Education: Looking for Oneself
The Return to Self-Concern, by Allen F. Bray, III (Westminster, 1964, 142 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Cornelius Jaarsma, professor of education, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
This book is essentially a discourse on Christian education. According to the author, the focal point in Christian education is self-discovery, or the understanding of the true self, and the freedom to realize the true self as one’s birthright. The search for self-understanding and the freedom to seek it Bray speaks of as self-concern.
His contention is that there must be a return to self-concern if Christian education is to be genuinely Christian. Jesus in preaching and teaching made true self-knowledge the focal point. He sought out men in their needs and led them to the Source of self-understanding. The early Christian community found its strength in the communion of individuals who in genuine self-concern sought one another in their common search for full self-realization.
During the Middle Ages self-concern became submerged in an establishment of church and culture that made belongingness a substitute for self-fulfillment. The Renaissance was a reaction, a search for self on a purely human basis. The Reformation represented the search for self in personal encounter with the personal God who comes to man in Christ. During the centuries since the Reformation, the Church has increasingly adopted the patterns of culture to make her message in proclamation and teaching relevant to a changing world.
The result has been that the Church has failed extensively in her primary function: to constitute a holy priesthood, a peculiar people with a singular message in preaching and teaching that reaches down to the basic need of all men, genuine self-knowledge.
Only a message and work that meet the need of the individual for self-understanding can revive the true function of the Church in our time, Bray says. When the individual sees himself as estranged from the God who is his very life and in repentance relates himself to God as Person, he will find a communion and community that give him freedom for self-fulfillment.
How the Christian community can return to self-concern of the individual the author sets forth in three chapters: “Sources of Response,” “The Faces of Resistance,” and “The Hope of Resolution.”
“Christian education is charged with the communication of the truth of God in relation to the needs of man,” according to the author. This statement, taken in the context of his call for a return to self-concern, leaves us with a message we might well appropriate when it is understood in the light of an authentic, infallible revelation of God in Christ and in the inscripturated record of God’s message to man.
In this volume Bray expresses ideas that can be provocative guidelines for the evangelical Christian who ponders the problems of Christian education today. But the ideas will undergo some reconstruction when considered in a framework that views man as the image of God and as a fallen sinner, and that accepts redemption as substitutionary atonement and the works of grace and sanctification as they are taught in the Scriptures. These central truths of Scripture become obscured in the author’s attempt to make them relevant to modern thought.
In spite of its accommodation to current theological existentialism, this volume merits careful and scrutinizing study by all pastors and teachers and by all who seek a clearer insight in a Christian interpretation of educational theory and practice.
CORNELIUS JAARSMA
For The Sake Of Beauty
The New Orpheus: Essays Toward a Christian Poetic, edited by Nathan A. Scott, Jr. (Sheed and Ward, 1964, 431 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by Frank E. Gaebelein, co-editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
This book of essays, collected and edited by Professor Nathan A. Scott of the University of Chicago, is an invaluable source-book of contemporary Christian criticism. As such, it lives up to its subtitle, “Essays Toward a Christian Poetic.” The twenty-two essays are presented under five heads: I. The Problem of the Christian Aesthetic; II. The Nature of the Christian Vision; III. Moorings for a Theological Criticism; IV. Belief and Form; The Problem of Correlation; V. The “Silence, Exile, and Cunning” of the Modern Imagination.
Some of the essays are difficult reading. This is particularly true of those in the first two parts of the book. Here the reader has the feeling that ideas are struggling for articulation. Other essays, in the latter half of the collection, are refreshingly lucid. Among these are Walter J. Ong’s “The Jinnee in the Well-Wrought Urn,” T. S. Eliot’s “Religion and Literature,” Christopher Fry’s little gem, “Comedy,” D. S. Savage’s “Truth and the Art of the Novel,” and Amos N. Wilder’s “Art and Theological Meaning.”
