Columbia Theological Seminary Bulletin, 58, number 5, December 1965

FACULTY ISSUE

Columbia Theological Seminary

Bulletin

For interested college men and women

CHURCH VOCATIONS WEEK-END
January 28-30, 1966

an opportunity to think together about the nature of Christian ministry and
to see the place of the seminary in preparation for service in the Church.

for information write to:

Mr. Robert Catlin, Columbia Seminary, Decatur, Ga. 30031

COLUMBIA THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY BULLETIN
Volume LVIII December, 1965 No. 5

Published five times a year by Columbia Theological Seminary, Box 291,
Decatur, Georgia 30031. Entered as second-class matter, May 9, 1928, at the
Post Office at Decatur, Ga., under the Act of Congress of August 24, 1912.
Second-class postage paid at Decatur, Georgia.

CONTENTS

Page
FOREWORD By J. McDowell Richards 3

ARTICLES

"Bethlehem of Judaea: A Christmas Meditation" 4

... By Ludwig R. Dewitz

"The Creative Task of Theology" 6

... By Philip E. Hughes

"The Vacuum of Unbelief" 20

... By Stuart B. Babbage

REVIEWS

William Pierce Randel The Ku Klux Klan 25

. . . By J. McDowell Richards
D. F. S. Thomson (tr.) Erasmus and Cambridge: 25

The Cambridge Letters of Erasmus
Margaret Mann Phillips The 'Adages' of Erasmus: 25

A Study with Translations
Craig R. Thompson (tr.) The Colloquies of Erasmus 26

... By Stuart B. Babbage
Paul T. Fuhrmann Extraordinary Christianity 27

... By Ronald S. Wallace
Gerhard Kittel (ed.) 28

Theological Dictionary of the New Testament: Volume II

... By Philip E. Hughes
George F. Thomas Religious Philosophies of the West 28

... By Philip E. Hughes
Keith R. Bridston and Dwight W. Culver Pre-Seminary Education 29

... By Charles B. Cousar
James T. Cleland Preaching to be Understood 30

... By Wade P. Huie, Jr.
J. Gordon Chamberlin Freedom and Faith: 30

New Approaches to Christian Education
Kendig Brukeher Cully The Search for a Christian 31

Education Since 1940
David J. Ernsberger Education for Renewal 3 1

Robert J. Havighurst The Educational Mission of the Church 31

Johannes Hofinger, S. J. and Theodore C. Stone (ed.) 31

Pastoral Cathechetics

Robert W. Lynn Protestant Strategics in Education 3 1

Jan A. Muirhead Education in the New Testament 3 1

Massey H. Shepherd, Jr. Liturgy and Education 3 1

Gerald H. Slusser The Local Church in Transition: 31

Theology, Education and Ministry
Charles R. Stinnette, Jr. Learning In Theological Perspective 31

... By Neely Dixon McCarter
Heinrich Ott Theology and Preaching 33

... By Wade P. Huie, Jr.
Ralph Moellering Christian Conscience and Negro Emancipation 34

... By Hubert V. Taylor
Erwin Panofsky Tomb Sculpture: Its Changing Aspects 35

from Ancient Egypt to Bernini

... By Stuart B. Babbage
Joachim Jeremias The Central Message of the New Testament 36

... By William C. Robinson
Eugene R. Fairweather (ed.) The Oxford Movement 37

... By Philip E. Hughes

Page
Albert N. Wells Pascal's Recovery of Man's Wholeness 37

... By Paul T. Fuhrmann
Jean-Paul Sartre The Words 38

... By Neely Dixon McCarter
Clyde L. Manschreck (tr. & ed.) Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine: 39

Loci Communes 1555

... By Ronald S. Wallace
William A. Clebsch England's Earliest Protestant, 1520-1535 40

... By Philip E. Hughes

Eugene Kevane Augustine the Educator 42

... By Neely Dixon McCarter
Paul H. D. Lang Ceremony and Celebration 44

... By Hubert V. Taylor
Surjit Singh Communism, Christianity, Democracy 44

... By Harold B. Prince
R. E. Clements Prophecy and Covenant 45

... By Ludwig R. Dewitz
W. D. Davies The Setting of the Sermon on The Mount 46

... By Charles B. Cousar
Leon Morris The Cross in the New Testament Al

... By William C. Robinson
Dewey M. Beegle God's Word Into English 48

... By Dean G. McKee
Ronald S. Wallace The Ten Commandments 48

... By Harry A. Fifield
Christopher Hill Society And Puritanism in P re-Revolutionary England 49
Christopher Hill Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution 49

... By Stuart B. B abb age
Friedrich Kalb Theology of Worship in 17th Century Lutheranism 50

... By Hubert V. Taylor

Herbert M. Waddams Life and Fire of Love 51

... By James H. Gailey, Jr.
Jack Finegan Handbook of Biblical Chronology 52

... By Ludwig R. Dewitz
Donald J. Bruggink and Carl H. Droppers Christ and Architecture 53

... By Mrs. James H. Gailey, Jr.
John Bishop Nero: The Man and the Legend 53

... By Stuart B. B abb age
Donald Macleod Presbyterian Worship 54

... By Hubert V. Taylor
R. E. O. White Open Letter to Evangelicals 55

... By Manford G. Gutzke

John B. Cobb, Jr. A Christian Natural Theology 55

... By Neely Dixon McCarter

Cecil Northcutt Hymns in Christian Worship 56

... By Hubert V. Taylor
J. V. Langmead Casserley Toward A Theology of History 57

... By Olof H. Lyon

V. H. H. Green Religion at Oxford and Cambridge 57

... By Stuart B. B abb age

Jesse Jai McNeil Mission in Metropolis 58

... By Cecil A. Thompson

Daniel Cappon Toward an Understanding of Homosexuality 58

... By Robert L. Faulkner

SHORTER NOTICES 60

POEMS

Shannon Cumming Brief Thoughts from Briefer Moments IBC

Only by Thy Love

FOREWORD

This issue of the Columbia Theological Seminary Bulletin is
expected to reach the hands of its readers at the Advent Season.
It is appropriate, therefore, that it should open with a Christmas
Meditation. The treatment of Bethlehem of Judaea by Ludwig
R. Dewitz suggests several lines of thought which should be
provocative and helpful.

In his article on The Creative Task of Theology, Philip E.
Hughes lays an emphasis on the centrality for Christian thought
of both the Living and the Written Word of God which is also
appropriate to the Season. In presenting the Reformed position
with reference to Scripture as the source of the revealed truths
with which the Christian theologian must work, the author clearly
suggests the fact that we have not begun to exhaust those truths.
but that our age is also challenged to creative study and thought
upon the basis of God's Revelation to man.

Stuart B. Babbage contributes a modern application of our
Lord's Parable of the Empty House which further emphasizes
the need of our day for a positive presentation of the Christian
Faith.

Two brief but moving poems have been contributed for this
bulletin by Miss Shannon Cumming, a member of last year's
student body who is now under appointment as a missionary of
the Presbyterian Church, U. S. to the Congo.

In accordance with our policy, a wide variety of new books
is the subject of reviews by various members of the Faculty.

J. McDowell Richards

BETHLEHEM OF JUDAEA

Ludwig R. Dewitz
A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION

Long before Mary and Joseph made their journey to their ancestral home
in Bethlehem Ephratah, another famous pair whose names have never been
forgotten were approaching the city from the direction of Bethel. It was
obvious that Rachel could not continue to reach the city proper for the time
had come that she must give birth to a son. She is afraid that death will
prevail over life as the pain of bringing her child to birth seems so agoniz-
ing. Into the darkness of her despair there comes the comforting message of
the midewife: "Fear not; thou shalt have this son also." It is, however, at
the sacrifice of her own life that her son is born. "Call him Ben-oni, son
of my sorrow," she urges Jacob with her dying breath, but the father follows
a different inspiration as he gives his son the name Benjamin, "Son of the
right hand," a term that speaks of strength and not of weakness, of a power
that upholds rather than a life that succumbs.

Is it not strange that of all the sons of Jacob it is only Benjamin, born
in the fields of Bethlehem, whose coming into the world is told in greater
detail? As far as his brothers are concerned, only their names and parentage
are given, but in the case of Benjamin the place of his birth and the circum-
stances surrounding it are mentioned. Is it mere fancy, an unwarranted read-
ing of the text, when we seem to hear the first harmonies of Christmas music
in the sound of the narrative, when we think we can see some rays of the
light that shone so brightly on Christmas night as the scene is opened up to
us by the writer of Genesis?

Bethlehem is brought to our notice in connection with the birth of a
child; there is a strange mingling of sorrow and joy, of life and death, of
fear and hope that we meet again so many years later when we witness the
birth of Jesus: the mother's joy and the sword that would pierce her heart,
the shepherds' fear and the angel's "Fear not," the darkness of the night and
the heavenly light, the threat to the child's life and its increase in wisdom and
stature. How beautiful the design of Christmas in its historical delineation!

Years passed, and the people of Bethlehem shared in the joys of harvest
time as well as in the sorrows of famine. Once the hunger was so terrible
that whole families left the town to seek sustenance elsewhere. People still
remembered the time when Elimelech and his wife Naomi had gone to
Moab; ten years had passed since those days of want, and things had changed
for the better. Then the day came when Bethlehem was stirred by the news
that Naomi had actually returned. Those years had taken their toll; no won-
der that she told her former friends not to call her Naomi any more but
Mara, seeing that "the Almighty had dealt very bitterly with her." What a
comfort it was to her to have Ruth, her daughter-in-law, at her side!

Bethlehem, as the scholars remind us, might have been originally the
place where the god Lachmu was worshipped; at any rate, to the Hebrews
the sound of the word spoke of nourishment, "the house of bread," and how
true this was in the case of Naomi and Ruth. It was at the time of harvest
that their circumstances changed, not only in regard to physical want, but

Ludwig R. Dewitz is Professor of Old Testament Language, Literature and
Exegesis.

4

more so respecting their deeper needs for fellowship and life's fulfillment.
Again it is the fact of the birth of a son that forms the climax in the dramatic
development of the story of Ruth. "May you prosper in Ephrathah and be
renowned in Bethlehem," that is the common sentiment as the people of the
town greet Boaz and Ruth at their marriage. Little did the parents realize
then that not many generations hence Israel's greatest king, the renowned
David, would be born as one of their descendants in Bethlehem.

If we find in the Bethlehem story of the Book of Ruth an atmosphere
that is reminiscent of the earlier episode recorded in the Book of Genesis,
and thus suggestive of the tidings of Christmas, it is apparent that in the
story of Ruth a new note is added by the fact that a stranger to the common-
wealth of Israel is joined to God's chosen people by what took place at
Bethlehem. Many years later the light of a star was to guide wise men from
the east to the city of David that there they might worship Him Who was
to be not only Israel's glory, but also "a light to lighten the Gentiles."

When we turn next to the chronicle of Bethlehem, we are still a long
way from Christmas as far as time is concerned, but in spirit we are very
close to the great event. Samuel has gone out to Bethlehem to anoint Israel's
King David in the very place where one day The Anointed of the Lord would
enter into this world's history that we might henceforth be able to celebrate
Christmas proclaiming, as the word indicates, that The Anointed One has
been sent! The very words with which the visit of Samuel to the house of
Jesse closes seem to herald the event of the incarnation: "Then Samuel took
the horn of oil, and anointed him in the midst of his brethren: and the spirit
of the Lord came upon David from that day forward" (I Sam. 16:13).

Apart from the scene of anointing, Bethlehem looms large once more in
the life of David. It is war time, and desperately athirst David longs for some
of the water from the well of Bethlehem. Three of his valiant friends risk
their lives in order to obtain the precious draught of refreshing water for
their captain; to their surprise, David pours the water on the ground refusing
to drink. Significantly the Chronicler says: "David would not drink of it,
but poured it out to the Lord" (I Chr. 11:18).

Does not Christmas tell us of the great "kenosis," the "emptying," when
"the word was made flesh and dwelt among us," when divine glory was re-
vealed in condescending goodness, not ashamed to call us brethren! Out-
wardly there is little resemblance in the picture of Christmas and the scene
of David's pouring out of the water from the well of Bethlehem, but the
principle of sacrifice working a deep and lasting union is exemplified in both.

In the poetry of the Psalms reference to Bethlehem is made only in
passing. In the 132nd Psalm, which is a record of David's concern for the
ark of the Lord, his desire to have a fitting place to bring the presence of
God to the consciousness of his people, we read: "I will not give sleep to
mine eyes, or slumber to mine eyelids, until I find out a place for the Lord, an
habitation for the mighty God of Jacob. Lo, we heard of it at Ephratah: we
found it in the fields of the wood" (Ps. 132:4-6). It would strain the rules
of sound scriptural exegesis to see in these verses a prophecy of Christmas,
but might we not take the mere suggestion of Bethlehem in its relationship
to David's concern for a place where God's presence might be located as a
thought that well fits the context of the Christmas story? It is not at a specific
geographical place that has any special sacredness attached to it that God

is pleased to dwell, but it is in the Christ Who was born at Bethlehem that
"all the fulness of the Godhead dwells bodily" (Col. 2:9).

The final significance of Bethlehem is impressed on the people of the
Old Covenant by the prophet Micah when he declares in a truly inspired and
inspiring message: "But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little
among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto
me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old,
from everlasting" (Micah 5:2). In the Old Covenant there is the promise of
the New Covenant, the breach shall be healed, for sinners there shall be a
Saviour, for the helpless, redemption, for those used to bad news and much
sadness "good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people, for unto you
is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord."
Thus Bethlehem is a story of promise and fulfillment.

THE CREATIVE TASK OF THEOLOGY

Philip E. Hughes

Creativity, properly speaking, is the faculty or process of making some-
thing out of nothing. Given this definition, the cynic might be tempted to
observe that the overwhelming flood of elucubrations that now pour forth
from the religious publishing houses indicates that there is an astonishing
number of theological technicians with a facility for fabricating intricate
patterns out of nonexistent or insubstantial premises. Inventiveness, however,
rather than creativity, is the category to which industry of this kind belongs.
Its exponents seem intent on producing or reproducing nothing old: for
them whatever is not new is dismissed as archaic and irrelevant. At the
other end of the spectrum are those who seem intent on producing nothing
new: for them, whatever is not old is suspect and threatening. They deal in
prefabricated blocks of theological concrete. Creativity is not for them. But
there is a mean between these two extremes, for we have it on good authority
that the theologian who is well instructed in the kingdom of heaven is "like
a householder who can produce from his store both the new and the old"
(Matt. 13:52).

Both the new and the old: this is the framework of theology that is truly
creative. But it is important that we should understand clearly what we
mean by creativity in this connection. To produce half a hundred massive
volumes of divinity is in itself not necessarily creative, except (almost cer-
tainly) of fatigue and boredom. Nor is the most brilliant human theorizing
in the ultimate issue creative. The creative function, in its absolute sense,
belongs to God, not to man. God alone is the Creator of all that exists. "By
faith we understand that the world was created by the Word of God" (Heb.
11:3). This is the first of the old things that the wise theologian brings out
from his storehouse. Man himself is God's creature, and he is this before he

Phillip E. Hughes is Guest Professor of New Testament Language. Literature
and Exegesis. This Honors' Day address, which was delivered in the Columbia
Presbyterian Church, Decatur, Georgia, will shortly appear in a symposium en-
titled, "Creative Minds in Contemporary Theology" (Eerdmans).

can even begin to think about being in any sense creative himself. It follows
that if we are to speak about creativity in relation to man and his powers
the term can be used only in a secondary or derivative sense. Indeed, the
creative faculty, which is one of the glories of man, is a significant aspect
of the image of God in which man has been made.

The Creator's mandate to man to "subdue" the earth and to "have do-
minion" over the created order is in itself essentially creative (Gen. 1:28).
It is an invitation to man to realize and bring to expression the creative
potentialities that reside within him. Man alone of all God's creatures has
the power to think, to discuss, to plan, to explore and harness the limitless
forces of nature, to adapt, to build, to civilize in short, to be a cultural
being. He has been given the logical capacity to investigate, systematically
and scientifically, the logic of the universe, which itself is the imprint of the
logic of the Divine Mind. It is the basic rationality of things which not only
explains the fact that the world is a cosmos and a universe, that is, an ordered
whole, but also alone makes possible the function of the scientist and the
philosopher, so that, as one fact or truth leads on to another, man the thinker
can penetrate ever more deeply and creatively into the logical structure of
the world to which he belongs. But the exercise of the faculty of creativity,
if it is to be consistently meaningful and progressive, must be fulfilled by
man in constant recognition of his own creatureliness: in other words, in
acknowledgment that as a finite creature he has capacities that are limited,
that he is ever dependent on and indebted to his Creator for all that he is
and has, and therefore that in all that he does his ambition should be to
glorify and be grateful to God. Man is not God. He does not and cannot
work from nothing. He works from the fundamental datum of an ordered
universe which is stamped with the logic and the goodness of the divine
character.

But there is a second "old" thing which the wise theologian brings out
of his storehouse, and that is the lamentable fact that man is a fallen crea-
ture. With incredible folly he has allowed himself to be drawn by an enemy
into rebellion against his beneficent Creator, in the empty expectation that
by doing so, by asserting his own self-adequacy, he will become as God. But
man can never cease to be what he essentially is, a creature (and all that
implies), any more than the Creator can cease to be what He essentially is,
God. How could man's willful attempt to overturn the true order of things
have any effect other than to bring a curse on the expression of his crea-
tivity? By his self-esteem and self-inversion he has introduced a dark shadow
of chaos into the universe. The nemesis of frustration dogs his steps. There
is evil mixed with the good of even his highest achievements. The perversion
of society, which is the rotten core of every civilization, is the bitter harvest
of human sinfulness. Despite all the remarkable cultural, scientific, and
philanthropic advances of the centuries, man shows a malign propensity
(which certainly has not decreased with the increase of knowledge) to em-
ploy his great faculties neither to the glory of God nor for the benefit of
his fellow men, but for the creation of falsehood and hatred and injustice
and destruction. The advance of technology has not been matched by an
advance of morality and magnanimity.

By persuading himself, against all reason, that the image of God is the
same thing as the being of God, that the reflection or imprint is identical
with the reality, or, to put it in more recent language, that God is the ultimate

depth of all his being, man seeks to destroy the "image" with its implications
of dependence and creatureliness and shuts his eyes to the inescapable truth,
so emphatically expounded by Christ, that it is precisely from the depths of
his fallen nature that all the things which defile him proceed (Mark 7:21).
Unable, however, to gainsay the defilement of society (of which he is part)
by greed, lust, lying, and violence, he attempts to cover over his guilt by
blaming forces over which he has no control heredity, environment, sick-
ness, mental black-out and pleads for consolation, not punishment. This,
of course, is an appalling abnegation of the proper dignity of man. It warns
us that the suppression of the image of God, in which man's true dignity
resides, so far from exalting man to God-like heights, plunges him into an
abyss of human futility. He is conscious of the amazing creative faculties
within himself; yet, instead of using them consistently and purposefully and
with gratitude to the glory of God, whose image he bears, he finds himself,
through his own folly, increasingly in the grip of frustration and meaningless-
ness. How could it be otherwise when the true order of things, which alone
can give coherence and meaning to existence, is met with denial and rebellion?

This predicament of man is, of course, the setting for the Gospel. Re-
demption is essential if man is to be made whole once again. And the Good
News is precisely this: that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to
Himself" (II Cor. 5:19); that through Christ's offering of Himself in man's
stead the work of atonement has been achieved, so that the new man in
Christ Jesus is one in whom the divine image is renewed, his dignity restored,
and his personality reintegrated. Now at last such a man begins to live crea-
tively and purposefully to the glory of God and the benefit of his fellow
men. And this stupendous truth that, thanks entirely to the divine initia-
tive on man's behalf, the grace and mercy and power of God are freely
available is the third "old" thing that the wise theologian brings out of
his storehouse. It is a datum, a constant, ever true and ever relevant.

