Mixed Usefulness
Finding the Old Testament in the New, by Henry M. Shires (Westminster, 1974, 251 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by John Goldingay, lecturer in Old Testament, St. John’s Theological College, Bramcote, England.
Henry M. Shires, who is professor of New Testament at Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, has written a wide ranging survey of how the New Testament uses the Old. He begins by noting that the New Testament regards the Old as the inspired word of God, “authoritative for belief and practice”:
It was the recognition that the Holy Spirit was active in the writing of the Old Testament which enabled Christians to accept its authority over them as over the Jews. Moses, David, Isaiah, Hosea, and other authors are looked upon as God’s chosen instruments for the writing down of his words [p. 27].
Later Shires affirms that Jesus too took this attitude to the Old Testament. But, he adds, it is true that in Jesus and the giving of the Spirit something new has come, with an authority equal to that of the Old Testament. Thus the New Testament quotes and treats the Old Testament with a sovereign freedom. Indeed, paradoxically, Jesus abrogated the Old Testament as well as accepting it, says Shires. His evidence for this conclusion is that Jesus taught that the Old Testament did not go far enough, that he treated some parts of it as on a higher level than others, and that he assumed the authority to give his own interpretation of it; one may grant the truth of these three points without regarding them as a demonstration that Jesus abrogated the Old Testament. Elsewhere Shires infers that the New Testament’s failure to quote from some of the psalms signifies that it rejected them, and he indicates that he himself wishes to apply a principle of selectivity to the Old Testament; I suspect that he is trying to find such a principle in the New Testament itself, when it does not in fact have one. Embarrassingly, the kind of psalm Shires disapproves of is in fact quoted in the New Testament.
Against the background of his examination of the Old Testament’s authority in the New, and of a sketching of contemporary Jewish methods of interpretation, Shires surveys the New Testament’s methods of actually using the Old under familiar headings—historical understanding, prediction, typology, literary influence—and looks at the way quotations were introduced, the areas of the Old Testament they come from, their implications for the history of the canon, and their use of the Septuagint. I found the most interesting material in the final chapters. One, “Christian Doctrine and the Old Testament,” surveys the use of Old Testament quotations in the New Testament in connection with each of the elements of the “apostolic kerygma” as these were isolated by C. H. Dodd. Then the last and longest chapter looks at “The Book of Psalms in the New Testament”—illuminating the use of the psalms in the teaching of Jesus and in the Gospels, and showing how they are used to illustrate or prove Christian doctrine in the New Testament.
Shires’s aim has been to write a resource work that will be useful to the minister, layman, or student in his own study of the New Testament’s use of the Old, and he provides various tables of further parallels between the testaments with which one can carry on the work of which he provides some samples. The scholar will not find anything very new in this book; it is a less technical and specialized work than such recent scholarly studies in this area as Michael Goulder’s Midrash and Lection in Matthew or Anthony Hanson’s Studies in Paul’s Technique and Theology, or even than the slightly older works by conservatives such as Earle Ellis’s Paul’s Use of the Old Testament or Richard France’s Jesus Christ and the Old Testament. Its virtue is as a survey of the actual New Testament data on the subject, the product of Shires’s own independent work.
But the person who wants to go on to work out how we may use the Old Testament may need to move on to the more technical studies, to get deeper into the rationale of the New Testament’s practice. He will also need to consider studies of Old Testament hermeneutics such as the works of Brevard Childs and James Barr and the volumes of essays edited by Claus Westermann (Essays on Old Testament Hermeneutics/Interpretation) and Bernhard Anderson (The Old Testament and Christian Faith).
Religion And Literature Are Yoked
Religion and Modern Literature: Essays in Theory and Criticism, edited by G. B. Tennyson and Edward E. Ericson, Jr. (Eerdmans, 424 pp., $8.95, $5.95 pb), is reviewed by Cheryl Forbes, editorial associate, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
Tennyson and Ericson picked some of the best literary critics of this century to anthologize: C. S. Lewis, Nathan A. Scott, Jr., Edwin Fuller, Austin Warren, and Cleanth Brooks, for example. The essays provide a thorough survey of the relation between literature and religion, in some cases specifically theology.
The contrast between T. S. Eliot’s opening essay “Religion and Literature” and J. Hillis Miller’s “Literature and Religion” will serve as an excellent discussion-provoker. Eliot emphatically states that as critics and readers of literature (the two ought to be one since all readers should be critics), we cannot divorce our theological views from our literary ones. Miller, on the other hand, thinks “literary study is objective and public” while “a man’s religious views are his private business and need have nothing to do with his public life as a scholar.” The two essays give the book a strong opening.
