The first 60 years

CONTENTS

Foreword: The Rt Revd John B. Taylor
Preface

1. Origins: 1938–42
2. Foundations: 1942–51
3. Debates: 1951–57
4. Restart: 1957–64
5. Refocus: 1964–70
6. Progress: 1970–78
7. Projects: 1978–81
8. Extension: 1982–86
9. Wider horizons: 1986–94
10. 1994–2004
Afterword: Professor I. Howard Marshall

APPENDICES
A Officers and staff of Tyndale House and Fellowship
B The Tyndale House Library in 2004: Dr Elizabeth Magba
C Computers at Tyndale House in July 2004: Dr David Instone-Brewer
D The Tyndale Lectures (1942–2004)
E Tyndale Monographs
F Bases of Faith of the Inter-Varsity Conference of Evangelical Unions
(1924) and the UCCF (1998)
G ‘The Tyndale Fellowship for Biblical Research’ (1947): F. F. Bruce
H Tyndale House research workers around the world

FOREWORD

My first acquaintance with Tyndale House was when I was an undergraduate in Cambridge in 1948. The then Warden, known to us only as Colonel Anderson, issued an open invitation to members of the CICCU to meet and hear the well-known Australian scholar Archdeacon T. C. Hammond, who was visiting Cambridge. I have no recollection of either the subject or the content of his talk, but a by-product for many of us who crammed into the lounge that evening was to be reassured that it was possible to be both an Evangelical and a member of the Church of England. Rumour had it that the only true Evangelicals were either Baptists or members of the Plymouth Brethren, so this was a comforting experience for us. Now here was a stout defender of the evangelical faith, author of such hard-hitting and scholarly IVF books as Reasoning Faith and In Understanding be Men, and a convinced churchman to boot, proclaiming an evangelical, scriptural message that no-one could gainsay. Now I realize that this effect was not one of the primary functions of the newly established biblical research library known as Tyndale House. The venue was chosen simply because it was the Andersons’ home and they were hosting a private gathering, but as far as I was concerned it put Tyndale House on the map, to my everlasting benefit.

So, when I graduated in Classics and Theology in 1950 and was awarded a Lady Kay scholarship to Jesus College for two further years of concentrated work on Hebrew and the Old Testament, an invitation to spend it as a Tyndale resident was too good an opportunity to resist. I spent those years under the kindly and solicitous eye of the Lady Bursar, Mrs Lilian MacLean (the legendary ‘Mrs Mac’), and in company with Leon and Mildred Morris, Bruce and Mary Reed, Kenneth Howkins, Peter Schneider, Elizabeth Lloyd-Jones, Percy Hammond, Alan Weir and a number of other good friends, all of whom in later life became distinguished in Christian service. For my part this was the beginning of a life of indebtedness to Tyndale House and all that it has stood for.

While my recollections of Tyndale House go back therefore almost to its foundation, and I might have been expected to know roughly most of its history through my continuing involvement with its activities, I nevertheless have discovered through the reading of Dr Tom Noble’s masterly chronicle what a treasury of background information he has been able to put together in this book. He leads us through the cut and thrust of debate surrounding its initial establishment, the differing viewpoints of the founding fathers (all familiar names to me from my youth), the behind-the-scenes stresses and strains that never came to the public eye, the financial pressures, the doctrinal and political issues and sensitivities; but through it all there are the triumphs and achievements, the mini-miracles, the answers to prayer, the quiet and lasting work of the Spirit in reviving and renewing the evangelical movement through the ‘signs and wonders’ of painstaking scholarship, biblical study and intellectual integrity.

The story of Tyndale House is one that could have been penned by a religious journalist, telling the world of one of the most influential means of grace that the church of the latter half of the twentieth century has known. Instead we are given a historian’s measured account drawn from the primary sources of committee minute books and archival material, livened occasionally with personal reminiscences from members of the cast. I have found it gripping reading, not just because most of the actors have been known to me, but because behind the story we are shown the thinking, the vision, the mental strivings that have undergirded all that has gone on in Tyndale House and in the Tyndale Fellowship over these past sixty years.

But there is more to this story than the undoubted achievements of a growing institution in a university city and a worldwide fellowship of like-minded scholars. I look back at the astonishing changes that have taken place in the churches, not least in the Church of England (which is the only communion I can really assess), and in university theological faculties over the past sixty years. Today evangelicals are not derided as they used to be; there are so many more of them, and they include respected scholars in their ranks. There is much less antagonism towards conservative scholarship. The publications of the Inter-Varsity Press and other similar publishing houses are read and appreciated far more widely than within their own constituencies. The climate is much more accepting of biblical viewpoints. The resurgence of evangelical life within all the churches cannot fail to be noted and commented upon, even by those who may be dismayed by it. Evangelicals in the Anglican Communion are stronger in numbers and in influence than they have ever been. And if we attempt to identify the causes for this transformation, I am not alone in coming to the conclusion that, among many influences that have been brought to bear on the church, the one key contributing factor has been the establishment of Tyndale House and the concentric circles of influence that have rippled out from there. Yes, there have been outstanding personalities and movements of the Spirit, from Billy Graham to the charismatic movement, but revivals and surges of interest that are not grounded in serious, continuing biblical study, preaching and research do not stand the test of time. I believe that what has come out of the library and fellowship of 36 Selwyn Gardens and has percolated the worldwide Church in every continent has been crucially responsible under God for the climate change that we see in the Church today.

The words that came to my mind when I reached the end of Tom Noble’s book were those that my wife and I had printed on the little cards that notified all our friends of the safe arrival and birth-weights of our first-born twin daughters: ‘The Lord hath done great things for us, whereof we are glad’ (Psalm 126:3). May Tyndale House and the Tyndale Fellowship, the twins born to the former Inter-Varsity Fellowship, continue to grow and flourish and fulfil the purposes which God intended when He brought them into the world.

