Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 67:1 (Mar 2024)
Article: ETS At 75: A Community Of Conviction And Love
Author: Timothy George

JETS 67:1 (March 2024) p. 1

ETS At 75:
A Community Of Conviction And Love

Timothy George*

^* Timothy George is distinguished professor of divinity at Beeson Divinity School of Samford University and general editor of the Reformation Commentary on Scripture. This essay reflects the oral nature of the initial presentation of the presidential address delivered November 15, 2023, to the 75th annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in San Antonio, TX.

Shall we gather at the river

Where bright angel feet have trod,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Gather with the saints at the river

That flows by the throne of God.

The river that inspired that gospel song, written in 1864 by pastor Robert Lowry during the Civil War, is the Susquehanna in western Pennsylvania. Nearby flows another river, even more famous, the Ohio, which stretches for nearly a thousand miles, from the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela, through the Ohio River Valley, until it empties into the mighty Mississippi.

For thinkers in the Old World, the Ohio River became a symbol of redemption and new beginnings—so in the year before Jonathan Edwards died, the visionary poet William Blake looked out from his engravers shop in London, and wrote:

Tho born on the cheating banks of Thames
Tho his waters bathed my infant limbs
The Ohio shall wash his stains from me
I was born a slave but I go to be free.1

At about the midpoint along the Ohio’s long tumble westward, a trading town was established in 1788 that grew into the thriving city of Cincinnati, thriving not just commercially and culturally but in religious—even evangelical—fervor as well. Long before Billy Graham brought his crusades to Cincinnati, Charles Finney and D. L. Moody had preached to throngs there, and in the first decade of the twentieth century, a 7,000-seat tabernacle was built for the irrepressible Billy Sunday.

JETS 67:1 (March 2024) p. 2

I. What Hath Billy Sunday To Do With ETS?

Billy Sunday once said that that he didn’t know any more about theology than a jack-rabbit knew about ping-pong,2 but nonetheless academic institutions prospered in the Queen City of the Ohio, as Cincinnati was known. Before the Civil War, Lane Seminary had given birth to the abolitionist movement. And then in 1900, rooted in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition, came God’s Bible College (that’s its real name), where the great devotional writer Oswald Chambers taught. God’s Bible College remains as a thriving ...