https://www.amazon.com/Life-Times-I-C-Herendeen/dp/B0FJZ4ZFY7
I am pleased to endorse this 2025 work authored by my son, Isaac. It would seem that our visits to Swengel, Millmont, and Lewisburg, Pennsylvania piqued his interest some years ago. I had visited those places in connection to Arthur Pink. I knew of Herendeen, but Isaac picked up his story and pursued his own course of research and I must admit I find Herendeen's life to be noteworthy.
The biographical information on Herendeen is pretty sparse but I think my son picked up on what makes figures like Herendeen and Pink so fascinating. It's their context, the times they lived in, and the tremendous changes taking place both in the world and the Church. Both men were born in Victorian times and witnessed the peak of the Industrial Revolution, the huge changes in technology with the telephone, electricity, flight, radio, and the like. Both lived through the world wars and saw the new culture that emerged in their wake. Pink died in 1952, while Herendeen (who was three years older than Pink) lived almost 100 years dying in 1982.
And both lived through a time of tremendous change within the Church. The Church that emerged in the 20th century was a break with history, and yet for many of us who grew up in Fundamentalist, Dispensational, and Evangelical circles, we knew no different and ultimately had to go on something of spiritual pilgrimage to learn the truth and rediscover some older paths.
Many have wrestled with these realities in recent years and have made a shift - with many moving toward Calvinism and the like. Today's there's almost a mass movement away from Evangelicalism. New Calvinism even made it into Time magazine in 2009. How different from the likes of Herendeen and Pink who wrestled with these issues decades ago, at a time when these paths were lonely and resulted in utter alienation from the larger Evangelical and Fundamentalist world.
I am continually fascinated by the story of Herendeen's interactions with Aaron Cowles who ran the original Bible Truth Depot out of Williamsport, Pennsylvania. A native of Western New York, Herendeen met Cowles in Buffalo in 1912 and would eventually take over his tract ministry. Cowles was in his eighties which means he was born in the 1830's or perhaps even 1820's. It's amazing to think that one could have sat and talked with Herendeen in the early 1980's and he would have had memories of his conversations with a man that had lived in what is almost like another world, a man who would have remembered when Andrew Jackson was president, would have known men who remembered the American Revolution and spoken with men who had seen figures like George Washington in the flesh. Cowles would have easily remembered the Mexican-American War and the Civil War as well. These kinds of connections fascinate me in the same way that should I live to be an old man, young people will marvel that I remember clearly speaking with men who fought in World War I and people born in the 19th century - or an age before mobile phones and the Internet.
But I digress. The work in question fleshes out a great deal of Herendeen's biography and I daresay is probably as exhaustive as anything out there written about the man. But the author also spends time on the context - hence 'the life and times'. There are helpful sections that lay out the momentous changes that took place in the Church over the course of the 19th century that help explain the emergence of figures like Herendeen and Pink who both were initially tied in with Fundamentalism, but would both break from that movement and trend in a Reformed and Calvinistic direction.
It's pretty safe to say that if it were not for Herendeen, Arthur Pink would be little known today and even now Pink is far more popular and well known that he was at the time of his death in 1952.
The book chronicles the setting of American Christianity as it emerged into the 20th century and how Herendeen and Pink interacted with it. There is also considerable space given to Pink's seminal 1918 work on The Sovereignty of God which was published by Herendeen to his own hurt. The work and its doctrine alienated both Pink and Herendeen from the larger Fundamentalist community. Herendeen's sales plummeted and to support his family and keep the Bible Truth Depot afloat, he had to resort to selling shoes for a time.
