Theology

The closest thing to a systematic theology is the revision by John F. Walvoord of Major Bible Themes (Zondervan) by Lewis Sperry Chafer, whom Walvoord succeeded as president of Dallas Seminary. A work of current usefulness, despite the brevity of its treatment of traditional themes in theology such as Creation, Major Bible Themes is also of historical value because of its characteristic dispensational views. God’s Inerrant Word edited by John W. Montgomery (Bethany Fellowship) contains seminal essays in vigorous presentation and defense of the historic, orthodox view of Scripture.

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Several substantial works have appeared in this field. Norman Geisler’s Philosophy of Religion (Zondervan) is really a textbook on fundamental theological problems, such as religious experience, the knowledge of God and the “proofs” of his existence, religious language, and the problem of evil; it is straightforward, easily understood, and very valuable. Malcolm L. Diamond in Contemporary Philosophy and Religious Thought (McGraw-Hill) goes into greater detail than Geisler does, and has extended treatments of several thinkers: Rudolph Otto, Martin Buber, William James, Sören Kierkegaard, Rudolf Bultmann, and, in a whole section of the book, Tillich, whose work Diamond calls “the most comprehensive system [of religious thought] that has been introduced in the twentieth century,” without himself adopting it. W. Donald Hudson in A Philosophical Approach to Religion (Barnes and Noble) examines and supports the logical structure of religious belief and its objectivity. He deals with the attempts of several theologians of the secular—Bonhoeffer, Braithwaite, Van Buren, Tillich, and Cox—to meet the challenge, attempts that Hudson feels are inadequate. Frederick C. Copleston, S.J., in Religion and Philosophy (Barnes and Noble) explains and defends the discipline of metaphysics as “a way to the Absolute through the activity of rational reflection”; the book is a very useful if somewhat scholastic corrective to the analytic philosophers’ familiar attempt to dismiss metaphysics—and the rest of philosophy and religion—as meaningless.

The anthology Philosophy of Religion: Contemporary Perspectives edited by Norbert O. Schedler (Macmillan) contains representative selections from outstanding recent thinkers on the borderline between philosophy and religion, including both atheistic and religious existentialists. The somewhat larger Readings in the Philos ophy of Religion edited by Baruch A. Brody (Prentice-Hall) presents a much broader historical perspective, going back to Augustine, and illustrates the ways in which traditional Christians, as well as some others, have dealt with some of the recurrent problems of religious philosophy.

Charles H. Malik in The Wonder of Being (Word) gives a fresh presentation of the cosmological argument in a reasoned defense of biblical faith. More technically, in opposition to the familiar attacks of linguistic analysis on religious language and hence on the content it expresses, Basil Mitchell proclaims The Justification of Religious Belief (Seabury). That such books are still necessary is evident from William Hamilton’s pretentious attempt to reinflate secularistic, God-is-dead theology in a subjectivistic way, in On Taking God Out of the Dictionary (McGraw-Hill). Much more substantial, and clearly intended to undergird the meaningfulness of the philosophical-religious quest, is the impressive tome by Paul Weiss, Beyond All Appearances (Southern Illinois University Press), which unfortunately remains more idealistic than Christian despite the author’s position as a professor at Catholic University.

An ambitious project, somewhat in the spirit of C. S. Lewis, is Morton T. Kelsey’s Myth, History, and Faith: The Remythologizing of Christianity (Paulist). Kelsey explains the function and value of myth and sees Christianity as myth, in his special sense, and also as true. A rather poetic plea for a more responsible use of language in proclamation and liturgy is Robert Farrar Capon’s Hunting the Dixine Fox: Images and Mystery in Christian Faith

(Seabury). Two collections of essays by eminent Christian philosophers, generally in support of Christian teachings against the disintegrating skepticism of linguistic analysis, are Ian Ramsey, Christian Empiricism, edited by Jerry H. Gill, and Austin Farrer, Reflective Faith, edited by Charles C. Conti (both Eerdmans). Ramsey offers some useful thoughts on the validity of theological discourse, and Farrar presents some solid arguments for the reality of God.

