Baptist Triumphs And Trials
The Indomitable Baptists, by O. K. Armstrong and Marjorie M. Armstrong (Doubleday, 1967, 392 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by L. Doward McBain, president, American Baptist Convention, and pastor, First Baptist Church, Phoenix, Arizona.
Thank God somebody has written something good about the Church! The Armstrongs have given us 392 pages of informative, fascinating material about the Baptists—from their Waldensian predecessors in the twelfth century to the vast and diversified group known as Baptists in 1967. More careful church historians than I will have to judge details. However, even the casual reader will have difficulty putting down this book. It is not all glowing history—the Armstrongs have dared to confess some of the more grievous crimes of our Baptist forebears. Nevertheless, anyone with an ounce of denominational pride (if this sin can still be allowed) will delight in reading about the contribution of one major religious group to the making of a nation.
Most of us take for granted our free institutions and often forget our history, especially that of the American struggle for religious freedom. We only vaguely remember names like John Leland and Anne Hutchinson; the Armstrongs have brought them to life. More than any other one man, John Leland gave us the Bill of Rights, guaranteeing separation of church and state. The authors also tell the story of Anne Hutchinson and her little friend Mary Dyer, who “was led to the Boston Common with hands chained and legs shackled as a criminal, charged with being a ‘vile Quakeress’ and from a rude scaffold … hanged by the neck until dead.” American Baptists who next year will converge on Boston for their annual convention should read this stirring story.
Not only do the Armstrongs dip back into American history and retell in their delightful style the stories of freedom-loving Baptists; they also chronicle the stormy years of growth and division. And they give a refreshing interpretation of Luther Rice and the early missionary enterprise as well as fascinating anecdotes—stories preachers can use to raise missionary money!
Speaking of money: Baptist clergymen fortunately have come a long way since the days of “$1.00 per meeting day—a fair wage and in keeping with the scale for a skilled worker.”
Not only was the income of Baptist preachers small in the eighteenth century; what is now the largest church in America (other than the Catholic) had mighty small beginnings itself. In 1700 in all of North America only ten small churches claimed to be Baptist. But by 1776 the total number had grown to 472. Then, according to the Armstrongs, we were off and running. During the next period, the population increased 140 per cent and Baptists increased 360 per cent.
Besides being very evangelistic, Baptists were also fanatically independent; nonetheless they “rationalized their fears of centralized church control and pooled their spiritual and material resources.” This all adds up to the greatest missionary movement in modern history. In view of this, it is hard to understand the logic Southern Baptists use in refusing to cooperate with councils of churches.
The Armstrongs are gracious about Baptist divisions and give a fine exposition of the continuing split between North and South. Men as far apart in emphases as Billy Graham and Martin Luther King are treated fairly. The book would be worth reading just for the simple story of Graham’s conversion and early years; yet this is told no more convincingly than the story of King.
The authors record Dr. King’s remarks to the student body of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1961 under the title “The Church on the Frontier of Racial Tension”: “I am absolutely convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other. They don’t know each other because they are separated from each other.” At a time when the major cities of America are on fire with race riots, these words still sound prophetic. To a group of demonstrators in Montgomery, King said: “If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, the historians will have to pause and say, ‘There lived a great people, a black people, who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’ ”
One could wish that the Armstrongs had described more fully the role of the contemporary prophets. I sincerely hope that these brilliant authors write another book—one that not only gives due appreciation to the revolutionary pioneers but also puts modern reformers into prophetic prospective.
The Armstrongs have done us a great service in glorifying the contribution made by Baptists in the past. Now someone needs to ask: Was the cause of the disenfranchised and the impoverished of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a cause Baptists championed—any more in need of the imperatives of the Gospel than the issues confronting the great denominations in the second half of the twentieth century?
Dry Rot In The Roots
The Roots of the Radical Theology, by John Charles Cooper (Westminster, 1967, 172 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Harold B. Kuhn, professor of philosophy of religion, Asbury Theological Seminary, Asbury, Kentucky.
