God the Future of Man, by Edward Schillebeeckx, translated by N. D. Smith (Sheed and Ward, 1968, 207 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by John Warwick Montgomery, chairman, Division of Church History and History of Christian Thought, and director of the European program, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.

Query: Is the change in posture of the post-Vatican II Roman church a good thing? Answer of most Protestants: Definitely—there is now less superstition, less use of Latin, more toleration, and so on.

But, though we naively dislike facing it, ecclesiastical changes in a sinful world invariably produce gray, not lily white or jet black. Even the Roman church cannot be regarded as an old western movie (despite Bishop Sheen’s famous appearance in a cowboy hat), with the good guys clearly separated from the heavies. A practical example is Dominican Robert Campbell’s survey of Roman Catholic youngsters entering De Paul University; whereas five years ago 90 per cent held that Christ is God and 73 per cent that extramarital intercourse is wrong, the corresponding percentages this year were only 64 and 47.

An equally jolting example of the negative side of current Roman Catholic change is the work of the Dutch theologian Schillebeeckx, whose influence on the controversial new “Dutch Catechism” has been very strong, and who is endeavoring to substitute existential for Thomistic categories of interpretation in such areas as sacramental theology (a perfect example of getting rid of one devil and thereby opening the door for seven others). God the Future of Man is the product of the author’s 1967 lecture tour in the U.S., and further develops his ideas vis-à-vis American radical theology and the new hermeneutic.

Ought the new hermeneutic of post-Bultmannians Ebeling, Fuchs, Käsemann, et al. to be identified (as they claim) with the hermeneutic of the Reformers? I find it to be the inverse of the Reformers’ conviction that Scripture is objectively, propositionally, and perspicuously God’s Word; it was the Roman Catholics who insisted on a “hermeneutical circle” that made the scriptural text dependent on the context (traditio) of the interpreter. Schillebeeckx cheerfully agrees: “Man can never escape from this circle, because he can never establish once and for all the truth or the content of the word of God.”

Faced with the death-of-God thinking of Hamilton, Altizer, and Van Buren, and the epistemological question their work has raised, Schillebeeckx can only offer a future-directed existential experience of God: as to “the ‘verification principle’ … all that we Christians can say, in the light of our faith in God as our future, is that faith is not based on what is empirically and objectively verifiable, but comes under the category of human existential possibility.” This answer is especially ironic when we remember that it was in part the unverifiable identification of truth with subjective immanence that led the death-of-Goders to deny objective divine transcendence in the first place.

Schillebeeckx, in obvious dependence on Ernst Bloch and Jürgen Moltmann, gives himself—and theology—up to the future. God is now the “wholly New”; “the Christian leaves the future much more open than the Marxist”; “the Christian cannot formulate the content of this promise in a positive way”; “the message which Christianity brings to the secular world is this—humanity is possible!” The author cautions his readers not to forget “the biblical basis of this so-called new idea of God;” but in light of Schillebeeckx’s prior commitment to the “hermeneutical circle,” what objective check can the scriptural text have on a new God of futurity?

Is Rome becoming the elephants’ graveyard for Protestant heresies?

Toward A Vital Christianity

Earthly Things: Essays, by Olov Hartman, translated by Eric J. Sharpe (Eerdmans, 1968, 235 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Bernard Ramm, California Baptist Theological Seminary, Covina.

These essays by Olov Hartman, a very perceptive and talented Swedish churchman and author, are divided into three subject groups: personal piety or spirituality, counseling and psychiatry, and the Christian and society (including the arts). The essays rank high in both content and literary style.

Hartman is concerned over the ways Christians foul up their Christian experience and its expression, and summons them to a larger and more wholesome experience and witness. He wants the theologian and the Church to live in the center of the twentieth century with all its problems, not at the edge—and certainly not in some previous century.

But he does not want this for just the sake of being modern. Hartman has no intention of bargaining away Christian substance. What he wants is for Christian theology to bite deeper into our interpretations of modern life. To our understanding of psychology, sociology, art, and drama he wants to add a theological dimension that a pure humanism lacks. Occasionally he seems so anxious to correct an anachronistic orthodoxy that he overcompensates and represents some doctrines—among them the atonement—in a somewhat offbase way.

The author sees a “multiple diaconate” in the ministry of the Church as the only realistic approach in the twentieth century. One pastor simply cannot handle all the complex parish problems. The closing chapters of the book deal helpfully with drama, the arts, and literature. And the book ends with an unusual extended paraphrase of the Apostles’ Creed as it should be read by modern man.

Although it takes some persistence to stay with these essays, the reader who does so will be richer for it.

Distorted View Of Viet Nam

American Catholics and Viet Nam, edited by Thomas Quigley (Eerdmans, 1968, 197 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by John Sawin, pastor, Lombard Bible Church, Lombard, Illinois.

In this volume, sixteen Roman Catholics—including theologians, editors, and philosophers—exercise their literary skills in criticizing their church’s war views and support of the American involvement in Viet Nam. They strum a single string and sing a well-known song. America is the bad boy in Viet Nam, and the Communists are the good guys who wear the white hats. If the bad boy would leave the good guys alone, there would be peace. The writers admit to holding a minority view within their church. They see the Viet Nam war as unjust (in view of “the just war” thesis), and hold that the issues revolve around Vietnamese internal differences and that America turned these differences into a bloody holocaust. Almost nothing substantive is presented to support their views.

The only non-Catholic contributor, Robert McAfee Brown, appends his “Amen” to this semi-pacifist position. In an “Afterword” he writes, “There is scarcely a line in the entire book to which I cannot wholeheartedly subscribe.”

I don’t take issue with the authors when they say that the Vietnamese people have suffered unimaginable pain, sorrow, and loss. Nor would I contend that the American government has shown the keenest insights regarding the Vietnamese people or pursued the best ways to rid South Viet Nam of Communist aggression. And the credibility gap has certainly contributed to the confusion of the American public. What irritates me is the authors’ complete whitewashing of the Communist Viet Cong and North Viet Nam and their wholesale incrimination of America. Haven’t they read about the Tet offensive, or are they ignorant of what Tet means in Viet Nam? Are they unaware that from 1964 through 1967 the Viet Cong killed or kidnapped more than 36,000 Vietnamese officials and civilian leaders such as school teachers, doctors, and nurses? Comparable deeds in the United States would have removed about 400,000 persons from American public life. Do these writers have any idea of the countless atrocities the Viet Cong have committed in their efforts to intimidate villagers?

American Catholics were heavily involved in relief work in Viet Nam during Diem’s regime. Some questionable practices were carried out, but there is not a line in the book about this aid. During the same time Protestant missionaries were denied entry visas for seventeen months. The Diem government repeatedly refused to permit Protestants to buy property and build a church for American personnel. Diem had dedicated Viet Nam to the Virgin Mary. This offended both the Buddhists (numerically superior) and the Protestants. The authors make no reference to this.

At times the writers are in error. For example, Harry Haas (Dutch priest-specialist, free-lance journalist, and authority on Southeast Asia) writes of Diem’s struggle to unite into the central government the great sects—Binh Xuyen, Cao Dai, Hoa Hao—and comments that these sects “had waged an almost independent war against the French.” On the contrary, the sects are better described as French lackeys who controlled certain territories for the French against the Viet Minh. The French continued support of them through the beginning of Diem’s regime and hoped to overthrow him. They failed. They had to use military means to evacuate the Binh Xuyen chief from Viet Nam to France.

