Methodism’S Uncertain Trumpet
Christian Mission in Theological Perspective: An Inquiry by Methodists, edited by Gerald H. Anderson (Abingdon, 1967, 286 pp., $2.50), is reviewed by Horace L. Fenton, Jr., general director of the Latin America Mission, San José, Costa Rica.
Evangelical readers will rejoice in the concern within Methodism that has prompted this book. In his preface, Gerald Anderson reminds us that “despite the sacrificial effort and significant gains of the Christian mission throughout the centuries, there are still more non-Christians in the world today than on the day when Jesus was crucified. Two out of three people in the world today do not recognize Him as Lord, and as many as one billion people have never even heard the name of Jesus. Our conviction is that He alone can bring healing and wholeness to men and nations. To this end we dedicate our efforts and seek for a radical renewal of Christian mission in our time.” Encouraged by this statement, many will eagerly examine this symposium, prepared by leading theologians and missiologists of The Methodist Church.
And what a variety of suggestions—often contradictory to one another—for the “radical renewal” of the Christian mission will be found in these pages! That the parts of a symposium should be somewhat uneven in approach, style, and quality is not surprising: unevenness is almost inevitable in a collection of essays. But that the leaders of a great denomination should manifest so little agreement with one another over such basic elements as the authority of Scripture, the trustworthiness of Christ, and the mission of the Church is disappointing indeed. And the result is at best an uncertain sound, at worst utter confusion.
In the closing chapter of the book, S. Paul Schilling insists that the biblical writings are authoritative, that Jesus Christ is central to all our faith, that sinful man desperately needs a new life, and that this new life is provided for him in Christ, by grace through faith. But to other contributors to the book, one or more of these basic positions would be utterly unacceptable.
Is the Bible authoritative in all matters of faith? Everett Tilson, in his chapter on “God’s Word and the Christian Mission,” doesn’t seem to think so. He fears the possibility that the words of Scripture, unaltered and unalterable, may supplant the Word of God. He finds Paul mistaken in his understanding of God’s dealings with the Jews and calls this “the apostle’s ‘Back-to-the-Bible Hour’ scheme of missions,” concurring with Blauw’s claim that “Paul errs here theologically.” He further comments, “Quite apart from the apparent failure of his [Paul’s] message to get through to the author of Luke-Acts and Simon Peter, Paul, the convert from Judaism, stands as a monument to the failure of Paul as primitive Christianity’s board of missions schedule-maker.”
And what of the uniqueness of Christ, and of his saving work? Here is D. T. Niles insisting that “there is only one Saviour, Jesus Christ (1 Tim. 2:5), and all who are saved will be saved by Him.… There is no salvation except by Jesus Christ.” (To be sure, he sounds once again a note of uncertainty on the question of universalism.) And here is J. Robert Nelson standing valiantly against religious syncretism and identifying himself with what he calls “the bluntly intransigent declaration of the church’s conviction that the one, holy God has acted decisively and unrepeatedly in Jesus Christ for the salvation of all men. Its corollary is that religious systems or doctrines which deny the absoluteness and particularity of God’s act in Jesus Christ are not partners with Christianity in man’s search for God, but are obstacles and hindrances to be overcome.”
But over against these clear statements, we find A. Roy Eckard averring that anti-Semitism has its roots in the writings of John, Paul, and other writers of the New Testament, and condemning our efforts “to prove to ourselves or to someone that the New Testament is morally unassailable.” He goes on to say that “we Christians must somehow be delivered from our monstrous assumption … that the Jewish people in any age have been unfaithful to their calling, for having (allegedly) rejected Jesus as the Christ, and that, correspondingly, their only hope lies in conversion to the Christian faith.” Again, he refers to “the imperialistic compulsion to turn Jews into Christians.” He holds that the Jews do not need Christ, since they already live in the household of God; that their non-acceptance of Jesus as Messiah is an act not of disobedience but of obedience to God [!]; that therefore “for the Church to endeavor to ‘convert’ the Jewish people to Christianity is forbidden; it is a theological impossibility.”