"Know thyself" was the Socratic principle of wisdom; but Socrates' in-
terpretation of this principle was vitiated by the dualistic concept of the world
which governed his thought. The dilemma he faced could be surmounted
only by the abandonment of the true humanity of man, by tearing man
asunder in an irreconcilable dichotomy of soul and body. The Christian
understanding of man alone enables him to know himself in a manner which
is free from the crippling conflicts of a dualistic world-view. While it is true
that, inasmuch as he is a creature, man cannot have that completeness of
knowledge which belongs to the Creator, yet the man-in-Christ has a knowl-
edge of himself which is true and coherent, and indeed he looks forward to
the consummation of his redemption when he will know even as he is known
(I Cor. 13: 12). And to know oneself truly is also to know oneself creatively,
because it is to know oneself as constituted in the image of God, which, for
the believer, is reintegrated in Christ. The man-in-Christ is set free to live
in joyful creativity to the glory of God. Furthermore, as the whole man is
redeemed by Christ, body as well as soul, so this applies to man's being in
its entirety, in every one of his activities and relationships. In no sphere,
surely, does it apply more obviously than in the sphere of theology.

The proper task of theology, then, is a creative task. But the theologian
does not fashion his system out of thin air. Just as the scientist works with
and from the given substance of the cosmos, and just as the sculptor shapes
his forms from a given substance such as marble, so the theologian has a

8

given "substance" with which to work. This "substance" is the Word of God.
The Word of God is indeed the creative force of the universe. The world
itself is the effect of that dynamic word (cf. Heb. 11:3 already cited) and
vibrates with its creative potentialities. Nor is the substance of the cosmos a
mere static mass. The basis of all matter, as we know today, is energy. In
every minute particle there is an unimaginable potential of dynamic force.
In every structure, small and great, there is an amazing logic. The more we
learn about our universe, the more conscious we become of how little we
really know of the wonders of its structure and operation. Despite the spec-
tacular advances of our day and the preceding centuries of intensive research,
thinkers, scientists, and artists are aware that they have advanced but a short
distance into the vast ocean of creativity that lies before them. The increase
of man's horizon of knowledge and perception leads, indeed, not to the di-
minishment but to the expansion of the creative task. In this sense at least it
may be affirmed that ours is an ever-expanding universe.

The scientist does not find that his creative faculties are inhibited by
having to work with the given substance of the world. On the contrary, he
is ever discovering that the treasures and potencies of the cosmos are inex-
haustive and that his task becomes ever more demanding and exciting. So,
too, the creative faculties of the theologian are not inhibited by having to
work with the datum of the Word of God, but are unfailingly stretched and
challenged by the inexhaustible treasures and potencies that belong to it.

But what exactly is this Word of God with and from which the theo-
logian has to work. It is, for all practical purposes, the Word of God written,
that is, the Bible. This by itself is a blunt statement, and open to misunder-
standing. It must not be taken to imply, as some have supposed it to imply,
the supplanting of the authority of the Living Word of God, Jesus Christ
our Lord, by the authority of an inanimate document of paper and print.
The authority of Scripture and the authority of Christ are not in fact in
conflict; for it is precisely the Bible that bears unequivocal testimony to the
supreme Lordship of Christ. The central focus of the scriptural revelation is
the person of Jesus Christ and His redeeming work. Within the framework
of God's dealings in creation, judgment, and redemption with His creatures,
man is placed in his world in the perspective of eternity. The Bible, indeed,
in that it conveys the knowledge of God's saving deeds in Christ, plays an
integral role in the divine purpose of redemption. The treasures creatively
quarried from Holy Scripture are not the treasures of an inanimate object
but the riches of Him who is the living Lord. The Written Word ever points
us to the Living Word "in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and
knowledge" (Col. 2:3).

The authority of the Bible, moreover, rests on the fact that it bears the
imprimatur of Christ our supreme authority. So plainly is this the case, that
there can be no question of the authority of Christ being dependent on the
word of the Bible: it is in fact the authority of the Bible which is dependent
on the word of Christ. And this is true not only of the authority of the Old
Testament. The crucial factor is certainly the authority of the New Testa-
ment, for the authority of the Old Testament, seen in the Christian perspec-
tive of fulfillment and consummation, stands or falls with the authority of
the New Testament. How, then, is the authority of the New Testament to
be established? The answer, already indicated, must be: only by the su-

premely authoritative word of Christ. And this particular word has been
preserved for us in the pages of the New Testament itself.

St. John tells us how, during those sacred hours in the upper room prior
to His betrayal and crucifixion, our Lord assured His apostles that after His
departure the Holy Spirit, who is the very Spirit of truth, would not only
be sent, but would actually dwell in them; that He would bear witness to
Christ, and glorify Him, taking the things of Christ and declaring them to
them; and that He would bring to their remembrance all that He had taught
them (John 14: 16f., 26; 15:26; 16:13ff.). This explains the transformation
in the apostles after the day of Pentecost, as seen in the Acts and the Epistles,
compared with what they were before Pentecost, as seen in the Gospels. The
privileged but uncomprehending years at the feet of Christ were not wasted:
what before they had failed to grasp they now understood and expounded
with assurance. Their teaching was not their own; it was Christ's, under the
guidance of the Holy Spirit. It is customary to speak of the doctrine of the
New Testament as apostolical; but it is something more than this, for, in the
true and ultimate analysis, it is dominical: it is the doctrine of the Lord
Himself.

These promises of Christ, then, and their Pentecostal fulfillment con-
stitute the veritable charter of the New Testament. The teachings of its
pages carry the authentic ring of the voice of the Master Himself. Christ
continues to instruct His Church through the writings of His apostles, who
themselves were under the control of the Holy Spirit. This means, inevitably,
that if the Church is to obey the authority of the Living Word it must sub-
mit itself to the authority of the Written Word. This the Church appreciated
from the beginning. Hence the careful sifting out of the spurious from the
genuine apostolic writings. And hence the most significant development in
the history of the post-apostolic Church, namely, the ecumenical acknowl-
edgment of the canon of the New Testament. So far from placing itself above
Scripture, the Church thereby placed itself under Scripture, saying in effect:
This is the rule and standard to which the faith and conduct of the Church
must conform if it is to remain genuinely Christian. The fixing of the canon
was of crucial and abiding importance because it was the acknowledgment
of the dominical authenticity of the New Testament. It was a clear and fully
conscious marking out of the boundary line beyond which the Church was
not to wander. As Oscar Cullmann has written:

The fixing of the Christian canon of Scripture signifies precisely that
the Church herself at a given moment traced a clear and firm line of
demarcation between the period of the apostles and the period of the
Church. . . , in other words, between apostolic tradition and ecclesi-
astical tradition. If this was not the significance of the formation of the
canon the event would be meaningless. By establishing the principle of
a canon, the Church recognized in this very act that from that moment
tradition was no longer a criterion of truth. She drew a line under the
apostolic tradition. She declared implicitly that from that moment every
subsequent tradition must be submitted to the control of the apostolic
tradition. In other terms, she declared: here is the tradition which con-
stituted the Church, which imposed itself on her. 1

1. "Scripture and Tradition," Scottish Journal of Theology, Vol. 6, No. 2,
June 1953, pp. 126f.

10

This being so, it is undoubtedly true, as Emil Brunner has observed,
that the fate of the Bible is the fate of Christianity. Christ sternly
rebuked the traditionalists of His day for rejecting the commandment of
God in order to keep their tradition and thus making void the Word of God
(Mark 7:9ff.). And it has been amply demonstrated in the history of the
Church that when the Bible has been lost from sight, overlaid with the
traditions of men, Christianity has languished and sunk into ineffectiveness;
but when the Bible has been restored to its rightful place then too the Church
has recovered its vitality and authority and sense of purpose.

It cannot be too strongly emphasized, however, that the phenomenon
of Holy Scripture is a mystery. The temptation at all times is to seek, even
with the best of motives, to explain this mystery which can only have the
effect of explaining the mystery away and reducing the phenomenon to a
category where it does not belong. The mystery in this case consists in the
paradox that a book composed of the writings of human authors can yet at
the same time be designated the Word of God. As with every Christian
paradox, the truth lies, and only lies, in the retention and combination of its
two poles. "Explanation" of the paradox solely in terms of one of its poles
is nothing other than rationalization. To dissolve a mystery in this way is
not to solve it. But this is what is constantly being done. Either the Bible is
explained as entirely the work of God, the human writers being no more
than the pens which God used, so to speak, or it is explained as merely the
work of men. In either case the "solution" is neatly parcelled up in accord-
ance with a particular predisposition, and the mystery of the paradox has
been ignored. But nothing has been gained. Indeed, the character of the
phenomenon has been violated and we are now confronted, not with a
dynamic paradox, but with the static either/ or of a contradiction.

It was attempts to explain the mystery of the person of the Incarnate
Son, by stressing either the pole of His divinity or the pole of His humanity,
that gave rise to the heresies which threatened the survival of the early
Church. But the frailty of His body, which was apparent in hunger and
fatigue and above all in His sufferings and death on the cross, was not in
fact a contradiction of His divine sovereignty. Similarly (though, of course,
the analogy does not belong to the realm of ontology) the frailty inherent
in Scripture as the word of man does not invalidate it as being truly at the
same time the Word of God. Like a body, the Bible in its own particular
category of revelation is an organic whole. Every part has its proper place
and function. The removal of a part disturbs the balance and integrity of
the whole. Yet all the parts are not equally important. Just as certain parts
of the human body, such as the head and the heart and the lungs, are vital
and indispensable, whereas other parts are dispensable in the sense that the
body can survive their loss, albeit in a maimed condition; so too some parts
of Scripture are vital and indispensable, while others have a humbler function
and are relatively dispensable.

There is another phenomenon which is familiar to the Christian ex-
perience, namely, that to the eye of unbelief the Bible may be dull and
dry-as-dust, or it may perhaps be of academic and literary interest, but it is
not seen as the dynamic and authoritative Word of God. To the eye of faith,
however, it comes alive. Suddenly, when a man comes to faith in Christ, the
Bible becomes a necessity for him. The book that before he found closed
and remote he now studies with eagerness and delight. The explanation is

11

what the Reformers used to call the internal witness of the Holy Spirit: the
Spirit of God bearing testimony to the Word of God in the believing heart.
The reintegration, in Christ, of the image of God leads at once to a hunger
for the Word of God, a strong desire for a knowledge of the things of God,
which is the knowledge of absolute truth. This is what Paul is talking about
when he says that "no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the
Spirit of God," and that as believers "we have received not the spirit of the
world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might understand the gifts
bestowed on us by God." Indeed, through this inner working of the Holy
Spirit "we have the mind of Christ" (I Cor. 2:1 Iff.). Helmut Thielicke
speaks of this phenomenon in the following terms:

Our deliverance lies in Him who opens our deaf ears and blind eyes that
we may see Him at the vanishing point of every biblical perspective. In
this sense we are always setting out toward someone who has already
overtaken us and from whom we came in the first place. For, as Augus-
tine said, we would not be able to seek Him if He had not already found
us. . . . Therefore if there is to be such a thing as theological knowledge,
an understanding of the Word and the mighty acts of God, then the
analogy to God which men have given up must be restored in a new act
of creation. The divine Word must create its own hearers. (For there are
no longer any hearers who would understand it 'naturally'.) The theo-
logical locus in which this creative function of the Word or if you
will this 'creation of the hearer', is dealt with is the doctrine of the
Holy Spirit. For this doctrine declares that we are called to share in
God's self-knowledge and thus to be put into the proper analogy. The
Holy Spirit, who enlightens us, is none other than God Himself. In Him
and through Him we become partakers of that which God Himself knows
about Himself. For the Spirit (not man's reason, but this Spirit, the Holy
Spirit) 'searches everything, even the depths of God'. 2
Scripture, indeed, belongs to the Holy Spirit. It is He, the Lord and
Life-Giver, who makes real in the hearts of men the redemption procured
by Christ, thereby and at the same time authenticating the genuineness of
the testimony of the biblical authors; for, as the creed declares, He it is
"who spake by the prophets." Should not the creed be a constant reminder
to us that the mystery of Scripture belongs to the realm of faith and there-
fore is accessible only to faith? I question very much whether it is right for
us to propound and defend notions concerning the mechanics of inspiration.
To do so is to transpose, however unintentionally, the Bible from the area of
faith to the area of reason, and in this respect to place it under man instead
of under God. Just at this point, it seems to me, fundamentalists have de-
veloped a somewhat frenetic rationalism of their own and tend, all unwit-
tingly, to conduct their warfare from the same ground as the radicals whom
they oppose. Not, however, that the radicals are models of consistency, for,
though they are avowedly rationalistic in their approach, yet it is their cus-
tom to seek support by quoting passages from the Bible, as though from the
authoritative Word of God, when it suits them to do so.

If the Church has placed itself under Scripture, which, as we have seen,
is the significance of the acceptance of the canon of Scripture, then it must

2. Between Heaven and Earth (New York, 1965), pp. 38, 42.

12

approve and preserve the teaching of the Bible concerning itself. As Her-
mann Sasse has said:

It is the Bible itself which tells me that the Scriptures are written under
the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and are therefore the Word of God.
This and nothing else is taught concerning the Inspiration in the written
Word of God. This, therefore, is the dogma of the Church, to be ac-
cepted by faith, just as we accept the dogma of the Incarnation or any
of the great doctrines confessed in the Creed. We shall never know in
this world how the Virgin Birth of Christ or His bodily resurrection was
possible. So we shall never understand in this life the inscrutable miracle
which is expressed in the words "according to the Scriptures," "who
spake by the prophets." 3
But if, conversely, theologians and others now wish to supplant the teaching
of Scripture with their own ideas and "insights," they must resist the temp-
tation to use the Bible as a prop for their positions.

In academic circles today the Bible is largely a discredited book. To all
intents and purposes biblical studies have become a branch of technology,
so much so that the electronic computer is the latest authority to make a
pronouncement on questions of authenticity and authorship. All too com-
monly Scripture is treated anatomically, like a corpse in pickle to be dis-
sected. It has become the preserve of the expert in the laboratory. Warned
that trespassing is prohibited, the ordinary man is advised that he is not
competent to understand and interpret the meaning of the Bible. No one
will question the necessity for an analytical approach to the text of Scripture
and the immense contribution which contemporary scholarship is making
to our knowledge of the semantics and linguistics of the Bible and its his-
torical provenance. What is to be deplored is the loss of the sense of the
mystery of Holy Scripture as dynamic and God-given, and therefore vital,
and the removal of the Bible from the hands of the ordinary Christian who
can make no claims to theological or technological expertise. As Alan
Richardson has written:

There were losses as well as gains amongst the consequences of what we
may call the new historical control of biblical exegesis. Amongst the
losses must be reckoned the gradual decay of the ordinary Christian's
sense that he can read the Bible for himself without an interpreter and
discover its unambiguous meaning. One factor at least in the decline of
Bible reading on the part of individual Christians must surely be that the
Bible came to be regarded as a book for experts, requiring an elaborate
training in linguistic and historical disciplines before it could be properly
understood; if it needed expert knowledge before it could be read, it was
best to leave the Bible to the experts, like so many other things in a
world of specialization. The layman would be satisfied if, every now and
then, some expert would bring him up to date in the conclusions which
the research workers had reached; he could thus be spared the trouble
of reading the Bible for himself, since he would be unlikely to profit by
his own inexpert flounderings. 4

3. "Concerning the Nature of Inspiration," The Reformed Theological Review
(Australia), Vol. XXIII, No. 2, June 1964, p. 41.

4. "The Rise of Modern Biblical Scholarship," chapter VIII in The Cambridge
History of the Bible: The West, from the Reformation to the Present Day
(Cambridge, 1963), p. 301.

13

This is indeed a grievous loss, and it cannot be viewed with complacency,
for the survival of a whole civilization built on the foundation of Scripture
is at stake. While we agree that "both spiritual insight and historical under-
standing are necessary for the accomplishment of sound biblical exegesis," we
dispute the assertion that "today the modern reader knows that he cannot
understand what Jeremiah or St. Paul is talking about because he does not
know enough about the historical background." 5 Over and over again in
the past, and still today in the present, the experience of any humble man
or woman with the spiritual insight of faith proves that through the pages
of the Bible Jeremiah and St. Paul speak the message of God with power
and meaning to the believing heart. In other words, spiritual insight is es-
sential for the apprehension of the message of Scripture; it does not wait
on the acquisition of historical understanding, much though the latter is to
be prized as an adjunct of the former.

The impression given by Richardson at this point seems, however, to be
corrected later in the same essay when he declares, in words with which we
entirely concur:

... it is of course agreed that the prophetic and apostolic understanding

of the meaning of the events of the biblical history is entirely due to the

revealing action of God. Revelation is a mystery, like all the miraculous

works of God. It is God alone who can open the eyes of faith, whether

of the prophets and apostles of old or of those who read or hear the

biblical message in subsequent generations. 6

The message of Scripture is addressed to everyman, and its focus is the

person and work of Christ, who came into the world to save sinners (I Tim.

1:15). No finer or more memorable explanation has been given of the

purpose of the Bible than that which was given by that great master of Holy

Scripture, William Tyndale: "The Scripture," he wrote, "is that wherewith

God draweth us unto Him. The Scriptures sprang out of God, and flow

unto Christ, and were given to lead us to Christ. Thou must therefore go

along by the Scripture as by a line, until thou come at Christ, which is the

way's end and resting-place." 7

The sum of the situation is this: that biblical scholarship is not an end
in itself; it belongs to the precincts, not to the sanctuary; in isolation, it will
never arrive at the heart of the matter. The scholar should be combined
with the preacher; the study should never be divorced from the pulpit. Thus
Bishop Stephen Neill has said:

The New Testament is concerned with proclamation. It is a Kerygma,
the loud cry of a herald authorized by a king to proclaim his will and
purpose to his subjects. It is Euangelion, good news, sent to those who
are in distress with the promise of deliverance. It is the Word of the
Lord and in the East a word is no mere vibration in the atmosphere,
it is a living power sent forth to accomplish that for which it is sent.
When the New Testament scholar has done his utmost in his sphere, his
work remains lifeless, until it is transformed into the living voice of
proclamation. The scholar may say, as many have done, that this is none
of his business; he will scientifically make known the facts, and it will
be the task of others to do with them as they will. But ... we have seen

5. Loc. cit.

6. Op. cit., p. 333.

7. Works, Vol. I (Parker Society edition, Cambridge, 1848), p. 317.

14

that many of the giants reached out beyond the study to the pulpit, be-
lieving that the two are most intimately linked, and that any truth gained
by the intense application of labour in the study will find its way out in
living proclamation as the Word of God to men. And so, in fact, from
generation to generation, the New Testament has taken on new life, as
the ancient words have asserted their relevance in every changing scene
of human existence, have clothed themselves afresh in human under-
standing, and have come home to the heart and conscience as challenge,
enlightenment and consolation. 8
Mere scholarship, however able and however worthy it may be, is not crea-
tive; seen as a Christian function, it is analytical and subservient. It is in
the proclamation of the scriptural message as the Word of the Living God
that the creative task of theology finds achievement, and that note of procla-
mation should inform the theological tome as well as the pronouncement
from the pulpit.

