Some Significant Books of 1971: Part 6: Theology, Ethics and Apologetics

A new systematic theology, the first such work by an evangelical author in some time, appeared in 1971: Charles F. Baker’s A Dispensational Theology (Grace Bible College). The dispensationalist perspective leads, as would be expected, to unusual thoroughness in dealing with such topics as Creation and the return of Christ; the presentation is straightforward and clear.

REVELATION AND KNOWLEDGE OF GOD After the sole systematic offering, we may properly turn to books on knowledge, revelation, and authority, deservedly led by Arthur F. Holmes, Faith Seeks Understanding: A Christian Approach to Knowledge (Eerdmans). Holmes has chosen for his title the name of Karl Barth’s early work on the medieval scholastic theologian Anselm of Canterbury, who held that the understanding could go very far indeed in its knowledge of God before the aid of revelation and faith became necessary. Holmes has no such optimistic hopes: his effort is to show that Christian faith, while not based on reason alone, is a reasonable alternative to other positions, which falsely claim to be objective and scientific. Thomas F. Torrance has given us God and Rationality (Oxford), essays and lectures dedicated to Barth’s memory. It contains a new and good introductory chapter on “Theological Rationality.” Torrance is convinced that theology must live up to the standards set by the other academic disciplines, including the natural sciences. It seems unfortunate that a man who is so close to the center both of Reformed orthodoxy and of evangelical piety here pays no attention to the mainstream of evangelical thought on the subject, while giving great attention to the non-evangelical theologians who dominate the universities. This defect, already noticeable in Holmes’s book, becomes quite objectionable in Jerry H. Gill, The Possibility of Religious Knowledge (Eerdmans). Although presumably writing for an evangelical audience, Gill largely confines himself to a technical discussion of linguistic analysis, and while he deals with Bultmann, Tillich, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, et al., he does not so much as mention the outstanding evangelical thinkers in the field of religious epistemology: neither the late Karl Heim of Tübingen, with his detailed analysis of religious knowledge as personal knowledge, nor the systematic works of Herman Dooyeweerd and Cornelius Van Til, nor even the readily accessible and much discussed Francis Schaeffer, whose popular works have brought the epistemological question before the wider Christian public. It is hard to understand why so many of these writers, each of whom would surely like to feel he is contributing to the general scholarly discussion, zealously ignore genuine evangelical efforts and confine themselves to discussing scholars who are at best less than fully evangelical. The same tendency is evident though less objectionable in a work on another subject, Theology and Metaphysics, by James Richmond (Schocken). Richmond attempts to rehabilitate both theological and metaphysical discussion and to show that healthy Christian theology needs some overall metaphysical scheme or vision to bring man’s experience and knowledge of the world into a rational unity—precisely what scholars as different as Herman Dooyeweerd and Rachel King have tried to give it.

Another aspect of religious epistemology is treated by Donald Bloesch in The Ground of Certainty: Towards an Evangelical Theology of Revelation (Eerdmans). Unfortunately his view of Scripture is that it can offer us only relative certainty, i.e., assurance with regard to salvation, but no unified structure of knowledge. It would seem that this is a false alternative, for Scripture can teach true and objective propositions even though it may not present a unified, structured world-view. Bloesch feels that one can arrive at certainty about the subjective effect of biblical revelation but not about its objective content. Despite his careful qualifications, to view the Bible as deficient and fallible apart from the proclamation of the Church and the light of faith implanted in man by the Holy Spirit is to miss the best starting-point for a theology of revelation.

Far less dialectical and at the same time more clearly on target with respect both to certainty and to revelation is Clark H. Pinnock, Biblical Revelation: The Foundation of Christian Theology (Moody). Pinnock gives a surprising amount of material in this 256-page work: a good discussion of current views on hermeneutics and inspiration, a treatment of objections to biblical authority and of modern evidences in favor of it, and also a clear and full presentation of the historic Protestant view of revelation and inspiration in the tradition of B. B. Warfield. Much the same spirit but quite a different approach characterizes Kenneth Hamilton’s 1970 Payton Lectures at Fuller Seminary, Words and the Word (Eerdmans). Hamilton takes the specifically biblical approach to religious knowledge and authority seriously in terms of a revelation that is verbal and propositional. It is a valuable if brief treatment, but unlike Pinnock, Hamilton abstains from serious interaction with other evangelical thinkers.

A final work on the question of authority is F. F. Bruce’s Tradition, Old and New (Zondervan), which reexamines the relation between scriptural and extra-scriptural traditions.