There is much in the book to help us and to stab us awake. But this hodgepodge of opinions on “radical renewal” is more easily recognizable as radical than as a substantial contribution to the renewal of the Christian mission.
Literary Criticism By Christians
Ernest Hemingway, by Nathan A. Scott, Peter DeVries, by Roderick Jellema, and Edith Sitwell, by Ralph J. Mills, Jr. (Eerdmans, “Contemporary Writers in Christian Perspective” series, 1966, 46, 48, and 47 pp., $.85 each), are reviewed by Paul M. Bechtel, chairman, Division of English, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.
Thoughtful men have always taken literature seriously because at its best it leads to self-knowledge; it makes clear what it means to be a man. Literature is concerned with all the dimensions of man, downward and upward. Invaluable, too, is its reflection of the world—an image often more authentic in its wholeness than the sociologists’ statistics or the psychologists’ case study. It is a discipline with its own distinctives, unduplicable in any other intellectual enterprise.
Not all readers can hunt out for themselves, however, the central values of a serious work of fiction or a complex poem, nor can most busy moderns read as widely as they would like to. For these people, and the well-informed also, here is an admirable new series of paperbacks. It offers what evangelical readers have long needed: an interpretation and evaluation of significant modern writers from a Christian perspective. Issued earlier were three other of these forty-eight handbooks: studies of Charles Williams, Flannery O’Connor, and T. S. Eliot. The publishers say that new titles in this continuing series will appear at the rate of about six a year.
The purpose underlying these critical surveys, edited by Roderick Jellema of the University of Maryland, is “to provide … a better understanding of a given writer’s work as seen in Christian perspective.” Although the booklets are said to be specifically “oriented to literary criticism,” they include also a biographical sketch, a bibliography, and an overview of the author’s work.
Nathan Scott, with his usual penetrating judgments and felicity of language, is a helpful guide through Hemingway. There seems to me to be this limitation: in all three studies no one of the critics describes the Christian perspective that is the base of his judgments. It is assumed. What kind of theological vision allows a critic to say that below the surface of Hemingway’s fiction is the drama “of the soul’s search for God”? What sort of God? Hemingway was certainly no theist but an energetic humanist and zestful worldling. True, he has loyalties all can appropriate with benefit—a warm response to the good earth and joy in courage, for instance. But God is denied in Hemingway, not in open combat but by his absence, by being nada, the God-shaped blank. However, a journey through his pages offers an authentic mirror of the world mind—the mind to which Christians are pledged to bring the message of hope.
Roderick Jellema understandably regrets that Peter DeVries has not won the wide acclaim he deserves, especially by the serious critics. Although he is known chiefly for his brilliant wit and his devastating satire, DeVries has other assets. He was reared in the faith and knows how to expose, with jagged thrusts, the failures of the visible church. Unhappily, he cannot balance that talent with an affirmation of certainty about the living Christ. Jellema shows skillfully how for DeVries there is no accommodating ground between a radical, perfectionist Christian faith, which he demands, and the world of the contemporary sophisticate, whose follies he so mercilessly exposes.
Critical competence is demonstrated also in Ralph Mills’s study of Edith Sitwell, though for the general reader she is the least appealing of the three. In her later years Miss Sitwell became a Catholic convert and thereafter was much absorbed in verse bent on exposing life’s follies. But her commitment was to what Mills seems seriously to call “natural Christianity,” at best a rather vague and graceful deism.
This is an exciting series. If the same acumen shown here characterizes other studies, we shall be much indebted to the critics and the publisher.
Smashing A New Icon
No Other God, by Gabriel Vahanian (Braziller, 1966, 114 pp., $4; also paper, $1.50), is reviewed by David Allan Hubbard, president, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.
