“A Pathway into the Holy Scripture.” Edited by Philip E. Satterthwaite and David F. Wright, Eerdmans344 pp.; $24.99, paper
Recently the Tyndale Fellowship for Biblical and Theological Research held a meeting to commemorate the fiftieth year of its existence. The timing of the jubilee happily corresponded with the five-hundredth anniversary of the birth of William Tyndale, the English Reformer from whom the research fellowship derives its name. Such was the occasion for evangelical scholars such as Carl E. Armerding, Anthony C. Thiselton, I. Howard Marshall, and Anthony N. S. Lane to present papers on a variety of biblical and theological issues. A Pathway into the Holy Scripture offers revised versions of these papers to a broader audience.
This volume represents the ripening of evangelical biblical and theological scholarship. Take, for example, Anthony N. S. Lane’s “Sola Scriptura? Making Sense of a Post-Reformation Slogan.” Lane’s finely tuned article guides the reader through the relationship between Scripture and possible “rivals,” such as ecclesial tradition, human reason, and culture. Lane rightly rebukes any attempt to “jump back to the Bible as if nothing has happened in the intervening millennia.” He warns that to do so shows “the arrogance and folly of despising all that the Holy Spirit has taught over two millennia.” The Reformers, Lane argues, neither wanted to replace the authority of the pope with private interpretation nor to exclude the teaching authority of the church. Instead, they rejected a dogmatic tradition “which prescribes credenda and agenda not contained in Scripture.” As Lane puts it, the attempt to interpret Scripture “to the exclusion of creeds, clergy and even church represents one possible understanding of sola Scriptura, but not the historic understanding.”
Lane’s insightful interpretation of sola Scriptura illustrates an encouraging broadening of perspective, lengthening of historical and theological memory, and deepening hermeneutical engagement in evangelical scholarship. Armerding’s stimulating discussion of story exegesis in Old Testament study, Thiselton on authority and heremeneutics, and Marshall on the relationship between biblical and systematic theology represent particularly penetrating analyses of important issues. Overall, A Pathway suggests that the evangelical mind, at least in biblical and theological studies, is blossoming.
–Christopher A. Hall
“Women and War.” By Jean Bethke Elshtain, University of Chicago Press 317 pp.; $14.95, paper
A reissue of Elshtain’s 1985 book of the same title, this edition includes a new epilogue considering intervening events, such as the end of the Cold War and the ensuing rise of ethnic conflicts within what were once stable sovereign states. Reflecting on the significance of the Gulf War for ongoing disputes about women’s role in the military, Elshtain retains her original criticism of the historic and oversimplified contrast between “women as life givers” and “men as life takers” but at the same time expresses concern about the rush to place women in combat positions under the banner of equal rights without regard to family life-cycle concerns, such as the presence of an infant in the household or the absence of a spouse.
Elshtain also cites a theme of her more recent volume, “Democracy on Trial,” namely, the need for all citizens to be “chastened patriots”–committed as well as detached, critically reflective about patriotic ties in light of other loyalties, both local and universal. In this apparent affirmation of the neo-Calvinist notion of sphere sovereignty, she wisely criticizes both feminist reductionism (the absolutization of gender loyalties above all others) and the postmodern temptation to deny feminist ethical universalism, with its concerns for the safety, dignity, and basic rights of all women.
–Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen
“Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft.” Edited by Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson, Oxford University Press 350 pp.; $35, hardcover; $17.95, paper
This book does for international affairs what Stephen Carter’s superb polemic “The Culture of Disbelief” did for domestic politics: It reminds us that religion matters. The books differ in two ways, though. First, Carter’s is the work of a single (excellent) writer who wants to be both a serious, thoughtful Christian and a responsible citizen. The present volume reads like what it is: the work of a committee. From this follows its second unfortunate aspect: The many contributors’ prose is too determinedly “scholarly”; boredom sets in, and the reader ends up less hopeful for what might be the project’s salutary influence.
It is a book by people whose first concern is “public policy” for others with similar concerns. “To put the matter in cold terms,” writes Stanton Burnett in the chapter on “Implications for the Foreign Policy Community,” “the long-term strategic benefits of understanding the cases in this book and the insights they provide are not precisely calculable but are clearly enormous. Strategic thinking needs information, analysis, and insight–insight from all of the relevant sources contributing to an understanding of human interaction.”
In other words, we “wonks” should broaden our horizons a bit in furtherance of our work on behalf of the state. Carter much more helpfully insists that religion is more and other than (his pithy term) a “hobby,” and that religion can and must constantly challenge the state’s presumption that might makes right.
–Ethan Casey
“Mission Legacies: Biographical Studies of Leaders of the Modern Missionary Movement.” Edited by Gerald H. Anderson, Robert T. Coote, Norman A. Horner, and James M. Phillips, Orbis654 pp.; $34.95
For at least a century, the history of Christianity has been a world history. That reality, which intensifies every day, has been slow to affect the conception held by Europeans and North Americans of both church history and the nature of Christianity itself. For far too long it has been far too easy to look on the growth (sometimes spectacular growth) of Christian churches in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the islands in between as essentially derivative of Christian developments in “the West.” Now, however, a gathering tide of resources is at hand to bring recording closer to reality.