If faith is an essential ingredient of that spiritual insight which is able
to understand and appropriate the message of the Bible, it is important to
emphasize that faith is not something which exists antecedently or in in-
dependence. Faith cannot exist or be engendered in a vacuum; for faith is
response, and in particular it is response to the message of Scripture. The
object of faith is the Christ to whom Scripture bears witness. To quote Emil
Brunner: "The Bible is the pre-condition of all faith, that which alone
makes it possible. And the whole Bible at that." 9

That is why evangelical proclamation is so indispensable an element in
the fulfillment of the creative task of theology. We need, more than ever,
to be reminded today, as P. T. Forsyth had to remind his generation, that
"the first value of the Bible is not to historical science but to evangelical
faith, not to the historian but to the gospeller," and that the theologian
"should first be not a philosopher but a saved man, with eternal life work-
ing in him." 10 And the following admonition, uttered by the same author,
is still valid and salutary:

The authority of the Bible speaks not to the critical faculty that handles
evidence but to the soul that makes response. The Bible witness of sal-
vation in Christ is felt immediately to have authority by every soul pining
for redemption. It is not so much food for the rationally healthy, but it
is medicine for the sick, and life for the dead. Even historical criticism,
which is a real part of theology, should be pursued on that basis. ... It
is only knowledge with a soul of faith that grasps the full scope of
revelationary history. 11

Since the focal point of the biblical message is the figure of Jesus Christ,
the divine Redeemer of the world, the repudiation of the authenticity of the
biblical witness leads inevitably to the repudiation of the authenticity of
Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord. This was amply demonstrated by the con-
sequences of the destructive criticism which flourished in Germany during
the last century and which today again is being advocated within the Church

8. The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861-1961 (London, 1964), pp.
347f.

9. The Christian Doctrine of the Church, Faith, and the Consummation, Dog-
matics Vol. Ill (London, 1962), p. 249.

10. Postive Preaching and Modern Mind (London, 1907), pp. 13, 305.

11. The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (London, 1909), pp. 178f.

15

on a geographical scale far surpassing that of the nineteenth century. The
radicals of our century and the last have this in common, that they adopt
as a fundamental premise the inadmissibility of the supernatural on the
ground that it is unacceptable to the modern mind. The application of this
principle to Scripture can only result in the banishment of God from His
world and the rejection of such cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith as
the deity and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The radicals of last century
sought to dismiss the authenticity of the New Testament by relegating its
writings to the second century, and thereby assigning them to the category of
spurious fabrications. That, however, it was the scholarship of these radical
critics and their followers which was spurious was proved with devastating
conclusiveness by a theologian of such intellectual repute as George Salmon,
whose learning and judgment caused him to speak with scorn of the critical
speculations and manipulations as

these German dreams retailed as sober truth by sceptical writers in this
country, many of whom imagine that it would be a confession of inability
to keep pace with the progress of critical science if they ventured to test,
by English common sense, the successive schemes by which German
aspirants after fame seek to gain a reputation for their ingenuity. . . ." 12
and by that prince of biblical scholars, Bishop J. B. Lightfoot, who com-
posed his massively erudite work on the Apostolic Fathers with the express
purpose of demonstrating the untenability of the position propounded by
the Tubingen radicals:

To the disciples of Baur [he wrote] the rejection of the Ignatian Epistles
is an absolute necessity of their theological position. The ground would
otherwise be withdrawn from under them, and their reconstructions of
early Christian history would fall in ruins on their heads. On the other
hand, those who adopt the traditional views of the origin of Christianity
and of the history of the Church as substantially correct, may look with
comparative calmness on the result. The loss of the Ignatian Epistles
would be the loss of one buttress to their fabric but the withdrawal would
not materially effect the stability of the fabric itself. ... I have been
reproached by my friends for allowing myself to be diverted from the
more congenial task of commenting on S. Paul's Epistles; but the im-
portance of the position seemed to me to justify the expenditure of much
time and labour in 'repairing a breach' not indeed in 'the House of the
Lord' itself, but in the immediately outlying buildings. 13
Lightfoot's attitude is summarized in the Preface to his Essays on the Work
entitled 'Supernatural Religion,' a crushing rejoinder to an anonymous "scep-
tical writer" of his day, where he says: "I cannot pretend to be indifferent
about the veracity of the records which profess to reveal Him, whom I
believe to be not only the very Truth, but the very Life."

It is this same issue, only in an intensified form, with which the Church
is confronted today. The radicals of our age, however, no longer, for the
most part, seek to depreciate the New Testament writings as forgeries of a
postapostolic period. Their method, rather, is to contend that the portrait of
Jesus and the sayings attributed to him in the New Testament are the prod-

12. A Historical Introduction to the Study of the Books of the New Testament
(London, 1892), p. 15.

13. The Apostolic Fathers, Part II, Vol. I (second edition, London, 1889), pp.
xif., xv.

16

ucts of the imagination or wishful thinking of the early Christian community,
which, in the years following Calvary, gradually built up an idealized picture
of the one who had been their leader and teacher. In the determination of
what portions of the story may be original and authentic, the criteria applied
are arbitrary and subjective in character. The conclusions reached are pre-
determined by the predilections and prejudices of each individual. Novelty
allied with an abstruse kind of linguistic ingenuity or an inventive historical
"reconstruction" is almost always assured of academic applause. The Holy
Spirit has been ushered off the stage and the human spirit dominates the
scene. To the degree in which theology affirms the self-adequacy of man,
or, in other words, denies man's creaturely dependence on God and asserts
the human spirit in opposition to the Holy Spirit to that degree it will
disallow both the nature and the necessity of Holy Scripture as the Word
of, God, and to that degree also it will incapacitate itself for its distinctively
creative task; for, as we have previously explained, the creative task of the-
ology inheres in the capacity of man as, in the first place, created in the
image of God, and now in Christ re-created in that image, to work con-
structively with and from the given "substance" of the revelation of God's
Word. The affirmation of human self -adequacy is but the repetition of the
primeval heresy that man in himself is "as God." Like all heresy, it is not
constructive (though it may wish to be) but subversive of the true nature
and capacity of man, entangling him in a web of contradiction and frustra-
tion of his own making.

The sickness of theology in our modern age is attributable to the in-
creasing extent to which it is becoming infected with the arrogance of human
self-sufficiency. In many academic institutions theology has degenerated into
a department of the humanities. Those who utter a word of protest are
blandly assured that "man has now come of age" though this, in fact, was
precisely the cry of eighteenth-century rationalism! The conclusion we are
invited to draw is that twentieth-century man must be set free from the doc-
trinal and ethical absolutes of Scripture, that to require belief in the super-
natural is an insult to homo sapiens, that the objective otherness of God must
go because God is but a synonym for man's ultimate concern, or, put in
other terms, God is only a way of expressing a human value-judgment, and
that the only legitimate scandal of Christianity is that Jesus Christ was a mere
ordinary mortal man no different from all other human beings. This situation
has elicited the following comment from Paul H. Holmer of Yale Divinity
School:

This complaint about the church's outmoded theology must not be taken
lightly. It creates the conviction that the whole world would like to be-
come Christian if only the theologians would become modern. Of course,
the price is a little high: resurrection, atonement, the virgin birth, the
last judgment, lately God and a few other things must go, but everything
else, and especially the meaning of these, can be kept! This is what hap-
pens when the responsibility is laid unequivocally on the church and the
theologians the only possible way to make Christianity palatable is to
strip everything from it and make its meanings coextensive with what
people will discern for themselves and believe anyway. 14

14. "Contra the New Theologies," The Christian Century, 17 March 1965,
p. 331.

17

In complete contrast to J. A. Froude's venerable father who believed, a
hundred years ago, that "the way to heaven was to turn to the right and
go straight on," the temper of the radical theology of our day is to move in
the diametrically opposite direction. The anguished disillusionment of the
last generation of left-wing liberals has quickly been forgotten, though it was
vividly described by able men who had personally experienced it. Thus
Richard Niebuhr has written:

The romantic conception of the kingdom of God involved no discon-
tinuities, no crises, no tragedies or sacrifices, no loss of all things, no
cross and resurrection. In ethics it reconciled the interests of the indi-
vidual with those of society by means of faith in a natural identity of
interests or in the benevolent, altruistic character of man. In politics and
economics it slurred over national and class divisions, seeing only growth
of unity and ignoring the increase of self-assertion and exploitation. In
religion it reconciled God and man by deifying the latter and humanizing
the former. . . . For an Edwards divine sovereignty had been a hard truth
to which he had slowly learned to adjust his thought and life; for liberal-
ism it was an untruth. It estblished continuity between God and man by
adjusting God to man.

Since no reconciliation to the divine sovereign was necessary the
reign of Christ, in the new interpretation, involved no revolutionary
events in history or the life of individuals. Christ the Redeemer became
Jesus the teacher or the spiritual genius in whom the religious capacities
of mankind were fully developed. Moreover the radical revolution at the
centre of life for which dynamic Protestantism and Evangelicalism had
contended seemed unnecessary to a liberalism which objected not only to
the identification of this revolution with mechanical conversion but also
to the belief that life had been corrupted. The renovation of which it
spoke was not so much the restoration of health to a diseased body as
the clearing out of the accumulated rubbish of traditional beliefs or
customs. Evolution, growth, development, the culture of the religious
life, the nurture of the kindly sentiments, the extension of humanitarian
ideals and the progress of civilization took the place of the Christian
revolution. . . .

A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom with-
out judgment through the ministration of a Christ without a cross. 15
Unbiblical humanism, which denies the sovereignty and the otherness of
God and affirms the adequacy and the centrality of man, is always present
because it is the expression of original sin. And its main threat to the Church
of Christ is from within. (It is far more menacing than the militant human-
istic atheism which assails the Church from without and is so easily recog-
nizable for what it is.) It is no new thing, but is as old as sin itself; and it
is adept at ignoring the lessons of even recent history. In the fifteenth cen-
tury the humanism of the Renaissance panegyrized man as the complete be-
ing, the crown of the cosmos and the key to its understanding, and proudly
declared that the dignity of man was so sublime that, even if he had not
sinned, the Son of God would still have become incarnate in token of man's
supreme excellence. It remained for the Reformation, in the following cen-
tury, by its rediscovery of the Word of God and the message of redemption

15. The Kingdom of God in America (Chicago, 1937), pp. 191ff.

18

by grace alone, to recover the proper dignity and humanity of man and at
the same time enthusiastically to dedicate itself to the creative task of the-
ology. The benefits of that dynamic restitution are still present with us today.
Of particular significance is the development by Herman Dooyeweerd of a
system of Christian philosophy a work of immense erudition con-
structed in loyalty to the principles of the biblical revelation which are also
the principles of Reformed thought. His purpose has been to construct a
philosophy which, being authentically Christian, penetrates to every sphere
of human life and activity. In doing so, however, he has engaged in a tran-
scendental critique of philosophy as a science in its specific manifestations
throughout the centuries and has shown how the only system which is not
incapacitated by insoluble inner contraditions is that which is founded on the
creation-fall-redemption ground-motive of the biblical revelation. Herman
Dooyeweerd has given a notable lead as with singleness of purpose and in-
tellectual integrity he has devoted himself to the creative task of the Christian
thinker.

In the historical perspective, indeed, it is the theology of the Reformation
which has most faithfully applied the scriptural principles relating to both
God and man. With its evangelical emphasis, its reverence for the Word of
God, and its dynamic doctrine of the Holy Spirit, it has helped to restore the
right balance between the supreme honor of God and the dependent dignity
of man; it has demonstrated the creative interrelationship between the grace
of God and the responsibility of man; and it has pointed man to the realiza-
tion of the fullness of his potentialities by the union of both mind and heart,
both intellect and emotion, in the service of his fellow men and to the praise
of Almighty God. On either side of the Reformed tradition, the theological
process may be simplified as a see-saw between the Enlightenment and Ro-
manticism, or between rationalistic and pietistic currents of thought, the
former advocating the supremacy of human reason and the latter the su-
premacy of human feeling or experience. Both movements have this in com-
mon, however, that they are humanistic, in the sense that their approach is
fundamentally anthropocentric, assigning ultimacy either to man's reason or
to his sentiment. 16

The creative task of theology is, first of all, the task of the redeemed
who, through the prior grace of God, have returned to the Father by the
Son, and through the inner working of the Holy Spirit have been put into
tune with the mind of Christ. The creative task of theology must be per-
formed with the given "material" of the Word of God written, from whose
pages the same Holy Spirit causes the truth to beam forth with inexhaustible
wonder and beauty, so that it is always an unfinished task, and always a task
with limitless possibilities ahead. And, finally, the creative task of theology
is related to mankind, indeed to the whole world in which we live. The truth
has to be applied once it is known, and it has to be applied in relevant and
comprehensible terms. This would be impossible if the truth were something
inert and static; for history is not motionless and mankind is not an undiffer-
entiated mass. Just as no two fingerprints are identical, so every single per-
sonality is different and sacrosanct, and every single human situation has a
quality of uniqueness about it. What endless scope there is for creativity

16. A penetrating study, historical and theological, will be found in Karl Barth,
From Rousseau to Ritschl (London. 1959); cf, also A. R. Vidler, The Church
in an Age of Revolution: 1789 to the Present Day (London, 1962).

19

here! The truth is constant; but it is not static: it is dynamic. That is why
the glorious Gospel of Jesus Christ is always old, yet ever new, and must be
proclaimed afresh in every generation with the creative power of God the
Holy Spirit.

THE VACUUM OF UNBELIEF

Stuart B. Babbage

Two cartoons by Sir Max Beerbohm hang in the Library of Fitzwilliam
Hall in Cambridge, England. One cartoon depicts a man, prosperous and
corpulent, who, with proud complacency, is gazing in a mirror at a larger re-
flection of himself. The other, by contrast, depicts a man of diminutive
stature, who, dressed immaculately in evening clothes and with a black crepe
armband, is gazing apprehensively at the horizon, over which there hangs,
like a baleful star, a giant question mark. The first cartoon represents the
smug self-satisfaction of the nineteenth century; the second, the pessimistic
perplexity of the twentieth.

Today, the question mark bears the ominous shape of a mushroom cloud.
In this twentieth century, despite the spectacular achievements of a techno-
logical civilization, we live in imminent danger of nuclear destruction.

In these apocalyptic circumstances we might expect advice and guidance
from the colleges and universities of our land. What is their saving word for
our human situation?

I

Sir Walter Moberley, in a book entitled, The Crisis in the University,
charges that the modern university lives and moves and has its being in a
moral and cultural fog. He writes: "If you want a bomb the chemists' de-
partment will teach you how to make it; if you want a cathedral the depart-
Stuart B. Babbage is Visiting Professor of Practical Apologetics,
ment of architecture will teach you how to built it; if you want a healthy
body the department of physiology and medicine will teach you how to tend
it. But when you ask whether and why you should want bombs or cathedrals
or healthy bodies, the university," he says, "is dumb and silent." "It can help
and give guidance in all things subsidiary but not in the attainment of the
one thing needful." We confine education, he rightly accuses, to the use of
means as opposed to the choice of ends, to training in the handling and
acquisition of tools to the neglect of the purposes for which those tools are
to be used. If students cannot get guidance for action from their teachers
they will seek it, he warns, from less reputable sources. It was thus that,
thirty years ago, the students of Germany fell victims to Hitler. As Professor
R. G. Collingwood points out, they will infer that for guidance in the prob-
lems of life, since one cannot get it from thinkers or from thinking, from
ideals or from principles, one must look to people who are not thinkers (but
fools), to processes that are not thinking (but passion), to aims that are not
ideals (but caprices), and to rules that are not principles (but expediency).

II

Our Lord Jesus Christ told a grim and creepy story about an -empty
house and an undesirable tenant which has an immediate relevance to the

20

situation in which we find ourselves. A house, Jesus related, fell into evil
hands. The owner turned the undesirable tenant out and did the place up
from floor to ceiling. Then he left it, clean but unoccupied. One day the old
tenant passed it again. He had found no suitable alternative home. He saw
the house was empty. He went and peered in at the windows and tried the
doors. Then calling to him a group of still more undesirable friends he forced
his way in and took possession. And soon the house was in a worse state
than ever. 1

That house, Jesus explained, was a human personality. The undesirable
tenant was an evil spirit which a man had cast out of his life. The spirit
came back from wandering restlessly about the desert and found an empty
soul. The man had invited no good angels to tenant his life. So the evil spirit
found seven other devils more evil than himself. "And they enter and dwell
there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first."

Ill

No one can deny that, in this twentieth century, the universities have
been responsible for casting out the devils of ignorance and superstition, the
devils of darkness and error, but what has taken their place? Has the house
been left clean and empty? Is there, in the lives of students today, a moral
and spiritual vacuum?

Within this century we have witnessed the betrayal of the universities.
How do we explain the fact, Sir Walter Moberley asks, that the universities
of Germany, in the days of Hitler, capitulated to doctrines that were morally
monstrous and intellectually despicable? How do we explain the fact that
places dedicated to the pursuit of liberty and freedom surrendered to doc-
trines of racial superiority and Nordic purity? And yet the German univer-
sities in the days before Hitler enjoyed an intellectual prestige second to none.
How do we explain the measure of their betrayal? Was it due to the fact
that the German universities had no independent standards of value of which
they felt themselves to be the guardians? Was this the reason that they lacked
sufficient conviction and tenacity of purpose to stand against the torrential
tide of Nazi tyranny?

Whatever the explanation, it is an incontrovertible fact that, in the day
of trial and testing, it was the Church that stood alone. Albert Einstein
testifies: "I looked to the universities to defend freedom, but the universities
were silenced in a few short weeks . . . Only the Church stood squarely
across the path of Hitler's campaign for the suppression of truth ... I am
forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise."

IV

We are, in America, rightly concerned with driving out and banishing
from the lives of men the devils of prejudice and passion, of ignorance and
darkness, of superstition and error. Have good angels been invited in to take
possession? Or is the house swept and empty?

There are other devils, more deadly than the first, waiting to take
possession.

Marxist Communism is ready to take possession. It is ready to take
possession because there is a spiritual emptiness in the lives of many students
today. "It will be hard indeed," Arnold Toynbee sadly comments, "to refill
the spiritual vacuum which is being hollowed in our western hearts by the
progressive decay of religious belief."

1. Luke 11:24-6.

21

The experience of Freda Utley illustrates the nature of our predicament.
She was a brilliant American student who married a Russian expatriate Jew.
They resolved that they would return together to Russia to serve the Soviet
Fatherland. Her husband disappeared during the paranoic purges of 1937.
She tells us, in her book, Lost Illusion, what moved her to embrace Commu-
nism. It was, she tells us, the consciousness of a spiritual vacuum. She was
looking for a faith to believe and a flag to follow and a song to sing. "The
instinctive desire for religion," she relates, "was the compelling force leading
me, step by step, into the communist trap."

Let me call another witness. Douglas Hyde was for many years Secretary
of the Communist Party in Great Britain. In his autobiography, / Believed,
he explains that Communism was, for him, a substitute religion. It filled the
gap. "Communism," he relates, "has had its origins in precisely that spiritual
vacuum which exists all over what once was Christendom." "One has to be
potentially good or intelligent," he explains, "even to be aware that it is not
enough simply to drift along without sense of purpose or direction, with
neither faith nor ideal. That is why Communism so often claims the best
those who feel the miss. It is why it has spread in our day and no other." "I
would say," he testifies, "that the majority who come to Communism do so
because, in the first instance, they are subconsciously looking for a cause
which will fill the void left by unbelief."

Let me give a further illustration. R. H. Grossman, who is now a member
of Harold Wilson's Labour Cabinet, edited, some years ago, a symposium
entitled, The God That Failed. The contributors relate the factors that led
them to embrace Communism, and the circumstances that eventually led
them to repudiate Communism as a god that failed. Arthur Koestler testifies:
"I served the Communist Party for seven years the length of time Jacob
tended Laban's sheep to win Rachel his daughter. When the time was up,
the bride was led into his dark tent; only the next morning did he discover
that his ardours had been spent not on the lovely Rachel but on the ugly
Leah. I wonder whether he ever recovered from the shock of having slept
with an illusion. I wonder whether afterwards he believed that he had ever
believed in it."

Every revolution, Dean Inge avers, begins by proclaiming that we have
nothing to lose but our chains and ends by binding our feet in fresh fetters
of iron. Communism is no exception. It proclaims that man is born free and
that everywhere he is in chains; it ends by enslaving men in the bitter bond-
age of Animal Farm.

Communists know our moral vulnerability. They know there is a vacuum
left by modern unbelief. They know that the heart of western man is swept
and empty. And they have been ready and eager to take possession.

V

But there are other devils who are also ready to take possession.

Scientific Rationalism is ready to take possession. The recent flight of
the American astronauts is simply a further stage in a spectacular series of
steadily mounting achievements. It is not surprising that, for many, science
is a god opening the door to a vista of limitless advance. John Addington
Symonds, in ecstatic mood, was one of the first to hail the dawn of a new
age:

22

These things shall be! A loftier race
Than e'er the world hath known, shall rise
With flame of freedom in their souls
And light of science in their eyes.

Lewis Mumford concludes his monumental study, Technics and Civilisation,
with the confident declaration: "Nothing is impossible." Sir Richard Gregory,
the editor of the scientific journal, Nature, says:

My grandfather preached the gospel of Christ,
My father preached the gospel of Socialism,
I preach the gospel of Science.

It is at the altar of science that multitudes today bow down and worship.
And the reason is not far to seek. We have all benefited from the solid and
substantial achievements of science, and, in our simple naivety, we are
tempted to believe that there are no problems known to man which cannot
be solved by the simple expedient of better plumbing.

