How Much More?
More Than Man: A Study in Christology, by Russell F. Aldwinckle (Eerdmans, 1976, 293 pp., $8.95), is reviewed by Bruce Demarest, associate professor of systematic theology, Conservative Baptist Seminary, Denver, Colorado.
Russell Aldwinckle, a theologian at McMaster Divinity College, Hamilton, Ontario, offers a penetrating reassessment of the relevance of Jesus Christ in the modern world. Very much at home in the theological literature, he ranges wide in his skillful evaluation of the competing claims made for the Man from Nazareth.
Aldwinckle applauds modern theology for recovering the authentic humanity of Jesus. With Baillie and Robinson he sounds the death knell of docetism. Yet he does not want us to stop at that point. There was something ostensibly “different” about Jesus, something that prompted the early Christians to speak of him in the language of divinity. Plainly, Jesus was “more than man.”
It is encouraging to find that Aldwinckle does not dismiss outright metaphysics and ontology in Christian theology. He asserts that an adequate Christology demands some ontological assertions about the Person, i.e., the “nature” of Jesus. He thus transcends the agnosticism of Bonhoeffer, who refused to speak of the “how” of the Incarnation. Similarly, Aldwinckle has little patience with the liberal bias against doctrine or dogma. Faith shorn of theological content vanishes in ineffable mysticism.
Aldwinckle bites the bullet when he insists that Christendom’s creeds and confessions were not gross mistakes. True, believers expressed their Lord’s significance in non-biblical language in a particular cultural context. Yet a classical creed such as Chalcedon was generally faithful to Scripture in defining heresy and affirming the reality of the God-man.
Granted, then, that Jesus was “more than man.” How are we today to interpret the divinity language of the early Church? Aldwinckle approaches the problem by working out a Christology “from below.” Orthodoxy’s Christology “from above,” with its models of Logos and preexistence, proves meaningless to the modern mind, he says. Hence we must start with the man Jesus, the carpenter of Nazareth. Aldwinckle then leaps to the conclusion that if Jesus was an authentic man, he could not have had the metaphysical attributes of God any more than we human beings have. The basic Christological category, then, is not a static nature but a dynamic relation between persons. Thus Aldwinckle claims that we are to “locate the divinity in the special and unique personal relationship which existed between Jesus and God.” In other words, “God was present in the relationship to Jesus in a way in which He is not present to Christian believers in general.” The reader may be inclined to reply that on this showing Jesus would differ from us in degree rather than in kind. But Aldwinckle anticipates this criticism with the retort that “the difference between Jesus and us is such that a difference of degree has become a difference in kind.”
Although the author issues a disclaimer, it is apparent that we are being served the old adoptionist Christology warmed over. Following Baillie, he views Jesus as a man chosen to enjoy a peculiar relation to God, to be the special channel of the divine revelation. Despite his noble intentions, Aldwinckle’s method is in error. The purely empirical starting point of a Christology “from below” fails to do justice to the full reality of the God of the Bible. A divinity fashioned from sense data alone is a truncated divinity. Only the ontological God who actually became man in Jesus Christ according to the Scriptures is the true and majestic God. Furthermore, Aldwinckle’s insistence that the man Jesus could never have possessed the divine attributes smacks of the untenable Kierkegaardian postulate of the “infinite qualitative distinction” between God and man. The antithesis between God and man is not of such an order that humanity is compromised when God assumes flesh.
The longest chapter in the book is entitled, “Jesus or Gotama?” In the light of current interest in comparative religions, Aldwinckle argues that Gotama the Buddha approximated the Christian view of the transcendent reality. Nevertheless, Jesus is final. Salvation is mediated only through him. But what about the destiny of the sincere Buddhist? “It seems incredible that the God whom Jesus revealed … would condemn millions of Buddhists to eternal separation from Himself simply because in their earthly life they were Buddhists. Even less believable is the idea that He would condemn them to eternal punishment.” Few evangelicals are likely to endorse Aldwinckle’s conclusion that God will grant an opportunity beyond this life for unbelievers to be saved.
What more shall we say about this carefully researched work that leaves no Christological stone unturned? Only that the author concedes too much to contemporary theological skepticism. In the attempt to communicate to modern man he surrenders to him.
Christianity And Marxism
Christians and Marxists: The Mutual Challenge to Revolution, by José Miguez Bonino (Eerdmans, 1976, 158 pp., $6.95), and A Marxist Looks at Jesus, by Milan Machovec (Fortress, 1976, 231 pp., $6.50), are reviewed by James S. Tinney, Ph.D. candidate in political science, Howard University, Washington, D.C.
