A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America, by John A. D’Elia, Oxford University Press, 2008, ($45.00).
George Eldon Ladd (1911-1982) was one of the foremost evangelical NT scholars in twentieth century America. He almost single-handedly pioneered the “now and not yet” view of eschatology which is probably the dominant view today among evangelical scholars. Whatever one thinks of his approach to the NT teaching about the kingdom of God, one must acknowledge the huge role he played in defining evangelicalism through his teaching and literary works. And yet this acclaimed scholar, during the pinnacle of his career, considered himself a failure for not fulfilling his own promise. During this period he descended further and further into depression and alcoholism and became more and more alienated from his immediate family. What can we make of such a complex career?
John A. D’Elia, currently minister of the American Church in London and graduate of Ladd’s own Fuller Theological Seminary, has authored the most insightful and interesting biography of an academic that I have ever read. D’Elia’s volume, a revision of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Stirling under David Bebbington, is a thoroughly researched work that does justice to Ladd’s great contributions while not engaging in the hero-worship that marks that type of biography known as “hagiography.” D’ELia thoroughly mined the large amount of historical archives at Fuller Seminary and utilized Ladd’s extensive personal correspondence to bring insight into the heart and mind of this troubled giant. Personal interviews with many of Ladd’s former colleagues and students add a familiar touch to the plethora of official historical sources.
Ladd’s early life in New England was as a self-described “freak” growing up in a family that often moved and suffered poverty. D’Elia looks for keys to Ladd’s persona throughout his emergence as a promising Bible college student, young pastor, and eventually as an academic at Gordon College and finally at Fuller. Ladd’s long struggle to get into a doctoral program, which finally culminated in a doctorate from Harvard in 1949, is painfully traced for almost a decade. When all his doctoral dreams were fulfilled and the invitation came to be part of the Fuller faculty being built in the late forties and early fifties, one would think that the young man who had been so teased would find fulfillment as he approached middle age. The theme of D’Elia’s biography, reflected in the title and sub-title of the book, is that Ladd desperately desired to earn “a place at the table” of mainstream scholarship in America and Europe. Furthermore, he desired to do this while maintaining a more open evangelicalism than what he had experienced during the first forty years of his life. His career is traced through that upward effort which, in Ladd’s own opinion, ended in abject failure.
Ladd’s ambition was to rehabilitate evangelical scholarship by overthrowing its repression which he thought was caused by a too heavy influence of Dispensationalism. His early works, Crucial Questions about the Kingdom of God and The Blessed Hope, were internal polemical works directed against the Dispensationalism associated with Dallas Seminary. Ladd’s debates with John Walvoord, President of Dallas at the time, are thoroughly explored. Ladd also desperately desired to secure his place at the table, however, not by tilting against Dispensationalists, but by convincing critics outside the evangelical fold that an evangelical scholar could do critically acclaimed scholarly work.
When Harper and Row finally published his magnum opus in 1964 titled Jesus and the Kingdom, he was confident that his place at that table was secured. The book describes, however, his deep emotional pain when a critical scholar, Norman Perrin, savaged Ladd’s book in a scholarly journal in 1965. D’Elia makes a strong case that Perrin’s review, despite other positive reviews both within and without evangelicalism, was THE turning point in Ladd’s life and career. After that crushing experience, even though he published five more acclaimed volumes before his physical decline in the late 1970s, D’Elia portrays Ladd as a defeated man who was just going through the motions.
Along the way, D’Elia offers insights into Ladd’s involvement in the struggles of Fuller Seminary as the institution was finding its identity in the fifties and sixties. For professors in theological education, the description of those battles is a familiar one. Many confessional educational institutions have shaken off the restraints which they perceive as holding them back. The fundamentalism of the founder Charles Fuller and the traditional influence of President Harold Ockenga were the losers in this battle at Fuller. While Ladd was one of those progressives who won out in the end, he never enjoyed the fruits of that victory due to his perceived failures outside the school in the world of scholarship. Compounding all of this is the sad story of his alcoholism and depression, which the author traces through many personal interviews, as well as the disciplinary actions against him because of his drinking.
There is much here from which to learn, whatever be the reader’s denominational identity. There are a couple of missing elements, however, in the author’s thorough analysis of each of Ladd’s volumes. He neglected to mention the second edition of Jesus and the Kingdom, re-titled by his new publisher Eerdmans as The Presence of the Future (1974). It is in this second edition and in the likewise omitted small volume The Pattern of NT Truth (1968) where Ladd responds to Perrin’s critical review. The impression left by these omissions is that Ladd completely retreated after the perceived defeat of his life long project. On the contrary, while he never wrote again for a secular publisher like Harper and Row, he did offer one last salvo in these books against the critical rejection of his ideas.
One of the endearing things about Ladd was his whole-hearted commitment to world evangelization. He believed, as he felt Matt 24:14 clearly taught, that when the gospel is proclaimed throughout the world, then Jesus will return bodily. The author tells a touching story about Ladd’s last chapel message at Fuller – on the theme of “The Second Coming and Missions.”
At the end of this very significant book, this reviewer was filled with a combination of appreciation and sadness for George Eldon Ladd. As an undergraduate at Bob Jones University I read Crucial Questions and The Blessed Hope with great profit. Little did I know that at that same time across the country the author was going through torment because he sincerely believed that he had not earned that “place at the table” which he so earnestly desired.
William Varner
Professor of Biblical Studies
The Master’s University