This inaccurate and highly disappointing analysis offers little help to the reader who seeks objective information on the complex problem of Viet Nam.

Rocks The Boat

Where Religion Gets Lost in the Church, by C. Edward Crowther (Morehouse-Barlow, 1968, 158 pp., $4.75), is reviewed by Charles Ball, pastor, First Presbyterian Church, River Forest, Illinois.

Here is a real shaker, one that may very well upset the complacency of the Establishment. The author seeks to say from a Christian standpoint what many dissident groups are saying by their anger and revolt.

Although Bishop Crowther repeatedly refers to his frustrations with the church in South Africa and although his remarks are oriented toward the Anglican system, there is here expressed a real concern for the Christian churches of the whole world. He contends that our smugness and unwillingness to act in current crises and problems will endanger the continued existence of the Church as we know it. In thirteen chapters, he analyzes these problems—“the living issues of the world”—and concludes that they can be either a threat or a challenge to the Church. He argues eloquently that the Church should be “a vehicle of involvement and Christian action” and that this action should be based not on emotional reaction to injustice but on what we believe about God.

Crowther addresses himself to the poverty and racism that are all about us, and the Church’s apathy in the face of these problems. He hits hard at our tendency to put the means before the end and to confuse priorities by allowing plans for new buildings and maintenance of the “administrative monster” to be put ahead of the needs of people. He discusses the challenge of the Church on the university campus and the possibilities latent in the rising laymen’s movements, and speaks of our inflexibility in adjusting to the social revolution, which today is aimed at the structured church. “Much that we administer need not even exist,” he says. “Today, more and more clergymen administer work involving fewer and fewer people.”

There is a chapter on sex, an area of life in which the Church’s attitude is greatly at variance with that of secular society.

All in all, this is a frank, hard-hitting book. One is fascinated with the author’s style and admires his courage. In my opinion, the chief weakness of his argument is his assumption that the influence and power of the Church lie solely in its official pronouncements and power structure. He seems not to be impressed by the fact that individual believers, by their influence, their vote, and their Christian activism, are in truth “the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world.”

Although it would be possible to criticize certain details of Crowther’s conclusions, in my judgment he has written a great book and administered a dose of medicine that will not be palatable to every one but will do us all good.

Ministry To Senior Citizens

The Bonus Years, by Thomas Bradley Robb (Judson, 1968, 156 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Walter Vail Watson, psychologist, Buffalo Bible Institute, Buffalo, New York.

Here we have the foundation for a ministry to older people. Read it, oldster and take heart, for here is a practical young clergyman who loves you and knows how to meet your “golden year” needs. Dr. Robb, a Presbyterian minister with pastoral experience, has been pursuing studies in a master plan for older adults in the California Bay area. The Bonus Years is well written, soundly analytical, and informative, and has a valuable bibliography. It is remarkably free from the pedantry and piosity so often found in the works of the religious do-gooder.

Robb outlines the aging problem in America and discusses the characteristics and the needs of the aging. In chapter four he considers the role of the church, which should function and focus at the parish level. The final chapter presents a modus operandi, and a warning that personal concern and a great deal of quiet persistence must be present in local study and planning. Something is left to the imagination of the concerned. This book could well be used as a study text preliminary to the instituting of local congregational programs.

It is always encouraging to discover the kind of practical, discerning leader who can write a book like this, whose consecration and insights augur well for the implementation of the kind of social programs that ought to be a chief concern of Christian people who care.

‘Relevance’ Re-Examined

Relevance, by Richard C. Halverson (Word, 1968, 102 pp., $2.95), is reviewed by John F. Walvoord, president, Dallas Theological Seminary, Dallas, Texas.

Even those committed to the Christian faith have often been sharply critical of what they see as a lack of sensitivity to the contemporary world on the part of the Church, in its message and in its program.

Dr. Halverson, minister of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Washington, D. C., responds to this criticism in a thoughtful and provocative way. He concedes that too often Christianity appears to be indifferent to the pressing needs of men and seems out of date and irrelevant. But, he says, such a view reflects misunderstanding by the world and lack of communication by the Church. The relevance of Christianity is to be determined, not by the Church’s involvement in social programs, but by its ability to deal with the disease rather than the symptoms of modern man, and to accomplish, through its transforming Gospel, reconciliation between God and man as well as between man and man. To individuals and to a world groping for solutions, Christianity offers the only real answer, God’s answer.

Beginning with the question of whether Jesus Christ was relevant to the world he lived in, Halverson criticizes the superficial definition of relevance often accepted today, defines the basic mission of Christianity as that of reconciliation, discusses the relation of Jesus Christ to race prejudice, and advocates the modern Samaritan attitude toward one’s neighbors. The book closes with an appeal to recapture the zeal of the early Church, which triumphed over a pagan world by total commitment to its Lord. Such Christianity was relevant then and is relevant today.

Here is a challenging book for both conservatives and liberals.

Book Briefs

The Taizé Picture Bible (Fortress, 1969, 277 pp., $4.95). Stories from the Scriptures, adapted from the Jerusalem Bible, with illustrations by Brother Eric de Saussure of the Taizé Community.

Buried Alive, by Paul G. Johnson (Knox, 1968, 171 pp., $5). Graphically and candidly analyzes the gap between clergy and laity, and offers guidelines for renewed vitality in the life of the Church.

The Infancy Narratives, by Jean Daniélou (Herder and Herder, 1968, 127 pp., $3.95). A Roman Catholic New Testament scholar defends the historical authenticity of the infancy narratives.

Are You Fun to Live With?, by Lionel Whiston (Word, 1968, 143 pp., $3.95). Suggests ways in which to make the most of personal relationships.

Punjab Pioneer, by Charles Reynolds (Word, 1968, 183 pp., $4.95). Challenging story of Dr. Edith Brown, who ministered to the physical and spiritual needs of the women of Ludhiana in the Punjab section of India and eventually established the Ludhiana Christian Medical College to train women doctors.

David, by John Hercus (Inter-Varsity, 1968, 136 pp., $4.50). A fresh, exciting look at David written in a crisp, slangy, first person style that makes for lively reading.

Higley Sunday School Lesson Commentary, edited by Ralph Earle (Huffman, 1968, 580 pp., $3.25). An evangelical commentary on the uniform lessons with questions, illustrations, and other teaching aids.

The Drama of the Cross, by J. Eugene White (Baker, 1968, 111 pp., $2.95). A graphic account of events leading up to the crucifixion.

Faith for a Secular World, by Myron Augsburger (Word, 1968, 96 pp., $2.95). Points modern man to the wholeness of life that can be found only in Jesus Christ. Contends that unbelief is more difficult than belief.

Silent Saturday, by R. Earl Allen (Baker, 1968, 98 pp., $2.95). Ten enriching sermons focusing upon the passion, resurrection, and return of Jesus Christ.

Paperbacks

Tomorrow’s Church: Catholic—Evangelical—Reformed, by Peter Day (Seabury, 1969, 192 pp., $2.95). The ecumenical officer of the Episcopal Church, who is a lay member of that church’s delegation to the Consultation on Church Union, evaluates the thrust and scope of present movements toward church union.