To those who have made the popular mistake of linking Gabriel Vahanian with the death-of-God theologians, this collection of essays on theology in a secular age will come as a surprise. He takes great pains to detach himself from Altizer, Hamilton, and Van Buren (without naming them) by making clear that what he deplored as a tragedy of the post-Christian era they have canonized into an absolute, an idol, a non-Christian religion. Labeling the death-of-God theology Cliristosophy, Vahanian lays bare its absurdity: “Without God no Jesus: this is the corollary of the New Testament’s without Jesus no God.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity gets its knocks as well. Says Vahanian acridly, Paul made himself all things to all men for the sake of God; Bonhoeffer wants to do this in spite of God.
As the title suggests, iconoclasm is a pillar in Vahanian’s system. Christians are not exempt from man’s proneness to idolatry, and Christianity, which conquered ancient paganism, has bred its own paganism. By fostering and surrendering to secularism, Christianity has forfeited its iconoclastic vocation. The Church has become an institution alongside other institutions and, therefore, has ceased to be the Church.
Vahanian’s longest and most provocative essay, “The Word of God and the Word of Man,” wrestles with the nature of words (icons but also iconoclastic), the authority of Scripture (“a phenomenon of faith”), and the similarity between the Word of God “contained” in the Bible and the Word of God that comes through other literary vehicles.
It is just here that the weaknesses of Vahanian’s approach become clear. Though he bases much of his thinking on the Scriptures, he has neither a consistent commitment to their authority nor a thoroughgoing hermeneutic for their interpretation. He rightly rejects the kind of syncretism that tries to wed biblical faith to some kind of philosophy; yet he offers no consistent methodology either in theology or exegesis as an alternative.
Vahanian’s aphoristic style often blurs his meaning. Important ideas are lost in the shuffle of disjointed affirmations. Theology, classically, has been based on a combination of historical-grammatical exegesis and careful reasoning. Though Vahanian has some nostalgia for this approach (witness his deep appreciation for Calvin), he has not yet brought himself to yield to it.
Reading for Perspective
CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:
• A Christianity Today Reader, edited by Frank E. Gaebelein (Meredith, $7.95). An inviting sampler of choice articles, editorials, news stories, book reviews, and features published in CHRISTIANITY TODAY during the past decade.
• Reformed Dogmatics, by Herman Hoeksema (Reformed Free Publishing, $14.95). A systematic treatment of biblical and Reformed theology, thirty years in preparation, that develops the traditional topics of theology, anthropology, Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and eschatology.
• Ring of Truth: A Translator’s Testimony, by J. B. Phillips (Macmillan, $2.95). The renowned biblical translator relates discoveries of the deep truths of God that have gripped his life during his long years of study.
Psychology And The New Birth
The Person Reborn, by Paul Tournier, translated by Edwin Hudson (Harper & Row, 1966, 248 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Frank Bateman Stanger, president, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.
A book as relevant and rewarding as this volume by Paul Tournier, the noted Swiss physician whose healing practice involves bodies, minds, and souls, cannot be reviewed adequately in a brief space. I will try, rather, to point out some of its significant insights.
The book has five sections. In Part I, “Technology and Faith,” Tournier reminds his readers that man has both a physical and a spiritual nature and pleads for the proper relation between science and faith, between psychoanalysis and soul-healing. Knowledge of one’s psychological state is indispensable to personal fulfillment in accordance with the plan of God. Thus the Christian use of psychology is possible.
Part II deals with “Moralism and Morality,” and there is a radical difference between them. It is motivation alone that determines a true morality. But morality is always related to the absolute standards of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Tournier pleads for a realistic view of human existence. We can understand the immensity of God’s forgiveness only as we realize the impossibility of avoiding mistakes and failures. Nothing is good or bad in itself; the use made of it is what counts. God is able to produce good out of evil.
Thus far in the work Tournier has discussed the relationships between technology and faith, analytical psychology and soul-healing, immediate and transcendent causality, moralism and morality. In Part III (“Against the Spirit of Dogmatism”) he discusses the relation between tolerance and dogmatism. His plea is for a combination of orthodoxy and tolerance. (Do not be critical of his insistence upon tolerance until you have read this section of the book.) He insists upon the reconstruction of a life as a whole.
