Accent On Christian Education
A Theology for Christian Education, by Nels F. S. Ferré (Westminster, 1967, 224 pp., $4.95), Christian Education in Mission, by Letty M. Russell (Westminster, 1967, 159 pp., $1.85, paper), The Recovery of the Teaching Ministry, by J. Stanley Glen (Westminster, 1967, 125 pp., $1.85, paper), and Straight Talk About Teaching in Today’s Church, by Locke W. Bowman, Jr. (Westminster, 1967, 151 pp., $1.95), are reviewed by Edward L. Hayes, assistant professor of Christian education, Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary, Denver, Colorado.
A strange subordination of the teaching function pervades the life, work, worship, and proclamation of the Church. This rather disquieting note is sounded in all four volumes. It might seem somewhat pedestrian if it had come from religious educators. However, a leading theologian, a New Testament scholar, a pastor-turned teacher, and an East Harlem parish worker here strike an amazing similar note.
An underlying conviction that Christian theology must be transposed into the educational key provides the impetus for theologian Nels Ferré’s A Theology for Christian Education. His attempt to integrate education and theology ought to be welcomed by scholars in both liberal and conservative camps. Ferré decries the subordination of church education: “To underplay education is to impoverish the life of the church.”
The author tackles the whole gamut of theological involvement in Christian education. He contends that Christian theology can no longer operate with presuppositions of either substance philosophy or process philosophy, and his reshaping of theology does not leave education untouched. His effort to integrate psychology, sociology, and philosophy is admirable. Such efforts, Christian and secular, have been meager.
Ferré concludes his work with a concise theology for Christian education, the substance of which reflects his concept of both the determinative Gestalt of the faith and the continuity of revelation. God is understood as Educator (viewed in relation to pedagogical process), Christ as Exemplar, and the Holy Spirit as Tutor. A theology for Christian education, Ferré contends, will help Christian education come into its own. The question remaining is, “What theology?”
Ferré’s and Glen’s volumes are by far the weightier of the four. J. Stanley Glen’s The Recovery of the Teaching Ministry, now published for the first time in paperback, carefully documents the contrast between sanctuary and classroom, the optional nature of the minister’s teaching role, the divorce of preaching from teaching, and the sublimation of truth to religious experience. His analysis deals a devastating blow to ambivalence toward church education. The greatest contribution in this volume is Glen’s synthesis of preaching and teaching.
Straight Talk About Teaching in Today’s Church is an eloquent plea to lift up the words teaching and teacher. It is hard to locate outspoken pastors, Bowman says, who exhibit a passionate, personal concern for the ministry of teaching. The teacher who wants sympathetic, non-technical help will find this an invigorating volume, regardless of how he reacts to the author’s ecumenical strategy for teacher improvement.
In Christian Education in Mission, Letty Russell expresses concern in quite another way. Christian education, she says, has been separated from other parts of church life. As a separate discipline, it never seems to have been exactly on the right foot. The Sunday school in particular appears as “a possession of the church that is applied as a ‘band aid’ to various problems of institutional survival.”
Miss Russell urges that instead of reshaping our ideas about education, we reshape our churches. She views education as something that takes place in a context. This vantage point is useful as long as there is a foundation for judging the validity of the context. But the author blurs that foundation somewhat. She rejects “morphological fundamentalism” with its rigid answers, and her only alternatives are freedom and courage to live with questions, intuition about truths, and the need to celebrate our freedom.
These four authors are not doing what is altogether too common of late—passing intemperate judgment upon the Church. Each in his own way offers positive assistance for the renewal of church education. The reader, whether he be pastor, professional theologian or educator, or lay teacher, will find helpful direction.
What’S An Evangelical?
Evangelicalism in America, by Bruce Shelley (Eerdmans, 1967, 134 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by Ronald H. Nash, head, Department of Philosophy, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green.
Shelley’s fine little volume marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the National Association of Evangelicals. One finds in it a short history of evangelical Christianity in Europe and America as well as a documented survey of the NAE’s first 2½ decades. Shelley also discusses the nature of evangelicalism and its relation to other movements in contemporary American Christianity.