The days of purist Marxism are over, agree Bonino and Machovec, who cite as examples: the earmarks of capitalist market economies, private incentives, and administrative bureaucracies that are appearing in the oldest socialist states; the failure of the socialist state to create the expected “new man”; the innovative quasi-socialist systems being created by new African states; and the new forms of struggle between “good” and “evil” in countries that have already described themselves as Marxist.
The hard-line atheism characteristic of materialist ideology appears to be a thing of the past (except in the U.S.S.R., where, Bonino admits, “disruption of religious and family traditions” is prevalent). Bonino and Machovec share, with other Marxists whom they cite, a functionalist explanation of Marxist atheism as the new approach. Says Machovec: Marx rejected Christian dogma “to free his followers for their task of radical criticism, not to create a new dogma of the non-existence of God for all eternity.” Whether Marx himself would agree with this appraisal is, of course, another question. This functionalist approach is one of many new appraisals of religion now being formulated by “thousands of Marxists.” Concludes Machovec, “It depends partly on Christians whether they go any further.”
In much the same vein, Bonino asserts that where the churches are no longer “reactionary,” Marxism is no longer anti-religious.
After reaching these points of agreement, however, these two authors part company. Machovec, a philosophy professor in Prague, Czechoslovakia, for seventeen years, is a convinced Marxist who sets out to reevaluate Christ and the Bible. Bonino is one of the more prominent Latin American Protestants, an Argentinian who is dean of graduate studies at the Higher Institute of Theological Studies in Buenos Aires. He is a self-professed evangelical who seeks a friendly reevaluation of Marxism.
In the long run, Bonino goes the farthest in the rapprochement. He decides that the basic ethos of capitalism is anti-Christian while that of Marxism is pro-Christian, “an historically scientific way to make love efficacious.” (In this, he is fairly typical of scores of Hispanic exponents of “liberation theology.”) Machovec, however, can come only so far as describing himself as a theist, certainly not as a Christian in the evangelical sense.
Machovec’s reading of the Bible (which he describes as “fantastically relevant” for atheists) does not lead him to an encounter with the Saviour. It ends with the worn distinctions between Jesus and “the Christ” that had their highest moments in the now-faded Bultmann era. While its search for a vital theism, and for the historic Jesus, could well serve as a stimulating introduction to religion for the Marxist atheist, for Christians of any designation it is boring rehash.
Its only surprising conclusions are that Jesus was not a Zealot or a political revolutionary of any stripe and that the revolution he espoused was more fundamental, and deeper, than a political event.
The greatest strength of Bonino’s book lies in its comprehensive criticisms of Marxism and in its call for renewal of both Marxism and the Christian church. No “party line” is apparent in this theologian, who is quick to criticize conventional Marxists for reflecting the monistic outlook common to German philosophies, for falling victim to the very type of absolutism they decry in others, and for losing to a large extent that ethos of love which theoretically is a part of socialism. He also decries the discrimination and repression that often characterize new socialist governments after revolutions.
This over-arching emphasis on the negative aspects of modern Marxists may come as a surprise to the reader who is not used to hearing about infighting and internal criticisms among Marxist revisionists. Bonino is certainly non-dogmatic in his Marxism. Although he is among the avant-garde of Latin American theologians who seek to find in Marxist criticisms of religion clues to the renewal of the church, he constantly subjects Marxism to the scrutiny of “Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, the reality and power of the Triune God, the witness of the Bible, and the story of God’s salvation.”
While he believes that Christianity does not have in itself a political theory (in this he differs from the “liberation theologians”), much less a scientific set of tools for social analysis or planning, he asserts that the Bible does raise questions and provide answers about the ultimate nature and foundation of the love and justice that should underlie political theories.
Zen Buddhism And Christianity
Zen Way—Jesus Way, by Tucker N. Callaway (Charles E. Tuttle, 1976, 263 pp., $8.50), is reviewed by Philip Blosser, Chiba, Japan.
Enough nonsense has been written about Zen. With the present glut of Orientalia in the tender-minded genre of “Christian Zen,” “Christian yoga,” and what not, it’s hard to avoid prejudging a book by its cover. I passed this one by more than once myself in the book shops of Tokyo.
Here is a rare little gem, a book at once suitable for the specialist and for the general reader, one that will be acceptable to both committed Zenists and Christians, yet is frank in laying bare the fundamental antithesis between them. The author hopes to deliver his readers forevermore “from the easy sentiment of unbridled Philos” that “feels it unfriendly to believe that different religions are truly different.” This is a long overdue book.