In Part III the author discusses the experience of conversion, which he describes as a complete “reversal of attitude.” His discussion of the sixfold evidence of conversion presents invaluable insights to the Christian. He reminds us that even though conversion begins with a decisive moment, it is fully realized only through a continuing examination of the conscience.
The three chapters of Part IV are headed “Faith.” Tournier gives a detailed discussion of the phenomenon of suggestion and its influence upon the health of the total personality. He presents an unusually vivid picture of the manner in which falsely interpreted suggestion can result in functional disorders. Such practical questions as these are discussed: What is the relation of suggestion to faith? How does Satan use suggestion in his warfare within the human mind and heart? Since suggestion is such a powerful factor, where do we find the truth? How can one be sure that any given thought, inspiration, or call really comes from God? How can a person receive guidance from God?
The closing section of the work, Part V, carries the challenging heading “The Spirit of Adventure.” Tournier says that seeking divine guidance in every circumstance of life is the great adventure of living with God. We must unload from our hearts all the dead weight accumuated there—the difficulties we have had, our disappointments, our failures, and our sin. Every person after an adequate experience of self-discovery must experience the healing of the grace of God. Then every Christian is to become engaged in the ministry of soul-healing. Such a ministry to others is a vital part of the universal priesthood of believers.
Tournier ends his book with a stirring appeal to his fellow medical scientists to restore the spiritual dimension of faith to the technology of healing.
This book is a revelation of the author’s versatility. His ministry is truly a multiphased one. He speaks as a medical scientist when he shows the relation of technology to faith and describes psychological phenomena such as repressed desires, motivation, and suggestion.
He is just as much a philosopher. He speaks of the reality of the spiritual world; urges a realistic view of life; distinguishes between moralism and morality; pleads for the restoration of the spiritual dimension to all of life.
And he also reveals his stature as a spiritual counselor. The reader sits at his feet to learn about conversion, faith, orthodoxy of spirit, the art of meditation, divine guidance, and a lay ministry of soul-healing.
Above all else, however, Tournier speaks as a Christian witness. He shares what he has experienced. All that he writes about—self-examination, confession, the grace of God, meditation, love and tolerance, the ministry of soul-healing, the dimension of faith in one’s professional activities—has first been confirmed in the laboratory of his own faith and life and vocation.
Such a volume as this could have been written only by a person of rich and mature experience. May I venture the opinion that it will be appreciated fully only by those who have tasted realistically of life’s experiences and assaults and demands.
This is a “must” book for the Christian who wants to understand himself more fully so that he can “grow in grace”; for the pastor who wants an effective ministry of counseling and healing; and for the scholar who desires to understand the relation between science and faith.
Do-It-Yourself Doctrine
Encountering Truth: A New Understanding of How Revelation as Encounter Yields Doctrine, by Harold E. Hatt (Abingdon, 1966, 208 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Samuel J. Mikolaski, professor of theology, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, New Orleans, Louisiana.
This book first furnishes an interaction between encounter theology (represented in the work of Martin Buber and Emil Brunner) and conservative theology (represented in what the author calls the fundamentalism of J. Gresham Machen and B. B. Warfield and the orthodoxy of Abraham Kuyper). Then Dr. Hatt, a professor in the Christian Church’s Graduate Seminary of Phillips University, Enid, Oklahoma, attempts a thesis of his own on how revelation as encounter yields doctrine.
But there is an imbalance. Three chapters are devoted to Buber and Brunner. Then the analysis of conservative theology follows under a specially formulated rubric into which the opinions of Machen, Warfield, and Kuyper are drawn. In my judgment no serious attempt is made to develop their views in depth, nor to take serious account of their numerous interpreters or of more recent conservative theological literature. Indeed, no such literature is mentioned in the index or table of contents. There occur only casual references to Merrill C. Tenney, Ned Stonehouse, Bernard Ramm (whose major work SpecialRevelation and the Word of God is missed), James Packer, G. C. Berkouwer, Gordon H. Clark, Carl F. H. Henry, and Paul Jewett. I feel that E. J. Carnell’s example (cited on pp. 196, 197) has not been properly grasped.