Rounding off the works dealing with the now old arguments of linguistic analysis is the translation of an important new book by a Dutch Catholic thinker who has concentrated on the problem of revelation, Edward Cornelis Florentius Alfons Schillebeeckx, The Understanding of Faith: Interpretation and Criticism (Seabury). This short but substantial work offers an insightful appreciation of some of the positive aspects of linguistic analysis, while explicitly rejecting its usual conclusions. Schillebeeckx also grapples with the “new critical theory” of the Frankfurt school led by Jürgen Habermas. Inasmuch as Habermas’s theory is an attempt to understand society while promoting (revolutionary) liberation and has had considerable influence on theologians of similar inclinations, Schillebeeckx’s careful presentation and critique of the “new theory” is particularly useful today.

A valuable book that is hard to categorize is Wayne C. Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent

(University of Chicago); the author exposes the way in which modern cliches and practices in public and private debate on values undermine reason and logic and make it extremely difficult to arrive at truth or to appreciate genuine values. He makes specific suggestions for combatting these trends.

DOCTRINE Perhaps the English version of the first volume of Helmet Thielicke’s massive Der evangelische Glaube (1968), skillfully translated and edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. The Evangelical Faith, Volume I, Prologomena: The Relation of Theology to Modern Thought Forms (Eerdmans), should appear in the thinly represented opening section of systematics. Thielicke is familiar to North Americans as a major German theologian who is not a liberal and who offers trenchant criticisms of the programs of the existentialists and secularizers. This first volume of three shows Thielicke’s tremendous mastery of his material. Never one to follow the crowd, Thielicke creates a new distinction in theology, between “Cartesian” (ego-centered modernist theology) and a message-centered “Theology B,” which is rather conservative but shies away from the name. It suffers from Thielicke’s typical hesitation between a recognition of what is false in modern theology and the academically uncouth decision to condemn and separate oneself from it because it is false.

John Knox Press offers two brief surveys of Christian doctrine today: A. M. Hunter, Taking the Christian View, and Stephen Sykes, An Introduction to Christian Theology Today. Both authors are on the conservative side of the theological spectrum.

A Roman Catholic contribution in the same area, by contrast, can serve both as a concise, trenchant presentation of basic doctrine and as a persuasive apologetic for the traditional Catholic (and, in many areas, evangelical) position on a number of important issues: John D. Sheridan, The Hungry Sheep: Catholic Doctrine Restated

Against Contemporary Attacks (Arlington). Malcolm Furness, Vital Doctrines of the Faith (Eerdmans), is one of the best short presentations of historic Christian doctrines available. It deals with the doctrines of God, man, sin, salvation, church, ministry, sacraments, and the last things. Basically conservative, Furness’s handbook describes rather than promotes any specific denominational emphases. J. Rodman Williams, Ten Teachings (Creation House), presents relatively conservative answers in ten basic areas, including God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, salvation, and everlasting life, but has nothing on revelation, a crucial issue in current struggles. Karl E. Kreig, What to Believe? The Questions of the Christian Faith (Fortress), is a concise summary of popular liberal nostrums.

Claude Geffré addresses a different topic in A New Age in Theology: The Marriage of Faith and History and the De-Ghettoization of Christian Thought (Paulist), an optimistic view of the theological directions pursued by Pannenberg, Moltmann, and Metz, with their interest in history, the future, and politics. Geffré himself is unwilling to abandon the necessity of conversion, and recognizes no great threat in the secularistic orientation of some of the currents he discusses.

THEOLOGY PROPER The noted dogmatician and successor to Karl Barth in Basel, Heinrich Ott, has written God (John Knox). He attempts to elucidate what is valid in the existentialist approaches of Buber and Tillich but in the process abandons the historical Christian doctrine of the Trinity; his book serves as a good example of the difficulty a theologian encounters in attempting to show the continuing relevance of teachings that he really does not accept. Little better is Juan Luis Segundo, Our Idea of God, Volume III of his five-volume opus, A Theology For Artisans of a New Humanity (Orbis). With impressive erudition and a noteworthy feeling for people and their concerns, Segundo attempts to create a theology that will accomplish something like what Jürgen Habermas expects from his “new critical theory” in society. Lacking a stable foundation in biblical truth, Segundo combines valid insights with eccentric interpretations, generally resulting from his constriction of the biblical doctrine of salvation to some kind of “liberation” in history.

