An Evangelical Classic
A Short Life of Christ, by Everett F. Harrison (Eerdmans, 1968, 288 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Richard N. Longenecker, associate professor of New Testament history and theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.
In “a study that confines itself to the highlights” of the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth, Professor Harrison gives us a work highly suitable for use by the student, the minister, and the earnest layman. The book is hardly a retelling of events or a tracing of travels in the ministry of Jesus, as one might expect from the title; nor is it a critical introduction to the narratives, something the author provided ably in an earlier work. Rather, A Short Life of Christ is an interpretive study on an introductory level of the most theologically significant aspects of Jesus’ life and work, and it incorporates, easily and naturally, such often diverse features as history, biblical theology, apologetics, devotional asides, and even something of homiletics. It is the work of a master New Testament scholar who knows how to lead his audience effectively into the major issues of the Gospels, and how to write clearly and warmly.
A weakness one might cite in what is on the whole a most intellectually satisfying and spiritually stimulating work is an imbalance in the selection of topics. In the first fourth of the book we are taken through our Lord’s birth, infancy, boyhood, baptism, and temptation; the last half treats the events of passion week, resurrection, and ascension; less than one-fourth is allotted to Jesus’ earthly ministry between the temptation and the triumphal entry—only fourteen pages to “Jesus as Teacher” and fourteen others to “The Miracles.” But the work is called “A Short Life of Christ”; and if the solution would have been to condense in other areas so as to have room to expand here, I withdraw my criticism. Exception might also be taken to the very brief interaction with “New Quest” historiography (so called). But, again, the author has warned us of brevity; and after all, something must be left to the classroom. Possibly more open to criticism are the treatments of (1) Jesus’ sinlessness, where a contradiction in the extent of Jesus’ identification with man seems to have imposed itself between page 81 and page 269, and (2) Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness, where Harrison seems to reflect more an undigested Gerhardsson than himself in arguing on pages 87–89 that the sphere of conflict in Satan’s suggestion to cast himself down from the temple need only be mental.
Nevertheless, Harrison’s book must be commended as a little gem of a work that well deserves to become an evangelical classic. The presentation, while admittedly introductory, is perceptive and informed throughout; the prose is in many places almost lyrical; and the bibliographies at the close of each chapter signal the breadth of the discussion and provide direction for further study. Noteworthy also is the author’s lack of reference to his other published works, which indicates something of the character of the man himself—and which might be a first in scholarly production.
Worthwhile Words
Words Fitly Spoken, by Donald Grey Barnhouse (Tyndale House, 1969, 242 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Paul S. Rees, editor, “World Vision Magazine.”
Donald Grey Barnhouse knew the value of words, their potency when used precisely, their waywardness when used carelessly, their peril when used falsely. Hence the appropriateness of the title given to this Barnhouse anthology.
Selections have been made from editorial copy that Dr. Barnhouse wrote for his two successively edited magazines, Revelation and Eternity. These selections, numbering more than 150, are divided into a dozen categories or themes, beginning with “The Bible” and ending with “The Home.” Other subjects are: “God,” “Christ,” “The Tempter and Temptation,” “Sin,” “Salvation,” “The Church,” “Christian Life and Growth,” “Forgiveness,” “Witnessing,” and “Thanksgiving.”
Some of the pieces are worked out with ingenuity and beauty, as, for example, the one called “His Sovereignty,” in which Dr. Barnhouse goes to the hymns of the Church to support the all-embracing character of God’s purposes and beneficences. The word “all” is the key, and its message comes through in all sorts of hyphenations: God with His “all-commanding might,” or his “all-animating voice”; Christ with his “name all-victorious,” or his “all-redeeming love.”
Striking use of antithetical thought and phrasing appears in some of the pieces. In the one on “Discipleship,” our Lord’s word to the apostles, “If it were not so, I would have told you,” prompts the epigram: “The worst has been told; the best we cannot know now.”
Many of the pieces are made memorable by strong illustrations, as in the one on “The Sin of Willfulness,” in which a Valentine’s Day fire in a New Jersey public school was traced to an eight-year-old boy. Asked why he had set the fire, he said, “In class yesterday they took away my bubble gum!”
Some are poignant, as when, writing on “The Senior Citizen,” the author etches the loneliness of some of these “past seventies” by telling of a lovely lady in his Philadelphia congregation who once told him that she “bought her groceries one item at a time so she might hear the voice of the clerk speaking to her in a moment of conversation.”
If this collection abounds with fine things and strong, as it splendidly does, it is not without its sticky patches. To say, as our author does, “Then He went to the Cross and through the tomb, and perfect reconciliation was provided; now, God is for us,” is to raise a question of biblical and theological accuracy. There must be some more careful way of making the point, with respect to the event of the atonement, than by implying that before the Cross we had a hostile God and after the Cross a forgiving God.
