Pursued By The Tiger
Christ the Tiger: A Postscript to Dogma, by Thomas Howard (Lippincott, 1967, 160 pp., cloth $4.50, paper $2.25), is reviewed by Virginia R. Mollenkott, assistant professor of English, Paterson State College, Wayne, New Jersey.
With the publication of Thomas Howard’s first book, a bright new planet swims into the ken of the evangelical reader. Unto us is born a writer—a writer whose passionate prose makes one simultaneously love and ponder, laugh and writhe. The honesty that lights every page of Christ the Tiger is nothing less than astonishing.
The title is neither a device to catch attention nor an attempt to cash in on Madison Avenue’s recent fondness for tigers. Drawn from T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion,” it goes to the heart of Howard’s concept of Jesus the Christ: “He has been the subject of the greatest efforts at systemization in the history of man. But anyone who has ever tried this has had, in the end, to admit that the seams keep bursting. He sooner or later discovers that he is in touch, not with a pale Galilean, but with a towering and furious figure who will not be managed.”
Howard admits at the outset that he is writing the story of one man’s experience. His childhood he describes as “a massive effort to get cozy,” during which he learned a “non-lunatic-fringe view of God” in his conservative Protestant home. During high school he scorned “the world,” which he defined as “sex, alcohol, tobacco, bridge, the fox trot, the races, and the movies.” It was “a highly specific vision and therefore eminently manageable.” But college, with its welter of options and its myriads of questions, forced him to “think of life in terms of quest rather than of arrival”; and the army gave him friends whom he could no longer see merely as potential converts.
Then, “in the cozy juvescence of Thomas Howard’s life … the world broke in and clobbered him.…”
He grooved all the grooves. Of the mind, of
The body. Art, sin, sex, love, words with ideas,
Ideas without words.…
In the course of his quest, Howard found he “must abandon the effort to insist on Love as the demonstrably operative energy behind human existence,” because life is “marked by limitation and outrage.” Finally, “in the frantic/Putrescence of the year came Christ the tiger.” Howard discovered that in the Incarnation man’s myths of perfection and beauty were actualized. Christ validated “our eternal effort to discover significance and beauty beyond inanition and horror by announcing to us the unthinkable: redemption.” Howard’s description of the meaning of redemption is soaring and sublime, a passage to be read aloud with tears of joy.
The intensity of this book is a demanding intensity; its questions are full of anguish and its terms are precisely defined. Its answers may seem unexpected and disturbing, but they are also large and liberating. Meeting Christ the Tiger is not only well worth the effort; for any person who wants with all his might to be authentic, it is an urgent necessity.
A Rising Star In Theology
Theology as History, “New Frontiers in Theology,” Volume III, edited by James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb, Jr. (Harper & Row, 1967, 276 pp., $6), is reviewed by James Montgomery Boice, assistant editor,CHRISTIANITY TODAY
For years now the great era of dialectic theology in Europe has been passing, both in its Barthian and Bultmannian forms. In the decade following World War II, Bultmann stole much of the Barthian thunder. But Bultmann is now being deserted by his followers, and the leadership of the theological world is up for grabs.
Reading For Perspective
CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:
• Parents on Trial, by David R. Wilkerson with Clair Cox (Hawthorn, $4.95). The founder of Teen Challenge relates stirring experiences from his inner-city youth ministry and calls for responsible parenthood to help curb delinquency.
• A Varied Harvest, by Frank E. Gaebelein (Eerdmans, cloth $4.95, paper $2.45). Out of his life as headmaster, editor, and writer, Gaebelein offers choice essays on Christianity, education, public affairs, and mountain climbing.
• Beyond the Ranges, by Kenneth Scott Latourette (Eerdmans, $3.95). With gratitude that “God sent his whisper to me,” this Yale University professor emeritus, America’s foremost church historian, humbly and intimately describes his life as scholar and servant of the church.
Who will give direction to a new generation of students and professors? Who will dominate theology for the final third of the century? The newest contender is Wolfhart Pannenberg, the thirty-eight-year-old professor of systematic theology at the University of Mainz, Germany, whose radical emphasis upon the nature of revelation as history is already regarded by many as an increasingly viable option in modern theology.