FAITH AND HISTORY From Germany, Wolfhart Pannenberg has addressed himself to the question of faith and history, among several other current issues, in lectures and papers (some of them previously published in English) collected in two slender but substantially priced volumes, Basic Questions in Theology (Fortress). To many American evangelicals, Pannenberg appears as the most encouraging figure on the German theological horizon, chiefly because of the radical break he makes with most academic theologians by insisting on the historical nature of the Resurrection and by attempting to close the traditional but artificial gap between Geschichte and Historie (history as meaningful experience and history as a subject of research and study). Evangelicals will be less enthusiastic about such essays as “What Is Truth?,” in which Pannenberg takes a subjective, process view of truth, one that seems to preclude objective, propositional revelation. Nevertheless, Pannenberg’s two volumes offer some useful alternatives to the standard German existentialist fare available in English translation.

Evidence that mythologization is not confined to Germans is given by William J. Duggan in Myth and Christian Belief (Fides), which includes a good deal more myth than Christian belief. In the tradition of comparative religion, Duggan emphasizes the similarities between the Gospel and characteristic myths, showing little interest in the Bible’s unique content and value. Curiously, the same press gave us John Scullion’s The Theology of Inspiration, a study that is both more representative of traditional Roman Catholic thinking and much more compatible with evangelical views of biblical authority.

There is little new available on individual modern theologians. Noteworthy is Andre Dumas’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theologian of Reality (Macmillan). An interpretation of Bonhoeffer as a Christian Hegelian, it gives a balanced presentation of the widely diverging ways in which man and his work are interpreted. Ewert H. Cousins has put together a number of essays by modern thinkers as different as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Schubert M. Ogden in Process Theology: Basic Writings by the Key Thinkers of a Major Modern Movement(Newman), offering a convenient selection of works that illustrate one of the more popular modern alternatives to biblical Christianity.

DOCTRINES On the doctrine of God, Vincent P. Miceli has given us The Gods of Atheism (Arlington) dedicated to Pope Paul VI. Miceli’s book has as its leitmotif the idea that the term atheism in reality covers many forms of idolatry. This sometimes leads him to a rather far-fetched analysis, but it is widely applicable. His discussion of the nineteenth-century figures Feuerbach, Marx, and Comte is especially valuable, as is his presentation of the unfamiliar but important contemporary French thinker Merleau-Ponty. The chapters on modern figures like Van Buren, Altizer, and Cox are less useful, but the final chapter, “The Idolatrous Heart of Modern Humanism,” is very impressive. Remaining with the First Article of the Creed, we come to Gustaf Wingren’s The Flight from Creation (Augsburg), a very brief monograph on an important theme. Wingren scores the modern tendency, both in theology and in ethics, to bypass God the Creator and to begin with Christ the Redeemer. In the course of his exposition, he gives a useful summary of his own work to date.

AFTER THE STROKE

The embolism loose

from the heart

lodged in the brain

a sudden confusion of language

paralysis

and the end of speech

As for man, his days are as grass.

Psalm 103:15a

Beside your bed,

I cannot speak the prayer

that begs for your recovery.

The Groaning Spirit

who gives us leave to pray

withholds that comfort.

He has given me, instead,

sleeplessness,

open eyes to watch

the sweet liquid, fortified,

drip three days

into your needled arm.

My mouth stays shut.

Bless the Lord, O my soul.

Psalm 103:1a

It is no easy thing

to bless the Lord in Buffalo

where you lie

stroke still and dumb.

My watch is pointless,

kept only for myself.

The nurses, crisp professionals,

need neither me

nor my questions.

The heat of your room drives

me out into the street.

The 5 A.M. winter wind

is cold. Its voice,

a quick thin blade, slips

through the layered wool I wear

and speaks deep into my side

the word that alters all.

He hath not dealt with us after our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.

Psalm 103:10

In the therapy room

they held you by a belt

stood you up and told you,

Walk.

You thought hard,

clutched the rails

and throwing your foot

like a loose shoe

stepped into the pain

and did not stop

until you’d walked it through.

But there were others there,

almost as young as you,

whose only grace

was the white webbed belt

around their waists.

Who satisfied thy mouth with good things.

Psalm 103:5a

When your words returned,

they came at random,

jumped from your lips

out of context

and refused to lie down

in sentences;

but they did return.

And slowly felt your lips

and tongue divide the syllables

until, one day, dominated,

they spoke as ordered

and blessed the name of God.

