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Samuel Davies: Apostle to Virginia
Samuel Apostle to Virginia is the first full-scale biography ever produced on Samuel Davies, America's greatest ever preacher. It is a meticulously researched work which presents the story of Davies' life from cradle to grave. With the publication of this biography, the great Samuel Davies will no longer be an obscure figure from the past. It deserves a place on the bookshelves of those who have read the biographies of Whitefield, Spurgeon, McCheyne, Edwards, Lloyd-Jones, and other great Christian ministers.
- GenresBiography
438 pages, Paperback
Published August 5, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 30, 2020
I have a very complicated relationship with this book.
There was not a single moment of my upbringing when I was unaware of its existence. I knew it as the book, the one about my namesake, the one my father spent countless hours researching throughout my childhood. As I grew older, he let me read early drafts of his opening chapters and I would make suggestions.
...and now, here I am, writing its first review on Goodreads. A review, written by the author's son, who is himself named for the subject of the biography his father wrote. Has anything like that ever happened on Goodreads before?
Praise where praise is due: this book is meticulously researched. No one will accuse my father of not having done his homework. The book describes all people, places, times, and events with such accurate, painstaking care that it begins to resemble military campaign logs or stenographic records of court proceedings.
This approach works best when relating Davies to more well-known figures from American history. Personages including, but not limited to, Patrick Henry, Sr. (and Jr.), Aaron Burr (Senior, not "Sir!"), Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and even a young George Washington all appear at intervals throughout the narrative, serving as welcome historical reference points and counterpoints for the modern readership's unfamiliarity with Davies himself.
However, this level of attention to detail does not always work in the biography's favor. Everything in the text receives the same level of attention, regardless of prominence or overall impact on the narrative. As a result, individuals often seem reduced to mere data, with little emphasis on their relationships and personal interactions. This constant flood of impeccably-chronicled but arcane information overshadows the narrative and threatens to drown out the already-obscure central figure of Davies himself.
Compounding this problem is one of style: the lion's share of the text's prose serves as mere connective tissue for its collection of quotations from primary sources. Ninety percent of that prose, however, is in the passive voice. The narrative thus trickles, rather than flows; and its constant admiration for the figure of Davies has the unfortunate side effect of imbuing the text with a kind of resigned fatalism, preventing the reader from identifying or even understanding Davies and his decisions.
This is partly due to the loss of Davies' personal diary, which was probably consumed in a fire. My father searched for that diary for years, contacting several of Davies' modern-day descendants, before finally giving it up for lost. Without this, historians can only guess at most of Davies' motivations and all of his early history.
However, this loss does not completely absolve the text of its weaknesses.
In his own time and after, up to the American Civil War, Davies was the most popular published evangelist after Whitefield and Edwards. In the modern era, however, no one knows of him outside of a few well-studied scholars. This would not be a terrible problem, were it not that the text makes almost zero concessions to a modern reading audience. It seems written primarily for an elite niche of Banner of Truth-reading Evangelical scholars who are already aware of Davies' life and work, not an audience more familiar with McCullough or Chernow.
More troubling, however, is the clear and unapologetic hero-worship of Davies himself, by the author. He was undoubtedly a brilliant evangelist, orator, and theologian; but he was still human. When he committed human errors, the text typically does not treat them as such, but attempts to minimize them.
For example, Davies seems to have considered the body itself to be intrinsically sinful or evil. This is a form of theology called Gnosticism, and most Evangelicals in the present day outright reject it.
Additionally, there are problems with Davies' attitudes concerning race. He witnessed to both Native Americans and enslaved Africans within the Colonies, but he never stood up for them as equals. The text tries to handwave this as a typical Eighteenth-century attitude among European colonials, but then also attempts to do the same for George Whitefield in the process. The author seems completely unaware of Whitefield's role in legalizing slavery in Georgia; anyone who is aware of his culpability would find this attempt troubling, to say the least.
Finally, for all of the portentous foreshadowing the text strives towards, it completely fails to demonstrate Davies' impact upon the formation of America. Imagine if Hamilton had ended immediately following the duel between himself and Burr. No "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?" No Eliza singing, "Can I show you the thing I'm proudest of?" That, unfortunately, is where this biography decides to leave off telling us about Davies.
For, while the narrative does tell us about Davies' interactions with several noteworthy figures from American history, he died before the American Revolution began. I know from conversations with my father that his sermons had direct impact upon the proceedings of the Second Continental Congress, but the text does not elaborate on these connections. The full impact of Davies' legacy is thus not made clear to the reader.
In light of these things, it's unclear why, exactly, Davies deserves the honorific of "Apostle to Virginia" conferred on him by the book's subtitle. As far as the text itself communicates, Davies was a brilliant minister who raised money for a college, witnessed to overlooked people groups with limited success, succeeded Jonathan Edwards as President of Princeton, and died young. That's it.
...and this is a shame, because I know how much my father poured himself into this biography. How he meant it to be, and what he wanted it to communicate. It just doesn't quite get there. It needed a little more polish, a little less adulation, and a lot more honesty.
