Book Briefs: April 12, 1968

Maritain Speaks His Mind

The Peasant of the Garonne, by Jacques Maritain, translated by Michael Cuddihy and Elizabeth Hughes (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968, 227 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Clifford L. Stanley, professor of systematic theology, Virginia Theological Seminary, Alexandria.

In Europe “The Peasant of the Danube” is a proverbial figure who blurts out disconcerting truth that no one else will speak publicly, because of squeamishness, cowardice, or some other bad reason. The author, the famous Thomist philosopher, lives in retirement on the Garonne and takes the liberty of adapting the tag to suit this situation. His intention is obvious. Plain speaking is long overdue; and he proposes to speak now with a forthrightness that will offend and embarrass many.

He has two main reasons for writing, one negative and one positive. Let us speak of them in order.

First, Maritain castigates what he calls Catholic neo-modernism. He finds this to be of like principle with and as offensive as, the first modernism, associated with Loisy and Tyrrell. He is thinking not so much of a rank-and-file movement as of untrustworthy leadership—intellectuals, professors, clergy. Four mis-developments scandalize him: secular utopianism, which would set up heaven on earth; existentialism, which removes the deeds of men from any context of fixed law; phenomenology, which cuts off the reason of man from the order of Being; and immanentist evolutionism (Teilhard), which substitutes the growing universe from transcend ant God. While all of these are general cultural trends, it is their influence upon the intellectual and practical life of the Roman Catholic Church that especially concerns him.

Reading For Perspective

CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:

• After You’ve Said I Do, by Dwight Hervey Small (Revell, $4.95). An experienced pastor-lecturer-counselor offers enlightening insights from the Bible, scholarship, and life on the complex problems of communication in marriage.

• Nine Roads to Renewal, by Walden Howard (Word, $3.50). The story of how nine Christian groups entered into deeper personal relationships with Christ and thereby recovered the experience of genuine Christian fellowship.

• Adamant & Stone Chips, by Virginia Mollenkott (Word, $3.50). A state-college professor of English makes a passionate appeal for a genuine Christian humanism that will relate the Lordship of Christ and the message of the Bible to the full range of human knowledge and activity.

The positive motivation is the Providential work of the second Vatican Council, opportunely developed “for such a time as this.” First, Maritain wants to ward off misinterpretations that see the council as neo-modernist. The “updating” (aggiornamento) is easily misunderstood by the heedless. The council offers true leadership and inspiration for the times, since it has in mind the problems and understands the mind of our contemporaries. The voice of the Church offers guidance in three great areas: “the general welfare,” the possibilities of human history; true philosophy, which takes us out of the subjectivist pit of phenomenology; man’s life with God both public and private, in liturgy and in contemplation.

Response to this book in Europe was sensational; this accounts for its appearance in translation here so soon after its writing (1966). Many people thought the writer (in his middle eighties) had all but taken leave of his senses; that he had betrayed many of the positions of his life’s work and had certainly altered its spirit; that he who had ever been in the vanguard was now commanding, “Backward, march!” To others the book was the still, small voice of sobriety and wisdom—“probably the most reasonable defense yet written of a moderate viable traditionalism” (Leslie Dewart, quoted on the jacket).

Since Protestants and Catholics live in the same world, they are subject to similar influences and should be expected to have many of the same problems. Maritain’s high-level work shows that these problems are even more widespread and disquieting than we had supposed. We have a great deal of fellow-feeling for him in his trials and share his grief. Yet often we can read his sturdy, blunt rejoinders with cheers. This is a heartening book. God reigns.

Often a sadness overshadows human affairs. Sometimes it seems that we are in dialogue with the wrong people. Frequently the people who talk with us seem to stand for less and less of their own tradition and to grasp the “idols of the tribe” to the degree that they have positions and make affirmations. The people we want to talk with will not talk with us, certainly not about the tradition itself. The Roman Question remains. It is—the Reformation. Put otherwise, it is the truth of justification by faith, the First Article, “by which the Church stands or falls.

The Road To Irrelevance

Crisis in Lutheran Theology, Volume II, edited by John Warwick Montgomery (Baker, 1967, 194 pp., $3), is reviewed by Herman Otten, pastor, Trinity Lutheran Church, New Haven, Missouri.

These essays, along with those in Volume I, show clearly that Lutheranism is indeed facing a theological crisis. The editor observes that the last decade has made it painfully clear to all but the very naïve that the Lutheran churches in America—those in the Missouri Synod included—are experiencing a “theological erosion” that, unchecked, will lead to deadness and irrelevance.

