It is difficult to believe that the first of the Theology on the Web sites – BiblicalStudies.org.uk – was launched in 2001. Over the coming months I will be posting some of what I consider the highlights of this 25 year journey, which has seen the websites grow from one to eight, providing millions of visitors each year with free access to what has become acknowledged by many to be a world-class theological library.
During my time at Bible College in the early 1990s I have greatly appreciated the writings of Professor F.F. Bruce. His influence on British Evangelicalism in the 20th Century was enormous – especially for his role in the establishment of Tyndale House in Cambridge. I remember being told by my lecturers that the only evangelical authors that were quotable at that time in Cambridge University papers were F.F. Bruce and Donald J. Wiseman. Despite not having a Ph.D. himself, Bruce was responsible for training over 50 scholars who went on to form the backbone of theology departments with the UK and beyond. These include:
Given the significance of F.F. Bruce and the enduring influence of his writings I was very surprised when started to digitise and upload theological articles to BiblicalStudies.org.uk that no-one else was uploading F.F. Bruce’s works. In around 2006 I was able to make contact with F.F. Bruce’s daughter via Prof. Alan R. Millard of Liverpool University. This enabled me to start to track down the copyright owners of the many hundreds of articles that Bruce had written through his long academic career. By 2016 I had uploaded around 250. In that year I was delighted to receive an email from book publishers Larry Stone and Robert Hicks, who had just formed F.F. Copyright International with the intention of guaranteeing the ongoing availability of Bruce’s works. Since then, we have worked together to achieve that end.
F.F. Bruce was, in the words of J.I. Packer, “blessed with a stellar memory, superb academic instincts, energy and versatility of mind, an easy, limpid fluency on paper, and a huge capacity for work. He wrote more than forty books . . . plus nearly two thousand articles and reviews.”
But he did not toot his own horn. F.F. Bruce was marked by humility. He poured his life into helping and mentoring his students. His legacy was not his concern.
Tim Grass, F.F. Bruce’s biographer, tells the story of a visiting academic who arrived at Bruce’s church one Sunday morning where “he encountered a little man in a boiler suit stoking up the heating system to ready it for the day’s services. He took a bit of convincing before he would believe that the little man was not the janitor but the great scholar whom he had come to see!”
When Robert Hicks, a British book publisher, met Sheila Lukabyo, Professor Bruce’s daughter, he realized that Bruce’s legacy needed to be preserved. And so he and Larry Stone, an American book publisher, created F.F. Bruce Copyright International to celebrate F.F. Bruce. It has published 27 ebooks by Professor Bruce, which are now readily available around the world, created a website (www.ffbruce.com), and promoted Bruce with images of his quotes.
When Robert Hicks met the four daughters of W.E. Vine, he realized that Vine too was a brilliant and godly member of a Brethren assembly – as was Bruce – who did not toot his own horn. Vine was best known for Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words — which was edited by F.F. Bruce – but neither Vine nor his daughters received much remuneration from it. He poured his life into helping and mentoring 600 missionaries through Echoes of Service. F.F. Bruce said, “W.E. Vine shows how great a service can be rendered to the church by well-balanced, all-around scholarship when it is combined with reverent submission to the Word of God and spiritual insight into its meaning.”
And so Hicks and Stone expanded the ministry of F.F. Bruce Copyright International by publishing eleven ebooks by W.E. Vine and promoting his dictionary.
Larry Stone has recently retired; Robert Hicks will continue to preserve and promote the godly and scholarly legacy of F.F. Bruce and W.E. Vine.
The full bibliography, which also includes material that is not currently available online free of charge, can be found here.
F.F Bruce, The Gospel of John. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994. ISBN: 0802808832. pp.433.
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