Heresy In Poetry
Religious Trends in English Poetry, Vol. V: 1880–1920, by H. N. Fairchild (Columbia University, 1963, 663 pp., $10), is reviewed by Roderick Jellema, assistant professor of English, University of Maryland, College Park.
The first volume of Professor Fairchild’s study of the history of religious sensibility as reflected in poetry appeared twenty-five years ago. He had set out to analyze the whole “spiritual pathology” of English poetry from 1700 to the present. This fifth volume brings us down to 1920—five-sixths of the way to the end.
What Professor Fairchild is quietly giving us is a patchy, crazy-quilt reference work of sound scholarship. It is a queer, uneven work that grumbles and snorts and laughs and smiles and sighs underneath the thrust of its brilliantly developed theses. It is too comprehensive to be tidy; too serious to be slick; too human to be grave or merely scholarly. In short, it has all the earmarks of a neglected but enduring classic.
In an age of graphs and “social sciences” we should perhaps remind ourselves of the importance of Professor Fairchild’s undertaking. He is not sifting through 250 years of mere facts and proclamations. In tracing the course of religious thought and feeling in poetry, he is studying the religious in its highest and most intense form of human speech. That, after all, is what poetry is: heightened human speech coming out of heightened human vision. Henry Zylstra, in the opening paragraphs of his Testament of Vision, reminded us again that poetry “is as a face on which the soul of the time is written.” Professor Fairchild reads the faces of past ages, testing the spirits, whether they be of God, with the fine critical discernment and the disturbed compassion of the Christian scholar.
Volume V studies the crack-ups and confusions and shifting values that followed hard upon the uneasy compromises between Christianity, science, and romantic individualism during the Victorian era (1830–1880—covered in Vol. IV). These two volumes ought to be of special and immediate interest to twentieth-century readers.
Consider, for example, our popular attitude toward the past century. Especially in this election year, but much of the time anyway, we find ourselves being drowned in an oozing honey of nostalgia for “the good old days.” This nostalgia is partly escapist; but it is usually associated somehow with morality, and its impulse is usually vaguely religious. It comes probably more often from the pulpit than from the press or the political stump. Its protest seems to be that our great-grandfathers lived in a sane, responsible, meaningful, moral, religious world, whereas we live in a sick, aimless, immoral, and decaying one.
Partly in the interest of preserving some meaning for the phrase “Christian faith,” Professor Fairchild cracks this nostalgic reverie wide open. If the poets are an accurate thermometer—and have they ever misrepresented the age in which they lived?—then all the symptoms of spiritual disease were already fully present in the body of the nineteenth century. The sickness cannot be hidden by all the gilt and black cloth, the stuffy parlors and sentimental pictures, the grand talk about thrift and industry. The intense preoccupation with Mammon, progress, science, and respectability altered the concept of God beyond biblical recognition. He was romanticized into a vague “Gleam” or “the Grail”; he was an object of great aspiration, but largely as a projected image of what is noblest in man. One can summon forth tons of “religious poetry” from the period, most of it smothering thought rather than laying it bare, much of it written by people whom Fairchild calls “devout birdwatchers.” Such poetry is there, Fairchild notes, because “precisely to the extent that it has ceased to believe anything in particular, the public also likes its poetry to be surcharged with an amorphous religiosity.” There is almost never a redeeming Christ in this stuff (though that is probably the central question about him in twentieth-century poetry); there is usually only gushing sentimentality about a kind martyr named Jesus. The poets, reflecting their age, tend to “dissolve the Cross in that world which it was meant to save.” The salt having lost its savor, to paraphrase Paul Claudel, they savored it with sugar. The convention has not entirely died in our own age.
The discovery of Victorian heresy underneath the smugness is not at all a new one. But Professor Fairchild’s illustrations and discussions of the malaise give the discovery a sharper relevance.
One might expect, for example, that it was the rebels and radicals in the nineteenth century who were effecting the unholy marriage of romanticism and the Christian faith. Not so. The arrogant, self-satisfied heresies are found most often in the respectable and respected family-hearth poets who identified themselves with middle-class mores and therefore (another unholy marriage!) with the Christian faith. While they were grandly flourishing a faith not worth holding, the Jesuit poet G. M. Hopkins was keeping out of print; the bohemians were wrestling painfully against the Christian apologetics of Cardinal Newman (Fairchild overlooks this); and the bitter agnostics, shaking fists against the darkening sky, were grappling with the essential questions and at least coming near a real encounter with the one faith that can save man.