Crisis in the Church, by Everett C. Parker (Pilgrim, 1968, 143 pp., $2.95). These essays, written as a tribute to Truman Douglass, attempt to put the last twenty-five years of church life into perspective and to make some educated predictions about what will happen within the next decade or so.

Biblical Numerology, by John J. Davis (Baker, 1969, 174 pp., $2.95). A careful, sober study of a subject that has fallen into disrepute because of the irresponsible treatment it has often had.

Contemporary Evangelical Thought, edited by Carl F. H. Henry (Baker, 1969, 320 pp., $3.95). Reprint of a series of essays by evangelical scholars reflecting the present-day thought of evangelicalism.

New Directions in Theology Today, Volume IV: The Church, by Colin Williams (Westminster, 1968, 187 pp., $2.45). Reviews the changing ways in which the nature and mission of the Church have been described since the organization of the WCC.

Personal Finances for Ministers, by John C. Banker (Westminster, 1969, 125 pp., $1.65). Details the minister’s special financial position and gives practical advice on the management of his income.

The Call of Lent, by James G. Manz (Augsburg, 1968, 92 pp., $2.25). Seven sermons relating the lessons of Lent to contemporary life.

The Church’s Faith, by Regin Prenter, translated by Theodor I. Jensen (Fortress, 1968, 224 pp., $2.75). A Danish theologian summarizes the classical beliefs of the Church from a biblical and confessional point of view.

The Book of Nehemiah, by Ralph G. Turnbull (Baker, 1968, 109 pp., $1.95). A helpful addition to the “Shield Bible Study Series.”

Research by social scientists verifies what most of us have observed, that many students enter college with one set of beliefs and emerge four years later with quite different ones. Yet the same literature shows that formal academic life usually has little or no effect on value change, though parents, legislators, and even many professors themselves think otherwise.

Philip Jacob published the results of some painstaking research on this subject in Changing Values in College (1957). He concluded that the teacher, his teaching method, and the subject matter all have little if any effect on student value and attitude change. Change usually occurs, he says, only when the life of the student is affected, which could happen through personal contact with a professor or other students or through other experiences.

Joseph Katz and Nevitt Sanford, at the Stanford University Institute for the Study of Human Problems, agree with the basic premise Jacob set forth more than a decade ago. They assert that students probably do not change their basic values because of the formal educational experience, but they do undergo change in the way they value; they begin college with values either unclear or rigid, and as seniors are increasingly independent and less rigid, tending to view issues as complex (Stanford Today, Winter, 1966). Other researchers as well argue that faculty and subject matter have little to do with value change.

To what are we to attribute the change seen in college students? Researchers suggest that value change only comes through personal relationships, in what might be called the informal educational process.

These conclusions are of value in relation to the change in religious values and attitudes—a change that might be termed liberalization—that occurs in Christian students. They suggest that we must look beyond the formal education process for the causes of this liberalization. We must recognize, however, that on most secular campuses the environment and other forces do tend to neutralize spiritual involvement and hinder spiritual growth.

What factors most affect student values? Environmental continuity seems to be one. If the collegian can identify with institutions, persons, or groups that are definitely related to those in his former environment, he may well be able to relate the belief system of the former environment to his new one. But if he finds himself in a wholly new situation that has little continuity with his past, he will be more susceptible to change in beliefs. Denominational houses, campus groups, and campus ministers as well as local churches can help to provide religious continuity.

A second factor is the nature of the student’s belief. One mode of believing tends to be based upon assumptions, personal commitment, acceptance, emotional involvement, and trust, which we normally term faith. It is personal. A student who has this kind of belief can usually assimilate new facts without basic changes in his belief patterns. He may redefine his philosophy of life and even view it in a different perspective, but it still remains based upon the beliefs and assumptions he brought with him when he entered college.

At the other end of the spectrum is belief rooted in intellectual assent, an empirical methodology, and human reason. One who has this kind of belief claims to accept little by faith. As new, contradictory, or varied information challenges his system of belief, that system must change. Hence, the way a young person believes determines to a considerable extent how he handles the new information and experiences that come to him in his college years.

A third possible factor is the student’s conception of religious certainty. If he says he will accept only what can be verified by reason, experience, or the scientific method, he will necessarily reject some former beliefs in the light of new evidence. Or he will at least come to an agnostic posture. But if his epistemology allows for some certainties beyond the realm of experience, reason, and analysis, he may not see new facts and theories as an automatic threat to his beliefs.

Possibly the most powerful non-campus factor in the loss or preservation of religious values is the pre-college environment. An authoritarian environment, one that stresses moralisms and absolutes rather than seeking workable solutions to problems through reason, prayer, love, and Christ-centered principles, often leads to rebellion in religious and other areas.

Often parents, teachers, and religious leaders want young people to accept their teachings without question, even if they seem illogical or irrelevant. They make little effort to help young people develop the ability to think critically, to test and analyze matters for themselves. This approach may seem effective as long as the young person is at home and subject to the direct pressure of authority. But it certainly is poor preparation for later years, when as a college student he will lack the ability to defend his faith and to analyze challenges to that faith. All he will be able to say, perhaps, is, “It’s not really important anyway,” or “It’s something we’re not supposed to understand.” How much better off is the young Christian who has been encouraged to think for himself, to be able to give a reason for his faith, to confront hard questions rather than avoid them.

If a student has had a personal experience of faith and has also seen faith in other persons, he will probably remain committed in a new environment. The one who comes from a rather sterile spiritual environment, where the changing relationship to Jesus Christ is not emphasized, will be more likely to succumb to arguments against faith.

Personal relationships on campus, the general campus environment, a particular teacher or subject—these are possible influences upon the belief system and pattern of values of a college student. Yet more determinative than these is what the person himself is.

The college years are a period of uprooting, transition, and acquisition of responsibility. They are also a time of new awareness, sometimes leading to disillusionment and cynicism as the young person comes to realize that the ideals he has been taught are indeed ideals and are not always a part of real life. The Christian community makes a grave mistake if it does not help its young people prepare for a life away from the restrictive and protective environment of the home and church. The pre-college years should be a time of cultivation of a deep personal faith, a proper conception of religious certainty, and an open approach to the unknown. To give young people less than this is to send them into life unprepared.

MALCOLM NYGREN¹Malcolm Nygren is pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Champaign, Illinois. He holds the A.B. from Hanover College and the B.D. from McCormick Seminary.

One Thursday at 8 P.M. ministers and laymen from two churches of the same denomination were meeting in separate places. They were moved by the same concern: racism and its results. But their purposes were quite different.

Leaders from Grace Church met with their counterparts from a black congregation to plan a tutoring program. Volunteers from the two churches would work together to help children who were being hurt by racial divisions. They know that the help they can give is small compared with the magnitude of the problem, but they do not let this discourage them. They are motivated more by compassion than by crusading zeal. Their model is the Good Samaritan, who helped the wounded man simply because his help was needed.

Memorial Church people have more ambitious goals. Their intent is not just to help a few people but to change the whole structure of the community. As one step they are meeting with black leaders to plan a demonstration at a city council meeting. They are convinced that political action is the only way the Church can count for anything in today’s society. They take their pattern from the fiery prophets of the Old Testament, not the compassionate Samaritan.