There are some, however, who suspect that science may equally well be
our destroyer. Pierre Curie, the discoverer of radium, had serious doubts
about man's moral maturity. "One may imagine," he warns, "that in criminal
hands radium might become very dangerous, and that we may ask ourselves
if humanity has anything to gain by learning the secrets of nature, if it is
ripe enough to profit by them, or if this knowledge is not harmful."

H. G. Wells, in his younger days, was enthusiastic about The Shape of
Things to Come. With the outbreak of war, he saw, with incredulity and
despair, science being used, not for the beneficient purposes of human wel-
fare, but for purposes of diabolical destruction. He bitterly confessed: "But
quite apart from any bodily depression, the spectacle of evil in the world
the wanton destruction of homes, the ruthless hounding of decent folk into
exile, the bombings of open cities, the cold-blooded massacres and mutila-
tions of children and defenseless gentle folk, the rapes and filthy humilia-
tions and, above all, the return of deliberate and organized torture, mental
torment and fear to a world from which such things had seemed well nigh
banished has come near to breaking my spirit altogether."

After the atomic destruction of Hiroshima, J. R. Oppenheimer, the
American atomic physicist, confessed: "In some crude sense, which no vul-
garity, no humour, no over-statement can quite extinguish, the physicists
have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."

Unhappily not all scientists are willing to acknowledge the inconvenient
fact of human perversity and sin. In his mordant satire, Brave New World,
Aldous Huxley warns us what may happen if the conditioners of the human
personality have their way. Through the awful instrumentality of a perverted
science we may find, he warns, that our last state is worse than the first.

VI

How, then, are we to avoid the seductions of atheistic Communism on
the one hand and scientific rationalism on the other? How are we going to
safeguard the citadels of our personality from sabotage and attack? How are
we going to avoid the corruption of truth and the conquest of evil?

The house, in the parable, was swept and empty. But no good tenant had
taken possession. Are we going to allow the rightful owner to come in and
take possession, or are we going to allow satanic forces to subdue us and

23

destroy us? "Behold," Jesus says, "I stand at the door and knock; if any
one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with
him, and he with me." 2

If the Lord Jesus occupies the citadel of our hearts, the evil spirits of
this present age may peer in at the windows, they may rattle at the doors,
but they will not find an entrance.

2. Revelation 3:20.

24

REVIEWS

THE KU KLUX KLAN: A Century of Infamy.

By William Pierce Randel. (Chilton Books, 1965.) 300 pp. $5.95.

This book should be required reading for all who believe that the Ku
Klux Klan was once a worthy organization, led by noble men, and playing a
necessary part in the reconstruction of Southern states after the Civil War.
On the contrary, the record of the organization almost from the beginning
is pictured here as one of racism, deceit, violence and cruelty. Intimidation,
floggings, and murder were weapons all too freely used by those who were,
or pretended to be, members of the Klan, in their generally successful efforts
to defy Federal authority and to assert the principle of White Supremacy.

It is hard to escape the conviction that this is a one-sided presentation
of history. The author vastly underestimates the magnitude of the problems
which confronted Southerners in the aftermath of perhaps the bloodiest war
in history faced with the necessity for dealing with a race which had been
thrust into the full privileges of citizenship with virtually no preparation for
it. Other competent historians have attested the fact that these problems were
very great, and that Northern leadership was too often vindictive in its atti-
tude toward a conquered people. Nevertheless the facts related in this volume
are too well authenticated to be explained away, and leave one with a sense
of deep dismay that such things could happen here.

Having largely attained its ends, the original Klan practically disappeared
from the scene during the later years of the nineteenth century. The author
of this volume records its revival in the nineteen twenties, its growth to a
membership of nearly 5,000,000, its political activities and successes, and its
later decline until the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court on segregation in
public schools brought its renewal once again. It is his conclusion that the
Klan continues to be a menace in American life and that constant vigilance
is required on the part of those who would oppose the lawlessness and hatred
which it furthers under the guise of patriotism and religion.

While not pleasant reading, the book is a timely one in the light of recent
events in the South, of current growth in Klan membership, and of the in-
vestigation of the organization now being conducted by a committee of our
National Congress.

J. McDowell Richards
President, Columbia Theological
Seminary

ERASMUS AND CAMBRIDGE:

THE CAMBRIDGE LETTERS OF ERASMUS.

Translated by D. F. S. Thomson. Introduction, Commentary and Notes
by H. C. Porter. (University of Toronto Press.) 233 pp. $6.50.

THE 'ADAGES' OF ERASMUS:

A STUDY WITH TRANSLATIONS.

By Margaret Mann Phillips. (Cambridge University Press.) 418 pp.
$9.50.

25

THE COLLOQUIES OF ERASMUS.

Translated by Craig R. Thompson. (The University of Chicago Press.)
662 pp. $15.00.

The Erasmian corpus has been splendidly enriched by the publication
of these notable translations and commentaries. These handsome volumes,
printed by three of the great publishing presses of Canada, England and
America, are an appropriate tribute to one who has been called one of the
first great cosmopolitans. As Trevor-Roper has noted, he was a "cosmopolitan
in an age of awakening nationalism; he was born in Holland, studied in
Paris, found his intellectual home in Oxford, took his doctorate in Savoy,
travelled to Germany and Italy, published his works impartially in Louvain,
Paris, Venice and Basel, and had disciples throughout Europe."

The volume on Erasmus at Cambridge, with its collection of sixty-four
letters, provides a very human portrait. Erasmus reveals something of his
monumental labours: he speaks of editing Jerome and Seneca, of working
on the Greek text of the New Testament with Latin translation, of compos-
ing the 'Adages', of translating Basil, Plutarch and Lucian. But he also tells
us a great deal about himself: his precarious health, his fear of the plague,
the chronic state of his finances, the execrable quality of the Cambridge beer,
and much else besides.

On the one hand, Erasmus was an indefatigible scholar, tirelessly en-
gaged; on the other hand, a valetudinarian, full of querulous complaint.

Dr. Phillips, in an informative introduction to the Adages, describes their
successive revision. In the latter part of the book, he provides a felicitous
translation of Erasmus's more extended Comments. Erasmus put everything
he had into the Adages. His aim was to illuminate the current proverbs of
the day by reference to the literature of the past. Erasmus did not hestitate
to attack current evils: the ignorance of the clergy, the corruption of the
papacy, the iniquity of war. Under a coruscating wit he cunningly disguised
a purpose which was not only educational but polemical.

The Colloquies were prepared, in the first place, as simple exercises for
students studying Latin. Its immediate success led to its progressive expan-
sion and enlargement. In its final form it consists of a series of dialogues on
an extraordinary variety of subjects, both secular and sacred.

Urbane and ironic, the Colloquies are a characteristic expression of the
Renaissance spirit. They reveal a new independence of judgment, a new
spirit of critical inquiry, a new interest in man. They are not anti-religious
but they are iconoclastic. By a disconcerting appeal to the testimony of
Scripture Eramus calls in question the validity of accepted practices and
traditions.

In the Colloquies we have the rich distillation of a highly critical intelli-
gence reflecting on the human scene. That is why the Colloquies have proved
a perennial source of interest and edification. Dr. Thompson has achieved
a herculean task of translation and commentary with grace and distinction.

Stuart Barton Babbage
Visiting Professor of Practical
Apologetics

26

EXTRAORDINARY CHRISTIANITY:

The Life and Thoughts of Alexander Vinet.
By Paul T. Fuhrmann. (Westminister Press.) 125 pp. $3.00.

After reading this book we ask, Why have we hitherto heard so little
about Vinet? In my student years we were taught 19th century theology by
no less an authority than H. R. Mackintosh. But never once did he mention
Vinet. Karl Barth also fails to refer to him in Die Protestantische Theologie.

This has obviously meant injustice and loss. Dr. Fuhrmann has given us
enough in this little book to show that indeed we have here a brilliant and
stimulating thinker, whose contribution to thought has real relevance for
our time.

Vinet is of especial interest to a Scotsman. In both Scotland and Switzer-
land, in the early 1 840's, there was a crisis in the relations between Church
and State. Vinet, in Switzerland, played to some extent the counterpart of
Thomas Chalmers, who led the "free church" out of the establishment. One
significant difference, however, is that Chalmers and the Free Kirk in Scot-
land held rigidly to the idea of a national and established Church, whereas,
for Vinet, any alliance between Church and State was a "pure heresy" which
could only bring the Church under suspicion, since the State has no con-
science. Vinet may have been more far-sighted than Chalmers. [When Dr.
Fuhrmann asserts that this Free Evangelical Church was the first modern
Church in Europe independent of any political society, he has surely for-
gotten our other Secessions in Scotland in the mid 18th century!]

Vinet was influenced by a Scottish lay theologian, Erskine of Linlathen.
In the style of his famous seminary broadsheets, Dr. Fuhrmann gives us an
interesting brief account of Erskine (as well as of Mme de Stael, De Wette
and Pascal). Erskine himself was of the School of McLeod Campbell which
sought to get behind the rigid "official dramatic" doctrines of Christ's
person and work in order to recover the view of Christ as entering into a
real personal life-situation that involved his true humanity in feelings which
sinners can understand, and themselves respond to. Vinet seems to have
managed to combine the emphasis of this theology with Calvin's stress on
the mystical union of Christ with His Church, in a way that later Scottish
theology failed to do, either in its federal form, or in the teaching of
James Denney.

Dr. Fuhrmann carefully condenses and summarizes the teaching of Vinet
on many important themes. "We shall see," he writes at the beginning of
the book, "that, for Vinet, faith generally is not a faculty detached from
other faculties of man, but a complex spiritual activity in which the whole
man is engaged. Repentance, conversion, justification, regeneration, sancti-
fication . . . are simply various aspects of one continuous whole, of one
perpetual movement of turning to God and to things above." His later ex-
position of Vinet's conception of faith is a valuable part of the book. So also
is the section on Being in the Truth: "Just as truth is one and indivisible, so
the whole truth is to be entered and apprehended only by the whole man.
Enter the truth, and you will see from within what cannot be seen from
without: practice Christianity, and you will know it," says Vinet. The sec-
tion on The Evangelical Ministry is equally valuable, and those on Modern
Civilization, and Art and Literature are equally fascinating, though few of

27

us would identify Socialism with both Roman Catholicism and Nationalism!
Dr. Fuhrmann also gives us many of Vinet's memorable sayings, e.g. Jesus
Christ is "without father, without mother, without ancestry here on earth.
He does not continue, he interrupts the course of time."

Vinet is obviously difficult to interpret. He believed that "words are
forces to be applied according to the concrete situation." Therefore, he
could say one thing in one situation, and even the opposite in another. He
believed that "every complete truth has two sides, particularly in religion,
for religion is essentially the mediatrix which leads all the dualities of human
existence back to unity." But, with patience, deep insight, and great skill,
Dr. Fuhrmann has selected and woven Vinet's thought into what is for us
an intelligible pattern, without sacrificing real scholarship for the sake of
being too simple.

It is regrettable that the publishers could not give us Dr. Fuhrmann's
constant and accurate references to Vinet's works themselves. At times we
are not quite sure whether he is speaking for himself or quoting Vinet. This
does not, however, detract from the intrinsic value of the book as it stands.
Here we undoubtedly have Vinet speaking to us today in a way that is
fresh and arresting.

Ronald S. Wallace

Professor of Biblical Theology

THEOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF
THE NEW TESTAMENT: Volume II.

Edited by Gerhard Kittel; translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley.
(Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.) 955 pp. $20.50.

One is filled with wonder and admiration at Dr. Bromiley's truly aston-
ishing industry as a translator of learned theological works. He must surely
be a long way in front of all other competitors in this field. The appearance
of Volume II of Kittell in English the best part of a thousand large pages,
covering the initial letters delta, epsilon, zeta, and eta increases our in-
debtedness to him very considerably, not merely for the quantity but also
for the quality of his achievement. The general method and form of the
articles in Kittell is already well known, as is also the wealth of contemporary
German scholarship of which they are the harvest. Of the articles in this
second volume those on the following words (and their cognates) are of
special importance: daimon, diabolos, diatheke, didasko, dikaios, doxa, dy-
namis, eikon, eirene, eleutheros, Hellen, elpis, ergon, euangelizomai, eucho-
mai, zoe, and Helias (Elijah). As with the first volume, so with this one and
those yet to come, pastors as well as scholars and students will find Kittel
invaluable as a work of reference and instruction.

Philip Edgcumbe Hughes

Guest Professor of New Testament

Language, Literature, and Exegesis

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHIES OF THE WEST.

By George F. Thomas. (Charles Scribner's Sons.) 454 pp. $7.95.

The author of this book, who is Professor of Religion at Princeton Uni-
versity, is careful to point out that his purpose has not been to provide a

28

comprehensive history of religious philosophical thought, but rather "to en-
gage in a critical dialogue with a limited number of thinkers who represent
different types of religious philosophy and offer different answers to the
basic religious questions"; and he describes his primary aim as being "to
give a clear and comprehensive exposition of the religious philosophy of
each thinker and sufficient evaluation to bring to light and sharpen some
of the crucial issues raised by him." It is not necessary to agree with all of
Dr. Thomas's presuppositions or conclusions to appreciate the worth of this
work and to applaud the manner in which he has achieved the goal which
he set before himself. The fourteen chapters of this book are devoted to
studies of the following thinkers: Plato (Theistic Idealism), Aristotle (Ra-
tional Theology), Plotinus (Neo-Platonism), Augustine (Christian Phi-
losophy), Aquinas (Medieval Rational Theology), Eckhart (Medieval
Mysticism), Spinoza (Pantheism), Hume (Skepticism), Kant (Critical
Philosophy), Hegel (Absolute Idealism), Kierkegaard (Religious Existential-
ism), Feuerbach and Dewey (Naturalistic Humanism), Whitehead (Process
Philosophy), and Tillich (Philosophical Theology). One could wish that the
Epilogue, on "Some Present Tendencies" (Linguistic Analysis, Existential-
ism, Atheistic Humanism), has been expanded to a much fuller length. As
it is, it is annoyingly brief and inadequate. It would have been interesting
to have had a chapter on the distinctively Reformed philosophy of Herman
Dooyeweerd. The explanation that Augustine interpreted Christian beliefs
in the light of Neo-Platonism should be taken cum grano salis. However
difficult Augustine might have found it to rid himself of every vestige of his
former Neo-Platonism, it is not correct to suggest that it remained as a
principle of his thought as a Christian philosopher.

Philip Edgcumbe Hughes

Guest Professor of New Testament

Language, Literature, and Exegesis

PRE SEMINARY EDUCATION:

Report of the Lilly Endowment Study.

By Keith R. Bridston and Dwight W. Culver. (Augsburg Publishing
House.) 257 pp. $4.75.

For a number of years a large group of college and university teachers
of religion have been dissatisfied with the "Statement on Pre-Seminary
Studies" approved by the American Association of Theological Schools and
appearing in most seminary catalogues. They particularly have objected to
the exclusion of religion from the list of recommended undergraduate majors
and to the recommendation of only three courses in religion during the four
college years. The Lilly Endowment, Inc., in response to an overture from
the A.A.T.S. and the American Academy of Religion, underwrote an in-
vestigation of undergraduate studies for seminarians, the results of which
are found in Pre-Seminary Education by Keith R. Bridston and Dwight W.
Culver.

The importance of the study lies not so much in the clear-cut answers
given in regard to undergratuate education for theological students (the
recommendations made, in fact, are inconclusive) but in the views of semi-
narians about their own vocational choice and the influences which have led

29

them to seminary. Two samples are significant: (1) While 68% of the
seminary students interviewed (of a total of over 17,000) expected to enter
the parish ministry immediately after seminary, only 33% expected eventu-
ally to remain in the parish (p. 227). (2) In viewing the adequacy of the
minister in his home church prior to his college years, the "average semi-
narian" said, "My minister was quite adequate in officiating at worship, in
private devotions, prayer and Bible study, in preaching the Word, and in
studying and preparing sermons in that order. He was fairly inadequate
in community leadership, in pastoral counseling, in visiting church members,
and in teaching in that order" (p. 39). In other words, in his predecessors
he sees a competence in the private and "impersonal," the official and litur-
gical functions of the ministry, and an inadequacy in those activities involving
direct person-to-person relations.

Charles B. Cousar

Associate Professor of New Testament

Language, Literature, and Exegesis

PREACHING TO BE UNDERSTOOD.

By James T. Cleland. (Abingdon Press.) 126 pp. $2.75.

Students at Columbia Seminary are encouraged to read at least one book
on homiletics each year after graduation. Such a practice can sharpen insight
and skills that have been dulled by the weekly routine and will no doubt keep
the preacher in touch with that series of studies which over the years have
contributed so much to homiletical literature the Warrack lectures de-
livered annually at two of the Scottish Universities.

Preaching To Be Understood contains the 1964 lectures given by James
T. Cleland, a native son of Scotland, who for twenty years has been Pro-
fessor of Preaching and Dean of the Chapel at Duke University. He main-
tains the high standard set by his predecessors, and his unusual gift of
picturesque speech demonstrates at least one reason why he is in such
demand as a preacher on college campuses.

With freshness and humor, Cleland seeks to help with next week's sermon.
He offers suggestions in Biblical interpretation and homiletical technique to
the end that the sermon will be bifocal, with one focus clearly set on the
Biblical past and the other focus forcefully set on the contemporary situation.
He is concerned with the responsibility of the pew as well as the pulpit for
preaching to be understood, drawing an analogy from the interplay between
the baseball pitcher and catcher ("the homiletical battery"). Actually, the
book appears to be a summary of homiletics as presented at Duke, and
though too many subjects are dealt with for a thorough treatment of any
one of them, the book can serve as a brief refresher course for the pastor
involved in weekly sermonic preparation.

Wade P. Huie, Jr.

Peter Marshall Professor of Homiletics

FREEDOM AND FAITH:

NEW APPROACHES TO CHRISTIAN EDUCATION.

By J. Gordon Chamberlin. (The Westminster Press.) 156 pp. $3.95.

30

THE SEARCH FOR A CHRISTIAN EDUCATION
SINCE 1940.

By Kendig Brubaker Cully. (The Westminster Press.) 205 pp. $4.50.

EDUCATION FOR RENEWAL.

By David J. Ernsberger. (The Westminster Press.) 174 pp. $4.50.

THE EDUCATIONAL MISSION OF THE CHURCH.

By Robert J. Havighurst. (The Westminster Press.) 159 pp. $4.50.

PASTORAL CATECHETICS.

Edited by Johannes Hofinger, S.J., and Theodore C. Stone. (Herder
and Herder.) 287 pp. $4.95.

PROTESTANT STRATEGIES IN EDUCATION.
By Robert W. Lynn. (Association Press.) 96 pp. $2.50.

EDUCATION IN THE NEW TESTAMENT.
By Jan A. Muirhead. (Association Press.) 94 pp. $2.50.

LITURGY AND EDUCATION.

By Massey H. Shepherd, Jr. (The Seabury Press.) 112 pp. $3.50.

THE LOCAL CHURCH IN TRANSITION:

THEOLOGY, EDUCATION AND MINISTRY.

By Gerald H. Slusser. (The Westminster Press.) 204 pp. $4.75.

LEARNING IN THEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE.

By Charles R. Stinnette, Jr. (Association Press.) 96 pp. $2.50.

In the discipline of theology, the system builders of the first half of the
twentieth century have faded away and no new gods have appeared. So it
is in the area of Christian education. There have been major reorganizations
in the theoretical writings as well as in the day-to-day curricula of the
churches since 1930. Today there is a quietness in the field, though there are
the sounds of distant rumblings which may issue in the storms of tomorrow.

One rumble in the distance is the re-evaluation of where we have been.
A large number of the books reviewed here are preoccupied with this task.
Jan Muirhead, Education in the New Testament, seeks to show that Christian
education is an integral aspect of the life of the Body of Christ (p. 15). He
attempts to establish this thesis by a New Testament study. This book is a
contribution to a neglected area, but leaves much work yet to be done.

Kendig Cully, The Search for a Christian Education Since 1940, re-
views the work of some twenty-five Christian educators in an effort to

31

analyze the intellectual structures behind the practical changes that have
taken place since 1940. Cully believes that Christian educators ought to take
the history of their work more seriously.

Robert Lynn does just this; that is, he provides us with a careful and
creative analysis of the strategies for educating which Protestants have used
in the United States since 1861. The author's insights into our dependence
upon the dual system of public education and Sunday School to produce
"morally educated" children explain many of our present frustrations with
both institutions. Lynn has some perceptive things to say about Protestant-
ism's attitude toward public education. No pastor can afford to fail to read
Protestant Strategies in Education.

Gordon Chamberlin, Freedom and Faith, offers us a historical study of
three recent system builders in Christian education Randy Miller, Lewis
Sherrill and James Smart. Chamberlin goes on to suggest some ideas which
he hopes will help Christian educators unify all of the various aspects of
Christian education. He deals with the nature of education, the context of
our education and the aim of our work.

The author sees Christian education's chief function as enabling men to
wrestle with the meaning of existence in the freedom which comes to be-
lievers (pp. 126, 127). His concluding chapter calls for a renewal of the
forms of education.

The book by David Ernsberger, Education for Renewal, does an able job
of dealing with this matter. If the pastor of the local church can find time
to read only one of these books, let him read Ernsberger, himself a pastor.
The author states his purpose in this manner: "Books on Christian education
and on the laity keep referring to lay training for ministers in all realms of
secular life, but tend to leave unanswered many basic questions as to how
this kind of educational enterprise is to be carried on. The extent to which
the local church or some other institutional forms of the Christian mission
should undertake it, and some of the resources that are available . . . (this)
subject of education for leadership and service in the world outside the
church has been relatively untouched. In an effort to help fill the void, this
book takes up the subject . . ." (pp. 9, 10).

Ernsberger is distressed that a pole of ministers indicates that they are
more interested in developing loyalty to the institutional church than to
Jesus Christ (p. 25). Nevertheless, the author defends the local church as
a necessary instrument, but clearly calls the particular congregation to its
task (chp. 3). He then devotes the remaining chapters to discussions of spe-
cific ways of educating men to bear witness in the world. He calls upon the
particular congregation to experiment, though he is aware of the fact that
many in the church are afraid to experiment because such operations might
not show results (p. 97). We are victims of the god of success who frequently
pushes aside faithfulness as the criterion of the Christian life.

Gerald Slusser deals with the local church also in his The Local Church
in Transition, which is an attempt to "relate theology to the practice of
Christian education" (p. 11). Slusser backs off for perspective giving us a
thumb nail sketch of the ministry in America. He shows how revivalism
detracted from both the teaching ministry and theology (pp. 34 ff). Other
factors have played a part in giving us a ministry today that might be de-
scribed as uneducated evangelical, or as educated pietistic (in their limited
sense of educated), or as educated orthodox (meaning, a ministry indoctri-

32

nated into this or that set of creeds and confessions), or as the divine
promoters.

Having demonstrated that theology, education, and the ministry are re-
lated, Slusser sets forth a presentation which seeks to put these three together
in terms which will make sense in our time. That is to say, he wants to talk
theologically for this age and show how such theology speaks to education
and to the nature of the ministry.

Slusser's restatement of the faith is strongly influenced by the existential-
ist movement in theology. He seeks, for example, to avoid the metaphysical
tangles about the nature of God by holding to an operational definition of
God (p. 104). Slusser's efforts to reject metaphysics brings him close to
Ritschl (see p. 168, for example).

The consequences of this historical analysis and theological viewpoint is
that the ministry must primarily be theological-educational, meaning that the
pastor's primary role must be to educate the laity for the task of proclaiming
the gospel in the world (p. 178). Modern man must be aided in his task of
theologizing, i.e., making sense out of the totality of his existence. This will
involve us in struggling for new ways of communication. If Christian edu-
cators genuinely do this, they have to share in "the work of the exegetical
and systematic scholars" (p. 184). Christian education will then become
"the testing agent for theology and a bridge between the laity and the
theologian" (p. 190).

In the Ernsberger and Slusser books we begin to hear rumblings which
go beyond a study of the past. Ernsberger is struggling to help us give a new
shape to Christian education. Slusser wants the whole pastor ministry inte-
grated so that its work can be meaningful today. To these must be added
the book by Charles Stinnette, Jr., Learning in Theological Perspective.
Stinnette is not content merely to borrow from popular learning theories;
he seeks to develop a perspective on learning from a theological point of
view. This does not mean that he neglects the social sciences. On the con-
trary, he takes them seriously and uses them wisely. This is a most stimu-
lating book.

Robert Havighurst's The Educational Mission of the Church does not
live up to the fine work of the author in the field of human development.
Massey H. Shepherd's Liturgy and Education also is a disappointment, not
because Shepherd is lacking in his grasp of liturgy, but because he fails to
relate liturgy and education significantly. Hofinger and Stone, Pastoral
Catechetics, have edied a volume of essays which cover the field but does
not offer anything new to the discussions within the Roman Church.

Neely Dixon McCarter
Professor of Christian Education

THEOLOGY AND PREACHING:

A Programme of Work in Dogmatics, arranged with reference to
Questions 1-11 of the Heidelberg Catechism.

By Heinrich Ott (translated by Harold Knight). (Westminster Press.)
158 pp. $4.50.

This book introduces to the American scene the successor to Karl Barth
in the University of Basel. In it Heinrich Ott indicates his views as to the
nature and future direction of theology.

33

Ott develops his "programme of dogmatics" from the relation of the
theologizing of the Church to its preaching. His thesis is that theology (dog-
matics) and preaching (proclamation) are in reality one act of the Church,
at one time "immediate," at another "reflective." The function of the
preacher is to expose one text to the immediacy of a concrete pastoral situa-
tion while the function of theology is to reflect on the whole of the faith.
This means that the preacher must learn to reflect theologically if he is to
preach correctly and the theologian is to teach theology with the preaching
situation constantly before him. No sharp distinction can be drawn between
these two functions of the Church's one act, but the health of the Church is
dependent on continuity and fluidity in their relationship.

With his "programme" described, Ott then seeks to demonstrate the
reciprocal influences of theology and preaching with the use of the first
eleven questions of the Heidelberg Catechism. They form the basis for dis-
cussing the unity of our message and the way that preachers are to under-
stand and deal with sin in the pulpit. In place of the typically moralistic
approach the preacher is encouraged in his categories and terminology to
express the existential dimension of sin.

Ott's general contention is for a theology with "a turning towards man
himself," a focus which he believes goes beyond Barth and yet is not incon-
sistent with Barth. He expresses deep appreciation for his former teacher,
but the development of his theological position in this work would suggest
strong influence from his other famous teacher, Bultmann. This mixture is
at times confusing, and it is hoped that as Ott develops his own theology
further he will be sharper in the distinctions he makes.

In trying to find a way between Barth and Bultmann, Ott seems to waver
in deciding whether the beginning point for theology and preaching is God,
or man, or God and man as seen in Jesus Christ.

The attention given to the Heidelberg Catechism will appeal especially
to readers in the Presbyterian Church, U.S. because of the use of this
catechism in the Covenant Life Curriculum and the authoritative place that
it has in the Reformed Church of America, with whom union negotiations
are now underway.

Wade P. Huie, Jr.

Peter Marshall Professor of Homiletics

CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE AND NEGRO
EMANCIPATION.

By Ralph Moellering. (Fortress Press.) 214 pp. $3.75.

A five year ministry on Chicago's West Side and research at Harvard
University prepared Ralph Moellering, a Lutheran pastor, to challenge our
conscience. His examination of the current arguments concerning Negro
emancipation reveals their similarity to those heard pro and con in the nine-
teenth century slavery debates. His skillful evaluation of these arguments
merits study. The author's own case for completion of emancipation rests
upon the teachings of the Biblical prophets and the doctrine of the com-
munion of saints: God's covenant people are challenged by the prophets
to worship through righteousness, mercy, and justice; the communion of the
saints involves concern for the total welfare of our brothers in Christ. Non-
involvement in the present struggle is therefore condemned as a policy both

34

contrary to Biblical directives and one contributing to the forces of injustice
and oppression.

Prayers for forgiveness and courage will rise from some readers as guilt
is exposed through the historical and theological analyses spread on these
pages; imprecatory prayers will rise from many who will reject this author's
concept of the Church and of Christian obedience that values persons more
than property rights. All who read carefully will know where we have been,
where we are, and how the Christian conscience is either pricked or salved.

Hubert V. Taylor
Professor of Public Speech and Music

TOMB SCULPTURE:

Its Changing Aspects From Ancient Egypt To Bernini.

By Erwin Panofsky. (Harry N. Abrams, Inc.) 319 pp. $20.00.

Jessica Mitford, in her documentary, The American Way of Death, has
thrown a flood of lurid light on the manner in which, in our contemporary
society, morticians practice their art. She has described, with painful par-
ticularity, the way the jaw of the deceased is broken preparatory to being
wired, the sewing of the lips, the embalming of the body: all this as a
necessary prerequisite for the public viewing of the corpse. In America,
Arthur Koestler satirically remarks, "morticians endeavour to transform the
dead, with lipstick and rouge, into horizontal members of a perennial cock-
tail party," and he attributes this horrid pantomime to the fact that there has
been a flight from the tragic facts of existence.

It is an incontrovertible fact that funeral customs are reflective of meta-
physical belief. Today, we seek to camouflage and deny the reality of death,
and this is eloquent testimony to the fact that we have long since ceased to
believe, in any real sense, in the resurrection of the body and the life
everlasting.

Professor Panofsky, in this sumptuous volume, discusses tomb sculpture
from the time of the ancient Egyptians to the Renaissance, and illustrates
the way in which sculpture reflects the beliefs of different ages. The early
Christians, he points out, eliminated from tomb sculpture the retrospective
or commemorative principle. "Early Christian art emphasized not what the
deceased had been or done but what would happen to him on account of
his faith." Early Christian funeral art was not, he repeats, eulogistic; on the
contrary, it was preoccupied with deliverance from death and sin. With the
Renaissance, however, a radical change took place: "a rejection of Christian
concern for the future in favor of pagan glorification of the past." Com-
menting on the nature of what he calls this "revolutionary" change, Pro-
fessor Panofsky writes: "Glorification of intellectual achievements and
academic honors has taken the place of pious expectations for the future
of the soul, and such 'immortality' as the deceased hopes for is limited to
the continued reputation and popularity of his books."

The text of this book was a series of four public lectures delivered at
The Institute of Fine Arts of New York University in 1956. The author was
persuaded to agree to their publication, and they now appear with the addi-
tion of 446 superb illustrations.

35

The author concludes his study with Bernini. After Bernini, he says, "the
days of funerary sculpture, and of religious art in general, were numbered."
He contents himself with quoting the judgment of Henry James: "Modern
tombs are a skeptical affair ... the ancient sculptors have left us nothing
to say in regard to the great, final contrast."

This is a work of graceful erudition, as illuminating to the student of
theology as it is informative to the student of art.

Stuart Barton Babbage
Visiting Professor of
Practical Apologetics

THE CENTRAL MESSAGE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
By Joachim Jeremias. (Charles Scribner's Sons.) 95 pp. $2.95.

In the light of current obstructions by sundry scholars, Jeremias has
accomplished a notable break-through, finding in the historical Jesus the
author of the central message of the New Testament. From the Saviour
Himself come the great evangelical notes: Abba Father, Sacrificial Death,
Justification by Faith, and the Revealing Word.

With Abba Father we are behind the Kerygma with Jesus in Gethsemane
and with His primitive disciples in Galatia and in Rome. The fifty-third
of Isaiah portrays the sacrificial death of Christ as the Suffering Servant
who bore the punishment inflicted because of our transgressions. And this is
the doctrine not only of Hebrews, of First Peter, and of Paul, of the most
primitive Church but five lines of testimony show that the thought of
Jesus goes back to Isaiah 53.

Justification is forgiveness in the fullest sense. It is not my achievement,
but the achievement of Christ on the cross. "Faith says: Here is the achieve-
ment Christ died for me on the cross (Gal. 2:20). This faith is the only
way to obtain God's grace." Moreover, this realized eschatology is not pri-
marily Paul's doctrine, but one which he received from Jesus.

Finally, the Logos concept played a very small role in Gnosticism. Where
it does occur in the early Valentinian system it has been borrowed from
John 1. Gnosticism asserts that the way of salvation is revealed knowledge,
while the Gospel affirms that the way of salvation is pardon for all our sins.
The Prologue to the Gospel of John is a primitive Christian hymn, com-
parable to such other hymns as Phil. 2:6-11; I Tim. 3:16; Matt. 11:25-27
which latter are used by James M. Robinson to show that the historicality of
Israelite religion has become a constitutive part of the historicality of Chris-
tianity.* The closest key to the meaning of Logos beyond the New Testament
is Ignatius. From the silence which betokens His inexpressible majesty God
spoke distinctly and clearly in Jesus of Nazareth, above all, in His Cross.

William C. Robinson

Professor of Ecclesiastical History,

Church Polity, and Apologetics

*In B. W. Anderson's The Old Testament and Christian Faith, pp. 149-150.

36

THE OXFORD MOVEMENT.

Edited by Eugene R. Fairweather. (Oxford University Press.) 400 pp.
$7.00.

The book under review is the second to appear in the series entitled A
Library of Protestant Thought, the purpose of which is "to illuminate and
interpret the history of the Christian faith in its Protestant expression," and
to do so by allowing the voices of Protestantism to speak for themselves with-
out being unduly obstructed by comments and explanations. Naturally, de-
voting a single volume to a single movement means that selection has to be
made from a great wealth of material, and this lays the selector open to
criticism and obloquy from those who for one reason or another would
have chosen differently. It is properly only the opera omnia that can be de-
scribed as exhaustive and this Library has wisely set before itself the ideal of
presenting those writings which are most representative and in general giving
them at length rather than providing an anthology of briefer extracts.

Professor Fairweather admits that there is "an element of incongruity in
the appearance of a volume of Anglo-Catholic classics in a Library of Prot-
estant Thought" and his attempt to justify the association does not carry
much conviction. This volume, however, will serve as a useful companion
to Professor Owen Chadwick's book The Mind of the Oxford Movement,
which has a much more extended introduction leading to an anthology of
short excerpts from the early Tractarian publications. One must certainly
agree with Dr. Fairweather that the Oxford Movement "seriously altered the
accepted patterns of Anglican thought and practice," but it is impossible to
approve of his assertion that it "did much to prepare the Anglican Com-
munion for the modern 'ecumenical dialogue'," excepting in so far as it
applies in an Eastward direction; for it is precisely the rigid Anglo-Catholic
doctrine of episcopacy and sacramental grace which constitutes the greatest
single barrier in the way of reunion with the Free Churches. The authors
represented in this selection are Newman, Keble, Pusey, W. G. Ward, Isaac
Williams, and R. I. Wilberforce. The selection itself is ably assembled, though
it could have been further enhanced in worth and perspective by the addition
of extracts from Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua.

Philip Edgecumbe Hughes

Guest Professor of New Testament

Language, Literature, and Exegesis

PASCAL'S RECOVERY OF MAN'S WHOLENESS.

By Albert N. Wells. (John Knox Press.) 174 pp. $4.25.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) planned a Vindication of Christianity in which
to show the holiness and truth of our religion. Of this work, however, he left
but fragments known as the Pensees. In these remains Pascal translated
Christianity into terms of human experience. He proposed to follow a new
course of his own, using, as a starting point, scientific induction. The given
fact is human nature, which is a monstrous assemblage of contradictory ele-
ments, of greatness and misery, nobility and abasement. This contradiction
is resolved when a man admits that his nature is twofold; that it participates
both in the nature of the fallen Adam and in that of the Redeeming Christ.

37

This strange doctrine, or hypothesis, is confirmed by religious experience: if
we open our being to Grace we find the Living God of Abraham and Jacob.
These adventitious and personal experiences are confirmed in living experi-
ence. Human life becomes orderly and harmonious when reshaped and re-
organized by Divine Grace. Conversion is a reality; by it we enter the
"supernatural" order of charity where God is master again of our self which,
in its turn, masters our senses and reason. In Christianity the supernatural is
not superimposed upon the natural; the supernatural interpenetrates and
transforms the natural. The Christian religion thus both explains and pro-
vides the remedy for the evils and problems of human existence. Under the
influence of A. Vinet, who was the greatest French-speaking Protestant after
Calvin, Pascal became a force in Protestant theology.

Albert N. Wells is an alumnus of Columbia Theological Seminary. At
Princeton Theological Seminary, he concentrated on Pascal, earning a Th.D.
in 1956.

Paul T. Fuhrmann
Professor of Church History

THE WORDS.

By Jean-Paul Sartre. (George Braziller.) 255 pp. $5.00.

The Church's early attempts to discuss the Christian faith with the world
involved her theologians with Platonism. Later Thomas Aquinas struggled
to preserve the Church's dialogue with the world by reshaping the Christian
message in Aristotelian concepts. In more recent days the Church has again
been faced with the problem of a shifting in the world's understanding of the
nature of ultimate reality. Tillich has sought to speak as a Christian to the
world in terms of ontology. Bultmann has attempted to use the existentialist's
stance as a frame of reference from which to articulate the Christian message.
While there is presently some dissatisfaction with this approach (and a re-
vival of interest in process philosophy, at least in America), existentialism
has been very much in the mind and life of the Church during our generation.

Although writing from an atheistic perspective, one of the most famous
exponents of existentialism is Jean-Paul Sartre. His novels and plays are
common knowledge among college students. His philosophical stance is
widely discussed by professionals. He sometimes symbolizes leftbank pornog-
raphy and decadence to those who only know his name. Yet this man
declined a large sum of money (The Nobel Prize for Literature) as a matter
of principle. To accept such a distinction would add the influence of the
institution (The Nobel Prize, in this case) to the man's writings and prevent
the reader from reading the man for the sake of his inherent qualities.

The Words reveals that Sartre has many good qualities. He can write
in an interesting and fascinating style. The book contains sketches, memories
and comments upon his early life (until he was ten or eleven) which could
easily be boring. For Sartre's early life is rather uneventful. His father having
died, Sartre and his mother lived with his grandfather, a relative of Albert
Schweitzer. Sartre was a lonely child who spent much time in the world of
fantasy and books. He began writing when very young and declares that he
was born of writing. Despite the ordinariness of these events, Sartre's story-
telling ability makes them good reading.

38

The reader of this volume can perceive some of the main concerns of
Sartre's later life as they appear in the process of growth. "I keep creating
myself . . ." "The New is ushered in this very hour but is never instituted:
tomorrow, everything goes by the board . . ." "I was led to disbelief not
by the conflicts of dogmas, but by my grandparents' indifference." Yet
throughout his life Sartre seems to have been possessed by the desire to read
and write. The love of books and the act of writing came early to him and
have never departed. "In vain would I seek within me the prickly memories
and sweet unreason of a country childhood. I never tilled the soil or hunted
for nests. I did not gather herbs or throw stones at birds. But books were my
birds and my nests, my household pets, my barn and my countryside. The
library was the world caught in a mirror. It had the world's infinite thickness,
its variety. I launched out into incredible adventures."

And in the conclusion, Sartre says: "I write and will keep writing books;
they're needed; they do serve some purpose. Culture doesn't save anything
or anyone; it doesn't justify. But it's a product of man: he projects himself
into it, he recognizes himself in it; that critical mirror alone offers him his
image."

Perhaps the book is another eloquent reminder that Sartre's understand-
ing of life can best be communicated by novel, drama and autobiography
rather than logical discourse.

Neely Dixon McCarter
Professor of Christian Education

MELANCHTHON ON CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE:

Loci Communes 1555.

Translated and edited by Clyde L. Manschreck. (Oxford University
Press.) 356 pp. $7.00.

Hitherto only the 1521 edition of Melanchthon's Loci has been available
in English. But the 1555 edition was four times longer, and reflected changes
in the author's theology. In the course of the years Melanchthon's views on
the Sacraments came closer to the Reformed view. In his teaching on Natural
Religion, he changed from an almost radical denial of its validity to a belief
in a harmonious co-ordination of revelation with "natural light," laying the
foundation for the development of a doctrine of "natural law." He also
veered away from Luther's doctrine of Predestination.

In recent years Melanchthon has been widely accused of breaking up the
unity of justification and sanctification, found in the teaching of Luther and
Calvin, and of treating each as a separate and independent act of God. It is
important for us therefore to have this volume, as well as the earlier edition
in our hands, so that we can know better how to assess Melanchthon. It is
beautifully printed and set out. It has an interesting preface by the translator,
and a good introduction by Hans Engelland.

Ronald S. Wallace

Professor of Biblical Theology

39

ENGLAND'S EARLIEST PROTESTANTS, 1520-1535.
By William A. Clebsch. (Yale University Press.) 358 pp. $7.50.