S. Paul Schilling, God Incognito (Abingdon), looks for evidence of God in the experience of psychologists, artists, et al., and attempts to meet the major objections to religious belief in this evocative way. Not without value as a corrective to skepticism, it still falls far short of articulating a biblical doctrine of the reality and presence of God. Similar, farther reaching, and less satisfactory in terms of biblical doctrine is Conrad Simonson, In Search of God (Pilgrim). Both of these works make it evident that modern man knows something is missing, but that neither is good at connecting the something they are seeking with the God of the Bible.

God Is With Us (Review and Herald) by Jack W. Provonsha, a noted Seventh-day Adventist scholar, is an attempt to surmount the modern tension between faith and reason by a fresh approach to natural theology. The author’s experience as a physician gives him great insight into the personal dilemmas that challenge and sometimes strengthen faith. Unfortunately, he has a rather superficial approach to the early church and patristic theology, and only faintly suggests several of the fundamental revealed doctrines that distinguish biblical Christian faith from liberalism, such as inspiration.

GOD THE SON Hans W. Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Fortress), deals with the texture of our subjective response to the proclamation of Jesus. Avoiding doctrinal assertions and approaching the theological implications of the kerygma in a very oblique way, Frei takes a very subjective approach and contributes more to understanding the psychology of belief than the doctrine of Christ. Does Jesus Make a Difference? edited by Thomas M. McFadden (Seabury), is a series of contributions by Roman Catholic scholars and gives insight into the doctrinal ferment of Catholicism today. Jesus: Inspiring and Disturbing Presence by Marinus de Jonge (Abingdon) is a well-done, relatively conservative attempt to reaffirm the traditional understanding of Jesus’ person and work over against the tendencies of liberalism and secularism, though the author prefers to label these “weak” rather than wrong.

Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Harper and Row), appears to be a reflective return to thinking about the original work of Christ in the light of the author’s frustration at the failure of the “theology of liberation” to make significant progress in producing general “salvation,” seen as political liberation. Like so much that is written by people of Moltmann’s stature, it is brilliant but unreliable, indeed fundamentally unsound; there is much in it that the evangelical should take seriously, and yet it is characterized by what seems a perverse refusal to accept the authoritative biblical witness without first subjecting it to existentialist and other historically conditioned mutations. The same author’s The Gospel of Liberation (Word) is a collection of talks and shows how a theologian can preach sermons that are far more biblical than his theories ought to allow.

THE HOLY SPIRIT The doctrine and work of the Holy Spirit received less attention this year than last, but two books more than make up for a dozen lesser works. William Fitch in The Ministry of the Holy Spirit (Zondervan) attempts to help evangelicals overcome their tendency to a “unitarianism of the Son” by relating the biblical doctrine of the person and work of the Spirit to daily individual and congregational life and experience. The sections on the gifts of the Spirit are helpful to those sympathetic to the author’s critical but not hostile approach to Pentecostalism and neo-Pentecostalism. Charles W. Carter, The Person and Ministry of the Holy Spirit: A Wesleyan Perspective (Baker) is equally biblical and evangelical. Based in the Wesleyan Holiness (non-tongues) tradition, Carter in this larger work goes into much greater biblical and historical depth than Fitch, and has correspondingly less to say about the Christian and the Church today. Each of these books is a major contribution.

ESCHATOLOGY Not surprisingly in light of the current world situation, there are several books on the Last Things. Concerned at the false information about the future given through astrology and by occultists, James Montgomery Boice give us his view of The Last and Future World (Zondervan), a clear exposition of pretribulationalist premillennialism without dispensational adumbrations. A well-written, thorough, dispensational treatment not merely of eschatological prophecies but of prophecy in general is Paul Lee Tan, The Interpretation of Prophecy (BMH Books). The well-known Lutheran theologian Carl E. Braaten offers an example of the liberal theologian’s concern for eschatology mentioned by Boice in the work cited above in Eschatology and Ethics: Essays on the Theology and Ethics of the Kingdom of God (Augsburg). Braaten really deals more with the currently popular concept of hope than with a literally understood personal return of Christ.