To evaluate the more radical forms of Christian “theology” that mark the current scene, one must have a perspective covering centuries rather than just decades. This author seeks to gain such a perspective. He develops, among other themes, the idea that the key to any understanding of the movement(s) of human thought is the assumption of a critical attitude, to which he assigns the title “positive negativity.”
Professor Cooper sees historic Christianity as being in a relation of identity with the rationalistic temper in Western thought, so that with the “collapse” of rationalism in the modern era, historic orthodoxy ceased to be a live option with thinking persons. He is critical of all attempts to synthesize Christianity and a rationalistic world outlook. He notes that “the rise of the radical theology with its declaration that God is dead demonstrates the failure either of the synthetic theologians [Herrmann, Schweitzer, Bultmann, and Tillich] or of the church which did not fully accept their great syntheses.”
The application of these principles causes Cooper to dismiss eighteen centuries of Christian history with a wave of the hand, and to assume that historic Christian theology is permanently incapable of enlisting the loyalties of thinking persons. Within the context of this assumption, he seems to assent to the view that “there once was a God to whom worship was appropriate, but now there is no such God”—the position of the radical theologians, especially Altizer and Hamilton.
This view is, it seems, a logical (if not an inevitable) conclusion in an age that is breaking out of a stagnation of more than a century. Such an age, we are assured, demands a “free” theology—a theology that owns none of the qualities of historic Christianity. That is, it acknowledges no norms, no creeds, no fixed points of reference. The task of the “radical” theologian seems to be “the proclamation of the example of the apocalyptic Jesus of the Gospels, in whose message and example God completely revealed himself and thus willed to die in order to bring about man’s salvation in the freedom of Jesus.”
The relation between such a “theology” and the Christian Church as it empirically exists is by no means clear. Cooper pleads with the theologians to avoid any negative reaction to the “Christian atheists,” since in his view no return to the forms of historic orthodoxy is possible in such a world as ours. We are urged to recognize that for the Christian theologian there remains no alternative to “the acceptance of the secular, the radically immanent as the sole locus of the transcendent.…”
The book has strong points, among them the statement of the position of Paul Tillich, for which Cooper seems to have a special competence. He also has a broad grasp of historical movements. What may be questioned is his absolutizing of the conclusions of modern man, and his out-of-hand dismissal of historic Christian faith. It may be helpful to note that, under other sets of premises, Christian supernaturalism has been pronounced “dead” in the past, while at the same time men and women of faith have continued to draw life and strength from it.
After all, ours is not the first age to proclaim naturalism the only option for the educated person. The one-layered outlook has always had its attractiveness. But to present this as the only option seems to suggest either angelic knowledge or academic provincialism.
A Polemic Against Tongues-Speaking?
Glossolalia, by Frank Stagg, E. Glenn Hinson, and Wayne E. Oates (Abingdon, 1967, 112 pp., $1.45, paper), is reviewed by Paul McClendon, director of learning resources, Oral Roberts University, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The authors purport to have written an “objective … understanding treatment of … glossolalia in a non-partisan way.…” Generally, however, what they offer is a thinly disguised, highly partisan derogation of tongues-speaking that is seriously lacking in competent scholarship.
An attempt is made to attach a heresy label to glossolalia by quoting Bishop James A. Pike, who said it is “heresy in embryo.” Apart from the logical weakness of this attempt, there is unintended humor: Bishop Pike’s authority as a judge of heresy has been, to say the least, seriously impaired.
The historical portion by Dr. Hinson is the volume’s only redeeming virtue. The weakest section of his survey is the discussion of glossolalia in the twentieth century. Hinson ignores the worldwide scope of the movement, and one would deduce from his remarks that it all started in Los Angeles.
The biblical section by Dr. Stagg starts off with some show of objective analysis but rapidly degenerates—beginning with the section on tongues at Corinth—into a polemic in which scholarship is virtually abandoned. He buttresses his biased arguments with categorical assertions that often lack biblical support, and misuses the very atomistic proof-text methodology he decries.