A few quotations—of many that might be cited—will give something of the quality of the thought presented in the essays. Of modern literature T. S. Eliot says, “There never was a time, I believe, when those who read at all, read so many more books by living authors than books by dead authors; there never was a time so completely parochial, so shut off from the past.…” “My complaint against modern literature … is not that modern literature is in the ordinary sense ‘immoral’ or even ‘amoral’.… It is simply that it repudiates, or is wholly ignorant of, our most fundamental and important beliefs.” In speaking of the moral aspect of poetry, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., remarks, “The greatest poetry will be morally right, even though perhaps obscurely so, in groping confusions of will and knowledge—as Oedipus the King foreshadows Lear.” And in her penetrating study of the imagination, Elizabeth Sewell says, “No matter at what level, the starved imagination is likely to run after aberrations.” Amos N. Wilder’s concluding essay, “Art and Theological Meaning,” contains this wholesome counsel: “It is necessary to introduce a caveat against misplaced aestheticism in the church. We should not encourage aesthetes in the pulpit, or ‘literary persons,’ or liturgical revivals inspired by false views of beauty.”
The evangelical thinker who is interested in aesthetics—and evangelicals ought to be interested in this subject—will gain much from this volume. He will also realize that most of the essays, with the exception of the one by Denis de Rougemont, who Writes out of a Calvinist background, reflect Anglican or Roman Catholic theology more than Reformation theology. In some of the writers there are Tillichian overtones. Of references to the Bible and to the theology of redemption there are comparatively few. To say this is not to derogate the value of this collection. It has much to say to evangelicals and should be a spur for evangelicals to enter the challenging field of Christian aesthetics.
The field is large. Professor Scott’s collection is devoted almost exclusively to poetics; there is only the barest minimum of reference to music and the visual arts. It may be that here evangelicals have a distinctive contribution to make. Bach, who shares with Beethoven the pre-eminence among composers, represented an utterly authentic evangelicalism, and some of the greatest of painters, such as Rembrandt, came out of the Protestant tradition. Or to turn to works of the literary imagination, there are rich fields to be plowed in the study of Bunyan and Milton from the biblical perspective.
It is regrettable that Professor Scott neglected to give the reader any biographical information. A page or two identifying the writers of the essays and telling something of their work would be of great help to the reader who is interested in further study.
FRANK E. GAEBELEIN
When Logic Has Gone
A Contemporary Christian Philosophy of Religion, by James A. Overholser (Regnery, 1964, 214 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Edward John Cornell, professor of ethics and philosophy of religion, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.
The author of this rather pedantic volume is convinced not only that Christianity is in a sick condition but also that he is qualified to administer the needed medicine. As it turns out, however, the more medicine he administers, the sicker Christianity becomes.
The crux of the problem, as I see it, is the author’s tendency to suppose that by an appeal to the dynamic-existential approach to reality in the philosophies of Kierkegaard, Whitehead, and Heidegger, a genuinely contemporary Christian is delivered from the bondage of traditionalism, of Aristotelian metaphysics and logic, in short, of “substantialism.” It is openly assumed, but nowhere proved, that this experience of deliverance prepares the way for a new understanding of Christianity, rather than opening the door to religious skepticism.
In any event, the author castigates traditional logic with weapons supplied by modern philosophies of being; and he does this without showing any respect for the fact that logic and ontology are separate sciences. “The ordinary logical concept is not a true image of any actual object or experience, but is on the contrary the rudest semblance, lifeless and distorted, of the ever elusive instant” (p. 22). True being is born whenever truth is measured by act. “The most penetrating of contemporary thinkers now hold that being is personal, and that the being of any individual is commensurate with his personal action. His deed is the index to his true essence; his being is the correlate and construct of his authentic deed. And this being is superior to, and unassailed by, the object-world without. It is not substantial but historical and must be grasped by the categories of existence” (p. 27).
