From Mark Noll’s foreword to Andrew Hoffecker’s new book Charles Hodge: The Pride of Princeton, published in P&R’s American Reformed Biographies series:
It remains to comment on a curiosity. In 1880 Charles Hodge’s son, Archibald Alexander Hodge, published a substantial biography of his father, shortly after the latter’s death. Subsequently, there have appeared a great number of articles, dissertations, anthologies, and essays on various aspects of Charles Hodge’s theology. But no full-scale biographies appeared until this year, 2011.
And now there are two of them.
In early 2011, Oxford University Press brought out Paul Gutjahr’s Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy.
Like Hoffecker, Gutjahr, who is professor of English at Indiana University, did the requisite digging in Hodge papers and comprehensive reading in the vast Hodge corpus.
Also like Hoffecker, Gutjahr is sympathetic to the main concerns of Hodge’s life.
The main difference in the two books is that Hoffecker aims his story at those who already have heard about Hodge and who may already be interested to some degree in the Reformed and Presbyterian themes of his life, while Gutjahr is writing more for the general student of American history who may know nothing at all about Hodge.
The result is two fine studies, complementary to each other, rather than competitive.
In fact, as someone who has been privileged to read both volumes, I can wholeheartedly recommend them both as together providing, really for the very first time, the kind of full-scale attention that Charles Hodge has long deserved but, as a faithful Calvinist himself, never sought.
Professor Hoffecker introduces the man and his ministry in this 10-minute video:
