Paul Chang-Ha Lim, an intellectual historian with particular focus on the consequences of Christian theology, serves as a Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education. Lim 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 in Spring 2023, and a Visiting Professor of Religious History at Yonsei University in Summer 2019. He began his teaching journey as a tutorial fellow for the Faculty of Divinity and Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge (1999-2001).
He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, Th.M. from Princeton Seminary, and B.A. in Economics from Yale University.
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, and has been reviewed by over 20 journals. 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 has taught courses on various topics on religion and theology for over 10 years in maximum security prisons in Nashville, Tennessee, along with teaching at Vanderbilt; delivered lectures at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Duke, Beijing, Seoul, Nagoya, Saigon, Jakarta, St Andrews, Oxford, Cambridge, Rotterdam, and Geneva, among others; served for 7 years as Dean of Crawford House, one of the first-year residential colleges at Vanderbilt; has successfully supervised 5 doctoral dissertations and served on 20+ thesis/dissertation committees at Vanderbilt and beyond.
Lim has served the field as the President of the American Society of Church History in 2017, as the Chair of the Prize Committee in Historical Studies for the American Academy of Religion between 2019-21, and as Chair and a member of the Executive Senate of the Faculty Senate for Vanderbilt University between 2013-16.
Future courses he plans to teach include: (1) C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the Shape of Christian Apocalyptic Imagination; (2) Baseball, Religion, and Politics in American Narratives; (3) Calvin and Hobbes as Cultural Significations; (4) Religion and A.I.: The Machine Breaks
Lim has two current books projects. His current project, Exalting Man, Demoting Christ: The Identity of Jesus in Enlightenment England is under contract with Cambridge University Press, with the publication date of 2027. It traces key debates on the ontology and economy of Jesus, particularly vis-à-vis the steady flow of challenges concerning the deity of Christ and his death as satisfaction for divine justice. 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.
Jesus and Prisons: A Political Theology beyond Bentham and Foucault is the second project. Based on his experience of being a son of a political prisoner in South Korea, and that of engagement of learning-and-teaching at various prison sites in New England and the American South, this project explores the intriguing nexus between orthodox Christianity and its variegated perspectives on prisons, equitable punishment for crimes, and the place for rehabilitation within the system of justice. It will be simultaneously historical, theological, and anthropological in its orientation, and seeks to go beyond the simple binaries of prison and/or death penalty abolition.
Professor Lim welcome inquiries from potential graduate students who are interested in the following areas:
“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.
