At the beginning of his essay on Charles Hodge's view of spirituality, Mark Noll writes, "This paper is a sympathetic account of a failure." In many ways, Charles Hodge Revisited reads like the academy's sympathetic account of what they deem to be a failure-the maintenance and defense of Old School Calvinism in nineteenth-century America. And yet this book may be the first step toward a recovery of Charles Hodge as an important public intellectual set in the context of his times.
This collection of essays, from the 1997 conference co-sponsored by Princeton Theological Seminary and Princeton University, does treat Hodge sympathetically. For the first time, Hodge is placed both in "the intellectual weather of the nineteenth century" and in the larger history of ideas. Hodge engaged the rising tide of Romanticism, represented by European theologians such as Schleiermacher and American theologians such as John Williamson Nevin and Horace Bushnell, and attempted to maintain creatively the long-standing partnership between religion and science. Further, these scholars view Hodge as particularly alive to his times, reflecting brilliantly on political and cultural issues related to the Civil War and wrestling less satisfactorily with the problems related to slavery and Darwinism.
In the assessment of these scholars, Hodge does not come off so well. Like most ministers and theologians of his age, he lived in and sought to reinforce a patriarchal world where "manly ministers" maintained rule over "womanly women." In addition, Hodge's failure during the national debate over slavery to speak on the side of emancipation represents "a disappointment, and perhaps a crueler disappointment than even his critics have claimed, because Hodge did actually see what truth and justice were tending toward, and refused to hasten it even after Appomattox" (325). Hodge's failure in accounting for the relationship between doctrine and life could be attributed to allowing "his own religious experience to come first in determining the meaning of Scripture" which "gave the lie" to his development of theological method, compromised his Augustinian stance, and undermined the biblical content of his theology (204). Not surprisingly, Hodge's approach to biblical interpretation, while not "pre-modern" and aware of some aspects of historical-critical method, was certainly "nave" in his conception of biblical authorship and generally deficient in "historical consciousness."
So where does that leave Charles Hodge for modern believers and postmodern intellectuals (assuming the two overlap to some degree)? This book sounds an ambivalent note. The best that the editors could manage in their introduction and conclusion was that Hodge was relevant because he provided an example of a professional theologian engaging a full range of intellectual issues and mediating cultural disputes for the advancement of American Protestantism. While this is a good mandate for religious intellectuals making their way in the academy, it fails to provide a serious explanation for Hodge's continuing vitality in conservative Reformed circles. Yet it is precisely as a conservative Reformed theologian that Hodge merits consideration. And it is at this point that Charles Hodge Revisited fails to consider Hodge at all-as a theologian who devoted forty years to teaching systematic theology and continues to exert a broad influence today. To be sure, this book provides discussions of Hodge's theology (particularly, theological method, his doctrine of Scripture, and the importance of representation for his theology), and references to Hodge's Systematic Theology abound. But in offering a critical appraisal of Hodge's life and work, this book fails to consider the central part of Hodge's lifework-the year-in, year-out training of ministerial candidates in systematic theology. Even so, Charles Hodge Revisited provides a starting point toward a full-orbed consideration of Charles Hodge as a theologian and public intellectual, and offers an important resource for those seeking to understand his continuing importance to Reformed theology in America.