His early argument in which he attempts to differentiate the tongues at Pentecost from the tongues at Corinth might be answered by A. T. Robertson, who in Word Pictures in the New Testament (III, 22), disagrees with him. Stagg even attempts to discredit the accuracy of the Acts text and avoids facing the obvious implications of First Corinthians 14:13—why should the speaker in an unknown tongue pray for an interpretation if the tongues were mere “ecstatic, unintelligible” nonsense? He gives meticulous attention to opinions of selected source critics while completely ignoring views of conservative scholars obviously acquainted with the same critical theories.
Stagg fails to admit that Paul nowhere argues against tongues but only against their disorderly abuse in a public meeting—the key is the edifying of the “church” (1 Cor. 14:4, 5, 12,19, 23, 28, 33–35). Using Stagg’s false logic, one could easily argue against communion and marriage, since they, like tongues, are sometimes abused.
The last section of the book, Dr. Oates’s treatment of the “psychology of glossolalia,” sheds little light on either psychology or glossolalia. In approach, it is surprisingly similar to many works by atheists who attempt to discredit conversion by purporting to explain the “psychology of conversion” without having experienced conversion themselves. His basic question-begging purpose is: “to correlate the studies of these psychologists with what we know about speaking in tongues as a childlike form of language.” Nowhere, however, does he support his proposition that tongues are nonsensical, baby babbling sounds.
Reading For Perspective
CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:
• The Ecumenical Mirage, by C. Stanley Lowell (Baker, $4.95). This timely and provocative analysis claims the ecumenical movement is not an authentic manifestation of the Holy Spirit but a symptom of the sickness of our time.
• Christy, by Catherine Marshall (McGraw-Hill, $6.95). Readers of A Man Called Peter will heartily welcome Mrs. Marshall’s first novel, a warm and moving story set in the Appalachian hill country, scene of her own upbringing.
• The Christian Life New Testament with the Psalms, notes by Porter Barrington (Royal Publishers, $4.95; 1.75). A functional King James Version with outlines and notes on great doctrines that will stabilize young Christians and assist all believers in their spiritual growth.
To the list of intellectuals the authors mention who find the charismatic dimension, including tongues, a meaningful part of their lives should be added Dr. Hugh O. Davis (Ph.D., Harvard), a distinguished teacher in Southern Baptist schools for twenty years. Although these men by implication share the condemnation implied by the book, the authors show no evidence of having consulted any of them.
The basic position of the book is an argument from ignorance rather than experience. The authors are like a Hottentot trying to describe strawberry ice cream that he has never seen nor eaten.
Conformity To Caesar
Capitulation: The Lesson of German Catholicism, by Carl Amery (Herder and Herder, 1967, 231 pp., $5.50) is reviewed by Earle E. Cairns, chairman, Department of History and Political Science, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.
The capitulation of the Roman Catholic Church to the governing urban middle-class milieu in the West German state and the consequent spiritual powerlessness of that church are the subject of this somewhat philosophical treatment by a German Roman Catholic writer. Amery traces this tendency from the days of the Fourth Crusade, through the Thirty Years’ War, the rise of Nazism in 1933, and World War II, and on to post-Nazi West Germany. He deplores the fact that the church, rather than challenging prophetically the values and actions of its environment even at risk of person and property, conformed to that environment.
One wonders why the author ignores the attempted genocide of the Jews by Hitler in World War II, especially in view of Hochhuth’s attack on the institutional Roman Catholic Church in The Deputy. This situation would seem to buttress Amery’s case. But perhaps he wanted to concentrate on the failure of the Catholic clergy and laity in West Germany.
This example of capitulation by the church to its milieu has particular relevance for American Protestantism as well as Roman Catholicism. Will the churches today conform to their economic, political, and social milieu, hostile though it is to biblical truth? His plea that the church preach and practice its prophetic function in order to become the conscience of the state, even at the risk of persecution, is needed in a day when the churches could become captives of the state.