It follows that Christ is “existentially” equal with God, but not “ontologically.” Christ is God because he chose to be God. “Because He has taken upon Him God’s own ‘history,’ and made Himself one with the total dynamic of messianic occurrence (not for one ‘life-time’ but for its entire course), because, in a word, He has in His decision actually become God in history, and maintained this vital identity in the consciousness of His authentic destiny, we may with realism and scientific justification affirm that Christ is God” (p. 112). Since both classical exegesis and the categories of classical logic may be ignored, we are treated with what strikes me as a disturbing sleight of hand. Although existential ontology federates the divinity of Christ with a structure of being that is actually an event in the space-time continuum (shades of Whitehead), we are calmly assured that the concept of Christ’s pre-existence as God is safely intact. “The historic Christ is eternally God” (p. 116). All of this is accompanied by the novel notion that “Jesus was tempted to be God” and that he “succumbed to this unique temptation” (pp. 76, 77).
The whole book is sprinkled with examples of theological legerdemain such as this. Thus, the scriptural account of Christ’s resurrection may not be literally true. “It is, notwithstanding, to be maintained that the Resurrection is factually true and theologically meaningful” (p. 90).
As might be suspected, this liberty to revise the essence of Christianity traces to a rejection of Scripture as a source of infallible revelation. After dismissing what happens to be a pitiful caricature of the evangelical view of Scripture, and after attempting to be clever by contending that the Word became “flesh” and not “grammar,” the author then sets down his own position in the following ambiguous manner: “The important thing about the text of Scripture henceforth is not that it should be an unalloyed demonstration of factual accuracy, but that it should be seen in relation to the whole of the unique community of Revelation of which it is a part, and thus have divine meaning. To have been wrought within the fabric of this whole, in the living process of which Scripture is the completion, is sufficient to establish the part as Revelation. This is the criterion: it participates in the meaning of the whole” (p. 151). But what, we must ask, is the whole?
Curiously, the author ends his labors with the pietistic assertion that mental and emotional health can be enjoyed only by those who experience a sense of wholeness within theistic presuppositions. “It is the testimony of more than one practicing psychologist that they have never been able to straighten out and rehabilitate the crippled personalities of those who do not believe in God” (p. 188). This point is utterly unscientific, and it is strange that it appears in a book which takes such pride in showing how a revamped Christianity is harmonious with science; it is simply a plain fact that some of the most expert psychologists and psychoanalysts make no profession of faith whatever in the Christian God.
A number of fine, though inconsistent, points are made in this book—such as the manner in which Barth is challenged, and the high respect for the Apostle Paul’s development of the plan of salvation in the Book of Romans. But until the author’s cryptic language is translated into plain English, not even these inconsistent points will make much of an impact on the contemporary Christian scene. The following is a sample of what I mean, and with this I shall close this review. “The important thing to notice at this point is that the verbal enunciation of biblical events is a part of the system of meaningful relations which begin at the pre-interpretational level of dynamic structure” (p. 132).
EDWARD JOHN CARNELL
Tested In Life
A Businessman Looks at the Bible, by W. Maxey Jarman (Revell, 1965, 159 pp., $2.95), is reviewed by John E. Mitchell, Jr., chairman of the board, John E. Mitchell Company, Dallas, Texas.
Here is a book not just for businessmen but for everybody. Its author, W. Maxey Jarman, is a successful businessman, an officer in his church, a Sunday school teacher, and a trustee or director of many Christian national organizations.
He opens his book with the question, “Is the Bible the real Word of God? The answer a man gives to that question can have a lot to do with his life.”
Mr. Jarman had the privilege of being reared in a Christian family. The Bible was read every morning at breakfast. He accepted it without question, just as he accepted food, clothing, and shelter without question. Later, while he was a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his faith was attacked by new acquaintances—skeptics, agnostics, and atheists. Even more destructive was the lukewarm testimony of so-called Christians who seemed to have little or no faith in the Scriptures as the inspired Word of God. Yet he emerged from this period with a good, solid faith in the Bible and in the God of the Bible.