Evangelical Christianity is not a denomination, religious organization, or theological system. It is, in Shelley’s eyes, more of a mood, a perspective, an experience. Modern American evangelicals continue to believe and preach the Reformation theology of Calvin and Luther and carry forward the evangelistic spirit of John Wesley and Charles Spurgeon. The major theme that runs through evangelical Christianity is the necessity of personal salvation. Evangelicals hold that conversion is a definite, decisive, and profound experience.
Evangelicals differ from liberals in their persuasion that doctrine is an essential ingredient of the Christian faith. Men gain God’s new life by believing the Gospel. Evangelicals are trinitarians who accept the deity of Christ and his atoning death; they look for a bodily resurrection and a future judgment; and they do not, like many liberals, think that what a man believes is irrelevant as long as he believes something. Evangelicals deplore the theological fuzziness so prominent in many American denominations; they regard it as unfortunate when even quasi-conservative religious groups exalt subjective religious experiences at the expense of sound doctrine. And it goes without saying that evangelicals are concerned about theological apostasy, whether it be Tillich’s camouflaged unitarianism or Altizer’s “Christian” Buddhism.
Evangelicals differ from fundamentalists in rejecting anti-intellectualism, theological nit-picking, and bitterness of spirit. The evangelical believes that a defense of the Gospel can be coupled with Christian charity and intellectual integrity.
Many otherwise conservative religious groups are wavering in their approach to the Scriptures. No one will question the genuine piety and theological conservatism of Southern Baptists, for example. But it is becoming increasingly more difficult to find professors in Southern Baptist colleges and seminaries who believe in propositional revelation. One sees an increasingly pitiful picture of devout theologians trying to maintain the verities of the faith while they reject the integrity and cognitive status of the only religious authority on which these doctrines can be based—the Bible. The result is that what one hears from Dixie these days sounds more and more like a nebulous mysticism. In contrast to this Barthian nonsense (i.e., noncognitive non-sense), evangelicals continue to maintain that the Bible is not only a revelation of God’s person but also a revelation of God’s truth. A denial of propositional revelation, evangelicals maintain, can only lead to a radical subjectivism that leaves the Christian without a foundation for his theology and without an apologetic for his faith.
Shelley does not ignore the shortcomings of orthodoxy, but as he says, “the church has known her periods of decadent orthodoxy but she has never witnessed a decadent evangelicalism. When the spirit of evangelicalism dies, the church will cease to exist.”
How Far To ‘Anything Goes’?
You and the New Morality—74 Cases, by James A. Pike (Harper & Row, 1967, 148 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by William C. Brownson, assistant professor of preaching, Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Michigan.
This most recent contribution to the mushrooming “new morality” debate represents, in one respect, a distinctive approach. Bishop Pike harks back to his first professional discipline, the study of law, and applies to contemporary ethical problems the familiar case-study method. Most ethical theorists, he complains, deal in abstractions, using only a few scattered examples—generally “loaded” ones at that. Here is an attempt to ground ethical conclusions more securely in “the inductive process.”
Armed with his battery of case-studies (seventy-four, to be exact), Pike aims to show the bankruptcy both of code ethics (“founded on immutable laws derived from an infallible source”) and of antinomianism or “anti-lawism.” The major force of his attack is leveled against code ethics—the view most people accept, at least on the conscious level. Bishop Pike puts to the test four of the alleged authorities on which this type of ethics is based: the Ten Commandments, other biblical injunctions, the teaching of the Church, and natural law. All are found wanting. The various commandments, he says, sometimes make conflicting claims. Other biblical injunctions are seen to lead to absurdities when consistently applied. The teaching of the Church, when viewed historically, is a welter of contradictions. And as for natural law—who is to decide what that really is, anyway?
Antinomianism, on the other hand, is dismissed on the ground that it doesn’t really work; that is, there are too many other would-be antinomians around to spoil the fun!