That whole age ended, as we know, in despair. It endowed our own age with disillusionment. But it might be argued, after Professor Fairchild’s book if not out of it, that the illusions were not worth having, anyway; that therefore the honest confusion in our own literature is a harbinger of sounder spiritual health.
In any case, we have to try to understand the spirit of our own times, how it got that way, where it is penetrable by the Christian message. Professor Fairchild’s chock-full masterpiece is an invaluable source book.
RODERICK JELLEMA
Victories In Viet Nam
The Bamboo Cross, by Homer E. Dowdy (Harper & Row, 1964, 239 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by J. Gordon Jones, pastor, First Baptist Church, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
These are times that test the optimism and hopefulness of Christians. We live in a world overshadowed with storm clouds. If it isn’t the Congo, it is Cyprus; if it isn’t Cuba, it is Viet Nam. Yet even in such a world, “it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”
This book tells of the kindling of lights, not in the cities of America, but in the jungles of Viet Nam. What is the Church doing in Southeast Asia? Here is the answer. It is interesting because of its up-to-the-minute story of Christian missions among the tribesmen of Viet Nam. It is informing because it deals with a part of the world about which many of us know very little. And it is inspiring because it describes victories won for Christ by representatives of the Christian and Missionary Alliance among a people whose minds have been darkened by sorcerers and witch-doctors.
This book is required reading for anyone who wishes a first-hand account of how the light of the Gospel is beginning to burn brightly in one of the most disturbed areas of Southeast Asia. There is not a dull page in this carefully written and well-illustrated volume.
J. GORDON JONES
God Or Idols?
The Abolition of God, by Hans-Gerhard Koch (Fortress, 1964, 191 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by William W. Paul, head, Division of Religion and Philosophy, Central College, Pella, Iowa.
“In the long run man is not able to do without God, unless he creates ideologies for himself or endows himself with values which he puts in place of God. God or idols? That is the question facing humanity” (p. 190).
This is the powerful conclusion to which one is persuasively drawn by an author who not only has the critical eye of a scholar but knows what it means to work in the Soviet rock-quarries as a prisoner of war and to try to raise a family and be a pastor to a church in East Germany. Although the book is not an autobiography, it is a moving and carefully documented account of the way materialistic atheism in rapid-fire fashion has taken hold of the educational system and press of the East Zone.
In a series of concise chapters on materialistic atheism’s attack on religion, the Bible, and the historical reality of Jesus (traced back through Engels and Marx to the polemics of Bauer and Feuerbach), Dr. Koch gives his readers an understanding of this current assault on the Christian faith and a sense of direction for confronting the Marxian atheist today. It is the author’s conviction that this task can be undertaken only if the lines are clearly drawn between the Lord Jesus Christ of the Evangelists and Apostles and the “Christ” of a sometimes disobedient, hypocritical church and of apostate theologians like Bauer. “The Christian knows that Jesus Christ means the abolition, the end of ‘religion’ and at the same time something different and new in the world”—the word of judgment and reconciliation spoken by God in Christ to all the world, West and East (p. 59).
Thus, although other books have presented a similar argument, none has made the case more alive in terms of the actual religious battle on the “other side of the Wall.” Indeed, one puts this book down with the feeling that this is not just something that is happening where Communism has taken over. As the prophet Isaiah implied long ago, there is a “wall” within each of us: a point at which we must decide whether it shall be the God who made us or the gods (ideologies) we make for ourselves.
WILLIAM W. PAUL
The Right To Live
The Right to Life, by Norman St. John-Stevas (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964, 117 pp., $2.95), is reviewed by Theodore Minnema, assistant professor of Bible, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
This book is a good warning against taking for granted principles basic to our Western society. “The right to life” is one such principle, and both its validity and its preservation are being consciously and unconsciously undermined in modern times.
The author is a Roman Catholic lawyer and a Conservative candidate for the British Parliament. His legal bent is evident in his knowledge of existing civil laws and in his ability to present material in a well-formulated, caselike manner. His particular concern in the book is not with a Roman Catholic perspective but with a broad Christian principle and its application to legal and civil practices.
The exceptional value of this book is that it clarifies and defends the principle of the “right to life” in relation to contemporary problems. The author sketches the historical background out of which this principle developed, but his focus is on modern society.