At twenty-eight he found himself the president of his company, and shortly thereafter he became a teacher of a Sunday school class of fourteen-year-old boys. He learned what all other dedicated Sunday school teachers have learned: the person who benefits most is the teacher himself. And he came to realize that the best way to understand the teachings of the Bible is to live by them. The Bible tells us that understanding will follow obedience and action.
About this time Maxey Jarman began reading the Word of God earnestly and systematically, putting it to the test in his day-by-day life in a practical, businesslike way. As he grew “in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ,” he reached the point where, to use his own language, “I want to know, I want to do, I want to tell, I want to enjoy.” The Scriptures taught him how to know, how to do, how to tell, and how to enjoy.
Mr. Jarman concludes: “I have read [the Bible], studied it, believed it, and applied it to my own life, and I can recommend it to everyone.… You will find it offers far more benefits than those I have mentioned.… You will begin to know what it means only when you live it.… Then you will experience a new internal joy, a readiness to meet life’s burdens, and a willingness to look toward the future with serenity and assurance.”
If I were forced to offer a criticism of Mr. Jarman’s book, it would be that he does not emphasize, as much as I would like, the sayings and deeds of the Book’s Hero—namely, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Nor does Mr. Jarman quote Scripture as often as I would like. He tells us in his own language what the Scriptures say, but I would prefer to have him quote the Bible and let it speak for itself.
No one can read Maxey Jarman’s book carefully and prayerfully without gaining a great deal. I recommend it heartily. And I hope that many Christians in business may follow the example set by Mr. Jarman and write their own convictions in a book.
JOHN E. MITCHELL, JR.
Use Or Abuse?
The Use of Analogy in the Letters of Paul, by Herbert M. Gale (Westminster, 1964, 282 pp., $6), is reviewed by William E. Hull, associate professor of New Testament interpretation, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky.
Converging developments in three areas point to the importance of a book on this subject: (1) historical studies of the analogies (parables) of Jesus; (2) theological studies of biblical word-pictures; (3) philosophical studies of the analogical character of religious language. Appreciation is in order for this first comprehensive effort in English to survey the analogies of Paul.
Gale begins by limiting the scope of his inquiry to the “undoubtedly genuine” epistles, thus excluding Second Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, and the Pastorals. He then arranges the seven remaining letters in probable chronological order and attempts a straightforward exegesis of thirty-four passages where analogies are to be found.
The conclusions of this analysis are largely negative. Again and again Paul’s illustrations are shown to be incomplete, only one element being valid for the immediate context. The point of comparison is often untrue both to the life situation from which it is drawn and to the theological argument into which it is thrust. Indeed, rather than the analogy’s illuminating the argument, the reverse is often true: the context must be consulted to determine the point of the picture! The chief value of these negative findings is to set the severe limits within which the Pauline analogies may serve as clues to the Apostle’s thought.
Inevitably, this pioneering attempt whets our desire for more than the book provides. Although Gale describes how Paul used analogies so clumsily, lack of detailed background studies prevents us from understanding why he did so. Again, the principle by which certain passages were selected for treatment and others omitted remains puzzling. Perhaps this will be answered by a later book in which the author promises to treat “the more crucial analogies” (p. 17). Finally, there are curious bibliographical omissions, particularly the biblical studies of analogy by Paul Minear and the many recent philosophical critiques of analogy which are of great help in clarifying presuppositions and terminology.
On the whole, the book suffers from a somewhat tedious and cumbersome style. In its present form, it may serve best as a reference tool for further study in this fruitful area of Pauline research.
