Crossway’s “on the Christian life” series continues to be excellent with the addition of Drew Martin’s volume Grimke on the Christian Life: Christian Vitality for the Church and World.
Francis Grimke is having a moment, and this is a good thing for the church. Born a slave before the Civil War, Francis Grimke became a Presbyterian Pastor in Washington DC, and kept up a running commentary on religion, culture, and politics along with his regular preaching.
Clearly, this is a moment for Evangelicals to rediscover a faithful preacher.
Even better, as Martin points out in this book, Grimke himself doesn’t fit neatly into the boxes we usually use to understand church history. At least, in some ways he doesn’t. He’s certainly anti-segregationist and anti-Jim Crow. So in that sense he does.
But he doesn’t fit well into the modernist/Fundamentalist controversy that so dominates most Evangelical narratives of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Grimke was certainly theologically orthodox, with a high view of Scripture and a solid devotion to the centrality of Christ’s person and atoning work. So far he is aligned with the fundamentalists. But! He also believed the church had the responsibility to preach clearly and faithfully to the culture with an eye to resisting cultural evils–including Jim Crow. So far he looks more like the modernists.
Now, that’s an oversimplification of a complex thinker writing in a complex time. But Grimke is a thinker we should all know a little better, and Grimke on the Christian Life is a great way to do so.
Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO
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