Two very different kinds of activism are open to today’s Church. Discussion does not end with the assertion that the Church must be in the world ministering to people. That only opens a new set of questions. What should the Church do in the world? The Church has historically made education, medical help, other ministries of compassion an integral part of its mission. Is political action the contemporary counterpart of this kind of Christian service?

Along with the distinction between political action and acts of compassion to individuals, another distinction must be made. It is between the Christian Church and the Christians who make up the Church. The Church is not a collective Christian. Acts that are appropriate for churches (administration of the sacrements, for example) are not always appropriate for individual Christians. Conversely, the responsibilities of Christians are not always the responsibility of their church.

There can be little doubt that Christians (or at least many Christians) are called to be active in politics. That is where large changes in society are made. The Good Samaritan didn’t make the Jericho road safe for travelers. Perhaps another man was beaten and left for dead within hours of his act of mercy. Political action would have been necessary to make the road safe. But is this responsibility of Christians also the responsibility of their church? Should the Church, which is involved in binding up men’s wounds, turn to political action to keep them from being wounded?

The answer is that it must not. When the Church tries to become a political leader, it harms both its own mission and the world it seeks to help. This is the more tragic because its acts are usually well-intended, and performed by devout and compassionate men.

The decision to feed someone who is hungry or to teach someone who is being punished by his lack of learning is relatively uncomplicated. More than anything else it requires commitment to God’s service or compassion for his children. Commitment and compassion are woven through the Church’s life. The Church has no life apart from them, and it has the full support of its Lord in expressing them.

A decision about admitting Red China to the United Nations, on the other hand, requires much more than commitment and compassion. It requires complex judgments about the effects of the act, whether it will be likely to increase peace and understanding among nations. What special ability does the Church have to make this kind of decision?

The Church can with confidence present what Princeton professor Paul Ramsey calls “middle axioms.” Political decisions aren’t made intuitively. They come at the end of a chain of decisions about what goals should be sought and what means will lead to them. The chain begins with an assessment of how things are. The middle step is a judgment of how they should be. The Church, in seeking to know and express the will of God, has an authentic word to offer about what the world should be. But in the final step, choosing and carrying out the means to make this kind of world, the Church’s judgment is no better than anyone else’s. Clergymen are not better statesmen than laymen, and church councils have no special abilities in statecraft that are denied to others.

The Church’s record in political action is altogether too mixed for anyone to believe it offers superior guidance. The American Civil War split the denominations into rival groups, each confidently announcing, “Thus saith the Lord.…” Presbyterians are likely to point with pride to John Witherspoon, the clergyman who signed the Declaration of Independence. They don’t mention those congregations that fled with their pastors to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Yet the descendants of those Tory Christians don’t view their ancestors as heretics who failed to see the political implications of their faith.

John Calvin is a remarkable example of both a Christian intellect and a political activist. Yet it is in his political statements that he is most clearly the creature of his time. He identified three forms of civil government: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. His judgment about them seems strange to us now. “I am far from denying that the form which greatly surpasses the other,” he wrote, “is aristocracy.” Although his statement is understandable in the light of his time, it doesn’t encourage us to believe that he knew God’s mind about the mechanics of government.

The German church of the 1930s is sometimes cited as an example of the dire results of political inaction. “If only the German church had opposed Hitler instead of remaining quiet,” the argument runs, “how much better the world would have been.” It is a compelling argument, but it has two flaws.

First, it assumes that if the German church had been politically active, it would have opposed the Nazi movement. That is an enormous assumption. Churches have often in good conscience supported evil political movements. The czars were supported by a church. Their Communist successors receive the same support from the successors to that church. It won’t do to dismiss such Christians as self-serving. They are likely no more or less so than other men. Because churches lack political omniscience, there is no more reason to believe that the German churches saw through the Nazi lie than to believe that the German people as a whole did.

The second flaw in the argument is its childishly simple view of the whole Nazi event. Hitler was the product not of a moment of madness but of a decade of anarchy. By the time he seized power, the question was not whether Germany would have a dictator; rather, it was which dictator it would have. For years the country had endured the agony of lawlessness, rioting in the streets, burning, and sabotage. Life had become almost unbearable. No nation can tolerate anarchy for very long. It always chooses order in the end—any kind of order. Anarchy inevitably leads to tyranny.

If we are to put the burden of failure on the German church, then the reason must be not only that it did not actively oppose Nazism but also that it took no active role to prevent the anarchy that resulted in Hitler. But this is a political question with which the Church is poorly equipped to deal. The Church has always had trouble distinguishing between freedom and anarchy.

Indeed, it may well be that there was little hope of interrupting the chain of events that led to the rise of Hitler once the Versailles Treaty had been signed. That treaty stripped Germany of both its economic security and its self-respect. After that, the opportunities for averting the slide into anarchy that led to the terrible events of the thirties were limited. But who could hope that the Church would clearly have seen that danger, or have been able to do anything about it?

If political decisions are complex and difficult, they are no more so for churches than for others, of course. Nor are they decisions that must be left to the experts, or avoided because they may be made wrongly. Christians must make responsible political decisions and take the risk of being mistaken. But should the Church intervene in these decisions? This in no way lessens the risk. The Church has no special competence to offer; it will not make the decisions more accurately than individuals. And there are valid reasons why responsibility for political action lies with Christians but not with their church.

Between the Church that expresses its concern for the world in its acts of compassionate service and the one that chooses political action, there is a wide difference in opinion about the Church as a servant. Political leadership casts the Church in the role of master. The fear that the Church and its leaders may not count for much in the world is no doubt one of the sources of the longing for political leadership.

The temptation is the one Jesus faced when on a high mountain he was offered the world’s kingdoms. He warned against the longing for power when he told his disciples, “You must be ready to wash one another’s feet.” When the Church seeks political power, it puts itself in grave danger. More than once the Christian Church has held political power, and the result has always been disastrous for the faith. From medieval times until the Reformation, the political activism of the Church was at its zenith. Bishops and abbots ruled as nobles, and the Church had the power to humble kings. No one would pretend that these were times of which Christians should be proud. Whenever the Church seeks power, it pays for it. Whether it is a congregation forcing its will on a city council or a national church able to dominate a country, the Church buys its power by selling its faith.

Political action in the Church provides a useful disguise for hostility. It gives sanction to anger by disguising it as righteousness. Strangely, in a day when ecumenism is so much in fashion that no man would question another’s religious beliefs, it is quite acceptable to denounce his political ones as unchristian. When the Church becomes a political force it inevitably divides Christians from one another, for it labels as unchristian whoever will not espouse its particular cause.

The Pharisees used every possible device to put Jesus in just this position. Jews were deeply divided over the Roman occupation. When Jesus was asked about paying taxes to Rome, his enemies were trying to get him to choose one side and alienate the other. With great adroitness he refused to do so. He would not judge a man’s faith by his politics.

Ministers are under this same kind of pressure. One temptation is simply to choose the majority side and get along without the others. But the minister’s other temptation is to feel virtuous about having offended nearly everyone. One can even be proud of failure as a pastor if it is possible to believe that it is the price he must pay for superior righteousness.

