Alexander Campbell: Adventurer in Freedom.

Alexander Campbell: Adventurer in Freedom. By Eva Jean Wrather. Edited by D. Duane Cummins. (Fort Worth, Tex.: Published for the Disciples of Christ Historical Society by Texas Christian University Press, c. 2005. Pp. xxxvi, 264. $25.00, ISBN 0-87565-305-7.)

This book is a labor of love, a celebration of the life and efforts of both its author and its subject. The writer, Eva Jean Wrather, spent seventy years tracking the details of Alexander Campbell's life and writing his story in a 3,254-page manuscript. She failed several times to make the unwieldy manuscript conform to the standards of publishers with whom she held contracts. But late in her life and after her death, D. Duane Cummins, a fellow Disciples of Christ scholar, contributed his editorial efforts in cooperation with Texas Christian University Press. Cummins's preface offers a tribute to Wrather's efforts, detailing the extraordinary history of the project and the writer who did not live to see the publication.

The lengthy manuscript expressed Wrather's devotion to her subject, Alexander Campbell, the minister who led a religious movement in the nineteenth century that helped form the Disciples of Christ denomination. Born in Ireland, Campbell learned from his parents independence and a distaste for the disputes surrounding religious establishment in the British Isles in general and in their own Presbyterian Church in particular. The Campbells were dismayed when struggles between Seceders and anti-Seceders, and Burghers and anti-Burghers, overwhelmed efforts to build unity and piety among Presbyterians.

The family determined that America might offer an escape from the entangling arguments of the past and risked the passage across the Atlantic. A shipwreck delayed Alexander, but he used the setback to his advantage, bolstering his learning with study at the University of Glasgow, where he imbibed the Common Sense philosophy expounded by Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewert, and George Jardine. The following year, Campbell arrived in America, settled in Pennsylvania, and promptly became displeased with the churches already in place. He helped found a new ecumenical movement, the Christian Association of Washington, Pennsylvania, and soon began wrangling with the boundaries of his faith, prompted by the birth of his daughter and his inquiry into the proper mode of baptism. This first of several projected volumes stops at this point in Campbell's life, age thirty-four, just shy of his most significant endeavors.

In Wrather's account, Campbell was consistent in his pursuit of his ideals, even as he was open to the unfolding of the new ideas developing from his studies during these formative years. He was supra-theological, formulating not a new system to compete with others but rather an innovative blending of the best of religious traditions, both Protestant and Catholic, to join with Enlightenment rationality. Campbell's idealism and approach made these combinations easy, Wrather argues, and the timely formulation corresponded with the emerging plurality and democracy of the new republic of the United States. So significant was Campbell and his revolutionary reformation that Wrather compares him to Thomas Jefferson, John Calvin, and Martin Luther. The biography will serve the interests of Disciples of Christ members, for it provides a readable account of Campbell's life and bolsters his religious principles. Scholars, however, will find the argument and lack of footnotes or bibliography frustrating throwbacks to earlier standards of confessional religious biographies. For them, Cummins's preface, which sets the book and its author in some context and politely explains the limits of the approach, will be the most redeeming feature.

PHILIP MULDER

High Point University