As leader of the Pannenberg “circle” (R. Rendtorff, K. Koch, U. Wilckens), the Mainz professor speaks for those who are dissatisfied with Bultmann’s radical skepticism in regard to biblical history and who question the basic disjunctions of faith from fact and revelation from history that characterize much modern theology. On the one hand, Pannenberg rejects existential theology, since it dissolves real history into the historicness of individual existence; on the other hand, he rejects the assumption of a superhistorical content of faith that is evident in Barth and others. Pannenberg’s objective, outlined in the original Offenbarung als Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1961) and carried a step beyond in the focal essay in the present work, is to create a theology in which faith can rest on fact. Faith is not mere knowledge, according to Pannenberg. Still less is it opposed to knowledge. Faith is God-given. Yet faith, if it is not to be mere illusion, must be founded on a revelation given in history and hence on a revelation demonstrable by objective historical research.
The distinction of the Pannenberg group, as over against the Heilsgeschichte school of Oscar Cullmann, is the attempt to locate revelation in the whole of history, in universal history, and to find the clue to that history in the proleptic character of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. For Pannenberg the resurrection is genuinely historical, though he allows that the language used to describe it is mythological.
For some time Pannenberg has written largely for European readership. Now through the work of Claremont’s James M. Robinson, the Mainz professor writes for American scholars and responds to their objections. In Theology in History, the third volume of the “New Frontiers in Theology” series, Pannenberg’s lead essay is followed by reactions from Martin J. Buss, Kendrick Grobel, and William Hamilton. Buss questions Pannenberg’s idea of universal history. Grobel examines Pannenberg’s arguments for the historical character of the resurrection. And Hamilton offers an unusual theological critique, questioning whether the historical method does not replace the internal witness of the Holy Spirit in Pannenberg’s epistemology.
In a final essay the young German professor responds to his critics, reserving his harshest words for Hamilton, whose remarks, he says, caricature his position. In these pages he reaffirms the necessity of faith for individual salvation, stressing only that faith must be based on knowledge and that theological knowledge rightly understood eventually leads beyond itself into faith. With these emphases Pannenberg’s work may well endure as long as that of the theological giants who have preceded him.
A Practical Tool For Ministers
Baker’s Dictionary of Practical Theology, edited by Ralph G. Turnbull (Baker, 1967, 469 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by Robert N. Schaper, assistant professor of practical theology and dean of students, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.
In name and orientation, though not in format, this volume follows Baker’s recently published Dictionary of Theology. The eighty-five contributors are properly representative of the varied specialties of the ministry. Where the articles have significant theological implication, the position is conservative and evangelical. Although the problems of practical theology do not lend themselves to doctrinal rigidity, this work casts the preacher and pastor against biblical imperatives and evangelical commitments. Presbyterians and Baptists are dominant among contributors, and there is thus a Calvinist influence. The only intramural problem of the book seems to be ecumenism. George Peters and Harold Lindsell find it theologically suspect, but Norman Hope is content to leave the history uninterpreted.
The book is self-described as neither an encyclopedia nor a history but a source book for pastors and students. It is arranged in ten sections, the first three (preaching, homiletics, hermeneutics) having to do with the sermon and the last seven dealing with various ecclesiastical tasks. Inclusion of hermeneutics in this volume is somewhat excessive, since this field is no more relevant to the task of preaching than biblical theology, church history, and so on. Strictly speaking, the volume is not a dictionary but a condensation of standard works on practical theology. Although the articles are somewhat uneven and in some cases repetitive (e.g., there is a section on “The Pastor as Worshiper” and another on worship), the busy pastor will be glad to have the essence of more elaborate volumes distilled in one readily available source.
Of note are the helpful bibliographies, especially the article by Ilion T. Jones on “The Literature of Preaching,” which is an excellent compilation and tells which works are in print.
Some of the theological trends within evangelical Christianity can be detected in this volume. One section is entitled “Evangelism-Missions”; yet the articles fall clearly into one category or the other, largely by geographical or historical criteria. The arrangement probably reflects the theological conviction of the unity of the mission of the Church. In the area of liturgy and worship, articles are heavily weighted toward a more formal liturgy and observance of the Christian year.
This is a reasonably useful tool. For the uninitiated, anticipating the many responsibilities of the pastor can be frightening. One might be encouraged if instead of being told of eleven different groups to whom the pastor should be a friend, he were simply told to be friendly. Perhaps this type of impracticality suggests why there has been no comprehensive book on practical theology since 1903.
