What Did Jesus Mean?
The Difficult Sayings of Jesus by William Neil (Eerdmans, 1975, 105 pp., $4.95), and The Hard Sayings of Jesus, by Albert McClellan (Broadman, 1975, 135 pp., $3.95), are reviewed by William L. Coleman, author and lecturer, Aurora, Nebraska.
Anyone who has taught the Bible regularly realizes that the “simple truth” is not always so simple. The greatest teacher who ever lived left many of his students scratching their heads and talking to themselves. It was the very complexity that caused many in his audience to stop following him.
The truth that Christ taught was not always in short, unequivocal terms, like “no parking.” While some of his teachings were edicts, others were like a fisherman’s tangled line. They need patience, thought, and humility to untie.
These two volumes grasp at some of the tough things Christ said, and the authors make gallant and often helpful attempts at focusing them. The books total fifty-three chapters but only brush against the surface. The reader should not expect a technical handling of the text such as may be found in Sidlow Baxter’s Problem Texts. William Neil seems capable of such exegesis, but he shows the results of careful study without incorporating the details.
Neil reminds one of Roosevelt. Those who visited with him often felt he completely agreed with them but later discovered his position was the exact opposite. Neil exerts himself so to be fair to all possible positions that the reader often wonders what his solution really is. One cannot help but agree with his interpretation of the divorce issue, since Neil hints at practically every position. He will disappoint some readers by his reasoning denying a six-day creation and yet defending the sanctity of God’s ratio of six to one. We find him saying that Christ believed in the resurrection into eternal life but not the resurrection of the physical body.
This is not to say that the book is not good or to deny its helpfulness. Reading it on a devotional level and possibly one chapter at a time, the stable Christian may feel his heart moved.
The chapter discussing “We have only done our duty” (Luke 17:10) is an excellent example of the book’s moving insight. “But ‘God’s strict bridle,’ do we not also need that? As servants of God we need his discipline as well as his mercy.” In discussing church and state he defends involvement in the government and raises the question of the South African Christian’s response to the state of his nation.
Neil is worth reading because his approach is different enough to jar our minds. McClellan is worth reading because his approach is more likely to stir our hearts. He has served as a pastor, been an editor, and been a director of public relations, all in the Southern Baptist Convention. Some of his material is syrupy, a bit simplistic, and even potentially harmful. Other chapters are beautiful. I would like to hear him preach “King on a Donkey” or “Harlots First.”
Despite his general soft approach, McClellan is not afraid to take difficult subjects by the horns. He discusses the narrow gate and makes excellent applications to the present life and not just eternity. He attempts to unravel the weighty “Let the dead bury the dead.” Likewise he plugs into the problem of people who have little and eventually lose the little they have. He applies this principle to all of life and insists that only the person who attempts to expand what he has will have hope of keeping it, whether it is faith, trust, skill, or spiritual responsibility.
These two volumes are humbling. They remind us how little we know and at the same time help us learn a bit more about Christian discipleship.
Scholarship Based On Unbelief
The Tübingen School, by Horton Harris (Oxford University, 1975, 288 pp., $26.50), is reviewed by W. Ward Gasque, associate professor of New Testament, Regent College, Vancouver, Canada.
No group has had a greater influence on the modern study of the New Testament in academic circles than the small band of scholars who gathered around the personality and theological opinions of Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), professor of theology at the University of Tübingen for thirty-five years. The standard reference works refer to Baur as “the founder of historical criticism”—though this is questionable, unless one has a very narrow definition of the term. Even today, when nearly all his specific conclusions concerning the New Testament writings have been rejected as untenable, critical assumptions that occurred for the first time in the writings of Baur and his school are part and parcel of contemporary criticism as it is practiced in some places.
