The Word That Rings True
Ring of Truth, J. B. Phillips (Macmillan, 1967, 125 pp., $2.75), is reviewed by Paul Rader, evangelist, Reality Evangelism, Inc., Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Today the key issue in theology is the authority of Scripture, and particularly the New Testament. Is it true? Are the records historically accurate and reliable? Are they authentic?
All kinds of critical studies and attacks have been made on the divine authority of Scripture, the only source of knowledge about Jesus Christ and the foundation of faith and practice. Whatever the motives of the critics, a result they have often achieved is doubt. The “hath God said?” of the deceptive serpent in Eden has been amplified a thousand fold through efforts to humanize and demythologize the New Testament. Often critics have not fully realized the way in which their destructive criticism has led people to reject the authority of the Bible and to consider its message to be unworthy of an educated person. The results have sometimes been tragic. Zealous and gifted evangelists have suddenly abandoned their call. Pastors have left their charges. Eager missionary candidates have turned back disillusioned. And some men have even taken their own lives.
Just such a case triggered the righteous anger of the Rev. J. B. Phillips and caused him to write this book. An elderly, retired clergyman read and listened to the irresponsible “experts” of the “new theology.” His beliefs and faith were so undermined that he took his own life, having concluded that his life’s work had been founded upon a lie. Upon learning of the tragedy, Canon Phillips made his decision:
I … felt it was high time that someone, who has spent the best years of his life in studying both the new Testament and good modern communicative English, spoke out. I do not care a rap for what the “avant-garde” scholars say; I very much care what God says and does. I have therefore felt compelled to write this book.
Evangelicals will be glad he did.
In his response to the modern doubting of the New Testament, Phillips shows incisively not only the authenticity of the sacred record but also the disrespect, arrogant pride, irresponsibility, and spiritual ignorance of many liberal critics. In the foreword, he writes,
I am no anti-intellectual, any more than St. Paul, who wrote so penetratingly that “the world by wisdom knew not God.” But I say quite bluntly that some of the intellectuals … who write so cleverly and devastatingly about the Christian faith appear to have no personal knowledge of the living God. For they lack awe, … humility, … and the responsibility which every Christian owes to his weaker brother. They make sure they are never made “fools for Christ’s sake,” however many people’s faith they may undermine.
As the silversmith hears the clear ring of true metal when he taps with his hammer, so J. B. Phillips in twenty-five years of diligent study and translation of the New Testament has heard the ring of truth from the inspired book, its writers, and its subject, Jesus Christ. Candidly, he admits to being astonished and surprised at the penetrating vitality of truth he discovered. This “Translator’s Testimony” records the impact of truth upon him: the truth of experience, the truth of the Letters, the truth of the Gospels, the truth of Jesus, and the truth of the Resurrection.
His reasoned and experienced conclusion is “that we have in the New Testament words that bear the hallmark of reality and the ring of truth.” And he communicates his insights and reasons and his “happy and unexpected discoveries” (which he calls “serendipities”) with clarity and precision.
Like his friend and informal mentor, C. S. Lewis, (who he claimed appeared twice to him after his death) Phillips as an apologist has the ability to hold interest while making crystal clear the great truths of the faith. By logic and imagination, he is able to appeal to the minds of many who would not normally read the New Testament and to present forcefully its great doctrines centering in Jesus.
This book might well be used as a first step toward interesting agnostic or indifferent friends in the New Testament. Indeed, Phillip’s testimony to the historicity and reliability of the New Testament should find wide reception among those who may have advanced knowledge of material things but who lack understanding of spiritual matters. The book has the ring of truth.
Diverging Theological Streams
The Divided Mind of Modern Theology, by James D. Smart (Westminster, 1967, 240 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by Carl F. H. Henry, editor,CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
This is an informative and highly readable work for the serious scholar, rich in biographical and historical as well as theological content. It scans the years 1908–1933 with an eye on the early interaction and widening split between Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, whose diverging views have divided contemporary theology into two streams.
