Paul Chang-Ha Lim, an award-winning author, speaker, and public intellectual, is Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education. He has previously taught at Vanderbilt University (2006-23) and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (2001-06). Lim has also been a Visiting Professor of Early Modern Religious History at the University of Chicago Divinity School in Spring 2023, and a Visiting Professor of History of Christianity at Yonsei University, Korea in Summer 2019, as well a tutorial fellow in the Faculty of Divinity and Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge between 1999 and 2001. His Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2012), won the 2013 Roland H. Bainton Prize as the best book in history by the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. He has published two other books in that area: The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge University Press, 2008); and In Pursuit of Purity, Unity, and Liberty: Richard Baxter’s Puritan Ecclesiology in Context (Brill, 2004). He is interested in the consequences of theological doctrines and their broader intellectual impact, whether how perspectives from early Christian writers (so-called patristic theologians) were reinterpreted in the early modern worlds, both in New England or in Hispaniola or China. He is equally committed to demonstrating the “strange world of the past,” in that using contemporary paradigms or perspectives—which are often neatly existing in simple binaries—can often cloud rather than clarify the complicated and messy nature of historical and religious contingencies.
Lim has two current books projects. He is planning to finish the writing of The Forgotten God? Christology in Enlightenment England by the end of 2025. It traces key debates on the ontic and economic identity of Jesus, particularly vis-à-vis the onslaught of challenges on the deity of Christ and his death as satisfaction. Key story-tellers of this theological narrative are the Quakers (Elizabeth Bathurst, George Keith), clandestine anti-trinitarian Anglican clergy (Stephen Nye), a Vice Chancellor of Oxford University in the 1650s (John Owen), a radical whose allegorical interpretations of Jesus’ miracles led to his loss of professorship at Cambridge (Thomas Woolston), and an Irish intellectual gadfly whose denial of mystery as a theological category and espousal of “Jewish Christianity” proved to be prescient (John Toland). The hoped-for consequence of this inquiry in intellectual history is to remedy the tendency to neglect theological, especially Christological, issues when considering the narratives of the Enlightenment, whether in France, Germany, or in this instance, England. In so doing, Lim offers a much more contested and nuanced agonistic narrative of the “triumph” of Enlightenment modernity, which was—at least seen from the perspectives of those living in it—far less inevitable and much more volatile, overlapping, and, frankly, truer to the messiness of lived religion and printed theologies.
The second project is provisionally entitled “Lives of Jesus” and the Rise of Historical Biblical Criticism in Enlightenment England. One of the underexplored areas of inquiry in the rise of modern sensibilities about Self, Savior, and Society is how the apologetically produced genre of “Lives of Jesus,” initially intended as a way of defending the historical verisimilitude and verifiability of the Incarnation of God in Jesus began to be used for an alternative purpose: historicizing the transcendent identity of Jesus, thereby denying any aspect of Jesus beyond the “historical Jesus.” This is intended to fill the lacuna in the way one thinks of the development of biblical scholarship. Key figures in this historiographical intervention is Nathaniel Lardner” (1684-1768), a Dissenting nontrinitarian theologian whose contribution to critical biblical studies has gone strangely unnoticed.
Lim’s long-term project is a longue durée account of Jesus as a “Cultic Figure and Cultural Icon.” It is an attempt to provide an updated version of Jaroslav Pelikan’s influential Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (Yale, 1985). In a tour de force 18 chapter account, Pelikan offered a fascinating throughline of understanding the place of Jesus in human history. In Lim’s From a Cult Hero to Cultural Icon: Jesus through Global Christianity, there will be a greater focus on understanding Jesus “through the eyes of the Other,” whether Jewish, Islamic, secular or non-Nicene Christian perspectives.
“From Loci Communes to Practical Divinity: Range of Puritan Theology in Old and New England,” in Oxford Handbook of Puritanism, ed. Francis J. Bremer, Ann L. Hughes, and Greg Salazar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2024).
Review essay of David D. Hall, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History, in Church History 91 (2022): 681-684.
“Learning about Jesus from Muslims and Jews: In Search of the Identity of Christ from Eighth-century Baghdad to Seventeenth-century Hague,” Church History 90 (2021): 753- 775.
“Owen the Polemicist,” in T&T Clark Handbook of John Owen, ed. Crawford Gribben and John W. Tweeddale (London: T&T Clark, 2022), 197-222.
“Atheism, Atoms, and the Activity of God: Science and Religion in Early Boyle Lectures, 1692-1707,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, 56, no. 1 (2021): 143-167.
“Reformed Theology in North America,” (with Drew Martin) in The Oxford Handbook of Reformed Theology, eds. Michael Allen and Scott McSwain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 154-170.
“From the Spirit to the Sovereign to Sapiential Reason: A Brief History of Sola Scriptura,” in The People’s Book: The Reformation and the Bible, eds., Jennifer Powell McNutt and David Lauber. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017, pp. 207-24.
“Not Solely Sola Scriptura, or, a Rejoinder to Brad S. Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation,” in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 46:3 (September, 2016): 555-82.
“‘But to know it as we should do’: Enthusiasm, Historicizing of the Charismata, and Cessationism in Enlightenment England,” in The Spirit, the Affections, and the Christian Tradition, eds., Amos Yong and Dale Coulter. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016, pp. 231-57.
“The Platonic Captivity of Primitive Christianity and the Enlightening of Augustine,” in God in the Enlightenment, eds. William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 136-56.
“Herbert, Edward (Lord of Cherbury),” and “King James I and VI,” “William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury,” in Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (Berlin: Water de Gruyter, 2009-16). Vol. 11, pp. 830-31, and Vol. 16, pp. tbd.
“An Asian-American Renewal Historical Theologian’s Response to the Duke African- American Nouvelle Théologie of Race,” in Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 36 (2014): 386-96.
“Corinth, Calvin and Calcutta: Trinity, Trafficking and Transformation of Theologia,” in Ex Auditu: An International Journal of Theological Interpretation of Scripture, ed., Klyne Snodgrass vol. 30 (2014): 117-31.
“Hypothetical Universalism and Real Calvinism in Seventeenth-century England,” Reformation 13 (2009): 193-204.
“Introduction,” (with John Coffey) and “Puritans and the Church of England: Historiography and Ecclesiology,” in Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, eds. John Coffey and Paul Lim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 1-18, 223-40.
“Adiaphora, Ecclesiology and Reformation: John Owen’s Theology of Religious Toleration in Context,” in Persecution and Pluralism: Calvinists and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe 1550-1700, eds. Richard Bonney and D.J.B. Trim. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006, pp. 243-72.
“John Bunyan,” “John of the Cross,” “Cyril of Jerusalem,” “Bartolomé de Las Casas,” “Abraham Kuyper,” “William Laud,” “Moïse Amyraut,” in Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, ed. Daniel Patte. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, s.v.
“The Reformed Pastor of Richard Baxter,” in Devoted Life: An Invitation to Puritan Classics, ed. Randall Gleason and Kelly Kapic. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004, pp. 224-43.
“Henry Bartlett,” “Samuel Wells,” “Benjamin Woodbridge,” “John Woodbrige,” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, s.v.
“Richard Baxter,” in The Dictionary of Historical Theology, ed. Trevor Hart. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000, s.v.
