Some of the most important lives in history are not especially enthralling. Their importance derives not from their intrigue but from their reliable return to labors short on glamour but long on reach. After prodigious archival research, Paul Gutjahr has written the definitive biography of the “Pope of Presbyterianism,” theologian Charles Hodge (1797–1878). Over fifty-seven episodic chapters, Hodge's life emerges as one of central importance to any history of nineteenth-century American Christianity. Yet, as Gutjahr gently reiterates, Hodge's work as a conservative religious thinker is connected to his humdrum habits and maddeningly achromatic stances on hot subjects. From his quiet vantage as a seminarian in southern New Jersey, Hodge maintained an “utter consistency of conviction” that was never contested by competing philosophies, theologies, or epistemologies (363). In every aspect of his person, Hodge had a “love of habit and systemization,” and focused on “hard work, self-denial, and personal achievement” achieved through “the known, the established, and the functional” institutional and ecclesiastical pathways of the Presbyterian Church (29, 30, 150). These tendencies permeated Hodge's hermeneutics. In his two-volume constitutional history of the Presbyterian Church, Hodge condemned “every person and action bringing disorder and confusion” like evangelists George Whitefield and James Davenport, “while he praises everything and everyone promoting a spirit of peace, orderliness, and unity” (191). Looking out onto an American landscape rife with self-appointed preachers and renegade religious movements, Hodge wished for more presbyteries and fewer heresies. “The strictest age of any particular church has almost always been its best age,” Hodge explained with a sigh (190).

In the study of American religion, strictness is often embodied by the figure of John Calvin and the creeds that emerged from his writings. The nineteenth century is imagined as an epoch in which Calvinism was slowly diluted by the forces of democratization and liberalization. Such a history portrays a concentration made watery, as if Calvinism was a fresh-squeezed orthodoxy that became a theological Sunny Delight. Within this narrative, Hodge starred as a “peerless advocate for the tenets of conservative Calvinist Christianity in America” (213). Born into an established Philadelphia family, Hodge made a profession of faith in 1815 and began an academic life that coincided propitiously with the development of religious education at Princeton. From the beginning of his career, Hodge argued that Christian lives ought to be ruled by the Bible, and for Hodge the “best single synopsis of the whole scope of God's creation and the doctrines taught in the Bible” could be found in the Westminster Confession (356). This doctrinal exclusivity became a Princeton trademark. Hodge stated that the Seminary had adhered to a single guiding principle, namely that, “[t]he Bible is the word of God . . . what the Bible says, God says. That ends the matter” (363).

Yet it hardly did. Knowing what that word of God was required relentless reading and reiteration, especially in a post-revolutionary country pervaded by talk of empowerment and individualism. Over his lifetime Hodge produced a lengthy bibliography of treatises bent upon supplying responsible scholarship the conveyed correct biblical interpretations. He founded the journal Biblical Repertory with other Princeton faculty to assist this cause and, optimistically, to reach a broad audience. In a time when free pamphlets were circulated by the American Tract Society, Biblical Repertory was too expensive and academic to reach a broad audience. Hodge had greater success accessing large numbers at Princeton where he taught over three thousand seminarians, and with the publication of The Way of Life, his small apologetics volume which sold 35,000 volumes. Within more academic circles, his three-volume Systematic Theology became the definitive summary of reformed theology, offering, as Gutjahr reminds us, “a work of synthesis and distillation, not innovation” (350). Gutjahr examines this print record thoroughly, tying its emphases on interpretive infallibility to a longer story of Christianity that will ultimately link Hodge to the emergence of fundamentalism. In every text that Hodge wrote, he never introduced evidence that contradicted his doctrinal confidence, seeking to represent a unified Presbyterianism smoothed of inconsistencies. If the Bible was to be understood definitively, then Hodge needed to march its scriptural borders, forbidding all wrongful readings.

Unsurprisingly Hodge stood against anyone who promoted ecumenism or evangelicalism. Whether it was the New Haven Theology of Nathaniel Taylor or the domestic Christology of Horace Bushnell, Hodge eschewed every liberal turn, sticking to a pronounced Augustinian Calvinism. While others sought to develop an elastic Christianity that would reach as many as possible, Hodge reified a stolid Christianity that would adhere to confessional church doctrine. Gutjahr shows how Hodge's commitment to orthodoxy contributed to his Whig republicanism, as well as his genteel ease with slaveholding and Pauline misogyny. Through effective reconstructions of Hodge's viewpoint, Gutjahr links his subject's thinking with actions, his private life and his public participation. It is a biography written in a straightforward style, unfolding reports on yellow fever deaths and Civil War acrimony with restraint befitting Hodge himself. Gutjahr is at his discursive best when he is mediating between two conflicting parties, offering acute descriptions of thorny schisms and political disputes. Anyone seeking to understand conflicts within the General Assembly in the years leading up to the Civil War, or the origins of Mercersburg Theology, or the shifting contours of Unionist politics, would be hard-pressed to find a superior account.

Despite Gutjahr's heroic resuscitative efforts, Hodge never quite emerges from the margins to which he has been shuttled. Earnest, low-key, troubled by a bum leg, Hodge seems very human, yet not terribly inciting to the imagination, theological or otherwise. Even his eulogies tended to focus on his kindness and friendship more than his vitae or consequence. Gutjahr perhaps overstates the case when he writes that “few Americans can match the depth, breadth, and longevity of Hodge's theological influence” (5). Even when grappling with his nemesis New School Presbyterians or Darwinian expositors, Hodge does not offer depth or breadth as much as he does a dogged devotion to the message itself. The Westminster Confession reminds its readers that “the infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself.” Hodge committed to nothing more, and nothing less, than to be as infallible as the text he guarded, an emblem of phlegmatism in an era of unstoppable change.