WILLIAM E. HULL
The Christ And The Bible
Revelation, by Werner Bulst, S.J., translated by Bruce Vawter, C. M. (Sheed and Ward, 1965, 158 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by James Daane, assistant editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
Protestants who have been intellectually jolted by the modern insistence that revelation is not—or is not merely—a word of God but divine action and events will find this a very helpful book. And they need such help. For while evangelical Protestants have insisted that the Bible is the written Word of God and that revelation is, therefore, capable of being stated in words and propositional statements, and have warned against the reduction of revelation to Event, few Protestant theologians have attempted to show how revelation as word and as event are related.
Roman Catholics have also been aroused by this modern (neo-orthodox) emphasis on the nature of revelation as event, for their classic formulation of revelation has been, locutio Dei attestans, i.e., “God speaking,” or more accurately, “attesting divine speech.”
The basic thesis of this book is that we must obtain our idea of revelation from the Bible. If we do, we then learn that “word” is the most comprehensive descriptive category of revelation. This being so, revelation is therefore capable of being communicated in preaching and teaching, and indeed in a Book. Yet, according to the teaching of this Book itself, this “word” is not a mere conceptual utterance; it is also event—and in heaven, vision.
The nature of revelation, says the author, is so complex that it cannot be reduced to a simple definition. “There is, however, one concrete formula which says everything that is essential in all brevity and accuracy: Revelation (in its definitive form) is Christ himself.” He is God’s act of coming, of God’s doing in history. But Christ is himself the Word, and since he speaks the word of God, revelation is not merely event any more than it is merely (conceptual) words or utterances. In Christ we are confronted with both word and act. “In him God has said everything to us and accomplished everything.” The Logos, the Word, is the work (ergon); the verbum, the opus.
Protestants will read with profit and, hopefully, with critical caution Roman Catholic Bulst’s inclusion of the Church within the revelation that is completed in Christ. But they will also read with considerable profit and agreement this Roman Catholic attempt to recognize the event-character of revelation without giving up the word-character of revelation as conceptual utterance and statement, which is to say, without giving up the Bible as the Word of God.
In view of the dearth of Protestant efforts to face the whole problem of revelation, this book can be highly recommended for Protestants who wonder how the Word of God can be both a book called the Bible and a person called Christ.
JAMES DAANE
For The Recommended List
Paul, Apostle of Liberty, by Richard N. Longenecker (Harper and Row, 1964, 310 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by James P. Martin, associate professor of New Testament, Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, Richmond.
“There is,” as Dr. Longenecker remarks in his introduction to this impressive work on Paul, “a divinely inspired timelessness about his message which grips men and leads them on to their Lord.” If he would replace the word “timelessness” by timefulness,” he would better support the forceful picture of the Apostle’s life and faith that appears so clearly in this book. The weakest feature of the study is the title: Paul was not an apostle of liberty or of any other principle or “ism” but an apostle of Jesus Christ. To attach the concept of apostle to a principle is to misuse the word; it must be related only to a person.
The legality-liberty dialectic of the Apostle is the matter Longenecker investigates. Readers who know the eschatological structure of the Apostle’s thought will easily be able to orient themselves in the intricate argument. Those who think that the dialectic under discussion here is the be-all of Pauline theology might be confirmed in this if they do not study the Apostle from other perspectives not central to this study. Within the compass of the author’s purpose, however, we are given a solid, weighty study of the particular dialectic. The work is not light or easy reading, but it is richly rewarding to anyone who puts forth the effort to follow the debate. The format suggests that this study was originally a dissertation; it bears many marks of academic origin in its structure, method, and mass of footnotes. It is never pedantic, however, and the argument does not become dull. The advantage of the book is that it presents a good discussion of many points of apostolic history and thought, and it will serve as a useful reference work.
Longenecker carries through his dialectic in three major divisions: Paul’s background, his teaching, and his practice. A helpful distinction is made between a legalist and a nomist, in order to show that pre-destruction Judaism had a formalistic piety and an inward spirituality. This means that the essential tension of Judaism was not primarily that of legalism versus love, or externalism versus inwardness, but that of promise and fulfillment (p. 84). The earliest (Jewish) Christians found this tension resolved in Christ.