Tucker N. Callaway has been a student of Buddhism for some thirty years. He first went to Japan in 1947, four years after graduating from Southern Baptist seminary in Kentucky. In Japan he taught world religions and philosophy of religion at a major university for twenty years. Immersing himself in the study of Buddhism, he completed a doctoral dissertation in 1957 on the concept of deliverance in Mahayana Buddhism. It was published under the title Japanese Buddhism and Christianity. Subsequently, in association with the National Christian Council for the Study of Japanese Religions, he moved to Kyoto to be near Kyoto’s great Buddhist temples. Having mastered zazen, become fluent in Japanese, and acquired some competence in Chinese, he was readily admitted into the higher echelons of Japanese Buddhism and befriended by such eminent Buddhologists and masters as D. T. Suzuki, Zenkei Shibayama, Sohaki Ogata, and Saizo Inagaki—a singular privilege not fully appreciated, I am afraid, by most missionaries in Japan.
Zen Way-Jesus Way grows out of Callaway’s concern to “expose the foolishness written about Zen by some Western authors who have dabbled in it enough to learn some of its techniques and terminology, but have missed its essence.” Accordingly, he binds himself at the outset with a pledge to his Buddhist teachers “to present the Zen Buddhist position with complete faithfulness.” What he wishes to demonstrate is that “once the presuppositions of the Zen view of reality are firmly grasped, all the strange affirmations and antics of the Zen masters are logically consistent and thoroughly reasonable.”
This approach, though taken with apologies to his Zen friends “for stating in what I hope will be a clear, rational form what they would prefer to remain on the level of provocative encounter and abstruse comment,” is a very fruitful one. Callaway is able to cut through the jungle of misleading (and often simply erroneous) notions propounded by the Norman Vincent Peales of popular Buddhism, such as the assumed ineffability and incommunicability of “Buddhist truth,” or of anything remotely Oriental, for that matter. He clearly sets forth the basic assumptions of Zen Buddhism and compares them with those of Christianity.
The book is divided into three parts: (1) “The Logic of Zen: The Mind Is Everything and Everything Is Nothing”—a synoptic exposition of Zen starting from its own presuppositions, with abundant illustrations, insight, and humor, and some interesting parallels from Occidental philosophy; (2) “Some Personal Experiences in Buddhist Temples”—examples of practical application of the Zen Lebenweisheit, which add flesh and blood and warmth to the exposition (the full transcript of a conversation with D. T. Suzuki is included here); (3) “Zen Way—Jesus Way”—a comparative study, with particular attention to the antithetical epistemologies and, by implication, ontologies of the two “ways.” The book is well documented for its purpose. For those versed in Chinese it contains the Hannya-Shin-gyo (Skt., Prajnaparamita Hrdaya Sutra) with Japanese side-script, a key sutra in Dr. Callaway’s exposition of Mahayana Buddhism. Appended is a good glossary of technical terms, giving Japanese, Chinese, and some Sanskrit equivalents as well as English definitions.
The outstanding strength of the book lies in the author’s knack for what might be called demythologizing. First of all, he shows that in its myriad Bodhisattvas, cosmologies, and hierarchies and its distinctive ceremonies and arts, Mahayana Buddhism is “talking about the same thing in different vocabulary.” That is, when these external manifestations are “demythologized,” they are seen to be mere “useful means” (Jap., Ho-ben, Skt., Upaya), convenient metaphors for the masses, who have no real understanding of the true meaning of their religion.
Second, he succeeds in getting at the presuppositional differences between Mahayana Buddhism (with its dialectical emphasis stemming from Madhyamika and Yogacara roots) and Theravadin Buddhism (of the Hinayana type, with its realist emphasis). This enables one to see the areas of affinity between the trouble spots in the heart of Buddhism and those in the European tradition.
What conclusions does the author draw? Of Satori, the existential realization of Zen, he notes: “I can induce the experience in myself by deliberately holding my critical judgment in abeyance, and can know the serenity of perfect deliverance, of utter freedom, of ultimate escape” (p. 228). “If what I wanted was sheer, uninterrupted delight, freedom forevermore from tensions, struggles, the frustrations of failure, the aching load of responsibility, the agony of grief, the ache of guilt—if that is all I wanted, I would go Zen. Zen works, you know. It really works” (p. 227). “I can induce the experience by pretending, but to go the Zen Way seriously would be for me a willful act of self-deception” (p. 228).
The ultimate difficulty with Zen Buddhism seems to be the inexorable antithesis between the world of concrete experience and the Zen state of mind that can be induced only with the most intense efforts of concentration or momentary flashes of a transformed perspective.
Karl Barth’S Continuing Relevance
Jesus Is Victor! Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Salvation, by Donald Bloesch (Abingdon, 1976, 175 pp., $5.95 pb), is reviewed by Eric Lemmon, assistant professor of theology, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts.