If it was the tendency of earlier ages to write hagiography instead of biography in dealing with the lives of the early Christian fathers, and of nineteenth-and twentieth-century evangelicals to idealize the lives of their leaders (especially missionaries), so has it been the tendency of liberal theologians to write apologetically slanted accounts of their nineteenth-century predecessors. A case in point is the influential work on Baur by Vanderbilt professor Peter C. Hodgson, The Formation of Historical Theology (1966), which has been strongly criticized in Germany and which is shown by Harris to be in many ways misleading. In contrast to Hodgson’s portrayal of a very pious theological professor who had a deep love for the truth and only slight tendencies toward heresy (for example, Ebionism, the view that Jesus was more human than divine), Harris makes it clear that Baur started his theological study with a clear rejection of God in the traditionally Christian sense of a transcendent personal Being. From this premise he embarked on a search for an alternative and comprehensive explanation of Christian origins.
In his earlier brilliant and highly acclaimed book, David Friedrich Strauss and his Theology (Cambridge, 1973), Harris offered what will no doubt become the standard introduction in English to the life and thought of Baur’s even more famous student. Strauss was more forthright about his rejection of the historic Christian faith than was Baur, and consequently Strauss lost his right to teach theology. But the basic starting place for the two men was identical. Harris’s earlier study should be read as a companion volume to this one. (He promises a further study of Albert Ritschel, the Tübingen School’s best-known demitter and probably its most important critic.)
The Tübingen School is the first full-scale history of the group and its influence to appear in English. Prime space is given to Baur, of course, but Harris also includes studies of Baur’s son-in-law, Eduard Zeller; the brilliant synthesizer Albert Schwegler; the obscure philosopher Karl Christian Planck (uncle of Max Planck); the shy aesthetician Karl Reinhold Köstlin; the onetime disciple Albrecht Ritschl; the eccentric and erudite biblical critic Adolf Hilgenfeld; and the school’s greatest source of embarrassment, Gustav Volkmar. Next to nothing has been previously written in English about most of these scholars, and in most cases very little information was generally accessible even in German. Harris has done a valuable service to the cause of a general understanding of the history of modern theology.
Three qualities stand out in this fine study. First, Harris makes careful use of the primary sources, many of them unpublished (especially letters); his study is entirely original and in no way dependent on secondary sources. Second, like his earlier work on Strauss, this study is eminently readable; there is no trace of the usual theological jargon or incomprehensible and linguistically indefensible Germanic English that so often marks works heavily dependent on German sources. Third, although he has his own presuppositions and assumptions—indeed, he argues that it is dangerous to think one has none—Harris takes great pains to be fair in representing the views of the various scholars he treats; he therefore gives great space to long extracts from their own writings, allowing them to express their own opinions on various matters. In all these things he presents a worthy model for aspiring younger scholars.
In spite of the aim of Baur and his school to be historical, it was in this area preeminently that their work was a failure. In fact, their reconstruction of early Christian origins was totally unhistorical; rather than being based on a prime study of the original sources, it was a creation of fertile imagination harnessed to the cause of a theological dogmatism as unbending as that of the most fervent traditionalist. Once Baur had formulated his essential conception of Christian origins, no amount of evidence could shake him from his conclusions, and he responded to his critics by accusing them of forsaking critical methods. For, as Ritschl once wrote to his father, Baur had “a strange conception of criticism; he does not mean the methods in historical investigation, but the dogmatized result of his negative opinions, and he is always ready to see apostasy from criticism where one differs from him.…”
However that may be, Baur and his school are extremely important for a proper understanding of the roots of modern theology and, even more, of the roots of modern New Testament criticism. For this reason I warmly commend Harris’s valuable study to all who are concerned, as students or as more advanced scholars, with the academic study of the Bible and theology. Despite its astronomical price—a thing becoming all too common among serious works of theology—The Tübingen School should be in all college and seminary libraries and also in the personal libraries of many students and teachers.
Conservative Resurgence
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, by George H. Nash (Basic Books, 1976, 463 pp., $20), is reviewed by Erling Jorstad, professor of history and American studies, St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota.
