An in-depth look at the institution as the center of many important cultural shifts with which the South and the wider Church have wrestled historically. Columbia Theological Seminary’s rich history provides a window into the social and intellectual life of the American South. Founded in 1828 as a Presbyterian seminary for the preparation of well-educated, mannerly ministers, it was located during its first one hundred years in Columbia, South Carolina. During the antebellum period, it was known for its affluent and intellectually sophisticated board, faculty, and students. Its leaders sought to follow a middle way on the great intellectual and social issues of the day, including slavery. Columbia’s leaders, Unionists until the election of Lincoln, became ardent supporters of the Confederacy. While the seminary survived the burning of the city in 1865, it was left impoverished and poorly situated to meet the challenges of the modern world. Nevertheless, the seminary entered a serious debate about Darwinism. Professor James Woodrow, uncle of Woodrow Wilson, advocated a modest Darwinism, but reactionary forces led the seminary into a growing provincialism and intellectual isolation. In 1928 the seminary moved to metropolitan Atlanta signifying a transition from the Old South toward the New (mercantile) South. The seminary brought to its handsome new campus the theological commitments and racist assumptions that had long marked it. Under the leadership of James McDowell Richards, Columbia struggled against its poverty, provincialism, and deeply embedded racism. By the final decade of the twentieth century, Columbia had become one of the most highly endowed seminaries in the country, had internationally recognized faculty, and had students from all over the world and many Christian denominations. By the early years of the twenty-first century, Columbia had embraced a broad diversity in faculty and students. Columbia’s evolution has challenged assumptions about what it means to be Presbyterian, southern, and American, as the seminary continues its primary mission of providing the church a learned ministry. “A well written and carefully documented history not only of Columbia Theological Seminary, but also of the interplay among culture, theology, and theological institutions. This is necessary reading for anyone seeking to discern the future of theological education in the twenty-first century.” —Justo L. González, Church Historian, Decatur, GA “Clarke’s engaging history of one institution is also an incisive study of change in Southern culture. This is institutional history at its best. Clarke takes us inside a school of theology but also lets us feel the outside forces always pressing in on it, and he writes with the skill of a novelist. A remarkable accomplishment.” —E. Brooks Holifield, Emory University

Published in 1989, this bibliography considers religious seminaries that are affiliated with the various denominations of the theological institutions established in the United States by the Protestants in the early 1800s, it also considers non-denominational and independent settings. Divided into two sections, the first short section considers the relationship between the civil governments and the seminaries, the second, organized by denomination into 15 chapters provides an extensive bibliography with annotations. The work pulls together a wealth of reference material and identifies salient works, whether book, article, dissertation or essay, to provide a much-needed resource for those interested in seminary education in the United States, whether scholar, student, policy maker, or interested citizen.

This biography of Joseph Henry Lumpkin (1799-1867) details the life and work of the man whose senior judgeship on Georgia's Supreme Court spanned more than twenty years and included service as its first Chief Justice. Paul Hicks portrays Lumpkin as both a civic-minded professional and an evangelical Presbyterian reformer. Exploring Lumpkin's important contributions to the institutional development of the Georgia Supreme Court, Hicks discusses Lumpkin's opinions in cases ranging in concern from family conflicts to slavery. He also shows how Lumpkin cleared a way through the thicket of antiquated laws that threatened to strangle the growth of corporate banking and business in Georgia. Treated in depth as well are the evolution of his views on slavery and secession and his involvement in social and economic reform, including temperance, education, African American colonization, and industrialization. Hicks also covers Lumpkin's undergraduate days at the University of Georgia and Princeton, his experiences as a state legislator and successful lawyer, and his family life. Among the family members portrayed are Lumpkin's older brother, Wilson, a two-term governor of Georgia; and Lumpkin's son-in-law, Thomas R. R. Cobb, cofounder with Lumpkin of the University of Georgia Law School. Joseph Henry Lumpkin played an important role in the public life of Georgia during the formative era of American law and the age of sectionalism. Here is a full and compelling portrait of Lumpkin as an individual of both intellect and passion, on and off the bench.

Probing at the very core of the American political consciousness from the colonial period through the early republic, this thorough and unprecedented study by Larry E. Tise suggests that American proslavery thought, far from being an invention of the slave-holding South, had its origins in the crucible of conservative New England. Proslavery rhetoric, Tise shows, came late to the South, where the heritage of Jefferson's ideals was strongest and where, as late as the 1830s, most slaveowners would have agreed that slavery was an evil to be removed as soon as possible. When the rhetoric did come, it was often in the portmanteau of ministers who moved south from New England, and it arrived as part of a full-blown ideology. When the South finally did embrace proslavery, the region was placed not at the periphery of American thought but in its mainstream.

Includes section "Reviews of recent theological literature".

