Authentic Christianity
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 53, No. 2 – Spring 2011
Managing Editor: Malcolm B. Yarnell III
By Cynthia Y. Aalders. Studies in Baptist History and Thought 40 (Colorado Springs: Paternoster, 2008).
In 1998, Tom Oden released a book about an important, but largely forgotten, American evangelical figure who had influenced leaders and established the direction of the entire holiness movement. He was shocked at how underappreciated and underreported her life and teachings were (incidentally, it was Phoebe Palmer). When the reader finishes Cynthia Aalders’s excellent book, he or she may wonder the same thing about Anne Steele. Called the first significant female hymn-writer of the modern period by Bruce Hindmarsh and the Baptist equivalent of Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and John Newton by Richard Arnold, Anne Steele (1717–1778) was “one of the most well-known and best-loved devotional hymn-writers of the eighteenth century” (2). In this book, Aalders seeks to dismiss misconceptions about Steele’s life and reintroduce her to a new generation of spirituality students.
To Express the Ineffable is Aalders’s thesis project written under Hindmarsh at Regent College in Vancouver where she serves as the Director of Admissions. Consequently, it is not primarily a biography but more an analysis of Steele’s theology and spirituality as observed in her hymns and poems and buttressed by her diary and personal letters. Aalders focuses on the areas of ineffability, suffering, and longing, arguing that Steele used her hymns to probe the divine-human encounter from both perspectives of doubt and hope. However, to accomplish her goal, Aalders works to correct biographical errors often associated with Steele.
The few historians who have dealt with Steele have often characterized her as a sullen and depressed woman. They refer to her mother dying when she was three, a horse-riding accident that left her invalid, and her fiancée drowning mere hours before their wedding. Aalders counters that Steele had a strong relationship with her stepmother in a loving home (she lived with her father and stepmother until she was fifty-two) and a strong heritage of Particular Baptist leaders. Her father, a wealthy timber merchant, supported her and even paid to publish her books of poems and hymns. As to the horse-riding accident, Aalders notes that Steele lived an active life and turned down at least three proposals of marriage, so she could not have been invalid. Aalders simply dismisses the story of the drowning fiancée, a tale she can trace to Joseph Ivimey but no further (not coincidentally, Ivimey grew up in the town where the poor man drowned).
In contrast, Aalders paints a picture of an educated, cheerful, and hopeful woman who approached her hymns from a personal, introspective, and honest viewpoint and was willing to confront thoughts of suffering and doubt. In this, she combined the structure of Watts with the thematic freedom of Wesley and the darkness of Cowper. Aalders argues that Steele’s ability to capture this feminine emotion so well at the cusp of the evangelical revival that celebrated such emotion made her enormously popular and influential among important eighteenth-century Baptists such as Caleb Evans, John Ash, and Benjamin Beddome. Steele knew that human language could not capture God’s glory, but felt a responsibility to use her gifts in a frail attempt. She confronted her experiences of pain and loss in her own life with her hope of eschatological perfection.
To Express the Ineffable is a gem of research for anyone interested in eighteenth- century Baptist life and literature. Aalders fills every page with exquisite footnotes of primary and secondary sources (including the personal correspondence of the entire Steele family). The book even contains a very useful index and bibliography. It is a must-have for students of this subject. For those interested in Steele herself, Aalders includes a wide range of carefully chosen verses and a facsimile of one of Steele’s manuscripts. However, the reader should be aware that while the book is incredibly strong on Steele and her contemporaries, it is weak on Baptist history and theology. For example, she misses connections between Hanserd Knollys and Katherine Sutton, as well as Benjamin Keach and John Rippon. Most strangely, she assumes that because Steele attended a Particular Baptist church, she would have known the 1644 London Confession. The differences between the 1644 and 1689 confessions have been well-documented, and signees of the 1689 confession have admitted never to have seen the 1644 confession. This leads Aalders to a rather superficial understanding of Calvinism, which she neither validates in general nor explains how Steele would have understood this system (the theological discussion of ineffability leaves much to be desired).
Aalders also leaves some work for future exercises. Most importantly, she fails to place Steele’s work on a timeline. Aalders notes, for example, the great impact of various deaths in Steele’s life. She also notes that Steele wrote for personal devotion earlier in life, and only gradually shifted to congregational hymns. Unfortunately, she does not take any of that into account when using Steele’s verse to validate theological observations. Also, Aalders touches on the subject of gender differences not only in the content of hymns but also in public perception and the ability to publish. Because this is a thesis, she understandably leaves that subject largely untouched, but it would be an extremely valuable subject to investigate in the future. Finally, Aalders insufficiently explains how and why Steele’s work disappeared with time.
In summary, anyone interested in this subject or this period of history would do well to take advantage of Aalders’s excellent research. In the process, he or she will learn to appreciate an interesting and important figure in the history of spirituality.