The author recognizes, rightly, that the central issue parting Barth and Bultmann was whether theology should be based on faith that responds to the Word or, as Barth insisted, on the Word to which faith responds. Continued evasion of this issue, Dr. Smart warns, will worsen the schizophrenic mind of modern theology. He appropriately notes, moreover, that Bultmann’s approach has as yet yielded no theological dogmatics.
But when Smart’s own views emerge, the volume becomes less statisfying.
He shares the Barthian notion that recognition of divine revelation in the created order requires natural theology. This emphasis, in my opinion, flows not so much from an exaltation of revelation as from a depreciation of reason.
Despite the increasing prominence of analogy in later writings, Barth nonetheless, as Smart detects, never abandoned his use of dialectic; to have done so would have necessitated an entirely new methodology. I think that the deeper issue must therefore be raised, whether the rejection of revelation in the form of scriptural truths—common to Barth and Bultmann—distorts the apostolic heritage, so that any stable and authentic theology must be found behind rather than through their views.
Smart hints, however, that he has no interest in returning to the evangelical view of scriptural revelation. He joins those who assail Barth for not recognizing “the theological necessity of a thoroughly historical and critical understanding of Scripture if men are to be free to hear what the text really says” and deals more softly with Bultmann’s attempted distinction in the New Testament of that which is culture-bound from that which witnesses to the eternal Kerygma. If Smart has found a reliable way to identify the revelational content within the Bible by a new standard, he ought to tell the world promptly. Failure of the dialectical and existential approaches to provide any objective criteria for picking and choosing between the texts is a prime factor in the present theological unrest.
The reader will, therefore, not be surprised that Smart dislikes Bultmann’s rigidity (seen in his abandonment of the futurist element in eschatology and the tendency to regard certain principles as fixed and final) and prizes Barth’s relativizing of all theology. “Because God and the human situation are both in constant movement, a theology that absolutizes anything in its own structure is unfaithful to its task.”
If Smart is here speaking his own mind as well as speaking for Barth, he has devoted several hundred pages attempting to learn from the past what, in any event, cannot undo the predicament of theology in the present and future. For not to know the truth about God seems to be a requirement of a theology subject to change without notice.
Analyzing A Psychoanalyst
Erich Fromm: A Protestant Critique, by J. Stanley Glen (Westminster, 1966, 224 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Gary R. Collins, associate professor of psychology, Bethel College, St. Paul, Minnesota.
Erich Fromm is one of the best known and most widely read contemporary psychologists. Trained as a psychoanalyst, he has written a number of books on modern society that have articulated the feelings of many people. In an age of growing automation, Fromm has written about man’s concern over his loss of freedom. As our society has become more and more impersonal, Fromm has discussed the problem of loneliness and man’s need for relatedness. With the growth of destructive nuclear power, Fromm has speculated about the nature of man and his capacity for good and evil.
In this “Protestant critique,” J. Stanley Glen (whose qualifications include doctorates in both psychology and theology) has written a summary of Fromm’s thought followed by a more extensive evaluation of Fromm’s psychology seen in the light of Scripture and Protestant Reformation theology. Glen shows, for example, how Fromm’s view of the Gospel has been distorted. By misinterpreting Scripture and by considering only portions of the works of Calvin and Luther, Fromm has developed the idea that the Gospel—instead of being good news—is a doctrine that enslaves men under the omnipotent control of an authoritarian and unforgiving God. When Fromm describes this God as an illusion that results from man’s projection of his own good characteristics, Glen shows that such thinking is neither good theology nor good psychology. The book also considers the biblical doctrine of original sin and compares it with Fromm’s view of man as a creature who is basically good but who has been corrupted by capitalistic society.
Glen discusses in detail many of the basic ideas in Fromm’s system, such as his views on loneliness, religion, authoritarianism, humanism, and love. The reader might have appreciated a further evaluation of what Fromm calls the five basic needs or of his view of the perfect society (which he calls humanistic communitarian socialism). However, Glen has limited his discussion to those aspects of Fromm’s system that have a bearing on “the message and theology of Protestantism” and has not attempted to appraise Fromm’s whole psychological system. Although the book is primarily a criticism, the author occasionally shows that Fromm raises some questions that evangelical Christians should consider.