Although there are additional passages where some readers will lift eyebrows and mentally enter a theological exception, nothing said here should be allowed to cast a shadow over the bright landscape of nearly every page Dr. Barnhouse has written.
A Sacred Universal Empire
The Holy Roman Empire, by Friedrich Heer (Praeger, 1968, 310 pp., $12.50), is reviewed by Robert G. Clouse, associate professor of history, Indiana State University, Terre Haute.
“Five thousand years measure the flight path of the imperial eagle, as he makes his way from the temple towers of Eridu towards the setting sun, towards the evening mists veiling the future of the atomic age.” It is with the European attempt to build a sacred universal empire that this book deals. This Holy Roman Empire consisted of the largely Germanic and North Italian territories organized under Otto I, crowned emperor by the pope in 962. The ruler of this empire represented an attempt to maintain an ancient Roman tradition of European unity blessed by a Christian conception of divinely ordained authority. But because of constant friction with the papacy, by the fifteenth century the state was little more than a legal term for the trusteeship of the Germans. From 1273 the empire was dominated by the Habsburg family, which concentrated on dynastic expansion in central Europe. When Napoleon sought to establish a French-dominated empire, he insisted on the formal abolition of the Holy Roman Empire (July, 1806).
The author, Friedrich Heer, has done a magnificent work of synthesis, and his book should be read by all who are interested in medieval or early modern church history. He is professor of the history of ideas at Vienna University and is considered a leading intellectual historian. His range of interests is wide, his knowledge vast, and he writes in a fascinating way as his mind moves easily over the centuries.
Heer, a liberal Erasmian-type Catholic, contends that all ideas or events are radial, all lie like overlapping rings on the map of Europe and across the ages. Sometimes he connects these for his audience, as when, writing of the attitude toward the Slavs of the tenth-century Germans, he adds, “German soldiers who fought in Russia during the Second World War described the Russian people’s capacity for suffering in almost identical terms.” In discussing the Peace of Augsburg (1555) he mentions that the papacy finally recognized it in 1955. This was done because the pope realized that the peace saved the Empire from the Turks and “Pius no doubt had his own ‘Turks’ in mind, the present-day Communists.”
At times this approach causes inaccuracies, as Heer sees parallels and influences where they do not exist. Because of this he is led to relate a theology that preaches hell-fire with war; he hints at a relation between Hussite teaching and Hitler; and he believes that “our present world is a product of the puritanical Protestant west.… It is rational, bureaucratic, impersonal-objective. Ours is a technical civilization, from which Eros and Ludus are absent.”
Nevertheless, I heartily recommend this attractive book.
Examining Terminal Illness
On Death and Dying, by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (Macmillan, 1969, 260 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Gary R. Collins, chairman, Division of Pastoral Psychology and Counseling, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.
When you learn that someone you know has a terminal illness, how do you react? If you are like most people, you don’t want to discuss or even think about death, and when convenient to do so you avoid the dying person altogether. This is one conclusion reached by the psychiatrist who writes this book. Doctors, relatives, and even clergymen feel uncomfortable discussing death and fail to realize that the dying person needs to talk—especially with people who are understanding and not too busy to listen.
In writing about death and dying, Dr. Kübler-Ross boldly considers the anxieties, fears, desires, and needs of the terminally ill. A warm concern for people shines forth from almost every page. The book contains much useful information. The author distinguishes, for example, five stages in dying. When a person realizes that death is imminent, he reacts first with shock and denial. Then he becomes angry (“Why does it have to be me?”). He tries to bargain for more time (“If I get better, I’ll serve God for the rest of my life”). He has periods of depression. Finally he accepts the inevitable. Throughout all this there is hope that some new remedy will be found and that death will be put off for a few more years.
Interviews provide dramatic illustrative material, but here lies one of the book’s weaknesses. Almost half the pages are devoted to these interviews and case histories, and after a while this becomes boring. In addition, the author tends to be repetitious with her main points. My conclusion is that the book would have been better, and just as valuable, if it had been about one-third shorter.
It is regrettable that this one who writes so perceptively about dying should apparently know so little about death. Once a patient asked to hear a passage read from the Bible. Dr. Kübler-Ross says she did not enjoy this “peculiar” assignment but accepted it—with “the dreaded thought that some of my colleagues might come in and laugh.” “I read the chapters,” she says “not really knowing what I had read.” The knowledge that God sent his Son so that believers “should not perish but have everlasting life” reduces one’s fear of death and brings the assurance that was expressed by one of the interviewed patients: “I have been at complete peace with myself.… I expect to be at home with the Lord when I die.”
No Solution Here
Introduction to the New Testament, by Willi Marxsen (Fortress, 1968, 269 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by John H. Skilton, professor of New Testament, Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
This English translation of the third edition of Professor Willi Marxsen’s book can perform the service of introducing the author to many not acquainted with his work in German. It is a highly personalized volume that sets forth conclusions in the field of special introduction which Professor Marxsen endorses but that purposely—in part, at least, to conserve space—gives minimal attention to other views. Although this is conceived by the author as a virtue, it seriously limits the usefulness of the work and tends to make it less an introduction to the New Testament than an introduction to Professor Marxsen.
Those who disagree with Marxsen’s basic approach to the New Testament and its problems will disagree with a great many of the particular positions taken as a consequence of that approach, and even some of those whose approach is similar to the authors’ may at times wish their own conclusions on certain problems had been given a more extended hearing.
Marxsen holds that we cannot separate the disciplines of introduction and New Testament theology. He proceeds, however, to assess the New Testament from a viewpoint foreign to its own theology. He limits his study to the twenty-seven books of our New Testament, not because he considers those books to be the written Word of God, themselves revelation, but because of their early date and because most of them therefore “stand nearest in time to the once-for-allness of revelation. As we have no other access to revelation except by following back the line of tradition at the end of which we stand, we shall always arrive ultimately at one of the lines that had their origin then.” Without prejudice to basic principles and without creating any real problem, he holds the Didache might perhaps be substituted for Second Peter and First Clement for Jude.
This introduction is offered as an “approach” to the problems of the New Testament. It is the type of approach that is more successful in generating problems than in solving them.
Bonhoeffer: The Man
The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, by Mary Bosanquet (Harper & Row, 1969, 287 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by J. Murray Marshall, pastor, First Presbyterian Church, Flushing, New York.
In April. 1945, less than a month before the capitulation of the Third Reich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed in Flossenbiirg, Germany. Since then his name has become a commonplace in theological circles, principally because of his Letters and Papers from Prison, in which he ventured the terms “religionless Christianity” and “world come of age.” While his other works also have been translated and widely circulated, it has remained for Mary Bosanquet to produce the first full biography of the man in English. (A work in German by Bonhoeffer’s close friend Eberhard Bethge is reportedly being translated into English.)
Miss Bosanquet has handled her difficult task with finesse. Not only has she reconstructed meticulously the details of Bonhoeffer’s background and life, but she also has interwoven extensive quotations from his writings to display the progress of his thought. The product emerges both as an informative, discerning sketch of a troubled time in German history and as a captivating account of a dynamic personality. Testimony to Miss Bosanquet’s success is borne by Bonhoeffer’s twin sister, Sabine Leibholz-Bonhoeffer, who says, “To have discovered in this book a distorted picture of the twin brother to whom I was bound with such powerful ties of affection would have been a bitter grief to me. But this has nowhere been the case.”
The Bonhoeffer pictured is the upper-middle-class German, endowed with a brilliant mind, educated in the classic fashion, ready to defend his own theological persuasions. His theology is not purely academic; he accepted the challenge of the pastorate, wherein he related the insights of the scholar to the needs of the common man. Moreover, he distinguished himself as a teacher of young men preparing for the pastoral vocation. He practiced consistently, and led his students to do likewise, the “secret discipline” of a life lived before the judgment of the Word of God and the presence of Christ. Early in his career Bonhoeffer noted that “nowadays we often ask whether we still have a use for God.” But he immediately added, “This is to put the question the wrong way round. The Church exists and God exists, and we are the ones being questioned.” And finally, as a Christian he found himself impelled to move with those who protested the tragic moral calamity of the Third Reich. So he lived—and died.
The question always remains, “What would Dietrich Bonhoeffer say to the interpretation and application of his thought today?” Miss Bosanquet notes:
Bonhoeffer was not destined to live on into the time when he might have explored these questions in depth and perhaps begun to approach here and there an answer; and in the years which have followed his death many have been appropriated and carried away, like stones from a half-built church, to be used as the foundation for theological superstructures for which he would have disclaimed responsibility [p. 256].
Later she says, “It is a hindrance to the full understanding of what Bonhoeffer was and is that sections of the Letters and Papers have so frequently been quoted as though they represented the end of a theological journey instead of its quite tentative beginnings.”
Undoubtedly Bonhoeffer’s complete works will be studied for years to come; his example of “secret discipline” might well be emulated. For understanding both the man and his works, Miss Bosanquet’s book is a most useful tool.
The Wesleys And Church Music
The Musical Wesleys, by Erik Routley (Oxford University, 1969, 272 pp., $8.50), is reviewed by Paul K. Jewett, professor of systematic theology, Fuller Seminary, Pasadena, California.
This work is a specimen of the fine book-making one expects from the prestigious Oxford University Press, and its content is a tribute to the author’s learning. If there is a writer living who knows more about hymns and all that pertains to them than Erik Routley, I have not heard of him. The factual information, theological perception, and musical criticism Routley brings to the task in his several books on hymns and church music add up to an enviable erudition.
Probably only a few will read this book through word for word. The great Wesleys, John and Charles, are not major figures in the story. The book deals principally with Charles Wesley II; his brother, Samuel Wesley; and Samuel Wesley’s son, Samuel Sebastian Wesley, the most learned and accomplished church musician of his day in England.
The work of any sensitive artist is profoundly affected by both his own makeup and the circumstances of his life and times, and Routley indulges in considerable psychological analysis of his subjects and elaboration of English society—its heritage, values, and struggles—at the time the Wesleys lived. This makes very interesting and informative reading. His conclusion is that while the senior Wesleys lived above their times, Charles II drifted with them, while Samuel and Samuel Sebastian struggled (but not very successfully) against them.
This book contains a good deal of musical criticism illuminating the state of English church music in the eighteenth century as well as the contribution of the Wesleys, their anthems, hymn tunes, and chants. Much of this material will be followed from afar by all but the specialist. Yet even here there is no wasted energy, no lazy moment; and the non-specialist will have his intellectual horizons enlarged by the perusal of these studies.
Book Briefs
Happiness Is Still Home Made, by T. Cecil Myers (Word, 1969, 127 pp., $3.95). Discusses principles and techniques for building a happy home life.
Religious Television Programs: A Study of Relevance, by A. William Bluem (Hastings House, 1969, 220 pp., $4.95). A study of the achievements and problems of religious television programming.
Take My Home, by Margaret Warde (Scripture Union, 1969, 96 pp., paperback, 5s). Describes how some Christians have used their homes in personal and group evangelism among various age groups.
Tongues: To Speak or Not to Speak, by Donald W. Burdick (Moody, 1969, 94 pp., paperback $.95). This study concludes that the modern tongues movement is not the same as the supernatural New Testament gift and that its dangers far outweigh its values.
Catholic Theories of Biblical Inspiration Since 1810, by James T. Burtchaell (Cambridge University, 1969, 341 pp., $9.50). Examines several views of inspiration advanced by Catholic thinkers in the nineteenth century and concludes that much present theorizing by Catholics on the subject is but a repetition of ideas stated by progressive thinkers a century ago.
L’Abri, by Edith Schaeffer (Tyndale House, 1969, 228 pp., $3.95). Those familiar with the ministry and writing of Francis Schaeffer will enjoy Mrs. Schaeffer’s account of the birth and growth of L’Abri Fellowship.
Evolution: The Theory of Teilhard De Chardin, by Bernard Delfgaauw (Harper & Row, 1969, 124 pp., $4). An analysis of the central theme in the thought of Teilhard de Chardin.
Ten Muslims Meet Christ, by William McElwee Miller (Eerdmans, 1969, 147 pp., paperback, $1.95). These stories of ten Muslims who came to know Christ serve as an encouraging reminder of the power of the Gospel to change lives even under the most difficult circumstances.
They Dare to Hope, by Fred Pearson (Eerdmans, 1969, 103 pp., paperback, $1.95). Investigates student unrest and argues that the Church has a unique opportunity to respond positively and lead to the social change the protestors seek.
The Dead Sea Scrolls 1947–1969, by Edmund Wilson (Oxford University, 1969, 320 pp., $6.50). The revised and expanded version of a controversial work on the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Ministers Manual (Doran’s), edited by Charles L. Wallis (Harper & Row, 1969, 339 pp., $4.95). The new edition of this standard work is now available.
Romans, by Geoffrey B. Wilson (Banner of Truth Trust, 1969, 255 pp., paperback, 6s.). This brief verse-by-verse commentary abounds with quotes from a number of commentators.
Revivals in the Midst of the Years, by Benjamin Rice Lacy, Jr. (Royal, 1968, 193 pp., $3.95). This reprint of an earlier work surveys a number of the great revivals of church history.
The Compulsive Christian: To Be or Not to Be, by David Mason (Zondervan, 1969, 208 pp., $4.95). A survey of the various aspects of personality that must work together as a balanced team for the building of the “whole man.”
Sprint for the Sun, by Loren Young (Word, 1969, 90 pp., $2.95). A director of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes shares lessons learned from a variety of “little things” he has experienced.