With these two contenders disposed of, “situation ethics” is seen as the one live option. For Bishop Pike, this means that there are no “ready-made answers for particular decisions.” The following are recommended as guidelines for decision-making: taking a responsible approach, rating persons above things, valuing eros love supremely (Pike sees agape love as inadequate because it sees the other as unlovable, thereby treating him as a thing instead of a person, eros on the other hand, sees what is lovable in persons and loves it), adopting fulfillment and service as the style of life, giving serious attention to the Code (as representing generalizations of human experience), and being aware of “pertinent factors to be weighed.”
You and the New Morality is a stimulating book. There is no doubt that Bishop Pike has posed some “hard cases” for which no pat answers will do. And almost everyone will find much to agree with in his proposed guidelines for decision-making. The book is disappointing, however, from a number of perspectives. Christian theologians will look in vain here for any grounding of ethics in God’s self-revelation. Biblical scholars will wince at the superficial treatment of New Testament ethics, particularly as this appears in Pike’s caricature of agape. And those who see lawlessness as a major foe in our time may view this book as another sellout (though perhaps a well-meaning one) to the enemy.
Like others of its kind, the bishop’s approach seems sadly naive. He calls for objective analysis in a host of situations that are emotionally charged, to say the least. Although he ends by bringing the norms of Scripture in at the back door (the Code is to be given “serious attention”), the main drift of the book suggests that, after all, we have precious little to guide—or restrain—us. For many, it may be a short step from there to “anything goes.”
Reading for Perspective
CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:
• The Indomitable Baptists, by O. K. Armstrong and Marjorie M. Armstrong (Doubleday, $5.95). The stormy but glorious history of Baptists in America is vividly related by a former congressman from Missouri and his wife.
• The New Testament and Criticism, by George Eldon Ladd (Eerdmans, $3.95). Introduces evangelicals to a positive, creative use of biblical criticism—textual, linguistic, literary, form, historical, and comparative religion.
• Nothing But the Gospel, by Peter H. Eldersveld (Eerdmans, $3.50). A collection of biblical, literate sermons by the late minister who served as the voice of the Christian Reformed Church on the “Back to God Hour.”
Uniqueness Of The Old Testament
The Authority of the Old Testament, by John Bright(Abingdon, 1967, 272 pp., $5.50), is reviewed by Robert B. Laurin, professor of Old Testament, California Baptist Theological Seminary, Covina.
The life and relevance of the Church reside in its biblical preaching, since only biblical preaching carries the normative authority of the Word. This is the conviction that produced this important book. But the specific problem to which Professor Bright addresses himself is the manner in which the Old Testament shares in this authority. It is a centuries-old problem, found even in Paul’s dispute over the place of the Law in the Church. But here in this book we are given a most lucid and compelling answer to the problem as a whole.
The volume is divided into five parts, each of which often rambles and becomes repetitious, but each of which has a simple point to make. The first chapter deals with the nature of the problem of the Old Testament’s authority. The Church, by including the Old Testament in the canon, has shown its belief in its authority as a rule of faith and life. But in what way, particularly since much in the Old Testament is from a different religious and political and cultural way of life? The second chapter surveys the major classical solutions in the history of the Church, each of which has its modern counterpart. There has been the Marcionite approach of eliminating the Old Testament from the canon, or at least of relegating it to second rank. There has also been the church fathers’ approach of retaining the Old Testament through allegory and typology. Then there has been the liberal Protestant approach of separating teachings of abiding ethical validity from outworn and sub-Christian elements.
Bright rejects all three of these approaches. In the third chapter he offers his own detailed view of the authority of the Old Testament. In brief, it lies in its unique theology, expressed in one way or another in each text, and shared with the New Testament, though this theology is often presented in cultural forms and applications that must be rejected. The fourth chapter shows what this understanding means methodologically. One must exegete the Old Testament from the perspective of continuity and discontinuity with the New. The theology of the two Testaments is basically the same, so one may read the Old Testament for its plain meaning. But there is also a “new” Testament, so one must also read Old Testament theology in light of what it has become in the New. Finally, in the fifth chapter, Bright presents us with illustrations of what this means in practice. This is worth the price of the book. Not only are “easy” texts examined (Ten Commandments; Jer. 31:31–34), but also historically passé (Isa. 7:1–9), ethically deficient (2 Sam. 11:1–12:24), and culturally crude (Ps. 137; Josh. 11:16–23; 23) passages are explained.