Although such conflicting opinions are evident in some of the essays chosen, the basic thrust of the book is to show the inseparability of literature and religion. Flannery O’Connor’s essay “Novelist and Believer” is perhaps the best exploration of that theme and is one of the best written essays in the collection.
The editors not only arranged the essays in an interesting and provocative order but also successfully blended theoretical essays with those considering specific authors. Both O’Connor and Eliot appear as writers in part one and as subjects in part three. Comparisons between what the authors say and what is said about them would also provide the basis for several good class discussions.
Most of the ideas of twentieth-century scholars and critics on literature and religion are represented here. The book will serve as an invaluable resource and text book. Anyone interested in the subject ought to own this volume.
Mutual Submission
Sexist Religion and Women in the Church: No More Silence!, edited by Alice L. Hageman (Association, 1974, 221 pp., $5.95 pb), and Human Liberation in a Feminist Perspective, by Letty M. Russell (Westminster, 1974, 212 pp., $3.95 pb), are reviewed by Nancy A. Hardesty, doctoral student, University of Chicago Divinity School, Chicago, Illinois.
To dismiss either of these books as “liberal,” even “radical,” will be easy for evangelicals who do not wish to think about the theological issues raised by the women’s movement.
The Hageman book consists of the 1972–73 Lentz lecture series at Harvard Divinity School and contains an essay by Mary Daly provocatively entitled “Theology After the Demise of God the Father: A Call for the Castration of Sexist Religion.” The author of the second book, Letty Russell, an assistant professor of religious studies at Manhattan College in the Bronx, is a devotee of the currently fashionable Third World liberation theologies. None of the authors comes across as a subscriber to the doctrinal statement of the Evangelical Theological Society. But both books raise a myriad of serious issues that all Christians are going to have to face if we wish to preach Good News to all people. On some fronts we have already begun.
Both Russell and Hageman in her own essay on “Women and Missions” complain that American Christianity has too often become entangled in politics at home and served as a tool of oppression and imperialism abroad. Similar criticisms were voiced by Third World delegates to last year’s Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne. Many mission organizations are aware of this problem and are trying to overcome it.
Nelle Morton, associate professor emeritus of Drew University, in her Harvard lecture on “Preaching the Word” justly criticizes Key ’73 spokesmen who continually spoke of “calling men to repentance and renewal” and of Jesus Christ as “the Word for modern man,” as “for all men,” as “good news to men.” I personally received a plea for funds from a usually progressive evangelical group whose return envelope read, “That Every Man May Hear.…” But members of the Thanksgiving Workshop of Evangelicals for Social Concern pledged to become more conscious of their use of masculine language and to seek to use more inclusive terms in all their communication. As Paul said, “Let no man put a stumbling-block or an occasion to fall in his sister’s way!”
Both books offer helpful insights and information for self-education in this direction. Hageman’s essay is particularly good in outlining the contributions women have made to the missionary cause (between one-half and two-thirds of all missionaries have been women). United Methodist executive Theressa Hoover outlines the “triple jeopardy” under which black women function in the church. Harvard theologian Krister Stendahl offers some male observations on how difficult it is to make practical adjustments in one’s thinking and acting in regard to women. Gail Shulman, a Harvard student, gives insights into Judaism’s treatment of women. Russell’s discussion of the nature of the ministry raises such pertinent questions, “Do we really believe in the priesthood of all believers and the minister as servant?
Beyond areas of agreement and the helpful new material in these books, however, lies a basic question. Particularly Daly and Russell are asking: What would be the shape of a theology that took seriously the declaration that in Christ there is neither male nor female? While I do not agree with the answer given by either, I do think they are asking many of the right questions, questions that we as evangelicals must answer if we hope to put forth a viable, biblical alternative.
Of the two, I find Russell less helpful, perhaps because I am immediately offended by her excessive use of contemporary jargon. For example, she speaks of conversion as “conscientization,” which (if you can say it) is defined as “the process by which men and women are awakened to their socio-cultural reality, move beyond the alienations and constraints to which they are subjected, and affirm themselves as the conscious subjects and creators of their own historical future.” That statement, like many others in the book, is linguistic and theological nonsense. She also has a penchant for throwing in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew words in a way that will frustrate those who do not know the languages and infuriate those who do.
But Human Liberation in a Feminist Perspective does represent a serious attempt to write a theology that is relevant to more people than just a few Western males. While this is a noble endeavor, the result reveals the difficulty of basing theology on the vagaries of experience and current philosophical fads. Evangelicals will find her manipulation of and even disregard for Scripture disconcerting.