Furthermore, in my opinion the contributions of Machen, Warfield, and Kuyper are unrecognizable in Hatt’s hands. I have always felt a warm appreciation of these three Reformed theologians, and I have never believed, as this author does, that their views are predominantly abstract and propositional. Some fine theological insights and a genuine meeting of Jesus Christ in their faith and teaching have come to me from their works. I do not think they insist, in the way Hatt contends, that Christian knowledge must be necessarily in a certain doctrinal form for faith to happen; but on the other hand I fail to grasp what knowledge for faith is in “existential” form. I do not think Hatt has explained this, and neither do I think he can explain it on his premises. But that our relationship to God in Christ is personal in the teaching of these three theologians, in the terms of the Gospel, cannot be challenged. It may be of interest also to point out that a non-propositional theologian (for the doctrine of revelation) like the eminent Leonard Hodgson can still insist that the doctrine of the Trinity is revealed doctrine.
I am also dissatisfied with the treatment of Buber and Brunner. The positive elements of Brunner’s faith do not shine through. Nor does Hatt reflect the full range of Buber’s ideas. Professor H. D. Lewis has commented that there is an odd use of I-Thou in Buber regarding encounter with things, such as an I-Thou relation with a tree. Hatt concedes that these I-It elements do intrude into I-Thou relations. This is his way of saying that “knowledge about” is logically a part of “knowledge of” someone, including God.
Evangelical Christians will express thanks for this, but they will remind the author that they have known this all along. What Hatt fails to show are the relations between meaning and the use of language and between truth and the functions of language, for revelation.
What is more, neither by acknowledging “knowledge about” nor by attempting to vindicate encounter language has he told us specifically what the content of the revelation is. Of what are we speaking? Of God, Christ, love, salvation? And in what respects? The knowledge of God is conceded by many outside the Christian camp. But what of the Christian knowledge of God, i.e., the knowledge of the God and Father of our Lord Christ? How does this come?
The concession of “knowledge about” is tritely argued in a way unrelated to the prime theological ideas of the Christian Gospel. And the discussion is unrelated also to crucial recent philosophical and theological dialogue. Hatt has missed the large body of literature, especially British, on the nature and truth-function of language and the status of theological utterances. The work of Austin Farrer, I. M. Crombie, Leonard Hodgson, Basil Mitchell, H. D. Lewis, and Ian Ramsey, to mention but a few, is ignored. No progress in this direction can be made until it is seen that revelation has something to do with truth, and that truth has something to do with language.
For creative engagement of the problems, one must take seriously the historical character of revelation and the indispensable role of Holy Scripture as Scripture. An example of recent philosophical discussion that is not unrelated to theological questions is the point made by Alfred Stern that ideas often survive their creators, and that spiritual contents form objective totalities (Proceedings and addresses of the American Philosophical Association. 1965–66, p. 55). He goes on:
What happens in such cases is, of course, not a ghost-like survival of “spiritual realities”; the survival is simply due to the fact that the ideas concerned had been changed into the physical realities of written or spoken words, books, scientific formulas, musical scores, records, pictures, sculptures, or magnetophonic bands, or that they persist as psychic realities in the memories of people. If none of these physical and psychical realities are preserved, no idea can survive in history, for a purely spiritual survival, detached from any physical or psychic reality, is impossible.
This echoes, in principle, what evangelical Christians stand for when they insist that Christian experience attested to by the New Testament cannot be had without the truth from the New Testament that generates it. Christian theology must aim to furnish an exposition of Scripture as Holy Scripture. If that be bibliolatry, then let’s have more of it.
Help For Homosexuals
Toward a Christian Understanding of the Homosexual, by H. Kimball Jones (Association, 1966, 160 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Frank C. Peters, associate professor of psychology, Waterloo Lutheran University, Waterloo, Ontario.