Portions of this book are difficult to follow, especially without a good knowledge of philosophy. Nevertheless, Glen has written a thought-provoking volume for the serious student of religion and contemporary psychology. At present, such evangelical appraisals of psychological theorists are rare.
Reading for Perspective
CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:
• Biblical Ethics: A Survey, by T. B. Maston (World, $6). Maston traces the development of ethics in the Scriptures, shows their climax in the life of Jesus and the writings of Paul and John, and argues for their contemporary authority.
• The Other Son of Man: Ezekiel / Jesus, by Andrew W. Blackwood, Jr. (Baker, $3.95). Blackwood relates Ezekiel’s message to current problems and considers the prophetic background of Jesus’ designation as the “Son of Man.”
• Service in Christ, edited by James I. McCord and T. H. L. Parker (Eerdmans, $6.95). Essays presented to Karl Barth on his eightieth birthday by a host of scholars on the Church as a servant to Christ and mankind.
Oohs And Aahs Must Come First
An Offering of Uncles: The Priesthood of Adam and the Shape of the World, by Robert Farrar Capon (Sheed and Ward, 1967, 182 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by James W. Sire, associate professor of English, Nebraska Wesleyan University, Lincoln, Nebraska.
Robert Farrar Capon, an Episcopal parish priest and dean of the George Mercer School of Theology, has written a delightful book. His approach to modern man’s predicament is summed up in the preface (which Father Capon, consistent with his own rationale, puts at the end): “We do not need to have either God or creation explained to us; we are already sick to death of explanations. We have forgotten, you see, not what reality means, but how it smells, and what it tastes like.” So rather than developing a profound argument, he writes a witty meditation on man as a priest in the modern world. As he says, “God and the world need to be held up for oohs and aahs before they can be safely analyzed.”
Thus the book proceeds by indirection. First comes a picture of a driver on a thruway (a man in no place), then a glimpse of a man in some place, a man walking and learning the sights and sounds of his home town and its environs, Father Capon’s own Port Jefferson on Long Island. Out of the second picture a tall marsh reed, cut off close to the ground and comically held in the hand, mysteriously emerges as the symbol of man’s priesthood. This subtle shifting from specific detail to symbolic import sets the tone of the work and does precisely what the author wants. It gives the reader the sense of taste and smell—the feel of the world, something we lose with shod feet and tight-fitting necktie. But the detail is so ingeniously chosen, in the case of the marsh reed so archetypal, that before the reader is quite aware of it, Father Capon is talking theology.
An Offering of Uncles investigates the relation between God, man, and the world by plumbing the countless ramifications of the analogy between a layman in his ordinary capacity and a priest in his. As Father Capon puts it, “I want to refresh the sense of the priesthood of Adam, to lift up once more the idea of man as the priest of creation, as the offerer, the interceder the seizer of its shape and the agent of its history.” Taking his cue from Genesis 2:15, he investigates the significance of Adam’s task—to dress and keep the garden of Eden. Adam was to offer up all things to God. When he failed, when as a priest he offered up the right things in the wrong way, he became a renegade priest; death was his unfrocking.
But perhaps I am giving too much away. Suffice it to say that the analogy between man and priest is developed in relation to modern Adam, the discussion covering such topics as the status of things in general, the body in particular (even faces and beards), marriage (the subject of his earlier Bed and Board), friendship, cousins, and uncles.
Father Capon’s delight in life does not prevent him from a clear vision of evil, which operates as a black Mass and is ultimately dealt with only by the ultimate priest, the Second Adam, who saves history from Adam’s bad priesthood through the Passion and Resurrection.
Perhaps the weakest chapter of the book is a polemic against a few selected views opposing Christianity. One gets the notion that Father Capon has created straw men. But he has a witty match, and the straw men burn brightly. Perhaps the most striking chapter is his argument for the historicity of Adam.
