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Meredith G. Kline: Controversial and Creative

John R. Muether

Meredith G. Kline was born a century ago, on December 15, 1922, in Coplay, Pennsylvania. When he was four, his family moved to the Dorchester neighborhood in Boston, where they joined Central Congregational Church. Upon graduation from Gordon College in 1944, his inclination was ministerial preparation at Dallas Theological Seminary. Kline’s mind changed when his mother grieved at the prospect of his moving so far from home, and instead, after their wedding that summer, he and his wife, Grace, moved to Philadelphia where he enrolled at Westminster Theological Seminary.

Though Kline had not come from a Calvinistic background, he quickly settled into Reformed convictions at Westminster, especially under the influence of Professor Ned Stonehouse. Particularly helpful in grounding him in amillennialism was his ThM paper on the structure of the book of Revelation. While completing two degrees in three years and raising a family with Grace (two of their three sons were born during his student years), he also preached on nearly one hundred occasions.

He then took a call at Calvary Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Ringoes, New Jersey, while enrolling in a PhD program in Assyriology at Dropsie College in Philadelphia. He would also begin to teach Old Testament part-time at Westminster, joining the faculty full-time in 1950.

The Relevance of the Theocracy

In 1953, Kline published his first article in the Presbyterian Guardian (a monthly magazine that was a predecessor, of sorts, for New Horizons). In “The Relevance of the Theocracy,” Kline took issue with two articles whose authors failed to understand the uniqueness of the Mosaic covenant, thus exposing them to errors in applying Israel to modern politics. In making his case, he quoted Geerhardus Vos’s Biblical Theology: “The significance of the unique organization of Israel can be rightly measured only by remembering that the theocracy typified nothing short of the perfected kingdom of God, the consummate state of Heaven.” The article itself is dated, and Kline would go on to write more memorable articles and books. But what stands out in this article is this quote. Kline shows at the very start of his publishing efforts an eagerness to approach biblical theology in the tradition of one whom he later called “the prince of exegetes.” It is no exaggeration to say that Kline would devote the next half century to expanding and refining the consequences of Vos’s claim.

The uniqueness of Israel carried consequences, political and ecclesiastical, that prompted Kline to embrace unpopular opinions. In 1963, when Kline’s sons were enrolled in the Abington township public schools, the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Abington v. Schempp ruled that mandatory prayer in public schools was a violation of the First Amendment. Kline supported the ruling, to the dismay of some in the OPC. But his logic was the same as J. Gresham Machen’s, seen in the latter’s unwillingness to entrust religious exercises to the hands of public education.

In the following year, Kline submitted a minority report (along with WTS colleague Paul Woolley) at the OPC general assembly on a proposal to establish a medical hospital in the mission in Eritrea. Kline did not dispute the importance of Christians sponsoring hospitals. But he challenged whether medicine could come under the authority and oversight of the church, because the standards for judging the competence of doctors and nurses are not provided in the church’s only rule of faith and practice, the Word of God. Kline was disappointed in failing to prevail at general assembly, but many ministers wrote to him expressing appreciation for his efforts.

Leaving Westminster

Kline’s gifts seemed to fit well with his senior colleague in Old Testament, E. J. Young. While they differed in their interpretation of the nature of the creation days, their disagreement was cordial, and their families were close. Kline purchased land from Young and built a home in Willow Grove where they became next-door neighbors. Kline’s respect for Young was best expressed in his review of Young’s commentary on Isaiah in the Gordon Review. While it may have lacked “imagination and excitement,” he wrote, it “breathes the spirit of humble adoration of the Word of God” and it was “solid, reliable, thorough in its soundly Reformed exegesis.”

