W. Stanford Reid: An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy
A. Donald MacLeod
McGill-Queen’s
My memories of Stanford Reid are not happy ones. As a young teenager at St. Paul's, Ottawa, I remember dismissing the anniversary speaker as tiresome and old. Ten years later, that impression was not remedied when I heard him holding forth at Knox College on the ordination of women, the WCC program to combat racism and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It is with some surprise, therefore, that I found Donald MacLeod's biography of the man to be a very good read (sic).
Obviously Stanford left his biographer no shortage of source material. The book provides a good sense of its subject and was written out of filial piety. While I have no private information, my sense is that Donald is the son Stanford never had. And the son's treatment of the father is sympathetic although not, at points, uncritical. He notes a certain snobbery and some of Reid's shortcomings as a scholar and as a writer. What emerges, however, is an engaging portrait of a rumbustious contrarian, provocateur, rebel and debater. As a 17th century confessional Calvinist (a real W.C.F. man as that tradition was mediated though 19th century Princeton of Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield), he was a sometimes-entertaining dinosaur as he tromped around the secularized academy of 20th century Canada. We are left with the impression that Reid was at his best as a teacher and a graduate supervisor — not least because he provided students with something strong and solid to react to. Since none of his books received great critical acclaim or popular success, his main contribution to the academy, besides his graduate students, seems to have been the Scottish studies program at the University of Guelph, where he lived the second part of his professional career.
The book places Reid in his broad historical context. He was one of the fighting Reids from Kinnear's Mills in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Joseph Reid, Scots farmer, Sunday school superintendent and precentor at Reid's Church "on the Concession Road" begat eight children, including three Presbyterian ministers: Andrew, Allan, and William Dunn Reid — who was Stanford's father. All studied at Presbyterian College, Montreal in the 1890's under that formidable confessional Calvinist principal, D. H. McVicar — himself a disciple of Charles Hodge. This is the tradition in which Stanford was raised and it was strongly reinforced by his years as a student at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia in its heyday when Gresham Machen was still its animating force. And this was the perspective from which he engaged in his sometimes lonely battle against the 20th century church. One of the most endearing qualities of the man is that he had such good enemies. The accounts of his sparring with Ted Johnson and the denominational bureaucracy in Toronto over mission policy are fascinating, as are the accounts of his theological battles with Frank Beare.
Part of what makes the book interesting is that by the 1980's such a man has made his peace with the ordination of women and didn't want to make it the litmus test for renewal fellowship orthodoxy. Similarly, he came to regard Living Faith as an acceptable statement of Christian faith, "as good, if not better than most." This suggests that the 21st century may not be quite so fractious theologically for Canadian Presbyterians as the 20th century was. We may yet find some sane middle ground. Then we may be ready for the Great Revival and reversal of denominational fortunes for which Stanford Reid waited a lifetime.