The New View Of Original Sin
Christ and Original Sin, by Peter De Rosa (Bruce, 1967, 138 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Warren C. Young, professor of Christian philosophy, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, Oak Brook, Illinois.
This author is a young Roman Catholic scholar in Britain, and his work reflects the thinking of the young Catholic scholars of today—perhaps best understood as the spirit of Vatican II. In dealing with two central theological themes, Christ and original sin, he presents briefly the traditional teaching of Catholicism and then devotes most of his study to contemporary discussion among Catholic scholars.
His discussion of Christ centers primarily on the mystery of Incarnation or the two-nature doctrine. The tendency in older Catholic theology was to overemphasize Christ’s divine nature and neglect his human nature—after all, is not Jesus God? As a result Catholic thought tended to docetism. Although there was no outright rejection of Christ’s humanity, in effect it just was not really there.
To correct this, De Rosa says, contemporary scholars want to get away from the “Jesus is God” approach and emphasize that Jesus was also fully human. Better to say that God became incarnate in a man, Jesus of Nazareth. God’s Son was not a puppet but a real man “called to make decisions and to learn obedience by suffering, called to endure in our humanity a condition of distance or exile from God.”
De Rosa makes an interesting point in dealing with the place of Mary in traditional Catholic thought. Since Christ was fully God rather than man, Mary in effect became the Mediator between God and man. Hence, he grants the validity of the charge made by some Protestants that in Catholic thought Mary has replaced Jesus as Mediator.
One has a feeling that De Rosa is writing to evangelical Protestants as well as to Catholics. Have we not also tended to neglect the real humanity of Christ in our zeal to stress his deity? No doubt this is often a defensive measure against a liberal theology that stressed his humanity almost exclusively.
In discussing original or Adamic sin, De Rosa says that most contemporary Catholic scholars view Genesis as a pictorial, not literal, presentation of theological truth. The basic elements in the Genesis story were taken over from neighboring communities, and these elements became the bearers of divine revelation. Adam, then, is to be considered not so much a historical man as the typical or universal man. And original sin is not the sin of a particular man but the sin of every man. “Original” sin is what results in us by reason of our birth into this condition of sin that precedes our own personal and conscious choices and inescapably effects us. The old view of original sin as something passed on through the race has no foundation. Indeed, the Jews “knew nothing of a sin handed on from parent to child.”
Furthermore, Augustine’s interpretation of Romans 5:12 is unjustified. The Douay version, following the Vulgate, reads, “Death passed upon all men in whom all have sinned.” Augustine believed that “in whom” referred to Adam. Actually the Greek should be translated, “Death spread to all men because all men sinned” (RSV). Many other theologians have pointed to this same error in Augustine’s understanding of Romans 5:12 and have insisted that this verse should not be used to support the doctrine of original sin.
Whether or not one can fully agree with the author, who claims he is presenting the views of others more than his own, one will profit by reading this very stimulating book. If for no other reason, it should be read as an excellent introduction to the theological discussion presently occupying the younger Roman Catholic scholars. We will surely be hearing more from this author in the years ahead.
A Denominational Danger Spot
Peace! Peace!: A Search for a Sincere and Alert Christian Perspective, edited by Foy Valentine (Word Books, 1967 162 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by C. Gregg Singer, chairman, Department of History, Catawba College, Salisbury, North Carolina.
This volume is a collection of addresses given at summer conferences sponsored by the Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Offered as an honest and realistic attempt to deal with the church’s conception of political peace, these eleven essays fall short of their goal. Although there are frequent references to the Scriptures throughout the book, there is actually very little biblical foundation for the conclusions advanced.
The first chapter sets the pace for all that follows. In it Carlyle Marney not only fails in his attempt to set forth a foundation for political peace but seems to go out of his way to replace the Scriptures with a humanistic outlook. He goes so far as to say that “the Eternal gets His character and His name from us.”
All the writers show a great awareness of the predicament of contemporary man and the possibilities of atomic warfare, and their sincerity is obvious. But their approach to the problem shows nothing of the insight that is so evident in Peace Is Possible, recent essays edited by Elizabeth Jay Hollins.
Not only does this book lack a scholarly approach to the issues at hand: it also betrays great theological weaknesses. The obvious lack of insight into the nature of war and peace results from an almost total neglect of the implications of the doctrine of sin. The omission of any discussion of the sovereignty of God raises many problems. And there seems to be no awareness that God may well use war as a corrective judgment on peoples and nations from time to time. All these authors proceed on the humanistic assumption that war is the greatest of all evils, and their position suggests that peace at any price may well be the biblical imperative. One writer attempts to make a sharp distinction between non-violence and the biblical role of non-resistance.
