Occupy Until I Come: A. T. Pierson and the Evangelization of the World

by Dana L. Robert

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.

Genres: Biography, Christian

332 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2003

About the author

Mission history, the history of world Christianity, and mission theology intersect in the research and teaching interests of Dana L. Robert. She is the Truman Collins Professor of World Christianity and History of Mission. At Boston University she has directed over sixty doctoral dissertations, and former students hold teaching and ministry positions around the world. In 2011 she delivered a keynote address at the Global Christian Forum in Manado, Indonesia. In 2010 she delivered the Alexander Duff and the Henry Drummond Lectures in Scotland, the opening keynote lecture at the historic Edinburgh 2010 conference, and the Henry Martyn Lectures at Cambridge University. Her most recent books are Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), now in its sixth printing; and Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706-1914 (editor, Eerdmans 2008). She wrote the study Joy to the World!: Mission in the Age of Global Christianity for the 2010-2011 summer schools of mission for The United Methodist Church. With M.L. Daneel, she edits the book series “African Initiatives in Christian Mission” (University of South Africa Press). Robert received her BA from Louisiana State University and her PhD from Yale University.

http://www.bu.edu/cgcm/about-us/dana-...

Reviews

[Anson Cassel Mills · Rating 3 out of 5]

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. 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.

[Hélène Lou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert is such a terrific scholar!!!! First-rate work.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this well written and engaging biography Dr. Dana L. Robert masterfully depicts the life of a key figure in both 19th Century American Christianity and in the movement of mission mobilization that was sweeping across the western world. Pierson’s ministry navigated the dramatic currents of cultural change that shaped America from the Civil War through the industrialization that dawned with the first decade of the twentieth century. The convictions that guided A.T. Pierson and the spiritual depth of his relationship with God carried him through tumultuous waters and are worthy of our emulation today. In Pierson we discover the too-often-odd matrix of Biblical proclamation, social concern, evangelistic drive, mission mobilization, and a vision for Christian unity. Soon after his death these passions would splinter into the separate movements of fundamentalist, evangelical, and liberal Christianity, but in Pierson they were held simply, purely and without conflict in the heart of one sincere and mightily used servant of God.

I urge pastors to carefully read this important work, for it holds forth a model of the kind of God-honoring faithfulness needed in our day as we too navigate cultural forces and spiritual winds that are no less threatening to the advance of God’s Kingdom.