ANTHROPOLOGY The Origin and Destiny of Man by Francis Nigel Lee (Presbyterian and Reformed) is brief but thorough and entirely biblical. In view of the prevalent tendency to make man the starting point of all our thinking, even religious, without knowing who or what man is, Lee’s book is highly valuable. In The Problems of Being Human (Judson) Lloyd J. Averill professes his Christian commitment but nevertheless deals far more with man’s existential situation as defined by art, sociology, and politics than with what God tells us about our nature and destiny.

Productive Jürgen Moltmann in Man: Christian Anthropology in the Conflicts of the Present (Fortress) provides much evocative imagery but remains mired in his merely tentative identification of the Son of Man as the Only-begotten of the Father, his explicit if unfounded universalism, and his use of God not exclusively but largely as a key-word to unravel the cryptogram of man’s apparent meaningless. The ethical implications he draws from his unfortunately fragmentary doctrines of God and man are nevertheless valuable. The naïve optimism of Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., in The Human Imperative: A Challenge For the Year 2000 (Yale) is suggested by this educator-government commissioner’s evaluation of “ecumenism” (including all world religions) as one of the “strongest” among the “most important movements” for mankind today.

Man’s worldly end is dealt with in two identically titled books, Richard Wolff, The Last Enemy (Canon), and Richard W. Doss, The Last Enemy: A Christian Understanding of Death (Harper & Row). Wolff deals briefly but cogently with the sharp edges of death in human experience and offers a clear and biblical statement of the Christian answer to death’s questions, as well as some practical psychological advice for dealing with the problems attending it. Doss, by contrast, is more literary and does not distinguish clearly between biblically warranted hope and poetic speculation. His book would be more useful for introducing outsiders to the Christian framework than for instructing believing Christians in sound teaching. Norman Cousins, The Celebration of Life: A Dialogue on Immortality and Infinity (Harper & Row) is poetic pantheism. Osborn Segerber, Jr., The Immortality Factor (Dutton), is about possibilities and consequences of the indefinite prolongation of physical life.

OTHER DOCTRINES The continuing development of the implications of Herman Dooyeweerd’s philosophy by his Toronto-based admirers (a development that many claim distorts Dooyeweerd’s basic intent) has now promoted a response from Reformed thinkers who fear that this trend is downgrading the authority of propositional biblical revelation: Harry L. Downs, Power-word and Text-word in Recent Reformed Thought, and Robert A. Morey, The Dooyeweerdian Concept of the Word of God (both Presbyterian and Reformed). Morey’s book is valuable as a warning, while Downs’s longer treatment will be helpful to the aficionado. John P. Newport and William Cannon, Why Christians Fight Over the Bible (Nelson), is an astonishingly balanced presentation of the issues and differences between the various forms of liberalism on the one hand and conservatism and the “New Evangelicals” on the other, and also illuminates some of the tensions between traditional conservatives and the “New Evangelicals.”

Robert Glenn Gromacki, The Virgin Birth (Nelson), is an excellent restatement of the historic Christian doctrine, a worthy successor to J. Gresham Machen’s classic work on the topic. Gromacki argues that the doctrine is not merely true but that attitudes toward it are critical indicators of the soundness of one’s basic theological position. Secure Forever by Howard Barker (Loizeaux) is a well-written, perceptive presentation of the arguments in favor of the doctrine of eternal security and of replies to the major objections against it. Richard A. Seymour, All About Repentance (Harvest House), is really a well-done evangelistic appeal that incidentally deals with the biblical doctrine of repentance. Turning to what is renounced in repentance, Catholic sociologist Andrew M. Greely examines The Devil, You Say! Man and His Personal Devils and Angels (Doubleday). Somewhat comparable to De Rougemont’s little classic The Devil’s Share, Greeley’s book deals well with the structural, sociological, and intellectual concretizations of the demonic in our world but unwisely dismisses the personal power of Satan and the reality of the occult with idle jesting.

Understanding the Kingdom of God, a posthumously published work of one of the most eminent contemporary Methodist theologians, Georgia Harkness (Abingdon), is a beautifully written statement of what might be called doctrinally nostalgic liberalism, for the author believes in the importance and “value” of doctrines related to the theme of the kingdom, including the personal return of Christ, without accepting them as objectively true. A much more satisfactory contribution is that of John W. Wenham, The Goodness of God (InterVarsity). Wenham deals skillfully with some of the traditional issues in apologetics and ethics, such as the fate of the heathen. A rather interesting and certainly timely little work is Udo Middelmann, Pro-Existence: The Place of Man in the Circle of Reality (InterVarsity). An associate of Francis Schaeffer, Middelmann deals with work, property, and community in a positive and perceptive way, and offers a creative rebuttal to pantheistic and statist-socialist tendencies that are gaining ground among Christians.