When the writers turn to practical ways of securing peace in our world, they fall into some serious pitfalls. Some of the solutions they devise are quite unrealistic. Frank P. Graham resorts to the theory of evolution and offers the hope that the next step in the evolution of human beings will be a step away from nation states toward a more effective United Nations for the collective security of all member nations. The chapter on missions subverts the missionary enterprise from its biblical purposes and offers it as a vehicle for international peace.
This book leads one to conclude that committees like the Christian Life Commission are a danger spot for the evangelical life of the Southern Baptists and other major denominations.
A Solid Punch
To the End of the Earth, by Rolf A. Syrdal (Augsburg, 1967, 177 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Don W. Hillis, associate director, The Evangelical Alliance Mission, Wheaton, Illinois.
As a former missionary to China, foreign-missions executive for the Evangelical Lutheran Church and later the American Lutheran Church, and seminary professor, Dr. Syrdal is well qualified to write on mission principles and practices. His evaluation of the concept of missions during the various missionary ages merits careful study. And the book also offers much valuable mission history.
To the End of the Earth is well documented with quotations from such well-known authorities as Kenneth S. Latourette, Lesslie Newbigin, Hendrik Kraemer, Robert Glover, and Stephen Neill. But the most significant things are said by the author himself. For example:
During our present period of international tension and insecurity, of literal realism, impressionistic art, philosophical nihilism, man’s focus has been drawn to himself, and his attitude is one of frustrated cynicism. The result is an existentialism that goes no farther than Man’s experience for the moment. God, objective spiritual realities, and a divine goal are eliminated. To the extent that this spirit influences the people within the church, missions will be regarded as a vague, unrealistic dream of the past.
Just why this book discusses “mission concept in principle and practice” to the end of the earth and stops short of the end of the age—indeed, of the twentieth century—is not clear. Even his chapter on “Era of the Mission Societies” ends at the three-quarter mark of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, he makes almost no mention of the great interdenominational missionary movement that gave such impetus to the whole mission program in the closing decades of the last century.
Does he feel the principles and practices of such large and effective “faith” missions as the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, Sudan Interior Mission, and Wycliffe Translators have nothing to say to us about mission concept? Or does he have some homework to do in the biographies of Hudson Taylor, Fredrik Franson, C. T. Studd, Rowland Bingham, and the thousands of missionaries who have followed in their train?
The final punch in Syrdal’s book is solid and right to the chin:
The day of missions is not over till the day of the church is over. The church’s vitality is in its mission, to which it is called and driven by the Holy Spirit. This mission does not decrease because of difficulties or problems. There are different situations to be faced in each generation. Mission is increased by the addition of each new church in each new area of the world. Mission will continue till the consummation of our age in the return of the risen Lord.
And so it will.
Svetlana’S Tale Of Death
Twenty Letters to a Friend, by Svetlana Alliluyeva (Harper & Row, 1967, 246 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by David E. Kucharsky, associate editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
This is the manuscript Svetlana Alliluyeva smuggled out of the Soviet Union. It is not the exposé some might have expected from the daughter of the late Josef Stalin. Nor is it the chronicle of a spiritual search others might have expected in view of Svetlana’s widely reported declaration of religious faith upon her arrival in the United States.
Instead, she presents a series of character sketches of the people who have been part of her life. The book gets to be a depressing tale of death as one by one the characters fall victim to political terrorism.
General criticisms of Soviet ideology abound, but Svetlana was limited by an all-too-obvious conflict of interest. The critique of the regime her father headed from 1929 to 1953 is tempered by her understandable regard for him.
“It’s true my father wasn’t especially democratic,” she allows in a staggering understatement. The reader is assured, however, that Stalin “never thought of himself as a god.”
Apart from references to a Protestant grandmother on her mother’s side, Svetlana says little about religion. She does give a succinct summary of her beliefs: “It seems to me that in our time faith in God is the same thing as faith in good and the ultimate triumph of good over evil. Religious differences no longer have any meaning in the world today, where men and women of reason, intelligence and compassion have already attained an understanding of one another that transcends the boundaries between countries and continents, races and tongues.”