The book also covers Herendeen's 1918 arrest in connection with anti-war publications. The Bible Truth Depot (which by then was located in Swengel) was raided by federal officers who confiscated the inventory. Herendeen was put on trial for sedition but ultimately the case was suspended - I'm still not sure if it was a suspended trial (functionally a dismissal) or a suspended sentence in light of a guilty plea. Regardless he did not serve jail time and yet his correspondence with Pink (who also supported the notion of conscientious objection) reveals he remained wary. Eventually (and sadly it must be said), he would shift views. Presumably he either re-examined his stand or perhaps was (as so many other Fundamentalists) profoundly shaken by the Russian Revolution and Red Scare of the 1920's. Many a Fundamentalist abandoned their non-participationism and separatism and would become super-patriots by the time the US became involved in World War II and the Cold War. It's a chapter of American Church history that has been largely forgotten - or more likely swept under the rug.
Herendeen would move his family and operation to Cleveland, Ohio in the 1920's but the stock market crash of 1929 would force him to relocate back to Swengel and a return to life in rural Pennsylvania. He would remain in the area for the remainder of his life and yet he also he seemed to know other publishers and obviously traveled a bit up and down the East Coast. Swengel is pretty out of the way even today, but Herendeen managed to continue moving in larger circles.
Having alienated the Dispensationalist-dominated Fundamentalist movement by his embrace of Calvinism, Herendeen was forced to carve out a somewhat unique niche. A case can also be made for his critical role in the formation of 20th century Reformed Baptist Christianity in America. There of course had been what we might call Reformed Baptists before this - one thinks of Spurgeon, Gill, and others. But in the American context by the turn of the 20th century, there was no movement of Calvinistic Baptists to speak of in the United States. Herendeen's publications along with Arthur Pink helped to birth this new movement. Later Herendeen also played a role in mentoring and influencing the Reisinger brothers (John and Ernie). John would become a central figure in the formation of New Covenant Theology, while Ernie became one of the early and leading figures in Reformed Baptist circles. He would also play an important role in the Southern Baptist Church's Founder's Movement as well as the decision by the UK's Banner of Truth Trust to open an office in Carlisle, Pennsylvania - which recently moved to a new location in the industrial area on the edge of town. Carlisle is 70 miles south of Lewisburg, which is the nearest town of any size to Swengel and where Herendeen attended church.
The Bible Truth Depot came to something of a sad end. Herendeen retired (at age 74) and the Depot was taken over by Donald Reiner in 1957. Reiner would only outlive Herendeen a few years dying in 1986 at the age of 69. Apparently at that point in time there was no one on hand to take over. As such Reiner Publications (as the Depot became known) came to end, its inventory being sold to Kregel Publications in Grand Rapids a few years later.
Today, there's nothing left in Swengel to testify to the decades of the Bible Truth Depot and its impact apart from the graveyard where Herendeen and his family (along with Reiner) are buried. I also find it interesting that Herendeen's youngest daughter (Mary) who just died in 2024 at the age of 100 is also buried there. Reiner's widow (Dorothy) would live to 95, dying in 2020 and is also buried in the Old Cedar Cemetery. Millmont (where Arthur Pink lived for a time in the 1920's) is just down the road and the already mentioned quaint old town of Lewisburg (home to Bucknell University) is but sixteen miles away. It's a few hours from us, but whenever we're passing nearby we like to stop and walk around the town.
The Reformed Baptist congregation there (which is now in a different part of town) contains some older members who still remember Herendeen. It's also noteworthy that in Mifflinburg, another nearby small town located between Swengel and Lewisburg there is now an Orthodox Presbyterian congregation as well.
The book ends with some samples of Herendeen's writing and some reflections. At just over 200 pages, the book is very accessible and I think fills an important gap in a small and neglected part of American Church history. The Reformed Baptist movement has grown considerably in recent decades and now overlaps with the New Calvinist movement that has emerged over the past twenty-five years or so.
Herendeen remains almost unknown and yet many who have been blessed by Pink's Studies in the Scriptures or some of his other writings would benefit from the larger story of IC Herendeen, his life and times.
See also:
https://proto-protestantism.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-testimony-of-ic-herendeen-and-world.html