Last week, many Christian historians, including Jeff McDonald, gathered at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, for the biennial meeting of the Conference on Faith and History. But the CFH is not the only opportunity for Christian historians to gather. Since 2015, Jeff McDonald has been organizing the annual Presbyterian Scholars Conference in Wheaton, Illinois, and this year’s meeting will be next week, October 22-23, 2024. As every previous year, the schedule features an all-star lineup, including George Marsden and Mark Noll, among many other excellent scholars (including my favorite American historian too!).
I am grateful for this opportunity to interview Jeff about his work and why it matters.
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You have been organizing the annual Presbyterian Scholars Conference since 2015–congratulations on launching something that is clearly a labor of love and resonates with so many scholars of Presbyterianism. Such endeavors, of course, require a significant investment of time and energy, so I am curious about the story behind this project: what were your goals for this conference when you first got started? Did you envision it from the beginning as something that would keep going?
The Presbyterian Scholars Conference was founded in 2015 because I could not find any conferences that dealt primarily with Presbyterian history and theology. Even though Presbyterianism has a rich tradition it seemed strange to me that there was no forum to discuss its past and doctrine. Another concern I had was that some Presbyterians were being ignored and marginalized. John Gerstner (1914-1996) taught church history for thirty years at Pittsburgh Seminary and was a key figure in evangelical Presbyterianism. Nonetheless, two volumes on the history of Pittsburgh Seminary barely mentioned him. So, the conference was started to try and highlight some of these neglected Presbyterians and address areas of Presbyterian history that have received little or no attention.
I find the ecumenical vision for this conference fascinating: Presbyterianism is remarkably diverse, and that diversity is represented at the conference. My husband and I had spent seven years in the PCA (alas, no PCA church close to where we moved a year ago, but we attend a wonderful Evangelical Free church now). But there are Presbyterians attending the conference who are both more conservative than the PCA (e.g., OPC) and significantly less so (e.g., PC-USA). Was this your vision from the beginning, or did it sort of come about over time?
Yes, one of the goals of the conference has been and continues to be to bring different types of Presbyterians together in order to learn from each other and have the opportunity for fellowship. We have had scholars from almost all the American Presbyterian denominations attend, but we have also had a paper on Mexican Presbyterian history from the Vice President of the National Presbyterian Church of Mexico and several papers from Canadian Presbyterian historians. Also, we have had numerous non-Presbyterian scholars attend who are interested in some aspect of Presbyterian history and/or theology.
What are the big themes and questions that keep recurring at this conference?
We invite people to come and speak on topics that they want to speak on so there is no set theme. However, the conference has had quite a bit of interest in the Presbyterian controversy of the 1920s and 1930s and how that played out in later periods.
None of us exist in a vacuum as thinkers. What are 2-3 books (whether on Presbyterian history and theology or on something else) that you would say have shaped your thinking more than any others?
The three books that have influenced me most are:
1. A. Donald MacLeod, W. Stanford Reid: An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004)
2. Bradley J. Longfield, The Presbyterian Controversy: Fundamentalists, Modernists, and Moderates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)
3. D.G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994)
You maintain an active research agenda! What is your current project?
I’m currently working on a paper that analyzes Xenia Seminary–the oldest Presbyterian seminary in the United States and a paper that deals with Presbyterians and the rise of Bible colleges in the early 20th century. I am also working on a book tentatively titled Presbyterian Minds in a Secular Age: Evangelical and Reformed.