Not long ago I went to lunch with three other ministers. One of them said his church had a fund that would pay for our lunch. (That’s remarkable enough by itself to make the story worth telling.) Another responded, “You must not be preaching the Gospel if your church has any money.” It was said as a joke, but only partly as a joke. Behind it was the thought that a real church was one that had cut itself off from all but a handful of people. And this from a pastor whose church had only shortly before said that its mission was reconciliation!

It is unfortunate when a man is unable to accept a church’s creed and must be cut off from the company of Christians. It is tragic when the creed he can’t accept is not a religious statement but a political one. The dimensions of the tragedy become dreadfully apparent when we realize that the political statement that excludes him is no more likely to be right than anyone else’s political statement.

The charge is often made today that the Church is irrelevant, that people don’t see anything important in what it says. The truth may be quite different: not that the Christian Gospel doesn’t matter to modern man, but that modern man simply doesn’t believe the Church.

Although people talk far more about other things, the questions that trouble them most deeply are theological questions. People are searching for a sense of identity. They are anxious to know who they are. Many are unable to find a purpose for living. The very foundations of ethics and behavior are in question. These are not new questions to the Christian faith. They are the things that make up the New Testament. The question is not whether these questions matter but whether the Church’s response can be trusted, whether its word is credible.

The credibility of the Word is always weakened when the Church extends it beyond its intended bounds. Earlier in the century the Church was shaken by Darwinism. The Bible had been presented as an infallible geology textbook, and when the claim was called into question everything else in the Word was questioned too. Pope Paul’s statements about birth control have done more to shake the faith of Catholics in the credibility of the Word than anything else in this decade. Darwin could indeed be wrong and Pope Paul could be right, but many responsible Christians think otherwise. If the Church is wrong about this, they ask, can we believe what it says about anything? The credibility of the Word should not be tested on such uncertain ground.

When the Church ventures into endorsement and activism in specific political programs, the credibility of the Word rests on the church’s judgment in these matters. Is it any wonder that people wonder how much that Word can be believed?

Not only do political activism and active ministries of compassion entail two different views of the Church; they also look at men differently. Compassion looks at suffering individuals. Political action deals with masses of men. The political church is the child of our age. It correctly senses that political power and mass action are the order of the day. It fails in compassion for men who long to be treated as individuals.

The most agonizing fact about contemporary society is that it is a mass society. A great deal of student rebellion is a reaction to the sheer size and impersonality of our universities. Students and faculty are shuttled about as though they were goods in a warehouse. But that is not their plight alone. The friendly store-owner from whom our fathers bought goods has been replaced by the vast merchandizing complexes of today. One result is an abundance of goods, cheaply priced and readily available. A less welcome result is that men and women have become that faceless creature, the consumer. We know that the goods are made not for us but for an average derived from a survey. The art of politics has changed, too. The voter increasingly casts his ballot for a face on a television screen and a handful of press releases.

We don’t want to be lost in the teeming hordes of men. It bothers us when someone mispronounces our name. Perhaps we half fear that we may not really exist: that there is only society, and not us.

Is the Church also to treat us as though we didn’t exist? To act as though the word “relevant” did not mean, important to you and me, but only, important to society? Will religion be one more dehumanizing force in a world where men and women are being crowded out of existence?

The combination of Church and politics always makes bad politics and bad religion. Bad politics because it gives the force of “thus saith the Lord” to judgments no better than anyone else’s. Bad religion because it appeals to men’s pride and hostility, because it undermines the credibility of the Word, because it fails to understand our need to be treated as real people.

A Christian bricklayer may find his attitude toward his work changed by the Church, but he shouldn’t expect it to tell him how to lay bricks. The Church shouldn’t tell him how to vote, either, nor present political programs to him as though they were the will of God.

The invitation to write an article about church music brings to mind several questions with which I have been wrestling for a long time, in my earlier days as a practitioner and more recently as a teacher. It was my growing uncertainty about the role of music in worship that prompted me to spend a year as a student at the Virginia Seminary and eventually to seek ordination in the Episcopal Church. Whatever wisdom I may have gained with regard to church music came largely through the seminary community, in daily chapel, and in discussions with students and colleagues. The experience of the past fifteen years has increased my uneasiness about the use of music in church and deepened my conviction that music must have help from other theological disciplines. To be fruitful, church music needs deep biblical, theological, and liturgical roots.

According to ancient tradition, music is a divine gift used by men to appease and entertain the gods and give mortals a foretaste of immortality, through magical incantations and the ecstatic dance. The way in which music has served the major religions of the world has led to the assumption that music is the handmaid of religion. Like all other generalities, this needs careful scrutiny. Music may be the handmaid of pagan as well as the Christian religion: the question is, does music serve all religions equally well? Is there no difference, for example, between its use in Dionysiac orgies, in Orphic mysteries, and in Christian worship?

Worship is a universal phenomenon, but Christian worship is unique, and this uniqueness has a definite bearing upon the question of church music. Christian worship stems from faith in God’s revelation in the Word made flesh, in Jesus Christ, evoking a response in love. The uniqueness of Christian worship lies in the uniqueness of Christ made known through the words and symbolic action of the liturgy.

The warrant for music in Christian worship comes from the Psalms and from St. Paul’s admonition to sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs; these Scriptures provide a clue to the words that were sung, but not to the music. Following the biblical tradition, the early Fathers looked upon congregational singing as a means of safeguarding the uniqueness of the faith. Christian worship was more than the expression of a vague religiosity on easy terms with the surrounding cultures. There was to be a radical break with Jewish and pagan tradition, and it was urgent that ways be found to reinforce this. It was chiefly through the words of liturgical worship that the faith of the Church gained strength in the minds, hearts, and lives of its people.

Throughout the history of the Church, advocates of congregational singing have maintained that wholehearted participation in Song based upon the words is one of the foundations of liturgical worship, and there is a long tradition of protest against the tendency to obscure this principle, whether through inertia and neglect or by deliberate interference.

During the Middle Ages, seeds were sown that bore fruit in the Renaissance and following centuries in the remarkably rich repertoire of music for choir, organ, and orchestra that is hailed as one of the chief glories of the Church; but this music was intended for professional performers and not for the people. Not until the early days of the Reformation was the plea for congregational singing made. Wycliffe and Hus urged a return to the principles of St. Paul, and their plea was repeated with great urgency by Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, and many others. During the Reformation and for several generations afterward, these principles were taken seriously, and congregational singing flourished in nearly every branch of the Reformed church. The tradition was developed with greater freedom in the Lutheran than in the other churches, but even in the Calvinist churches in which the liturgy proper was spoken, there was enthusiastic singing of the metrical psalms. The latter tradition prevailed in the Church of England, where the liturgical services were read and singing was limited to the optional singing of metrical psalms before and after the Prayer Book services.

In the meantime the organ had fallen into disrepute in all but the Lutheran churches, partly because of its expense, but mostly because it distracted the people from their worship, obscured the words, and interfered with the liturgical action.