As for the title, I shall allow each reader to discover how uncles are offered. This book, like a work of art, loses too much in the paraphrase. Ministers and laymen, students and wives, cousins and uncles: these and many other priests in God’s world will find An Offering of Uncles a book to be savored in the reading.
Prescriptions For Prayer
The Cycle of Prayer, by Ralph A. Herring (Broadman, 1966, 80 pp., $2.50), and How to Pray, by Francis E. Rein-berger (Fortress, 1967, 138 pp., $2.50), are reviewed by C. Ralston Smith, director of development,CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
These are intriguing and attractive books that attempt to treat a vast subject in a small space. One of the reasons for their attractiveness is their unusual approaches to the well-worn theme of prayer. This basic manifestation of the Christian life continues to be a problem, both in understanding and in undertaking. These men, one a Baptist and the other a Lutheran, make their pages shine with originality.
Dr. Herring brings to the author’s desk a vast training and experience. He was the son of missionary parents in China, was educated in Baptist institutions in the United States, and served a twenty-five-year pastorate in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His denominational services have culminated in his present post, director of the Seminary Extension Department of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Herring uses a circle to illustrate the nature and function of true prayer. A jagged line across its diameter indicates the level of human experience, intercepted by the Incarnation at the center of the circle. The quadrants are labeled with significant phrases: God enthroned, Point of Need, Crisis of Faith, and Joy of Receiving. If this seems nebulous, do not despair, for he also elaborates upon high doctrine down at the level of understanding. Sound and simple examples, chiefly scriptural, are used to point up the tremendous power available through this communication with God.
Mr. Reinberger has had campus experience as professor of practical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary, Gettysburg, and is now the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Frederick, Maryland. In six of the nine chapters, the road taken is already well-trodden. The high calling of audience with the Almighty is treated, as well as such mundane things as posture, place, and time for prayer. Then follows a brief study of how Jesus prayed, including an interesting analysis of John 17. The Lord’s Prayer is the theme of still another chapter, and the concluding section contains a suggested liturgy, a brief closing exhortion, and a treasury of prayers collected from sources ranging from St. Patrick to The Student Prayer-book.
However, the unusual feature about Reinberger’s book is the art work. With great taste and imagination, the text is interspersed with halftone reproductions of line drawings of postage stamps from across the world. Nearly all these government-issue stamps have religious themes, including portrayals of biblical characters, church fathers, reformers, and theological leaders of latter days. There are also reproduced famous works of art, such as a detail from “The Creation of Man” by Michelangelo (United States, 1958) and “Descent from the Cross” by Peter Paul Rubens (Belgium, 1939). This art work, carefully done and appropriately spaced, greatly enhances the appearance of the book, and indicates a facet of scholarship that shines infrequently.
While neither of these small volumes adds significantly to the vast literature on prayer, either one would be a helpful gift.
Straddling The Fence
Comprehensive Handbook of Christian Doctrine, by John Lawson (Prentice-Hall, 1967, 287 pp., $7.75), is reviewed by Gordon R. Lewis, professor of systematic theology and Christian philosophy, Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary, Denver, Colorado.
Although no single volume can be comprehensive of “all important issues” in theology, this one by an associate professor of church history at Candler School of Theology (Emory University) effectively introduces the serious, nonprofessional reader to the field.
Lawson objectively compares and contrasts many historical and contemporary viewpoints. Amid all the debates he discovers “a central, comprehensive, and balanced position of Christian interpretation.” He writes:
The historic Christian theological tradition is an intellectual and spiritual system so spacious, so well balanced and well articulated, and so tested by experience, that it well merits the deep respect even of those moderns who do not personally accept every part of it.
Lawson seeks to mediate between extreme positions and so he adopts an irenic Arminianism as over against Calvinism and Catholicism. On all sides, of course, such an arrangement is debatable.