APOLOGETICS This category outdoes the others in number of titles this year. Gordon R. Lewis has produced another workbook, a first-rate tool for study and discussion groups, Judge For Yourself (For Those Who Are Tired of Being Told What to Think): A Workbook on Contemporary Challenges to Christian Faith (InterVarsity). Thomas Howard’s Once Upon a Time, God … (Holman) is a very good presentation, in informal dialogue fashion, of some of the best answers to familiar religious questions. Henry M. Morris, familiar for his defense of biblical authority with respect to Creation and the Deluge, offers Many Infallible Proofs (Creation-Life), a very valuable handbook in defense of biblical inerrancy. Oliver R. Barclay, in Reasons for Faith (InterVarsity) argues the same case equally cogently, but along rather different lines. Cosmological and scientific problems are evoked, but Barclay devotes more attention to moral and psychological objections and suggests effective ways of meeting them. Briefer but similar in tone and direction is Rheinallt Nantlais Williams, Faith, Facts, History, Science and How They Fit Together (Tyndale), arguing for the unity of knowledge, its compatibility with Christian doctrine, and the Christian’s title to assurance.

Richard L. Purtill, Reason to Believe (Eerdmans), deals chiefly with the linguistic and moral objections to Christian belief. Help Thou My Unbelief by Manford George Gutzke (Nelson) is apologetic in the sense that it chronicles, with appropriate argument, the author’s pilgrimage from atheism to a conservative, evangelical faith. Francis M. Tyrrell, Man: Believer and Unbeliever(Alba), is a remarkably comprehensive study of the problem of belief in the modern world, vis-a-vis secularistic humanism, and gives a detailed Christian anthropology from the author’s Roman Catholic perspective. He attempts, boldly if unconvincingly, to preserve the normative status of Christian revelation while finding truth in all faith and universalistically embracing all mankind in God’s plan of redemption.

Arthur E. Travis, Where on Earth Is Heaven? Biblical Answers to Questions About Heaven, Time, and Eternity (Broadman) is a good general apology but lacks a treatment of inspiration and authority. Robert McAfee Brown, Is Faith Obsolete? (Westminster), does not answer the question with any relevance for evangelicals inasmuch as he deals not with the historic Christian faith but with modern surrogates. The same reduction of faith from what it means in biblical terms to a vague attitude towards life characterizes Eugene C. Kennedy’s Believing: The Nature of Belief and Its Role in Our Lives (Doubleday).

Moving from such vague non-faith to exaggerations of faith we have former priest Charles Davis’s Temptations of Religion (Harper and Row), in which the author’s often apt warnings against elements of arrogance and self-righteousness in religion do not adequately distinguish in their criticism between the distortions of faith and the type of real Christian faith for which he longs.

Donald M. MacKay, The Clock Work Image (InterVarsity), is an ambitious attempt to resolve the apparent conflict between faith and science by stressing the complementarity of mechanistic and theological explanations and attacking the “nothing-buttery” that thinks that understanding how a mechanism works eliminates the need to ask its origin or ultimate purpose. Werner Schaaffs, Theology, Physics, and Miracles (Canon), is somewhat similar. Schaaffs, a noted physicist who believes that the biblical reports of miracles are historically true, suggests complementary natural scientific interpretations of signs and wonders performed by God in an effort to show that believing in them does not necessarily mean thinking that the “laws of nature” were set aside.

Diogenes Allen, Finding Our Father

(John Knox), is a well-written presentation of some basic Christian truths, including love, death, and the Resurrection, but is a bit evasive of questions of historicity. James Hitchcock, The Recovery of the Sacred (Seabury), is essentially a conservative case against secularism in theology and worship, strongly centered on the deterioration of the Roman Catholic liturgy in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Richard Holloway, New Vision of Glory

(Seabury), reaffirms the validity of the Christian vision in the light of the Resurrection, but in so doing does not deal with skeptical objections.