Daly’s conclusions that we must dump both a male saviour and all concepts of original sin are equally unacceptable, but I find the issues she raises in Sexist Religion both lucid and challenging. Unlike Russell, Daly is certainly in dialogue with the history of the Church and its interpretations of Scripture, wrong as some of them may have been. She declares that “women are at war with sexist religion as sexist” and that “women whose consciousness has been raised are spiritual exiles.” In this she speaks as well for many women reared in evangelical circles.
I do not agree with Daly’s method of “liberation,” or her assertion that “to exist humanly is to name the self, the world, and God.” I believe that naming has already been done by God’s revelation in Scripture. But I would sympathize with her methodological goal of “cutting away the phallus-centered value system imposed by patriarchy.” In speaking of God as a “dynamic verb” and the “Verb of Verbs” rather than as a “static noun,” I think she is coming closer to an articulation of the meaning of God’s revelation as “I Am” to Moses at the burning bush than do most theologians who concentrate on such masculine images as “Father” and “King.” Her attempt is at least a reminder that all language about God is symbolic and limited, that all images represent only one facet, and that we are to make no graven images of God.
Daly concludes by declaring that “women are perceiving that patriarchal religion is indeed patriarchal and are choosing to give priority to what we find valid in our own experience without needing to look to the past for legitimization of this.… There are no adequate models in the past to guide us.” Yet she does not reject the notion of a God actively involved in our lives nor the possibility of meaning for life within a religious context.
If we as evangelicals are going to have something to say to women who are also listening to Daly, we must recognize the patriarchalism in Christianity, stop defending it, and start building a theology around those elements that transcend sexual dichotomies. For example, we must begin to emphasize that both men and women are made in God’s image and that therefore God is neither male nor female. We must stop emphasizing Jesus’ maleness and start remembering his humanity. We must stop preaching submission only for wives and justice only for a few and start exhibiting agape-love and equal respect.
BRIEFLY NOTED
Adjustment to Widowhood and Some Related Problems, by Cecile Strugnell (Health Sciences, 201 pp., $6.50 pb). For pastoral counselors and their teachers, an annotated bibliography that encompasses the spectrum of problems related to bereavement and resulting loneliness. Though not specifically Christian, this is a valuable resource.
1975 Directory of Religious Stations and Programs in the United States, edited by Ben Armstrong et al. (National Religious Broadcasters [Box 2254 R, Morristown, N. J. 07960], 88 pp., $10 pb). A listing by state of hundreds of stations, plus an alphabetical listing of scores of broadcasts. Useful reference.
The Prayers of the New Testament, by Donald Coggan (Harper & Row, 190 pp., $6.95), Sense and Nonsense About Prayer, by Lehman Strauss (Moody, 123 pp., $3.95), Hungry For God: Practical Help in Personal Prayer, by Ralph Martin (Doubleday, 168 pp., $5.95), The Workbook of Living Prayer, by Maxie Dunnam (The Upper Room, 138 pp., $2 pb), Healing of Memories: Prayer and Confession—Steps to Inner Healing, by Dennis Linn and Matthew Linn (Paulist, 101 pp., $1.45 pb), and Inner Healing: Ministering to the Human Spirit Through the Power of Prayer, by Michael Scanlan (Paulist, 85 pp., $2.25 pb). Many aspects of prayer are explored here. Coggan is now the archbishop of Canterbury; a reprint is offered of his 1967 study of all the recorded prayers in the New Testament. Strauss examines the follies most of us practice in prayer and provides practical helps. Martin, a Catholic charismatic leader, shares his thoughts. Dunnam offers the ultimate in “how-to’s” in a genuine workbook designed to teach new awareness and sensitivity in prayer in six weeks. Some of the exercises could be helpful, but many seem contrived. The Linns and Scanlan, Catholic priests, stress prayer as a means of inner healing. Scanlan spans the range of interpersonal relationships. The Linns treat individual confession about past attitudes that may be blocking present relationships.
An Annotated Bibliography of Bible Study, by Jerome Walker and David MacLeod (Western Bible Institute [Box 9332, Denver, Colo. 80209], 41 pp., 75¢ pb). A very good, classified aid to building up a library of commentaries and other biblical reference books. Aimed at the serious Bible student rather than the advanced scholar.
The Human Life Review, edited by J. P. McFadden, is a new quarterly journal devoted to certain crucial ethical issues. The first two issues include articles on abortion, the relevant Supreme Court decision, and the fetus as a person. Former CHRISTIANITY TODAY associate editor Harold O. J. Brown now has the same title with this journal. Available for $2.50/issue (about 110 pp. each) from 150 East 35 St., New York, N. Y. 10016.