Concerning the authority of Scripture, the author rejects radical criticism on the one hand and the complete truthfulness of the Bible on the other. Yet the bulk of the biblical witness to Christ is “consistent, majestic,” and continuous with Christian thought. Mixed in with the biblical narrative, however, are interpretive elements from the Church that Lawson says are not objectively true. He fails to see that the interpretive elements may also be the product of divine inspiration and true expressions of God’s redemptive plans and purposes. Since he cannot follow Christ in accepting the truthfulness of the whole Old Testament (Matt. 5:17, 18; Luke 24:25–27), it is hard to see how he can claim that Christ’s teaching is normative. And though the book includes an extensive index of Scripture references, it does not fulfill its aim of supporting its articles of belief with comprehensive Scripture “proofs.” The appeal to the passages seems to be less determinative than the appeal to critical evidence.
The impossibility of a mediating position on the authority of Scripture is clearly seen in Lawson’s discussion of the Lord’s virgin birth. He sees clearly that one who starts with a bias against the miraculous and for radical criticism will find grounds for rejecting the traditional doctrine. On the other hand, he sees that one who starts with a reverence for the authority of Scripture and the integrity of the Church’s creed will find equally good ground for upholding the doctrine of the Virgin Birth “as a historical event as well as a divine sign.”
What then does the author recommend? On this we are not to be “too dogmatic.” This is hard to reconcile with the historian’s commendable stance on the problem of the Jesus of history. “The Faith,” he said, is “an authoritative witness to events which actually happened, which are the saving acts of God performed in the course of the history of this world.”
The resurrection of Christ is affirmed with less tentativeness. But it is accepted, not on the inherent authority of the biblical witness, but on the basis of historical criticism. The early belief in the resurrection “could not have arisen in the first place apart from the outward physical sign of God’s saving act.”
The limits of historical methodology become more evident in connection with Christ’s second coming. We are told that it is “incautious” to affirm dogmatically a visible return of Christ. Admiring Lawson’s “reverent reserve” on some details, we must nevertheless warn of the dangers of irreverent reserve concerning the Bible’s view of itself.
Know Your Competition
Alternatives to Christian Belief, by Leslie Paul (Doubleday, 1967, 227 pp., $4.95), and Religion in a Modern Society, by H. J. Blackham (Frederick Ungar, 1966, 229 pp., $5), are reviewed by Howard A. Redmond, professor of religion and philosophy, Whitworth College, Spokane, Washington.
Alternatives to Christian Belief is an expansion of a series of lectures originally given at Kenyon College, Ohio, by Leslie Paul, professor at Queen’s College, Birmingham, England. It critically examines the various philosophies (and theologies) men have held and now hold as substitutes for Christian faith, including humanism, evolutionary optimism and pessimism, utopianism or Marxism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, positivism, and the death-of-God cult.
In general approach, there is little that is strikingly new or different about this book. But some of the sections contain material of special value. How widely is it known, for example, that Wittgenstein virtually repudiated his famous Tractatus, so long considered the holy book of the linguistic analysts? And though we all know of such existentialists as Sartre, Heidegger, and Marcel, how many of us have any knowledge of the personalistic existentialist Emmanuel Mounier? The chapter on Marx and Engels is also rich in background and analysis, as are brief sections on Toynbee and Teilhard de Chardin. In short, one could learn something about the modern world’s most important intellectual movements by reading this book.
But this strength is also the book’s weakness. If good writing is the selection of the significant and the exclusion of what is not directly relevant to an author’s purpose, this book leaves something to be desired. There is a serious question whether all the views discussed in this book are really live options to thinking people today. Evolutionary optimism and pessimism, for example, are surely possible alternatives to Christian faith; but they are hardly serious rivals today, though at one time they were. The same can be said of Freudianism; if our age is post-Christian, it is also largely post-Freudian.
Also, Professor Paul seems reluctant to consider the ideas of Americans. Except for the death-of-God theologians, American thinkers are given short shrift: one paragraph on Dewey, and not a word about Reinhold Niebuhr (whose penetrating analyses of Communism would have enriched that section) or William James (whose pragmatism is at least as much an alternative to Christian faith as, say, Spencerian evolutionism). Occasional British spellings and idioms (Tillich, Bonhoeffer, and others are said to be “not all of one kidney”) either mar or merry the verbal landscape, depending on one’s tastes. To sum up: the book is a compendium of much useful and sometimes little-known information, but is also slightly archaic in places, if one is concerned with alternatives to Christian faith in 1967.
