Theology Made Interesting
Sacramentum Mundi: An Encyclopedia of Theology, Volumes 4–6, edited by Karl Rahner, with Cornelius Ernst and Kevin Smyth (Herder and Herder, 1969–70. 426, 438, and 423 pp., $22.50 each), is reviewed by Leslie R. Keylock, pastor, Point Lookout Community Church, Point Lookout, New York.
In the light of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), G. C. Berkouwer saw that his book Conflict with Rome had become so dated that a mere revision was inadequate, and so he wrote The Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism. Unfortunately American evangelicals who have written on Catholicism have not always been so sagacious. With a convenient encyclopedia of post-Vatican II theology like Sacramentum Mundi now available, no Protestant has any excuse for misrepresenting current Catholic thought.
The broad coverage of this theological encyclopedia makes the reader aware of the expanded understanding of the scope of the term theology in our day. Whereas theological studies traditionally have included primarily Old Testament, New Testament, historical theology and church history, dogmatics, and practical theology, these volumes also include articles in such relatively recent fields as ecumenical theology, comparative religion, and “Christian social doctrine.” Almost all the topics that have long been considered polemical (merit, purgatory, transubstantiation, works, to mention a few) are here treated in very brief articles that reflect an irenic or at least “non-traditional” spirit, underlining the fact that for progressive Catholic thought they have ceased to be of central concern. Also reflective of improved relations with other Christian bodies is the fact that ecumenical topics like “Protestantism” (Peter Meinhold’s sections are the best I have read by a Catholic) and “Reformation” and “Reform” (Joseph Lortz’s views of the Reformation are already somewhat dated; Viktor Conzemius’s discussion of reform is excellent) receive an almost disproportionate emphasis (thirty-four and thirty-seven columns). Only twelve articles in the three volumes receive lengthier treatment, including such non-confessional topics as “New Testament Books” (fifty) and “Old Testament Books” (sixty-seven). A number of the longer articles will no doubt be of marginal interest to many readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY—those, for example, on the history of the papacy, orders and ordination, religious orders, scholasticism, Catholic missions (the longest article in the whole encyclopedia), and spirituality.
Although the encyclopedia was published simultaneously in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and although the authors of articles come from many countries, this is still basically a German Catholic encyclopedia, as a quick glance over the list of contributors at the end of Volume 6 will readily indicate. From a Protestant perspective this is perhaps fortunate, because no other Catholic scholars have succeeded as well as the Germans in overcoming the deadly and dull scholastic phraseology of the old theology manuals. Even when Karl Rahner, the dominant influence in the whole encyclopedia, uses classical Aristotelian-Thomistic language, he gets beneath the words to a real understanding of the subject (no exegete would derive a doctrine of merit from the strange concatenation of verses he cites as evidence, however!). This is not the case with the conservative French Catholics, who almost without exception use the old language in a way that does not excite or stimulate the non-Thomistic reader. Occasionally this contrast is given an almost humorous turn, as when the French biblical scholar, Xavier Léon-Dufour, in “New Testament Books” says of the two-source theory of Synoptic history: “In actual fact, this dogma is only an opinion, and to our mind is a serious over-simplification of the literary evidence”—and Anton Vögtle in almost the very next article expressly adopts it! In the short article “Miracle,” a similar contrast in theological temperament is vividly evident in the discussions of Louis Monden and Johann Baptist Metz. All this difference shows is that a national Weltgeist influences theologians across confessional lines; British Protestant theologians are also more conservative, by and large, than their German counterparts.
The list of contributors would have been greatly improved if the authors of articles had been identified by more than just their names, since the vast majority are completely unknown in this country, even to Catholic theologians, and many of them deserve to be known.
Evangelical scholars are by now probably aware that most contemporary Roman Catholic scholars accept the conclusions of a moderate higher criticism. The authors of the biblical articles in Sacramentum Mundi are not exceptions; they adopt a modified Wellhausean approach to the sources of the Pentateuch, three distinct periods for the composition of Isaiah, a Maccabean date for Daniel, and pseudepigraphical authorship as a definite possibility or even probability for Second Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, the Pastoral Letters, First and Second Peter, and Jude.
Unfortunately, even in this encyclopedia the feeling still occasionally emerges that Catholic theologians are a bit too quick to point out Protestant weaknesses and a bit too reluctant to admit Catholic errors and distortions. And although asterisks are no longer used in bibliographies to indicate “safe” works, mediocre Catholic volumes are still sometimes slipped in beside major works by non-Catholics. Of course, et tu, Brute! would be a perfectly justified rejoinder.
