged from his work’ (pp. xiv–xv). From there, the book consists of twenty-one chapters unevenly divided into five major sections.

‘Section i: Formation’ describes the religious and political history of Ireland, where Campbell was born in County Antrim in 1788. Foster provides a brief biography of the single greatest influence on the young Alexander: his father, Thomas Campbell, a Seceder Presbyterian minister. He also reports on Alexander's momentous year of study at the University of Glasgow just before emigrating to the United States in 1809.

In ‘Section ii: Creation’, Foster tells the story of Campbell's career as an American religious reformer, c. 1810–50. Soon after he arrived in the US, the young Alexander began making a name for himself as a preacher in western Pennsylvania, and as a polemical writer and occasional religious debater. Like his father, he argued for the removal of what he called ‘human opinions’ as terms of Christian fellowship. In time, he specified that the ‘ancient gospel’ required only one fact and one institution: people must believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, and must submit to baptism by immersion for the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Beyond Christian initiation, Campbell emphasised ‘the ancient order of things’, the Bible's teaching on practical topics like the Lord's Supper, the congregational offices of bishop and deacon, and church discipline. According to his implicit programme, the restoration of apostolic faith and practice on biblical grounds would promote the unity of believers and the conversion of the world, conditions that would usher in the millennial kingdom. Foster insists that Campbell never relinquished this outlook. He takes issue with Richard T. Hughes's argument that in the late 1820s and into the ’30s, Campbell transitioned from primitivist to a much more ecumenical Protestant who embraced American civic religion. According to Foster, ‘transforming church and society through the restoration of the ancient gospel and order’ was ‘Campbell's consistent vision’ (p. 88). Campbell's growing, nationwide fame led to his 1829 debate with the religious sceptic Robert Owen, and an 1837 debate with John Baptist Purcell, archbishop of Cincinnati. In 1840–1, Campbell planned and established Bethany College, and presided over ‘the first national annual gathering and missionary organization for his growing movement’, the American Christian Missionary Society, established in 1849 (p. 144).

‘Section iii: Defense and Conflict’ takes up eight chapters and represents the centre and heart of the book. Here, Foster fully establishes his main theme about Campbell's career during the 1830s to 1850s: religious controversy. The list of opponents is impressive. His first adversaries were Presbyterians, the denomination in which he was raised, and Baptists, his adopted religious group. Both rejected Campbell's conviction that people are saved not by faith alone, but by faith accompanied by acts of obedience, the first being immersion. Another critical difference was that Campbell rejected the prevenient work of the Holy Spirit for an individual's salvation. As early as 1829 a Baptist association condemned Campbell's belief that ‘baptism should be administered to all who say they believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God’, with no consideration of the candidate's experience of saving grace (pp. 191–2). Likewise, the Baptist leader Andrew Broaddus rejected Campbell's belief in ‘the sufficiency of intellectual assent to the facts of the gospel without supernatural action by the Holy Spirit’ (p. 203). Campbell also struggled with leaders in his reformation whom he could not rein in, like John Thomas, a British physician and wayward preacher. Eventually, Thomas established the group that to this day wears his designation, Christadelphians. Campbell seems to have been especially vexed by the departures of at least four leading evangelists who embraced Mormonism, especially Sidney Rigdon, an early associate of Campbell's from whom the Latter-day Saints seem to have got their rhetoric of restoration. He also had public bouts with loyal associates like Barton W. Stone, from whom the Stone-Campbell Movement gets the other part of its name, and Walter Scott, the great evangelist of the movement's first generation.

In ‘Section iv: Surrender’, Foster highlights the tumultuous 1840s and ’50s, when Campbell was growing old and the United States was coming apart. Seeing that north-south divisions among Baptists and Methodists signalled a threat to the movement over which he presided. Campbell took a moderate position on the question of slavery and insisted that it must never become a term of communion. But his efforts to hold the movement together achieved only partial success. With the outbreak of civil war, Campbell, then in his early seventies, could only wonder about the dream of a coming millennium. The leader who seemed to have an answer for everything was forced to admit that he did not know what to think, except that the Almighty was still in control of human destiny. He died in March 1866, not long after a son, Alexander Campbell Jr, who had served during the war as an officer in the Louisiana state militia, escaped a charge of treason against the United States.

‘Section v: Legacy’ contains one final chapter, ‘The shadow of Alexander Campbell’. Here, Foster surveys some of the literature about the reformer, and reflects on his influence in every branch of the movement. Indeed, ‘no part of Alexander Campbell's reformation ever totally forgot him’, not even those congregations who insist that they began in the first century at Jerusalem and depend on nothing but Christ and the Bible (p. 324).

Footnotes on nearly every page of this book, pointing to a wide variety of sources, reveal the depth of the author's research. Dozens of interesting, well-placed photographs and maps accompany the text, which is followed by a full index.

Every biographer must deal with the question of proportion. The attentive reader will notice that Foster includes very little about the women in Campbell's life, especially his mother, Jane Corneigle, for whom he named his first child, and Margaret Brown, his first wife and the mother of eight of his children. Should these important individuals have garnered more attention in an otherwise thorough biography? Foster sometimes refers to Campbell's ‘elitism’ (pp. 52, 61, 190), ‘self-absorption’ (p. 326) and ‘arrogance’ (pp. 52, 61, 190, 326). Was Campbell really an arrogant elitist? Or was he simply a gifted, self-assured, and successful leader? In any case, it is clear that Alexander Campbell lived a full and momentous life, one that Douglas Foster has masterfully captured in this definitive biography.