The appearance of this work by Professor Clebsch, of Stanford Univer-
sity, California, is welcome both because of its own intrinsic worth as a
contribution to serious scholarship and also because there is a real need for
a new and thorough study of the writings which belong to the earliest tenta-
tive period of the movement known as the English Reformation. (Bishop
Marcus Loane's admirable book Pioneers of the Reformation in England,
which in any case is executed at a more popular, biographical, level, and
Professor A. G. Dickens' masterly volume The English Reformation, which
is a study of historical development rather than of theological literature, were
both published more or less at the same time as Professor Clebsch's work,
and so could not be taken into account by him.) This is a contribution of
real importance, the fruit of extensive and painstaking research in the litera-
ture of the period the source material listed in the bibliography takes up
no less than 18 pages, which will relieve students of at least this amount of
spadework and it establishes Dr. Clebsch as an authority in this particular
field. He has a proper appreciation of the indigenous influence of Lollardy
as a source of the English Reformation a fact which has been amply
demonstrated by Professor Dickens and also of the strong impression
made, in their different ways, by men from outside, such as Luther, largely
through the writings of William Tyndale, and Erasmus, through personal
association at first hand. He also adds his tribute to the integrity of John
Foxe as historiographer of the period.

"Certainly their finest and most widely heralded monument is the English
translation of the entire New Testament achieved by Tyndale," says Dr.
Clebsch of the early English Protestant writers. Yet his attitude to Tyndale
seems on the whole to be unsympathetic. He charges Tyndale with having
shifted his theological position from an earlier and fully Lutheran "concep-
tion of the gospel as liberating man from moralism and legalism" to "a moral-
istic and legalistic understanding of Christianity." If it is correct, this would
indeed indicate a "radical revision" and a "repudiation of Luther's theology"
in fact, "a theology inimical to Luther." But is it true that "the large place
accorded to the law in the prologues to the Pentateuch and to Jonah in fact
contradicted the thoroughly evangelical note of the 1525 prologue to the
New Testament?" Did Tyndale really, in his later years, teach a "double" or
"twin" justification, "by faith before God and by works before men?" I do
not find any teaching on law, grace, and justification in the Old Testament
prologues which cannot be matched in the writings of Luther. Nor do I find
any radical departure from Tyndale's earlier understanding of the gospel:
the law and the gospel together still constitute the twofold key to unlock
Scripture, the law with its demands driving the sinner to despair, and the
gospel with its promises bringing him to faith and salvation. The gospel is
simply the fulfilment of the new covenant, whereby the law, hitherto menac-
ingly standing over against man, is now written within the believing heart, so
that now, by the Holy Spirit, the believer is enabled to do what previously he
could not do, namely, to walk according to the will of God. It is the unani-
mous testimony of the theologians of the Reformation that good works do
not and cannot precede justification, but that they do and must follow after
it. The good works that flow from justification are not meritorious, .however,

40

even when we hear of rewards. As Tyndale says in the prologue to the book
of Numbers: "All that I do and suffer is but the way to the reward, and not
the deserving thereof." Such good works justify before men in a different
sense, that is, in the sense that they bear testimony to the authenticity of the
faith which is professed; and these good works have the sanction not only
of Luther but also of the New Testament writers: Paul sums them up as
"love," which is "the fulfilling of the law" (Rom. 13:10).

The postulation of Tyndale's theological shift plays a prominent part in
this volume and leads to the conclusion that Tyndale must be seen as the
founder of legalistic Puritanism. It is supported by what I can only describe
as a misunderstanding of an incidental saying of Luther's: "Sin boldly!"
"Luther could counsel his associates to sin bravely," we are told. "Tyndale's
adherents must bravely avoid sin." Again: "For Luther, faith resulted in a
trust that could sin bravely, while for the Englishmen faith resulted in an
obedience that could eschew sin." This, apparently, is meant in Luther's
favour; but I think Luther would have been suprised at this interpretation
of his saying, for he was no advocate of sinning. "Pecca fortiter!" (If my
memory is not at fault) was intended as a final taunt to his friend Melanch-
thon whom he had failed to dissuade from a certain course which he re-
garded as sinful, and to whom he at last said in effect: "Well if, despite what
I have said, you are still determined to follow this course, then go ahead and
sin brazenly!"

But these critical observations must not be allowed to obscure the per-
vasive virtues of Dr. Clebsch's volume. His study of John Frith, martyred
for his faith in 1533 as a young man of 30, who "displayed the finest mind,
the most winsome wit, and the boldest spirit among the men who wrote
theology in English between 1520 and 1535," is excellent and opportune in
that it helps to restore to a condign place of honour a figure that has been
unduly neglected. There is also a careful investigation of the writings of
lesser figures such as George Joye, William Roy, and Simon Fish; and, by
no means least, an admirable chapter on Sir Thomas More, friend of
Erasmus and "a veritable inquisitor" in the intensity of his persecution of
adherents of the Reformed faith. There were, no doubt, two sides to his
character; but, as Dr. Clebsch remarks, "the fact that there were two sides
to his character and career gives no warrant for interpreting one side by
reference to the other . . . More reserved his tender spirit for family and
friends. No Protestant ever glimpsed it." We can be happy that he made a
good end, devoting his pen during his last months to devotional writings
before, in 1535, he became a political victim of the scaffold for refusing to
put allegiance to his king above allegiance to his pope. "His last writings,"
says Dr. Clebsch, "like the letters to family and friends, shine with the noble
sentiment, profound thought, and complete religious dedication of the private
man. Yet it was only toward the young and attractive Frith that the public
More allowed humaneness to temper his hatred for heretics, and even there
he failed to distinguish between the heretic and his heresy." This failure, of
course, was common in those days. Yet Professor Clebsch rightly points to
the contrast between More and Wolsey in this respect. The latter was gentle
and forbearing in his treatment of Protestants arraigned before him. "Thanks
to his humane qualities, Protestants and their sympathizers were mercifully
handled, as the records of many processes attest. Under him, abjuration and

41

self-exile were the rule, execution the very rare exception. The elevation of
Thomas More to the chancellorship swiftly changed all that."

Incidentally, I wonder whether Dr. Clebsch is aware of the interesting
fact that the Church of St. Edward King and Martyr in Cambridge (which
he mentions on more than one occasion) was in the sixteenth century, and
still is today, what is known as a "peculiar" that is, a church outside the
jurisdiction of the bishop with the important consequence that when there
was a ban on the preaching of the doctrines of the Reformation men like
Barnes and Latimer were able to proclaim their message from its pulpit with
immunity? The authentic sixteenth century pulpit is now back in St. Edward's
(having in recent years been discovered in a side-chapel at King's College)
and in regular use.

Scholars will be in Dr. Clebsch's debt for a long time to come for his
learned and detailed account of the battle of books and theologies during
these fifteen years which were of such importance in the struggle and de-
velopment of the English Reformation.

Philip Edgecumbe Hughes

Guest Professor of New Testament

Language, Literature, and Exegesis

AUGUSTINE THE EDUCATOR.

By Eugene Kevane. (Newman Press.) 446 pp. $5.95.

In a recent article John B. Cobb, Jr., discusses the way in which the
philosophical theism of the Whitehead-Hartshorne variety contributes to his
own theologizing (Christian Century, LXXXII, no. 9, March 3, 1965, pp.
265-67). Cobb's remarks are indicative of the renewed dialogue between
theology and philosophy found in current American theology. As John E.
Smith has said, "Religious faith and philosophical thought . . . have always
found themselves in the peculiar position of not being able to get along with
each other and of not being able to remain permanently apart" (Reason and
God, p. ix).

Concurrently churchmen are deeply involved in the debate concerning
the place of religion in education. Recent Supreme Court decisions, Presi-
dential bills calling for federal aid to education, and the quickening pace of
university life have forced many Christian thinkers to wrestle afresh with
this "Christ and Culture" issue.

This book by Eugene Kevane deals with both of these pressing problems
from a classical Roman Catholic position. The very outline of the book re-
veals this, for the first division is given over to an interpretation of Augus-
tine's early training and writing in terms of the great Bishop's educational
purposes (chapter 2-5). The second part of the book is devoted to an analy-
sis of Augustine's philosophy of education (chapters 6-7). The final portion
adumbrates Augustine's administrative practices or his blueprint for the
establishing of a new type of school (chapters 8-10). Since the latter became
the seedbed of the Christian order of the centuries that followed, the author
indicates in the closing chapters just how Augustine's educational approach
is relevant for our work today. The book contains excellent and extensive
notes as well as a lengthy bibliography.

42

Monsignor Kevane seeks to make a contribution to Augustinian scholar-
ship in his first section (and in Appendix II) by showing that Augustine's
educational purposes give continuity to his life and thought. The author
argues cogently for the fact that Augustine's Dialogues of Cassiciocum were
created as the first step in an educational corpus. This being the case, these
writings do appear to be merely philosophical. But, Kevane argues, they are
philosophical only for the purpose of leading young minds to perceive that
God is a spiritual reality belonging to the intelligible world. Augustine had
been led to see this truth by his reading of Cicero's Hortensius; this volume
evoked from him a love of wisdom, which he later identified as God. In his
own teaching, therefore, Augustine led students through these philosophical
discussions so that they could come to see God as he was revealed in Scrip-
tures. Thus Kevane declares, The Confessions are not in disagreement with
the earlier dialogues (as many maintain); they are merely the preparatio
evangelica while The Confessions contain a revelation-centered interpretation
of Augustine's own life.

Having spoken of this intellectual and moral preparation for Christian
doctrine, Kevane goes on to elaborate Augustine's philosophy of education.
The Bishop's intention was to restore and renew the classical education of
Plato, claiming the same for the Christian cause. Augustine therefore in-
cluded in his philosophy of education, music, logic, mathematics as well as
philosophy and Christian doctrine. He thus developed a Christian humanism
so that education

once more (becomes) a true initiation of youth into the divine economy

for human living and plan for human happiness, and accomplishes the

reform of the heritage of education to its pristine state (pp. 258-59).
Perhaps the core of this process was Augustine's understanding of history.
He did not separate sacred history from secular history in that he understood
the latter as well as the former to be a systematic and orderly unfolding of
God's will. All of life was unified from this perspective.

In his final chapters Monsignor Kevane sketches for us the decline of
Augustine's doctrine of history. He tells us of the various efforts to eject
God from the processes of life by Bayle, Voltaire, Comte, Hegel and Marx,
so that today education consists of bits and chunks psychology over here
with its presuppositions, math over there, etc. Kevane contends that a return
to Augustine would enable us to hold together religion and life while making
academic studies a means of grace.

The book, in a sense, turns out to be an apology for the parochial school.
Such an institution can offer a unified view of reality; theology can be a part
of every subject as well as every aspect of the school's social life. If such a
unified view of life is to be instilled in the youth of today, it will probably
have to be done by the schools. Father John-Baptist Reeves said some years
ago that "it is only by schools that culture is directly determined" {A Monu-
ment to Saint Augustine, p. 123). Kevane ignores the weaknesses of parochial
schools which some of his Roman brethren point out in Theology and the
University.

While this is an excellent study, this reviewer notices at least two under-
lying presuppositions which raise questions in his mind. First, "underlying
these educational positions is the bedrock of St. Augustine's metaphysical
realism" (p. 291). Without classical metaphysics these "objective human
values, morals, orders, etc." will not stand. Can we seriously hope to build

43

an educational system today on classical metaphysics? Is Christianity nothing

more than applied Platonism?

The second assumption is that, since Augustine might be called the father

of Western Civilization, a return to his educational philosophy will restore

western culture to its prime. Can we so restore western civilization? Do we

even want to try?

Neely Dixon McCarter
Professor of Christian Education

CEREMONY AND CELEBRATION.

By Paul H. D. Lang. (Concordia Publishing House.) 191 pp. $4.95.

Lutheran research has produced valuable works on the history, theology,
rites, and music of the liturgy. Paul Lang here adds a definitive work on
everything connected with the performance of a rite: bodily expressions,
observance of the church year, ornaments, symbols, and material objects em-
ployed in the worship such as the building, the altar, candles and vestments.

What is of value here to the non-Lutheran? First, there is the justification
of rites and ceremonies. Although non-liturgical churches minimize the cere-
monial element they do not escape it, and understanding of theory may lead
to more meaningful ceremonial. Man is both body and soul; and the body is
the instrument of the soul in both directions, expression and impression. So
religion is a matter of the body as well as of the heart. Moreover, we glorify
and acknowledge God both with the church building and with the service
of worship: cheap, ill-kept churches and slovenly services dishonour Him;
our actions in the service outwardly express the faith. The faithful under-
stand the symbols and are moved powerfully by them; the children learn the
content of the faith through these ceremonials. Moreover, traditional actions
expressive of the faith safeguard the church's doctrinal purity. Departure
from traditional celebration indicates change of doctrine. Thus, says Lang,
rites and ceremonies have a very real and practical value in teaching, pre-
serving, recalling, familiarizing, and impressing the truths of the faith, (p. 14)

Two notes here strike the reviewer as particularly important for non-
liturgical churches. Lang insists that the organ be silent when parts of the
service are spoken. (This would eliminate the deplorable practice of accom-
panying spoken prayers with organ music or choir humming.) He also re-
minds us that hymn tunes are primarily bearers of the text and not musical
interpretations of the text. Thus the hymn text and not the hymn tune is
the first concern of the worshipper. (What does this indicate for the practice
of selection of hymns according to the popularity of the tune?)

Hubert V. Taylor
Professor of Public Speech and Music

COMMUNISM, CHRISTIANITY, DEMOCRACY.

By Surjit Singh. (John Knox Press.) 127 pp. $3.00.

San Francisco Theological Seminary Professor Singh declares in this
stimulating and provocative volume that communism and liberal democracy
have displaced Christianity as the religions of modern man because the
Church both in the East and in the West has been willing to consider

44

the Christian faith as a purely private affair with no interest in the social
concerns of men today. Thus, Christianity's total claim on life has been
denied : in the East the Russian Orthodox Church has always been subservient
to the state, and in the West men's pursuit of selfish interests has reduced
Christianity to a "Sunday religion."

The Russian Church, Singh declares, must become "deeply and sacrifici-
ally involved in the social revolution in Russia" and must at the same time
reach out with ecumenical interest to give to and receive from Protestantism
and Roman Catholicism. In America also the Church must enlarge its areas
of concern : by increasing its ecumenical activity and by participating in the
social revolution that is bringing such "manifestations of the Christian her-
itage" as the Civil Rights Act.

With a successful consummation of the American social revolution, the
nation will have nothing to fear from communism, and with a more united
ecumenical Church, the people of the world will be able to recognize the
people of the Church as the "people of God and his Christ."

Harold B. Prince
Librarian

PROPHECY AND COVENANT.

By R. E. Clements. (Alec R. Allenson, Inc.) 135 pp. $2.85.

As the title of Dr. Clements' study suggests, the author seeks to show
the close relationship which exists between the message of the prophets, in
particular the pre-exilic ones, and the covenant traditions as connected with
the Patriarchs, Sinai, and the house of David.

Dr. Clements presents a synthetic picture of Old Testament religion in
which the legal traditions, the cult and the message of the prophets are seen
as mutually interacting, the message of the prophets being the genuine in-
terpretation of the covenant so that the light which they shed on the past
and the present does enable Israel to face the future with a new understand-
ing of the covenant.

Two quotations from the concluding chapter of the book will show the
author's understanding of the problem of Prophecy and Covenant:

The prophets, therefore, only reveal their significance to us when we
understand them in the light of the wider history and traditions of
Yahwism, which they shared. They neither created a new religion, nor
introduced a new morality. To regard their achievement primarily as the
introduction of ethical monotheism is to see them out of relation to their
religious heritage.

Wherein then lay the distinctiveness of the canonical prophets? We have
sought to show throughout this study that it lay in their particular rela-
tionship to, and concern with, the covenant between Yahweh and Israel.
Their preaching was felt to bear a unique quality as a witness to what
that covenant meant both by way of demand upon Israel, in the realm of
morality, and also by way of promise for the future.
Dr. Clements has written his book in a style that will please the expert
in the field of Old Testament studies as well as the layman.

Ludwig R. Dewitz

Professor of Old Testament Language,
Literature, and Exegesis

45

THE SETTING OF THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT.
By W. D. Davies. (Cambridge University Press.) 547 pp. $12.50.

This book is no bedtime story. None of the books of W. D. Davies are.
He is the kind of writer who investigates the theme or problem thoroughly,
weighs all the arguments pro and con, and arrives at judicious conclusions.
The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount is so well documented and so full
of pertinent facts that it will go on the shelf reserved for reference books
and will constantly become a source for help in rightly understanding the
background of Matthew 5-7.

Davies has left no stone unturned in his "examination of influences,
within and without the church, which led to the concentrated presentation
of moral teaching known as the Sermon on the Mount" (p. IX). The book
does not seek to survey the content of the Sermon or its significance for
doctrine or ethics, but rather to investigate the circumstances of its emer-
gence and formulation. This is not to indicate that it is a study in source
criticism or form criticism or liturgy; instead it seeks to understand the his-
torical milieu in which the Sermon arose and to which it speaks.

The author rightly begins by investigating the setting which the Sermon
has in the Gospel of Matthew. He understands the writer of the first Gospel
not as an editor pasting together snippets of fragments garnered from the
early church but rather in a real sense as an author who has, to be sure, used
sources, but has used them for his own ends.

His conclusion is that Matthew does not set forth the Sermon on the
Mount as a new, revolutionary law in sharp antithesis to that given on Sinai
but as a "Messianic Torah," new in the authority with which it interprets the
Old Law ("You have heard it said . . . but I say unto you . . .").

Were there stimuli from outside the church which in any way determined
Matthew's presentation of the Sermon on the Mount? After surveying the
Messianic expectation of contemporary Judaism and the movements which
were active in first century Palestine, Davies concludes, particularly in the
light of the Council of Jamnia, that "it was the desire and necessity to present
a formulation of the way of the new Israel at a time when the Rabbis were
engaged in a parallel task for the old Israel" (p. 315).

As for internal stimuli Davies does not feel that this Sermon arose out
of any sort of practical necessity on the part of the church, such as cate-
chesis or paraenesis, but rather because these words of Jesus were an
indispensible part of the gospel itself. They clarified the moral and ethical
seriousness of the gospel and therefore were essential as revelation. To say
that the Christian faith is no more than a statement that God appeared in
human history in the form of a particular man, that he lived and taught and
died and was raised again is to reduce the faith to a mime. Instead, Davies
suggests, it should be understood as a drama in which the words of the chief
actor are essential to the action of the story. The chief actor of course is not
to be severed from the words which he spoke. In the light of the gospel the
imperatives of the Sermon become themselves indicatives; they prevent the
gospel from the danger of abstraction from life; they make concrete the
meaning of the kerygma. The Sermon thus becomes a kind of bridge span-
ning the arch between grace and law, between Paul and James.

The chief value of this book is its enormous contribution to the relation-
ship between Christianity and Judaism in the first century. This is Davies'

46

forte, and The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount will stand alongside his
Paul and Rabbinic Judaism as a monumental work. There are a number of
significant by-products which the book also provides, namely a valuable
study of the Council of Jamnia and a sympathetic critique of the approach
to the gospel tradition by Riesenfeld and Gerhardsson.

Charles B. Cousar

Associate Professor of New Testament
Language, Literature, and Exegesis

THE CROSS IN THE NEW TESTAMENT.

By Leon Morris. (William B. Eerdmans.) 454 pp. $6.95.

Principal Leon Morris here adds to his great doctoral study on The
Apostolic Preaching of the Cross this exegetical and doctrinal study of The
Cross in The New Testament. These two works bracket Morris with James
Denney whose two books on the same theme mightily re-inforced the Gospel
preaching of the last generation. Like Denney, Morris is a top-flight Greek
scholar with the rare gifts of careful analysis, discerning judgment, and pre-
cise language.

