One thing is clear: there will never be another Charles Hodge. Born in 1797, Hodge came of age and flourished in the critical, formative years of the American republic. Over the course of a remarkable career at Princeton Seminary that spanned five decades, Hodge became a towering figure on the American political and religious landscape. By the time he died in 1878, Hodge had created and defended—one is tempted to say ‘single‐handedly’—a distinctive, American path to modernity. Thanks to the excellent work of Paul Gutjahr, historians and theologians interested in American religious thought now have at their disposal a serious, readable, and well‐researched biography of the great Princeton theologian.
Gutjahr is sensitive to the fact that Hodge's reputation as a staunch defender of Protestant orthodoxy and thus as a retrograde ‘derivative thinker’ makes the prospect of a new Hodge biography rather dim and unattractive. To this perceived objection, Gutjahr offers a sensible response: ‘Whatever judgments exist, the truth remains that in the life of Charles Hodge one finds a stunning panoramic view of nineteenth‐century Protestantism. His story touches many, if not all, of the most critical developments in the American Christianity of his era, and whether one admires or despises Hodge, there is no denying that he exercised a profound influence in his day with lasting consequences after his death’. (4)
To say that the America of 1822 (when Hodge was appointed a Princeton professor) was not the same America Hodge left behind when he died in 1878 would be a gross understatement. Equally remarkable as the scope and pace of change, though, is the stable, changeless nature of Hodge's character and convictions in the same period. The closest Hodge ever came to a public boast was to claim, at the end of his life, that in all his years at Princeton he did not produce a single new idea. How and why Hodge resisted so many ‘critical developments’ when so many Christian leaders did not is an important question.
In a skillful and sure‐footed way, Gutjahr guides the reader through periods, crises, and events that transformed America during Hodge's tenure. The deep background for the period, which Gutjahr sketches with commendable clarity, is the fissiparous character of American Protestantism. Revivalistic movements in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries spawned contests and schisms that led to divisions within Presbyterianism and plunged denominations and divinity schools such as Harvard, Yale, Andover, and Union into deep identity‐forming conflicts. These set in motion the tectonic shifts that formed American religious topography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Only Hodge's Princeton seemed to stay in its place.
Gutjahr's talents as a historian are also manifest in the clear and intelligent way he connects Hodge's work to larger social and political currents. A significant portion of the book traces Hodge's response to the slavery question and, ultimately, to the political realities at the heart of the American Civil War. American churchmen grappled with the exegetical question of whether slavery is permitted or condemned in the Bible, and they also struggled to work out the relation between the churches and civil authorities. Hodge arrived early at a kind of gradualist position with regard to slavery, namely that its abolition was desirable but that the Bible's ‘silence’ on the issue prevented Christians from pursuing abolition through political radicalism.
In Hodge's time, there were also aggressive intellectual challenges to the durable Protestant cultural and theological synthesis forged by American Presbyterians in the eighteenth century. The first wave included a potent mixture of pietism, romanticism, speculative theology, and critical rationalism associated with German Higher Criticism and the liberal theological project of Schleiermacher. The second, which arrived in Hodge's later years, erupted from the Darwinian controversies of the 1860s and 70s.
These two movements struck at the twin pillars of Hodge's theological framework—biblical theology (in the Reformed tradition) and natural theology (inspired by Francis Bacon, the Scottish realists, and William Paley). Yet, as Gutjahr shows, Hodge stood against the waves and breakers, rooted to his Princeton seat by an unwavering commitment to the Reformed scholasticism of Turretin and the Westminster divines. He did not cede any ground. In a famous or perhaps infamous distillation, he declared that ‘Darwinism is atheism’. Yet Gutjahr is clear: Hodge's rejection of both was not only principled, it was also informed. Hodge studied biblical languages at Paris and biblical criticism at Halle; he kept current with scientific developments and read Darwin carefully. To the Germans, many of whom he admired, he said, politely, ‘No thank you’; to Darwin he said, rather more brusquely, ‘No way’.
Within the history of Presbyterianism, Hodge is a towering ‘guardian of orthodoxy’. But against the backdrop of America's swift and tumultuous passage into modernity and global ascendancy, Hodge is a recusant figure, a defiant anti‐modern. Gutjahr is a sympathetic, at times psychological biographer who steers clear of explicit theses for understanding Hodge's larger significance. Yet he subtly offers the intriguing suggestion that Hodge is anti‐modern not in spite of his American identity but because of it.
According to the subtitle, Hodge is the guardian not of Reformed Orthodoxy but of American orthodoxy. And as the epilogue suggests, his heirs are not to be found in the theological mainstream. Rather, they include B. B. Warfield, J. Gresham Machen, the tiny Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and the conservatives who took their name from the Fundamentalist‐Modernist controversy. In this way, Gutjahr makes Hodge the inspiration for a very American phenomenon: modern fundamentalism. The word bears dark and frightening connotations for many, but here, in the life of Hodge, it begins, rather more modestly, in the simple, sturdy faith of a quintessentially American figure. Those interested in the peculiarities of the American religious context would do very well to understand the life and legacy of Charles Hodge.