Svetlana is bound to write more. Let us hope that in future volumes the restraint and ambiguity that characterize her first book will yield to candor and objectivity.
Understanding World Religions
The History of Religions: Essays on the Problem of Understanding, edited by Joseph M. Kitagawa (University of Chicago Press, 1967, 296 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by James E. Aydelotte, assistant professor of religion and history, Tarkio College, Tarkio, Missouri.
In honor of its 100th anniversary, the Divinity School of the University of Chicago is sponsoring an eight-volume series, “Essays in Divinity,” by its alumni and faculty, both past and present. This first volume is largely the product of a 1965 alumni conference.
The introduction, a 1935 essay by Joachim Wach, sees the main task of the study of history of religions as sensitive, thorough, and objective research into the vital spirit of every religion. Mircea Eliade explores the discipline’s contribution to an understanding of the contemporary milieu. Joseph M. Kitagawa demonstrates “a hermeneutical principle which would enable us to harmonize the insights and contributions of both historical and structural inquiries.” Charles H. Long examines the relation between the phenomenological and historical methods.
Kees W. Bolle, rejecting any obligatory approach, advocates “a deprovincializing of Christian theology” to make it more useful hermeneutically. Thomas J. J. Altizer argues that in the Incarnation God fully and finally “abandoned or negated His transcendent form,” indissolubly linking spirit and flesh on earth; thus belief in the Resurrection is seen as a retreat to the past and a separation of God and man.
The remaining contributors discuss the discipline’s methodology in relation to their specialties. Philip H. Ashby concludes: “We seek to understand, and to do so we question, we re-enact, we seek to participate, and we are called upon to contribute our understanding to present and future religious man.” Charles S. J. White illustrates the subtle difficulties of participation in another religion.
Charles J. Adams questions the applicability of many of the discipline’s methods to any living “higher” religion. H. Byron Earhart advocates a methodology “capable of taking at face value the pertinent religious phenomena, analyzing them historically and structurally,” and interpreting them on that basis. Jerome H. Long examines the relation of symbol and reality among the Trobriand islanders.
Paul Tillich rules out the “orthodox-exclusive” and the “secular-rejective” approaches, as well as those based on supranatural or natural theology. He proposes “a theology of the history of religions in which the positive valuation of universal revelation balances the critical valuation”; “this phrase, a fight of God against religion within religion, could become the key for understanding” and directing this discipline.
The origin of these essays has produced a certain amount of “clubiness” that an analytical outside introduction would perhaps have overcome. The book will undoubtedly appeal to the increasing number of religion departments in state universities, and it is a valuable glimpse into present formative thinking about the study of history of religions. Methodology is seen as the “single most important problem.” There is serious questioning whether it is possible to analyze every religion with appreciative but objective participation, and whether one’s Christian faith, however tenuous and detached, enhances or precludes true knowledge of another religion. Like Archimedes, these scholars seem to be searching for some “neutral” place from which to understand all religions.
Book Briefs
Theologians at Work, by Patrick Granfield (Macmillan, 1967, 262 pp., $5.95). Interviews with sixteen working theologians (including R. Niebuhr, J. Pelikan, R. M. Brown. Y. Congar, K. Rahner, and A. Heschel), conducted by a Catholic theological professor and editor, provide intimate glimpses into the ideas and approaches of influential thinkers.
Gods, Graves, & Scholars, by C. W. Ceram (Knopf, 1967, 455 pp„ $7.95). Students of archaeology will “dig” this revised and enlarged edition of a work that considers archaeological discoveries in Egypt, Babylonia, the eastern Mediterranean, Central America, and elsewhere.
Your Influence Is Showing! by Leslie B. Flynn (Broadman, 1967, 127 pp., $2.50). Flynn uses a popular style and scores of inspiring true-life incidents to show the importance of a Christian’s personal influence on others.
The Land, Wildlife, and Peoples of the Bible, by Peter Farb (Harper & Row, 1967, 171 pp., $3.95). A naturalist offers a wealth of information on the habitat and inhabitants of the Holy Land. Beautifully written and illustrated for family reading.
Salvation in History, by Oscar Cullmann (Harper & Row, 1967, 352 pp., $6.50). The first American edition of the 1965 German book in which Cullman shows that the “event-interpretation” occurrences of salvation history are essential for a proper understanding of the New Testament. Reviewed in CHRISTIANITY TODAY, July 16, 1965. Read this book!