In his conclusion Professor Nash states that in the early 1970s conservatives had “the greatest opportunity of their lives before them” to influence, even to direct, the nation’s political and intellectual life. The appearance of this book, a doctoral dissertation at Harvard, published by a major scholarly house, is further evidence of that opportunity. It is the first comprehensive study of the intellectual dimension of modern American conservatism. Such a work is greatly needed by our opinion-makers and in our high schools and colleges.
Conceding that the intellectual conservatives criticized each other as much as their adversaries, Nash shows that a definable, cohesive movement does exist. Its major spokesmen have been Russell Kirk, Wilmoore Kendall, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Frank Meyer. Nash summarizes the thought of each in detail. He adds also valuable summations of the work of conservatives such as Walter Berns, James Burnham, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Molnar, Leo Strauss, Stephen Tonsor, Ernest van den Haag, and Richard Weaver.
These plus a few others are pictured on the front dust jacket as the prime contributors to the intellectual development of conservatism. Nash finds three major streams flowing through the work of his group: libertarianism, traditionalism (these two he finds adequately fused by Frank Meyer), and anti-Communism, on which they all agree. Nash traces the origins of the movement, the agonizing conflicts of personalities within it, the common enemies of New Deal liberalism and moral permissivism, and the hostility of academe and most reflective journals to the new conservatism. Nash has firm control of his material and leads the reader through the detail without losing sight of the larger patterns.
The heart of the author’s argument is that the movement has stayed alive by following a “conservative center” rather than its extremes; by 1972 this center has “gained a national audience and had won a chance to exercise national leadership.” The center holds this position because its leaders share “certain fundamental prejudices” (his quotation marks). These are: “a presumption in favor of private property and a free enterprise economy; opposition to Communism, socialism, and utopian schemes of all kinds; support of strong national defense; belief in Christianity or Judaism (or at least the utility of such belief); acceptance of traditional morality and the need for an inelastic moral code; hostility to positivism and relativism; a ‘gut affirmation’ of the goodness of America and the West.”
Nash’s own commitment to the conservative center is everywhere evident. When the movement is criticized, the criticism is that of such adversaries as Dwight Macdonald, not of Nash himself. The long list of persons he interviewed consists only of advocates, not of critics. Generally this bias is not obtrusive.
As to shortcomings, surely L. Brent Bozell deserves a picture on the dust jacket. By comparison, Ralph de Toledano, pictured there, remained more a reporter than an originator of conservative ideas. Nash states that without the journal National Review “there would probably have been no cohesive intellectual force on the Right in the 1960s and 1970s.” That assertion needs much more substantiation than he gives. Russell Kirk is a Roman Catholic. He converted to that faith in 1964, as Nash says, but a self-defined “Puritan.” But such factual errors are very rare in this book, which has ninety-one pages of footnotes and a first-rate index.
Readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY may be disappointed to find the author giving short shrift to the reawakening of conservative Protestant theology and ethics in the post-1945 era. Someone should make a comparative study between the National Review circle and the authors in CHRISTIANITY TODAY; this would greatly illuminate our understanding of the best of the resurgence of conservatism in our day. Nash offers only brief suggestions about the epistemological and ontological assumptions of his group; my intuition tells me these would be very close to those of the conservative Protestant renaissance of the sixties.
For those seeking to understand the origins, progress, and intellectual dimensions of modern American conservative thought, this book is the standard work. It should hold up for many years as definitive. Its record and its message can also serve to inspire conservatives to continue to “defend enduring truths in a language appealing to America in the 1970s.”
Solzhenitsyn And Christianity
Solzhenitsyn’s Religion, by Niels C. Nielsen, Jr. (Nelson, 164 pp., $6.95. $3.50 pb), and Solzhenitsyn: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Kathryn Fetter (Prentice-Hall, 174 pp., $2.95 pb), are reviewed by Cheryl Forbes, assistant editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Christian faith has become well known. His Lenten prayer and his Letter to the Third Council of the Russian Church Abroad are just two reasons. As editor of From Under the Rubble he included a fine essay on the schism between the Church and the world (the Church, it said, is morally bankrupt). And his own essay on repentance in that volume reinforces the fact of his deep commitment to Christianity.
