Charles Hodge : guardian of American orthodoxy /

This long-overdue biography of Charles Hodge (1797-1878) by Gutjahr (English, Indiana Univ.) serves simultaneously as an introduction to virtually every major movement and figure in 19th-century American Protestantism. Hodge's formulation of Old School Calvinism through the twin lenses of commonsense realism and Baconian rationalism provided him a platform from which he mounted a defense against such movements as German idealism, biblical criticism, revivalism, transcendentalism, Darwinism, and Unitarianism, and against such figures as Charles Finney, John W. Nevin, Edwards A. Park, Nathaniel W. Taylor, and Horace Bushnell. His lengthy career at Princeton Seminary as a much-venerated teacher (some 3,000 students), mentor, editor, administrator, author, moderator, polemicist, and theologian elevated him to a position of prominence well beyond the Old School Presbyterianism he so ably defended amid New School/Old School schism and antebellum sectional division. From these pages emerges a major figure of enormous energy, piety, and wisdom, whose wit and grace made him a delightful and entertaining dinner table companion and conversationalist. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers. B. M. Stephens emeritus, Pennsylvania State University, Brandywine Campus