The book is exciting reading and if considered seriously should do much to restore powerful biblical preaching to modern pulpits.
Authority: Pragmatic Or Ordained?
Ordination and Christian Unity, by E. P. Y. Simpson (Judson, 1966, 184 pp., $5.75), is reviewed by James Daane, director, Pastoral Doctorate Program, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.
A Baptist bias and an ecumenical urge combine to discover a road without barriers leading to Christian unity. The author, Ervin Peter Young Simpson, professor of church history at the Berkeley Baptist Divinity School, dispatches apostolic succession, the traditional conception of ecclesiastical authority, the laying on of hands, and the threefold ministry as having no other foundation than their pragmatic usefulness in meeting the needs of the Church as these emerged during the Church’s historical development.
None of these orders or structures of the Church’s ministry, according to Simpson, is prescribed by the Bible. Aside from the injunction that the Church carry on its ministry decently and in order, the Bible enjoins no specific order. Any and all orders are “permissible when they do not contradict the spiritual principles of the scriptural revelation, undesirable when they obscure that revelation, and unacceptable when they contradict those spiritual principles.” In short, any order of the Christian ministry, any structuring of church authority, is acceptable if it is thought to facilitate the Church’s ministry.
The ministry of the Church in any or all of its forms belongs to the bene, the welfare, of the Church, not to the esse, the essence. Only the action of the Holy Spirit is essential to the Church. There are no offices in the Church ordained by Christ or the apostles and vested with an authority that is to be exercised by the occupants. Christ alone is the authority in the Church, and he has not, it is urged, deposited any of his authority in any office, nor delegated it to any occupant of such an office. Spiritual authority, says Simpson, cannot be delegated. The only authority in the Church is found in those people who, under the gift and operation of the Holy Spirit, possess a high quality of inner spiritual life. The laying on of hands conferred no authority; it merely indicated the selection to special service of persons who already had persuasive authority in their inherent spiritual quality. Such personal spiritual authority, says Simpson, cannot be transmitted. Even Christ’s authority in the world was of this personal, morally persuasive kind.
The Church, according to Simpson, cannot be an institution that mediates God’s grace; the sacraments as media of God’s grace are always conditional, dependent for their effectiveness on human cooperation, since God by his Spirit only operates directly upon the individual in the “I-Thou encounter.” Thus no earthly, human, institutional medium can be a necessary medium, nor the particular medium chosen by God, for the mediation of divine grace. One would think that such a view is not only unrelievedly individualistic but inconsistent with the motif of the Incarnation. But Simpson surprises us by asserting that if there is any extension of the Incarnation, it is the Holy Spirit!
What, it must be asked, does Simpson do with Paul’s injunction that elders be appointed in every church and that they, for the sake of their office, be honored? Simpson does urge that Jesus did not institute a presbytery to rule over his church. But about this injunction of Paul he says nothing, unless he is indirectly addressing this obstacle to his position when he warns against an extreme biblicism that regards the Bible as “completely inerrant and wholly supernatural” and as “an infallible guide book,” and when he suggests that the way to avoid “the Scylla of bibliolatry and the Charybdis of complete liberty” is to grant “ultimate authority” to “the gospel of God” to which the Bible testifies. He also asserts that even the apostles do not belong to the esse of the Church (though Paul asserts that they, with the prophets, are the foundation upon which the Church is built). Further, Simpson sees Paul as carrying the motif of the synagogue and Peter the motif of the temple, and sees in the first the error of Reformation Protestantism and in the other the error of Roman Catholicism.