Despite these criticisms, however, Sacramentum Mundi is the most interesting and certainly the most irenic encyclopedia of Catholic theology that has appeared in centuries.
Detecting Church Lobbies
The Growing Church Lobby in Washington, by James L. Adams (Eerdmans, 1970, 294 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by E. Russell Chandler, news editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
If James L. Adams didn’t know it when he wrote this book about details of religious influence in national policy, he does now: Most churchmen engaged in influencing the decisions of Congress or government administrative agencies don’t like to be called “lobbyists” or “church bureaucrats.”
At least three top United Methodist staff officials in Washington, D. C., have publicly faulted Adams, a veteran reporter and religion writer for the Cincinnati Post and Times-Star, for some of his definitions and designations; the book is filled with references to Methodist view points and to behind-the-scenes activities in the United Methodist Building hard by the Senate Office Building, the Supreme Court, and the Capitol. Here the United Methodists share space with at least seven other church agencies on Washington’s prestigious “Religion Row.”
Lobbying by any other name is still the growing game of more than a dozen church-related agencies in the nation’s capital. And, Adams points out, these agencies are powerful and entrenched.
Adams, an evangelical, gathered voluminous notes and completed scores of interviews for the book while he was in Washington during 1967 as a fellow at the Washington Journalism Center and a news intern at CHRISTIANITY TODAY. He finished the book in 1970. The Growing Church Lobby is an accurate chronologue of some of the key concerns of the religious lobby during the 1960s. Most chapters read like a detective novel: Adams tells “whodunit” and why as he spins out the interplay between government and church bureaucrats on four major topics: the 1964 civil-rights legislation, the fight over funding the Child Development Group of Mississippi, the church-state battle ensconced in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, and the peace issue, particularly in Viet Nam.
Adams concludes that the churches played a key role in the Civil Rights Act passage because there was a strong consensus for it in the pews, and racial equality was an “idea whose time had come.” But the Cincinnati journalist contends that never again in the decade did church lobbyists achieve commensurate clout.
The Rollicking, Controversial 1740S
The Great Awakening: Documents on the Revival of Religion, 1740–1745, edited by Richard L. Bushman (Atheneum, 1970. 174 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by Dirk Jellema, professor of history, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Perhaps surprisingly, this book should be of unusual interest to the average reader of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. It is part of a continuing series that presents documents dealing with problems in pre-Revolutionary American history and attempts to encourage an independent evaluation by the college student. This present collection deals with that most spectacular of American revivals, the Great Awakening of the 1740s.
Was that notable event a great work of the Holy Spirit, or the product of a fanatical emotionalism that did more harm than good? The documents show spirited and often bitter argument on this point. The Great Awakening was sparked by the English Anglican revivalist George Whitefield and spread by like-minded colonial evangelists, Gilbert Tennant and many others. It was, in brief, successful, spectacular, sensational, and controversial.
Hear Nathan Cole report on his conversion, after hearing Whitefield (“a young, slim, slender youth”) preach: “God appeared unto me and made me skringe … I was shrinked into nothing …” and then, after accepting Christ, “I was swallowed up in God … and all the air was love.” On the other hand, hear Charles Chauncey on Whitefield (and Tennant): “He generally moved the passions, especially of the younger people, and the females among them … the Town, in general, was not much mended in those things wherein a reformation was greatly needed … preaching every day in the week, taking people off from their Callings, and introducing a neglect of all business but that of hearing him preach … ’tis scarce imaginable what excesses and extravagancies … never was [there] such a spirit of superstition and enthusiasm … it makes men spiritually proud and conceited beyond measure, infinitely censorious and uncharitable.…” But hear William Gaylord, who despite some reservations felt he “must heartily rejoice that Mr. Whitefield has been through the country preaching the Gospel in every place with such life and zeal as are rarely to be seen in this dead and frozen age.…” And many other contemporary observors give their evaluations, for or against the evangelists.
Opposition to the Awakening came especially for two reasons: first, many distrusted the emotionalism it engendered; secondly, and perhaps more importantly, its leaders began denouncing the established clergy as unworthy preachers—a course obviously leading to trouble. The occasional excesses of emotionalism (or were they typical?), the occasional tendencies to separatism (or were they inherent in the Awakening?), were pounced on by those eager to discredit it. The quarrels between the “Old Lights” and the “New Lights” (those favoring the Awakening), and the various positions in between, did indeed embitter the churches for a generation, with the “establishment” position slowly losing ground. Or, perhaps, the controversy increasingly seemed irrelevant as (a generation later) the more basic threat of deism and the Enlightenment became apparent.