The Works of Jonathan Edwards, two volumes (Banner of Truth, 1,894 pp., $19.95/set). Kudos to the publisher for reprinting an 1834 edition that includes a lengthy biography by Sereno Dwight plus the complete journal of David Brainerd. It would take twenty or more volumes in conventional format to equal what is in this small-print, two-column edition. Edwards is widely recognized as being probably the greatest American theologian. His writings, though sometimes difficult, are often inspiring. Full doctrinal agreement is not a prerequisite to profiting from this great man of God.
Current Christian Books, two volumes (Christian Booksellers Association [2031 West Cheyenne Road, Colorado Springs, Colo. 80906], 448 pp., $29.95/set). A Christian version of the comprehensive guide called Books in Print. Alphabetically lists (one volume by author and the other by title) the books currently available from almost all the larger and many of the smaller publishers of religious books from a Protestant perspective. (Only a couple of Catholic houses are included, and, curiously, Logos is omitted.) Valuable reference tool for librarians as well as booksellers, and one that all students of religion will want to know about.
God, Man, and Archie Bunker, by Spencer Marsh (Harper & Row, 104 pp., $5.95, $2.95 pb). A Presbyterian minister evaluates, in the light of biblical teaching, the personality traits of America’s favorite television bigot and the “God” he has imagined. Some stimulating observations, though rather preachy in spots. Fans of “All in the Family” may have different conclusions as to what the producers intended by some of the examples Marsh refers to.
Introducing Church Growth, by Tetsunao Yamamori and E. LeRoy Lawson (Standard, 256 pp., n.p.), Your Church Has Real Possibilities, by Robert Schuller (Regal, 179 pp., $2.95 pb), The Church That Dared to Change, by Michael Tucker (Tyndale, 129 pp., $2.95 pb), Hey, That’s Our Church!, by Lyle Schaller (Abingdon, 192 pp., $4.50 pb). Survival and Mission For the City Church, by Gaylord Noyce (Westminster, 162 pp., $3.95 pb), and Church Growth Is Not the Point, by Robert Hudnut (Harper & Row, 143 pp., $7.95). Varied approaches and opinions regarding “church growth.” Yamamori and Lawson provide a comprehensive introductory text that combines analysis of various growth theories with some of their applications. Schuller bases his comments on the success of the well-known southern California church that he started from scratch twenty years ago. (The same principles have been taught in his numerous Institutes for Successful Church Leadership.) Tucker’s church was twenty years old when he became the pastor but was on the verge of disbanding. He tells how dying bones can be made vibrant. Schaller, drawing on visits to 3,000 congregations in the last fifteen years, delineates several “types” and their growth patterns. One of these “types,” now struggling but formerly prestigious, is the inner-city church, Noyce’s subject. He stresses the positive potential and suggests five varied “images” and the need for each city church to decide which to aim for. A needed counterbalance to advocates of bigness is offered by Hudnut, who reminds us “that church growth is not the point; faithfulness to the Gospel is.”
Jesus According to a Woman, by Rachel Wahlberg (Paulist, 106 pp., $1.45 pb), Christian Freedom For Women, edited by Harry Hollis (Broadman, 192 pp., n.p.), The Fulfilled Woman, by Lou Beardsley and Toni Spry (Harvest House, 172 pp., $2.95), and Love, Honor and Be Free, by Maxine Hancock (Moody, 191 pp., $5.95). Christians offer varied responses to the questions raised by the Women’s Liberation movement. Wahlberg maintains that we have been wrong in our interpretation of some of Jesus’ teaching. She offers a “liberated” look at nine of Jesus’ encounters with women. Hollis and three other sociologically oriented Christians present thirteen essays on a variety of pertinent topics. Beardsley and Spry, both women, address themselves to married women and do not consider fulfillment apart from conventional housewifery. Hancock, a housewife and freelance writer, is a welcome contrast to them as she discusses a Christian woman’s role in marriage.
Gay Liberation, by Roberta (PTL Publications [Box 1277, Tustin, Calif. 92680], 131 pp., $1.49 pb). Autobiographical account of struggles and failures on the way to liberation from the practice of homosexuality. Doctrinal and practical explanation of why God calls for abstinence.
How I Write, by Robert Hastings (Broadman, 145 pp., $3.95 pb). Some very basic (and well written!) suggestions for aspiring writers interested in being published for the Christian community. Doubtless most editors wish they could require all would-be writers to read such a book before mailing in manuscripts.
Who Walk Alone, by Margaret Evening (InterVarsity, 222 pp., $3.95 pb). One of the most honest examinations of all aspects and struggles of the single life. A practical, Bible-inspired approach toward relationships with married couples, roommates, and children, constructive use of time, importance of accepting oneself as a whole person. Goes far beyond the usual tripe to scratch at the truth. Highly recommended.
