Calvinism – An Interview with Darryl Hart (part 1)

Darryl Hart, Visiting Professor of History at Hillsdale College, is one of America’s premier Christian historians. Since publishing his work on J. Gresham Machen in 1994, the Church has been blessed with a series of well written studies on Presbyterianism, American Evangelicalism, Jonathan Edwards and American Christian conservatism. Recently Yale University Press published his latest academic study—Calvinism: A History.  It has already been reviewed in several prominent places like the Wall Street Journal, The Tablet, and the International Catholic News Weekly. Any evangelical book taken up by the Journal certainly warrants consideration from Credo Magazine. Recently I (Jeff Straub) spoke with Darryl Hart about his new book, Machen and Presbyterianism, and his view of the current evangelical fascination with Reformed theology.

I understand from listening to a previous interview you did that you write more as a historian than a theologian. Is that a fair assessment?

Yes. I am an elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (a ruling elder not a teaching elder) and I do blog. When I blog, I think my theological cards are showing. But when I do history, I try to write as a historian. My training is academic and because I am writing for academic audiences, I just cannot do the theology there. I know this raises a whole lot of questions about Christian scholarship.

Darryl, we are going to talk about your new book on Calvinism, but I want start by asking you a question about J. Gresham Machen, who figures into this new book, because that was where I was introduced to your writing (Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America). Machen was the first of your books. How did you come to study Machen and were you influenced by William R. Hutchison in the study of Machen?

Yes, I went to Harvard Divinity School after studying at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. I was doing a Masters in Religious History. Hutchison was my advisor and he had just come out with The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Duke, 1992). He devoted half of a chapter in that book to the fundamentalist critique of modernism and Machen was a prominent figure in that discussion. The survey course that I took included a week reading Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism and that was my first encounter with Machen. We had read a little bit of Machen at Westminster but not that book. In an older day, they would have assumed that students going to Westminster had already read that. So I was intrigued. I did a reading course with Hutchison on old Princeton. I identified Machen as a figure for further grad work and people I talked to encouraged me to do that. That was an important time and my first sustained encounter with Machen.

Was Machen a part of your pilgrimage from Baptist fundamentalism to the world of the Orthodox Presbyterians, a church movement Machen started?

My first encounter with Reformed Protestantism came while I was in college, as an undergraduate at Temple University in Philadelphia. I took a philosophy course and didn’t feel like I had any kind of way of handling that as a Christian. A friend of mine, who was going to Lancaster Bible College, was reading Francis Schaeffer, so he recommended I read Schaeffer. I took a year off from college and went to L’Abri. So that was my introduction to Reformed thinking in a way. I have reservations about Schaeffer now, but it was a very important point. It made it easier to go to Westminster since I was already in the Philadelphia area. Schaeffer was kind of a threshold path. Then I went from Westminster up to Harvard; I think I was really interested in Reformation studies. When I went up there I took a seminar on Luther, my first semester, and was really captivated. Then Machen came into play. So providentially it has been a very gradual immersion into the Reformed world. When I was at Johns Hopkins working on Machen, we joined a Presbyterian Church (PCA). When I took my first job at Wheaton, we joined a Christian Reformed Church, a different side of the Reformed tradition, a kind of ethnic side. Then I went to Westminster to become the librarian and we joined an OPC church (Orthodox Presbyterian Church). There weren’t any major wrestling matches psychologically. It seemed to just flow smoothly, but Schaeffer was my first introduction to the Reformed outlook.

Darryl, now to your book, Calvinism: A History. What you did is remarkable in itself—to condense, in three hundred pages, five hundred years of history. Some of the individuals you selected are obvious choices, others are less obvious. Tell me about how you came to write this book. You’re known for being an American Presbyterian historian.

You’re right. Only in my wildest dreams would I have thought of undertaking a book of this scope. I was thankful that the editors only wanted one volume. If they had wanted a five-volume work, then I would have had to learn a lot of other languages. What happened was the editors at Yale approached me because they thought they needed a comprehensive history of Calvinism, in one volume, that was at least transatlantic if not global. When a publisher like Yale comes to you and asks you to write something like that, it’s hard to say no, even though it took me much longer than I expected. I had been working in American subjects, and now, since I was teaching at Hillsdale College, I wind up teaching some European history because of the way our core curriculum works and the way we teach western heritage. I have become increasingly fascinated by the Middle Ages, especially because I travel to Ireland, and there is a translation of Presbyterianism from Scotland to Ireland, etc. I am thinking more and more outside the history of the United States. But it was mainly because someone else asked me to do it. It was hard to do but it was very rewarding and I am honored to have been asked to do this.

What was really interesting in your book was that I kept having this sense that Calvinism and Presbyterianism are sort of synonymous terms in your mind. What I hear your saying is that Calvinism is essentially Presbyterianism and Presbyterianism is essentially Calvinism. You’re not really a Calvinist unless you’re a Presbyterian. Is that a fair assessment?

Well, I don’t think you are really reformed unless you are in a Reformed church, so Presbyterian or Reformed. I have objections to the word Calvinist for historical reasons as well as really definitional reasons. It’s much more precise than “evangelicalism,” but it can mean a variety of things. I’m actually thinking about writing a sequel to the book on people’s expectations for what they think Calvinism is and then trying to challenge those notions in some way—both for Christians and non-Christians. It’s an odd subject because so many people have a preconception about it. You can pour in a variety of understandings into it, even though most people religiously, and some secular people, identify it with election and predestination and the like. But beyond that it begins to go in a variety of different directions. So I don’t think that Calvinism is the most helpful term, even though it’s the most eye-catching, because people think they know what it is.

Jeff Straub (Ph.D., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary.

Come back tomorrow for Part 2 of this interview.