JOHN LEAX

Passing on to Christology, we have three books: Peter Hodgson’s Jesus—Word and Presence: An Essay in Christology (Fortress); a posthumous publication by Friedrich Gogarten, Christ the Crisis (John Knox); and Piet Schoonenberg’s The Christ, translated from the Dutch (Herder and Herder). None of the three is satisfactory from an evangelical perspective. Christ the Crisis, the final book of the old dialectical theologian, offers a refresher course in the themes of the older existentialist theology popularized by Bultmann. Gogarten holds that Jesus’ proclamation is by its very nature completely unverifiable, and maintains the existentialist position of realized eschatology, i.e., that the judgment occurs here and now in the moment of existential encounter. He does not even consider the resurrection or return of Jesus Christ; this seems odd in view of his title, but to do so would be out of place in his highly existentialistic and subjective world of thought. Both his concepts and his style make for difficult reading, and he offers no substantiation for his views other than his own speculation and the existentialist tradition. Hodgson’s Jesus—Word and Presence hardly offers us more substance, as he too abandons real history. His alternative is a timeless realm in which the resurrection is at once past, present, and future. He follows Willi Marxen and others of his ilk in viewing the New Testament proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus as an inference without substance or content. The book by the Roman Catholic, Schoonenberg, is more valuable. He gives a good résumé of early and medieval teaching on Christology. While he questions the usefulness of the ancient creedal formulations today, he generally affirms their validity and provides a clear and helpful presentation of the way in which they developed. A very useful text for the history of Christology, Schoonenberg’s book is less satisfactory when he attempts to restate the orthodox position for today. He does his best to rehabilitate “modern” theology (e.g., Willi Marxen) as having “strayed far less from the faith … than was at first supposed.” He builds to some extent on Teilhard de Chardin, and while he identifies Altizer as a pantheist rather than a Christian, he curiously sees some hope of arriving at a valid position via Altizer’s method.

The eleventh volume of G. C. Berkouwer’s massive Studies in Dogmatics has appeared: Sin (Eerdmans). Berkouwer’s work is the only Protestant “summa” of our day to rival the late Karl Barth’s unfinished Church Dogmatics in magnitude, but it is of course more clearly in the historic Reformed tradition. Berkouwer is especially helpful in his treatment of the much abused and often misunderstood doctrine of original sin. He clearly distinguishes the biblical teaching from both the monistic view that God is the ultimate author of sin and the dualistic idea that sin is an evil power equal to God.

The question of The Lord’s Day is treated by Paul K. Jewett (Eerdmans). This short book bears the subtitle A Theological Guide to the Christian Day of Worship, yet is actually more of a history than a theology of Lord’s Day observance. As such it is interesting and informative. Jewett concludes with practical advice for Christians in a post-Constantinian situation in which the state no longer protects and encourages Sunday observance. Interestingly, he suggests that in a society where the majority is Christian, the state should protect the jobs of non-Christians who refuse to work on their own day of rest, whereas Christians should be willing to lose their jobs rather than accept Sunday work.

APOLOGETICS Questions of theological method, but especially the presuppositionalist apologetics of Cornelius Van Til and the reactions of sympathizers and critics to it, form the subject of the Van Til festschrift Jerusalem and Athens, edited by E. Robert Geehan (Presbyterian and Reformed). Contributors include Herman Dooyeweerd, James I. Packer, and John W. Montgomery. There is also a discussion of the relations between Van Til and the late Edward J. Carnell. In another essay collection, Clark H. Pinnock and David F. Wells have edited a number of theologians’ proposals Towards a Theology for the Future (Creation House). The contributors attempt to point the way in which evangelical theological studies ought to develop in a changing world—not “theology of revolution.”

Apologetically useful material from writers who do not profess Christianity but who criticize important anti-Christian mentalities comes from Eliseo Vivas in Contra Marcuse (Arlington) and Norman MacBeth in Darwin Retried (Gambit). Although Vivas becomes rather acid at times, he gives the reader the benefit of his careful reading of Marcuse’s extremely difficult writings. The Marcuse variety of Marxism is important for the radical new left and has also influenced a number of younger Christians. What Vivas says will be helpful for anyone having to deal with Marcuse’s ideas or enthusiasts. Naturalistic evolution, by contrast, is not a philosophy confined to the universities or to political radicals; it is taught as doctrine in almost all schools, public and private, around the world, usually in such a way as to rule out any divine activity in the origin of life, whether by creation or by theistic evolution. In Darwin Retried, MacBeth argues that if William Jennings Bryan had tried Darwinism on its merits instead of trying to defend his own variety of fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial would have been a disaster for the evolutionist position (see CHRISTIANITY TODAY, January 21, 1972, p. 26). One of the most remarkable and original books by an evangelical writer is Rachel H. King’s The Creation of Death and Life (Philosophical Library), which unfortunately has not received the attention it deserves. It is a thoroughgoing attempt to situate the biblical doctrine on such important subjects as creation, sin, and the future life in the scientific landscape as we know it today. She deals extensively with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that disorder is constantly increasing in the universe. King’s thesis is that this law makes naturalistic evolution unthinkable. Her alternative vision rivals Teilhard de Chardin’s in breadth but is far more biblical both in intention and in execution.