With a few exceptions the situation remained basically the same throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the Lutheran Church, the congregational chorale served as the basis for the organ chorale-prelude and the church cantata in the style of J. S. Bach. In the Reformed churches, the metrical psalm on the model of Calvin’s Genevan Psalter was strictly maintained as the norm and was imitated in the countless editions of English, Scottish, French, and Dutch psalters. In the Anglican church, where the singing of metrical psalms prevailed, Merbecke’s setting of the Litany, Eucharist, and Office fell into disuse, while music for choir, organ, and instruments in the style of Purcell was limited to the cathedrals and to the royal and private chapels. In the Non-conformist churches, noteworthy contributions to hymnody in the spirit of the Reformation were made by the German Pietists, by Amish and Mennonite hymnwriters, by Isaac Watts, and by the Wesleys in the popular style of hymnody that became a prominent feature in the revivals of Jonathan Edwards and later evangelists. In this country, hymn-singing was fostered from the very beginning as a vital popular expression of great religious, social, and political aspirations. The singing taught by itinerant music masters flourished wherever they traveled throughout the countryside and bore fruit in the publication of vast quantities of song-books and the organization of countless numbers of singing societies. Under the leadership of Lowell Mason, singing became a fixture in nineteenth-century homes, schools, and churches.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century a change began to take place in church music that involved a turning away from the conception strongly advocated by the Reformers and deeply embedded in the Reformation tradition. This change of attitude, which rapidly gained momentum in the early part of the twentieth century, produced a remarkable increase of interest in a more professional attitude toward church music. The signs of change were a sharp increase in the volume of music published for choir and organ, rapid growth in the organization of vested choirs, a radical upswing in the number of new organs built, and the establishment of new professional societies and schools of music. All this conspired to undermine the Reformation victory of music for, of, and by the people.

In our day there seems to be no limit to the amount of music available through concerts, recordings, radio, and television, and music is increasingly entertainment for a listening rather than a participating public. Choral music in particular has become a keenly competitive art requiring a high degree of skill and long hours of disciplined preparation. On the other hand, popular group singing has become a medium for expression of social concerns in a way that requires a minimum of effort and musical skill. Church music today seems to tend toward one or the other of these two extremes, the highly professional or the popular. This is an unhappy situation for those who lack the time and skill for achieving musical excellence but who sense the need for something more significant than an instinctive response to an exciting but vague musical stimulus.

Recognition of the uncertain state of church music has been on the increase since the early part of this century. In 1905, Pius X issued Motu Proprio, the first of several papal encyclicals specifically addressed to the need for reform in the music of liturgical worship. Two decades later the Joint Commission on Music of the Episcopal Church reported its findings and recommended a program of education and reform. Similar concern was expressed in Music in Church, the report of a commission appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, which first appeared in 1950. Of the various attitudes and interests expressed, one of the most significant is that of Bonhoeffer in his Life Together, under the heading “Singing the New Song.” Other expressions of sound theological and liturgical attitudes toward church music have appeared in Response (published by the Lutheran Society for Worship, Music, and the Arts) and in the publications of the Valparaiso University conferences on church music. Among the most valuable contributions of recent times are the writings of Erik Routley and the twelve position papers of Crisis in Church Music, published by the Liturgical Conference of Washington, D. C.

One of the first to break the traditional sound barrier was Geoffrey Beaumont with his 1955 Folk Song Mass, which met with a mixed response. Beaumont’s aim was to reinstate the people as active participants in the central act of Christian worship. Despite his good intentions, there is a serious error in his reasoning. Beaumont claims that Merbecke’s music for the first Book of Common Prayer (1550) was based upon popular ballad-tunes of that day. But this music was firmly rooted in the ancient plainsong tradition, adapted to fit the new liturgical text in English.

Beaumont’s example has led enthusiastic imitators to assume that the answer to the problem of church music is to open the doors of the Church to a flood of new music in the latest popular style. But this leaves unanswered the vital question of the relation of music to the liturgical text and action. Popular music, with its strong beat, is fairly successful when used to accompany the metrical texts of hymns, but it does violence to the prose texts of the basic parts of the liturgy. To force the words of the Nicene Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and other liturgical elements into waltz-time or march-time undermines their serious intent.

Since Beaumont’s Folk Song Mass, popular musical settings of the Eucharist have multiplied rapidly and have found particular favor among those who work with young people. This music has been fairly effective in getting young people involved in the life of the Church, but whether it has led to a deeper understanding of the meaning of worship and the message of the Gospel is another matter. While it is true that this music is intended to help increase congregational participation, I question whether it is more than a passing fancy.

The chief argument for popular music in church is that it can easily be appropriated by the congregation and can help to heighten the sense of spontaneity and joy that often seems lacking in corporate worship. The implication seems to be that if the barrier of musical technique is lowered, spontaneous singing will result. But this line of reasoning, if followed to its conclusion, leads to glossolalia. Corporate liturgical worship, whether sung or spoken, requires structure; structure requires technique; and technique requires serious effort: these are the plain facts. The solution lies not in removing the barriers of musical technique, but in helping people overcome these barriers in order to enjoy greater freedom and spontaneity. The argument that popular music makes people feel more at ease is incongruous with the basic message of the Gospel, and to defend the use of any device merely because it requires a minimum of effort is irresponsible.

The priority of liturgical words and action needs constant reemphasis. But when music is put in second place, the musician may feel he is being downgraded. The remedy is for the musician to come to understand the relation between music and worship through a deeper understanding of the meaning of worship. This points to a serious need in the life of the Church: dialogue between clergy and musician on a deep and enduring pastoral level. This dialogue can be fruitful only if ministers and musicians face the problem, not as competitors in two separate professions, but as servants of God working together toward the same end.

It will probably be hard for the clergy to convince musicians of the primary importance of the words, for the musician thinks primarily in terms of music. Patience, conviction, and tact to persuade may be necessary. Whether in prayer, praise, or preaching, it is the words that make worship uniquely Christian, and it is primarily through the meaning of the words that people come to understand the meaning of Christian symbols and sacraments. There is always the danger of exaggerating the rational function of words, to the detriment of their emotional and symbolic overtones. And yet, in all liturgical language there are inherent principles of imagery, rhythm, and inflection that penetrate and color the meaning of language in ways that defy analysis.

The question of church music cannot be answered merely by an appeal either to tradition or to popular taste. Church music needs to be rooted in a deep understanding of the uniqueness of Christian worship and in a strong conviction that the primary function of music is to provide a means for congregational participation in liturgical worship. This understanding will be found only as clergy and musicians work together under the sign of the cross of Christ.

A Critique of Process-Theology—First of Two Parts

Influences governing religious thought in the mid-twentieth century have dealt rather scurrilously with theological metaphysics.

For quite different reasons, both recent Continental theology and English positivism have repudiated philosophical theology. While the one, the dialectical-existential school, has espoused personal non-propositional decision over against external revelation and objective reason, the other, logical positivism, has dismissed metaphysical assertions as meaningless nonsense because unverifiable by empirical scientific method.

All the while evangelical Protestant theologians have been busying themselves largely with matters other than the metaphysical implications of biblical belief. And the few significant contributions that have appeared in evangelical circles have been overlooked in ecumenical theological dialogue.

Under these circumstances, the task of descriptive metaphysics has gone by default, as it were, to the neo-Thomists and to the Marxists.

Indications are growing, however, that both English positivists and Continental existentialists have failed to clamp a permanent “veto” on metaphysics; their influence in contemporary theology seems to be waning.