Francis and Edith Schaeffer of L’Abri have written Everybody Can Know (Tyndale), a remarkable kind of apologetic work for family reading. Those who know the Schaeffers’ approach will not expect them to have watered down the seriousness of man’s predicaments nor of God’s solutions, and they have not; nevertheless, the book is understandable by sub-teens. Francis A. Schaeffer’s No Little People (InterVarsity), is a collection of sermons centering on the theme that the people and places God chooses are not insignificant.

Ian G. Barbour, Myths, Models, and Paradigms (Harper & Row), is an interesting but inconclusive attempt to blend a concern for truth with the conception of religious statements as (somehow valid) models and paradigms. Marshall and Sandra Hall in The Truth: God or Evolution (Craig) offer a well-done, impressive attack against the doctrine of evolution that is unfortunately now part of our cultural orthodoxy. Juan Luis Segundo, Evolution and Guilt, which is Volume 5 of A Theology For Artisans of a New Humanity (Orbis), tries unsuccessfully to preserve the biblical doctrine of sin in a universe seen as the product of a virtually mechanistic evolution.

MISCELLANEOUS TOPICS David L. Miller, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses (Harper & Row), is a cunning and perverse attempt to lure fallen-away Christendom back into an antique and deceptive dream no longer really accessible even to the imagination, except for those sustained by the ample livings of an effete affluence that can afford to subsidize the theoretical trivialization of all reality. Truth and Dialogue in World Religions edited by John Hick (Westminster), contains articles by first-rate scholars in the field of comparative religions, most of whom see a measure of truth in everything, and is more helpful in illustrating the limitations of this method than in arriving at any trustworthy approximation of truth. The dialogue volume Speaking of God Today: Jews and Lutherans in Conversation edited by Paul D. Opsahl and Marc H. Tanenbaum (Fortress) contains some interesting essays and is enlightening on the approach of Jewish theology to grace; and at least one Lutheran contributor demands, mildly but definitely, the proclamation of the Gospel to the Jews. The famed Jesuit authority on Buddhism, Heinrich Dumoulin, gives us Christianity Meets Buddhism (Open Court), very helpful for the understanding and appreciation of Buddhism, but dismal in its implications for world evangelism. By contrast, Dick Hillis in Is There Really Only ‘One’ Way? (Vision) clearly asserts the necessity of belief in Christ.

The strange book by Singapore-based Japanese Protestant theologian Kosuke Koyama, Waterbuffalo Theology (Orbis), is a disorganized but extremely interesting attempt to relate Christian doctrine and Western Christian theology to Asia, and is much more evangelistic in its intent than Dumoulin. Harvey Seifert, Reality and Ecstacy: A Religion For the 21st Century (Westminster), is a nice try.

INDIVIDUAL THINKERS In Biography as Theology: How Life Stories Can Remake Today’s Theology (Abingdon), James William McClendon, Jr., has hit upon a very provocative theme but unfortunately has chosen ambivalent examples with which to work. Sharon Maclsaac, Freud and Original Sin (Paulist), has eighty-eight pages in appreciative summary of Freud compared to thirty on original sin, which Maclsaac sees as symbolic rather than historic. Joseph Allen Matter, Love, Altruism, and World Crisis: The Challenge of Pitirim Sorokin (Nelson-Hall), is a good survey of the work of one of the greatest sociologists, one who appreciated Christianity in a rather Tolstoi-like fashion but who always attempted to preserve his detachment.

John W. Robbins, Answer to Ayn Rand: A Critique of the Philosophy of Objectivism (Robbins [P.O. Box 4028, Arlington, Va. 22204]) is a long-over-due analysis from a biblical perspective of the Mary Baker Eddy of the objectivist movement. Because Ayn Rand’s particular variety of individualistic humanism, often called libertarianism, makes common cause with Christian conservatism at many points while denying and seeking to overthrow its basic convictions, this book is significant for all Christians interested in economic, political, and social structures. Tibor R. Machan, The Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner (Arlington), is a very important analysis of a thinker and a school of thought whose insidious influence is more dangerous and already more influential than we like to think. Unfortunately Machan’s critique does not deal with the religious aspects of the apostate vision behind Skinner’s explicit teachings.

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