Jeffrey McDonald has provided a thought-provoking biography supported by over a thousand footnotes that document sources including Gerstner’s writings, reviews of his writings, recordings, judicatory records, letters, web material, and interviews of his students and colleagues. The nineteen-page bibliography shows a wide variety of sources accessed by McDonald. The book provides another angle on the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the twenties as its influences played out in Gerstner’s era, and it reinforces the significance of Machen and his colleagues’ role affirming supernatural Christianity.
Jeffrey S. McDonald’s John Gerstner and the Renewal of Presbyterian and Reformed Evangelicalism in Modern America, 2017, is an informative biography of a seminary professor serving in an era of crucial events in American Christianity during the last sixty years of the twentieth century. The author is a Presbyterian minister, historian, and author, who in 2015 was instrumental in founding the Presbyterian Scholars Conference. The centennial of J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism last year reminded Presbyterians of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the nineteen-twenties and the founding of Westminster Seminary (WTS, 1929), as well as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC, 1936). However, in later years there were confessional, Reformed evangelicals such as John Gerstner who carried on the apologetic for supernatural Christianity against the theological-scientific naturalism of what evangelicals often describe generically as liberalism. Dr. McDonald shows that Gerstner was influential from the lectern, in the pulpit, and through writing for a variety of publications. He presents Gerstner in the context of Reformed evangelicalism as it developed during the era of the Second World War, through the turbulent nineteen sixties, then beyond the life and gender views wrought by Roe vs. Wade in the seventies, and on to his death at the end of the millennium while through it all defending the faith built upon the supernatural and inerrant Bible. The reviewer purchased the e-version book for this review, but it is also available in hardcopy.
John Henry Jr. was born in Tampa, Florida, November 22, 1914, to John, Sr., and Margie (Wilson) Gerstner. Shortly thereafter the family settled in Philadelphia. He was a good student, edited the school newspaper, enjoyed sports, and participated in debate club. He grew up without Christian influences until high school when he met a girl who was a member of a United Presbyterian Church of North America (UPCNA) congregation. He went with her to services and youth meetings. The UPCNA traced its ancestry to seventeenth-century Scotland through the Associate Synod; it was not the same (at this point in history) as the PCUSA. Unsure about his future he visited Philadelphia School of the Bible where an administrator named J. D. Adams explained the message of the Bible so that Gerstner “finally understood the heart of the gospel message” (21). Intending to become a medical missionary he enrolled in the UPCNA’s Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. Consistent with his medical interests he studied science and worked in a sanatorium for income. As was common among students of the era, he joined the YMCA and was president of the campus chapter. Half-way through college he changed his major to theology, which likely resulted from advice given by his mentor, Professor John Orr, who was a Princeton Seminary alumnus that held the teaching of B. B. Warfield in high regard. It was the Calvinism of Orr’s lectures that steered Gerstner into the Reformed path, particularly as he came to see that regeneration precedes faith. Gerstner graduated in 1936 then continued his UPCNA directed education at Pittsburgh-Xenia (Pitt-Xenia) Theological Seminary. Gerstner was quickly disappointed because he found the academics unchallenging, so he transferred to WTS beginning the fall of 1937. When he graduated with the Batchelor of Divinity and Master of Theology in 1940, the question was what to do next. After considering further study at Princeton Seminary and the University of Chicago, he went to Harvard for doctoral work.