But even these arguments are not enough to lead one to dismiss Paul’s injunction and accept a view of the Church and its orders and structures based on an unrelieved individualism and on a spiritualization of the whole reality of God’s redemptive action in Jesus Christ—a spiritualization that contends that God can pursue his redemptive business with actual, historical sinners only by directly confronting the individual sinner, and even then, only if the sinner is willing. For this carries the view that if the sinner is not willing, God’s entrance into the concrete historical situation remains unsuccessful—a position consistent with Simpson’s idea that the Holy Spirit is the only real extension of the Incarnation.
This book is the product of a capable scholar. No reader will doubt it. But the author has not shown himself capable of subjecting the views of his tradition on the Church—its ministry, its authority, its sacraments—to the critique of the Bible.
There is little possibility that Simpson’s kind of spiritualization of the Church and the order of its ministry, which reduces the esse of the Church to pure pragmatics, will show the road the whole Church will tread toward unity. Indeed, Simpson is really interested, not in the unity of the Church, but, as his book’s title suggests, in Christian unity, a unity of Christian individuals who never attain corporate reality, and who do not wish to, since God deals only with individuals. Neither the Reformed, nor the Lutheran, nor the Anglican, nor the Roman Catholic, nor the Orthodox, nor the Coptic churches will take seriously this view from the left field of the Reformation on how to achieve unity. None of these believe that God deals only and directly with the individual, and none, therefore, will accept a merely pragmatic view of the Church and of its ministry and sacraments.
As was said, Simpson with facile dispatch rids himself of the biblical teaching about offices in the Church that carry authority which its incumbents exercise both over those who acknowledge such authority and over those who reject it. Simpson recognizes no authority in the Church, nor in Christ himself, except that which carries its own persuasion. If the Church, the Christ, and the Gospel have no authority but this, how, we ask, shall the Church exercise discipline over those who remain unpersuaded, and how shall Christ one day judge all men according to the Gospel?
Simpson has a Church that is only for believers; a Church that has no authority, no gospel imperative for a sinner, unless he on his own recognizes and acknowledges its moral-spiritual authority; and hence a Church with a Gospel that has no inherent authority either to discipline a sinner in this life or to judge him in the Last Day. Much is wrong in the various sectors of the Christian Church—but not enough to gain acceptance of this road to that unity for which the ecumenical movement hopes and prays.
How It All Began
Religion: Origins and Ideas, by Robert Brow (Inter-Varsity, 1966, 128 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by James I. Packer, warden, Latimer House, Oxford, England.
With the modern decline of conviction about the truth of Christianity has come a new interest in “religion” as a world-wide human phenomenon. In this situation, Brow’s ground-clearing introductory survey of the forms that religions have taken in East and West, and of the options of belief and behavior with which they confront us, will prove a very useful tool, particularly in student work. Brow knows his way around, particularly in the area of Indian religions (he worked in India for many years), and has a flair for the thumbnail sketch. His book is packed with information presented in a neat and palatable form.
Particular theses are of striking interest. In the first part of the book, Brow shows convincingly that the hypothesis of monotheism, with informal animal sacrifice, as the earliest religion fits the evidence better than any doctrine of religious evolution through animism and magic. He brings out well the character of the new departures in Eastern religion in the sixth century B.C. as essentially reactions against priestcraft, and helpfully isolates Unitarian ethicism (Zoroastrianism, Islam, Sikhism, “liberal” Christianity, and modern Judaism) as a typical pattern of reactionary simplification.
In the second part, Brow points up the parallelism of J. A. T. Robinson’s “end-of-theism” thinking and the “modified monism” of Hindu Vedanta philosophy. Robinson has now forsaken the “ground of our being” image, but as long as he believes that the essence of the Christian position is to see “reality as personal” he will continue to be vulnerable to Brow’s criticism that it is really a refined monism that his theology voices. Perhaps Robinson’s real problem, like that of Tillich, is that he is too naturally religious to be consistently Christian.
There are small flaws. Unhappy references to Berkeley and Oliver Cromwell show Brow off his beat. There are some over-simplifications. The mysterious “Unity” in the diagram of monistic positions on page 34 is probably Radhakrishnan’s position, but neither text nor index makes this clear. All in all, however, this is a reliable and very recommendable book.
