The situation is familiar. A man—a faithful man—spends much of his life on a quest to explain himself and to show the world the meaty substance to his intellectual struggles. He writes and writes and writes, grappling along the way with condescending peers, departmental brouhaha, denominational provincialism, financial trials, irritating children, and an unloving wife. Through it all, he persists, dreaming of the day when his book, his magnum opus, makes it clear: he has the answer. And once the world sees that he has the answer, his life—his motley, muddy little life—will be redeemed. And maybe too his subject will be saved from the dustbin, placed now by his genius at the center of every conference panel, journal forum, and dissertation prospectus.

Because the man and his fantasy are familiar, you can guess how it ends. Watching from a distance, you wish you could stop the carnage before it begins, grabbing the hand of the faithful man and directing him inward (to his church, his employer, or his home) rather than relentlessly, obsessively outward to the phantom of academic celebrity. Because the book will never do the thing he wants, because books (like children, like parishioners, like students) are uncontrollable beyond your clenching stare. They will be reviewed and contorted in ways you could not imagine, replying to your rectitude with assessments that “the author's approach and methodology, his understanding of contemporary critical scholarship, and his attitude to its findings all seem to raise rather serious questions” (136). The balloon pops in an empty room; what you believe you made has now been unmade in a single sentence. “Stricken right down to the core,” you “abandon the dream of engaging” the world beyond your particular pews, descending instead into spiritual grief, into the solace of the classroom, and maybe into alcoholism (140, 147).

The book is George Eldon Ladd's Jesus and the Kingdom: The Eschatology of Biblical Realism (1964), and the reviewer was Norman Perrin, then a professor at the University of Chicago. Jesus and the Kingdom took Ladd, a thirty-year member of the Fuller Seminary faculty, ten years to complete as he sought to mold an evangelical exemplar for secular eyes. Initially, it seemed Ladd had done the impossible, publishing a critical study on a purely biblical topic with a house (Harper and Row) outside the evangelical mainstream. “Evangelicals have done relatively little in the area of solid scholarship,” Ladd wrote his editor at Harper, and “the old line scholars have tended to look down upon Evangelicals for their uncritical Biblicism” (126). Through this book, he wanted to demonstrate the growing erudition among evangelical scholars, he wanted to describe the Kingdom of God as the dynamic rule of Christ in history, and he wanted to model a methodology that he believed reconciled God's presence in the human activities of history. In short, he wanted in one volume to convince scholars that his methodological objectivity was not compromised by (what he called) his “historic premillennism”; rather, it was enhanced by it, providing an even more dynamic view of the past. When Perrin attacked Ladd's “biblical realism” by suggesting that Ladd possessed an “uncritical view of the Gospels as historical sources,” he effectively negated the entire venture (136).

Canadian-born and New England–educated, Ladd emerged from an impoverished childhood ceaselessly hustling for uplift. “While it is difficult to quantify with precision the impact [of] Ladd's difficult upbringing,” D'Elia summarizes with journalistic breeze, “the related themes of inferiority, obsession with status, and his desperate need to be heard remained apparent until his death” (4). D'Elia records the multiple private and public ways Ladd tried to resuscitate the evangelical sophistication he believed directed the early twentieth-century publication of The Fundamentals and the Scofield Reference Bible. In D'Elia's rendering, Ladd becomes an indifferent family man, a beloved teacher, and a relentless operator, seeking to connect the work of seminarians and believers to scholarship produced in non-sectarian universities. To that end, he joined academic organizations, wrote letter after letter to scholars far afield from Pasadena, and published fourteen books. Although biblical critics from the secular ranks never incorporated Ladd's research, when the members of an evangelical academic society were asked in 1984 (two years after Ladd's death) to identify the theologian who had influenced them the most, George Ladd shared top billing with John Calvin.

A Place at the Table plots itself in neat chronological segments, with the first chapter addressing Ladd's childhood and education, the second his first five years at Fuller, the third his next five years, and so on. With an amazing trove of personal letters and memoranda at his disposal, D'Elia relates with journalistic panache Ladd's debates with John Walvoord, his support of the Revised Standard Version translation of the Bible, and his explication of Rudolf Bultmann's theology for conservative readers. Through this ramble in academe, D'Elia supplies a vivid sidebar to the sweeping histories of modern Christian intellectuals authored by Gary Dorrien, Mark Noll, David Russell, and, most significantly to this study, George Marsden's institutional history of Fuller Seminary, Reforming Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1987). Unlike those craftsmen, D'Elia's style is occasionally halting, and he leaves interpretive reflection to subsequent scholars. But as a parable of modern scholarly practice and a report from the front lines of seminarian intellectualism, the story of Ladd is indispensible. Insofar as D'Elia's goal is to explore “why Ladd wrote rather than simply an examination of what he wrote,” A Place at the Table will be most interesting to scholars of American evangelicalism rather than those academic theologians to whom Ladd directed such keening energy (xviii). That even a biography of Ladd will receive more attention from those interested in his identity politics than those benefiting from his contributions to biblical criticism is an irony in which neither he, nor his current inheritors, would find much pleasure.