One of Professor Paul’s alternatives, humanism, is presented in Religion in a Modern Society by H. J. Blackham, director of the British Humanist Society and secretary of the Ethical Union. The book is a humanist blueprint for the place of Christianity and the Church in contemporary society. The best of Christianity, Blackham argues, has been secularized or laicized, and all pretense of a supposed Christian foundation of society should be abandoned. Society should be characterized by “the coexistence of absolutes,” in which various conflicting systems live together in peace.
If sociologist Will Herberg is right, this has been largely realized in American religious pluralism. Indeed, it is often difficult to see what relevance the book’s argument has for American Christians (despite an introduction to the American edition that tries to show such relevance), for most of what the author says is directed to British society. Many of the points for which he argues were decided for Americans as long ago as the Bill of Rights and various historic Supreme Court decisions. To argue them anew is to beat a dead dog.
Yet there are some real values in this work. The comparison of the theories of Christianity and society held by Coleridge, Maritain, and T. S. Eliot is probably the finest thing in the book. And some of the author’s criticisms of institutional Christianity’s role in British society seem eminently reasonable. But the book’s basic anti-theistic, humanistic philosophy will draw a negative response from evangelical Christians, particularly when it advocates, a la Northrop and Toynbee, a syncretizing of the best insights of the world’s great religions.
It is helpful to know of the various roads to truth men have taken other than the way of historic Christianity. But the Christian is thankful for the Way with a capital W—the Way that leads us to the Truth and the Life.
Book Briefs
The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll, by J. A. Sanders (Cornell University, 1967, 174 pp., $10). The Psalms scroll, said to be “the most interesting and intriguing ancient biblical scroll ever discovered,” is translated and analyzed by a Union Seminary (New York) professor.
Dynamics of Doubt: A Preface to Tillich, by Arne Unhjem (Fortress, 1966, 128 pp., $2.95). If you don’t quite grasp the meaning of “ground of being,” “essence,” “existence,” “correlation,” “ultimate concern,” “theonomy” and other Tillichian concepts, this interpretation of Tillich’s doctrine of God will be helpful.
An Introduction to Mennonite History: A Popular History of the Anabaptists and the Mennonites, edited by Cornelius J. Dyck (Herald, 1967, 324 pp., $5.75). Mennonite scholars collaborate to present a readable account of the vision and progress of the Anabaptist movement from the sixteenth century to the present.
The Relevance of Physics, by Stanley L. Jaki (University of Chicago, 1966, 604 pp., $12.50). An analysis of the field of physics: its various theories of the world, its major themes of research, and its relation to other disciplines. Jaki emphasizes the changing nature of the field, points out its limitations and incompetence in dealing with certain areas of knowledge, and warns against scientism—“the profoundly unscientific attempt to transfer uncritically the methodology of the physical sciences to the study of human action.”
Paperbacks
Interpreting the Atonement, by Robert H. Culpepper (Eerdmans, 1966, 170 pp., $2.45). A substantial work on the atonement which is thoroughly biblical, well acquainted with historical perspectives on the doctrine, and theologically informed. All ministers and serious Bible students should own it.
The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal, by Conrad Cherry (Doubleday, 1966, 270 pp., $1.25). A long overdue appreciative appraisal of the covenantal theology of the man known to many only for “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
The Sermon on the Mount, by W. D. Davies (Cambridge, 1966, 163 pp., $1.65). Davies considers the Sermon on the Mount from the settings of Jewish messianic expectation, contemporary Judaism, the early Church, and the ministry of Jesus and claims that it spans the arch of Law and Grace.
The Ruin of Antichrist, by John Bunyan (Reiner, 1966, 324 pp., $1.50). Bunyan’s view of the doom of the Man of Sin remains in focus for today’s Christian.
The Greatest of These Is Love, by A. A. van Ruler (Eerdmans, 1966, 111 pp., $1.45). An inspirational verse-by-verse treatment of First Corinthians 13.