ROMAN CATHOLICISM The prolific Tübingen professor Hans Küng offers us a bombshell with Infallible? An Inquiry (Doubleday). His arguments are on a par with those of Ignaz von Döllinger against papal infallibility on the occasion of the First Vatican Council. Döllinger left the Roman church after the council, because he could not accept the papal claim. Küng seems determined to stay in, and although Catholics have called Infallible? a “Protestant book,” it seems unlikely that he will be disciplined for it. Küng seems to hold a process view of truth and to think that the rest of the church ought to do so as well. This means more than the traditional Catholic idea that doctrine develops, as expounded by Cardinal Newman, for according to Küng’s view, what the First Vatican Council proclaimed as true in 1870 is not to be understood as true today—except by the addition of enough qualifications to reverse its 1870 meaning. The ensuing controversy has been evaluated in The Infallibility Debate (Paulist), edited by John J. Kirvan, in which two Catholic essayists try to rationalize Küng’s departure from Catholic teaching as no departure, while a third Catholic finds his position Protestant and a Protestant finds it neither fish nor fowl. The dismay of the typical traditional Catholic at Küng and similar Catholic innovators is mirrored in John Eppstein’s Has the Catholic Church Gone Mad? (Arlington). Despite its sensationalistic title, this is a sober book, and makes informative reading for the Protestant who would like to understand how many and possibly most practicing Catholics feel about what is going on in their church today. The Paulist Press has also given us a highly favorable and articulate presentation of Catholic Pentecostalism by Donald L. Gelpi, Pentecostalism: A Theological Viewpoint. Gelpi, like Eppstein but unlike Küng, has secured an imprimatur for his book, which unfortunately does not say much about the points on which Pentecostalism would seem to challenge traditional Catholic doctrine and structure.

ETHICS The past year saw an impressive output of books on ethics, headed by an English translation of Danish professor Knud E. Løgstrup’s The Ethical Demand (Fortress). Løgstrup gives a prominent place in his book to modern novelists such as D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster. He is very hostile to prescribed norms in ethics, and considers “Christian ethics” impossible, for which reason he is said by Wingren (cf. above) to have a deficient view of the Creation order.

James M. Gustafson presents a series of essays in Christian Ethics and the Community (Pilgrim Press), assembled by Charles M. Sweezey to form a remarkably unified and balanced work, one that takes note of fully biblical ethical systems but generally favors a biblically influenced Christian humanism. More systematic and squarely based on biblical revelation is Norman Geisler’s Ethics: Alternatives and Issues (Zondervan), which uses contemporary situations (such as the Pueblo incident of 1968) and problems (pollution) to develop a full-fledged evangelical ethics.

A more ecumenical, modern-day casuistic handbook, Moral Issues and Christian Responses, edited by Paul T. Jersild and Dale A. Johnson (Holt, Rinehart and Winston), deals with the gamut of modern and traditional ethical dilemmas but offers no solid answers. The difference between the Catholic and the general Protestant approach to ethics is systematically examined by Roger Mehl in a brief but perceptive study, Catholic Ethics and Protestant Ethics (Westminster). New Trends in Moral Theology (Newman) by George M. Reagan is a Catholic work that moves away from prescriptive biblical ethics and natural law in an attempt to find a basis for conduct in a broadly based Christian humanism. James P. Smurl has given us Religious Ethics: A Systems Approach (Prentice-Hall), in which he discards the specificity of Christian ethics and tries to establish a common method and content for various ethical systems.

The most comprehensive Protestant work after Geisler’s is William Barclay, Ethics in a Permissive Society (Westminster). Simple, because it was originally presented on television, this book is generally faithful to biblical norms. It tries to make them understandable as the wise instructions of a loving Father instead of as the capricious commands of a tyrant, but it does not water them down. It is a little less explicit on some current topics such as sexual morality than one might wish. More systematic and including more individual topics is Bernard Ramm’s The Right, the Good, and the Happy (Word), written for people without an academic background in philosophy or ethics; it is valuable but short. Another evangelical writer, L. Harold DeWolf, has given us Responsible Freedom: Guidelines to Christian Action (Harper & Row), in which he works out general principles of moral decision and relates them to biblical and theological material.

The alternative Reformation or Revolution is treated at length by E. L. Hebden Taylor in his book of the same name, subtitled A Study of Modern Society in the Light of a Reformational and Scriptural Pluralism (Craig), a very thorough historical, philosophical, and theological analysis. The same problem is treated in simple terms by Harold O. J. Brown in Christianity and the Class Struggle (Arlington and Zondervan).

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