A Many-Sided Ethic
Biblical Ethics: A Survey, by T. B. Maston (World, 1967, 300 pp., $6), is reviewed by Reginald Stackhouse, professor of philosophy of religion and ethics, Wycliffe College, Toronto, Ontario.
T. B. Maston wrote this book out of a conviction that one of the greatest needs in the Church is a deeper understanding of what the Bible says about ethics. To meet this need he surveys, clearly and comprehensively, the ethical teaching of both Old and New Testaments book by book.
Running throughout the work are certain basic convictions that Maston claims are found all through the Bible and must be upheld emphatically by the Church today. One is the centrality of the ethical dimension of the Christian life. This dimension is not simply an addendum to the one that connects God and the believer, nor is it an option that the believer is free to accept or reject. It is a fundamental part of the believer’s relation with God, because, Maston writes, “religion and ethics are thoroughly integrated in the Bible.”
The Bible shows that God himself is the true foundation of Christian ethics, says Maston; this means that no moral code is the beginning and the end. The author does not discount the need for a moral code nor suggest that the Bible fails to provide one. What he does is show how that code is mandatory because it comes from God, not because of anything intrinsic in it.
The still popular notion that the Old and New Testaments teach different ethics is shown to be a shallow misunderstanding. The two testaments share a basic outlook and, despite any particular differences, find a unity in their common belief that the ethical life is a response to God.
Maston shows a welcome perspicacity in refusing to accept glibly the current catchphrase approach to Christian ethics. Yet at the same time he is careful not to close his eyes to the truths writers are now advancing. He rightly asserts that no single term can describe biblical ethics because all refer to different aspects of the Bible’s many-sided message. We must therefore give attention to all of them—a covenant ethic, a koinonia ethic, a love ethic, a will-of-God ethic, and the like.
What is even more necessary is that we heed Maston’s appeal to see how the real vitality of the Christian ethic depends on its arising from a fellowship with the living Christ, without whom not even the right words form the Word of life.
Book Briefs
This Is Living: Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, by Leonard Griffith (Abingdon, 1967, 159 pp., $3). Spiritual treasures from the “uncomplicated” book of Philippians that enrich the life of the man in Christ.
The Word of Reconciliation, by H. H. Farmer (Abingdon, 1967, 105 pp., $2.75). Farmer considers Christ as reconciler, prophet, priest, and king and tells what his saving work means in the lives of men.
Search for Identity: A View of Authentic Christian Living, by Earl Jabay (Zondervan, 1967, 150 pp., $3.95). The chaplain of the New Jersey Neuro-Psychiatric Institute claims that a major cause of emotional problems is the loss of a sense of identity, then shows how faith in Christ leads one to a proper sense of personal identity. Recommended.
Religion and Contemporary Western Culture: Selected Readings, edited by Edward Cell (Abingdon, 1967, 399 pp., $7.95). Readings that present leading positions on the relation of religion to culture, art, literature, philosophy, psychotherapy, science, and the socio-economic and political orders. The evangelical viewpoint is studiously neglected.
The New Christianity, edited by William Robert Miller (Delacorte Press, 1967, 393 pp., $6.95). The rise of the new theology is traced in this anthology of writings by William Blake, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Buber, Tillich, Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, Robinson, Altizer, Cox, and others.
Systematic Theology, by Paul Tillich (University of Chicago and Harper & Row, 1967, 912 pp., $12.50). Tillich’s three volumes published in 1951, 1957, and 1963 combined under one cover.
Living for a Living Lord: Devotions for Women’s Groups, by Lucy J. Pelger (Concordia, 1967, 97 pp., $2.95). Thirty brief, meaningful evangelical meditations for women’s groups.
The Catholic Avant-Garde, by Jean-Marie Domenach and Robert de Mont-valon (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967, 245 pp., $5.95). Describes post-war efforts to modernize Roman Catholicism in France and pave the way for church-wide aggiornamento.
Handyman of the Lord, by James W. English (Meredith, 1967, 177 pp., $4.95). A challenging account of how Negro minister William Holmes Borders sought for forty years to meet the spiritual and social needs of the people of Atlanta.
