Thoughtful Christianity
Alvah Hovey and the Problem of Authority within the Context of Nineteenth-Century Northern Baptists
- History & Biography
- Publisher: Pickwick Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2021
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Publisher's Description
Baptists in the nineteenth century grew from a small, struggling denomination to the second-largest Protestant denomination in America. They constructed conventions, schools, churches, and benevolent works. American Baptists transformed from cultural outsiders to insiders. Despite this growth in size, organization, and influence, there is surprisingly few attempts to understand them historically. This is even more true for Northern Baptists as opposed to their Southern counterparts, despite the fact that Northern Baptists, in many respects, were the theological leaders of the denomination. This raises questions about what their theology was, what it was rooted in, and how well it could handle the surplus of challenges that nineteenth-century religion threw at it. Chief among these were the challenges toward biblical and theological authority. Perhaps the brightest star of the Northern Baptist constellation, and doubtless the most well-connected, was Alvah Hovey from Newton Theological Institute in Newton Centre, Massachusetts. This book, the first book-length treatment of this Baptist giant since Hovey's son published a biography in 1929, chronicles Hovey's life and career focusing on how he coped with the challenges of biblical criticism and a rapidly changing theological context. Hovey produced a theology he understood as thoughtful Christianity.
Endorsements (4)
Foreword
“Alvah Hovey (1820–1903) is the most important Baptist in America about whom few nonspecialists have heard—and this is the first scholarly book about his massive scholarly footprint in Baptist life and American Christianity in general. Many thanks to Matthew Shrader for this first-rate scholarly monograph, and to Michael Haykin and friends for this crucial series of books. They are finally shining a light on an enormous but all-too-often neglected denomination in modern religious history.”
“In his deeply researched Thoughtful Christianity, Matthew Shrader casts new light on the career of Alvah Hovey, an often neglected but influential theologian in Northern Baptist history. But the author does more than that. Shrader makes the compelling case that students of American religion need to rethink a number of their common assumptions about the nature of the evangelical faith in the last half of the nineteenth century. Shrader’s volume, then, is itself a ‘thoughtful’ piece of historical scholarship.”
“The usual story that is remembered of the Northern Baptists in the nineteenth century is one of collapse under the juggernaut of higher criticism and schism as faithful Christians hived off into fundamentalist communities. As Prof. Shrader’s new monograph on the Northern Baptist scholar Alvah Hovey shows, however, this is not the only story from this era. Hovey upheld classical orthodoxy and wielded an enormous influence among his fellow Baptists—a thousand or so students sat under his tutelage and his teaching bore fruit. A welcome study on a key figure in a denominational group, the Baptists of the nineteenth century, who have not been given their due in the world of historical reflection.”
“A fine study into the thought of a theological stalwart. Hovey was the most significant American Baptist theologian of the nineteenth century because of his influence for thirty years as president of Newton Theological Institution, America’s oldest Baptist seminary, and because of his voluminous literary output. Yet he has been that century’s most under-studied Baptist champion largely because the ground shifted underneath him from the old orthodoxy to ‘the new theology.’ An important contribution!”
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