H. Kimball Jones has here met two needs. He has provided scientific data about a situation in which many citizens—among them many church people—find themselves. And he has given evidence to homosexuals that Christians do care for those whose sexual behavior lies outside the pattern set forth in Scriptures.
Jones accepts an operational definition of the homosexual that includes both motivation and behavior: “One who is motivated, in adult life, by a definite preferential erotic attraction to members of the same sex and who usually (but not necessarily) engaged in overt sexual relations with them.” He refutes the theory of bisexuality advanced by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in the late nineteenth century. This theory attempted to root the problem of homosexuality in biological factors. Since bisexual behavior is primarily a question of psychology, says Jones, the term “bisexuality” with its biological connotation should be dropped.
Only 4 per cent of the adult males can be classified as absolute inverts who are attracted exclusively to members of their own sex; therefore any attempt to make a typology of homosexuals is bound to result in some oversimplification. The author does give a useful descriptive analysis of homosexuals that should be read by everyone who deals with the public. He sees homosexuality best described as a continuum with absolute inversion on one end and complete heterosexuality on the other.
Jones discusses several myths about homosexuals in the light of surveys and other studies. The homosexual is not more effeminate than his heterosexual counterparts, nor is he more compulsive. He is not highly promiscuous. Another myth presents the homosexual as exceptionally artistic and creative. Jones gives evidence to the contrary but suggests that the artistic fields often allow for greater variations and liberty and therefore are a haven for homosexuals and neurotics.
The major cause of homosexuality is found not in constitutional factors but in an arrested or distorted psychosexual development that is the result of an abnormal relationship with either one or both parents. The author correctly limits this conclusion to those homosexuals who have sought help through therapy; the generalization to all homosexuals would be unwarranted.
The optimistic note that 80 per cent of male homosexuals can be helped by therapy and 50 per cent have been cured of all homosexual symptoms contradicts Freud’s pessimism, which was supported by his emphasis on the constitutional basis of homosexual behavior. It also sets the problem in proper focus. If a homosexual can be helped toward a heterosexual orientation, his personal motivation to change comes into light.
The reader will surely wonder whether Jones really gets to the heart of the matter. Is homosexuality to be condoned as an expression of man’s sexuality, though a somewhat aberrant expression?
The author reviews biblical and patristic literature and admits that “homosexuality is strongly condemned in both the Old and New Testaments as an aberration that is contrary to God’s purpose for human sexuality.” However, he underscores Helmut Thielicke’s plea for an understanding of the homosexual. The problem must be studied in depth, he says, and the Church should be willing to listen to what the homosexual has to say.
The rest of the book deals with “understanding,” as the title suggests. But “understanding” seems to imply more than a factual approach to the problem. I sensed that “understanding,” as Jones uses it, means condoning homosexual behavior.
The issue, as I see it, is to ascertain whether the biblical revelation sets forth heterosexuality in a prescribed form as the divine goal for which sexuality was given to man. Man’s sexuality is to serve two ultimate purposes: one is conceptional, procreating children, and the other relational, establishing the “one flesh” union in marriage. The Apostle Paul lists homosexual acts among the “works of the flesh” and therefore as outside the divine purpose. Homosexual acts are contrary to the will of God for human sexuality.
With this Jones seems to agree. He takes up the argument from the position that both the homosexual and the heterosexual are sinners before God. Since heterosexuality is never expressed in the “purest” form, that is, entirely without lust or selfishness, one has no right to criticize homosexuality. This is a rather familiar argument. It is as if we said that since all Christians gossip, and gossip is sin, we have no right to criticize someone who happens to drink himself and his family into misery.
I disagree with the author’s formulation of the problem: “In the first place it means that, given man’s sinful nature, the primary problem in sexual relationships is not sex within marriage versus sex outside of marriage, or sex within a heterosexual relationship versus sex within a homosexual relationship. The problem is rather sex as a depersonalized force versus sex as the fulfillment of human relationship.” Rather, as I see it, the problem for a Christian is to establish the will of God through God’s self-disclosure in revelation and to accept that revealed will as ultimate authority. It is one thing to fall short of perfectly accomplishing the will of God and therefore to stand under judgment as a sinner in need of grace; it is another thing to attempt to alter the will of God to suit man’s sinful desires.
