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The Catholic Historical Review 92.4 (2006) 697-698

Reviewed by
Walter H. Conser, Jr.
University of North Carolina at Wilmington
Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work. Edited by John W. Stewart and James H. Moorhead. (Grand Rapids: William. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 2002. Pp. x, 375. $25.00 paperback.)

In his summary chapter, coeditor James Moorehead states that Charles Hodge (1797-1878) was neither the bogey man nor the icon that later generations considered him. Professor at Princeton Seminary for five decades, instructor to 3,000 students, author of more than a dozen books and several score articles, Hodge's influence, particularly among certain strains of mid-nineteenth-century American Protestantism, is indisputable. This volume revisits that legacy with a well-qualified cadre of scholars providing an updated assessment of Hodge's significance as theologian, scriptural exegete, and public intellectual. Philosophically, Hodge stood squarely in the tradition of Scottish Common Sense Realism, an impulse that was powerfully regnant among many Protestants, even if challenged by the currents of Kantianism and nineteenth-century Romanticism. With its confidence in the mind to know the world and overcome any residues of Humean skepticism, this philosophical tradition promoted a static rather than a dynamic view of theology. It understood the world, the heavens, and everything in between in terms of equilibrium with little recognition of historical development. Hodge's view of scripture was equally ahistorical. The centrality of the Bible for issues of faith was paramount. This volume clarifies Hodge's engagement with European and specifically German intellectual resources that go beyond the Scottish tradition. However, these alternative resources were drawn from conservative and pietist circles, and not from the historically sensitive influences of Hegel and Schleiermacher. Finally, regarding society and politics, Hodge was firmly anchored in the Federalist-Whig-Republican trajectory, skeptical of Jacksonian appeals to the common man, fearful of the social instability posed by Transcendentalism and Abolitionism, and opposed to the market revolution taking place under his own feet.

For readers of this journal, Hodge might seem to be a prototypical nineteenth century American Protestant with little attraction. His affirmation of biblical authority would brook no appeal to tradition, and his animus against historicism could not embrace even Newman's doctrine of development. Even if his occasionally unsympathetic remarks about Catholicism might be written off as reflections of his class and cultural position, his insistence upon the sufficiency of the Bible and the error of a mediating priesthood represented a deeper chasm. Nevertheless, Hodge was more than a demagogue purveying a [End Page 697] simplistic anti-Catholicism. His Systematic Theology, published in 1871-1872, was every bit as concerned with the issue of religious authority as were the roughly contemporaneous reflections taking place at the Vatican under Pius IX. Moreover, Pius had invited several American Protestant denominations to send representatives to the First Vatican Council. When the Northern Presbyterians decided to decline this invitation, Hodge was chosen to write the response. While Catholic and Protestant relations were often combative in this era, Hodge wrote a conciliatory response stating that any who professed Jesus as Lord and Savior were true Christians. Consequently, while students of American Reformed Protestantism can encounter in this volume a more nuanced estimate of one who has played an important role in that tradition's nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century history, so too can students of American Catholicism find in Hodge not simply a one-dimensional caricature of their tradition, but rather an informed disputant. Finally, for the general student of American Christianity, as this volume makes so clear, Hodge represented an important, though ultimately limited, authority in the intellectual domain of the nineteenth century and its legacy for future generations.

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