It is rare in academic circles to read about a scholar's love for his subjects, yet such adoration flows freely through the pages of Garth Rosell's The Surprising Work of God. This profound admiration stems naturally from Rosell's own past. The son of mid-twentieth-century preacher Merv Rosell, one of the many evangelists his book lauds, Rosell readily admits his place in the history he tells:

What follows this refreshingly honest admission is an equally stimulating account of the “remarkable individuals” who revitalized American evangelicalism between the 1930s and 1950s. Rosell's text is meant to inspire as much as instruct, and, as evidenced in the church leaders' glowing endorsements printed on its opening page, it clearly hits this mark. Each chapter contains teaching moments for evangelicals today, and in the book's last pages Rosell summarizes what any reader will sense he was getting at all along: that study of the evangelical movement in the mid-twentieth century “can be of help to the contemporary church” for the way it proved faithful to “historic orthodoxy” and was “activist in style, optimistic in mood, reformist in strategy, Bible-centered in authority, Christ-centered in ministry, mission-centered in outreach, evangelistic in practice, and ecumenical in spirit” (221). As pedagogy, The Surprising Work of God thus proceeds with a sincerity of purpose drawn from its author's personal and pastoral side. To read Rosell's rich, descriptive prose detailing Harold Ockenga's intellectual life, the wave of youth rallies that swept the country after World War II, and the bitter controversies that accompanied Billy Graham's revivals in the late 1950s, is to gain direct access to the thoughts, emotions, expectations, and frustrations that evangelical leaders encountered in this formative period. This is where the insider's perspective translates into powerful storytelling.

As history designed to instruct, The Surprising Work of God proceeds with scholarly diligence and care. Soon after Harold Ockenga's death in 1985, Audrey Ockenga donated her husband's papers to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary with a request that Rosell tell her spouse's story in light of “the mid-twentieth century rebirth of evangelicalism” (11). In his writing it becomes evident that Rosell, professor of church history at Gordon-Conwell, not only honors that commitment, but also takes full advantage of it by carrying out a thorough read of Ockenga's papers. Rosell's impressive command of American religious history further strengthens his work and allows him to draw important connections between Ockenga's life and key developments in modern American Protestantism. In his first five chapters—the strongest of the book—Rosell provides a concise history of the evangelical tradition from John Winthrop and its Puritan roots to Jonathan Edwards and its revivalist heritage, then turns to Ockenga as testament of this tradition's staying power in American society. After tracking Ockenga's personal life, from its beginnings in a Chicago suburb, through its pivotal turn at Princeton Seminary in the late 1920s, to its vocational triumphs in the pulpit at Park Street Church in Boston, he devotes several pages to the religious awakening this cleric helped spark in the 1940s. Here The Surprising Work of God shines, and offers fresh insight into the internal processes by which Ockenga shaped the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and energized the broader alliance of pastors, lay leaders, and initiatives it came to represent. In the years immediately following the NAE's founding in 1943, he explains, a new generation of evangelists (a “band of brothers”) that included Merv Rosell, Jack Shuler, Jack Wyrtzen, Percy Crawford, Torrey Johnson, Billy Graham, and many others, embraced Ockenga's vision for postwar evangelicalism and began selling it to the public through mass evangelism. For a decade extending into the 1950s, these crusaders crisscrossed the continent, holding revivals in Los Angeles, Boston, and many points in between, and extended their reach beyond the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans into uncharted, un-evangelized territory. In the last four chapters of his work, Rosell takes this story to what he deems its unfortunate conclusion—evangelicalism's fragmentation over Graham's New York Crusade in 1957—then pauses for further assessment of Ockenga's worldview. Here he provides brief and surface coverage of the evangelical leader's notions of race, poverty, Catholicism, ecumenism, and social activism, before reaching the point he is most interested in: Ockenga's rigorous intellectualism and its impact on evangelical thought.

Clearly dictated by Rosell's own convictions, The Surprising Work of God passionately conveys the commitments that drove Ockenga's “new evangelicalism,” even if it does so through a rather narrow lens. There is much to learn from his account but also a lot that is tantalizing left unsaid. Rosell's focus on lesser-known revivalists and a relatively understudied decade in evangelicalism's history—the 1940s—fills a void in religious historiography, yet barely touches on some of the broader cultural contexts in which this mid-century revival took place. As Rosell tells it, the formation of the NAE, for instance, seemed to transpire in a vacuum with inter- and intra-denominational politics the only real concern. True, Ockenga's vision for the NAE was principally theological, but to read the words he spoke at this organization's inaugural gatherings—sermons Rosell reconstructs—is to glimpse a much larger agenda undertaken by a broader constituency of Americans who saw the tumult of war as an opportunity to redefine their nation's identity and purpose, and sense of mission to the world. When calling on his allies to fight the “terrible octopus of liberalism” and remake evangelicalism into a “vanguard” able to counter communism in the race for global dominance, Ockenga seemed willing to invest his faith community in a much larger project of cultural and political reconstruction (97, 103). Yet Rosell does not pursue this line of analysis and prefers instead to accept Ockenga's words (and actions) at face value as a product only of priestly thinking. Because of Rosell's insular approach, Ockenga's life itself sometimes seems one-dimensional, devoid of internal tensions, contradictions, and complexity. What Rosell compellingly demonstrates, though, is that Ockenga's life—and by extension mid-twentieth-century evangelicalism's—was never devoid of drama or large-scale significance. Meant to edify the saints, Rosell's book should, in this respect, also excite scholars about fresh possibilities for the study of evangelicalism in the modern era.