The Church must seek to understand man’s sexuality, and it must seek to relate sympathetically and redemptively to those who are unable to establish satisfactory heterosexual relations. The homosexual and the heterosexual cannot be held completely responsible for their sexuality. However, both are held responsible to God for what they do with it. While the Church seeks to guide men toward accepting responsibility for sexuality under the law of God, it dare not attempt to change that law to accommodate people with problems.
Young Enough To Survive
The Restless Quest of Modern Man, by William Graham Cole (Oxford, 1966, 110 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by David A. Redding, writer in residence, Tarkio College, Tarkio, Missouri.
William Graham Cole replies to Christian crepe-hangers with words Mark Twain used when his name appeared in the obituary column by mistake: “Your announcement of my death is somewhat premature.” Twain’s death was only postponed, but Cole finds our most holy faith quite young enough to survive the death wishes of Paul Sartre and the chronic attack on insincerity.
Many go on and on about The Restless Quest of Modern Man, but Dr. Cole is arresting. He is no stranger to contemporary life and thought and speaks as one who understands the disenchantment with a lethargic Church. He does not speak judgmentally of juvenile agnosticism but listens appreciatively to the questions and behavior of the next generation, which tell about the emptiness of the previous one. He is secure enough to praise the contribution of psychoanalysis but handles it with humor. He is not afraid of the mysterious ambivalence of human life that escapes the fanatic, but he reminds every thinking man that he is “condemned to meaning.” No perverted scorn, no trite apology of God will do. “Neither Robert Browning nor Tennessee Williams can be ignored.”
Cole remembers Reinhold Niebuhr’s words: “The Church is like Noah’s ark: you couldn’t stand the stink inside if you didn’t know about the storm outside.”
Perhaps Cole’s answer is not quite so inclusive and articulate as his diagnosis of the illness of our times, but whose is? He confirms the faith in the face of the major complaints and the obstinate forcefulness our time has hung against it. And he does so without neurotic nervousness and in terms that might disarm and captivate any listening skeptic. He might even raise a dead member or two.
We are rather like the crew of a ship crippled by a hurricane, which drifted helplessly for days. The water supply ran out and the men were perishing of thirst. Finally another ship was sighted on the horizon, raising their hopes. As the vessel drew within hailing distance, they cried out from parched throats, “Water! Give us water!” The captain of the rescuing ship called back, “Lower your buckets and draw it in. You are in the mouth of the Amazon River!” The Church at least points to the existence of the redeeming waters all around us, and it needs the help of those who are eager to see the new community become a reality instead of only a hope. To join requires neither the surrender of the intellect nor the uncritical acceptance of an absurd creed. Christianity is not primarily a series of statements to which the mind is asked to give assent. It is an encounter with Ultimate Reality, symbolized by a man on a cross. It is a search, a walk, a dream, a hope.
Book Briefs
I Stand by the Door: The Life of Sam Shoemaker, by Helen Smith Shoemaker (Harper & Row, 1967, 222 pp., $4.95). Mrs. Sam Shoemaker vividly relates the life story of her husband, who in his Christ-centered ministry was parish priest, mass communicator, and initiator of Faith at Work, the Pittsburgh Experiment, and Alcoholics Anonymous.
The Problem of Historicity in the Church and Its Proclamation, by Gerhard Ebeling, translated by Grover Foley (Fortress, 1967, 120 pp., $3). A new English translation of a 1954 work in which Ebeling advances the erroneous concept that the Word of Scripture is not the Word of God until it is proclaimed and interpreted for man.
New Branches on the Vine: From Mission Field to Church in New Guinea, by Alfred Koschade (Augsburg, 1967, 175 pp., $4.50). A Lutheran professor, formerly a missionary to New Guinea, pleads for indigenous churches with indigenous theology in emerging nations.
I and He, by H. D. McDonald (Epworth, 1966, 127 pp., 16s.). The reality of man, God, and grace is considered in the light of philosophy, theology, and Scripture.
The Names and Titles of Jesus: Themes of Biblical Theology, by Leopold Sabourin, S. J. (Macmillan, 1967, 334 pp., $7.95). An excellent study of fifty personal, messianic, soteriological, and Christological names and titles applied to Jesus. By a Jesuit biblical theologian.
Rediscovering the Parables, by Joachim Jeremias (Scribners, 1967, 191 pp., $4.95). An abridged and revised version of Jeremias’s 1963 volume in which he stresses that the parables must be understood in terms of their original historical setting and the catechetical setting of the primitive church.
Hope Triumphant, by William K. Harrison (Moody, 1966, 153 pp., $2.95). General Harrison offers a Bible-studded case for the pre-tribulation rapture of the Church.
The Christian Fathers, by Maurice Wiles (Lippincott, 1966, 190 pp., $3.95). A compact introduction to the thought of the early Fathers organized around central Christian doctrines.
Guide to the Pilgrim Hymnal, by Albert C. Ronander and Ethel K. Porter (United Church Press, 1966, 456 pp., $8.50). The composers, sources, and background stories of hymns dear to many Christians.
Games Christians Play: An Irreverent Guide to Religion Without Tears, by Judi Culbertson and Patti Bard, drawings by Susan Perl (Harper & Row, 1967, 124 pp., $2.95). A funfilled examination of the gambits and gimmicks of skilled practitioners of ecclesiastical oneupmanship. Evangelicals (“sons of fundamentalists”) will especially appreciate the analysis of Christian jargon.
See Yourself in the Bible, by Walter Russell Bowie (Harper & Row, 1967, 176 pp., $4.50). Eighteen well-written vignettes of biblical people and events that provide light for contemporary living.
Building and Maintaining a Church Staff, by Leonard E. Wedel (Broadman, 1966, 158 pp., $3.50). Pastors burdened with administrative duties may find Wedel’s systematic approach a godsend.
The Quotable Billy Graham, compiled and edited by Cort R. Flint and the staff of Quote magazine (Droke House, 1966, 258 pp., $5.95). Graham’s aphorisms may not establish him as a literary light, but his simple and direct statements on hundreds of topics drive home powerful truths.
Paperbacks
Honesty and God, by John M. Morrison (St. Andrew Press, 1966, 174 pp., 7s. 6d.). A perceptive critique of Honest to God that calls attention to its vital omissions, its erroneous view of Christ, and the inadequacy of its relative standards of morality.
Free in Obedience: The Radical Christian Life, by William Stringfellow (Seabury, 1967, 128 pp., $1.45). The Episcopal lawyer continues his crusade to provoke the Church to action in the world. He particularly calls Christians to contend against demonic “principalities and powers,” which today are “ideologies, institutions, and images.”
The Inside Story, Luke, John, Acts, and Romans, translated by J. B. Phillips (American Bible Society, 1966, 307 pp., $.35). The American Bible Society’s slick edition of J. B. Phillips’s translation of four New Testament books. Priced at thirty-five cents for wide distribution.
Confronting the Cults, by Gordon R. Lewis (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1966, 198 pp., $2.95). An important book for evangelicals in view of the skyrocketing growth of cults. Aids one in understanding the aberrations of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science, Latter-day Saints, and three other movements, and in evangelizing people deceived by these cults.
The Confession of 1967: Its Theological Background and Ecumenical Significance, by Cornelius Van Til (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1967, 128 pp., $2.50). Van Til argues that the Barthian-based new confession is a distinct departure from biblical and Reformed theology.
The Mystery of Israel, by H. L. Ellison (Eerdmans, 1966, 96 pp., $1.25). An erudite exegesis of Romans 9–11. But if one is anticipating a rationally satisfying explanation of the doctrine of predestination, he is likely to find this treatise somewhat disappointing.