The opening chapter is a discussion of the Thalidomide tragedy and the trial of the mother in Belgium who killed her baby deformed by this drug. The legal and ethical implications of this case are explained lucidly and competently. What the mother did, and her subsequent acquittal, cannot be harmonized with the Christian doctrine that all innocent human life has the right to live. The following chapters apply this basic Christian doctrine to the crucial problems of abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, suicide, and the taking of life through war. Every chapter has illustrative and concrete data. Although the book is oriented to the British situation, it does bear significantly on problems in the United States.
The Right to Life casts a great deal of light on modern ethical and legal problems. The author realizes that the complexity of modern life makes consistent application of a basic ethical principle difficult. But Christians must face up to this responsibility or, as the author makes clear, disastrous consequences will inevitably follow.
THEODORE MINNEMA
Profitable Conversations
Origins of the Synoptic Gospels: Some Basic Questions, by Ned B. Stonehouse (Eerdmans, 1963, 201 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Charles B. Cousar, assistant professor of New Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia.
The question of the relation between Jesus Christ and the Gospels is complicated and can be approached from various angles. Professor Ned B. Stonehouse, in a series of lectures given some nine months before his death, proposes a solution by way of tracing the origins of the Synoptic Gospels. Modern scholarship, he feels, has neglected the underlying continuity between Jesus and the evangelists; therefore his major concern is to show that in the last analysis the Gospels owe their existence to Jesus himself and “are what they are because of what he was and did.”
Professor Stonehouse begins with the written documents and proceeds to raise four basic problems: Who wrote them? (Here the primary concern is with Matthew, whose apostolic origin is the most seriously questioned.) Are they dependent on each other, and, if so, how? (Streeter’s analysis is critically followed, with the conclusion that Mark is the prior Gospel and that Matthew is dependent, not only in content but also in order of arrangement and in language.) How was the material transmitted into the hands of the writers? (There was one closely knit group of persons who from the beginning were eyewitnesses of the basic happenings and were recognized as responsible for their transmission by preaching and teaching. The evangelists, in turn, recognized the need of basing their accounts upon this apostolic tradition.) Where is their ultimate origin to be found? (Jesus, not the community, was the creator of Christianity and thus was also ultimately responsible for the origin of the Gospels.)
One feels that the real merit of this work is not in the author’s conclusive proof of his major thesis, for in reality the modest scope of the book means that a number of basic questions are left unanswered. Rather its importance lies in the helpful treatment given to problems of criticism and exegesis, together with the “conversation” the author carries on with differing scholars. For example, a chapter is devoted to the story of the rich young ruler, with particular attention given to the discrepancy in the use of the word “good” in Matthew’s account (19:16, 17) as over against Mark’s (10:17, 18). Professor Stonehouse cogently argues that although there is an inconsistency in usage, the context allows no variation in meaning. Jesus, in responding, “No one is good but God,” is not offering a hidden confession of sin nor making a Christological affirmation but rather is pointing the young man to God and inviting him to reflect on the implications of his reference to goodness.
Again, there is a careful and critical treatment of the thesis of Harald Riesenfeld, who in contrast to the form critics has argued that the Sitz im Leben of the gospel material was neither the preaching of the early community nor its catechetical instruction but a milieu unique to itself. An exactly defined group within the community transmitted the material in a manner similar to the transmission of the Jewish oral tradition until its ultimate reduction to writing. The fact that the sayings of Jesus are for the most part omitted from Acts and the Epistles, Riesenfeld has argued, is due to the special commission given to certain trustworthy persons to transmit the material in a fashion distinct from preaching and teaching. In response Professor Stonehouse rightly notes that the distinction Riesenfeld has drawn between the Gospels as collections of the sayings and deeds of Jesus and the Epistles (and Acts) as the proclamation and instruction of the Church is a false one. The Gospels as well as the Epistles proclaim and instruct.
Other profitable “conversations” with Cadbury, Kilpatrick, and various Roman Catholic scholars (Dom Butler, Chapman, and, to a lesser extent, Wikenhauser) make Origins of the Synoptic Gospels a book well worth owning.
CHARLES B. COUSAR
A Scottish Classic
Human Nature in Its Fourfold State, by Thomas Boston (Banner of Truth Trust, 1964, 506 pp., 10s. 6d.), is reviewed by David J. Innes, minister, Tarbat Parish Church, Ross-shire, Scotland.
