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The Surprising Work of God: Harold John Ockenga, Billy Graham, and the Rebirth of Evangelicalism
by Garth M. Rosell
Baker Academic
288 pp., $19.99 (paperback)

On the afternoon of April 23, 1950, Billy Graham preached to a crowd of 50,000 on the Boston Common, the same place where George Whitefield had proclaimed the gospel at the height of the Great Awakening in 1740. The dashing young evangelist's rally culminated months of revival in Boston, which had begun with two weeks of packed auditorium meetings across the city and ended with return engagements throughout New England and Boston, reminiscent of Whitefield's famous tour.

"We have humanized God and deified man," Graham proclaimed to his admiring audience, and we "have worshiped at the throne of science."

The usual story of Graham's rise to national prominence dwells on his spectacular Los Angeles crusade the previous fall, but as Garth Rosell points out in The Surprising Work of God (5 stars), Graham's follow-up triumph in the less congenial atmosphere of Catholic-dominated Boston, in the shadow of leading universities, was crucial for proving that he "could hold his own in any context."

The Rev. Harold John Ockenga, pastor of the influential Park Street Church at the edge of the Boston Common, brought Graham to Boston and did as much as anyone to give Graham's mission its larger shape. Ockenga and Graham both heralded the revival of 1950 as the greatest in New England since the Great Awakening. While Graham could well assume the role of Whitefield, the revival had no towering theologian to assume the role of Jonathan Edwards, who wrote several works defending the 18th-century awakening.

Yet Ockenga, a scholarly pastor who had earned a Ph.D. under J. Gresham Machen at Princeton and Westminster seminaries, did more than anyone else to launch a neo-evangelical movement that balanced revivalism with intellectual rigor. Named founding president of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942, Ockenga oversaw the "fundamentalist" to "evangelical" transition that theological conservatives underwent in the next decades. He helped found Fuller Theological Seminary in 1947 as the theol-ogical center of the renewal movement and long served as its absentee president. In 1956 he was instrumental in founding Christianity Today, which promoted an educated, informed clergy and laity.

Ockenga's close friendship with Graham, as Rosell writes in his engaging study, linked "the steepled church with the revival tent." At Ockenga's funeral in 1985, Graham proclaimed: "Nobody outside of my family influenced me more than he did. I never made a major decision without calling and asking his advice and counsel."

At the center of Rosell's interest are two stories: the remarkable awakenings of the 1940s and '50s, and Ockenga's role in shaping them and the new evangelical movement.

Surprising Work offers a new angle on the awakenings, for although Graham emerged as the champion of the mid-century revivalists, he was far from alone. Rather, he served alongside what Rosell calls "a band of brothers"—young evangelists who were building the awakening during and after World War II. This band included Jack Wyrtzen, Percy Crawford, Torrey Johnson, T. W. Wilson, Hyman Appleman, Jimmie Johnson, Bob Cook, Chuck Templeton, Grady Wilson, Cliff Barrows, and Merv Rosell.

Most illuminating are Garth Rosell's well-documented accounts of his father, Merv Rosell, who preceded Graham in working with fundamentalist leader William B. Riley and with Youth for Christ, and who became a good friend of the younger Graham. In 1950 Rosell's revival campaigns still rivaled Graham's in prominence. Preaching in cities such as Chicago, Phoenix, Des Moines, and Kansas City, Rosell's crusades typically packed out auditoriums for weeks and recorded thousands of decisions for Christ.

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August 2008, Vol. 52, No. 8