Assessing the historical significance of a person is not an activity that suits quantification. But when historians put together reference words such as dictionaries and encyclopedias, they need to assign word counts for subjects to control the project’s size and scope. In which case, the people with the more important biographies receive more space or words.
I made this point during Sunday school talks on J. Gresham Machen last Spring and continue to think the point has some merit. The standard biographical reference work for the United States, Oxford University Press’ American National Biography gives a window into the collective mind of professional historians and how they judge a figure’s significance. Online access allows readers to generate a quick list of word counts for those persons who made the editors’ cut.
Here is a sampling of presidential word counts:
George Washington 8,025
James Buchanan 3,150
Abraham Lincoln 11,125
Woodrow Wilson 8,400
Ronald Reagan 9,900
Buchanan’s tally as the president consistently rated the worst (but Pennsylvania’s lone national executive) makes sense, but surprising is that Washington takes a back seat to Wilson and Reagan. Lincoln is, well, St. Abraham.
Here are some Reformed theologians:
Charles Hodge 2,925
Benjamin Warfield 1,525
John Williamson Nevin 1,450
Archibald Alexander 1,250
John Witherspoon 2,550
And here are some figures from the Presbyterian controversy of the 1920s:
Henry Sloane Coffin 1,100
Robert E. Speer 1,375
Charles Erdman 850
Clarence Macartney 1,025
William Jennings Bryan 3,500
J. Gresham Machen 1,325
Of course, Bryan was more than a Presbyterian controversialist and his running for the presidency three times on the Democratic ticket explains why he receives more space than Buchanan.
Finally, the tallies for Orthodox Presbyterian notables (or would be OP’s):
Cornelius Van Til 0
John Murray 0
Geerhardus Vos 0
I guess, when the lights and cameras were packed up, the OPC’s theologians looked a lot less interesting to historians.
So what does this have to do with union with Christ? I have engaged consistently with union advocates about the doctrine’s relative importance and have asked repeatedly why the doctrine does not receive more coverage in the Reformed creeds and confessions. The response often is that the Holy Spirit does not merit a separate chapter in the Westminster Confession but that doesn’t make it unimportant. The point that usually follows is that union was so important to the Divines that they did not need to assert it. But I continue to wonder about this argument and a handy search of the Westminster Standards reveals the following word counts:
Union 6
Spirit 79
Some may want to claim that because union and communion go together in the Standards, then references to “communion†should also be counted. In which case, the same should go for all uses of spirit, as in “spiritual.†Here are the results:
Union and communion 33
Spirit and spiritual 114
Which leads me to continue to wonder about the import of union with Christ for defining Reformed orthodoxy. I do not deny that it is there or that the Divines wrote about it in their personal writings. But if it were so crucial to Reformed soteriology – and if it were so important for delineating Reformed and Lutheran doctrine – then you would think union would receive more words and space. After all, the Divines were not bashful as going into specifics.
Old Life 