The inflation crisis is now an international phenomenon. The whole industrialized world is suffering from chronic price inflation, and no government seems to be able to do anything about it. When those of us associated with Chalcedon began warning people of the impending inflation, back in 1964, few listeners took us seriously. They simply cold not accept the fact that governments would not control their monetary policies. But year after year, as monetary inflation has continued, thereby producing price inflation, people have learned the grim reality of what we warned about a decade and a half ago. The problem facing us today is massive. Few people understand the inflation process, and when people don’t understand what the cause of their problem is, and the problem gets serious enough, then they are likely to make serious errors—personal financial errors, political errors, and policy errors. If Christians have no better understanding of the causes and cures for inflation than the secular world does, then we are not going to be in a position to exercise effective leadership. The trouble is, everyone thinks he knows what inflation is all about. A person who wouldn’t venture an opinion concerning physical chemistry or astrophysics is ready with an explanation for inflation. About the only things not going up in price today are dime-a-dozen solutions to inflation. And given their value, they shouldn’t be going up in price; the supply of them keeps increasing too fast. What the latest issue of The Journal covers is the inflation question: causes, effects, cures, and ineffective solutions that have failed in the past. We hope that people who have read this issue will have a far better perspective on the subject: what to do about it personally, what the political authorities should do, and what we can expect them to do. We can expect them to take steps that will compound the problems. The intellectual father of modern price inflation was John Maynard Keynes. It is the universal popularity of Keynes’ ideology—and ideology favorable to government intervention and printing press money—which has led to the monetary policies of today. Ideas have consequences, and Keynes had some exceedingly bad ideas. The professors in the universities who have infected two generations of students with Keynesian economic theory are still in power, fully tenured, and still somewhat respectable. But these men are now trapped by their own ideology: price inflation is wiping out faculty salaries and pensions. This is precisely what Keynes said would happen: the reduction of real purchasing power, despite nominal increases in wages. Instead of the workers getting deceived by this phenomenon, it has been the professors. When this era’s economics are destroyed by the ravages of inflation controls, unemployment, and market instability, the utter nonsense published by the economists over the last 40 years will be seen for what it was: incomprehensible, overly mathematical propaganda for the construction of a statist society. What Christian laymen need to understand in advance is that professional economists, supposedly orthodox in their Christian faith, have generally bought the Keynesian ideology. We have to be ready to abandon all such attempts to fuse Keynesian economics and Christian faith. We have to disassociate ourselves from all versions of baptized Keynesianism, so that when public repudiation comes in the wake of economic destruction, Christians will be able to say, “We warned you about this. Now listen to us while we lay out the answers.” One of the nicest features of the last 15 years of international price inflation has been the erosion of faculty pension funds, university endowments, and the reputation of the big-name Keynesian advisors. They still have some prestige left, just as they still have some money left in their pension funds, but they are in trouble. The public is beginning to catch on. If these economic doctors can’t seem to be able to beat inflation in their own lives, why should anyone take them seriously? These two-bit emperors have no clothes. All they have left to cover themselves are their Ph.D.’s. Now that these have been debased through overproduction, they don’t mean as much as they used to. The Bible does have answers. It has solutions to the problem of inflation. They Keynesians have never taken the Bible seriously as a guide to economic policy, including the Keynesians who teach on Christian college campuses. We have to be able to spot nonsense solutions when they are offered in the name of Science or Christianity. Can we have inflation and unemployment simultaneously? The Keynesians used to say no. Now we see both. Can the boom-bust cycle be avoided through “fine-tuning” the economy? the Keynesians used to say yes. Now we know how wrong they have been. Will the government be able to find a politically acceptable solution to inflation before mass inflation wipes out the middle class? None has been able to do it so far. Will the middle class wake up in time? Some of them have, but as they do, prices rise even more rapidly, as they seek to find inflation hedges. Will any of these hedges really work? Did any of them work in the great German inflation of 1921-23? What will be the effect on society of continuing inflation? Who will be hurt most? Will anyone profit? All of these questions are covered in the latest issue. Keynesians in the classroom won’t appreciate the answers, but The Journal isn’t aimed at them anyway, except insofar as you would aim a shotgun. The economies of the West are in serious trouble, and this trouble is going to become far worse over the next half decade. Christians had better be forewarned. If Christians fare no better in the coming crises than humanists, then they will hardly be in a position to offer advice after the crash.

A study of the ways that southern Presbyterians in the wake of the Civil War contended with a host of cultural and theological questions Southern Presbyterian theologians enjoyed a prominent position in antebellum southern culture. Respected for both their erudition and elite constituency, these theologians identified the southern society as representing a divine, Biblically ordained order. Beginning in the 1840s, however, this facile identification became more difficult to maintain, colliding first with antislavery polemics, then with Confederate defeat and reconstruction, and later with women’s rights, philosophical empiricism, literary criticisms of the Bible, and that most salient symbol of modernity, natural science. As Monte Harrell Hampton shows in Storm of Words, modern science seemed most explicitly to express the rationalistic spirit of the age and threaten the Protestant conviction that science was the faithful “handmaid” of theology. Southern Presbyterians disposed of some of these threats with ease. Contemporary geology, however, posed thornier problems. Ambivalence over how to respond to geology led to the establishment in 1859 of the Perkins Professorship of Natural Science in Connexion with Revealed Religion at the seminary in Columbia, South Carolina. Installing scientist-theologian James Woodrow in this position, southern Presbyterians expected him to defend their positions. Within twenty-five years, however, their anointed expert held that evolution did not contradict scripture. Indeed, he declared that it was in fact God’s method of creating. The resulting debate was the first extended evolution controversy in American history. It drove a wedge between those tolerant of new exegetical and scientific developments and the majority who opposed such openness. Hampton argues that Woodrow believed he was shoring up the alliance between science and scripture—that a circumscribed form of evolution did no violence to scriptural infallibility. The traditionalists’ view, however, remained interwoven with their identity as defenders of the Lost Cause and guardians of southern culture. The ensuing debate triggered Woodrow’s dismissal. It also capped a modernity crisis experienced by an influential group of southern intellectuals who were grappling with the nature of knowledge, both scientific and religious, and its relationship to culture—a culture attempting to define itself in the shadow of the Civil War and Reconstruction.