Several difficult and important problems are thoroughly aired in Dr. Longenecker’s discussion, such as the interpretation of Romans 7, the “in Christ” formula, the nature of liberty, and the consistencies or (alleged) inconsistencies between Paul’s theory and practice. The author solves the consistency question by unfolding Paul’s radical freedom—to be all things to all men, so that he could keep vows if he willed because he was free to act thus. The argument is always fair to opposing views and states clearly the author’s conclusions and his reasons for them. This book must be included in any recommended list of works on Paul.
Several errata may be noted: the first and second lines on page 165 have been mixed; the spelling of Buttenweiser in note 85, page 84, does not agree with the spelling in note 88, same page, or with the index. The page reference in the index (p. 299) to Schoeps should be ix, not xi. There are printer’s mistakes on pages 239 (marriage), 258 (that for than), and 264 (Christ, not Chirst). The inclusion of some lines of German quotation hardly seems necessary; since the German is not obscure, why not translate it all?
JAMES P. MARTIN
Book Briefs
Christianity in the Computer Age, by A. Q. Morton and James McLeman (Harper and Row, 1964, 95 pp., $2.50). The authors report how by the use of a computer they have proved that only five of the fourteen epistles attributed to Paul were actually written by him. To this they add their indictment of the Church on the basis of an unbiblical understanding of the biblical message.
How to Become a Bishop Without Being Religious, by Charles Merrill Smith (Doubleday, 1965, 131 pp., $3.50). A tongue-in-cheek satire that bites a lot of truth. Good reading for the minister and his wife; delightful, if the reader is neither.
War of Amazing Love, by Frank C. Laubach (Revell, 1965, 150 pp., $2.95). To eliminate war and poverty the author suggests that we combine the compassion of Jesus with the Pentagon and thus, hopefully, save the world from being covered with nuclear dust.
Sex and Racism in America, by Calvin C. Hernton (Doubleday, 1965, 180 pp., $3.95). The author believes that racism is shot through with sexuality and that this sexuality operates in both directions.
Wonders of Creation, by Harold W. Clark (Pacific Press, 1964, 134 pp., $4.95). Essays that show the marvels and mysteries of a creation viewed as the handiwork of God. With fine photography. Delightful and informative reading.
The Social Thought of John XXIII: Mater et Magistra, by Jean-Yves Calvez, S. J., translated by George J. M. McKenzie, S. M. (Regnery, 1964, 121 pp., $3.75).
Day of Resurrection, by Leslie B. Flynn (Broadman, 1965, 96 pp., $2). Eight sparkling essays on the Resurrection by a teacher of journalism who can write.
The True and Living God, by Trevor Huddleston (Doubleday, 1965, 120 pp., $2.95). Eight lean, hard, plain-talk “lectures” by a bishop from Tanganyika. If you are willing to be shook up, read them.
Tangled World, by Roger L. Shinn (Scribners, 1965, 158 pp., 83). A description of our changing society and its demand for decisions.
Generation of the Third Eye: Young Catholic Leaders View Their Church, edited by Daniel Callahan (Sheed and Ward, 1965, 249 pp., $4.95). Essays by intellectual laymen and clerics that are more sophisticated than critical.
Economic Harmonies, by Frederic Bastiat (Van Nostrand, 1964, 596 pp., $11.50). The book’s thesis is that all mankind can live in harmony and peace if all violence, or the threat of it, is reserved exclusively for the maintenance, by the state, of a free market. Of such dreams big books are made—and sold.
Theology for Renewal: Bishops, Priests, Laity, by Karl Rahner, S. J. (Sheed and Ward, 1964, 183 pp., $4). Roman Catholic theologian Rahner talks to laymen about current issues in the Roman Catholic Church. Equally informative for the Protestant who wants to know about Catholicism.