The sheer ineptness of much that is written and spoken about Karl Barth is one bane of Barth scholars. A second is the probability that any scholar may himself be inept given the scope, depth, and sheer volume of Barth’s work. Donald Bloesch has written a book that is anything but inept, and most Barth scholars will recognize in it a good and comprehensive grasp of Barth and a fidelity to the variegations of his thought. It has been said that one either knows Barth comprehensively or does not know him at all. That Bloesch knows him comprehensively is apparent as he reflects on some of the nuances and niceties of Barth’s theology. Jesus Is Victor, though written more for the student than for Barth scholars, can stand up to the scrutiny of those who know Barth well.
Bloesch has done what few evangelicals have been willing to do: he acknowledges the great value of Barth’s work, not simply as technical theology but as, at very least, incipient evangelical theology. He knows where to agree with Barth and where to disagree with him. He commends Barth’s great appreciation for the biblical foundation of theology and his practice of doing theology biblically, something that many in their zeal to renounce Barth’s definition of revelation as it relates to Scripture do not acknowledge. Bloesch also points to Barth’s enormous skill as a theologian and to his great importance in the current and future epochs of theology. He says, for example, that although Barth “cannot be considered a sure and safe guide in the theological quest when taken only by himself,” when “united with the faith of the Protestant Reformation and when purified and corrected in the light of the Bible and the church tradition, his contribution has in estimable value for the church universal.”
Bloesch says that the major area of difference between evangelical theology and Barth is soteriology. This is so because of Barth’s emphasis on the universality of election in Christ and the implied salubrious effects on culture. In this connection he points out that Barth’s view of sin, often limited in the eyes of detractors to a simple notion of privation, is much more profound, but that it is nevertheless inadequate. He further takes issue with Barth on the non-personification of evil as das Nichtige and hence his definition of the devil as “hypostatised falsehood.” In the area of soteriology, Bloesch discusses without attempting to document the often noted theological similarities between Barth and P. T. Forsyth. In this discussion he includes comparisons to J. McCleod Campbell’s moral-satisfaction theory of the Atonement. Focusing on Barth’s own view, Bloesch notes the double strain of reconciliation and penal substitution. Here he may too easily dissociate Barth from Anselm, Barth emphasizing reconciliation and Anselm, commercial satisfaction. As I read Barth, he unquestionably sees God’s honor satisfied and his justice requited, superabundantly fulfilled for all men (the superfluous-merit idea of Anselm). (See Church Dogmatics II–1, pages 379, 380.) Bloesch acknowledges this in some measure but may overstate the differences. He is on very firm ground, however, when he sees Barth as “radicalizing penal substitution” in open hostility to the moral-influence theory that was a part of the subjectivist liberalism of Schleiermacher and Ritschl.
Bloesch carefully wends his way through the ambiguity of Barth’s statements on the universality of the election of Christ for all men. He seems to conclude that Barth is a universalist but a timid one (can one dare to speak of Barth like this?).
Among other noteworthy features of Jesus Is Victor is an excellent discussion entitled “Barth’s Continuing Relevance.” Here Bloesch properly takes issue with those who are trying to put Barth in the stream of radical theology and to identify him with the theologies of liberation. With keen awareness Bloesch discusses the very great, wide-ranging indebtedness of many theologians to Karl Barth, though none of them necessarily espouses Barth’s theology per se. I failed to find, in Bloesch’s several lists of notables influenced by Barth, any mention of Rudolph Bultmann, whose relation to Barth spanned several decades; their dialogue was formative, if only negatively, for both men.
There are some problems with Jesus Is Victor. For one, Bloesch criticizes Barth’s doctrine of Scripture as inadequate to the degree that he does not define inspiration properly. But Barth’s problem goes deeper than this to what is tantamount to misdefining revelation and confusing the Reformers’ categories of revelation and illumination. To my mind the biggest difficulty will come for those who know that Barth is regularly and formally called a technical irrationalist. Bloesch speaks directly of Barth’s theology as objective and even rationalistic. It will appear to some, especially those trained in philosophy, that Bloesch has not adequately distinguished Barth’s technical and principal epistemology from his penchant to ground salvation in the objective history of Christ. It is quite true that Barth believes faith is supremely objective, but it is in the definition of this history and this faith, as well as at other points, that Barth becomes the irrationalist that he has been seen to be by such scholars as Brand Blanshard. Bloesch himself does identify at least some of this ambiguity in his correct discussion of Barth’s use of Histone and Geschichte and in his chapter on Barth’s two conflicting orientations, i.e., Reformation and enlightenment.
Jesus Is Victor is a readable book with good footnotes (at the back, regrettably, rather than on the pages where they fit). It is an admirable assay of Barth’s soteriology. Teachers in seminaries and colleges will find it a good supplemental text to introduce students to Barth’s thought.