Process-metaphysicians already are aggressively jockeying for position in the philosophical race; a number of American liberal theologians energetically support process-theory as the framework for expounding Christian beliefs. At the same time, Jürgen Moltmann and Wolf-hart Pannenberg in Germany, by their breakaway from the dialectical-existential repudiation of external divine revelation in nature and history, suggest fresh promise for theistic metaphysics. And a number of evangelical Protestant scholars who think process-theology unnecessarily dilutes supernatural theism are showing new interest in the metaphysical implications of rational revelational theism.

In this conflict over metaphysical perspective, Marxists and neo-Thomists, as already suggested, are vocal spokesmen for so-called organizational philosophies. Protestant ecumenism, on the other hand, has no “officially approved” metaphysical theory; its theological vision is quickly dissipated in the chaotic diversity of contemporary philosophy. It might be said that the neo-Thomists are trying to revive a dead horse, and the Marxists to mechanize a live one. As for process-theologians, they may be trying to rejuvenate and rerun a previous loser. Evangelical Christians, on the other hand, are demanding a steed of biblically heritaged form, fitness, and fettle.

Evangelical Christian theology is metaphysically affirmative. For that reason, when process-metaphysics re-emerges as a serious contemporary inquiry into the nature of God, it confronts a climate of theological discussion within which the Living God of the Bible is seen to be a very real alternative and challenge. Karl Barth’s “theology of the Word of God” expounded the self-revealing God in the context of immediate personal revelation as over against that of universally valid propositions of objective reason. Process theologians appeal to experience and logical coherence rather than to miraculous divine disclosure as the source of truths about God. Evangelical theologians tend to consider modern movements of religious thought as concessive reactions and therefore short-lived; the separation of revelation and reason they regard as a costly misadventure. In the mounting debate over who and what God is, they simultaneously champion revelational truths and rational coherence. Over against the process-metaphysicians they stand with Barth, therefore, on the side of revelation. But together with the process-metaphysicians they stand against Barth on the side of coherence. Moreover, evangelical theologians stand against both Barth and process-metaphysicians in emphasizing the intelligible content and universal validity of divine revelation.

What do these theological differences imply for the reality and identity of God? Does this intellectual controversy promise new significance for reason and revelation in defining the knowledge of God and the life of the spirit? No more critical issue than this confronts the scientific culture of our late twentieth century, and no responsible theologian will sidestep engagement in it.

Process-metaphysics is not a new nor even a modern theory, though its recent form has distinctively fresh features. In its post-Christian format, it tries to correlate the evolutionary view of a growing universe with that of a religious reality which, though directly and necessarily involved in time and space, somehow transcends and guides the process of which it is a part. Unlike traditional Christian theism, process-metaphysics does not totally differentiate God from the universe, but neither does it, like pantheism, identify God with the whole of reality. On the basis of evolutionary theory, process-philosophy assimilates God to the universe more immanently than Christian orthodoxy allows; in fact, it repudiates God’s absolute transcendence by making creation inevitable if not necessary to his being. Process philosophers emphasize the temporal flow of all reality; time, as they see it, is an ingriedient of Being itself.

Even in its post-Christian statement, process-metaphysics has taken a number of forms. All of them depart from orthodox Christian theology by importing part of the creative process into the inner reality of God; they differ, however, in how they distinguish the universe, or aspects of it, from divine being.

Late in the nineteenth century, process-philosophy found a prophet in the French philosopher Henri Bergson (Creative Evolution, 1911), and early in this century, in England, it gained quasi-naturalistic statement by Samuel Alexander (Space, Time and Deity, 1927) and quasipantheistic statement by C. Lloyd Morgan (Emergent Evolution, 1926). (For an evangelical critique see C. F. H. Henry, Remaking the Modern Mind, Eerdmans, 1948.) Both Bergson and Alexander had influenced Alfred North Whitehead before he left Cambridge for Harvard. Whitehead’s subsequent Process and Reality (1929) attracted such attention that he is now widely credited as the seminal mind and formative influence in later definitive statements of process-metaphysics. The so-called Lotze-Bowne tradition of “personalism,” which A. S. Knudson and E. S. Brightman influentially expounded in America, was somewhat competitive; its premise was that while the physical world is a part of God (is God’s externalized thought), human selves are divine creations other than God. (The influence of this tradition on an American evangelical theologian is sketched in C. F. H. Henry, Strong’s Theology and Personal Idealism, Van Kampen, 1951.) In Whitehead’s view, however, the structure of all being is the eternal order in the mind of God, and all reality (God included) manifests a real history of actual events.

Whatever attention process-metaphysicians commanded in England and the United States was largely eclipsed in the mid-thirties by the impact of Barthian theology, which stressed divine transcendence and the impropriety of depicting Christianity in terms of evolutionary immanence, and by the rise of logical positivism, which was more interested in physics than in biological process. But even through this period American interest in the process-concept of deity was maintained somewhat through the exposition and development of Whitehead’s thought by Charles Hartshorne (Man’s Vision of God, 1941; The Divine Relativity, 1948).

Through the breakdown of the logical positivist indictment of metaphysics, and the faltering of dialectical-existential theory, supporters of process-metaphysics gained a propitious opportunity to reassert their view, just at a time when interest in metaphysics was beginning to revive. Since then, the significant development in process-metaphysics has been its growing support by a number of American Protestant theologians as the preferred vehicle for expounding Christian theology. Among them are Bernard Meland, The Realities of Faith (1962); John Cobb, Jr., Towards a Christian Natural Theology (1965); Schubert M. Ogden, The Reality of God (1967); W. Norman Pittenger, Process Thought and Christian Faith (1968); and Daniel Day Williams, The Spirit and the Forms of Love (1968). In England process thought has waned since the twenties and thirties, when at Cambridge J. F. Bethune-Baker, Canon C. E. Raven, and H. C. Bouquet showed some interest, though Pittenger has recently retired to King’s College, his alma mater, and is promoting process-theory. Also at Cambridge, a Trinity College research scholar, Peter Hamilton, wrote a volume entitled The Living God and the Modern World (1967); in it he proposes a Christian theology based on Whitehead’s thought. A number of Roman Catholic writers—among them Teilhard de Chardin, Peter Schoonenberg, and Leslie Dewart—express a similar trend. It is necessary, therefore, to recognize process-theology for what it is: a movement trying aggressively to articulate metaphysics on a presumably Christian basis in order to overcome the recent dearth of metaphysical theology.

What is its theological methodology? What is its view of God and the world? Is process-metaphysics authentically biblical?

Daniel Day Williams has given the fullest schematic statement by a process-theologian of the theory’s implications for the Christian view of God. His basic premise in The Spirit and the Forms of Love (Harper & Row, 1968) is that the structures of human existence reflect the being of God or Divine Love. God is mirrored, he contends, in the categorical structures of human love, including the conditions of historical existence, limitation of freedom by another’s freedom, suffering, and risk.

Foundational to Williams’s experiential appeal is a skeptical view of the reliability of the Gospels and a relativistic view of truth.

Jesus’ words are said to be so qualified and reinterpreted that we cannot be sure what he said and did (The Spirit and the Forms of Love, p. 157). Quite apart from the miracles, however, Jesus is the Incarnate Logos, “the Truth acted out in love.” Creative Divine Love is the metaphysical ground of everything else.