The Rt Revd John B. Taylor

Extract from ... Chapter 3 - DEBATES

The change of chairman was significant for the direction of Tyndale House and the Tyndale Fellowship. Lloyd-Jones may justifiably be seen as the intellectual leader of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship, and indeed of conservative British Evangelicalism, at the midpoint of the twentieth century, and Bruce was soon to be widely recognized as its most prominent biblical scholar. Neither was the product of a theological education. F. F. Bruce was a classicist, a graduate of Aberdeen and Cambridge. While a lecturer in Greek at the University of Leeds, he had developed a professional interest in Biblical Studies, claiming to approach the biblical literature with the same historian’s objectivity as he employed in approaching any other ancient literature. In 1947, he transferred to the University of Sheffield as head of the new department of Biblical Studies, being appointed Professor of Biblical Studies in 1955. But he made no claim to be a theologian, even doubting whether a unified dogmatic scheme could be derived from holy Scripture. This stance united the historiography then dominant among classicists and historians with Bruce’s approach to Scripture as a member of the Christian Brethren. The Brethren eschew not only a professional clergy but also the emphasis upon systematic theology which is historically part of the education of clergy, at least in the Reformed tradition. Under Bruce, therefore, Tyndale House had been founded to fulfil the dreams of W. J. Martin, also in the Brethren tradition, for untrammelled scholarly study of Scripture. For both of them, the authority of Scripture was exercised in the church through careful scholarship and exegesis, not by reference to any ecclesiastical tradition of creeds or systematic theology.

Theological debate
The influence of Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Martyn Lloyd-Jones belonged to the different Evangelical tradition of Welsh Calvinistic Methodism, and his different perspective had already been evident at the Kingham Hill conference. Experiencing evangelical conversion while Chief Clinical Assistant at Bart’s to the Harley Street physician Sir Thomas Horder, he had abandoned a potentially brilliant medical career in 1926, to become pastor of a mission hall in a working-class area of Port Talbot. Such was his impact throughout Wales and beyond, that when he felt his ministry in Port Talbot was complete, he was invited by Dr Campbell Morgan to share the ministry at Westminster Chapel in London’s west end, one of the leading Congregational churches in the country. Like the rest of his generation of Evangelical leaders in England, Campbell Morgan, who had re-established Westminster Chapel as one of the capital’s leading pulpits, did not share Lloyd-Jones’s Calvinism, but he recognized the spiritual and intellectual impact of his preaching.

Lloyd-Jones had been initially cool to an interdenominational body such as Inter-Varsity Fellowship, finding much English Evangelicalism shallow and subjectivist, and mistrusting the predominance of Anglicans. But he had been persuaded by Douglas Johnson to speak at the IVF Annual Conference at Swanwick in 1935. DJ persuaded him that the Anglican Evangelicals were actually moderate Calvinists in the tradition of Charles Simeon. Thereafter the Doctor had been President of IVF for three consecutive years during the war (1939–42), and in 1947 had become first chairman of the executive committee, and then first President of the IFES, the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. He had given the addresses at the conference of delegates which met to set up the IFES in Harvard in 1947. He was again President of the British IVF in 1951–52. His seniority had been recognized in the invitation to dedicate Tyndale House in January 1945. By the time he succeeded F. F. Bruce, eleven years his junior, as chairman of the BRC and thus of the Tyndale Fellowship, he had already been established for over a decade as one of the outstanding British preachers of the day and a leading senior figure in IVF.

Like F. F. Bruce, Martyn Lloyd-Jones had undertaken no formal study of theology, but neither had he any formal qualifications or academic
standing as a biblical scholar. Noted for his prodigious memory and his
keen analytical and diagnostic gifts as a physician, his ability to expound the biblical text and apply it to the human condition was second to none. But unlike Bruce, he had never wrestled at first hand in an academic context with the problems raised by biblical criticism. Like an intellectual but deeply conservative Christian layman, he had tended to be rather suspicious of ‘Higher Criticism’. Theologically, his intellectual grasp of the faith had begun with his acceptance of the Calvinist view of predestination at the age of 17. His own conversion came later through a deepened awareness of sin both in the lives of patients, poor and rich, and in himself, and his early preaching was predominantly evangelistic, focusing on sin and conversion.

Accepting the critique of a fellow minister early in his ministry that he talked of God’s sovereignty like a Calvinist and of spiritual experience like a Quaker, but had little to say about the cross and the work of Christ, Lloyd-Jones read Forsyth, Dale and Denney diligently to correct this deficiency. But it was in 1932, in the library of Knox College, Toronto, that he discovered the collected works of the theologian with whom he was to identify most, B. B. Warfield of Princeton. He was later to describe Warfield, who had died in 1921, as ‘undoubtedly the greatest theologian of the past seventy years in the English-speaking world’. Owing primarily to the Doctor’s influence, this representative of the old Princeton school, hitherto of little significance for British Evangelicals, was to have considerable influence on their theology.

It was partly Douglas Johnson’s profession of moderate sympathy with
the theology of Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield which had persuaded
Lloyd-Jones to preach initially at the IVF Conference of 1935. His
critique of Evangelicalism at the Kingham Hill conference of 1941 had
largely been aimed at what he saw as its superficiality, activism, and lack of sound theology. Now his influence was to lead to a revival among Evangelicals not just of theology, and of the old Puritan tradition of expository preaching, but of Calvinist theology in particular.

The summer conferences

The new interest in theology in the Tyndale Fellowship was evident in
the series of summer conferences at Tyndale House in the early 1950s....