The Making of Many Books

Commenting on Ecclesiastes’ curtain speech about “pleasing words” and “words of truth,” G. S. Hedry says: “In the ancient world authorship was held of small account, so small indeed that the names of many authors of antiquity have been lost. The question men asked of a book was not ‘Who wrote it?’ but ‘What does it say?,’ and there was no need for an author to make a profession of modesty, since his work was not regarded as a personal achievement or a feat of virtuosity” (The New Bible Commentary Revised, D. Guthrie and J. A. Motyer, eds., 1970, p. 578). While that observation says less than some of us would say about the biblical writers, it nonetheless holds a powerful message for many of the rest of us.

For all that, I shall risk a few reminiscences and venture some comments on evangelical literary production.

Some thirty years ago, the only book this converted journalist had written was A Doorway to Heaven, a readable work on the Pacific Garden Mission now long out of print after some eleven editions. An evangelical publisher telephoned me from his Hawaii vacation spot to offer a $10,000 advance royalty if I would write a newspaperish biography of Jesus. The invitation rather stunned me. Who was I, I mused, to write a life of Jesus? Besides, the thought of thus turning Christian realities into a profit bothered me. My negative decision at that time helped to reinforce a growing determination to devote my writing energies to solid advancement of the cause of biblical truth.

When I wrote Remaking the Modern Mind I soon learned that many believers who have a lively evangelistic interest in Christianity do not at the same time have serious intellectual propensities. Even a fellow college alumnus wrote the alumni office that he had read Remaking twice but still couldn’t figure out what I was saying. By contrast, when in New Delhi I was covering the World Council of Churches assembly, a Christian leader sought me out for a word of personal thanks. “In my university studies my Christian faith was under heavy pressure,” he said, “and I want to thank you for the book that held me steady.”

In recent days a publisher has issued the first two of my four volumes on God, Revelation and Authority, themes of essential and even of supreme importance in theology today. If, God helping me, I complete the total effort by 1980, I will consider the four volumes to be my final contribution to the evangelical witness, unless I subsequently yield to pressures to write also a candid autobiography entitled Confessions of a Nonconformist.

Few readers, least of all those not at home in serious reflective thought, sense the toll in time and energy that serious writing takes—the long hours, the impact on family life, the self-restricted social opportunities, the pre-empted weekends and vacations, the ceaseless reading to stay abreast, the tedious editing and re-editing (in which I have providentially had the help of a gifted wife). My own library of about 10,000 volumes, now being dismantled and contributed piecemeal to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, has provided a costly but invaluable and indispensable insight into the best minds of the ages.

Ours is not a time when American Christianity has been intellectually strong. Neo-orthodox theology deliberately took an anti-conceptual stance and, along with existential theology, rejected cognitive knowledge of the invisible world. Even the older rationalistic modernist theology in time tilted more and more toward anti-intellectualism. Fundamentalism, to be sure, emphasized the indispensability of revealed doctrines, but it pursued theology mainly in an evangelistic context and largely ignored the task of earnest philosophical confrontation. Technically oriented scholars were the exception, and one can be grateful for Gordon H. Clark, Cornelius Van Til, Edward John Carnell, and others who in their evangelical concerns interacted with the contemporary theological revolt. None of the evangelical writers here at home gained the literary power, reading audience, and wide impact of C. S. Lewis, though D. Elton Trueblood, espousing a kind of evangelical rational theism, alternated serious and popular works with considerable literary flair. Among British evangelicals, relatively few engaged in serious philosophical-theological writing; most of them lent their energies instead to biblical studies.

Many American evangelicals tend to be suspicious of higher learning and measure Christian credibility only by the yardstick of conversion. Various disconcerting signals of evangelical weakness have been the forfeiture of Christian university possibilities; the move toward an evangelical doctorate only in the context of missionary concerns; the fact that most significant philosophical contributions now come mainly from evangelical scholars teaching on secular university faculties (Alvin Plantinga at Calvin is a noteworthy exception); the limited scholarship support for serious evangelical graduate study and research effort; and reader interest among evangelicals in primarily intellectually undemanding literature.

The brighter side of the picture over the past generation is the appearance and growing demand for theological symposiums, Bible commentary series, modest encyclopedia efforts, theological and ethics dictionaries, and a few works in the area of biblical theology. The market for these works is largely among ministers and seminarians, however. Lay men and women have yet to share widely in an intellectual theological awakening; their usual concerns are stimulated mainly by polemical works, and some of their pastors set little example in reading and discussing serious religious literature. Among some Christian college students, however, we see a gratifying upturn of interest in intellectually rewarding evangelical books; this parallels what is happening in the religion departments of some secular universities. Serious evangelical students are realizing that neglect of the rational foundations of Christian theism and failure to confront the radically secular, positivist, and existential alternatives to biblical theology will only make less and less credible their own faith in the self-revealed God.

In a time of trouble the Apostle Paul solicited his “cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments” (2 Tim. 4:13). He did not, however, reserve his reading for the hours of critical need only. He was versed most deeply in Scripture, as we all need to be. But he was also a well and broadly read man, qualified to enter into dialogue with the unbelieving world of his day, to unmask its misconceptions, and to present a convincingly relevant alternative.

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