The running commentary going with the documents is necessarily brief, but generally excellent: it makes a point often forgotten, that the Awakening aimed at a revitalized Christian community as well as individual conversions. It notes in passing influences from England and Scotland, but fails to tie in the affairs of the colonies with the general “revival” or “reform” movement in Europe, which included not only English Methodism but Dutch and German pietism (see for example James Tanis, Dutch Calvinistic Pietism in the Middle Colonies, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1967; the career of T. J. Frelinghuysen is a striking example of such connections). Indeed, the question of why the Awakening came about is ignored.
A possible answer is along these lines: As the tremendous energies unleashed by the Genevan and Puritan dream of forcing all of society to follow the Bible drained off in a welter of religious wars, the Reformation—in the colonies as well as in Europe—settled down, content with an established position, in close alliance with Protestant governments. The dream then took a modified form: the revitalization of at least part of the society, the formation of at least a sub-society that would follow Christ fervently and faithfully. Hence the Awakening (which, incidentally, comes chronologically half-way between Cromwell and the Abolitionist movement).
Today’s “Jesus freaks,” “underground churches,” and the like are perhaps the early stirrings of something similar; as the evangelical dream of “Christian America” seems hopelessly eroded, and the churches seem linked to a secular establishment, cannot a sub-society at least turn joyously to fervent worship of Christ? Chauncey, as he observed the preaching of Whitefield, noted (though with a jaundiced eye) one form of the “enthusiasm” it produced: “Loud hearty laughing was one of the ways in which our new converts, almost everywhere, were wont to join together in expressing their joy at the conversion of others.” All in all, this collection of documents on the Great Awakening turns out to be both engrossing and relevant.
He unveils, however, their successful strategy for going over the head of Sargent Shriver, Office of Economic Opportunity chief, to get Vice-President Hubert Humphrey to force Shriver to refinance the controversial Mississippi Head Start program.
The chapters on federal aid to education give especially helpful background on the 1965 school bill; more important, the reader gains useful insights for assessing the plethora of church-state issues bound to reach the courts and legislatures in the next several years. These could well have more impact on the future of education than any thus far in the country’s history.
Adams feels church efforts to end the Viet Nam war have been particularly ineffective because the lobbyists have been unable to present a clear-cut choice of right and wrong behind which to unite. Because the religious leaders represent what Adams believes is only a segment of their churches, he refers to them as “generals without armies.”
The book concludes that church lobbyists are effective only when they have the backing of the majority of the people in the pews: “Government officials are both sensible and sensitive enough to know whether a lobbyist represents a wide spectrum of opinion or whether he is speaking for a small class of church bureaucrats who have lost contact with their constituents.”
Adams sees a valid role for the church lobbyist in pressing for better government. He can relay information back to his membership about imminent questions to be resolved in Congress (thus the voter can make more intelligent choices and individually write his congressmen). And he can sometimes provide helpful information to individual congressmen on technical or esoteric subjects. But his greatest task should be to express moral outrage rather than to proffer political and military advice.
“The church lobbyist is never more true to his calling than when he forces our national leaders to re-examine U. S. goals in the uncomfortable glare of biblical morality,” declares Adams. “The most relevant thing a church lobbyist can do is to remind persons in high places that even nations stand under the judgment of God.”
The book is well documented, is sprinkled with dry humor, and moves with a sprightly style. The chapter surveying Washington’s church lobbies, their personnel and how they operate, is itself worth the price of the book.
Newly Published
Your God Is Too White, by Columbus Salley and Ronald Behm (Inter-Varsity, 1970, 114 pp., paperback, $1.95). A good, documented overview of black history and present experience in America that lays the foundation for a clear, biblically based challenge to whites to break with racist “Christianity” and a call to both whites and blacks to become disciples of the true Christ.
The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, by Francis A. Schaeffer (Inter-Varsity, 1970, 153 pp., $3.95). Schaeffer calls for the Church to be orthodox (some would say “hyper-orthodox”) yet loving, uncompromising with the world yet compassionate toward it. Not a profound or well-edited book, but the exhortations to a more biblically informed life-style for individuals and congregations are much needed. On the other hand, some of the sideswipes at different evangelical approaches and at artists and thinkers are questionable.
New Perspectives on the Old Testament, edited by J. Barton Payne (Word, 1970, 305 pp., $6.95). Seventeen scholarly essays prepared for the twentieth anniversary meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in 1968. Among the contributors are teachers at Calvin, Covenant, Conservative Baptist, Dallas, Faith, Gordon-Conwell, Grand Rapids, Trinity, and Wheaton seminaries.