With an outreach that is encyclopaedic, the author has enriched his
presentation with quotations from most modern and many ancient writers.
These citation are generally positive, evidencing a rare facility for finding
good things even in "bad" books. The exception to this positive mood is
found in Morris' treatment of G. S. Hendry's The Gospel of the Incarnation.
Of this book, Morris writes: it attributes "no particular significance to the
death of Christ." In the last resort, he says, it is hard to see what difference
there is between the Jewish view of forgiveness and Professor Hendry's

For Morris, man's sin and guilt have put him into such a serious plight
that his salvation can only be wrought by God. Accordingly the New Testa-
ment writers see the cross of Christ as God's great act, which is efficacious
for man's salvation. The sin of man aroused the ire of the Almighty, but
through the blood of the Cross that Divine enmity was removed and recon-
ciliation was accomplished. Outside of Christ, Paul sees no hope of forgive-
ness. All that Paul was and all that he hoped for centered in the action of
God on the Cross. There God was propitiated, the world reconciled, man
forgiven. According to the Epistle to the Hebrews "Christ has dealt with sin
by bearing to the full all that it means. He has taken upon Himself God's
judgment. He stood in our place that we might go free." "No matter how sin
is understood, Christ is the answer."

It is a pleasure to endorse Morris' well substantiated conclusions. "In the
New Testament there cannot be the slightest doubt that the Cross is the
great central divine act which brings men salvation." "In His death Christ
made Himself one with sinners. He took their place." "By His life, death,
resurrection and ascension, Christ triumphed over Satan and sin and every
conceivable source of evil." "Not only did Christ win a victory, but he se-
cured a verdict. He wrought salvation powerfully, but also legally." "In His
death Christ is man's supreme example: inviting a threefold response in
repentance, faith and holy living so that there is a cross for the Christian as
well as for Christ." "While the many-sidedness of the atonement must be
borne in mind, substitution is at the heart of it." "Man can do nothing to

47

bring about his salvation, but must rest on what God has done for him"

in Christ.

William C. Robinson

Professor of Ecclesiastical History,

Church Polity, and Apologetics

GOD'S WORD INTO ENGLISH.

By Dewey M. Beegle. (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.) 230 pp.
$2.25. (Paperback)

Many developments in recovering a more authentic text, the increasing
pace of language change, so much unnatural, frequently obscure, and some-
times ambiguous, misleading and inaccurate wording these are only a
few of the reasons set forth with generous illustrative evidence for the urgent
necessity of each generation having a fresh translation of the Bible in a
reasonably contemporary vernacular.

Half the book, first published in 1960, is given to appendices reprinting
pertinent documents and to a description and critical estimate of nine major
translations and two reprints issued between 1960 and 1964.

The reading of this fascinating, informative and yet complicated story
of the problems of putting Scripture into understandable English should
renew our confidence in the evangelical and pedagogical soundness of regu-
lar use in pulpit and pew, in classroom and home, of an up-to-date transla-
tion. How long will God's Word be fettered and thus abused, especially for
our youth, for new Christians and for not-yet Christians, by the clinging to
obsolete versions?

Dean G. McKee

Professor of Biblical Exposition

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS:

A Study of Ethical Freedom.

By Ronald S. Wallace. (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.) 181 pp.
$3.95.

More than a rigid legal code, demanding the strictest compliance under
threat of dire penalty for failure, the "Ten Commandments usher us into a
world dominated by a living Lord who desires to enter personal communion
with His people and to give personal guidance to them when they are in
every situation involving moral decisions," says the author of this little book.

Few contemporary writers on the Decalogue rise with any great strength
to counter the challenge of the so-called "new morality." Ronald Wallace's
book is the exception. Here is a fresh and forceful approach to the Com-
mandments which studies them in the light of Biblical themes necessary to
their understanding, interprets them in the light of the New Testament, and
applies them with an insight as contemporary as are the morning headlines.
So, for example, the threat of idolatry to the new young Israelite nation is
vividly described, but no less vivid is the description of the idols men worship
today. And then there is the clear portrayal of the only Image of Himself
that the mercifully jealous God permits us. The study of the Sabbath Day,

48

its practices and perversions, from the creation story to the New Testament
Lord's Day is clear and succinct, but its timely meaning for today is emphatic
summoning man from his absorption in creation, not just to relax, but
to step back from his busy preoccupation, discover God's company again,
and in it the whole reason for his existence.

So for each of the Ten Commandments, Ronald Wallace leads his readers
through solid Biblical scholarship to a clear Christian interpretation of the
Decalogue with convincing and fresh applications for a day desperately
groping for moral certitude. This is a book that should be in every preacher's
library.

Harry A. Fifield

Pastor, First Presbyterian Church,

Atlanta, Ga.

SOCIETY AND PURITANISM IN
PRE-REVOLUTIONARY ENGLAND.

By Christopher Hill. (Schocken.) 520 pp. $10.00.

INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF THE
ENGLISH REVOLUTION.

By Christopher Hill. (Oxford University Press.) 333 pp. $7.20.

Christopher Hill has recently been elected to the coveted position of
Master of Balliol College, Oxford. His special field of interest is the English
Revolution and its antcedents. The works under review are an impressive
addition to his earlier works in this field: The English Revolution 1640;
Economic Problems of the Church from Archibishop Whitgift to the Long
Parliament; Puritanism and Revolution; Oliver Cromwell, 1658-1958; and
The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714.

Dr. Hill is an accurate and meticulous scholar. In the first of the two
volumes under review he points out that the puritans were often supported
by the industrious sort of people for a variety of non-theological reasons,
and that no account of puritanism is adequate which neglects the part played
by these non-theological factors; in the second volume, he discusses the
part played by ideas in relation to the political changes of the seventeenth
century ("After two decades of economic interpretations of the English Civil
War, the time, I believe, is ripe for a revival of interest in the ideas that
motivated the seventeenth century revolutionaries").

The author demonstrates, by a wealth of apposite quotations, that there
was no hard and fast agreement as to the meaning of the term "puritan." It
was, of course, used pejoratively, but the overtones were sometimes political,
sometimes social, sometimes ecclesiastical, depending upon the individual's
prejudices and predilections. (Shakespeare makes Maria say: "Sir, some-
times he is a kind of puritan." To which Sir Andrew replies: "O, if I thought
that, I'd beat him like a dog!") The one thing the term "puritan" did not
mean, the author says, is the accepted stereotype of an embittered killjoy.
("The Puritan," Macauley satirically observes, reflecting the views of a later
time, "hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because
it gave pleasure to the spectators.") In his second volume Christopher Hill

49

makes a further comment: "Very few of the so-called 'Puritans' were 'Puri-
tanical' in the nineteenth century sense of that word, obsessed by sex and
opposed to fun: 'Puritanism' of this sort was largely a Post-Restoration
creation. The body of ideas which has to be called 'Puritan' . . . was a
philosophy of life, an attitude to the universe, which by no means excluded
secular interests.")

With a wealth of superb documentation the author discusses the life of
the industrious sort of people, and the way in which considerations of eco-
nomic advantage conveniently combined with theological conviction to justify
resistance to autocracy in Church and State.

Christopher Hill has a barbed wit. Commenting on the royal appointment
of bishops, he cynically notes: "Bishops appointed by the Crown very rarely
forget their maker." He speaks of the degradation of the word "charity":
"It used to be the holiest, of the three, holier than hope or even faith: it
has become a crust of bread handed to the poor man at the gate." Concern-
ing the maypole (abhorred by the puritans for its phallic associations) he
observes: "It is one of history's little ironies that the liberty poles of the
American Revolution descended from the maypole."

The author shows the way in which theology tended to adjust itself to
changing social realities. "When both the discipline and Calvinist theology
lost their grip in the conditions of relative freedom of the sixteen-forties, the
sects formed new voluntary communities. In them the emphais moved away
from discipline to social services and communal self-help, just as the theo-
logical emphasis shifted from the eternal decrees to the perfectibility of
man."

This is a learned work which demands, and deserves, careful and critical
study: its merit is that it raises, in the sharpest form, inescapable questions
concerning the relationship between theology and society.

In his second volume the author discusses the contributions of Bacon,
Ralegh, and Coke, in relation to science, history, and law. The puritan em-
phasis upon personal experience ("True knowledge of Christ," wrote Thomas
Taylor, "is experimental") accorded with the new reliance on experiment
in relation to science. Science, history, law, "all three provided ideas for the
men who hitherto had existed only to be ruled, but who in the sixteen-forties
would help to take over the government. Together with the Puritan sense
of destiny and emphasis on self-help, they prepared men for revolution."

The two volumes, taken together, illustrate the unsuspected ramifications
of puritanism in every field of thought and activity. They are a notable
achievement.

Stuart Barton Babbage
Visiting Professor of Practical
Apologetics

THEOLOGY OF WORSHIP IN 17th
CENTURY LUTHERANISM.

By Friedrich Kalb. Translated by Henry Hamann. (Concordia Pub-
lishing House.) 192 pp. $3.95.

Those concerned for both orthodoxy and liturgy will welcome Friedrich
Kalb's study. His question is who was responsible for deviation from class-
ical Lutheran worship in the 17th century. His research indicates Orthodox

50

dogmaticians were unable to maintain inherited forms against the attacks
of Pietism and Rationalism.

Orthodoxy supported the classical concern for the whole man. Its the-
ologians discussed worship as an integral part of dogmatics (p. 41). They
had no split between liturgies and dogmatics, between religion and piety.
These were inseparables for the entire life of the Christian was worship.
Neither a few acts of an external nature performed in a worship service,
nor the private devotions of a devout individual, fulfilled worship (pp. 8, 9).
Intellectual grasp of doctrine and complete life service were interdependent,
not exclusive, parts of Christian life. Internal devotion of the heart led to
participation in external public rites witnessing to the reality of the internal
attitude but not substituting for it.

Pietism fragmented man into spirit and body. Primary emphasis was
placed upon personal experience and congregational rites were minimized.
Conversion was substituted for confirmation, private baptism was practiced,
efforts were made to hold communion services in private homes. The doc-
trine of justification by faith was levelled against liturgical actions for some
might consider the latter works of merit.

Searching the Scriptures for clear directives Orthodoxy built a legalistic
defense for classical Lutheran forms. This helped resist the inroads of
spiritualizing and individualizing tendencies, but it did not prevent decay.
Its inadequacy is evidenced in part by its failure to recognize the excellencies
of Schutz and Bach, "the real pinnacles of Orthodox church music." (p. 150)
The demand that worship music must accompany a Biblical text left the
"wordless" music of Bach outside the province of worship. The critical and
negative dogmatic of Orthodoxy was incapable of meeting the problems of
the new age.

Lutheran struggles of the 17th century cast light upon similar Reformed
tensions in that period and also point directions for those seeking true faith
and right worship today. Kalb calls for positive understanding of the rela-
tionship of outward forms to the Gospel and for use of psychology and
aesthetics to determine the value of our forms for the worshipper. His study
warns us again of the dangers of legalism, traditionalism, and subjectivism.
His evidence is convincing.

Hubert V. Taylor

Professor of Public Speech and Music

LIFE AND FIRE OF LOVE:

Prayer and its presuppositions.

By Herbert M. Waddams. (S. P. C. K.) 242 pp. 18s. 6d.

Canon Waddams contributes a study of the Christian life and of prayer
which concentrates heavily on the inner life of the person who prays. The
first half of the book deals with what the subtitle apparently intends by the
word "presuppositions," but the author more accurately defines his theme
as "ascetical" or "mystical" theology. Instead of attempting a portrayal of
the God to whom the Christian prays, Canon Waddams urges that "all
Christians . . . can and must aspire to the mystical life," but he cautions
that "they cannot aspire to any particular mystical experiences." (p. 16)

51

In succession he discusses the will, the mind, and the feelings of the one
who prays, and then he enlarges upon the aspect of discipline in the Christian
life, drawing throughout from the New Testament and from the experience
of Christians through the ages.

In the second part of the book Canon Waddams defines three ways of
prayer, which many Christians will understand only with difficulty. He then
discusses various circumstances and their effect on the life of prayer. A brief
appendix deals with the problem of quietism, and the book concludes with
extracts from various spiritual writers.

Much of the terminology and many of the distinctions which occupy
Canon Waddams will be a foreign language to the typical activist American
Christian. Perhaps some prayer meeting groups will be ready to explore the
deeper refinements of his theme, but the fact that most Sunday morning
Christians would find it difficult to complete the reading of the book is an
indication of the shallowness of the life of the Spirit among us.

James H. Gailey, Jr.

Professor of Old Testament Language,

Literature, and Exegesis

HANDBOOK OF BIBLICAL CHRONOLOGY

By Jack Finegan. (Princeton University Press.) 338 pp. $8.50.

Dr. Finegan's work should prove a valuable addition to the library of
any person interested in studying the historical framework of the Bible. It is
primarily a handbook, i.e., a work of reference to which one may turn for
certain information regarding the chronology of the Bible. However, it is
also advantageous to read through the book as a whole since only then one
becomes acquainted with the various problems of reckoning time in the
ancient world and its relation to Biblical events and our own calendar.

The book is conveniently printed in numbered paragraphs which yet
form a synthetic whole dealing with systems of reckoning time in Egypt,
Mesopotamia, Israel, Greece and Rome; proceeding to a survey of the
chronographies of Africanus and Eusebius, dealing finally with the internal
problems of Old and New Testament chronology.

One wonders whether the proportions of the various parts of the book
might not have been adjusted a little better since Part I is nearly double
the length of Part II, and some of the tabulations appear rather repetitious;
the 40 pages dealing with the Chronicle of Eusebius might in the opinion of
this reviewer also have been condensed profitably.

Clarity is one of the admirable features of the book which is evidenced,
for example, in the following excerpt dealing with the important matter of
regnal years: "In the accession-year system the portion of a year from the
accession of the king to the end of the then current calendar year is only
his "accession year" (and for chronological purposes remains a part of the
last numbered regnal year of his predecessor), and the new king's Year 1
begins only on the first day of the new calendar year after his accession. In
the nonaccession-year system the portion of a calendar year, no matter how
brief, remaining from the accession of the king to the end of the then current
calendar year is treated not as an uncounted accession year but as already
Year 1 of the new king; therewith the preceding king fails to be credited

52

with that calendar year as a regnal year in which he does not live out a

full year on the throne."

The section dealing with chronological problems of the New Testament,

such as the significance of the Star of Bethlehem, the problem of Synoptic

and Johannine reckoning of time in Passion week, and the dates concerning

the careers of Peter and Paul, are most illuminating.

Ludwig R. Dewitz

Professor of Old Testament Language,

Literature, and Exegesis

CHRIST AND ARCHITECTURE:

Building Presbyterian/Reformed Churches.

By Donald J. Bruggink and Carl H. Droppers. (William B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co.) 708 pp. $20.00.

Christ and Architecture is a magnificent plea for theologically oriented
church architecture. After the hymns are sung and the sermon spoken the
church building can itself stand as a witness to Christ. The possibilities and
impact of this visual witness unfold in the readable, informative text and
photographic record of witnessing churches. The wholeness and oneness in
Christ become a seen and felt experience as the word and sacraments are
expressed in sensitively designed communion tables and baptismal fonts. The
careful design of these objects is a dynamic heritage of Christianity growing
from the desire of Christians to allow Christ to speak in every feature of
the sanctuary.

After the experience of the first half of the book seeing Christ mani-
fest in His church structures the second half of the book deals marvel-
ously with all the practicalities, such as selection of the architect, church
neighborhood surveys, site selection principles, the overall cost picture, the
contractor, maintenance, depreciation, the shape of the church building, and
even the organ.

Christ and Architecture is absolutely indispensible reading and resource
for every church, minister, session, building committee and responsible lay-
man, since many who are not building need to reconsider the witness of their
sanctuary.

Mrs. James H. Gailey, Jr.

NERO: The Man And The Legend.

By John Bishop. (Robert Hale, London.) 208 pp. 21s.

The Professor of Classics in the University of New England (in Aus-
tralia, not America), advances two novel interpretations: the first, in rela-
tion to the part played by Christians in the Fire of Rome (A. D. 64); and
secondly, in relation to the legend of Nero Redivivus.

Tacitus, in a well known passage, asserts that Nero, to deflect suspicion
from himself, accused the Christians of responsibility for the appalling con-
flagration, punishing them with appropriate ferocity. The Christians, while
not responsible for starting the fire, Professor Bishop suggests, were never-
theless responsible for spreading the fire. They believed in the imminent

53

return of their Lord, which return, they taught, was to be preceded by a
great fire presaging "the day of judgment and the perdition of ungodly men"
(2 Peter 3:7). "On that July night in 64 the Christians, eager and expectant
for the return of their Lord, alerted by the hedonistic passions of the pagan
Romans around them, recognizing in them the signs of decay that were to
herald the end, were suddenly confronted with the pagan heart of the Empire
in flames. Forgetful of their duty to obey civil authorities as far as they could
in civil matters . . . they threw themselves with enthusiasm into the task of
helping to prepare the way for the Lord." There is only one difficulty about
this hypothesis: the alleged conduct of the Christians violates every accepted
principle of Christian morality. The author's interpretation is ingenious but
incredible.

Secondly, the author argues that Nero was not the object of universal
detestation tradition has represented him to be. "The Nero Legend is a fact
of history: men in their thousands held his memory dear enough to await
with a thrill of loyal anticipation the return of an Emperor who had looked
after them well." The legend of Nero Redivivus, however, may have been
the product, not of eager expectation, but of hysteric fear: and this, in the
light of Nero's known character, is the more probable explanation.

Stuart Barton Babbage
Visiting Professor of Practical
Apologetics

PRESBYTERIAN WORSHIP: Its Meaning and Method.
By Donald Macleod. (John Knox Press.) 152 pp. $3.25.

For Presbyterian theological students and pastors seeking specific meth-
ods and procedures for the ordering of public worship, the administration of
the sacraments, and the conduct of weddings and funerals this is the long-
awaited book. Amid the current restudy of worship (new Directory for
Worship and Work, experimental Service for the Lord's Day) church officers
and teachers will find here a helpful guide to the why and how of changes
their pastors propose. The glossary of terms will serve to prevent breakdowns
in current dialogues on worship.

Macleod first traces the theological and historical foundations of current
worship theory and then erects a tripartite order for morning service : Prepa-
ration, Proclamation of the Word, Fellowship of Prayer. Each portion of the
service is discussed and suggestions for procedure are offered. Chapters on
the sacraments both expose the meaning of these symbols and indicate their
appropriate administration.

Would that Macleod had provided more adequate guidance to the
excellent literature now available on worship! Readers stimulated by his
laconic excursions into meaning could then have pursued further study
readily. Why not an annotated bibliography? Worship practice should rise
out of thorough understanding of worship theory for without theory practice
becomes routine and pastors become imitators, not creators of significant
forms.

One misses here adequate discussion of prayer, especially of the im-
portant prayers at the Lord's Table. More thought could well be devoted
to the significance of the offering in the service, and some will disagree with
Macleod's insistence that the offering should never be placed upon the Table.

54

This first comprehensive handbook on Presbyterian worship published
since C. W. Baird's Presbyterian Liturgies (1855) deserves a place on many
Presbyterian shelves.

Hubert V. Taylor

Professor of Public Speech and Music

OPEN LETTER TO EVANGELICALS.

By R. E. O. White. (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.) $4.95.

The title of this volume (a commentary on the First Epistle of John)
indicates its basic thrust. Dr. White expounds the Scripture focusing the
attention of the reader upon the passage being studied.

By a unique organization of the treatment the reader is led along a sound
procedure in exposition. Part One is a clear, concise exposition of the obvious
thought of the epistle, directing attention to what is written without distrac-
tions of critical questions or argument for or against some current theory of
interpretation. It appears as a careful study of the text in its own movement
of thought. Part Two is a very rewarding group of six essays discussing
contemporary problems in evangelical thought in the light of I John. Part
Three serves as an appendix comprised of scholarly and critical notes on
problems implicit in the commentary as presented.

The reading of this volume will not only enrich understanding of I John,
but it will afford wholesome examination of contemporary evangelicalism,
as well as familiarize the reader with a sound procedure in dealing with
Scripture.

Manford Geo. Gutzke

Professor of Biblical Exposition and

Christian Education

A CHRISTIAN NATURAL THEOLOGY:
Based on the thought of Alfred North Whitehead.

By John B. Cobb, Jr. (The Westminster Press.) 288 pp. $6.50.

