In a 1970 article, historian George M. Marsden provocatively argued that twentieth-century American Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism owed as much to the previous century's New School Presbyterianism as to the Old School stream represented by Princeton theologians Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield. With their activist brand of piety and evangelistic-oriented vision of ministry, many New School Presbyterians who revered Charles Finney eventually found their way into nascent Fundamentalism. Perhaps the poster child for this movement was A. T. Pierson (1837-1911), whose life is insightfully chronicled by Dana Robert in Occupy Till I Come.
Robert has skillfully located Pierson in the hurly-burly world of antebellum New School Presbyterianism. Pierson grew up in churches associated with the progressive Third Presbytery of New York City, which emphasized revivalism, reform, and anti-pew rents. After graduating from New School bastions Hamilton College and Union Theological Seminary (New York), he pastored churches in Binghamton and Waterford, New York, before moving to the ministry that would make his reputation and shape his view of ministry, Fort Street Presbyterian Church in Detroit, Michigan. While at Fort Street, Pierson became involved in networks for urban and foreign missions. The developing interest in foreign missions would eventually lead Pierson to become a promoter of "the evangelization of the world in this generation," a motto which he first articulated. Pierson would spend the last twenty years of ministry primarily as an itinerant promoter of missions in his role as editor of the Missionary Review.
Pierson was a striking embodiment of many traits that historians have come to associate with American Evangelicalism. Strongly committed to the plenary inspiration of Scripture, long before the Princetonian formulation of inerrancy, Pierson's inductive Bible study approach led him in often surprising directions: the denigration of ordination, the promotion of women in preaching ministries (especially on the mission field), a movement from the optimistic postmillennialism of his youth to a contradictory premillennialism of his later years, and finally, a decision to be "rebaptized" by immersion though he did not disbelieve infant baptism. Pierson also promoted holiness theology. Although he did not move as far as Finney and the Oberlin theology's commitment to "entire sanctification," Pierson was involved in the Keswick movement and played an important role in the decisive 1905 Keswick Convention. Several times at key points in his ministry, Pierson experienced "deeper works of sanctification," which he believed deepened his relationship with Christ. Because he loved Scripture and sought the Spirit, Pierson was a promoter of ecumenical cooperation based on shared theological commitments instead of denominational activity. After his "rebaptism" and removal from the roles of the Philadelphia presbytery, Pierson's work typified the independent, nondenominational, parachurch ministry characteristic of later evangelicals.
Above all, Pierson was an important representative of later Evangelicalism in the way he privileged evangelism over all other religious priorities. His Detroit and Philadelphia pastorates made him an early promoter of urban evangelism and moved him in directions that foreshadowed twentieth-century social Christianity. He regularly castigated his wealthy Detroit congregation for failing to abandon the pew rent system, which kept the poor from worshiping and hearing the gospel. When the church building of Fort Street Church burned down, Pierson immediately rented an opera house and experienced a sixteen-month revival modeled on the ministry of Finney; almost three hundred people professed conversion during that time. With the assistance of retail tycoon John Wanamaker in Philadelphia, Pierson led Bethany Church as one of the nation's first "institutional churches," that met physical needs through a multitude of mercy ministries which provided bridges to the working classes for the gospel. At both churches, Pierson's most important ministry was the interdenominational inductive Bible studies that he taught to equip Sunday school teachers and lay leaders to evangelize their neighborhoods.
However, it was particularly as a promoter of foreign missions evangelism that Pierson achieved his greatest notoriety. From his first book on missions, The Crisis of Missions (1886), Pierson was an important linchpin in the engine of missions that made the nineteenth century "the Great Century" of missions. With mission promoters George Muller, J. Hudson Taylor, A. J. Gordon, John Mott, William Blackstone, and especially D. L. Moody, Pierson advanced the cause of foreign missions throughout transatlantic Evangelicalism. He played a role in the establishment or continuation of nearly every major "faith" mission in the world-African Inland Mission, China Inland Mission, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Oriental Missionary Society. A visit to speak at Princeton University led one freshman football player, Robert Speer, to commit himself to missions; eventually, Speer would head the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions for a generation.
Even in his transition from postmillennialist to premillennialist, Pierson typified evangelical trajectories. Profoundly affected by the Civil War, he believed that the soldiers' blood was shed in a cosmic battle for freedom and morality that provided an atonement for the sins of the United States. Once the country was freed from the sin of slavery through armed conflict, Pierson moved to a different kind of warfare-a cultural war against moral sin and vice that typified his Detroit ministry. However, by 1878, as it was apparent that the United States was not moving to a higher plane of morality, he became discouraged and convinced that the movement of history was degenerative, not progressive. Eventually, Pierson became known as a leading dispensational premillennialist, and at the end of his life served as one of the original associate editors for C. I. Scofield's Reference Bible. Yet, even with his commitment to dispensationalism, Pierson never got beyond his original optimism. He earnestly hoped, until the end of his life, that the evangelization of the world could and would occur in his generation, making the kingdoms of the world into the Kingdom of Christ.
Dana Robert's biography, then, serves not only as a perceptive introduction to the life of A. T. Pierson. Rather, its larger significance can be found in the window it provides on late nineteenth-century Evangelicalism. Out of that still murky milieu, the forces that continue to shape the American way of evangelical faith were formed. Only if we understand that time can we understand our own. For her compelling book that casts light on both the past and present, we are extremely grateful.