The publishers are to be congratulated on reproducing this great religious classic from eighteenth-century Scotland. Written by the saintly minister of Ettrick in the Scottish border country, this book, according to Dr. Thomas McCrie, “contributed more than any other work to mould the religious sentiments of the Scottish people.” It was to be found, along with the Holy Scriptures and Bunyan’s glorious dream, in virtually every humble cottage and stately home over a large part of Scotland 200 years ago. It was read by multitudes, and literally thousands were converted through it. Jonathan Edwards, in a letter of 1747 to his Scottish correspondent, Thomas Gillespie (who was himself a convert of Boston’s ministry), expressed the opinion that Fourfold State showed Mr. Boston “to have been a truly great divine.”
George H. Morrison’s biographical sketch of Boston, originally written to introduce the new edition of his Memoirs published in 1899, is reprinted in this present volume. Then comes a masterly unfolding of “human nature in its fourfold state of primitive integrity, entire depravity, begun recovery, and consummate happiness or misery.” The state of nature and the eternal state are those treated most fully, and this reviewer was a little surprised to find only two chapters—entitled “Regeneration” and “Mystical Union between Christ and Believers”—under the heading of “The State of Grace.” But the cumulative effect of the entire work is certainly to humble the reader, and to lead him to glory anew in the greatness of the saving purposes of God in Jesus Christ.
There is solid, biblical teaching here; the work abounds in quotations and illustrations from the Scriptures. One is forcefully reminded that men could take “solid meat” in Boston’s day. For those seeking instruction, edification, and a deeply rewarding spiritual experience, here is the book.
But there is not just solid doctrine here; there is also a wealth of illuminating illustration, and a constant concern to apply the truth to the conscience, the affections, and the life of the reader. “None are transplanted into the paradise above, but out of the nursery of grace below.” “This world is a great inn on the road to eternity to which you are travelling.” These are but two of the vivid pictures presented. And, time and again as the truth is driven home, there are heart-searching and soul-stirring passages of practical appeal and beseeching tenderness. None will be the poorer for taking time to browse in Boston’s mighty masterpiece.
DAVID J. INNES
Paperbacks
Basic Introduction to the New Testament, by John R. W. Stott (Eerdmans, 1964, 179 pp., $1.45). Originally published in 1954 as Men With a Message. Evangelical—with substance.
Designed for Duty, by Jeanette W. Lockerbie (Moody, 1964, 128 pp., $1). Devotionals designed especially for nurses. Good, practical, inspirational.
The Gospel of Our Sufferings, by Sören Kierkegaard (Eerdmans, 1964, 150 pp., $1.45). Christian discourses that are the third part of Edifying Discourses in a Different Vein, published in 1847 in Copenhagen.
An Old Faith For Modern Man, by Demetrios J. Constantelos (The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, New York City, 1964, 72 pp., $1.25). An interesting and attractive story of the Greek Orthodox Church, its history and teachings. Revised edition.
Mennonites and Their Heritage: A Handbook of Mennonite History and Beliefs, by Harold S. Bender and C. Henry Smith (Herald Press, 1964, 148 pp., $1.50).
Ministers of God, by Leon Morris (Inter-Varsity, 1964, 128 pp., $1.50). A good study of New Testament teaching on the ministry in all its aspects, with a brief survey of current practice in the Church.
Design for Dedication, by Peter Howard (Regnery, 1964, 192 pp., $.75). Speeches that challenge the morals and ideals of America, by the new head of Moral Re-Armament.
We the People: A Book about Laity, by Kathleen Bliss (Fortress, 1964, 139 pp., $1.75). Written from the current ecumenical perspective; carries solid cargo.
Christian Morals Today, by John A. T. Robinson (Westminster, 1964, 47 pp., $.65). Bishop (Honest to God) Robinson urges that love is the only unconditional moral demand, and that there are no things always sinful.
The Law and the Elements of the World: An Exegetical Study in Aspects of Paul’s Teaching, by Andrew John Bandstra (J. H. Kok [Kampen, Holland], 1964, 209 pp., f 11,50). A doctoral dissertation that faces the question: Since the Law is of divine origin, how could Paul include it under the “elements of the world”?
Jesus, History and You, by Jack Finegan (John Knox, 1964, 144 pp., $1.95). Finegan, a vivid writer, is always interesting. Here in a refreshing style he joins the quest for the “Jesus of history,” confident that he can be found.
Peaceful Coexistence: A Communist Blueprint for Victory (American Bar Association, 1964, 123 pp., $1). The book’s thesis is in the contradictory title.
The Principles of War, by James I. Wilson (Christian Books in Annapolis, 1964, 62 pp., $1). An application of military theory to personal spiritual conflict.
The New Testament in the Language of Today, by William F. Beck (Concordia, 1964, 459 pp., $1.45). An American translation.