The Remedy Is Confession
Integrity Therapy, by John W. Drakeford (Broadman, 1967, 154 pp. $3.95), is reviewed by Orville S. Walters, director, Health Services, and professor of psychiatry, University of Illinois, Urbana.
“Like John the Baptist … clad in a camel’s hair garment girded with a leather belt, so in these days a modern prophet has appeared.… Clad in academic gown, he blasted passive and permissive techniques of therapy and called for a new day.…” This excerpt is a good introduction both to the author’s prose and to his infatuation with a system of treatment that concentrates upon “therapeutic confession.” The prophet of this addition to the jostling field of psychotherapeutic sects is Professor O. H. Mowrer, “from whose hospitalization has come a new concept of psychotherapy.” This early assertion of uniqueness collides with a more moderate statement in the author’s penultimate paragraph: “Integrity therapy is certainly nothing new.”
The idea that neurotic conflict is essentially ethical or moral, being due to the repudiation of conscience, was indeed expressed by several of Freud’s associates and has been repeatedly asserted since then. The compulsive confessing and emphasis upon work advocated in “the new group therapy” are here shown to be similar to practices of the Oxford Group movement and Alcoholics Anonymous. The author also cites precedent for small groups in the early Church and in the Methodist class meeting.
Integrity therapy postulates that the troubled person is isolated from his fellows because of secret guilt, and that the remedy is confession. The therapist “gently but firmly pushes in to relate to the distressed person,” and opens his own life with some confession to prove that he was once in the same situation himself. If no exactly parallel experience comes to mind, the therapist draws upon some other example of “his own personal irresponsibility.” This gesture “frequently brings the response of openness and honesty and restitution, leading the way to health and adjustment.”
In the group, the subject is invited to accuse himself, to tell of his own defects and failures. Other members of the group then “zoom in” to help him recognize his shortcomings. They reject such “excuses” as sickness or the influence of past events. “No time is spent with the patients’ assets,” Drakeford reports. He is apparently satisfied to accept the standards of society as normative: “Aware of the expectations of the social group, the individual develops criteria for passing judgment on his own conduct.”
The author gives a glowing account of therapeutic results. The method is “simple, easy to use, and very productive.” It “frequently brings fairly quick relief from psychotic suffering.” The group technique proved to be “infinitely superior” to individual psychotherapy. “Almost any perceptive and interested person can play a part in helping troubled people.… We have the abiding conviction that it works—really works!”
A former associate says of Mowrer:
Deliberately and lucidly, he employs conventional theological language to describe thoroughly secular concepts and thus endeared to the clergy, he proceeds to assault choice parts of their theologies with gusto, wit and venom.
Drakeford quotes this sentence but omits the italics in the original. He is eager to prove that “integrity therapy follows not only the letter but also the spirit of the Bible,” but he is saddled with Mowrer’s disparagement of some basic Christian doctrines. As Freud pronounced agape “unpsychological,” so Mowrer declares forgiveness “psychologically questionable.” Moreover, Drakeford acknowledges, Mowrer “saves some of his most telling blows for Protestants and their justification by faith.” Pelagian overtones reverberate in Mowrer’s continuous emphasis upon expiration, penance, and works.
Every psychiatrist knows that the patient who concentrates upon his own faults and shortcomings may bring on increased depression. How often has recurrent depression or suicide followed group therapy that has this accusatory emphasis? At least one of Drakeford’s case histories seems to illustrate such an outcome. The author gives no statistics of any kind, though after several years of usage, long-range results should now be available.
A criticism of the system, quoted with disapproval by the author in his epilogue, is nevertheless apt, penetrating, and restrained: “Integrity therapy oversimplifies both religion and psychology.”
A Worldwide Spiritual Movement
The Church of the Lutheran Reformation: A Historical Survey of Lutheranism, by Conrad Bergendoff (Concordia, 1967, 339 pp., $9), is reviewed by Richard V. Pierard, associate professor of history, Indiana State University, Terre Haute.