“Mission Legacies” is one of the most important recent books to move toward the newer reality. To be sure, its 75 short, but authoritative biographies tell the story of mostly European or North American missionaries and so present the story of the expansion of Christianity from a Western perspective. But the contents of these biographies open wide the door to understanding how the faith has been globalized over the course of the last two centuries.
These portraits originally appeared in “The International Bulletin of Missionary Research,” which regularly offers some of the most thought-provoking reading available in North America on the worldwide expansion of the church. The book casts its net wide to include women as well as men, Catholics as well as Protestants, doers as well as thinkers, denominational loyalists as well as independents. Many of the pieces are gems of compact historical writing, but of special note are the chapters on Thomas Fowell Buxton, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, and David Livingstone, by Andrew F. Walls, for Walls is the most perceptive writer on the meaning of world Christianity alive today.
–Mark Noll
“Origins of the Salvation Army.” By Norman H. Murdoch, University of Tennessee Press 241 pp.; $32
Norman Murdoch’s well-researched book sheds welcome light on William and Catherine Booth, the remarkable couple who founded the Salvation Army, and whose family dominated for 60 years (1870-1929) this hybrid organization–part revival crusade, part denomination, part missionary enterprise, part social service agency. The special contributions here are to show how much the early William Booth was influenced by the democratic style and innovative procedures of American revivalists, and how the Booths turned to widespread social programs only after their original purpose of evangelizing Britain’s slums had failed.
Murdoch may overstress the extent to which the Army’s evangelistic and social purposes clashed, but his perspective is still a salutary one. He treats the Booths with respect but leaves to denominational advocates (and critics) the business of ferreting out the ultimate spiritual meaning of their work. To tell his tale, Murdoch sticks with the somewhat less precarious enterprise of exploiting archives, the Army’s full array of publications, and a full corps of biographies and autobiographies. The result is a lively portrait of anti-establishmentarians turned autocrats who, sometimes despite themselves, changed the face of evangelical Protestantism in Britain and around the world.–MN
“Reimagining Denominationalism: Interpretive Essays.” Edited by Robert Bruce Mullin and Russell E. Richey, Oxford University Press 326 pp.; $35
The day of the denomination, as the key form of Christian organization, may have passed. But historians, who are always a little behind the times, are having a field day studying the form. This authoritative collection of essays joins a field that has been recently crowded with seven volumes of twentieth-century Presbyterian history (edited by John Mulder, Louis Weeks, and Milton Coalter), an ongoing series of one-volume denominational histories edited by Henry Warner Bowden (published by Greenwood), a boom in titles on the Southern Baptist Convention, and significant individual volumes on the Disciples, Methodists, and still other denominations.
“Reimagining Denominationalism” is noteworthy for the seriousness with which its contributors take the title. Almost all of the essays, even if they focus on episodes or particularities of individual denominations, reflect usefully on the meaning of the category as a whole. The book in general would have been better if authors had taken more note, for comparative purposes, of denominational trajectories in other societies, especially others on the margins of the British empire: Canada, Australia, South Africa.
Inevitable limitations aside, there is still much to ponder in this book. Among several signal contributions, especially intriguing are Laurie Maffly-Kipp’s argument for the importance of denominational differences within “the black church,” Robert Orsi’s sensitive reflections on the spiritual, emotional, and psychological difficulties that attend any attempt to write the history of one’s own denomination, and Marc Lee Raphael’s suggestion that the time has come for scholars to acknowledge the existence of “a number of Judaisms within the three large branches of American Judaism”–Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform–and thereby recognize affinities and differences masked by the traditional denominational categories.
–MN
“Cosmos in the Chaos: Philip Schaff’s Interpretation of Nineteenth-Century American Religion.” Stephen R. Graham, Eerdmans280 pp.; $21.99
Philip Schaff was a bright young professor full of preconceptions about America as spiritual wilderness when he immigrated here from Germany in 1844. Stephen Graham’s book recounts how Schaff changed his mind to become the champion of the American Way, ecclesiastical division.
Schaff’s critique and compliance alike hinged on the quality for which he is remembered today. As a champion of historical study (and founder of the American Society of Church History), he tried to supply the sense of tradition and development whose absence explained American Protestants’ relentless sectarianism. Yet his Hegelian-mediating theology made history into divine revelation and gave national culture normative weight, so eager intellectuals who wanted part of the action had to make some critical accommodations. Thus, on one count, Schaff resembles his fellow immigrant and once-radical ’48er Carl Schurz, while on another he foreshadows Reinhold Niebuhr–like Schaff, a product of the German Evangelical Union and professor at Union Theological Seminary.
Graham does not draw such parallels nor delve much into Schaff’s secular significance, and on his chosen turf he deals much more with his subject’s ideas than with his life. (We learn late and in passing, for instance, that Schaff married an American woman within a year of landing in the States, an event that might have changed his perspective.) Within these constraints, however, Graham provides a close profile of how the world looked from the vantage of earnest Victorianism. That vision is important because it founded the Protestant establishment through the mid-twentieth century and because it haunts the remains of the same still today, after history has passed it by.
