Remembering B. A. Gerrish (1931–2025)

Was he a Christian or not? It was so hard to tell for sure.

This past week we lost Prof. B. A. Gerrish at the age of 93. And I lost one of my most interesting professors.

Credit: The University of Chicago

Mr. Gerrish’s obituary can be found here. He was a globally recognized scholar of the theology of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and F. D. E. Schleiermacher, author of 15 books and numerous articles, and known mostly for his career as professor of theology at the Divinity School of The University of Chicago.

I first met him as a prospective doctoral student. I drove from Chicago’s western suburb of Wheaton to the southern suburb where he lived in hopes of impressing him enough to gain entrance to the Theology program and to his tutelage for my dissertation.

Alas, I was clearly unprepared. When he asked me what contemporary systematic theologians I had read, I was at a loss. My two-year theological M.A. at Wheaton was solid, but I had concentrated mostly on church history and historical theology. I came up with “Berkhof,” and he nodded approvingly—only to make clear that it was Hendrikus that he had in mind (a rather mainstream Reformed theologian), not the conservative Louis that I had in fact meant.

Through a chain of events too long and irrelevant to render here, I did go to Chicago, but in the History of Christianity program and under the supervision of Martin E. Marty—also recently departed. Still, I took more courses with Mr. Gerrish than with anyone else besides M.E.M., and I wrote a special doctoral examination with him (on “The Bible in Nineteenth-Century Theology: Germany, Britain, and America”) as well as part of my examination in the history of theology.

Mr. Gerrish—he had earned a doctorate at Columbia University, but all Chicago professors, except physicians, are called “Mr.” or “Ms.”—gave quietly brilliant lectures indeed on the history of theology, from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries. (I got my contemporary theological introduction from Langdon Gilkey.) Standing still behind the lectern in the neo-Gothic classroom of Swift Hall, light pouring in through high mullioned windows, Mr. Gerrish moved deliberately, clearly, and sometimes even eloquently through often murky and marshy theological ground.

In particular, he taught me to understand one of his main areas of interest, the thought of Schleiermacher, the father of liberal theology. I spent several hours in his office trying to get my late twentieth-century Canadian evangelical head into the thoughtworld of this early nineteenth-century German Pietist and Mr. Gerrish was the ideal guide: patient, lucid, and learned. I ended up giving my candidating lecture on Schleiermacher at the University of Manitoba less than a decade later to demonstrate that this evangelical could comprehend and critically appreciate one of the most significant of the exvangelicals, to use an anachronism.

 Mr. Gerrish himself was an exvangelical, he revealed to me privately—as he came to realize that I was not a firebreathing fundamentalist and I came to realize that he was not an orthodoxy-bashing modernist. (I had graduated from Wheaton, after all, and he was teaching at Chicago.) He told me he had been converted as a teenager under the preaching of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, of all people, and had participated in the Inter-Varsity Fellowship when he went up to Cambridge as an undergraduate.

From there, however, his personal path of faith became less clear to me as his studies brought him to schools uncongenial to traditional Christianity: Westminster College, Cambridge; Union Seminary, New York; and then Columbia. He had landed on Schleiermacher—the most pious and most traditional of liberals, but very much a liberal—as his theological guide, impressed as he continued to be with John Calvin, his other favourite theologian.

This in itself was striking. Normally, one has to pick: Calvin (orthodox) or Schleiermacher (self-consciously not orthodox). But Mr. Gerrish rather serenely admired them both, as portraits of both adorned his office wall.

The puzzles continued. I once used the referential shorthand of historical theology to try to pin him down. Erasmus or Luther? Kant or Wesley? Whatever the choice, Mr. Gerrish kept coming down on the evangelical side. Anything smacking of so-called works righteousness, of sheer ethical heroism, was un-Christian, he declared. We are saved by God’s grace through the work of the Redeemer (Schleiermacher’s favourite term for Jesus).

Yet for him, as for Schleiermacher, the Trinity was not a metaphysical reality (God isn’t three-in-one); Jesus wasn’t God made flesh; the Bible isn’t a supernaturally supervised book of revelation; and so on. Liberal—and yet so piously devoted to Jesus. My evangelical categories were pressed very hard by Mr. Gerrish.

It wasn’t all theological intensity between us, however. He had a droll British sense of humour.

Another student in our class on Reformation theology placed a commemorative stamp of Martin Luther at the end of his handwritten test and wrote beside it, echoing Luther’s famous speech at the Diet of Worms: “Here I stick. I can do no other.”

Mr. Gerrish delightedly held up this paper as he handed back the class’s work one day. Then he read what he had written underneath: “God help you. Amen.”

(Sorry about the “inside baseball” humour. Trust me: It was very funny.)

When I signed my own test simply “Stackhouse,” he wrote, “And are we a lord?” (Lords in England typically sign themselves on behalf of their title as simply “Worthington” or “Chisham” or such.)I returned a message that my family did have a coat of arms, but he (rightly) shot back that they were a dime a dozen. I wrote my name properly after that.

More impressively, Mr. Gerrish concluded his lectures on nineteenth-century theology with the question, “Is there someone I ought to have included in the reading list that I didn’t?”That’s quite a question to ask fifty doctoral students each of whom is anxious both to please and to avoid looking stupid. No one replied at first.

I had worked with Prof. Mark Noll at Wheaton, however, for an entire year as his research assistant on a book featuring the theologians of Princeton Seminary in the nineteenth century. So I put up my hand and ventured, “How about Charles Hodge?”

Mr. Gerrish, normally impassive except for the occasional small smile, was visibly affected. “Why do you nominate him, Mr. Stackhouse?”“Well, unlike a number of the people we read, Charles Hodge’s systematic theology has been in print ever since he wrote it and his work is still read avidly by many Reformed pastors and students today.”Mr. Gerrish leaned back against the blackboard. He paused. And then he said, “Charles Hodge was the first theologian I read in seminary.”The class began to stir. “I haven’t heard his name around here in years.”A little more stirring.“Well, Mr. Stackhouse, I grant you that he is significant. But perhaps you are thinking as a church historian and remarking on Hodge’s enduring readership. I am thinking about who is theologically interesting . . . “ and he trailed off with the implication clear.

To this day, I don’t agree that Hodge isn’t interesting. He just doesn’t fit the narrative trajectory of ever-more-progressive liberal theology until Barth. But I was genuinely moved by Mr. Gerrish’s humility in both asking the question and receiving an answer with evident respect and careful consideration.

This respect and consideration showed up unexpectedly one warm spring afternoon. I had showed up a few minutes early for my scheduled appointment. The Divinity School was unusually quiet, and I could hear two voices emanating from Mr. Gerrish’s office.

One was his own: as usual, mild and modulated. The other I recognized as a fellow student from the course I was taking with him. Her voice was neither mild nor modulated.

In fact, her voice became increasingly loud and insistent—so loud that I could not avoid hearing the burden of her complaint. She had written an excellent answer for her test paper and deserved an “A.” (A lot of my fellow students seem never previously to have encountered grades lower than “A.”)

Mr. Gerrish replied that while she had made an excellent “pro” case in her essay, she had failed to discuss the “con” side. Scholarship was not mere advocacy, he said, but arguing a point having taken everything important into consideration. Her answer demonstrated not even the attempt to consider what might militate against her position.

I learned two valuable lessons that afternoon as she kept arguing the same point (ahem) for another fifteen minutes and Mr. Gerrish kept patiently repeating himself. First, no first-class work can be merely a promotion of one’s thesis, but must demonstrate due regard for alternatives. Second, even very bright students can be delayed in grasping that fact, and the wise teacher gives them time to absorb this new idea.

She finally left, red-faced and tight-lipped. Mr. Gerrish welcomed me in for my appointment with a low-key nod and a quiet “No one is after you, so we still have our time.” But I had already gotten my time’s worth out in the hall.

I ended up featuring Mr. Gerrish—and my perplexity about his confession of faith (Was he in or out?)—in my third book, Humble Apologetics. I disguised him lightly as “Professor Sack” (his initials were B.A.G.—get it?) and later, when I sent him a copy of the book, he told me he was delighted by the mention and that I certainly could have used his real name.

Alas, I didn’t keep up correspondence with him, as I have with half-a-dozen other mentors through the years. I should have, I realize now with a pang.

My student conversations with Mr. Gerrish clarified what to me previously had been a liberal theological tradition in equal parts opaque and repellent. They also widened and deepened my appreciate for Luther and Calvin. In fact, one of his articles on the two of them wrestling with predestination was absolutely key in the move I made in my second book, Can God Be Trusted? Therein, I assert that we must move toward the figure of Jesus Christ as The Answer and away from the deus absconditus, the frightening “hidden God”—as Luther’s confessor, Johan von Staupitz, had advised him.

His allegiance to Jesus showed up also in our shared dismissal of process theology, once regnant in those very halls. (The late Schubert Ogden was among the brightest of stars in that movement.) “Any version of Christianity that fails to give Jesus a vital place, let alone the very centre of the religion,” Mr. Gerrish averred, “isn’t worthy of the name.” Once again, my teacher said the crucially right thing.

Alas, for the last decade of his long life, Mr. Gerrish suffered from both dementia and metastatic cancer. He was cared for by his dedicated wife, Prof. Dawn DeVries, herself a theological scholar. (She writes movingly about that experience here: "The Spiritual Tasks of Aging towards Death," Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 75:3 [June 28, 2021]: 227–35.) I look forward to talking with Brian Gerrish in the world to come about what he makes of that hard and extended experience for the two of them, under the providence of God.

I want to say that again: I truly do look forward to those conversations with full expectancy. It will seem absurd, perhaps, and even offensive to some that I would emphasize this point, given Mr. Gerrish’s career as a teacher and preacher of Christian theology. Why wouldn't I be sure I will see him again? Some, however, will recognize the challenge, even the anguish, for those of us schooled in a piety that places a high priority also on correct doctrine.

So I will avow that Mr. Gerrish’s theology, in my view, was importantly and regrettably wrong. But his heart for God? I recall Calvin’s own motto: Cor meum tibi offero, Domine, prompte et sincere: "My heart I offer to you, O Lord, promptly and sincerely." And I think that on that, too, Mr. Gerrish would agree with both of his theological heroes.