Fall Of The House Of Bultmann
Jesus of Nazareth: Saviour and Lord, edited by Carl F. H. Henry (Eerdmans, 1966, 277 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Wayne E. Ward, professor of Christian theology, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky.
In a series that has already established itself as the most significant voice of evangelical Christian scholarship comes this fifth volume on the burning issue of the “historical Jesus.” The first volume in the series, Contemporary Evangelical Thought, gave the name to the series; and succeeding volumes have dealt with revelation and the Bible, basic Christian doctrines, and the Christian faith versus modern theology.
Editor Carl F. H. Henry sets the stage for the whole volume by analyzing the breakdown of Karl Barth’s “dialectical theology,” which, for all its power in challenging the liberal theology of the early twentieth century, was itself undermined by the existential and anti-historical onslaught of Bultmann. Now, although many American scholars do not know it, Bultmannian theology has fallen into confusion and disarray. This disintegration of the “house of Bultmann” is carefuly documented by Henry and the other European and American scholars as they take up “the new quest for the historical Jesus” and analyze it.
This book is not a carping criticism of everything written by the form-critical scholars, nor is it a rehashing of the old liberal-fundamentalist controversy of a generation ago. It is an exciting and sympathetic study of the central issue of the Christian faith: “Do we meet the real historical Jesus of Nazareth in the pages of the New Testament, and is he one and the same with the Christ of faith whom we proclaim as Saviour and Lord?” No book has been published in English, German, or French that covers the whole debate on the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith” more thoroughly than this one does. For an understanding of these issues raised by Bultmann and his followers, this is one of the best volumes available. And it cannot be said too clearly that this is no tirade against “critical scholarship.” It is both a sympathetic understanding and an incisive criticism of the New Testament theology of Bultmann that has dominated Europe for two decades and still reigns in many American theological schools.
As in any symposium, the articles are unequal in value and scholarly depth, but the entire volume is delightful reading. Henry’s editing has produced a remarkable unity out of contributions from scholars of more than a dozen denominations in England, Germany, Sweden, and the United States. In my opinion, the chapter by F. F. Bruce on “History and the Gospel” and the brilliant study of the resurrection of Jesus, “On the Third Day,” by Clark H. Pinnock, are worth the price of the book! No Christian can read these two magnificent witnesses to the “Word made flesh” without being moved in mind and in heart to confess again, “Jesus of Nazareth, my Saviour and Lord!”
Reading for Perspective
CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:
• Men of Action in the Book of Acts, by Paul Rees (Revell, $2.95). Lively biographical sketches of six prominent New Testament leaders that provide solid biblical knowledge and inspire Christian commitment and action.
• Pentecostalism, by John Thomas Nichol (Harper & Row, $5.95). A well-documented history of “the tongues movement” that sets forth its genesis, its distinctive character and competing camps, and its growth throughout the world.
• Philippian Studies, by J. A. Motyer (Inter-Varsity, $3.50). This valuable expository work shows the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ as Lord. Useful as a preaching aid and for study by laymen.
Toynbee And The Super-State
Change and Habit: The Challenge of Our Time, by Arnold J. Toynbee (Oxford, 1966, 240 pp., $5.50), is reviewed by Clifford M. Drury, professor emeritus of church history, San Francisco Theological Seminary, San Anselmo, California.
Even though Dr. Toynbee has been retired for over eleven years, he is still active, traveling around the world, lecturing, and writing. This book contains the main substance of two series of lectures—one at the University of Denver, Colorado, in 1964 and the other at New College, Sarasota, Florida, in 1965.
The first part of this volume moves rather slowly, but the reader is not far into the book before the theme grips his attention. Toynbee reasons that during the million years of man’s existence on earth, a spirit of divisiveness has ruled. This arose out of necessity, especially during the “food-gathering” age. Economic necessity, not instinct, has caused mankind to live in disunity. Even the dividing force of race-feeling, argues Toynbee, is not an instinct but a habit. His main thesis is that habits, even those that are accepted by large groups of people, can be changed.
Toynbee is concerned with the crisis that has been thrust upon the whole world by the discovery of atomic power. He mentions as other revolutionizing phenomena: the population explosion with an ever-increasing demand for food, urbanization, mechanization, affluence, and leisure. Mankind must come to terms with these forces, especially atomic power, or else they will perish.
Toynbee’s answer to the problems created by the Atomic Age is “political unification.” The only way to survive is to abandon the old habits of nationalism and be politically united in some super-state. This is possible, he argues, because habits even on a huge scale within society, can be changed.
Unfortunately, Toynbee gives little consideration to the role that Christianity might play in the creation of this world-state. In his closing paragraph he quotes with approval the first question and answer of the Westminster Shorter Catechism and concludes: “It is possible … that the human impulse to seek God may be ineradicable.” What a pity that this great authority was unable to continue from this point. We who hold and preach the power of the Gospel believe that Christ alone is the hope of the future. It has always been the proud boast of Christianity that Christ can change the habits not only of individuals but also of races.
A Gift Of Scholarship
The Greek New Testament, edited by Kurt Aland, Matthew Black, Bruce M. Metzger, and Allan Wikgren (American Bible Society, British and Foreign Bible Society, National Bible Society of Scotland, Netherlands Bible Society, and Württemberg Bible Society, 1966, 920 pp. plus introduction, $1.95 [plastic] and $4.40 [morocco]), is reviewed by Everett F. Harrison, professor of New Testament, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.
This latest in a long series of Greek New Testaments fully meets the expectations created by advance announcements and by the caliber of the scholars who directed the project. Conceived primarily as a tool for Bible translators, theological students, and pastors, it has fewer variant readings (averaging about one and a half to the page) than the widely used Nestle but much fuller evidence supporting those readings. Theological importance was the principal criterion used for including variants. Although the text does not differ substantially from Nestle, it was independently constructed in the light of the evidence. Several score of manuscripts were used that had never been used before in a similar work.
The text is printed in large, easily read type and is broken up into paragraphs with English headings. Besides the critical apparatus below the text, there is a section devoted to punctuation (since this often affects the interpretation of a passage) and another that contains Scripture references related to passages on the page. The most revolutionary feature is the weighting of the readings in the apparatus by use of the letters A, B, C, and D. A indicates a reading of virtual certainty, D one of considerable doubt, and B and C intermediate stages. Wherever feasible, Latin terms have been replaced by English. Everything possible has been done, it seems, to make this volume easy and pleasant to use. Its success was assured from the start.
A companion booklet of thirty pages, “An Introduction to the Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament,” was issued by the American Bible Society. This gives information about criteria used in evaluating variant readings and also indicates the part played by many persons in the production of this distinguished Greek New Testament. Another book is promised that will deal in detail with the method the committee followed in deciding on variant readings.
A Primer On Sex
A Christian View of Sex and Marriage, by Andrew R. Eickhoff (Free Press, 1966, 262 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by E. Mansell Pattison, instructor in psychiatry, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle.
This book is presented as an attempt to combine the most recent findings in sociology and psychology with the Judeo-Christian moral values as they relate to courtship, marriage, and the family.
The author, head of the Department of Religion at Bradley University, asserts that the social sciences hesitate to discuss universal norms and confuse mores and morals. He says that this directly contrasts with the ideal norms of Christianity, including Christian love as the basis of interpersonal relations and the special value and dignity of every man in the sight of God. These ideal norms, he says, are the only true guide to moral values and must be affirmed in the face of the relative values of social science.
Eickhoff then turns to marital topics. This discussion turns out to be an overly simplified, practical-counsel-to-the-young approach to marriage. It is sensible, humane, faithful to a broad Christian perspective, and scientifically acceptable. One could recommend the book as an acceptable primer for the general reader.
But the author laid claim to a much broader goal, one with potential scientific and theological significance. What does he achieve?
Recent findings in sociology and psychology are not found in the text. Nor do they appear in the bibliography, in which the author lists four books on psychology and three on sociology, all between ten and twenty-five years old! Consequently the author makes statements that do not accurately reflect current thought in social science. Anthropologists do not hold to a naïve cultural relativism, and sociologists are well aware of the differences between mores and morals. Many psychologists are greatly concerned about the loss of human values in a strictly scientific approach toward life. In fact, the problem of social and personal values is a central one in current social science.
Eickhoff does quote a few contemporary sources in theology. Curiously, however, he does not even mention the crucial issues posed by the situational ethicists. Traditional approaches to morality have been outmoded by the findings of sociology and psychology, but the author never shows how, where, or why. The situational ethicists are attempting to speak to this problem, even if unsatisfactorily. But the author does not tell us how a social-science view of man and his behavior can be related to the Christian perspective.
What of this book as a whole? We already have many marriage primers, even good ones, in a Christian perspective; we have more up-to-date texts for college courses in marriage and family; and we have more creative help for pastoral counseling on this topic.
We still lack adequate dialogue between social science and theology, except in psychology per se. In my experience, social scientists are more aware of the crucial issues than theologians are. This author, writing in a theological perspective, seems tragically unaware of where these issues lie.
Assault On A Fortress
Old and New in Interpretation: A Study of the Two Testaments, by James Barr (Harper & Row, 1966, 215 pp., $5.50), is reviewed by David P. Scaer, assistant professor of systematic theology, Concordia Seminary, Springfield, Illinois.
Dr. Barr of the University of Manchester has produced a scholarly work that questions some of the basic canons of higher critical “orthodoxy.” The main thrust is against Bultmann and company, who are called “purists” for their attempt to extract the kernel of truth from the shell of culture in their exegetical method. Examples of this dichotomous method are the separation of the Incarnation from Hebrew culture and of the kerygma from the Greek-thought forms. For Paul the real enemies were groups like the Judaizers and not the philosophies or thought-forms of the Greeks.
The chapter “Athens or Jerusalem? The Question of Distinctiveness” will disturb scholars who have long pontificated the infallible dogma that the Greek mind was “abstract, contemplative, static or harmonic, impersonal,” while the Hebrew mind was “active, concrete, dynamic, intensely personal, formed upon wholeness and not upon distinctions.” The distinctions between two cultures cannot be set forth in such a simple antithesis. It is interesting that the Greece of Homer was closer to Moses than to the post-Socratic philosophers, and that the modern insight of the “whole man” that we consider Hebraic in origin was for Calvin “Aristotelian.”
Barth is criticized for his “artificial distinctions” between Sage and Urgeschichte and between Geschichte and Historie. An end is called to treating Scripture as a special kind of a history because it has interpretation, since interpretation is the mark of every history. Barr also suggests that God’s acts should not be considered revelatory. He writes: “We may not say that the acts of God are really and strictly ‘revelatory’ except in the trivial sense in which any act done or anything said may be considered to ‘reveal’ something of the doer.” It is the speech of God accompanying the event that gives it any meaning, and this speech links one incident to another.
Perhaps the unkindest cut of all is Barr’s identification of the motives of the “purists”—i.e., Bultmann et al.—with those of the “fundamentalists,” because in both there is an unwillingness to let the Bible speak from the historical situation.
But Barr is inconsistent with his own plan. While taking Barth to task for his distinction between Geschichte and Historie, he applies the same distinction in criticizing the “ ‘fundamentalism’ of an African or an American Negro village church where Nimrod or Noah can be as real and obvious a historical figure as George Washington.”
Barr’s suggestions are revolutionary because they have loosened some foundation stones in what has appeared to be the impregnable fortress of modern exegetical interpretation. The big question now is just how influential this book will be.
Mormonism’S Warts And Bumps
The Mormon Establishment, by Wallace Turner (Houghton Mifflin, 1966, 343 pp., $6), is reviewed by Harold Lindsell, associate editor,CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
Devout adherents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) not only will dislike this book; they will fulminate against it. While it does not really direct itself to the theological issues that mark off Mormonism as a cult (and thus basically non-Christian), it does prick the cult in those exposed areas and sensitive spots where the reflexive response will perhaps be greatest.
Turner sketches the background history of Mormonism and paints fair pictures of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Then he bears down hard on the warts and bumps that stick out all over this cult: the legalistically prescribed tithe; polygamy, which has never really been banished from the church and is shown to have originated more in the carnal proclivities of Joseph Smith than in the revelation of God; the anti-Negro doctrine, which forecloses the possibility that any Negro will attain any real place in the church or in the gloryland to come; the authoritarianism of certain leaders of the church; and the tightly knit organizational framework that leads to a closed Mormon society and a despotism over the individual that is wholly foreign both to the Gospel and to democracy.
In the author’s zeal to controvert the anti-Negro doctrine of the church, he seems to fall into the trap of using highly colored rhetoric and emotive language somewhat unsuited to scholarship. But he has produced a lively volume, thoroughly documented and well written. Anyone interested in viewing Mormonism from the sociological perspective will want to read it.
The Language Of Philosophers
Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy, edited by Ian T. Ramsey (Macmillan, 1966, 399 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by William W. Bass, professor of philosophy and chairman, Division of Humanities, Biola College, La Mirada, California.
The articles assembled in this book move along a single front of theological concern—the application of analytical philosophy to theological ethics. They contain much valuable material. R. F. Holland insists that the whole philosophical tradition, including Plato, Kierkegaard, and Kant, has been woven of the thread of two worlds—the outer and inner, which turn out to be the timeless and the temporal. P. F. Strawson, with his customary ability to isolate crucial issues, adopts Braithwaite’s “stories,” transforms them into “pictures,” and finds the locus of morality in a social morality based on an overlapping of individual idealized pictures.
P. H. Nowell Smith also pierces into an area that is of lasting pertinence. Building upon Jean Piaget’s parallels between the development of an infant and the major areas of philosophy, Smith compares many of the practices and beliefs of the believer to those of early childhood. While the Christian may find these parallels irritating, some of them seem valid. Compulsive rule-observance and a concept of grace that eliminates any significance of human effort may indeed reflect more the childhood quest than the direct teachings of Scripture. But other aspects of the faith that Smith mentions, such as the concept of original sin (which closely approximates the “all flesh” of the Bible) and the emphasis on authority (which is integral to any concept of the Kingdom of God), have basic roots in other than childhood frustration.
Certain ideas in these essays may be of particular worth for evangelicals. Braithwaite’s classic article, “An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Religious Belief,” is reproduced here. One of his central ideas is the equation of moral assertion with “intention.” A religious assertion becomes to him the expression of an intention based on a “story,” which may or may not be a matter of fact. Several evaluatory articles take him to task for failing to recognize that only stories that are believed to be based on fact have power to motivate.
Helen Oppenheimer’s article commends that of R. W. Hepburn, because he utilizes the “painter model” of the vision or picture that enables a person to make life’s pilgrimage successfully. The thinking of both writers in this matter is quite comparable to John Hutchison’s point of view as he justifies religious language on the basis of its structuring the believer’s way. How similar this type of idiom is to the biblical emphasis on the way, and to the Halachah of the rabbis. Hepburn distinguishes between story, which is factual, and “fable,” which contains more mythical elements. He holds that the Old and New Testament can be construed as the specification of the religious life through fable. They can satisfy many as a moral blueprint regardless of their failure to be factual. Jesus sought to fulfill the Old Testament fable. The evangelical is reminded that Hepburn has retained scarcely anything of the painter model (say as best portrayed in the Book of the Revelation) and is not particularly concerned to regain a significant model (a word often used throughout the book); but he is also reminded of the inherent limitations of analytical concentrations, which can scarcely rise above the world of words with which they begin.
The articles by the editor of the book, Ian T. Ramsey, are welcome relief at this point, since he insists that stories must have a “claim-acknowledging element” in order to be a basis for ethics. The moral claim must rise out of a prior claim (God) to which the moral judgment is a response. He also sees the need to rehabilitate some kind of concept of natural law to counter the current legal positivism. He suggests that Christian morality and natural law are supplementary but that the content and relationship cannot be described until key ideas from both realms are selected and matched.
But even these conservative and eager hopes—which serve as a suitable ending for the book despite their intrinsic impossibility today—are vitiated by a final salute to the problems of form criticism. These problems are thought to compound the difficulty of selecting the most important ideas of the Christian morality.
A significant article on situation ethics and the report of the 1958 Lambeth Conference, which deals with sex and the family, add to the value of this significant work but give little comfort to the biblically oriented Christian.