Nielsen plays on this country’s interest in Solzhenitsyn as a religious and moral leader. But there is little specific discussion of Solzhenitsyn’s beliefs; the title promises more than the book provides. Nielsen quotes some passages from the Solzhenitsyn canon pertinent to the novelist’s Christianity but overlooks other important ones (e.g., in Gulag Archipelago II, “The Soul and Barbed Wire”). He pads his book with discussions of political aspects of Solzhenitsyn’s works and with quotations from and references to other critics.
Alexander Schmemann’s essay “On Solzhenitsyn” in much less space than Nielsen’s book systematically outlines the novelist’s Christianity. Schmemann, who was Solzhenitsyn’s confessor-priest when he first left the Soviet Union, explains how and where Solzhenitsyn develops themes of sin, repentance, conversion, and resurrection. For those who want a thorough treatment of the subject, go to Schmemann, not to Nielsen. His essay is in Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn, edited by John Dunlop et al. (Nordland, 1973).
Feuer’s helpful introduction to the Prentice-Hall volume also deals with Solzhenitsyn’s deep religious faith and cites the passages where it first was evident. Her footnotes provide information to aid the interested person in further study of Solzhenitsyn. Topics in the book range from meanings of the novelist’s symbolism (much of it Christian) to a technical discussion of the dramatic structure in some of Solzhenitsyn’s books and an evaluation of the English translations available (Solzhenitsyn doesn’t think very highly of them).
One of the most interesting essays, “The Debate over August 1914” by Nikita Struve (a reprint from a previous collection of essays), centers on the pivotal scene in the story, the crisis of General Samsonov. Both theme and symbolism reflect Solzhenitsyn’s Christian perspective. Struve explains that from the first sentence of the novel Solzhenitsyn displays an “unquestionable” Christianity, which culminates in his portrait of Samsonov.
The book also includes a fine, though brief, bibliography and an annotated chronology of important dates. The book is a valuable addition to the growing critical discussions of a great artist.
Unfulfilled Promise
Creating a Successful Christian Marriage, by Cleveland McDonald (Baker 1975, 392 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by Terry L. Leckrone, minister, Jerseytown-Eyers Grove Methodist Charge, Millville, Pennsylvania.
Most of the many popular-level books on marriage and sexuality produced during the past decade have been “pop” psychology with a little sex thrown in to keep the reader’s interest. Unfortunately, this author does little better. The scholarship and level of treatment are “popular” in the worst sense: shallow. His attempt to present a Christian alternative to secular opinion falls hopelessly short of the goal.
McDonald wrote the book as a text for Christian colleges and pastoral counselors. His approach to the family unit is functional, “designed as a preparation-for-marriage course” rather than as a theoretical treatment. Herein lies one of the major defects of the book. The author divorces his study of marriage and the family from its social-science origins. The result is a sociological framework—i.e., his use of role theory—filled in with light theologizing and much romanticism.
His treatment of the biblical basis of marriage points out the inadequacy of his hermeneutic. After quoting the masterly Genesis account of Eve’s creation, McDonald lapses into the most blatant kind of sexism. This takes the reader by surprise, since the author is careful to point out that woman was created as “help meet,” not “helpmate,” which he rejects as having a sexist intent. Throughout the rest of the book it is assumed that women are inferior because of original sin.
To further offend our sensitivities, McDonald tells us that the subjugation of women and male supremacy are eternal norms ordained by God. What about Galatians 3:28, “In Christ there is neither male nor female”? Why shouldn’t it be the keystone for a Christian view of male-female relationships? Saying that Paul’s profoundly Christian affirmation to the Galatians refers only to spiritual matters leaves much to be desired.
Another major fault of McDonald’s scholarship is his continual use of stereotypes. Christians who share his views are “Bible-believers.” In opposition to this group are the “liberals,” who are identified with the God-is-dead fiasco of the sixties and with relativity in morals. This is certainly a dubious equation when we consider classical liberals like Rauschenbusch and Fosdick, who combined faith in a living God with the highest ethical standards, not only for themselves but for the whole society.