Contemporary Protestant Thought, by C. J. Curtis (Bruce, 1970, 225 pp., $6.95). A text for Catholic colleges by a Lutheran pastor who teaches at one of them. He says his “concern has been to present as broad … a perspective of the modern religious scene as possible,” and hence his exclusion of evangelical thinkers is to be regretted.
How to Win Them, by John R. Bisagno et al. (Broadman, 1971, 158 pp., $3.95). Thirteen recent messages by Southern Baptist leaders at their state evangelism conferences.
Biology: A Search for Order in Complexity, edited by John Moore and Harold Slusher (Zondervan, 1970, 548 pp., $9.95). The Creation Research Society has prepared an introductory text for schools and colleges that presents the “facts” of biology in a framework favoring instantaneous creation of the major kinds of life a relatively short time ago.
Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, by H. R. Rookmaaker (Inter-Varsity, 1970, 256 pp., paperback, $3.95). An evangelical art historian offers a well-illustrated survey of modern Western art for the purpose of theologically interacting with what this art exhibits, both as art and as a reflection of society. Stimulating and provocative. More such works, with varying perspectives, are needed.
Christ and Prometheus: A New Image of the Secular, by William F. Lynch (Notre Dame, 1970, 153 pp., $5.95). Christ and Prometheus have often been compared. In this book the author creates, from comparison of the Greek figure and the Messiah, an image of man searching for light. It is written in the form used by Aeschylus (though Aeschylus never used diagrams). Ingeniously conceived and cleverly completed.
The Single Reality, by Preston Harold and Winifred Babcock (Dodd, Mead, 1971, 386 pp., $7.95). This book seeks to combine science (specifically physics) with secular religion, creating a philosophy for the whole life, intended to move man into a new era. Just what that era is to be we are not told.
Letters to Polly, by Melvin Schoonover (Eerdmans, 1971, 106 pp., $3.95). Through his own illness and that of his daughter—both suffer from a rare bone disease—the author’s faith in Jesus of Nazareth has been strengthened.
Bridging the Generation Gap, by William L. Self (Broadman, 1970, 95 pp., paperback, $1.95). A prosaic treatment of a subject that has been discussed to death. The lack both of fresh insights and of a lively style condemns this book to failure.
Evangelical Directions for the Lutheran Church, edited by Erich Kiehl and Waldo J. Werning (2751 S. Karlov, Chicago, Ill. 60623, 1970, 165 pp., paperback, $2.45). Twenty-two messages to a congress in Chicago last summer concerned with loyalty to the Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions.
Our Many Selves, by Elizabeth O’Connor (Harper & Row, 1971, 201 pp., $4.95). For those who want to have dialogue with each of their different personalities, here are some exercises to help. This is very modern, very psychiatric, and very tiresome. Let’s get back to Augustine’s Confessions.
Christianity and Comparative Religion, by J. N. D. Anderson (Inter-Varsity, 1970, 126 pp., paperback, $1.95). A professor at the University of London who is a specialist in Islamic law offers a very stimulating and informative set of lectures in book form. Highly relevant in view of the growing interest in Eastern religions.
The Church in China: Its Vitality; Its Future?, by William H. Clark (Council Press, 1970, 212 pp., $4.95). The first half surveys Christianity in China from 635 to 1949; the second half surveys and reflects on the Church under Communism. The author was a Presbyterian missionary in China.
The Lutheran Ethic: The Impact of Religion on Laymen and Clergy, by Lawrence K. Kersten (Wayne State, 1970, 309 pp., $8.95). A thorough study of the views of Lutherans in Detroit, with about equal participation from the four largest branches, based on questionnaires and interviews. Extremely useful for revealing beliefs of the “grass roots” and for differences and trends within and between the denominations studied. Among laymen there is no correlation between theological and political liberalism.
People-Centered Evangelism, by John F. Havlik (Broadman, 1971, 92 pp., paperback, $1.75). This is an apologetic for people. God cares about people, and our evangelism should reflect this.
Be/Come Community, by James B. Ashbrook (Judson, 1971, 127 pp., paperback, $1.95). “This book is to be experienced as much as it is to be read”—an experience similar to that of a nightmare. The author suffers from a pseudo-with-it complex that should not have been made public.
The Ministry of Reconciliation, by Georgia Harkness (Abingdon, 1971, 160 pp., paperback, $2.45). The author defines and discusses reconciliation from the Bible, without restricting it to the role of churches only.
Women’s Liberation and the Church, edited by Sarah Bentley Doely (Association, 1970, 158 pp., paperback, $2.95). Essays by women involved in church work. Some are militant, others not.
Some of the above books will later be reviewed at greater length.
