Book Review
Standing firm amidst a crumbling denomination
Jeff McDonald, Special to The Layman Online, February 17, 2006
A. Donald MacLeod, W. Stanford Reid: An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2004,
401 pages)
In an era of mainline decline in North America, the Presbyterian Church in Canada is no exception. The denomination is the result of those who stayed out of the union, for a variety of reasons and with a very mixed theological legacy, of the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational churches in 1925.
For years, the PCC has been plagued by liberal theology, and Canadian Presbyterian seminaries have become increasingly secular and are now experiencing financial difficulties. From1925 until quite recently, the theological seminaries of the denomination generally have been unsympathetic to confessional orthodoxy.
W. Stanford Reid
An evangelical who sought to reverse this decline and bring the denomination out of its theological malaise was W. Stanford Reid (1913-1996). Reid’s inspirational life story has now been chronicled in a new biography by Donald MacLeod titled W. Stanford Reid: An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy.
Evangelical Presbyterians who feel alienated from their church or simply frustrated will find MacLeod’s biography of Reid spiritually helpful. The chapter titled “Embattled Mainline Evangelical” should be of special note, and the history of evangelical Presbyterianism in Canada and the United States is a main feature of the book.
Donald MacLeodIn an interview, MacLeod said the PCC has declined from 202,498 members in 1965 to 123,988 in 2004. One of the most dramatic declines he highlighted has come in the Presbytery of Montreal (Quebec), which has experienced a decline from 14,016 members in 1962 to 3,498 in 2004. MacLeod cites four reasons as to why the PCC has experienced such a perilous decline:
(1) the secularization of Canadian society;
(2) theological liberalism of the Canadian Presbyterian theological colleges;
(3) no clear identity as to what the PCC is – no unity in the church;
(4) no clear theological identity – a mixture of theological views. In recent years, the PCC has seen some numerical and spiritual growth due largely to the evangelicalism of Korean, Chinese and Ghanaian Presbyterians. MacLeod notes that, “Most of the churches in the PCC that are thriving are those that have a clear sense of evangelical mission and are spiritually dynamic.” Evangelical Presbyterians in Canada over the years also have published their own independent periodicals and formed various groups in an effort to curb liberalism and bring renewal to the church.
Donald MacLeod
The author is the son of PCUSA missionary parents. They served in China and Taiwan and were strong evangelicals who encouraged their son to study with an evangelical historian – named W. Stanford Reid – who taught at the secular McGill University in Montreal. Later, MacLeod was a Woodrow Wilson scholar in history at Harvard.
He was ordained in the PCC in 1963, served various pastorates, and also has served as president of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and as general director of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship of Canada. In 1983, he founded a group known as the Renewal Fellowship Within The PCC.
MacLeod continues to work for reform and renewal within the church. Recently, he retired as pastor of St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Trenton, Ontario, and is serving as research professor of church history at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto.
Tyndale is a non-denominational evangelical seminary that has trained a number of ministers who subsequently were ordained in the PCC, and a few PCC pastors have served on its faculty. The rise and growth of Tyndale and Regent College in Vancouver has been a blessing for Canadian evangelicalism. These two seminaries have aided the evangelical movement in the PCC and have considerably enhanced the academic and spiritual credibility of evangelical thought in Canada.
The 2005 General Assembly of the PCC honored MacLeod with a history award for his biography of Reid, who was a leading evangelical Canadian Presbyterian and a noted historian of the Scottish Reformation. As a longtime history professor at McGill University and the University of Guelph (Ontario), Reid wrote widely on the Scottish Reformation and its leader, John Knox. His most famous work, Trumpeter of God: A Biography of John Knox, (1974) is considered one of the most significant biographies of the great reformer. In addition, he was a leading authority on John Calvin and also wrote on the history of Presbyterianism in North America. As a historian, he wrote many academic works, but also started an evangelical Presbyterian newspaper and wrote extensively on church renewal. MacLeod writes:
“Part of the uniqueness of Stanford Reid was his presence in the secular university as an active and aggressively orthodox Christian whose apologia was unapologetic in a time when academia had been virtually abandoned by the evangelical community.”
Reid was an outspoken evangelical Presbyterian who worked tirelessly to stop what he considered to be the negative effects of liberal theology upon his denomination. Early in his career, denominational leaders, liberal pastors and seminary professors labeled Reid an agitator and he was refused church seminary professorships numerous times. Many referred to him simply as “that fundamentalist.” MacLeod writes:
“His [Reid’s] Reformed faith provided a ready antidote to this buffeting. He was continually going back to the themes of providence and the perseverance of the saints.”
MacLeod’s biography carefully examines how Reid dealt with such treatment and what he did to try and bring renewal to the church.
Even though Reid was marginalized by his own denomination, he was a respected leader and thinker within North American evangelicalism and served as editor-at-large of Christianity Today for many years. Harold Shapiro the recently retired president of Princeton University, has said he considers Reid one of the most brilliant professors he ever studied under, and said that he was amazed at Reid’s prodigious learning.
Perhaps the decline in the PCC can be directly attributed to its failure to take seriously evangelicals – such as Reid – who could have helped it the most. MacLeod notes that the PCC’s response to the secularism that assaulted the church in the second half of the 20th century could have been improved had the church not sought to exclude Reid. He writes that, as early as the 1940s, Reid saw signs of a growing and subsequently accelerating secularism in Canada and sought to respond to it with a strong call to a clearly articulated Christian commitment to mind and spirit.
The Religious and Theological Students Fellowship of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship of Canada recently invited MacLeod to give a lecture series at various universities on the life and work of Reid. The Reid lectureship, as it is called, has been funded in order to challenge students in theology and religious studies to use Reid as a paradigm for intellectual engagement with the university and with the culture.