Certainly the influence of Kierkegaard has been dominant in contempo-
rary theology. The emphasis among theologians has been more and more
upon personal, vital faith. Bultmann and some of his diciples have all but
declared metaphysical statements to be demonic. This preoccupation with
the historic and personal has made it difficult if not impossible to speak
meaningfully of God's relation to the non-personal. Theologians have moved
back over a familiar route which ends in man's subjectivity. We should not
be surprised, therefore, to find today a lively group of Feuerbachians (the
God-is-death theologians).

There have been a number of theologians who have tried to see God's
relation to the whole of reality, not just to the subjectivity of the individual.
But to describe God's relation to the world is not easy in today's technological
world. What terms shall we use? Can we speak of God being out there, etc.?
In addition when one makes statements about God or Christ, one does pre-
suppose certain things about the nature of reality. These assumptions need
to be clarified. John Cobb refers to this task as the work of Christian natural

55

theology. Cobb grants that one can have faith in God through Christ without
this intellectual exercise; nevertheless, this intellectual undertaking must be
done. It is Cobb's commitment and his desire to be a theologian which
pushes him to deal with philosophy (p. 14).

Cobb is a true post-Barthian; he takes the recent criticisms of natural
theology seriously (pp. 259ff). Nevertheless he is not satisfied either to use
just any philosophical categories or to try to create a Christian philosophy.
It is more realistic, he believes, to modify an existing philosophy.

The major part of the book is devoted to explaining, correcting and
adding to Whitehead's metaphysics. Many will be surprised to see how con-
genial Cobb's version of Whitehead is with Biblical faith. The arguments
for understanding God as personal and Cobb's own warmth as a theologian
will no doubt contribute to the growing dialogue between the Christian faith
and Whiteheadian philosophy.

Neely Dixon McCarter
Professor of Christian Education

HYMNS IN CHRISTIAN WORSHIP.

By Cecil Northcutt. (John Knox Press.) 83 pp. $1.75.

This thirteenth volume of Ecumenical Studies in Worship follows the
recommendation by the World Council of Churches' 1963 Faith and Order
Conference that varied elements of worship be studied with a view to im-
proving our ability to communicate the Gospel to our contemporaries and
to share our Christian life in worship. It succinctly deals with what hymns
communicate and with attempts to communicate this content more effectively.

Northcutt defines a hymn as "singable praise, and for the Christian that
means praise to God for His mighty acts in creation and Christ, a salute in
song to the events of the Gospel both in the Old and the New Israel. It is an
objective announcement in song of certain events in history, and of the
believer's experience concerning them." The Christian hymn has thus tradi-
tionally celebrated the great affirmations of Scripture. At its best moments
the Church has insisted upon song Scripturally true and doctrinally pure.
The hymn, therefore, has become a conservative force that preserves the
faith of the past and passes it on to new generations "even more pungently
and personally than the creeds themselves or indeed any other statement of
Christian belief."

The reader may be surprised to find the author linking contemporary
jazz experiments in hymnody with the nineteenth century "Gospel song," yet
Northcutt recognizes both as attempts either to reach the non-religious or
to retain the interest of the religious by the introduction of familiar styles
of music into worship. Although he recognizes some value in both efforts,
he doubts that either will develop a new style of hymnody matching the
universal appeal of classical hymnody. He approves the use of hymns at such
gatherings as sporting events and the "house church" because the power of
Christian song links the sacred and secular spheres in life: "People sing
hymns because they want to and like to, wherever they happen to be."

Pastors and parishioners will profit from study of this work. Its size and
cost make it available for all. Both may come to regard Christian song as

56

"an act of the Church at worship and not simply the individual believer sing-
ing a pious and independent solo."

Hubert V. Taylor

Professor of Public Speech and Music

TOWARD A THEOLOGY OF HISTORY

By J. V. Langmead Casserley. (Holt, Rinehart and Winston.) 238 pp.
$6.00.

Dr. Casserley, who has already given us an important work in his
The Christian In Philosophy, in this turns to the problem of the relationship
between Christianity and history. He is an original thinker and while he is
very critical of some of the contemporary work done in this field he is con-
structive rather than polemic.

"The Christian tradition cannot tolerate the scandal of irrational, un-
theological religion," he says, and then argues that "our doctrine of revela-
tion implies . . . some events . . . have an intrinsic, objective meaning of
their own." He then goes on "to argue that Biblical typology (carefully
purged of all allegorical elements) is a genuine historical method" and
demonstrates what he means by this by seeking to show that Toynbee, for
example, does this in his historiography, that is, Toynbee treats historical
events and interprets them in precisely the same way as events are interpreted
in the Bible. He recognizes, of course, that Toynbee does not take a Christian
point of view and makes a sharp criticism of the Toynbean synthesis by
saying, "We find in Toynbee the paradox of the historian who insists on
taking a religious view of history while resolutely declining to take a his-
torical view of religion." The task which Casserley sets out for himself is
to take a religious view of history (justified by Toynbee's example) but from
the point of view of a genuinely historical, but critical, understanding of
those events upon which Christian faith is founded. While Toynbee in this
is not necessarily saying anything "new" he does make his argument in an
original manner and in a very helpful way.

In replowing all of the ground that is involved in a theology of history
Casserley leaves for us a well prepared seedbed within which our own think-
ing can come to better flower.

Olof Harvard Lyon

Dean of Students and Director of

Field Education

RELIGION AT OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE.
By V. H. H. Green. (S. C. M. Press.) 392 pp. 42s.

Dr. Green, in this scholarly volume, comments on the way in which
Christianity, within the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, has been
subject to progressive secularisation. In effect, he provides us with a cap-
sulated history of Christianity in England as it has been played out on the
stage of these twin centres of ancient learning.

Dr. Green seeks to explain why evangelicals, in their day, failed to make
a more lasting and effective impact on their intellectual peers. "The more
obvious defects of the Evangelicals, then and later," he observes, "were their

57

instinctive conservatism, which made them fight shy of radicalism in politics
or religion, and, although they numbered some able minds, their intellectual
poverty." He speaks of their "distinctively antiseptic view of pleasure," their
censorious condemnation of those from whom they differed, their neglect
of the social dimensions of the gospel. "Even their jocularity could possess
a rebartative brightness, and their charm appear synthetic." Nevertheless,
evangelicals, he concedes, took the initiative in promoting missionary in-
terest and enthusiasm, and individual evangelicals played a notable role in
the realm of humanitarian reform.

Concerning the situation today, Dr. Green finds little room for optimism.
There is, he notes, an almost complete divorce between the university and
religion. Scientific humanism is the predominant influence today. If a pro-
fessional don seeks to integrate his field of study into a religious apologetic
he tends to be regarded with suspicion. "C. S. Lewis," he comments, "for
long a fellow of Magdalen, Oxford, and latterly the Professor of Mediaeval
and Renaissance English Literature at Cambridge, though very highly re-
garded as an English scholar, lost some respect in his own university for his
work in Christian apologetic."

This study inevitably invites serious reflection on the validity of our
contemporary strategy in relation to the evangelisation of the sceptical in-
telligensia of our day.

Stuart Barton Babbage
Visiting Professor of Practical
Apologetics

MISSION IN METROPOLIS.

By Jesse Jai McNeil. (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.) 148 pp.
$3.50.

"Redemptive involvement" is the theme of this book. With one foot on
a solid scriptural and evangelical foundation and the other on a keen dis-
cernment of the sociological problems involved, the author discusses Mission
in Metropolis.

Institutionalism, conformity, indifference, tradition, and unconcern must
be replaced by redemptive involvement, creative initiative, adaptability, and
the compassionate concern of the Living Christ.

This book should stir the more conservative, and stabilize the more
liberal, churchman. The Scriptures, the Holy Spirit, the Risen Christ must
guide in the complex problems of race, immorality, poverty, and indifference
in the inner city church and community.

Urban pastors Read and Heed!

Cecil A. Thompson

Professor of Evangelism and Missions

TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING
OF HOMOSEXUALITY.

By Daniel Cappon. (Prentice-Hall.) 302 pp. $6.95.

"There are no homosexuals only people with homosexual problems.
No person with a homosexual problem, however deep or extensive, is merely

58

an aberrant creature or a totally pathological specimen. Such a person re-
mains, first and foremost, a person." From this hopeful and theologically
tenable position Dr. Cappon, an analytical psychotherapist, launches a work
that should be found in every pastor's or counselor's library.

His book is an important contribution in that it stands almost alone as
a comprehensive, well balanced survey of the best of contemporary thought
in the difficult area of homosexuality. This is no small achievement when
the topic is such a controversial one, so laden with centuries of bias and
confusion, and illuminated by so few candles of real factual knowledge.

The fact that the book is directed toward the pastoral counselor is a
bonus of questionable value. Dr. Cappon writes in a style the well trained
minister can understand, but, in his concept of the minister as a moralist
rather than a pastor, he denies him the right ever to become an adequate
counselor.

Robert L. Faulkner, M.D.
Graduate Student

59

SHORTER NOTICES

THE PERSONAL HERESY: A CONTROVERSY.

By E. M. W. Till yard and C. S. Lewis. (Oxford University Press.)
150 pp. $1.50 (Paperback).

This reprint of a famous debate on the nature of poetry between E. M. W.
Tillyard and C. S. Lewis (both of whom are unhappily deceased) is most
welcome. Is poetry an expression of the poet's personality, or is poetry con-
cerned with objective reality? C. S. Lewis, who subscribes to the latter view,
believes that the answer to this question has metaphysical implications.

All who enjoy the delights of lucid thought, pungent expression and
hard-hitting debate will respond to the thrust and parry of this classic con-
troversy. Of C. S. Lewis, Tillyard testifies: "He is, indeed, the best kind of
opponent, good to agree with when one can, and for an enemy as courteous
as he is honest and uncompromising; the kind of opponent with whom I
should gladly exchange armour after a parley, even if I cannot move my
tent to the ground where is own is pitched."

THE BROKEN WORLD OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS.

By Esther Merle Jackson. (The University of Wisconsin Press.) 179
pp. $5.75.

Tennessee Williams, the author says, "conceived for popular theatre an
ancient purpose: the exposure of human suffering." Each play, for Williams,
"represents a glimpse of reality, a momentary image drawn out of the flux."

Williams is committed to an ethic, Dr. Jackson argues, "which regards
man as a sinner, as a transgressor whose salvation is dependent on his
personal recognition of his condition." To achieve this end he seeks to shock
the spectator into a recognition of his moral condition by exposing both his
public and private sins. (In this connection, Sartre argues that the theatre
has usurped the function of the church in exposing the guilt of man.)

Dr. Jackson, in this brilliant analysis, concludes that "Williams has at-
tempted to restore to the theatre not only its creative power but also its
moral function and its ritual power of carthasis . . . He comes to define
the condition of man in terms very much like those of orthodox Christianity
and to pose, therefore, for human redemption and reconciliation, the for-
giveness of God."

RACE: A STUDY IN SUPERSTITION.

By Jacques Barzun. (Harper and Row.) 263 pp. $5.00.

An important work, first published in 1937, by one of America's leading
cultural minds on the most pressing social question of the present day,
written with the objective of showing "how equally ill-founded are the com-
monplace and the learned views of race." In his preface to this new edition
Dr. Barzun strikes out at "the danger and the folly of thinking that groups
are made up of identically hateful or identically lovable people." "We must
learn," he says, "to see and to believe that generalities about groups, even

60

when true, tell us nothing about the individual, and that it is the individual
we must judge."

JOHN KNOX.

By Lord Eustace Percy. (John Knox Press.) 343 pp. $4.50.

A standard and sympathetic biography of the great Scottish Reformer
which has done much to re-establish the true stature of John Knox as a
national leader and man of God in the troubled times in which he lived.

THE PARABLES OF THE KINGDOM.

By C. H. Dodd. (Charles Scribner's Sons.) 176 pp. $1.45.

A celebrated study of the Parables in which the doyen of British New
Testament scholars expounds his thesis of the "realized eschatology" implicit
in the teaching of Jesus.

IRONY IN THE OLD TESTAMENT.

By Edwin M. Good. (The Westminster Press.) 256 pp. $6.50.

It is very easy to miss irony or to misunderstand it. Perhaps the reason
no one has written on the irony of the Bible is that the Book has been taken
so seriously and so literally that it did not seem proper to look for irony
in it. Professor Good has looked for and found irony in the Old
Testament. His definition of irony is broad enough to take in both the
tragic and the comic, in fact, to take in quite a range of rhetorical devices
with ironic aspects. Since irony springs from a vision of truth, it is funda-
mentally in harmony with the motives which produced the Bible and the
study of it can lead to new insights.

Drawing on studies of Jonah, Saul, Genesis, Isaiah, Qoheleth and Job,
Good concludes that Biblical faith liberates men to an obedience to God's
demands that has room for the expression of irony. "The urgency lies with
faith, not with the faithful." As a result the faithful may turn irony against
themselves as well as against the many incongruities of life.

CHRISTIANITY AND THE VISUAL ARTS:

STUDIES IN THE ART AND ARCHITECTURE OF THE CHURCH.

Edited by Gilbert Cope. (The Faith Press.) 107 pp. 42s.

A variety of contributors discuss changing styles of art down the ages,
with particular reference to the interpretation and portrayal of Christ. Gilbert
Cope discusses the nature of contemporary architecture in relation to Coven-
try Cathedral. The illustrations splendidly illuminate and clarify the text.
This book has the merit of raising fundamental questions in relation to
theology and liturgy.

61

THE GRACE OF THE LAW:

A STUDY IN PURITAN THEOLOGY.

By Ernest F. Kevan. (The Carey Kingsgate Press.) 294 pp. 30s.

The Bible recognizes that the law serves three different purposes: there
is the civil use of the law to restrain evil men; there is the use of the law as
a "schoolmaster" to convict men of sin and lead them to Christ; there is the
use of the law as a guide to the Christian life. Dr. Kevan, in this doctoral
study, is primarily concerned with the third purpose, illustrating his theme
by reference to a host of seventeenth century puritan writers. This study has
an immediate relevance to current discussions concerning "the new Morality"
and the relationship between law and love.

ADMINISTERING CHRISTIAN EDUCATION:

PRINCIPLES OF ADMINISTRATION FOR MINISTERS AND
CHRISTIAN LEADERS.

By Robert K. Bower. (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.) 227 pp.
$3.95.

Deriving his principles from several areas (including the commercial, the
military and the ecclesiastical) Dr. Bower organizes administrative procedures
into planning, organizing, delegating, staffing, coordinating and controlling.

The book does not deal with nurture; encounter with Jesus Christ is the
sole goal of Christian education. Success of one's administrative work is de-
termined by efficient operation and numerical growth. The lack of either is
cause for replacement or retraining of personnel. One wonders if this is a
sufficiently total concept of the Church. Can one adequately derive admin-
istrative procedures for the Church by adopting those of business and the
military, even if they are checked for harmony with Scriptural ideals?

THE CREATIVE ERA: BETWEEN THE TESTAMENTS.
By Carl G. Howie. (John Knox Press.) 96 pp. $1.45.

"The creative era" is a happy designation for the relatively little known
period between the Old and New Testaments. In a brief but highly pertinent
survey Carl Howie covers the history of the period from the rise of Cyrus
and the Persian Empire to the birth of Jesus.

The true creativity of the period is not to be found in the erection of the
Hasmonean kingdom or in Herod's magnificent building program, but in the
probing of the theological and practical consequences of the idea that One
God has created the whole world and rules it. In a way that should appeal to
laymen as well as ministers Howie traces the changing forms of faith which
prepared the stage for the proclamation of God's action in Christ and for the
call which the early Christians issued in His name for men to unite in the
new Kingdom of love.

62

HENRY THORNTON OF CLAPHAM 1760-1815.

By Standish Meacham. (Harvard University Press.) 206 pp. $4.95.

This is a biography of one of the notable members of that coterie of
evangelical churchmen familiarly known as the "Clapham Sect", so-called
because of their residence near Clapham Common.

The book is marred by the intrusive introduction of gratuitous polemics.
"We lose patience," he protests, "with righteous zeal." Their achievements,
he says, "appeal least to the modern temper." "Evangelicals," he relates,
"carried Christianity to the heathen" (in a sentence in which the rules of
grammar are recklessly disregarded), "forced Christianity upon him, and
made him lie down upon their Procrustean bed." Their "buoyant optimism,"
he tells us, "sounds almost fatuously naive."

Perhaps it is the author's lack of imaginative sympathy which makes this
biography dull. It is based on a careful examination of the sources; never-
theless, it profoundly disappoints. The explanation is not far to seek: the
author is at odds with his subject.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE: THE KNOWN AND THE UNKNOWN.
By Edward Wagenknecht. (Oxford University Press.) 267 pp. $6.00.

The author of Uncle Tom's Cabin wrote: "This story is to show how
Jesus Christ, who liveth and was dead, and now is alive forevermore, has
still a mother's love for the poor and lowly, and that no man can sink so
low but that Jesus Christ will stoop to take his hand." Lincoln once sug-
gested that Mrs. Stowe's famous novel caused the Civil War. Wagenknecht,
in this useful and informative biography, studies Mrs. Stowe as wife and
mother and writer and reformer.

THROUGH TEMPTATION.

By James H. Hansom. (Augsburg Publishing House.) 78 pp. $1.50.

A penetrating analysis of temptation in the light of Genesis 3 and Mat-
thew 4.

THE HOLOCAUST KINGDOM: A MEMOIR.

By Alexander Donat. (Holt, Rinehart and Winston.) 361 pp. $5.95.

A stark account of the harrowing sufferings of a Jewish family who
miraculously escaped living incineration in the Warsaw Ghetto only to ex-
perience the further horrors of Auschwitz, Dauchau and Ravensbruck. The
way in which certain representatives of the church sought to exploit the
plight of the sufferers for sectarian advantage is as incredible as it is shame-
ful.

63

FAITH AND FICTION:

CREATIVE PROCESS IN GREEN AND MAURI AC.
By Philip Stratford. (University of Notre Dame Press.) 345 pp. $5.95.

Professor Stratford's purpose in this book is to delineate the "complex
interplay of faith and fiction" because, he states, the tension that results
from the unresolved conflict between faith and fiction gives singularity and
distinction to the creative works of Green and Mauriac. The most common
trait between Green and Mauriac, he explains, is their concern to create a
fictional world in which theological concerns, sin, grace, commitment, be-
come real in the characters.

Jean Paul Sartre has criticized Mauriac for controlling the destiny of his
characters and depriving them of real freedom. Stratford insists, however,
that it is only as these authors control their characters and their destiny with
a view to propound doctrine that they succeed as artists.

Stratford is concerned with a matter of fundamental importance the
relationship between faith and the act of artistic creation but he makes the
basic mistake of starting with a conclusion and then seeking to prove his
thesis instead of creatively searching for a real relationship.

NEAR EASTERN ARCHAEOLOGICAL SEMINAR
July 2 -August 28, 1966

The Near Eastern Archaeological Seminar offers an unusual overseas
educational program for students of history, archaeology, anthropology, ge-
ography, and theology. The program consists of academic courses combined
with actual participation in archaeological work as field experience, traveling
through historical countries and the visiting of ancient sites.

Professor James H. Gailey, Jr., Columbia, will teach the History of
Palestine and Professor Immanuel Ben Dor, Candler School of Theology
will teach Archaeology of Palestine.

for information write to:

Professor James H. Gailey, Jr., Columbia Seminary, Decatur, Ga. 30031

64

BRIEF THOUGHTS FROM BRIEFER MOMENTS

I flew to Chattanooga Sunday last.
The flight was late
And noon was long since past.
The light fell slanting

and though dim,
Revealed the snow-draped fields below.
The snow was tan,

not glistening white;
The dark red Georgia earth showed through.
I thought how often the men we really are

show through
The robes of righteousness we wear.

Shannon Cumming

ONLY BY THY LOVE

Oh Lord, My God, I stand in awe before Thee,
My knees give way, my heart is sore distressed.
I pray Thy peace, Thy grace and mercy to me,
Thy strength and power for one by troubles pressed.
May yet my soul sing "Glory, Hallelujah,"
My lips speak out Thy praise to all mankind.
For Thou art great and holy beyond measure;
I bow to Thee my heart and soul and mind.
The angels bow in holy awe before Thee.
How then may I, a sinful man, rejoice?
When all creation honors and adores Thee,
How dare I lift a single trembling voice?
My God, my Christ, my Savior Thou and Master,
My sins are washed away within Thy blood,
So stand I clean within Thy glorious presence.
My lips are opened only by Thy love.

Shannon Cumming