W. Stanford Reid: An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy (review)

Stanford Reid (1913–96) was a Canadian professor of history who was also a staunchly conservative Christian. The ostensible rationale for this biography is that Reid's life nicely illustrates a sharp and profound conflict between Canadian higher education and religion. But Donald MacLeod, who teaches church history at Tyndale Seminary, Toronto, evidently had a more personal motive for writing. He was Reid's student, admirer, and friend. In fact, MacLeod has written himself into the biography at a few points.

Some impressive research undergirds this study. MacLeod has combed through family papers and archival collections with the single-mindedness of a parent hunting nits in a child's hair, and he has conducted scores of interviews over several decades. He also has the strong advantage of a close familiarity with Reid's religious world, and with evangelical Christianity in Canada, a subculture which is usually either ignored or misinterpreted by the scholarly community. Although he is part of this subculture, MacLeod is also candid about it. He narrates events and identifies people that someone else in his position might have treated more discreetly, and less interestingly.

Reid was intriguing, but in the end, his contributions were not immense. Childless and focused on his work, he gave himself whole-heartedly both to the universities that he served and to the Presbyterian Church. Wearing his academic hat, he spent thirteen years at McGill, then went to the University of Guelph as the founding chair of the history department. Along the way he wrote articles and books on medieval and early modern Scotland that CRESSONwere prone to exaggeration and not always attentive to detail. In Christian circles, he briefly pastored some churches, had a hand in founding Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, practised controversy, wrote for Christianity Today, and played politics as a trustee of Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia.

MacLeod catches the personality of his subject. An outsized man with a booming voice, Reid was 'humorous, provocative, irritating, opinionated.' Throughout his life, he tirelessly exposed the errors of all Christianity other than Calvinism, including millennialism, dispensationalism, fundamentalism, liberal ecumenical Presbyterianism, Barthian neo-orthodoxy, and popular evangelicalism in its pietistic, works-righteous, experience-obsessed form. He seems to have seen himself as a latter-day John Knox, that is, a Scottish reformer and historian who excited strong feelings because 'he took a clear-cut religious and theological position.' The obvious difference is that Knox proved influential. By contrast, Reid, too theologically pure to build bridges, could lead no movements, although he occasionally made the attempt.

The recurring theme of the book is that Reid's Calvinist vocation was to marry faith to understanding, and that this vocation provoked both academics, who regarded a cleric 'as a pariah,' and the many conservative Christians who had 'retreated into anti-intellectualism.' But while the book provides copious evidence of the problems Reid had with his fellow Christians, it fails to show that his faith created any serious difficulties for his academic career. On the contrary, as a professor, Reid enjoyed large audiences for his views, job security, and prestige. Well, says MacLeod, McGill and Guelph were exceptions; Christian faculty there were not 'penalized' as they were 'elsewhere.' But then why choose Reid as a model of the unwelcome Christian intellectual?

Where MacLeod has gone wrong is in his key interpretive assumption that most Canadian universities in the 1950s and 1960s were secularized and reflexively hostile to Christian faith. Catherine Gidney, in A Long Eclipse: The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920–1970 (2004), has demonstrated the strong Protestant hegemony of public anglophone universities in Canada, and universities in the Roman Catholic sphere of influence were at least equally friendly to faith. Reid, then, was the model, not of a Christian in a secular Canadian academy, but of a conservative Protestant Christian in a Canadian academy that privileged other forms of Christianity. But how hard it would be to find a clear narrative thread in...