The contributors to this second volume include some of today’s most competent and loyal Lutheran scholars. Several chapters previously appeared in CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Herman Sasse of Australia writes, “Because it is no longer understood, the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture has been abandoned by the theologians in the majority of the Protestant churches.” Robert Preus of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, notes in an essay on “The Doctrine of Revelation in Contemporary Theology” that for such theologians as Karl Barth, Martin Heinecken, Anders Nygren, G. Ernest Wright, Reginald Fuller, and Rudolf Bultmann, Holy Scripture is not revelation. He says:

He stresses: “Scripture IS revelation. How naïve for theologians to speak of Scripture as God’s Word and then to deny that it is a revelation!”

This Missouri Synod professor claims that “the basis of inerrancy rests on the nature of Scripture as God’s Word.” He supports the official position of his church as it is confessed in the Brief Statement: “Since the Holy Scriptures are the Word of God, it goes without saying that they contain no errors or contradictions, but that they are in all their parts and words the infallible truth, also in those parts which treat of historical, geographical, and other secular matters (John 10:35).”

H. Daniel Friberg of Tanganyika, Africa, asks, “If God caused men to utter certain words as his own—which they could utter as easily as they could hear his words—why should that utterance be called a witness to God’s Word rather than the very Word of God?” Raymond Surburg of Concordia Seminary, Springfield, Illinois, in discussing “Implications of the Historico-Critical Method in Interpreting the Old Testament,” rejects the JEPD source hypothesis and says that “the views of the historico-critical method cannot be harmonized with the traditional view on the inspiration of the Bible as held by conservative Christians in the past nor by The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.” Surburg’s well-documented chapter is an excellent summary, showing how the critical views of some modern Old Testament scholars are irreconcilable with historic Christianity. He rightly insists that what Jesus said about the Old Testament is entirely factual.

Lewis W. Spitz, Sr„ of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, concludes that Martin Luther affirmed the verbal and plenary inspiration of Holy Scripture. Ralph Bohlmann, also of that seminary, ably shows that today’s theologians can learn much from the principles of biblical interpretation found in the Lutheran confessions. However, he correctly emphasizes that “the exegesis of the fathers—whether they be fathers of the ancient church, the Reformation church, or The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod—cannot determine our doctrine; only Holy Scripture can do that.”

Both these volumes edited by John Warwick Montgomery deserve wide circulation, and not only among Lutherans. All major denominations are facing basically the same theological crisis. These volumes offer a clear testimony to Christ and his inerrant Word. May they arouse sleeping churches.

Unorthodox Literary Greats

Belief and Disbelief in American Literature, by Howard Mumford Jones (University of Chicago, 1967, 153 pp., $5), is reviewed by Paul M. Bechtel, chairman, Department of English, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

Here are six essays on the religious beliefs or rejection of belief of major American writers: Tom Paine, William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Robert Frost. Paine was a deist, Bryant and Emerson Unitarians, Whitman an unclassifiable universalist, Twain a foe of all organized religion, and Frost, at the core, a skeptic. Only Cooper could be considered Christian in an orthodox sense.

Howard Mumford Jones, who long graced the Harvard faculty and now is in retirement, chose these authors because they semed to him “to represent important phases of the relation of belief and literature” through major eras of American history. He wanted to see what their writings revealed about what he regards as major theological concerns: man’s place in the world, his relation to God, and the structure of moral values drawn from that relationship. Jones’s analysis leads him to this conclusion: “I do not see that the direct presentation of any system of religious orthodoxy has at any time been a matter of major concern to most major American writers.”

In its broad generality that statement is difficult to challenge. It is essentially right. No major American writer ever set out, as Milton did in Paradise Lost, “to justify the ways of God to men.” But had Jonathan Edwards, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and T. S. Eliot been included in this study instead of Paine, Twain, and Frost, an alliance between belief and literary art might have come through somewhat more favorably.

Jones notes somewhat incidentally that our literary classics have been “overwhelmingly Protestant in tone,” or have been written by authors “reared in some branch of the Protestant faith and later departing from it, as in the case of Whitman.” We have had, of course, many books, articles, and novels on religious themes, “but most of them are negligible as literature.” America has produced no religious classics like Paradise Lost or the Divine Comedy, though it has achieved successes of the second rank like the Journal of John Woolman.

This little volume reveals the organizing skill, freshness of insight, and grace of style that often characterize the mature scholar. Such assets make the author a valuable guide in extracting and organizing the core of religious responses in these writers, for no one of them was a systematic thinker about theological problems. Jones does not test his writers on some of the central Christian doctrines as Randall Stewart did several years ago in his fine book American Literature and Christian Doctrine, in which he makes the acceptance or rejection of original sin a clue to orthodoxy.

Jones acknowledges that great American writers have come powerfully to grips with the intense moral issues that forever engage men’s minds and that they have not failed to grapple with theological issues. But he concludes that there is “an almost continuous failure of religious orthodoxy to appeal to the serious literary imagination.” Perhaps there is a challenge in his words. Piety and high artistic creativity are not really alien. It happens only that each has such intense demands that the two are rarely found in fusion.

Courage Confused With Grace

Tillich: A Theological Portrait, by David Hopper (Lippincott, 1968, 189 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Ralph A. Bohlmann, assistant professor of systematic theology, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.

Theological portraiture, the author tells us, is designed to illumine the bond of life and thought and thus to capture the inner spirit of the subject in a way that a photograph generally fails to do. In a series of five carefully and clearly written chapters, the Macalester College professor of religion draws a portrait of Tillich by illustrating how certain key situations in his life helped to shape important and persisting aspects of his thought.

Early formative influence in Tillich’s career shaped the revolutionary-romantic motif that he himself considered distinctive of his life and work. This motif is embodied in his doctrine of the kairos: the belief that significant moments in the ambiguous process of history witness the emergence of new forms of meaning and life amidst the death of the old. This doctrine was significantly involved in Tillich’s religious socialism. It also figured in two subsequent theological encounters, the first of which was his conflict with Barth in the post-World War I years. Professor Hopper illustrates how Tillich sought to universalize the Christian faith by romantic identification with the movement of history and culture, while Barth endeavored to carry out the theological task within the more traditional Christian categories of God, Canon, and Church.

Through his conflict with Emmanuel Hirsch and the views of national socialism in the thirties, Tillich-was led to differentiate more sharply between revelation and kairos. According to Hopper, Tillich’s encounter with Hirsch also led to the one major shift in his thought: from an early preoccupation with the broad social and political dimensions of history to a formulation of the New Being more open to individualistic application.

This was not a shift from history to ontology, however. Hopper shows that Tillich’s ontological frame of reference underlies and inspires not only his later work but his earlier kairos doctrine as well. On the basis of Tillich’s 1912 treatise on mysticism and guilt-consciousness in Schelling, Hopper sketches the main lines of Tillich’s ontological framework, then applies them to an explanation of the Systematic Theology, Tillich’s major work of the years 1951–63.

The author concludes his portrait with a penetrating assessment of Tillich’s theological contribution. While applauding certain Tillichian accents, he criticizes the romantic-mystical basis of his program for reconciling religion and culture. He finds fault not only with Tillich’s moral-exemplar theory of atonement but also with the generally subordinate role of Christology in his system. But the great weakness of Tillich’s theology, Hopper contends, is that it confuses courage with grace, thereby universalizing the particular message of the Christian faith, diluting the Gospel, and failing to structure adequately the Christian life.

Hopper’s portrait of Tillich deserves attention not only for its contribution to Tillich studies but also for the background it provides for understanding the efforts of some current theologians to recast and radically reformulate Christian doctrine on the basis of an intuitive reading of the times.

Gallery Of Great Reformers

Reformers in Profile, edited by B. A. Gerrish (Fortress, 1967, 264 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by C. George Fry, assistant professor of history, Capital University, Columbus, Ohio.

“For many years the history of the Protestant Reformation has been presented largely as a single movement and from the standpoint of a chosen hero … According to B. A. Gerrish, professor of church history at the University of Chicago, it is time to replace this “textbook orthodoxy” with an understanding of the sixteenth century as an “Age of Reformations.” To prove his thesis, he has assembled ten biographical essays by noted historians illustrating five distinct types of reform—later medieval, humanistic, Protestant, radical, and Roman Catholic.

S. Harrison Thomson begins the volume with a portrayal of “the whole Wyclyf,” a man simultaneously “a philosopher, a theologian, a reformer, and a political thinker.” Wyclyf stands in marked contrast to his near contemporary, Pierre d’Ailly, “a staunch advocate of the establishment theology of his day.” Lewis Spitz, in a readable and reliable chapter, paints a picture of Erasmus as a reformer in his own right. The prince of humanists was more than a man of weak will and character, or a premature philosophe, or “the John the Baptist of the evangelical revival.” He had his own program emphasizing a recovery of the Scriptures and a reappropriation of the “philosophy of Christ.” The sketch of Luther by F. Edward Cranz, though poorly written, conveys the Saxon professor’s quest for “a gracious God and a sound theology.” The Swiss reformers, Zwingli and Calvin, receive excellent treatment. Calvin has been variously interpreted by historians as a “narrow dogmatist” and “an ecumenical churchman,” as a “ruthless inquisitor” and a “solicitous pastor,” as an ‘inhuman authoritarian” and a “humanistic social thinker.” Gerrish reveals him as a theologian whose intention was to proclaim “the pre-eminence of Jesus Christ, not a gloomy pre-destinarianism nor a new legalism.” Geoffrey W. Bromiley of Fuller Theological Seminary offers an enlightening study of the enigmatic Thomas Cranmer. Primarily a scholar, Cranmer had administrative responsibilities thrust upon him. Paradoxically, it was not the “robust Luther” or the “dedicated Calvin” but the “cautious and timid” Cranmer who was to win the martyr’s crown. Believing that “Reformation theology is essentially that of the early church, as well as that of Scripture,” Cranmer made a unique contribution in establishing the relation between the Protestant and the patristic churches. Chapters on Menno Simons, the gentle and saintly evangelical, and Thomas Müntzer, the revolutionary social reformer, depict two facets of the Anabaptist movement. Finally, Ignatious Loyola is described as “the very epitome of Tridentine papalism.”

This book’s appearance is marred by printer’s errors, and its usefulness is limited by several errors of fact. Father McNally, for example, reports that prior to the arrival of the Jesuits “no one had ever before preached the good news of salvation” in China. What then of the Nestorian church in China before 700 and of the Franciscan mission in the thirteenth century? Indeed, a Chinese monk was even to visit Europe and administer Holy Communion to King Edward I of England in 1287!

One can also disagree with the editor’s thesis. The Reformation of the sixteenth century differed in quality and quantity from what preceded it. As historian Denys Hay has observed, there simply was no spiritual leader who “fired the imagination of all men in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,” and because prophetic power was lacking, “spiritual revival and reform was … confined.” The period from 1300 to 1500 was a pre-reformation era, and its significance derives from what followed it. Despite the editor’s contention to the contrary, I remain convinced that the work of the dissenters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was “adjectival to some other more substantive vision.” Frankly, would churchmen in 1968 read about Wyclif and d’Ailly had there been no Protestant Reformation in 1517? To equalize the two groups of reformers is to confuse anticipation with fulfillment and distort one’s understanding of the dynamic process of historical development. Try as one may, the trilogy of “forerunners, Reformers, Counter-Reformation” remains. Finally, while it is helpful to have the reformers’ differences carefully distinguished, it would have been ecumenically meaningful if their inter-relatedness and similarities had been stressed.

Probing Church Trouble Spots

Growth and Life in the Local Church, by H. Boone Porter, Jr. (Seabury, 1968, $2.50), is reviewed by Donald McGavran, dean of the School of Missions and Institute of Church Growth, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.

Growth and Life in the Local Church is a deeply Christian book that speaks effectively to today’s churches. Dr. Porter knows the American church thoroughly. He speaks about life and growth among congregations that generally are not growing, and what he says is reasonable and encouraging. He values the Church and does not strive for effect by belaboring it. He is for it—yet with a sure touch he probes the trouble spots and describes convincingly what should be done.

Porter’s realism and simplicity are welcome. Listen to him describe a common cause of stagnation:

Or take his description of public worship:

Porter, an evangelical Episcopalian, tackles some of the main problems of the American church—mission, extending the ordained ministry, lay leaders, baptism, worship, the Lord’s Supper, growth and renewal—with gusto and with a fresh approach ministers and laymen of all churches will find stimulating. Baptists and Mennonites will read what he has to say with as much profit as Presbyterians and Episcopalians. All will find their reading of this book an event, not because it is particularly new, radical, or startling, but because it compels us to reassess old assumptions and take more Christian views of familiar church and community scenes.

Book Briefs

The Christian Stake in Science, by Robert E. D. Clark (Moody, 1967, 160 pp., $3.50). A plea for Christians to realize that theology cannot be divorced from scientific discoveries but goes beyond them.

Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, edited by Kurt Aland (Concordia, 1967, 116 pp., $3.50). The theses, their relation to the Reformation, and sermons and comments upon them by Luther.

The New Oxford History of Music, Volume 4, The Age of Humanism, edited by Gerald Abraham (Oxford, 1968, 979 pp., $22.50). An imposing volume on music from 1540 to 1630. Church directors of music will appreciate its sections on Latin and Protestant church music on the Continent and in England.

The Gospel of Luke, by Ralph Earle (Baker Books, 1968, 110 pp., $2.95). Helpful homiletical units from each chapter of Luke; a good entry in the “Proclaiming the New Testament” series.

Luther for an Ecumenical Age, edited by Carl S. Meyer (Concordia, 1967, 312 pp., $9). High-quality essays by eleven top scholars on Luther, his period, and his theology.

Preparing for Platform and Pulpit, by John E. Baird (Abingdon, 1968, 222 pp., $4.50). A sound and methodical, though unimaginative, public-speaking text designed for seminaries and Bible colleges.

Angola Beloved, by T. Ernest Wilson (Loizeaux, 1967, 254 pp., $3.95). Wilson’s love for this land on Africa’s west coast is vividly communicated as he describes his forty years of missionary service there.

As a Roaring Lion, by Martha Wall (Moody, 1967, 254 pp., $3.95). On the missionary trail in Colombia with Don Vicente Gomez. A gripping story of Christian witness in remote areas.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.