Four hundred fifty years ago this year an obscure German monk named Martin Luther posted on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg a series of propositions for debate on the question of indulgences, and this action touched off a controversy that led to the fundamental transformation of the Church in the West. In this volume Conrad Bergendoff, a distinguished theologian, church historian, and retired president of Augustana Lutheran Seminary, traces the history of the Lutheran Reformation and the subsequent development of the Lutheran movement.
His thesis is quite simple. The Lutheran reformers did not seek to create a new church; rather, they wished to restore the Church to its original character. Rome had introduced innovations such as the Mass, the hierarchy, and the papacy, and the Church needed to be called back to its original mission of proclaiming the Gospel and administering the sacraments. Bergendoff portrays Lutheranism as not merely a German movement but also a worldwide church of great individuality and variety.
Although Bergendoff is not writing for the specialist in church history and his book contains very little that is new, yet the work has much to offer. He writes with clarity and eloquence and shows familiarity with the relevant literature in English, German, and the Scandinavian languages. Even though he is convinced that Lutheranism is primarily a spiritual movement, he relates its development to the general context of European political and intellectual history in a careful and balanced manner. Of particular value to the non-Lutheran reader is his portrayal of the life and worship experiences of the various Lutheran bodies. Perhaps the main strength of the book is its breadth. It is not the dreary record of endless theological controversies and the trivial activities of churchmen but rather the unfolding of a dynamic spiritual movement that encompasses the entire world.
On the other hand, many readers of different persuasion will be less than satisfied with some of Brown’s statements about the Lutheran attempt to restore the original scriptural church. His discussion of more recent Lutheran history is somewhat imprecise, particularly in regard to the nature of the Prussian Union and the role of the Church under Hitler. The book also needs more careful editing to give consistency in the use of German names. For example, Bergendoff repeatedly uses Smalcald instead of the German spelling, Schmalkalden, but then uses the German, Nürnberg, instead of Nuremberg. The Altona Statement of 1933 is incorrectly called the “Altoona” Statement. Finally, many ecumenists will be disappointed by his assertion that Lutherans have little interest in worldwide organizational unity unless there is first confessional unity.
An Edifice Built On Quicksand
Peace Is Possible: A Reader for Laymen, edited by Elizabeth Jay Hollins (Grossman Publishers, 1966, 339 pp., $2.95, paper), is reviewed by C. Gregg Singer, chairman, Department of History, Catawba College, Salisbury, North Carolina.
This carefully documented collection of essays and addresses presents the thinking of many scholars on the intricate problems of peace in the atomic age. Motivation for the essays is the tensions brought into international relations since the advent of the atomic bomb in 1945. In spite of the rather imposing list of contributors, the volume is little more than a plea for world peace through world law.
The first section lays out the predicament that confronts mankind today and indicates that a drastic change from the present system of sovereign states is an absolute necessity if civilization is to survive. Section two then presents the basic document around which the rest of the book revolves—“Introduction to World Peace through World Law,” by Grenville Clark. This has been somewhat revised and updated since its appearance in 1960. The third section deals with possible objections to the plan envisioned by Clark, and the fourth suggests transitional steps toward the goal of world peace through world law.
The fundamental idea is this: “There can be no peace without law.” But Clark overlooks the basic difficulties in this assumption. In our world of divergent legal philosophies and political ideologies, how can there be any agreement on the nature of law? Is the West to accept the Soviet concept? In a world government, which philosophy of law will become the basis for law as it is actually administered through (as the writers advocate) a court of international justice and a greatly strengthened United Nations? How can a Marxian view of law be brought into harmony with the philosophy of constitutionalism and English common law as we know it in this country? Furthermore, will not the greatly strengthened United Nations become a super-national totalitarian regime? Clark feels he has dealt with this problem sufficiently in the elaborate system of safeguards written into his proposals. And other writers believe that if there is to be a super-national United Nations it should be democratically controlled, to minimize the danger of despotism.
The book basically emphasizes that the threat to world peace raised by modern missiles transcends all other considerations. Thus most of the writers give the impression that world peace is more important that the form of government used to achieve it.