But both love and intellectuality have a history (ibid., p. 294). Williams concurs with the dogma of scientific evolutionary philosophy that “the structures which reason abstracts are set in the concreteness of process,” and so considers all rational formulations to be tentative (p. 286). His doctrine of Divine Love as creative becoming therefore relativizes both revelation and reason. Possibly, despite Williams’s intentions, even love may not escape this fate. For it is difficult to see how Williams can exempt his own view from the premise he invokes to discredit all earlier views: “In a creative history where God opens up new possibilities of understanding it is an error to confine the meaning of reason to the historical forms of certain cultural presuppositions and values” (p. 297). What’s more, if this assertion is an epistemological absolute, it is self-refuting; if it is not, it still breaks down. In either event, the premise dooms all truth—the truth of Christianity included—to cultural relativity, and ultimately overtakes and judges Williams’s view as well. Williams, in fact, cautiously contends, not that his view is superior or impervious, but that other views are outmoded (p. 294). Perhaps, we might add, it would be safer merely to insist that one’s own view is not yet passe. For all pretensions to enduring truths are twice relativized in a creative process in which God is assertedly changing and growing, and in which man’s knowledge is assertedly culture-bound.

Instead of appealing to intelligible divine self-revelation, which is the strength of traditional Christian theism, Williams’s theological method relies on the analogy of being, and in a highly selective way. The central realities of our self-understanding, the categorical conditions of human life—namely, time, freedom, self-limitation by another’s freedom, historical existence, action and causality, suffering, risk—have metaphysical consequences, says Williams, for the analysis of God’s love, and hence of his very being. The analogy, he claims, explodes the doctrine of God’s absolute simplicity, unchangeableness, impassability, and preferential election-love, and requires instead the view that God is neither absolutely transcendent nor completely perfect, but is creatively relational and temporal (p. 123). The necessary result is said to be a reconception of the being of God that involves the divine nature both in time and in becoming. The relation of love to suffering in human experience is said to imply similar consequences for God in his historical involvement (p. 91). In reconceiving the Creator-Redeemer of the Bible as creative being, Williams uses the human analogy of love’s “dealing with broken relationships and the consequent suffering” to restate the incarnation and atonement of Christ (pp. 40 f.) in a way that accommodates “the fully social relationship of God and man” (p. 55).

The difficulty of metaphysical theology built on an appeal to analogy, Williams concedes, “is to carry through the analogy of being with full justice both to the structures of experience and to the transmutation of structures as they apply to the being of God” (p. 124). And in extrapolating agape from human experience, Williams faces a greater problem than he seems to recognize. For the christological foundation of ethics turns on whether agape is divinely derived or present in the experience of sinful man. Williams wavers: on the one hand he refuses to identify the form of any human life with agape (p. 204), but on the other he thinks agape may be present even in humanitarian concern (pp. 260 ff.).

What Williams actually does is to invoke analogy inconsistently without disclosing that this selectivity rests upon convictions about God previously held and otherwise derived. Indeed, even the premise that “love is the key to being” reflects this selective approach, for human experience entails far more than love. And human love falls at times into disorder and perversity, features that Greek mythology readily attributed even to the gods.

Williams concedes that there are undeniable differences between the divine and human: “There is indeed a dimension in the love of God which differs from human love” (p. 139). It is hard to see, however, just how Williams derives such information from an analysis of human existence. He says: “God as a reality which is necessary to all being cannot sustain exactly the same relationship to time, space and change, which the creatures exhibit.… God does not come to be or pass away” (p. 124). This apparent acknowledgment of God’s qualitatively different being, whose relation to the universe does not involve God’s own becoming, nor experiences that constitute his essential reality in a new way—such acknowledgment in principle demolishes the argument that temporality, mutability, and suffering must be posited of God analogically of man’s experience, for what structures man’s relationships need not then structure God’s. Indeed, Williams is impelled to concede that “there is that in God which does not suffer at all,” for his relationship to the world’s suffering does not involve finite limitations (p. 128), and he also protests any attempt to “fit Jesus’ experience to our limited understanding” because “we cannot delimit another’s experience by our own” (p. 162).

But these commendable observations—which would require a higher principle than the analogy of being to define the nature of God—are set aside to give metaphysical speculation the right of way. We are told that analysis of the structures of human experience, as illuminating the ultimate world, constitutes “the sole justification of metaphysical thought” (p. 129), and that “whatever is present in the inescapable structures of human experience” must be present in “being-itself.” “It is the essence of God to move the world toward new possibilities, and his being is ‘complete’ only as an infinite series of creative acts, each of which enriches, modifies, and shapes the whole society of being” (p. 139). God’s love for others is said to involve suffering that alters his experience (p. 127).

To the degree that Williams exempts the nature of God from structures found in finite, changing experience, he holds a view of God that is not derived from analogy predicated on human relationships but is in secret debt, rather, to revelational theism, at least insofar as his attributions agree with the Living God of the Bible. To the extent that he limits the nature of God to human structures, to that extent he objectionably compromises the God of Judeo-Christian revelation. How, on the basis of analogical argument, can Williams speak of “that in God which does not suffer at all” if, as he contends, love inherently involves suffering—unless, contrary to what he contends elsewhere, God’s being is not wholly identical with love?

According to the Scriptures, fallen man loves neither God nor neighbor as he ought. The gulf between divine, and human love might seem therefore to require the non-analogy of being, without thereby necessarily denying to man the fractured remnants of the divine image. May it not be the height of human presumption, rather than the mark of a meritorious theology, to project divine love from within an experience of human love that needs always to be not only fulfilled but also redeemed? The fact and nature of God’s love, if deducible at all, are deducible only from some higher principle than human analogy, indeed, from intelligible divine self-revelation alone.

Why do process-theologians object to the evangelical view of God? Basically, they read into the historic Christian view that God is supernatural, absolute, timeless and immutable the outlines of the immovable static Being of Greek philosophy; in this interpretation, time and man are sacrificed to God’s eternity. They propose, instead, a God of temporality and becoming.

This tendency of process-theology to identify the God of classical Christian theism with the static Being of Greek philosophy actually overlooks several important considerations: (1) Classic Greek philosophy itself wrestled with the problem of eternity and time and tried, however unsuccessfully, to save significance for the temporal; (2) ever since its New Testament beginnings, evangelical Christianity has affirmed a supernatural Creator who is active and personally involved in history; by emphasizing God’s election-love and the incarnation, atonement, and resurrection of the Logos, it espoused a divine relationship to the universe irreconcilable with Greek notions of a “self-contained static God”; (3) the Protestant Reformers repudiated the medieval scholastic attempt to expound the God of the Bible in Greek philosophical motifs; (4) neither the Church Fathers, the Protestant Reformers, nor recent evangelical theologians have found in the biblical view of God’s relation to the world any need to repudiate the absoluteness, non-temporality, and immutability of God.

In view of these observations, it appears that process-theology’s proposal to redefine the nature of the Divine as creative becoming does not rest on evangelical and biblical motivations. It issues, rather, from attempts to fuse modern evolutionary theory with arbitrarily selected elements of the scriptural heritage. And therefore it substitutes a modern speculative abstraction for the God of the Bible.