Such writing not only obscures the real issues of theological ethics and social philosophy but also cuts the holder off from active participation in the larger life of the Church and society. Christians who follow this practice exchange their chance to be prophetic and influential for the security of isolation. And, needless to say, there is a vast spectrum of opinion between the fundamentalism of McDonald and the views of Fletcher and Altizer.
While in its major thrust the book fails to give a significant appraisal of the complex problems of marriage and suggests solutions that are often inadequate, there is a comforting note of nostalgia and simplicity in McDonald’s approach. But maybe that is the siren song that will lure the American church to its demise.
The book fails to achieve the author’s intention of becoming a major Christian text in the field of marriage and the family. It does contain some practical help for newly married or engaged couples.
Misreading Bonhoeffer
A Dissent on Bonhoeffer by David H. Hopper (Westminster, 1975, 184 pp., $8.50) is reviewed by Richard Bube, chairman, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was twelve when the first World War ended. From the age of twenty-seven on, he was involved in some phase of the resistance against Hitler in Germany. His theological writings came out of this historical milieu; his Ethics was fragmentary and unfinished, written while he was essentially in hiding; his Letters and Papers From Prison were the searchings of a man under pressure of prison, bombings, and an uncertain future. Finally his life was terminated by a Nazi hangman when he was thirty-nine. To attempt to understand the impact of Bonhoeffer apart from this historical context is impossible. It is precisely because Bonhoeffer’s concern was with a living Christianity that his theology cannot be traced as a kind of abstract intellectual maturation, but rather must be appreciated as a dynamic product of the interaction between the Word and Spirit and his own life experiences.
David Hopper, professor of religion at Macalester College agrees with this assessment but thinks that it necessitates a dissent against other assessments of Bonhoeffer. Whereas some might argue that it is precisely because Bonhoeffer’s theology and life are so intimately connected that his overall contributions speak to many in an enduring fashion, Hopper argues that this connection provides the basis for questioning the enduring nature of Bonhoeffer’s contributions.
Hopper puts together evidence by which he can challenge both the stature of Bonhoeffer as a theologian and the continuity of his thought. His method is first of all to look at the interpreters of Bonhoeffer and to show that there are deep disagreements among them about Bonhoeffer’s views of ecclesiology, Christology, concreteness, reality, and worldliness. Given the nature of the extant works of Bonhoeffer, and the tendency of interpreters to read into any theologian’s writings their own presuppositions, such disagreement is hardly surprising.
There is abundant evidence of both continuity and discontinuity in Bonhoeffer’s thought; any interpreter wishing to emphasize one or the other has many instances to cite. Hopper presses for a determination, however, of whether shifts in Bonhoeffer’s thinking can be attributed to “the process of intellectual growth and increasing social-historical awareness” or are “related to patterns of Bonhoeffer’s own personal development and personal exigency.” The implication is that only the former can be used to defend Bonhoeffer’s lasting theological contribution, whereas the latter is somehow damaging to that defense. It is not at all clear to me that such a distinction is meaningful. I suspect that Bonhoeffer speaks so urgently so often precisely because his concern is with translating Christian theology into Christian living, rather than with systematic theology per se.
Hopper also seems to press for unnecessary dichotomies in other areas. For example, he asks, “Did he do what he did because of his Christian convictions or because of the inbred and inculcated qualities derived from his unusual family?” Must a choice be made? As in so many other cases emphasized in Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, are not “both/and” or “neither/nor” often more useful categories than “either/or”?
I can agree wholly with the author when he says, “these uniquely, personal, existential concerns make Bonhoeffer’s theology something less than systematic,” and “Bonhoeffer’s own deep involvement in the struggle of faith, its constant presence in his life, its anxious character, work against a reasoned and fully coherent theological statement.” But this does not surprise me as much as it seems to surprise the author, nor does it detract, in my opinion, from the enduring ability of Bonhoeffer’s thoughts to stimulate and revitalize Christian faith and life.