The volume as a whole rests upon the humanistic assumption that peace is possible simply because rational men can and will find a rational solution to the crisis of the atomic bomb and the missile race. The editor has made one concession to Christian conscience by including the papal encyclical Pacem in Terris, but this concession is more apparent than real since the encyclical rests the case for world peace more on nautral law than on an appeal to the Scriptures.
None of the writers pays any attention to the problem of sin, and none gives any place to a theistic world-and-life view. The book presents a closely reasoned scheme for a world government based on world law—that is, for a lofty edifice built upon the sands of human merit, on the assumption that the human mind and will is fully capable of solving the great problems that confront humanity today.
Book Briefs
Toward an Undivided Church, by Douglas Horton (Association and University of Notre Dame, 1967, 96 pp., $2.50). The retired dean of the Harvard Divinity School waters down the differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants. Claiming that the vocabulary of ecumenism has no such words as “surrender” or “compromise,” he envisions a world church that allows the various communions to preserve their distinctions and yet be united. Horton offers sincere optimism based on a blurred view of the theological and ecclesiastical problems involved in church union.
Religion and Regime, by Guy E. Swanson (University of Michigan, 1967, 295 pp., $7.50). A sociological investigation of forty-one societies during the Reformation era, 1490–1780, that concludes that Catholicism survived in countries with centralist or commensal regimes, Anglicanism or Lutheranism triumphed in limited centralist states, and Calvinist and Zwinglian doctrine became dominant under balanced or heterarchic regimes. Very interesting.
The Emergence of Philosophy of Religion, by James Collins (Yale, 1967, 517 pp., $12.50). Collins examines the attitudes, methodologies, and concepts of Hume, Kant, and Hegel in the area of religion. He defends the right of philosophers to study the human meanings of religion on the basis of a realistic, naturalistic approach.
Sinai, by Heinz Skrobucha (Oxford, 1966, 120 pp., $17.50). This large volume, filled with beautiful photographs and an expressive text, tells the dramatic history of Sinai from the time of Moses and on through its fourteen centuries as the site of the monastery of St. Katherine, where Tischendorf found the “Codex Sinaiticus.”
The Principles of Biblical Interpretation, by A. Skevington Wood (Zondervan, 1967, 103 pp., $3.50). A well-known British Bible expositor returns to his earlier interest in church history and traces the methodology of selected writers from Irenaeus to Calvin. His opening chapter states his own position: “The sphere from which the methodology of our interpretation of Scripture is to be drawn is that of Scripture itself”; but this overlooks the vexed contemporary issue of Vorverständnis.
The Holy Spirit: Believer’s Guide, by Herschel H. Hobbs (Broadman, 1967, 160 pp., $3.50). These popular studies in the person and ministry of the Holy Spirit by a Southern Baptist preacher contain much edifying substance. His equating the Pentecostal glossolalia with the “tongues” at Corinth places him in some difficulty, however.
The Davidson Affair, by Stuart Jackman (Eerdmans, 1966, 181 pp., $3.50). The events of Good Friday and Easter and the people involved in them come vividly to life in this twentieth-century TV documentary setting. Mr. Jackman’s narrative is convincing, sensitive, and moving without doing injustice to the biblical account.
Paperbacks
The Idea of Perfection in the Western World, by Martin Foss (University of Nebraska, 1967, 102 pp., $1.50). Foss shows the Greek idea of perfection to be static, abstract, limited, and erroneous. In contrast, he contends that the biblical understanding of perfection is not a stagnant concept but a living experience of faith in a personal God who is known in the course of dynamic service. A stimulating, scholarly little book.
The Seventh Solitude, by Ralph Harper (Johns Hopkins, 1965, 153 pp., $1.95). The solitude to which Harper refers is that of writers who realize they are metaphysically homeless and care about it. He examines the spiritual isolation of three existentialists influenced by Stendhal: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. Then he offers alternative views: St. Augustine’s passion for God and Proust’s passion for remembrance of the past. A new edition well worth reading.
