Arthur Tappan Pierson (1837–1911) was the elder statesman of the student missionary movement and the leading evangelical advocate of foreign missions in the late 1800s. "Occupy until I Come," the first biography of Pierson in more than a century, explores the life, thought, and legacy of this major figure in American religious history. Working from the best available sources, Dana Robert illumines the relationship between A. T. Pierson's role in the surging foreign missions movement and the development of nineteenth-century evangelicalism. Pierson was famous in his day as a Bible teacher, a leader in Keswick holiness piety, and an urban pastor who cared passionately for the poor. An original editor of the "Scofield Reference Bible," Pierson also carried on a transatlantic preaching ministry that made him famous in Scotland and England. In covering both Pierson's career and his context, this book is not only the finest available biography of A. T. Pierson but also a valuable portrait of America's religious landscape at a key point in history.

As Joel Carpenter, the distinguished historian of American religion, has commented about this book, "it is difficult to understand why someone so important to American religious history has not, until now, been subjected to a scholarly study." The scholarly yet pietistic Pierson seems to have been present and influential at each juncture in the history of Anglo-American evangelicalism from the Civil War through the first decade of the twentieth century. A. J. Gordon was his best friend, D. L. Moody a respected colleague, and George Müller a prayer partner. Pierson encouraged Hudson Taylor to visit North America, and when C. H. Spurgeon became mortally ill, it fell to Pierson to serve as caretaker of his London pulpit. Pierson lived long enough to critique the modern tongues movement, serve as an editor of the Scofield Reference Bible, and contribute to The Fundamentals (1909-1911).

Dana Robert has a clear understanding of American religious history, and her narrative skillfully interweaves the connections between higher criticism, dispensationalism, premillennialism, evangelical social reform, the Keswick holiness emphasis, and (especially) the turn-of-the-century faith missions movement. What occasionally gets lost in this authoritative exposition is Pierson himself. Of his private life we learn little--although perhaps a man who writes fifty books and delivers 13,000 sermons and addresses doesn't have much of a private life.

Occupy Until I Come is also repetitive and overly long. A considerable amount of work went into transforming the original dissertation into this book. But not enough. Finally, Robert's biography doesn't work as well in Eerdmans' "Library of Religious Biography" series as well as some of the other volumes do (for instance, Lyle W. Dorsett's Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America). The requirement that the books in this series be "free of footnotes" is annoying in this case and leads to some awkward textual constructions so that Robert can identify her sources. The general editors intend that the books in this series be "well-written narratives. . .read and enjoyed as well as studied." Robert writes well enough, but whether Occupy Until I Come will be "enjoyed" by the general reader is at least debatable. It certainly should be consulted by anyone interested in American religious history during the late nineteenth century.

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ISBN: 9780802807809
Catalogue code: N/A
Publisher: WM B EERDMANS PUB CO - published 15/06/2003
Format: Paperback