–James D. Bratt
“Home Was the Land of Morning Calm: The Saga of a Korean-American Family.” By K. Connie Kang, Addison-Wesley 307 pp.; $23
The title of this memoir subtly communicates the sociological reality of K. Connie Kang’s family: Korea is no longer home for them in a physical sense, yet this “Land of Morning Calm” weighs heavily in the author’s heart and soul, enough to be given the appellation “home.”
Tension animates Kang’s book–a tension resulting from a life lived with a foot on two shores, the cultural differences as vast as the ocean between them. Any recent immigrant can immediately relate to Kang’s lifelong balancing act, while other readers might be instructively surprised. Consider Kang’s recollections of herself at age 31, overwhelmed by feelings of filial piety in a society where Bart Simpson would soon be enshrined as a cultural icon: that’s a recipe for cognitive dissonance.
While the cover modestly labels the book a family story, it is Kang’s own, painted occasionally on the canvas of her family relationships. It is also, at times, a tendentious commentary on Korean history and politics. As a result, the book exhibits a distracting schizophrenia. Still, Kang’s narrative illuminates not only the particular experience of Korean Americans but also the lives of other recent arrivals to the United States.
–Helen Lee
“John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait.” By Sidney Hook; introduction by Richard Rorty, Prometheus Books 242 pp.; $29.95
First published in 1939 and reissued in 1995, this little book remains one of the clearest ingatherings of John Dewey’s central ideas. Ideas, Sidney Hook is careful to remind readers, are for Dewey simply “plans of action.” An idea is an attempt to solve some problem, and a successful idea is one that achieves a solution. The justification of an idea is not found in some set of first principles or theological verities; it is the proof of the pudding that counts. Dewey’s quintessential American philosophy gained many adherents over his long life (1859-1952), including Hook, who, over his own long life (1902-89), turned from Marxism (as Dewey had turned from Hegelianism early on) to an advocacy of democratic socialism and a commitment to Deweyan pragmatism.
Hook calls Dewey “the philosopher of American democracy,” one who made “a sustained and systematic attempt to take the pattern of scientific inquiry as a model for knowledge and action in all fields”–even morality. Dewey believed that new techniques would enable human intelligence to be brought to bear on social problems to control at last the forces leading to war and poverty. The Deweyan watchword is novelty. New experiences open up new possibilities, and the interaction of human beings with their world is part of one dynamic process. “In remaking parts of the world,” Hook summarizes, “we remake ourselves.”
Enter Richard Rorty, neo-Deweyan. In the spirit of Dewey (though the claim is controversial), Rorty is systematically attempting to dismantle what he regards as unfortunate dualisms. It is not very useful, says Rorty, to worry about the subject/object dichotomy or the realism/antirealism debate. He rejects not only realism but antirealism as well. As he writes elsewhere, he believes “that a world of pragmatic atheists–people who thought realism versus antirealism as little worth thinking about as Catholicism versus Protestantism–would be a better, happier world than our present one. But this is, of course, just a guess.”
In his introduction to the Hook volume, Rorty is at pains to make Dewey consistent with himself. Dewey’s pragmatic “method” was really not scientific at all, Rorty claims, for there is no algorithm that can systematically be applied to the human condition to generate needed answers. Creative intelligence is less like science and more like the old Aristotelian phronesis (practical wisdom). Dewey’s faith was in democracy as a source of pragmatic inventiveness (or at least fertile soil for it). But such a faith cannot be grounded in any prior philosophical justification. On Rorty’s account, there is no such thing. “Pragmatism,” he says, “is neutral between democratic and antidemocratic politics,” since the pragmatic definitions of truth and value do not inexorably lead to a liberal concern for the lessening of human suffering.
The bottom line: both liberalism and pragmatism are no more (and no less) than a kind of faith. For Rorty, it is a faith at odds with those who cry “back to fundamentals!” The Deweyan faith, Rortyan version, comes complete with Darwinian antisupernaturalism (the old supernatural viewpoints are just not useful anymore) and a belief in the almost infinite plasticity of the human animal. It looks to ever more “radical social experiments” to lessen suffering and more fully realize the liberal ideals of freedom and equality. Those who call for a return to “moral absolutes” are showing “selfish unconcern” toward human suffering because they are unwilling to experiment.
The pragmatic faith is forward-looking only superficially. It tends to implement experiments with an eye toward the future, but such experiments embody only present experience. History can teach no lessons because it is ultimately contingent. There is no short list of common human needs that can command pragmatism’s attention, no goals inherently better than others. There are only outcomes, and by then the future must judge, and the responsibility belongs to someone else.
To the extent that the pragmatic faith is wise, it must recognize the excesses of radical social schemes gone awry and the untold suffering produced. But then it is no longer pragmatic. From the pragmatic perspective, alas, times change and so do social experiments, and perhaps next time the results will be different. To the extent that the pragmatic faith is a faith, it insists on living in a disenchanted world and, curiously, will never admit that pragmatism itself, when it comes to the alleviation of human suffering, is no longer useful.
–Dan Barnett
Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review
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