Still, Young was the chairman of the department, and he was teaching the classes that Kline yearned to teach. So Kline could not resist the opportunity, after sixteen years at Westminster, to move to South Hamilton, Massachusetts, and chair the Old Testament department of Gordon Divinity School (now Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) in 1965. Kline imagined an enlarged platform at Gordon, and it was certainly that. But it was a serious blow for Westminster, and a challenging adjustment for him. Two years into his Gordon teaching experience, Kline candidly expressed to a friend: “Some days, I admit, the environment seems discouraging and I could wish to be in my theological home.”

The prospect of returning increased with the sudden and unexpected death of Young on February 14, 1968. Many faculty—especially Cornelius Van Til—urged him to return. There is evidence that Kline weighed this very seriously, though he declined largely for family reasons. Yet he never lost his love for Westminster. He would serve as a visiting professor in Philadelphia in the 1970s, and for two decades, beginning in 1981, Kline taught the spring semester classes Pentateuch and Old Testament Prophets at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido, during which he produced his most fruitful work.

Refining the Theology of the Covenants

It is common to hear analysts of Kline refer to an “early Kline” and a “later Kline.” For example, in the 1970s, Kline was given to say that the Mosaic covenant was an administration of the covenant of grace embedded with a “typological works principle.” By the 1980s, he would put that differently: the Mosaic covenant was “a republication of the covenant of works.” Rather than contradictory, these expressions are harmonizable, though it is clear that his emphasis was shifting. Two theological controversies that refined his thinking were the theonomy movement and Norman Shepherd’s novel views on justification.

Kline’s criticism of theonomy appeared in his 1979 Westminster Theological Journal review of Greg Bahnsen’s book Theonomy in Christian Ethics. The “tragedy of Chalcedon” in failing properly to apprehend the theocracy of Israel extended to its “delusive and grotesque perversion of the teaching of Scripture.” Along the way, Kline also took on postmillennialism. By its “premature eclipse of the order of common grace” it denied the faithfulness of God, who under the terms of the Noahic covenant has committed to preserving common grace.

Debate over the teaching of Norman Shepherd began at Westminster in 1975. For Kline, the root of Shepherd’s error was his covenant confusion: where works and grace are mixed in the old covenant the same problem ensues in the new covenant. For Kline, the heart of the gospel—the merit and mediation of Christ as the second Adam—was at stake. His involvement sharpened especially his thinking on the works principle in the garden of Eden and its typological replication in the Mosaic covenant. Here he continued to elaborate on the biblical theology of Geerhardus Vos. “For Vos,” Kline explained in Kingdom Prologue, “delineating the progress of special revelation is broadly the same as expounding the contents of the several divine covenants.”

Controversial and Creative

Kline’s pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Ipswich, Massachusetts, David O’Leary, observed at the time of Kline’s death in 2007 that “Meredith Kline was probably the most controversial and creative man I knew. His insight and ability were far beyond the rest of us. Yet when we reflected on it, we often admitted that he was correct.”  This was certainly the experience of his students in Philadelphia, South Hamilton, and Escondido. It is difficult to capture the dazzling character of Kline’s classroom lectures. They began with the rich devotional theology of his heartfelt prayers, offered in the poetic cadence of the King James Version. Early students saw the dust around the chalkboard create the impression of the glory-cloud he described through brilliant exegesis. Later students learned of the “typological legibility” of the biblical covenants through his barely decipherable scrawling on overhead projectors or whiteboards.

Kline once outlined the goals in his seminary calling as threefold: he sought to contribute toward the students’  “acquisition of a sound and scholarly hermeneutical approach to the Old Testament,” their “formulation of a comprehensive theology of the OT,” and their “confidence in the OT as infallible.” His students were in the habit of describing his influence in simpler terms. It was the recurring testimony of more than five decades of seminarians that “Kline taught me how to read the Bible.”   

The author, an OP elder, is professor of church history at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida. New Horizons, October 2022.

New Horizons: October 2022

Theologian and Churchman Richard B. Gaffin Jr.

Also in this issue

Theologian and Churchman Richard B. Gaffin Jr.

Stonehouse’s Charitable Confessionalism

Robert B. Strimple on the Image of God

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