There was not a single moment of my upbringing when I was unaware of its existence. I knew it as the book, the one about my namesake, the one my father spent countless hours researching throughout my childhood. As I grew older, he let me read early drafts of his opening chapters and I would make suggestions.
...and now, here I am, writing its first review on Goodreads. A review, written by the author's son, who is himself named for the subject of the biography his father wrote. Has anything like that ever happened on Goodreads before?
Praise where praise is due: this book is meticulously researched. No one will accuse my father of not having done his homework. The book describes all people, places, times, and events with such accurate, painstaking care that it begins to resemble military campaign logs or stenographic records of court proceedings.
This approach works best when relating Davies to more well-known figures from American history. Personages including, but not limited to, Patrick Henry, Sr. (and Jr.), Aaron Burr (Senior, not "Sir!"), Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and even a young George Washington all appear at intervals throughout the narrative, serving as welcome historical reference points and counterpoints for the modern readership's unfamiliarity with Davies himself.
However, this level of attention to detail does not always work in the biography's favor. Everything in the text receives the same level of attention, regardless of prominence or overall impact on the narrative. As a result, individuals often seem reduced to mere data, with little emphasis on their relationships and personal interactions. This constant flood of impeccably-chronicled but arcane information overshadows the narrative and threatens to drown out the already-obscure central figure of Davies himself.
Compounding this problem is one of style: the lion's share of the text's prose serves as mere connective tissue for its collection of quotations from primary sources. Ninety percent of that prose, however, is in the passive voice. The narrative thus trickles, rather than flows; and its constant admiration for the figure of Davies has the unfortunate side effect of imbuing the text with a kind of resigned fatalism, preventing the reader from identifying or even understanding Davies and his decisions.
This is partly due to the loss of Davies' personal diary, which was probably consumed in a fire. My father searched for that diary for years, contacting several of Davies' modern-day descendants, before finally giving it up for lost. Without this, historians can only guess at most of Davies' motivations and all of his early history.
However, this loss does not completely absolve the text of its weaknesses.
In his own time and after, up to the American Civil War, Davies was the most popular published evangelist after Whitefield and Edwards. In the modern era, however, no one knows of him outside of a few well-studied scholars. This would not be a terrible problem, were it not that the text makes almost zero concessions to a modern reading audience. It seems written primarily for an elite niche of Banner of Truth-reading Evangelical scholars who are already aware of Davies' life and work, not an audience more familiar with McCullough or Chernow.
More troubling, however, is the clear and unapologetic hero-worship of Davies himself, by the author. He was undoubtedly a brilliant evangelist, orator, and theologian; but he was still human. When he committed human errors, the text typically does not treat them as such, but attempts to minimize them.
For example, Davies seems to have considered the body itself to be intrinsically sinful or evil. This is a form of theology called Gnosticism, and most Evangelicals in the present day outright reject it.
Additionally, there are problems with Davies' attitudes concerning race. He witnessed to both Native Americans and enslaved Africans within the Colonies, but he never stood up for them as equals. The text tries to handwave this as a typical Eighteenth-century attitude among European colonials, but then also attempts to do the same for George Whitefield in the process. The author seems completely unaware of Whitefield's role in legalizing slavery in Georgia; anyone who is aware of his culpability would find this attempt troubling, to say the least.
Finally, for all of the portentous foreshadowing the text strives towards, it completely fails to demonstrate Davies' impact upon the formation of America. Imagine if Hamilton had ended immediately following the duel between himself and Burr. No "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?" No Eliza singing, "Can I show you the thing I'm proudest of?" That, unfortunately, is where this biography decides to leave off telling us about Davies.
For, while the narrative does tell us about Davies' interactions with several noteworthy figures from American history, he died before the American Revolution began. I know from conversations with my father that his sermons had direct impact upon the proceedings of the Second Continental Congress, but the text does not elaborate on these connections. The full impact of Davies' legacy is thus not made clear to the reader.
In light of these things, it's unclear why, exactly, Davies deserves the honorific of "Apostle to Virginia" conferred on him by the book's subtitle. As far as the text itself communicates, Davies was a brilliant minister who raised money for a college, witnessed to overlooked people groups with limited success, succeeded Jonathan Edwards as President of Princeton, and died young. That's it.
...and this is a shame, because I know how much my father poured himself into this biography. How he meant it to be, and what he wanted it to communicate. It just doesn't quite get there. It needed a little more polish, a little less adulation, and a lot more honesty.
December 20, 2021
The amazing story of the spiritual/religious history of Virginia and Samuel Davies role in it. The author researched Samuel for 27 years. The history and details he included gave a clear picture of the transformation of Virginia in the mid-1700's.
Samuel went on to be the president of the College of New Jersey that later became Princeton University.
Samuel went on to be the president of the College of New Jersey that later became Princeton University.
November 6, 2022
Overall a great biography of a great minister.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews