Page 6385 – Christianity Today (2024)

All reports evaluate the year just ended as one of tremendous activity in the publishing world. Both secular and religious fields reflected a great output of titles and banner sales of books.

Among evangelical Protestants, the Christian Booksellers Association convention in Grand Rapids saw record attendance and interest, and publishers talked of larger editions and a new high for in-print totals.

Religious books shared in trends common to the secular publishing world, such as television-inspired interest in books by celebrities, continuing attention to news headline-related subjects, and large numbers of titles devoted to the self-help and how-to, and the personal improvement formulas. The religious field also registered a gain in heavier or more serious titles, commentaries, new versions of Scripture, and scholarly symposia, while fiction and juvenile reading continued to reflect long-standing weaknesses.

The list of theological works was a strong one, perhaps the strongest in recent years in volumes of distinctly evangelical character. Sherwood Wirt’s Crusade at the Golden Gate and Russell Hitt’s Jungle Pilot sold more than 25,000 copies. The symposium on Revelation and the Bible already is in 30,000 homes despite efforts of some liberals to demean it, and a British edition has appeared. Also encouraging is the fact that evangelical works are appearing under “new” imprints such as Oxford, Harpers, Westminster.

There was a day when it would have been extremely difficult to list 25 creditable evangelical books published within a year’s time, but when CHRISTIANITY TODAY named its “Choice Evangelical Books of 1959” (p. 17), a wealth of worthy titles was available. Books of sermons and several theological works of real stature were perforce omitted. This evidence of evangelical advance in the world of books is heartening.

While prosperity seemed to be smiling on publishers, booksellers, and certain evangelical writers, a rash of self-criticism evidenced itself in writers’ conferences and evangelical journals. Editorials appeared commenting on the decline of good reading and the cultured unrelatedness of evangelicals. Panel discussions on the cultural lag in Christian publishing gave evidence of increasing awareness of deficiencies. An editorial by Dr. A. W. Tozer in Alliance Witness was reprinted by several magazines, and others picked up the same theme. Deploring the poor reading habits of most evangelical Christians in this country and the output of mediocre stuff by many evangelical writers, Tozer—in a rather harsh judgment—held it “hardly too much to say that illiterate religious literature has now become the earmark of evangelicalism.”

Whether this wave of critical awareness inaugurates an improvement toward a higher quality of writing, or merely a preoccupation with the problem, remains to be seen. Awareness of deficiencies is essential but in itself offers no real solution. The problem remains, into 1960 and beyond, unless skilled writing becomes a serious concern and a genuine goal. Too long have evangelical Christian circles evaded a striving for perfection in literary expression as well as for excellence in content. This lack has not gone unobserved even among secular writers. Sydney Harris in his “Strictly Personal” syndicated column recently observed (Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Nov. 23): “It is the religious manuscripts, especially, that are the most painful to look at.… The amateurs feel strongly about the subject, and they assume that strong feelings make strong writing, but such is not always the case.… Most of these aspiring authors are trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly … and untalented. Their fine characters and good intentions gleam from every page; and so does their lack of writing ability.…” Perhaps nowhere more than in this world of literary expression have evangelicals shown greater allegiance to the prevailing American cult of mediocrity.

True, some improvement may be noted in religious non-fiction in the last several years. But alongside the encouraging signs, a dearth of good copy remains in many areas. Good religious fiction, in the main, is noteworthy for its absence, and while more material of a wholesome variety has appeared for teen-agers, good books for the eight-to-twelve-year-old bracket appear to be a casualty of TV thrillers. Even here, as in all classifications, religious publishing could stand a good spurt of competition in keen writing, the sort of spur that would send quality soaring, through the publishers’ opportunity to be discerningly selective in the choice of manuscripts for publication.

One point that often rises to the surface in discussions with religious publishers and booksellers is the seeming unwillingness of the Christian reading public to pay sufficient prices for quality books. The religious book market—particularly that portion of it called evangelical or conservative—has a reputation for being a “cheap” market. Books in similar categories, especially juveniles and devotionals, generally sell for double or more in the secular world. If this is so, this price barrier in itself is a severe stricture on the production and publication of quality material. Such cultural barriers can be overcome only by a long process of education, a training from childhood up in the real values of good books and good reading. At the same time, on the higher levels of secondary school and college, we shall need to encourage serious dedication to Christian writing as an art, both as avocation and career. For until the literary pursuit gains the status of an art that deserves and demands the highest training, application, skill, dedication, and discipline, we shall not encourage great writing, and the output of the presses will not achieve better quality—even though they may attain increases in circulation as in the year just past.

In certain areas, especially in respect to theological subjects, there has been an improvement, reflected in the annual summaries elsewhere in this issue. This is all to the good. But the evangelical picture retains a need, within the near future, for something akin to the university presses for the issuance of scholarly works in limited editions for libraries and serious students. The output of a Christian university press need not necessarily be limited to theological and critical works. Establishment and endowment of such a publishing venture might do more than any other single development to inspire and raise the level of quality writing in the evangelical camp. It would raise goals and standards for others, and set an example for private and other institutional publishers. It could mark the beginning of a new era in evangelical publishing in this country and in the whole Christian world.

In broader perspective: Not in three decades have there been more alluring opportunities for the expression of religious and moral convictions. In this climate capable and discriminating evangelical thinkers and writers should respond with growing enthusiasm. Great days are ahead for religion in the world of books.

WILL DAILY NEWSPAPERS YIELD TO ROMAN PROPAGANDA DRIVE?

A cleverly-written article in the Catholic Home Messenger gives advice on “How to Write a Letter to a Newspaper Editor.” It suggests among other things that appeals should be made to the editor’s vanity, and adds that the writer should not necessarily identify himself as a clergyman or as a Roman Catholic. The author explains that the object in view is not to make the daily newspapers of our country Roman Catholic. “We are only concerned,” he writes, “that the changes (which the letters seek to bring about) conform to Catholic principles.”

Letter writing is a free exercise of the citizenry of our land, and within legal limits is above criticism. One wonders, however, if newspaper editors are aware of the intensive campaigns being undertaken in our time by groups within the Roman church seeking national conformity to the teachings of the hierarchy.

“Maybe Catholics fail to realize what one suggestion can do,” says the author, Russell L. Faist. “Letters from readers have done marvelous things to newspapers. They have stopped serials in the middle of publication; they have caused editors to refuse half pages of advertising; they have teased editors into taking a second look at national and international figures.”

If, as he urges, letters to editors deal with questions of “fairness, unselfishness and suitability,” little fault can be found. Actual conditions, however, are quite otherwise. Pressure on newspaper editors from Roman Catholic sources is lopsidedly religious in nature. “Is the news unfavorable to Romanism? Does the Church appear to be something less than the ‘one true Church’? Is its personnel seen as anything but noble and heroic? Are its activities described in any terms other than altruistic, even when (as in Colombia) rival houses of worship are burned and innocent people are killed? Do people ever walk out of its ranks? Can I afford to print the truth?” These are the questions that Romanism subtly wants the editors to consider along with such matters as “fairness, unselfishness and suitability.” These are the issues that affect subscriptions and advertising revenue.

Certainly there is a place for letters to the editor, and we can join with our Roman Catholic friends in protesting the immorality that is constantly trying to invade our family newspapers. We need further to bear our witness to the truth as it is in Jesus Christ by speaking up in defense of the Christian faith. But the whole trend of our time—to turn the house of God into a lobby group or letter writing organization for political and social action, and to retool the Church of Jesus Christ so that its main thrust is as a power bloc instead of a beacon and herald—is a travesty of the Gospel. Churches have a right to urge their constituents to exercise responsible citizenship. But what standard will the Church use in evaluating the issues of the day? If the Christian conscience of the laity is stirred to trust social reform alone, and not spiritual regeneration as the primary Christian dynamism for the renewal of society, why bother with the adjective “Christian”?

We need to pray earnestly for the newspaper editors of our nation. We need to beseech our Heavenly Father that they be converted to genuine faith in him, and that they be filled by his Spirit with such godly confidence that they cannot be swayed from truth and freedom of the press by any pressure group, whether religious or nonreligious.

BARTH AMONG THE MIND-CHANGERS: SOME UNRESOLVED ISSUES

From time to time Karl Barth has penned brief reviews of his own theological position and perspective, the last in this series in a recent issue of The Christian Century. Naturally, too much importance is not to be attached to a report which Barth himself regards as little more than a trifle. Nor shall we find much light on the basic issues that concerned him 30 years ago and therefore on the underlying principles of the Church Dogmatics. On the other hand, the actual impressions and intentions of Barth as stated by Barth have a particular value, especially since he stands among the “mind-changers” as a champion of special divine revelation.

A great part of this latest review is taken up with Barth’s well-known if not so easily understood attitude to the East-West political cleavage and conflict. It might be thought that this outlook discloses a basic strain of Swiss neutralism possible only in a country artificially isolated from the strains and stresses of other powers. Yet the Swiss generally do not follow this line of approach, and it may be that, in spite of his attempts at understanding, Barth is guilty of a certain naiveté in relation to the policies and dominating principles of the Kremlin. On the other hand, Christians in the Western world should be impelled from time to time to search their own consciences, not so much in regard to the basic rightness of their cause, but certainly in relation to the way in which they represent it, and more particularly in relation to the over-easy identification of everything in the Western world itself with Christian truth and practice. An element of prophetic challenge may be found here, one which gains no little point from the threatening signs that German nationalism needs little encouragement to rear its ugly head for the third time this unhappy century.

Our main interest lies in the remarks concerning the Dogmatics as Barth’s major theological enterprise. He confirms the fact that in its later stages the Dogmatics has become in large measure a refutation of Bultmannism, in which Barth himself finds a new version of the older liberalism fostered by Schleiermacher, and more specifically an example of the evils of enslaving theology to a dominant existentialist interpretation. The basic problem for evangelicals is whether Barth himself does or does not break free in effect from the neo-liberalism which he finds in Bultmann. Not a few evangelical writers feel that, while he may not subjectivize the Gospel as Bultmann finally does, he sets it in a sphere of transcendence which breaks its contact with true history and thus deprives it of genuine objectivity. If this is true, the Dogmatics is vitiated from the outset and must finally be adjudged a liberal work in spite of its express intention and the apparently good points or passages to be found in it. On the other hand, some contend that there is an intrinsic improbability in this reading in view of Barth’s explicit aim and the fact that Barth himself dismisses as misconceived caricatures the various representations of this kind, usually drawn for the most part from his earlier writings.

Unfortunately his latest self review gives little help in deciding this issue. At most, we are given one or two very indirect indications that may help us to view the matter as Barth himself sees it. First, he reiterates strongly his own desire that theology should be emancipated from all philosophical domination, whether existentialist or historico-critical, or for that matter Kantian. Hence there can be no doubt as to his own intention. Second, he does not find much serious understanding of his work in the Protestant world, whether orthodox, neo-orthodox, or liberal. Indeed, apart from isolated studies such as that of Berkouwer, he sees the greatest critical and even positive interest and appreciation among Roman Catholic dogmaticians, who apparently take him at his face value and are not on the lookout for mysterious transmutations. Finally, he is amused that in so many books about his theology he comes across hypotheses from which he learns more about himself than “he ever dared dream.”

This does not amount to very much in fact. It is all allusive and indirect. It contains no explanation of issues that arouse apprehension. It does not point us to the basis of Barth’s objectivity, nor clarify his interpretation of history, nor establish his interrelating of the objective authority of Scripture with its not so clearly objective inspiration as he seems to understand it. It does not remove the possibility that Barth may be mistaken as to his own presumed fulfillment of what is no doubt his sincere aim. The most that can be said is that Barth seems to have a picture of himself and his theology rather different from that of many of the orthodox expositors even of his Dogmatics. Elementary fairness demands that this be given serious consideration as the basis of understanding, although an author is not always the best judge of his own work. It may prove that there are serious defects as well as good qualities in the picture, as Roman Catholics from their own angle do not hesitate to maintain. It is important, however, that the evangelical as well as the Roman response to Barth should be concerned with these genuine rather than perhaps illusory defects and qualities. For in this way, as Berkouwer’s approach to Barth suggests, the path is opened to fruitful interchange which may lead, not merely to clearing up misunderstandings, but to putting right the defects and harnessing significant emphases to the service of biblical truth and evangelical witness.

FAITH AND THE WORD OF GOD

We do not believe there has ever been a time when Christians needed more help than now. There is a raging tide against faith in a completely trustworthy and authoritative Bible, and this is having a devastating effect.

The consequences are not primarily in the areas of culture or ethics, or even sociology and politics. The devastation has to do with spiritual power—that ability to confront sinners with their need of a Saviour and to lead them to repentance and conversion. It has to do with the spiritual power necessary to lead men to the Word of God for strength and wisdom for daily living. The concern is over preaching and teaching which brings a Scripture-based confidence for today and an assured hope for the life beyond the grave.

Right now we are reaping the harvest of attacks on the integrity of the Scriptures which began in Germany a century ago. In institution after institution, the chair of Bible is now occupied by men who have capitulated either to the older, higher critical viewpoint of the Scriptures, or to the more recent deviation from faith in the complete trustworthiness of the Bible, known as Neo-orthodoxy. There are, of course, notable exceptions, and for these we are deeply thankful.

Those who hold the higher critical or neo-orthodox viewpoints of Scripture deny the accuracy and validity of the Bible on a rational basis. But in the more popular concept we find something very different: Man has superimposed upon the authority of the Word of God the authority of the human interpreter, so that revelation as a fait accompli becomes revelation only when acknowledged to be such by the human interpreter of the Word. We of course recognize that divine revelation becomes operative in the life of the individual only as he hears and acts on that revelation.

The point is that this act of obedience on the part of man does not validate revelation, for God’s revelation is valid regardless of what man may do with it. To equate obedience to God’s revealed truth with that truth itself is to becloud the issue.

The words of Paul as found in Romans 3:3, 4, are pertinent: “For what if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect? God forbid: yea, let God be true, but every man a liar; as it is written, That thou mightest be justified in thy sayings, and mightest overcome when thou art judged.”

Old-line higher criticism, said by some to be discredited today, is far more alive than many think. The old rationalism has been largely supplanted by neo-orthodoxy, it is true. But this welcome shift to the theological right is far from adequate, for its destructive effect is a demonstrable fact. Wherever human speculation is permitted to take the place of divine revelation, the way is open for interpretations contrary to that revelation.

An overwhelming majority of seminary students are now being subjected to this new philosophy of inspiration. The bold affirmation, “Thus saith the Lord,” has been muted. The voice of authority has been supplanted by the expression of opinions. We have lost the power of God’s Word for us in the din of human speculation. Power from entirely too many pulpits rises no higher than the leading intellects of the day.

This is an appeal, therefore, to young ministers. The question to them is, do you have the power of God’s Holy Spirit resting on you when you go into the pulpit? Are you seeing souls saved and lives transformed through your ministry? If you are, thank God and go forward.

If not, the writer would suggest a soul-searching inquest into the death of spiritual power. The point at which you no longer believed in the complete integrity and authority of the Word of God may have been your departure. Or it may have been at some time in life when you did not surrender motives, habits, and other activities to the searching and cleansing of the Holy Spirit.

There is on every hand today a raging tide, a drift against which Christians must stand. The faithfulness of God, the reliability and comfort of the Holy Bible, the consistent testimony of Spirit-directed lives are all a part of effective witnessing for our Saviour. Against these bulwarks of the faith, Satan is waging an unending warfare with active and effective devices.

History indicates that the spiritual witness of the Church has always been as strong as the faith that held the integrity and authority of the Holy Scriptures and lives that were consistent with that faith.

Christians should regard as suspect every attempt to undermine faith in the Bible. They should ask those who have substituted human speculation for divine revelation, or who speak knowingly of the more recent findings of modern scholarship, whether by their standards we have a Book which contains the Word of God, or whether in the Holy Scriptures we have in fact the Written Word of God?

There is a tremendous difference in the two approaches.

With one we have an anchor and a chain which can withstand every tide of unbelief. The other is sustained only by links of human opinion, reasoning and speculation—and they cannot hold.

We live in a day of scientific experimentation and achievement, a day when theories are being tested and facts determined. In the realm of biblical criticism we would suggest an experiment, if the one making this experiment is willing to follow through, regardless of the cost.

Let every minister search his own heart in the presence of God and offer a complete surrender of his God-given faculties to the Holy Spirit.

Then, in all sincerity, let him ask God for a clear understanding of the Scriptures, an understanding that will deliver him from philosophical presuppositions and prejudices. At the same time, may he ask for the faith of a little child and for the power in personal living and public witness that alone comes through the complete and constant indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

It is our conviction that when the matter of biblical inspiration and interpretation is met in the light of understanding that comes from the Holy Spirit, difficulties disappear like mist before the rising sun, and we come to marvel at our own blindness and unbelief.

We believe that when this kind of examination takes place in an individual, the study of God’s Word becomes a joy instead of a chore; and any Christian, whether minister or not, will find so much to think about, teach, and preach that he will not have opportunities adequate enough to make these new-found truths known to others.

The Bible is an inexhaustible mine of wisdom, joy, and divine truth. Its gold is waiting for the humbled mind, the willing heart, and the surrendered will.

L. NELSON BELL

The best books of 1959 from a strictly evangelical point of view, in the judgment ofCHRISTIANITY TODAY’Seditorial staff, are listed below. The year saw many significant gains in conservative Protestant literature. These volumes are not the only meritorious publications, nor do they reflect the convictions of all evangelical groups. But the selections propound evangelical perspectives in a significant way, or apply biblical doctrines effectively to modern currents of thought and life.

BLACKWOOD, ANDREW W., ed.: Evangelical Sermons of Our Day (Harper, 383 pp., $5.95). Thirty-seven select messages from a cross-section of evangelical preaching.

BLAIKLOCK, E. M.: The Acts of the Apostles (London: Tyndale Press, 168 pp., 9s.6d.). An historical commentary viewing the apostolic age in its Greek and Roman setting.

BRUCE, F. F.: Biblical Exegesis in the Qumran Texts (Eerdmans, 82 pp., $2.50). Discloses the principle of biblical interpretation employed by Qumran writers.

CARNELL, E. J.: The Case for Orthodox Theology (Westminster, 162 pp., $3.50). A challenging though controversial apologetic for the evangelical faith.

HALL, CLARENCE W.: Adventurers for God (Harper, 265 pp., $3.75). Thrilling stories of missionary heroes.

HENRY, CARL F. H., ed.: Revelation and the Bible (Baker, 413 pp., $6). Twenty-four international scholars expound the evangelical view of the Scriptures.

KUIPER, R. B.: For Whom Did Christ Die? (Eerdmans, 100 pp., $2). Calvinistic teaching on the death of Christ alongside the Arminian and neo-orthodox views.

LADD, GEORGE E.: The Gospel of the Kingdom (Eerdmans, 143 pp., $2.75). A popular, non-polemic presentation of biblical teaching about the Kingdom.

LASOR, WILLIAM S.: Great Personalities of the Old Testament (Revell, 192 pp., $3). Portrayals soundly based on the scriptural data, modern archaeological research and ancient literature and divine revelation.

LLOYD-JONES, D. MARTYN: Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (Eerdmans, 320 pp., $4.50). The devout English expositor’s study in depth of Christ’s words as recorded in Matthew.

LEUPOLD, HERBERT C.: Exposition of the Psalms (Wartburg, 1,010 pp., $8.75). Newest addition to the author’s well-known Old Testament commentaries.

MCCLAIN, ALVA J.: The Greatness of the Kingdom (Zondervan, 556 pp., $6.95). An exhaustive biblical exposition in a dispensational frame of reference.

MIXTER, RUSSELL L., ed.: Evolution and Christian Thought Today (Eerdmans, 224 pp., $4.50). Fourteen scholars consider the status of the theory of evolution a century after Darwin’s Origin of Species.

MURRAY, JOHN: The Imputation of Adam’s Sin (Eerdmans, 95 pp., $2). The classical Protestant doctrine presented with relevance to modern theological views.

PELIKAN, JAROSLAV: The Riddle of Roman Catholicism (Abingdon, 272 pp., $4). A fresh evaluation of Romanism from the Protestant perspective, acknowledging certain values in the Roman tradition.

PFEIFFER, CHARLES F.: Between the Testaments (Baker, 124 pp., $2.95). A study of intertestamentary times given fresh significance by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

PLASS, EWALD: What Luther Says (3 vols., Concordia). A scholarly and systematic collation and translation of the great reformer’s utterances.

SASSE, HERMAN H.: This is My Body (Augsburg, 433 pp., $7). A definitive and comprehensive treatise of Luther’s doctrine of the “real presence” in the sacrament of the Lord’s supper.

VAN TIL, HENRY R.: The Calvinistic Concept of Culture (Baker, 245 pp., $4.50). The relationship of religion and culture from the Calvinistic point of view.

WALLIS, ETHEL E. AND BENNETT, MARY A.: Two Thousand Tongues to Go (Harper, 308 pp., $3.95). The romance of the translation of the Holy Scriptures into the language of the world.

WHITCOMB, JR., JOHN C.: Darius the Mede (Eerdmans, 84 pp., $2.75). A noteworthy archaeological contribution in support of the historicity of Daniel.

WIRT, SHERWOOD E.: Crusade at the Golden Gate (Harper, 176 pp., $2.75). The gripping story of Billy Graham’s San Francisco campaign.

WISEMAN, D. J.: Illustrations from Bible Archaeology (Eerdmans, 112 pp., $3.50). A conservative approach to biblical problems by an archaeologist on the British Museum staff.

YOUNG, EDWARD J.: The Study of Old Testament Theology Today (Revell, 112 pp., $3). A bold and authoritative affirmation of the orthodox view of God’s redemptive work in history.

ZIMMERMAN, PAUL A., ed.: Darwin, Evolution and Creation (Concordia, 231 pp., $3.95). A company of Lutheran scholars give a centennial appraisal of the Darwinian theory.

Featured among the current glossy-covered paperback books is the reissue of Sinclair Lewis’ 1927 novel Elmer Gantry, that infamous caricature of a clergyman. Recent rumor has it that a Hollywood studio is projecting a movie version with Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher in the lead female role.

The Reverend Elmer Gantry is but one example of the many ministers who live in the pages of American and British novels of the past 100 years. The picture of clerical compromise, both in theology and in morality, is infrequently relieved even now. When religious leaders lament the lack of spiritual vitality in this day when church membership is so popular, they can attribute no small blame to the effect of these widely-read books.

The close interrelation between literature and social trends is universally recognized and documented. It is not always possible to determine with exactness whether the changing age is simply reflected in literature, or if the literature has something to do with inspiring and creating social changes. The fact remains, however, that the effect of literature upon the public mind and mores, both as creator and abettor of social change, is dynamic. Even when the literary coterie is defeated, or when the public does not respond for a decade or two, the cumulative shaping power of literature on public life is without equal among the many influences that mold us.

The importance of fiction, especially where it deals with religious themes and persons, is underscored by the perennial popularity of the subject. The religious motif has been, still is, and probably always will be appreciated and sought by the general reading public. From the time of Chaucer, English-language writers have been interested in the gentle and not-so-gentle satire of the clergy.

SOME APPARENT TRENDS

Through the year 1915, almost one-third of the best sellers were religious. Since 1915 this ratio has probably not prevailed, but the percentage is still significant. Perhaps we are too close to these years to draw precise conclusions or detect inexorable trends. However, it would seem that certain observations are valid.

Novels immediately prior to the Darwinian impact (1859) were already expressing with some force the rising dissatisfaction with evangelicalism. Generally respectable criticism of evangelicalism and commendation of liberalism and the social gospel marked the time of the publication of Darwin’s work to the era of the muckraking books (1902–1916).

Since that time, two world wars, the great depression, the general breakdown of public and private morality, complete disillusionment of utopianism, and the always terrifying post-Korean cold war have provided a matrix in which discredit of the Gospel has been bred. By fair means and foul, novelists have sought to spread before the reading public their diatribe against the Church, the clergy, and the Christian message.

On the eve of World War II and to the present day, there has been a counter-trend in defense of the faith. The effect has been partially ameliorating. Writers have been creating or describing virtuous and able men of the cloth, and yet have denounced devastatingly the people in the pews. For example, Hartzell Spence’s biographical book One Foot in Heaven (1940), subsequently made into a successful film version, had as its main character the amazing and redoubtable Reverend William Spence. Despite certain foibles in the man, he was revealed as the sort of dedicated minister who accomplishes things. But the overall picture of ministerial life, as well as the calibre of church people, hardly commended that life or calling to anyone.

In this period also is Rachel Field’s All This and Heaven Too (1947) with the two diverse but equally admirable ministers—the Reverend Monod and the Reverend Field. Here, particularly through the eyes of the minister’s wife, one sees the pettiness and near-cruelty of church people.

Nonfiction books, having to do with our subject, may be noted just in passing. In the area of biography, A Man Called Peter acts as a palliative to the general malaise. In the realm of missionary biography and adventure such volumes as The Keys of the Kingdom, Through Gates of Splendor, Shadow of the Almighty, and The Small Woman (which has been given further stature in the film version Inn of the Sixth Happiness) reflect a continuing sympathetic interest in the cause of Christ. Can it be that people are in sympathy with the propagation of the Gospel to heathen lands but appreciate sublimation of the claims of Christianity at home?

ROOTS OF THE DECAY OF FAITH

Nineteenth century Protestant clergymen were confronted with skepticism in their congregations as well as within themselves.

For example, higher criticism, born in Germany, had its influence in England in 1841 with George Eliot’s translation of David Strauss’ rationalistic Life of Jesus. Her repudiation of the evangelicalism of her youth was abrupt; but, as E. Wagenknecht says in Cavalcade of the English Novel, she never really reached the “certitude of unbelief. Like Renan she might have said, ‘I feel that my life is governed by a faith I no longer possess.’”

Men felt compelled to readjust their views on creation when Darwin’s Origin of Species came out in 1859. The concept of evolution was popularized as a view of life. It was the actual “turning point in the history of modern thought” as George Sampson points out in The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature.

Learned and respected professors urged the college-age generations to ignore outdated Mill and Spencer and turn to Kant and Hegel. The English philosophy “idealism” was thus conceived, and the latter half of the nineteenth century was studded with works by writers directly influenced by Kant and Hegel.

The awakening of social consciousness also involved a dramatic readjustment in ecclesiastical thinking. Many a minister found himself tossed upon the pointed horns of a dilemma: should he cultivate the wealthy who were the financial mainstay of the church but often guilty of injustice, if not sheer inhumanity, in the acquisition and maintaining of their fortunes; or should he risk career, calling, church, and compensation to relate the Gospel to man’s total life and thereby run athwart the vested interests of pillars of the church?

Out of this context arose the “social gospel”—the effort to project the example of Jesus without the creedal dogmatism and pampered moneyed oligarchy of the churches. America with its industrial conflict, increasing squalid slums, and the evils of big business domination was a natural ground for such religious renewal. Dr. Washington Gladden’s “Applied Christianity” became famous. The Reverend Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps (1896), originally preached as an evening service series at the Topeka, Kansas, First Congregational Church, rocketed into fame as an artless tale of a shabby Stranger whose appearance at a worship service of a comfortable congregation shamed nominal Christians into a more real following of Christ.

Thus a complexity of changes wrought the beginnings of a decay of faith, and the novels about clergymen chronicle the details of this defection.

FROM DARWIN TO THE MUCKRAKERS

One of this writer’s favorite books is Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Bronte in 1847. In it Miss Bronte said the kindest things she could of evangelicalism in the Reverend St. John Rivers. The impression is one of unrelenting severity, uncompromising principle, and undaunted self-destruction in the Cause. Her more telling strokes are reserved for the Reverend Brocklehurst, a spouter of texts and neglecter of kindness, devoted to purity and devoid of charity. He, as treasurer of the Lowood School, was more concerned with balanced books than balanced diets. Such a monster could have started a whole decay of faith by himself.

Ernest Pontifax, the curate in Samuel Butler’s Way of All Flesh (1859), is an immature man who has been raised in the strictest kind of fundamentalistic environment. In all of his preparation he had never been introduced to any work antithetical to evangelicalism, and was indoctrinated completely in a bibliolatrous theology. There are actually two clergymen in this book. The elder Pontifax to the end is bound to the past, portrayed in unflattering descriptive strokes as a mean, impatient, narrow-minded, ill-tempered, fraudulently pious man and prototype of the evangelical clergyman:

Theobald (the father) was always in a bad temper on Sunday evening. Whether it is that they are as much bored with the day as their neighbors, or whether they are tired, or whatever the cause may be, clergymen are seldom at their best on Sunday evening.

Against this harsh background, the character of Ernest, at first a twig bent by parental pressure and then by dint of will bent the other way and almost broken, emerges at last divorced from the church, liberated from submission to his parents, and financially enriched by a timely inheritance. He has become an integrated nationalist, the picture of contentment, a happy skeptic from the manacles of a jailer Christianity.

One paragraph describes the beginnings of this departure as the new attitude of supposed honest inquiry gains mastery:

the more he read in this spirit the more the balance seemed to lie in favor of unbelief, till, in the end all further doubt became impossible, and he saw plainly enough that, whatever else might be true, the story that Christ had died, come to life again, and been carried from earth through the clouds into the heavens could not now be accepted by unbiased people.… He would probably have seen it years ago if he had not been hoodwinked by people who were paid for hoodwinking him.

Butler, of course, stands at the beginning of the decay of faith. He is not the ultimate by any means. Critics of his day and ours regard him as a friend to true religion. Wagenknecht in the Cavalcade of the English Novel writes:

Butler was far from orthodox Christianity, yet he was a very religious man … in his view he was building a better foundation for the religion of the future. He believes that if a man loves God he cannot come to much harm. But, like the Quakers, he felt that to achieve this security a man must disregard theological dogmas and social conventions completely and listen to the voice of God within himself.

Thus the trend was established. One author after another added to the evil heritage of suspicion and ridicule of the ministry, specifically the evangelical ministry. The old way of faith and life was rejected as being outmoded and unrealistic.

An island in the midst of this flood appeared as Thomas Wingfold, Curate, written by George MacDonald, and published in 1876. Wingfold is an average minister whose hall mark is sincerity. His practice of prayer is purposeful, and his study of the Bible is a search for a truly meaningful message. The moment of his spiritual birth comes in the confrontation of a text. It dawns upon his heart with the radiance of the sun bursting through the clouds of perplexed meditation: “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

Clym Yeobright of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native (1878) is the pawn of his creator’s philosophic pessimism—another symptom of the decay of faith in what Toynbee has called “this post Christian era.” Clym, after a successful career in Paris, is thoroughly disturbed by his “trafficking in glittering splendors with wealthy women and titled libertines”; and he longs to do something to help the poor and ignorant. Fate enters, and blow after unrelentless blow falls, bending, crushing, breaking, rending. At the nadir of his brokenness, half blind, and on the way to total blindness, Clym turns to the ministry as his only recourse. His success is indifferent, and the best opinion seemed to be that “it was well enough for a man to take to preaching who could not see to do anything else.”

In 1895 Hardy wrote Jude the Obscure, a novel currently appearing in eye-catching reprint as “the novel which shocked the Victorian age.” Published originally as a serial in Harpers magazine, it is a tale of unmitigated disillusionment, disenchantment, and despair. It presents the terrible refinement of Hardy’s pessimism. Jude is kept by Fate from becoming an educated cleric. Led from one shattering relationship to another, Jude spends his days as a laborer, fitting the stones in arches of apse and narthex, but never mounting the cherished steps to the coveted pulpit.

Theron Ware is the earnest, unsophisticated and terribly limited young cleric of Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896). In the May 2, 1896, issue of “The Critic,” the reviewer states that Frederic

has conceived a man of some intellectual and emotional readiness, with a meagre education and very limited knowledge of the world; inoffensively virtuous through lack of opportunity for vice, but with no genuine foundation of character.

In their third charge Theron and his wife, Alice, find themselves $800 in debt. An important elderly citizen, Abraham Beekman by name, bails them out with the fatherly advice that Theron study law and slip out of the ministry at the first good change. In the end, having been led from one damning association to another, and finally to his fateful “illumination,” Theron leaves the ministry, heads for the West, with a pipe dream of politics, perhaps even the White House some day.

Of all these novels, perhaps the most influential was the American Winston Churchill’s Inside of the Cup (1913). It was one of the most popular muckraking novels dealing with the Church that came out at the time the movement was strongest (1902–1916). John Hodder is the name of the minister. In these pages he changes from an extreme conservatist to the personification of the liberal movement in theology. His repudiation of the interpretations of the Christian belief in terms of the old orthodoxy is complete, and just as final is his identification with the whole new set of liberalism’s interpretations of the old articles of faith. At the end,

he perceived at last the form all religions take is that of consecration to a Cause—one of God’s many causes. The meaning of life is to find one’s Cause, to lose one’s self in it. His was the liberation of the Word,—now vouchsafed to him; the freeing of the spark from under the ashes. To help liberate the church, fan into flame the fire which was to consume the injustice, the tyranny, the selfishness of the world.…

FROM 1916 TO WORLD WAR II

The period from 1916 to the beginnings of World War II is marked by the most abusive treatment of the minister and his mission. For example, H. G. Wells’ The Soul of the Bishop (1917) presents a sorry struggle revolving around Smoking versus Conscience, the story of a human crustaceon in a stew over creeds who leaves the church in favor of tobacco.

Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), which even H. L. Mencken dubbed a profoundly immoral book (because of its treatment of murder), gives us the Reverend and Mrs. Griffiths, parents of the book’s protagonist, parroters of pious phrases even in the presence of the most bitter tragedy.

Well, blessed be the name of the Lord.… We must keep our hearts open. Yes, we mustn’t judge—We only hope for the best. Yes, Yes! Praise the Lord—we must praise the Lord! Amen! Oh yes! Tst! Tst! Tst!

We see the Reverend Freemantle of James Hilton’s And Now Goodbye (1931), a picture of frustration, thwarted escape, and final resignation to dullness; George Brush of Thornton Wilder’s Heaven My Destination (1935), a ridiculous figure, a composite of fundamentalists foibles, zealous without knowledge; the unspeakably vulgar Jim Casy in John Steinbeck’s unthinkably vulgar Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Aron of the same author’s East of Eden, a man who literally degenerates into religion; and the Reverend Blampied of James Hilton’s Random Harvest (1941), a lazy man, rebellious against authority.

The decay of faith issues in waning morality, spiritual aenemia, or perhaps the atheistic bravado of a Mencken who said, “The noblest man I think is the one that fights God and triumphs over him.” Or in the melancholy of Will Durant who said in his On the Meaning of Life (1932):

God who was once the consolation of our brief life and our refuge in bereavement and suffering, has apparently vanished from the scene; no telescope nor microscope discovers Him. Life has become in that total perspective, which is philosophy, a fitful pullulation of human insects on the earth, a planetary eczema that may soon be cured; nothing is certain in it except defeat and death, a sleep from which it seems there is no awaking.… The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, nor Europe vs. America, not even East vs. West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.

PRESENT DAY FICTION

Except for purely Christian fiction, which has a limited public, the plight of the parson is much the same in present day novels.

Peter DeVries’ The Mackeral Plaza (1958), a top 10 national best seller for a number of weeks last year, presents us with the racy story of a youngish widower, the Reverend Mackeral. He is theologically liberal, vituperative about fundamentalism, and morally more chased than chaste. His romantic involvement includes an actress with whom he has numerous clandestine meetings, and his housekeeper whom he finally marries after they thoroughly discover their happy compatibility. In the name of all that is holy, including the sacred office of the ministry, what effect must a book like this have upon the public mind?

It was perhaps the sobering effect of World War II, plus the widely-heralded findings of neo-orthodoxy, that stimulated the secondary trend noted earlier. By the end of the war, novels were appearing which made religion at least a matter of choice.

What can we say in conclusion? The minds and conduct of people have been molded and directed largely by the fiction they have been reading for years; and there is not nearly enough evidence yet of that kind of literature which will effectively counteract the poison that has touched the clergy, the church, and the claims of Christ!

Bright Legacy

Oh Earth, retreat with broken toys,

Torn ribbons, while I trace

Where Death and he went quickly forth

Out-orbiting known space …

His soul, released and bright

With joy of Christ’s own presence soars!

Glad for his coronation? Yes!

Yet, God, this lonely night

My human cry in darkness heed—

Thy tenderness, thy grace I plead.

RUTH WEBBER SHIVELY

Jacob J. Vellenga served on the National Board of Administration of the United Presbyterian Church from 1948–54. Since 1958 he has served the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. as Associate Executive. He holds the A.B. degree from Monmouth College, the B.D. from Pittsburgh-Xenia Seminary, Th.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and D.D. from Monmouth College, Illinois.

The past year saw a steady stream of new theological and historical books, interrupted only by the printing strike that afflicted Britain for several weeks during the summer. Many of these works will meet only a temporary need and may be left aside for the purpose of our survey. Among the rest, there are quite a number of solid merit from different standpoints and in different spheres, though few if any are likely to prove of decisive theological significance. Perhaps our best plan is not to attempt any invidious ranking, but to consider some of the outstanding works according to relevant categories.

We mention first some new contributions in the sphere of ecclesiastical history and doctrine. A new account of the first beginnings of Christian theology has been attempted by J. N. D. Kelly in his Early Christian Doctrines, a book which may prove no less valuable and a little more readable than the Bethune-Baker, so well known to theological students. Professor Latourette has carried a stage further his latest studies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with volume II of his Christianity in a Revolutionary Age, and a new and slightly revised edition of Williston Walker’s History of the Christian Church is also welcomed. The quater-centenary of the Scottish Reformation, now in course of celebration, evoked a fresh study of John Knox under the title of The Thundering Scot, by Geddes McGregor, together with an informative new survey due to appear at the end of the year or early in 1960 by the Edinburgh scholar Dr. Gordon Donaldson, The Scottish Reformation. The past year was also one of the many Calvin anniversaries; and while it produced little historical writing of note, attention should be paid to a valuable account of Calvin’s doctrine of the Christian life in a book of this title by Dr. R. Wallace, and also to the American edition of T. H. L. Parker’s earlier work, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Knowledge of God. Dr. Wallace’s book in particular breaks much new ground and helps to give a picture very different from that of popular caricature. The great Anglican evangelical Charles Simeon was born in 1759, and to mark this anniversary a symposium of essays was published titled Charles Simeon 1759–1959.

Turning to works that are more strictly theological, we find an interesting venture undertaken by Westminster Press with its three “cases” for dominant theological trends: The Case for New Reformation Theology, by W. Horden; The Case for Liberal Theology in Perspective, by L. H. de Wolf; and The Case for Orthodox Theology, by E. J. Carnell. Many reviewers have commented that the presentations are far less conflicting than might have been the case a generation or even a decade ago. Whether this is due to closer approximation to the true centre, to the good or bad influence of ecumenism, or simply to a retreat in some measure from clear-cut convictions will be variously assessed by different writers, some of whom will regard it as a hopeful sign and others as dangerous and unhealthy. Dr. Carnell’s book is of particular interest to the evangelical world. Many who might demur at his presentation, either in general or in detail would do well at least to refrain from mere denunciation and to study the author’s basic problems and intentions, give attention to the probing finger which he directs at some aspects of evangelical faith and practice, and work constructively and concertedly toward a restoration to orthodoxy of the theological vitality and power which it has lacked. In this regard the dangers of an ultimate subjectivism are to be particularly avoided, and the authority and power of Holy Scripture brought to new honor both in statement and in practice.

Ecumenism continues to determine a good deal of the orientation and content of modern theology. In addition to his book on Knox, Dr. Geddes McGregor has given us one of the most thought-provoking works in this field with his Corpus Christi. Professor Pittenger’s The Word Incarnate may also be mentioned in the same connection, though it deals with the subject from a different angle and is rooted, of course, in a different tradition. In relation to the Roman Catholic church, the fine work by J. Pelikan, The Riddle of Roman Catholicism, is a fresh attempt to understand Romanism and also to suggest ways of overcoming the rift between it and the rest of Christendom. Perhaps one of the most interesting of all the ecumenical writings is a series of essays, The Ecumenical Era in Church and Society, which deals basically if not always satisfactorily with the interpretation of the mission of the Church. This is a theme to which evangelicalism, with its no mean record of activity of mission, might well make a worthwhile contribution.

Among varied themes to which evangelicalism might contribute forcefully are the theology of the Holy Spirit, theological understanding of the sex relationship, and the relationship between theology and culture. There has been a revival of interest in the doctrine of the Spirit, Dr. Hendry and Dr. E. H. Palmer both having given us interesting studies in this field. During 1959, A. B. Come’s Human Spirit and Holy Spirit carried the discussion a stage further, though nothing was added to a positively biblical exposition. So far as the man-woman relationship is concerned, Dr. D. Sherwin Bailey has made this an object of special study, and particular attention should be paid to his The Man-Woman Relationship in Christian Thought. Both theologically and practically this is a matter of greater importance than is often realized, and the evangelical world today seems to be particularly at fault in neglecting it, except perhaps from specific angles that may seem the most urgent but not necessarily the most basic. Cultural problems have occasionally been tackled by theology, but only too often they are abandoned to the kind of twilight world in which Professor Tillich is such a master. It is thus no surprise that he should have given us a series of essays on The Theology of Culture, and that in his honor a number of eminent writers should have contributed to the Festschrift entitled Religion and Culture. It is debatable how far Tillich ever gives us theology in the strict sense, or strictly Christian sense, but his work does at least indicate problems often neglected, and therefore invites a constructive theological answer in biblical and evangelical terms.

The continuing writings of Karl Barth demand a short section of their own, partly because in the original and translation they are so vast, partly because they are so strongly individual in relation to our usual classifications, and partly because they may well prove to have the most lasting effect for good or for evil, or both. Among the translations, Barth’s Short Commentary on Romans is interesting as a return to the epistle with which he has consistently wrestled; however, it is of no great intrinsic significance. More important perhaps is his Protestant Theology, a slightly abridged version of his survey of leading thinkers and theologians who contributed to the rise of Liberalism or Neo-Protestantism in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this work we are brought face to face with the interpretation of recent dogmatic history which underlies his own understanding of the modern situation and negatively, therefore, his attempts at a genuinely Protestant and apostolic reconstruction. Finally, we have additions to the Church Dogmatics, both in English translation and in the German. In English, volume III, 1, makes available Barth’s thinking on creation with its discussion of the genre of the creation stories, its theological interpretation of these stories, and its assessment of optimism and pessimism in the light of God’s approval of his work. In German, vol. IV, 3, which became so large that it had to be published in two parts, concludes the discussion of the theology of reconciliation, and is of interest because of its fresh treatment of words and lights outside Scripture, its attempted presentation in broader terms of the prophetic office of Christ through the Holy Spirit in the revelation of reconciliation, and for its serious grappling with the problems of vocation and mission. Readers of Dr. Berkouwer’s Triumph of Grace will be interested to know that a full excursus is devoted to an amicable but serious and forceful answer to Berkouwer’s basic criticism.

Finally, a word must be said about some of the reprints that may finally prove to be of more lasting value than the original works. From the last century come two great books on the Atonement, the fine statement by Denney in his Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, and the thoughtful and reverent, if less satisfactory, treatment by McLeod Campbell—The Nature of the Atonement. New volumes have been added to the excellent series of Luther translations by Concordia in which some of the expositions of John and writings on the Word and sacraments are given. Calvin’s Tracts and Treatises in three volumes really belonged to 1958, though they may have eluded the attention of some readers and should be consulted for the valuable material that we always expect from Calvin. Last, reference may be made to a voice from Scotland, for, in addition to his independent work and to a new and useful edition of various Reformation creeds, Professor T. F. Torrance has edited the illuminating sermons of the Scottish Reformer Robert Bruce on The Mystery of the Lord’s Suffer. This introduces both a little-known author and some valuable creative thinking on a very relevant topic in contemporary discussion.

Jacob J. Vellenga served on the National Board of Administration of the United Presbyterian Church from 1948–54. Since 1958 he has served the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. as Associate Executive. He holds the A.B. degree from Monmouth College, the B.D. from Pittsburgh-Xenia Seminary, Th.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and D.D. from Monmouth College, Illinois.

Two translations of the New Testament have reached their completion: The Amplified New Testament (Zondervan) and Kenneth S. Wuest’s three-volumed Expanded Translation of the Greek New Testament (Eerdmans). The former amplifies the language in order to bring out the full sense of the words; the latter expands it in order to bring out the finer shades of grammatical usage.

The Swiss scholar Robert Morgenthaler has provided New Testament students with a most useful tool for their work in his Statistics of the New Testament Vocabulary (Zürich: Gotthelf), a comprehensive analysis and synthesis.

Alfred Wikenhauser’s New Testament Introduction (Herder), translated from the German, is a distinguished combination of critical assessment and conservative judgment.

Among books of the Festschrift category, one may be mentioned—a collection of 21 New Testament Essays, originally planned as a presentation volume for T. W. Manson, but because of his death, May 1958, was completed as a memorial to him. To enumerate (not to say evaluate) the contents would outrun the scope of this survey. Mention may be made of a contribution by the editor of the volume, A. J. B. Higgins, on research into the “Son of Man” concept (since Manson published The Teaching of Jesus in 1931), one by Manson’s colleague H. H. Rowley on “The Baptism of John and the Qumran Sect,” and one by C. K. Barrett on “The Background of Mark 10:45” in which he criticizes adversely the current view that the background of this saying is the fourth “Servant Song” of Isaiah 52:13–53:12.

A monograph similar to Barrett’s article is Morna D. Hooker’s Jesus and the Servant. She argues that Jesus’ understanding of his own sufferings must be seen against a much wider pattern of suffering than the one based on the Servant Songs alone—that is, a pattern interwoven with the mission of God’s people in the world.

Oscar Cullmann in The Christology of the New Testament (London: SCM Press), translated from the German, expounds this important subject on the basis of the various titles given to Christ in the New Testament. In A New Quest of the Historical Jesus (SCM Press) James M. Robinson shows how the old quest was bound to fail, and expounds the possibility and necessity of a new quest in the post-Bultmannian epoch. This new quest must start with the New Testament kerygma, the primitive Christian message. An English translation of The So-Called Kerygma and the Historical Jesus (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd), by Paul Althaus, tackles the same problem together with the wider problem of the relation of faith to history, and takes issue with Bultmann’s existential Christology. The positive significance of God’s self-revelation in Christ is brought out in Karl Heim’s Jesus the Lord (Oliver and Boyd), also a translation from the German. Sherman E. Johnson’s Jesus in His Own Times (London: A. and C. Black) gives a useful picture of the world of the Gospels with special reference to the Qumran evidence. Josef Blinzler’s The Trial of Jesus (Cork: Mercier Press) provides the best available study of this controversial subject.

The student of the Gospels has a magnificent tool now in A Greek Synopsis of the Gospels (Leiden: Brill), by M. de Solages. This work of over 1,100 pages provides one with a synopsis, a concordance, statistical tables, an account of the help which mathematics may give in problems of textual interdependence, and a suggested solution to the Synoptic problem.

Martin Dibelius’ work on The Form Criticism of the Gospel (Tübingen: Mohr) has appeared in a third (posthumous) edition. A new line in this field of research is presented by Harald Risenfeld in The Gospel Tradition and Its Beginnings. Where Dibelius made the preaching basic to the formation of the gospel tradition, Riesenfeld thinks rather of the school—the school whose first teacher was Jesus and whose first pupils were the apostles.

F. C. Grant follows older established lines in The Gospels: Their Origin and Their Growth (London: Faber). Luke is evidently Dr. Grant’s favorite Evangelist; his account of the fourth Gospel is the least satisfactory thing in the book. Another veteran scholar, Edgar J. Goodspeed, has given us a well-argued defense of the apostolic authorship of the first Gospel in Matthew: Apostle and Evangelist (Winston). Matthew, he believes, was deliberately called and chosen by Jesus after the breach with the religious leadership of the Jews in order that he might put Jesus’ teaching on permanent record much as Isaiah’s disciples recorded his (Isa. 8:16). In view of the general consensus of exponents of classical Synoptic criticism that Matthew could not have been the first Evangelist, Goodspeed’s is a most notable book, especially as he continues to hold the priority of Mark.

A new edition of N. B. Stonehouse’s The Witness of Matthew and Mark to Christ (Eerdmans) is a most welcome sight. Stonehouse is abreast of the contemporary debate on the Gospels, and his work has been appreciated by liberal as well as conservative scholars. It is interesting to compare his chapter on “The Conclusion of Mark” with the recent reprint of J. W. Burgon’s The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark (Sovereign Grace Book Club) which is provided with a stimulating introduction by that doughty defender of the Byzantine text, Edward F. Hills.

A. R. C. Leaney contributes the commentary on The Gospel According to St. Luke (A. and C. Black) to the series of Harper’s New Testament Commentaries. He endeavors to assess the theological as well as the historical character and value of this Gospel, and points out that scholars of the previous generation would have found the conception of Luke as a theologian impossible. A second edition of Henry J. Cadbury’s The Making of Luke-Acts (London: SPCK) shows that the author has found little to change in the first edition; he is concerned with the literary criticism of the Lukan writings and the “element of historical certainty and human interest” which they lend to New Testament study. An original and readable study of Luke’s outlook is presented by Adrian Hastings in Prophet and Witness in Jerusalem (Longmans).

D. E. Holwerda’s doctoral dissertation, The Holy Spirit and Eschatology in the Gospel of John (Kampen: Kok), is planned mainly as a critique of Bultmann’s “present eschatology.” And it is good that a new English translation of Calvin’s commentaries should be inaugurated with T. H. L. Parker’s translation of his commentary on John (Oliver and Boyd)—the Gospel which Calvin was accustomed to describe as “a key to open the door to the understanding of the others.”

A study of Paul from an unusual angle is Jung and St. Paul (Longmans), by David Cox. This “study of the doctrine of Justification by Faith and its relation to the concept of Individuation” arose from the author’s reaction to Jung’s complaint that the Western mind has never devised a concept or a name for “the union of opposites through the middle path.” Does not the doctrine of justification by faith supply this need? That was his reaction which led to the writing of this book. He discovered that the matter is not so simple; there are radical differences as well as resemblances. But he ends on the Pauline note: “O the depth …!”

Ernest White, also a disciple of Jung, has given us St. Paul: The Man and His Mind (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott). But Dr. White is an evangelical Christian as well as a psychiatrist, and it is Paul, not Jung, that he is concerned to present to his readers in this “psychological reassessment.” Many aspects of Paul’s career and teaching are illuminated by Dr. White. The Mind of St. Paul (London: Collins) by William Barclay, bears a similar title, but this is no psychological study of the apostle. It is based on a series of articles in The British Weekly. After initial chapters on the apostle’s background and environment, Dr. Barclay gives a systematic exposition of the main aspects of the apostle’s thought in which he makes good use of his expert knowledge of the New Testament vocabulary.

Paul and the Salvation of Mankind (SCM Press) by Johannes Munck, which is a translation from the German, breaks new ground in a study of Paul’s own conception of the part his ministry as apostle to the Gentiles played in the consummation of God’s saving purpose. It is a work of more than ordinary importance. H. J. Schoeps, internationally renowned expert in the history of religion, has given us a study of Paul’s theology in the light of Jewish religious history which is shortly to be published in English translation by the Lutterworth Press, London. The heart of Paul’s theology can only be understood by those who have shared Paul’s religious experience, but in so far as Paul’s theology can be subject of an objective academic study, it could scarcely be done Better than by Schoeps. Herman Ridderbos in Paid and Jesus (Baker) takes issue with Rudolf Bultmann’s synthesis of the eschatological and religious-historical interpretations of Pauline Christology. N. Q. Hamilton insists that Paul’s doctrine of the Spirit must be understood in an eschatological context in The Holy Spirit and Eschatology in Paid (Oliver and Boyd).

The volume on Acts in the “Evangelical Bible Commentary” series (Zondervan) is the work of two men, Charles W. Carter being responsible for the analytic outlines and exposition, and Ralph Earle being responsible for the introduction and exegesis. To the “Tyndale Commentary” series E. M. Blaiklock has contributed a historical commentary on Acts in which he stands in the succession of W. M. Ramsay and makes apt and illuminating use of his expert acquaintance with classical history and literature. Not a commentary but a series of helpful studies of the Palestinian background of Acts and the apostolic writings is given by Eric F. F. Bishop in Apostles of Palestine: The Local Background to the New Testament Church (London: Lutteworth Press).

The epistle to the Romans continues to provide material for an unending stream of commentators. The Letter to the Romans: A Commentary (Lutteworth Press), by Emil Brunner, is the English version of a commentary first published in German in 1938. For Brunner this epistle is “the chapter of destiny of the Christian Church”; the Church’s welfare has depended time and again on the fresh discovery and appropriation of the message of Romans. Why this should be is what he endeavors to show in his exposition. A Shorter Commentary on Romans (SCM Press), by Karl Barth, is not simply an abbreviation of the historic Römerbrief of 40 years ago; it is the mature Barth who speaks here, and echoes of the Church Dogmatics may be heard throughout the work. Indeed, of both these commentaries it may be said that they tell us as much about the thought of Brunner and Barth as about the thought of Paul—although they make it clear how greatly Paul’s thought has influenced theirs. From the older school of Reformed theology comes Floyd E. Hamilton’s The Epistle to the Romans (Baker), an exegetical and devotional commentary by a well-known writer who believes that the doctrine taught in the Westminster Confession of Faith is the doctrine taught in Holy Scripture, and not least in the epistle to the Romans. The volume on Romans in the excellent “Shield Bible Study Series” (Baker) is the work of Gleason L. Archer, Jr. On the second half of the seventh chapter, to which we regularly turn in a commentary on Romans to discover the commentator’s standpoint, Dr. Archer says that it describes the “tension and defeat in the life of a Christian who tries his best to lead his own good life.” It is unfortunate that the linguistic barrier will prevent most of our readers from appreciating the magnificent Dutch commentary on Romans (Kok) recently produced by Herman Ridderbos. But nothing should stand in the way of their appreciating the reprint of Robert Haldane’s Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans (London: Banner of Truth Trust), a volume which makes one’s heart rejoice as at the finding of great spoil. Dr. D. M. Lloyd-Jones of London, England, who writes a foreword to this reprint, couples Haldane’s exposition with Charles Hodge’s as the two best commentaries on Romans: “While Hodge excels in accurate scholarship, there is greater warmth of spirit and more practical application in Haldane.” The Imputation of Adam’s Sin (Eerdmans), by John Murray, is a characteristically able and thorough-going study of Romans 5:12–21. It will make one look forward all the more eagerly to the two volumes which Professor Murray is contributing on this epistle to the “New International Commentary on the New Testament.”

To the “Torch” series of Bible commentaries W. G. H. Simon, Bishop of Llandaff, Wales, has contributed a useful little volume on I Corinthians (SCM Press). The veteran Dutch scholar F. W. Grosheide has revised his large-scale commentary on II Corinthians (Kok) for the same series as includes Herman Ridderbos’ commentary on Romans. Floyd E. Hamilton has written the volume on Galatians for the “Shield Bible Study Series” (Baker): he prefers the “North Galatian” interpretation of the epistle.

F. W. Beare of Toronto has written the commentary on Philippians for the Harper-Black series (A. and C. Black). His attempt to distinguish three separate Pauline documents in the epistle falls short of cogency. But he writes as a man who has fallen under the apostle’s spell; the spending of six months in the study of this epistle he describes as “a most rewarding and at the same time a shattering experience.” He gives an interesting interpretation of the Christological passage of Philippians 2:6–11, and what he says about it, together with an appendix on “The Kenotic Christology” by E. R. Fairweather, exposes the futility of the once popular kenotic theory.

The volume on I and II Thessalonians in the “New International Commentary on the New Testament” (Eerdmans) is the work of Leon Morris who has already written on these epistles in the shorter “Tyndale Commentary” series. Dr. Morris has many good things to say, and he says them with a refreshing freedom from hallowed theological jargon.

John Knox’ Philemon Among the Letters of Paul (Abingdon) has appeared in a revised edition with its intriguing suggestions for the solution of quite a handful of problems in New Testament studies and early Church history. Some of the suggestions he gives are more convincing than others.

Two short but significant studies of Hebrews call for notice: Hebrews and the Scriptures (SPCK), by F. C. Synge, and New and Living Way (London: Faith Press) by Antony Snell. Synge takes note of the fact that in the Old Testament quotations at the beginning of Hebrews, God is represented as conversing with someone whom Synge calls the Heavenly Companion. He goes on to argue that Hebrews depends on a testimony-collection concerning this Heavenly Companion, identified by the writer of the epistle with Christ. Snell gives a fresh interpretation of the epistle which he thinks was written by Barnabas to a Jewish-Christian community in Cyprus.

The volume on I Peter in the “Tyndale Commentary” series (Tyndale Press) is the joint work of two authors: Alan M. Stibbs is responsible for the commentary proper, while Andrew F. Walls writes an excellent introduction.

On the book of Revelation comes a posthumously-published work by C. C. Torrey, The Apocalypse of John (Yale University Press), in which he repeats and expands his argument, first ventilated 18 years ago, that the odd Greek of this document is due to its being a meticulously literal translation from Aramaic. He provides a translation of the reconstructed Aramaic; we could wish that the reconstructed Aramaic text itself had been reproduced in full. Torrey makes out a stronger case for the Apocalypse than he does for the Gospels. H. M. Féret’s study of the same book has been translated from the French under the title The Apocalypse of St. John (London: Blackfriars). Féret’s aim is to inspire the same Christian optimism today as John sought to inspire in his day: the Christian “need never despair as to the ultimate victory of Christian truth.” An older work, Visions of the End (London: James Clarke), by Adam C. Welch, has recently been republished. His studies in Daniel and Revelation have still a timely message. Pierre Prigent studies the history of the exegesis of the twelfth chapter of Revelation (Tübingen: Mohr) from the earliest times to our own day.

Jacob J. Vellenga served on the National Board of Administration of the United Presbyterian Church from 1948–54. Since 1958 he has served the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. as Associate Executive. He holds the A.B. degree from Monmouth College, the B.D. from Pittsburgh-Xenia Seminary, Th.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and D.D. from Monmouth College, Illinois.

Publishers have been active during 1959 and have provided an interesting and varied assortment of works dealing with the Old Testament and related subjects. We cannot mention all these works, nor would it particularly be profitable to do so. But we shall confine our attention to what appears to be most significant. Of course the new works are most appealing, but some valuable reprints have been made available. One that will cause Hebrew teachers to rejoice is the reprint of the Davies-Mitchell Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon (Zondervan). It should take its place among standard helps for students of the Old Testament.

The controversy over evolution seems always to be with us, and we may welcome a paper-back reprint of Gillispie’s Genesis and Geology (Harper) which surveys the conflict between “science” and “religion” in the decades before Darwin. Of a different nature is the reprint of Andrew Bonar’s Commentary on Leviticus (Zondervan), a devotional work that will prove to be a study help. Of similar nature are Joseph Caryl’s Exposition of Job, Charles Bridges’ Exposition of Proverbs, and John Brown’s The Sufferings and Glories of the Messiah (Sovereign Grace Publishers). These works are all devotional and from voices of former years expounding the Old Testament to us.

NEW APPROACHES

A somewhat novel approach to the study of the Exodus comes from Theodor Reik, a colleague of Sigmund Freud, who presents a startling interpretation of the events connected with the revelation at Mt. Sinai. In Mystery on the Mountain (Harper) he attempts to show that the events of the Exodus and of Sinai can be understood only as acts in a central drama of revelation which were similar to initiation and rebirth rituals in the cultures of the ancient Near-Eastern world. In studying the puberty rites of the Australian aborigines, Reik thought that he detected a concealed similarity with the events at Sinai. What we have in the present volume is an interestingly presented thesis, one which requires examination. We do not believe that the thesis can stand, but it should not be ignored.

In this connection we must also note the English translation of Sigmund Mowinckel’s lectures The Old Testament as Word of God (Abingdon). These lectures were delivered in Norwegian in 1938, but they present a picture of the Old Testament that must more and more be reckoned with. This book, however, is disappointing, and does not measure up to the author’s He That Cometh (Abingdon). There is exegetical carelessness in the book as seen for example in the rendering of 2 Timothy 3:16: “Every scripture inspired by God is useful for doctrine,” or in the statement: “Luke says that he will write his Gospel because none of the previous ones was satisfactory” (p. 24). Luke, of course, actually said no such thing. This book will have to be taken into account because Dr. Mowinckel is its author, but in many respects it is unsatisfactory, and its basic position is one which, we believe, does not do justice to genuine Christian theism.

DEAD SEA SCROLLS

Books on the Dead Sea Scrolls are not coming forth as frequently as they were in the past few years. What is appearing, however, is of high quality. In Ten Years of Discovery in the Wilderness of Judaea (Alienson Inc.), a translation from the French by J. Strugnell, we have a useful and compact survey of the discovery and study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The work is provided with helpful chronological tables and bibliographies and may be recommended as a satisfactory introduction to the study of the Scrolls. C. Roth, in The Historical Background of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Philosophical Library), has written quite a thought-provoking book. He presents a radical thesis, one that we believe to be incorrect, but one that nevertheless is challenging. The sectaries of Qumran, he maintains, were not the Essenes but the Zealots, and the Teacher of Righteousness was Menahem ben Judah who was killed in Jerusalem by the priestly faction in 66 A.D. or, if not Menaham, at least his nephew Eleazar ben Jair. The Wicked Priest was the one responsible for the death of Menahem, namely, Eleazar ben Hananiah, Captain of the Temple. We confess to a certain fascination with this theory, but the arguments against it are too strong for it to be acceptable.

A third work dealing with the Dead Sea Scrolls is F. F. Bruce’s Biblical Exegesis in the Qumran Texts (Eerdmans). Here we leave the realm of fancy and come down to the solid business of studying the contents of the texts as they should be studied. Bruce has given us a careful piece of writing which will serve as a useful work of reference for all who are engaged in studying the Scrolls. We need more work of this kind. The time for fancy and sensationalism over these Scrolls has passed. Bruce’s book may well set a truly profitable pattern for study in this field.

BIOGRAPHY

Of the great Old Testament prophets Jeremiah is certainly one of the most intriguing. In Fire in My Bones (Broadman Press) Fred M. Wood has given us a popular exposition of the teaching and ministry of this prophet. Dr. Wood is a pastor who did his doctoral work on the subject of Jeremiah. His attempt has been to relate the teachings of the book to present day problems, and this is helpful. There is a fair discussion of the problems of interpretation, and, although we are unable to agree with some of the emphases, we think that this little work should prove a helpful introduction to its subject.

Those who find the Old Testament difficult to read will discover a splendid introduction in William S. La Sor’s Great Personalities of the Old Testament (Revell). The author makes simple yet penetrating studies of several Old Testament personalities. Somewhat similar is the study of C. E. Autrey’s Revivals of the Old Testament (Zondervan). As its name indicates these are studies of periods in Old Testament history when God acted mightily among his people. The book is of a popular nature, and should prove helpful to those readers for whom it is designed.

JUDAISM

One of the most useful and needed works published during 1959 is that of an evangelical scholar, Charles F. Pfeiffer, titled Between the Testaments (Baker Book House). In simple, readable style, the author carries us through the difficult intertestamental period. His devotion to the authority of the Bible characterizes the book, and the result is that we now have a popular history of this period which all should find to be of great help.

Nor has post-biblical Judaism been neglected. Selections from the writings of Abraham Heschel have been edited by Fritz Rothschild. In Between God and Man (Harper) we have an interpretation of Judaism by one who is himself a Jew. Old Testament students can be grateful that this work is available, even though the Christian will find himself unable to agree with many of Heschel’s observations and comments.

BIBLE TRANSLATION

That a translation of the Old Testament should appear during the course of the past year is an event of no mean significance. And evangelicals may rejoice that a translation of such high quality has been produced. We refer to the Berkeley Version in Modern English (Zondervan). We congratulate the translators upon their work and rejoice in the generally high standard that appears in the volume. We are happy, too, for example, that Isaiah 7:14 is correctly translated with the English word “virgin” and not the incorrect “young woman.” We are happy too that Psalm 2:12 is accurately rendered and is not garbled as is the case in the Revised Standard Version. And it is cause for rejoicing that Isaiah 52:15 is translated with the Word “sprinkle” as it should be. The work throughout manifests a devotion to the true meaning of Scripture. In a revised edition we hope that some corrections will be made. The principal suggestion which we would offer is that the quality of the English be improved, as for example in Genesis 3:17. A number of the footnotes, some of which, despite the disclaimer, are doctrinal in character, could just as well be omitted.

INTRODUCTIONS

To the best of our knowledge no evangelical scholar has produced an Introduction to the Old Testament during 1959. Two works that fall into this category have made their appearance. G. W. Anderson of the University of Durham has written A Critical Introduction to the Old Testament (Duckworth) in which he gives us the latest views in brief compass. A far more pretentious work is the Introduction by Norman K. Gottwald, titled A Light to the Nations (Harper). This work is an Introduction but it is more than that; it comes close to being an interpretative history of the people of Israel. It is written from a modern point of view and the doctrine of “inerrant” Scripture is rejected. It is not at all clear, however, that the author really understands what the doctrine of “inerrant” Scripture is. One who wishes an up-to-date picture of Old Testament criticism will find it in this work. The book itself is most attractive and we congratulate the publishers upon having produced such a pleasing volume. Here are beautiful illustrations and useful tables and even translations of extra-biblical material. All in all, it is a useful compendium. We could only wish that its position were much more definitely biblical.

An evangelical scholar, Donald J. Wiseman, has produced a handbook of archaeology which should find wide acceptance. Illustrations from Biblical Archaeology (Eerdmans) contains more than a hundred photographs, charts, and drawings. Accompanied by an interpretative and explanatory text, they give to the reader a clear picture of the discoveries which illumine the background of the Holy Scriptures. The author is a master in his field.

ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES

Ira Maurice Price’s The Monuments and the Old Testament has been revised and brought up to date by Ovid R. Sellers and E. Leslie Carlson (Judson Press), and the result is a remarkably attractive handbook of archaeology. The publishers have given us a lavishly illustrated book and one which should hold the field for many days to come. The volume makes an excellent companion for students of Old Testament history. We could wish that the treatment were more conservative in matters such as the authorship of Daniel, or at least that more care were devoted to a consideration of arguments for the traditional orthodox position respecting the authorship of the Old Testament books.

Robert F. Heizer, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, has prepared a handbook of archaeological method and interpretation in The Archaeologist at Work (Harper). The volume consists of essays by different archaeologists and archaeological authorities and discusses practically everything that one needs to know concerning archaeology, Biblical and otherwise. For the scholar who does not have much opportunity to engage in actual excavation, this book is truly a boon, and is to be heartily recommended.

Illustrative of the interest being displayed in the prophets today is the work of S. Paul Schilling, titled Isaiah Speaks (Crowell). The author is concerned to bring out the message of the prophet and to demonstrate its relevance for the present day. He says many good and helpful things, and he has read widely in a certain type of literature on Isaiah. But the work is based upon the untenable “three-Isaiah” theory and, although we did not see the name of Bernhard Duhm in the book, we cannot escape the impression that much of what is said really betrays Duhm’s influence. The exegesis represents the dominant “critical” emphases of our day. For example, the Child in Isaiah 9:6 is not “… a king who is himself divine,” but simply one who is “… divine in might, gifted with extraordinary power and insight because the Spirit of God dwells within him” (p. 55). But this we believe is an improper interpretation of the Hebrew. And it is not encouraging to read “Had Isaiah wanted to specify unmistakably a miraculous birth from a virgin, he would have had to use the Hebrew bethulāh …” (p. 35). It is time that writers cease making such statements. In fact, to specify a miraculous birth as bethulāh would have been the worst possible word.

I close this brief survey with the consideration of a work of an entirely different type, a book that in some respects may be the most significant thing produced in the field of Old Testament study during 1959. We refer to John C. Whitcomb’s Darius the Mede (Eerdmans). One of the fundamental dogmas of those who deny the trustworthiness of the book of Daniel is that the character of Darius the Mede mentioned in the book is not an historical personage. With whom therefore is he to be identified? Attempts to answer this question have been made, but many of them are unsatisfactory. It is to the answering of this question that Professor Whitcomb has devoted his studies. His answer is as follows: Ugbaru, the governor of Gutium entered Babylon on the sixteenth day of Tishri, and on the eleventh of Arahshamnu (November 6) Ugbaru died. Gobryas, the governor of Cyrus, installed (sub-) governors in Babylon. Gobryas and Ugbaru were two different persons, and it is Gobryas whom we are to identify as Darius the Mede. This thesis is developed with skill and ability, and it removes at one stroke one of the principal objections that has been raised against the trustworthiness of the book of Daniel. Evangelicals should be grateful to Dr. Whitcomb for his research.

CONCLUSIONS

What does this brief survey of Old Testament literature have to teach us who claim to be evangelical? One thing is apparent. There is need for the production of more specialized monographs such as that of Whitcomb on Darius the Mede. Unless we are prepared to engage in the sacrificial and painstaking labor necessary to produce works of this kind, we shall be betraying our cause. And there is need also for the production of scholarly commentaries. These commentaries must reveal an adequate knowledge of the Hebrew and cognate languages on our part. They must also, if they are truly to serve the Church of God, reveal an attitude toward the Scriptures such as that expressed toward the close of Professor Whitcomb’s work. We cannot do better than to close with his words: “It is in this light (i.e., the view of Christ that the Scriptures cannot be broken) that the Christian scholar must approach the Scriptures and investigate such problems as the historicity of Darius the Mede. His conviction that Darius the Mede actually lived in the sixth century B.C. and did the things ascribed to him in the Book of Daniel does not depend upon the confirmation of cuneiform documents, but he is confident that the discovery of new documents can only serve to confirm the statements of God’s Word” (p. 67).

Jacob J. Vellenga served on the National Board of Administration of the United Presbyterian Church from 1948–54. Since 1958 he has served the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. as Associate Executive. He holds the A.B. degree from Monmouth College, the B.D. from Pittsburgh-Xenia Seminary, Th.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and D.D. from Monmouth College, Illinois.

Upon the great king Solomon there came, at the end of his days, a vast boredom, a weariness deep as the sea, a melancholy made inconsolable by its own lassitude. He saw in the hearts of the sons of men while they live evil and madness, and “after that they go to the dead.” At the end of the path he sensed a time of deathly listlessness, a time when “the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders shall cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened.” This is the road which T. S. Eliot describes in Murder in the Cathedral: “The honor of the effortless journey, to the empty land.…”

This melancholy had not come upon a work-ridden drudge whose fingers had never reached the bright consoling flowers of worldly enjoyment. It had descended upon the richest, wisest man of his day, one whose every earthly whim could be, and was, immediately satisfied. He had savored every delight of the senses with discrimination and sophisticated perceptiveness. He had, in the phrase of Walter Pater almost two millenia later, “burned always with a hard, gemlike flame”—but the promised harvest of “maintained ecstasy” and “success in life” had not been reaped. Instead, he foresaw a condition which takes the greatest imaginations to depict: the death of desire. Both Dante and Milton depict it: the utter deadness, mingled horribly with continued self-consciousness which is the condition of the damned.

From the example of Solomon there radiate many paths of meaning and truth, but the purpose of this writing is specific and twofold: to note briefly the reason why man sets his feet on the road of the effortless journey to an empty land; and to show how certain works of contemporary literature mark a dreadful culmination of the journey.

The cause is easily spotted and quickly named: pride, deadly pride, which seeks, through disobedience, “self-fulfillment.’ The futile quest began with Satan, who “trusted to equal the Most High if he opposed,” and whom “the Almighty Power hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky.” It touched man when he was seduced by the promise that if he and Eve sought a “higher freedom” in rebellion they should “be as gods.” (As W. H. Auden says, this is the only temptation which Satan has ever had to use, for this one always works.) Adam’s motive, writes Francis Bacon (Advancement of Learning, VI, 138), was “not curiosity about Nature’s secrets but the desire for moral omniscience in order that Adam might be a law unto himself.” Even to the pagan Greeks, a pride so overweening as to seek total freedom is a manifest symptom of madness—and whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

For the moment, total rebellion is a heady wine. “O this cheers my soul,” cries Marlowe’s Faustus the moment after he accepts the dark counsel to “try his brains and gain a deity.” Milton shows Adam and Eve after the Fall as “swimming in mirth” as if intoxicated with new wine. Even in a modern work—a very great one—Conrad’s Lord Jim, the theme is still present, for Conrad still wrote within a framework of cosmic, divine order. Jim, abandoning his duty to the sinking ship Patna, saves his skin by leaping into a lifeboat. He decides to live to himself and for himself, and for the moment is exhilerated. As joyously as does Mammon in the “great consult” in hell, he dismisses his former condition of “splendid vassalage” in heaven and seeks his own good, from himself. “If God is dead,” says Dostoevski, “then all things are permitted.” The road of rebellion seems not to lead to the death of desire. There is none to cry “Ichabod!” Rather, the path seems to rise ever upward, shimmering in brightness. Forgotten as if never uttered is the ancient doom: “In the day that thou eatest … thou shalt surely die.”

But just as the plucked flower shows bravely for a day, and then droops and sickens and dies, so rebellious men and angels find that they have set their feet on a dry and rocky road leading to darkness. And they find that they have taken on their shoulders the yoke of a double and insupportable burden: the burden of irrelevance, and the burden of creation. They bear the burden of irrelevance because, so long as two things relate to each other in any way whatsoever, “freedom” is limited by the truth of that relationship; total freedom ends up in total fragmentation. Only in a meaningless jumble of atoms is such false freedom possible, and a sense of total irrelevance in the universe—an incapacity to see how any two things relate to each other—is a condition of total madness. To escape, then, they must try to bear the other insupportable burden, that of creation. Having escaped God’s environment, they must now escape chaos. But this they cannot do, for the power of true creation (the production from within one’s own power and virtue of a new environment in one’s own image) lies in none save God. Strain and twist as he may, the rebel finds that he can invent nothing new. It lies beyond him to imagine a new mode of existence, a new dimension of experience. Thus, hating that from which he has rebelled, he is forced into the humiliating role of imitator—in reverse. If heaven showed order, at least he can show disorder; if there was light in heaven, he can make darkness; if there was the unity of love in heaven, there can be the unity of shared hate in hell. Even in the realm of sensory pleasure, he finds he must continue to use those capacities which are not of his making but of God’s. So, in maddened frustration, he tries to pervert the channels of sense, only to find that misuse produces satiety and the death of desire. And then begins the boredom, the hopelessness, the ennui—the emptiness of Eliot’s hollow men whose dried voices, when they whisper together, are “quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass or rats’ feet over broken glass in our dry cellar.” The distant echo of the curse, “In the day that thou eatest …”

Faustus’ eyes jerk upward. Is not the darkness deeper? Is it not peopled with vague shadows? “O whither should I fly?” he cries. And so cries Milton’s Satan: “Which way shall I fly infinite wrath and infinite despair? Which way I fly is hell; my self am hell.” (We are reminded of the terrible words in Isaiah: “Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming.”) There is only one way for the rebel to fly: inward, ever inward, seeking a foothold on that dwindling island of self originally created by God but now steadily eroded by the waters of dissolution. And that brings us to the revelation in contemporary literature of the deadly end of the rebel’s journey.

It is a truism of modern criticism that the literature of no previous period has showed such intense introspection. “Probably at no other time in the world’s history has the individual been so much occupied with himself,” writes J. Donald Adams of The New York Times Book Review. This is the burden of irrelevance. Lacking any vision of wholeness or harmony in the universe at large, of which man is a part, the modern writer must find his meaning, his morality, his values, his fulfillment within himself. It must be suggested that every tiny thought or physical sensation is of sufficient importance to be written about, talked about, and interpreted in a dozen ways. But as Katherine Mansfield points out, when every detail is presented as of equal importance, it is inevitable that we should conceive of each one as also of equal unimportance. Consequently, the stature of man as shown in the “hero” has shrunk like a withered leaf. No longer Hamlets and Lears but the shuffling Willy Lomans of Arthur Miller (who defines tragedy as the failure of a man to live up to his own image of himself) and the sex-ridden psychopaths of Tennessee Williams; no longer beings created to great estate, germane to God and the universe even though fallen, but biological specimens, collections of cells, blood vessels, and bones with nothing of dignity or worth. Here is the true cosmic irony. Man too great to obey anything has become man the insignificant fragment. “The problem of the 19th century,” says one critic, “was the death of God. That of the 20th is the death of man.” Ours is the age whose faith is summed up by Julian Huxley: Darwin and Freud suffice.

Evidence of the disintegration and degradation of man in the hands of modern writers is so abundant that any selection must be arbitrary. And it must of course be remembered that fine literature continues to be written in our day in almost every genre, but it is writing which continues the traditional order and hierarchy of past ages, whether of Classicism, or Hebraism, or Christianity, those three great strands of the rope of Western civilization. We are speaking here of the peculiar quality of twentieth century writing, that which sets it apart from earlier periods and which shows the culmination of the effortless journey.

Perhaps the disintegration first becomes vivid and distinct when, late in the nineteenth century, the romantic hero-rebel dwindles into the absinthe-scented aesthete. The god of the movement was Baudelaire, whose own ultimate ennui after a life spent in search of sensation grew so intense (as he tells in his Journals) that he greeted with delight the first touch on his brain of the black wings of syphilis-induced madness. It is the time of James Thomson’s “City of Dreadful Night,” the most frighteningly melancholy poem in the language (“Lo, thus, as prostrate, ‘In the dust I write my heart’s deep languor and my soul’s sad tears …’”). A few years later it is the time of Dowson, Beardsley, and Wilde—Wilde, who with poignant self-knowledge, quoted Scripture in a poem: “I did but taste a little honey with the end of the rod that was in mine hand, and, lo, I must die.” And it is the time when a minor figure, John Davidson (a suicide at Penzance in 1909), put his finger directly on the Satanic predicament: “For half a century I have survived in a world entirely unfitted for me … and I begin definitely in my Testaments and Tragedies to destroy this unfit world and make it over again in my own image; in my own image because that cannot be transcended” [italics mine].

But in the turn-of-the-century writers there lingers a faint beauty, overripe and sometimes corrupt, but suggesting that there has once been a fresh garden. In our own time almost every flower has rotted. The final writhing efforts to avoid the death of desire are all too clearly seen in Norman Mailer, James Jones, Mickey Spillane, Gerald Tesch, Jack Kerouac, and scores of others. It is with their perversions and barbarities in mind that Edmund Fuller writes in the April 26, 1958, issue of The Saturday Review: “It can be a somber and terrifying thing to contemplate man’s full measure of freedom and responsibility, and both his nearness to and alienation from his Creator God.” Only in our own day do we see eminent critics hailing as “modern and progressive” a literature which exhibits self-induced madness and cosmic disgust. These terms—madness and disgust—are not accusations cast at the modern cults; they are words used by the cults themselves. Writes Henri Barranger in Le Centaure: “Surrealism now aims at a condition which will be in no way inferior to mental derangement” (“Surrealism in 1931”). The entire “Dadaist” movement deliberately sought insanity, with its mink-lined teacups, its “pictures” consisting of a blank piece of canvas containing one tiny dot just off center, its “dramas” consisting of characters speaking inaudibly in diving helmets, its “objets d’art” such as the replica of a human eyeball swinging frantically on a metronome, its “poems” consisting of the alphabet spoken in the normal order, its “art exhibits” such as the solemn unveiling of a spot-lighted toilet seat, its shrieks of maniacal laughter and howls of defiance and despair. (The “beatniks” are rather enfeebled offspring of the Dadaists, but of them one does not so much ask “whence come these fiends” as “what meaneth this bleating of sheep in mine ears.”)

The symptom of disgust, the depiction of man as a repulsive blob, is the easiest of all to illustrate from contemporary writing. Limitations of space preclude even a partial catalogue. Two typical examples must serve. First, just to set the tone, the words of Wyndham Lewis in Blast three decades ago: “Men have a loathesome deformity called Self, affliction got through indiscriminate rubbing against their fellows: Social excrescence.… Only one operation can cure it: the suicide’s knife.”

And second, the works of the widely-hailed Samuel Beckett, an Irishman now living in France, author of the popular off-beat play Waiting for Godot. (Presumably Godot is God; he never comes.) In an astonishing, appalling trilogy, Buckett depicts human beings so far degenerated and corrupted that only the tiniest flicker of self-consciousness remains in the biological blob. Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable leave nothing more to be said. Man’s little drama, starring himself, is over. The name of his star is called Wormwood. Molloy, partially deaf and blind, victim to unnamed diseases, crippled, tries to cross a dark forest to get home to his mother. (A poignant homesickness pervades many sensitive modern novels.) The reader never knows what happens to him, but he never gets home. Malone in the second novel is even worse off, for he can only lie in bed and scrawl words with a pencil stub, reaching for objects with a crooked stick. He occasionally sees a hand reach in and place a dish near him or take one away, but he does not know where he is or why. Part of the time the place clearly is an insane asylum. He wishes only to be “neither hot nor cold any more.” (For the reader sensitive to rhythm, the background is haunted by the words, “They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more.”) Malone is driven frantic by a “vast continual buzzing” in his ears, and is ultimately beaten to death by an asylum attendant. But worst of all is the “I” of The Unnamable, one of the most horrifying novels ever put on paper. Armless, legless, almost blind and deaf, “I” lives in a huge jar, head protruding from a neck-fitting cap at the top, his limbless trunk imbedded in fouled sawdust. Occasionally the owner of the restaurant in front of which the jar is placed comes out and throws an old piece of canvas over his head when it snows. The book ends: “Where I am I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

And so the great adventure ends. From glorious rebel, to ecstatic sensualist, to bored worldling, to frantic pervert, to hideous blob. Truly, he that diggeth a pit shall fall into it. The reader of much modern fiction is inescapably reminded of King Lear’s revulsion after looking at man as pure biology: “There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie! pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination.” But we find a better sweetener than the apothecary’s perfumes in Solomon himself, for although he trod the effortless journey a great way, he did not, by the grace of God, complete it. He sought “acceptable words, … even words of truth”—and he found them: “Fear God, and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” And perhaps, being wise, he remembered Samuel: “Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.”

Jacob J. Vellenga served on the National Board of Administration of the United Presbyterian Church from 1948–54. Since 1958 he has served the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. as Associate Executive. He holds the A.B. degree from Monmouth College, the B.D. from Pittsburgh-Xenia Seminary, Th.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and D.D. from Monmouth College, Illinois.

One of the gifts of my life has been a succession of great professors—John McNaugher and John Whale, to name two. And to name another great one—Dr. Albert Baldinger, now retired on top of a beautiful hilltop in Longvue, Washington. This page could profitably be written about him, but I resist such a temptation. What I want to do is to get started with one of “Baldy’s” thought starters, and he had plenty of them He urged us in class one day to watch the shift of styles in theology, and he said we could always tell what was in style by noticing what subjects brought theological students to the edges of their chairs.

For 14 years now it has been my high privilege to teach in a theological seminary, and I think I have noticed for myself how some subjects come alive for a while and then seem to subside. For a spell it seemed we could never quit wrestling with theories of the Second Advent. Why, I do not know, except that the rise of the Bible School movement across the country seemed, on the whole, to emphasize dispensationalism which was being answered, in conservative circles at least, by men who took their amillennialism seriously. Then came the onslaught, to everyone’s surprise, of the European theologians at Evanston who insisted to the World Council that “The Christian Hope” was primarily an apocalyptic one.

Baptism, or more exactly, the validity of Infant Baptism, was highly debatable even in our seminary of Presbyterian persuasion. The Southern Baptists were no longer satisfied to be “southern”; many independent movements were showing attitudes of the early Anabaptists; the Barthian influence was being felt in every aspect of modern theology and Barth’s discussion on infant baptism with his European contemporaries was having repercussions everywhere. Arguments on the validity of infant baptism kept forcing us to reconsideration of covenants and covenant theologies, not to mention regeneration, new birth, the order of salvation, repentance and faith, and therefore the theological bases of Christian education especially for young people.

It seems self-evident that classroom discussions in theological seminaries are clear reflections of current religious thought. Why not! In our own seminary and at the last count we had representatives from 11 different denominations, 52 colleges and universities, from every synod of our own denomination, and from three different foreign countries. Here is a true and live cross section of contemporary religious thought, not in the upper echelons of churchmanship but from those beloved grass roots. What may not be so self-evident is my own judgment of what brings these theological students to the edge of their chairs now. But my judgment for what it is worth is that there are at least three live topics on which you can get discussion at the drop of your chalk: critiques of the ecumenical movement; the revision of confessional statements; and what it really means to call the Bible the Word of God.

On the subject of ecumenism we can all agree that we do suffer—and that we ought to suffer—over the divisions in the church. They are an offense and a scandal. Paul never answered his own rhetorical question, “Is Christ divided?” He didn’t need to. But Calvin answered it for him and posed one of his own. “Christ is divided,” said Calvin. “Who bleeds?” One cannot contribute knowingly and willingly to the rending of the body of Christ. With this kind of thinking the ecumenical movement was initiated, found answer in the thinking of multitudes of serious churchmen everywhere, and is still sustained with vigor.

But other movements are observable. With emphasis on the invisible rather than the visible church (and I recognize this as an over-simplification for the sake of brevity) there have been countless movements against the ecumenical even in this day in which the climate and atmosphere of the church dictate unions and federations and councils. Differences which began vertically between denominations now run in horizontal stratifications across all denominations. Liberal Baptists, for example, are closer to liberal Methodists than they are to other Baptists; inclusive churches like the Episcopal can support seminaries both high and low and somehow absorb the anomaly. Independent seminaries at both ends of the orthodoxy spectrum have sprung up, are finding sturdy financial support, and are drawing students from all denominations. In the meantime there are so-called divisive movements marked by Bible schools and rival publications even in the same denomination.

There are serious questions in all this: if we are to unite on essentials, what are the essentials? If we can lay aside essentials for the sake of union, are they then really essential? Why must the World Council have three different communion services? If the member churches are not united at the Lord’s table, are they united at all? If we all “see through a glass darkly,” which is an argument against the dogmatism that divides, do we, conversely, have hold of any truth on which we can unite, including the truth that we ought to unite? In the ecumenical game is it ever possible to get any enthusiasm worked up except among the few who play on the varsity (and they always look like the same team), the kind of enthusiasm, for example, some misguided laymen feel for the Berean Class bowling team? Have ecumenical groups become means for the union of the churches in order to present a solid front to the world and remove the scandal of divisiveness, or have they become organizations by which our betters tell us what’s good for us? So the discussions run.

If my judgment is correct, there are still two other questions very much alive among seminarians: the revision of confessional statements and the Bible as the Word of God. Mutatis Mutandis we shall work the theme in our next exciting chapter!

An Adventure In Christian Evidences

Reasons for Faith, by John H. Gerstner (Harper, 1960, 241 pp., $4), is reviewed by Bernard Ramm, Professor of Systematic Theology, California Baptist Theological Seminary.

Reasons for Faith is a popular presentation of Christian evidences with some apologetic materials. The first six chapters develop a natural theology and discuss the theistic proofs at a popular level. Commencing with the seventh chapter, the good professor presents the case for special revelation followed by discussions of miracles, prophecy, archaeology, comparative religions, and the influence of Christianity. From this he turns to treat standard objections to Christian faith from science, criticism, and the shortcomings of the Church. He concludes the book with a short chapter called “The Pragmatic Test.”

Dr. Gerstner informs the reader that his exposition is guided by two considerations: (1) that he writes from the perspective of the older apologetics, and not the newer; and (2) that he writes popularly for the average college student. So far as the second consideration is concerned, the goal is achieved. The book is well written and the thought and sentences flow along rather smoothly. Of the first consideration we are not so sure. Dr. Gerstner does not identify the old or the new in apologetics. My guess is that by the old he means the old Princeton school of Alexander, Hodge, Greene, Warfield, and Machen. First, the antiquity of this school is not older than Butler (unless one wishes to equate Butler’s system with that of Aquinas). Thus the new apologetics which Gerstner declines is in point of time much older (going back to Calvin, Anselm, and Augustine) than his old apologetics. Secondly, I do not think that Professor Gerstner accurately represents the old apologetics, at least as it is found in Warfield. There are deep-seated differences between Gerstner’s theses in Reasons for Faith and those propounded by Warfield in his great essay on “Calvin’s Knowledge of God,” or his equally great essay on “Augustine’s Doctrine of Knowledge and Authority.”

Reasons for Faith is a work which will be of help and guidance to those students and lay people who need a straightforward, uncomplicated defense of the main truths of the Christian faith. However, it will be particularly disappointing to those students who are fighting a real battle in their souls with the modern intellectual world. Although the book shows some revelance to twentieth century thought, it is basically nineteenth century in its mode of argumentation, in its philosophical terminology, and the kind of logical inferences it makes. But we simply cannot write apologetics from the philosophical stance of the nineteenth century. Existentialism and analytic philosophies are the contemporary philosophies with which we must contend. Furthermore, can we discuss the proofs for theism or modes of arguing for theism and disregard the writings of Wiggenstein, Carnap, Russell, Ayer, or Feigl?

The author apparently has not read the works of any hard-hitting analytic philosopher, or else he is not familiar with the Oxford debates over the character of theological language. Yet, this is where the alert twentieth century college and seminary student is being pushed, and where an apologetic must become relevant. I am also surprised that Dr. Gerstner has completely by-passed the issues of general and special revelation. This is certainly Zeitgeist with orthodox (Berkouwer, General Revelation) and neo-orthodox thinkers. One has to take sides in the Barth-Rome controversy (the validity of the analogy of being), and the Barth-Brunner controversy (the validity of general revelation) and the Berkouwer-Barth controversy (the validity of the historic orthodox relationship of general and special revelation).

BERNARD RAMM

A Melee

American Catholics: A Protestant-Jewish View, a symposium edited by Philip Scharper (Sheed & Ward, 1959, 235 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by C. Stanley Lowell, Associate Director of Protestants and Other Americans United.

This particular symposium manifests more lack of coordination and planning than do most. It would appear that the editor must have called the writers on the phone and said; “Look, will you be a good fellow and give me 3,000 words on what you think of American Catholics? You take history.”

The result is a hodgepodge in which some topics are inadequately treated two or three times, and certain fundamental problems are not properly faced at all. This kind of project deserved more careful preparation.

Protestant readers will find greater interest in the Protestant-Catholic confrontation than they will in Judaism and Catholicism. Martin Marty, a parish minister and one of the editors of The Christian Century, undertakes to debunk the Protestant-American dream. There is a petty accuracy in much that he writes. Still, he overlooks the forest for the trees. The Protestant-American dream has been one in which men have lived and moved and had their being. Perhaps America is not a “Protestant nation”—a designation most of the writers seem to deprecate. Yet America cannot be accounted for without this very Protestant-American dream. It deserves more than debunking treatment.

Robert McAfee Brown, a professor at Union Theological Seminary, writing on “The Issues Which Divide Us,” does state on page 73 a number of the major issues dividing the religious communities, but he does not indicate broad understanding of their import. The commanding issue of our day—government subsidies for Catholic schools—receives bare mention, but its relation to the “money barrier” by which tax funds have been denied to churches under our system is not traced.

Dr. Brown may be suspect as to prejudice in his discussion of Protestant-Catholic issues. He discloses on page 83 that he has espoused a view of Roman Catholicism which has little documentary warrant. Why has he done this? He does not give the answer but one can guess. Dr. Brown is a revered participant in what is called “the dialogue.” There is one requirement for participation in “the dialogue” which seems to be rigidly enforced. One must sign a loyalty oath to accept as infallible the Courtney-Murray-John Cogley line on what the Roman church teaches in regard to religious liberty. Dr. Brown writes from this aberrational stance. The fact that he acknowledges the aberration is helpful, but that he rests his work upon aberration is dubious scholarship.

Father Murray is actually an inconsequential cog in the vast mechanism of the Roman Catholic church. His view that this church really does believe in religious liberty in a situation like America, and would not destroy it even if it could, is a view that has never made any headway at the Vatican. Not a single papal encyclical supports it, and there are many that can be cited against it.

Prejudice is again exhibited when Dr. Brown in a footnote attacks POAU for criticizing the Vatican as a church, then as a state depending on “the polemical needs of the moment.” The fact is that the Vatican is a State-Church hybrid which alternately poses as a church and as a state depending on which will prove the more profitable at the moment. The Vatican claims all prerogatives as a state, but denies all responsibilities as a state because it is a church. This aspect of the matter has probably never occurred to Dr. Brown.

Allyn Robinson who heads the New York office of the Conference of Christians and Jews offers what might be expected from a representative of this group. Its leaders are obsessed with the virtues of talk. They are committed to the proposition that if people of different convictions can only get together (preferably at a good dinner) and talk and talk, then tensions can be resolved. One wonders what warrant there is for believing this. Much talk sometimes worsens rather than betters relations. Dr. Robinson’s uncritical and unfair classification of POAU with the Know-Nothing Movement is rather startling in a professional exponent of brotherhood. He gently slaps wrists all around, but always comes back to the Conference theme which stresses sentimental confrontation rather than realistic grappling with issues.

C. STANLEY LOWELL

Exegetical Studies

Notes on the Epistles of Paul, by J. B. Lightfoot (Zondervan, 1957, 336 pp., $4.50), is reviewed by Wick Broomall, Author of Biblical Criticism.

Perhaps all ministers who have studied Greek exegesis in seminary days have become acquainted with Dr. Lightfoot’s never-to-be-outdated commentaries on some of Paul’s epistles. Though the good bishop died in 1889, his commentaries have had few equals up to our time.

In the present volume, which contains, in the order of treatment, Dr. Lightfoot’s notes on I and II Thessalonians, 1 Corinthians 1–7; Romans 1–7, and Ephesians 1:1–14, the hand of this old master of exegesis is seen on every page. It is true, unfortunately, that many ministers today, unacquainted with Greek and Latin, will pass over the many quotations from the early Church Fathers; but even those with only a smattering of Greek will find these pages replete with satisfying material for the mind and soul.

Lightfoot will always remain among the elite of commentators. This position has been merited because of his sound and judicious treatment and interpretation of Scripture. His vast erudition is so gently employed in the service of divine truth that even the average reader will understand readily the simple English style found in this volume.

In these Notes the reader will find excellent studies on individual passages and words. The reviewer calls attention to katartisai (p. 47), skeuos (pp. 54 f.), hemeis hoi zontes (pp. 65 ff.), apo tou ponerou (pp. 125 f.), hilasterion (pp. 271 f.) dikaioma (p. 292), oikonomia (pp. 319 ff.), anakephalaiosasthai (pp. 321 ff.) and arrabon (pp. 323 ff.) as illustrations of the deft way in which Dr. Lightfoot enriches our knowledge of Paul’s words. Like Ellicott, an equal among exegetical giants, Lightfoot was a careful student of Greek grammar and syntax. Naturally, therefore, the reader will expect to find questions and problems of syntax—largely ignored in more recent commentaries—the subjects of careful investigation. This expectation is well rewarded when one considers, for example, Lightfoot’s treatment of the genitive (p. 15), of hina (p. 151), of me in questions (p. 154) and of similar problems. Nor is that all. Does the reader desire to know the difference between dokimazo and peirazo (p. 21), between ou and me (p. 39), between anagke and thlipsis (p. 45), between to kalon and to agathon (p. 86), between oida and ginosko (p. 179), between bios and zoe (p. 211), between laleo and lego (p. 269), between eulogetos and eulogemenos (pp. 210 f.), or between phronesis and sophia (pp. 317 f.)? If so, Lightfoot will not disappoint him.

Critical and introductory problems receive only scant attention. There are, however, detailed analyses of all the epistles dealt with in this volume—except Ephesians.

Today, in the light of the missile age, secular educators are demanding that our schools return to the fundamentals of learning. Perhaps it is not too late for us to suggest that the ministerial world, grown flabby on a mushy diet of predigested “popular” commentaries, should, right now, return to the study of Lightfoot’s commentaries. These Notes offer a wonderful opportunity to begin an exegetical study of Scripture with the help of a man fully qualified as a guide.

Zondervan Publishing House, let us add, has done a real service to our generation in adding this volume (published posthumously in 1895) to their valuable “Classic Commentary Series.”

WICK BROOMALL

Historical Commentary

The Acts of the Apostles, by E. M. Blaiklock (Eerdmans, 1959, 197 pp., $3), is reviewed by Raymond O. Zorn, Minister of Faith Presbyterian Church, Fawn Grove, Pennsylvania.

Readers interested in short commentaries that are neither unduly technical nor unhelpfully brief should procure the commentaries of this series of which the volume under review is the seventh and most recent in publication. As with the others, this book has a neatly printed format and a 33-page introduction dealing with the date, authorship, and historical setting of Acts, which reveals a scholarly awareness of critical problems. A detailed outline of Acts and a brief but adequate bibliography are other helpful features of this book.

Since the book of Acts presents a history indispensable to our knowledge of the earliest decades of Christianity’s advance, the commentator, professor of classics in University College, Auckland, New Zealand, is well equipped to set forth the contents of the book especially with regard to the historical setting in the ancient world.

But the value of the book does not end as an historical commentary. Throughout it reflects a scholar’s knowledge of the original Greek (significant words are given in transliteration) combined with a sincere effort to remain faithful to the basic meaning of the text. Problems are faced and wrestled with to satisfying conclusions for the most part (e.g., the Pentecostal tongues, pp. 55–57); yet there will be differences of opinion on the part of readers over other matters (e.g., the toning down of the predestinarian emphasis of 13:48 on p. 110; the interpretation of “church” in 7:38 as merely political, pp. 82–83; and the feeling that Acts was either unfinished, or that Luke intended to write a third volume, pp. 12 and 195).

The reader will find provocative the author’s treatment of Paul with detailed implications as to the significance of his being a Roman citizen (pp. 83–87); his exegetical effort to prove that Luke was a native of Philippi (pp. 123–124), though the Anti-Marcionite Prologue dating from the latter half of the second century makes Luke a native of Syrian Antioch; his support of the south Galatia hypothesis as the region where Paul established churches (pp. 121–123) to which the Galatian epistle was subsequently sent; his detailed background of Greek achievement as epitomized in the glory of Athens (pp. 132–136), and numerous other matters.

The major shortcoming of the commentary, if it can be classified as such, is its exegetical brevity. However, a commentary of 200 odd pages, the biblical text being omitted as is uniformly true of all in this series, may yet do justice to the exegesis of the text. The author subdivides Acts into rather large pericopes with comment on these sections in the form of condensed essays. Then a brief section on additional notes is appended in which exegetical treatment is given to selected verses of the context. A suggested remedy for future editions of this otherwise useful work, as well as for the commentaries not yet published for this series, might be the enlarging of the “Additional Notes” section by approximately 50 pages. This would still keep the volume within the handy limits of its originally intended range.

Blaiklock, in giving his estimate of Luke, says that he had a “scholar’s ability to strip away irrelevant or dispensable detail” (p. 15). Blaiklock has achieved to an admirable degree this same quality in his commentary.

RAYMOND O. ZORN

Strides In Archaeology

Light from the Ancient Past, by Jack Finegan (Second edition, Princeton University Press, 1959, 638 pp., $10), is reviewed by Charles F. Pfeiffer, Associate Professor of Old Testament, Gordon College.

Since its first publication in 1946, Light from the Ancient Past has been one of the most readable and informative works on the historical and archaeological backgrounds of Scripture. The reader is able to visualize the cultures of Sumer and Egypt, of Canaanites and Hittites, and relate them to the biblical narrative in such a way that both the Bible and ancient history take on new meaning.

Rapid strides have been made in archaeological studies since 1946, and the new edition brings both additions and changes. The volume has been enlarged by 138 pages which in part is old material reworked in the light of more recent studies, and in part consists of material unknown at the time of the first edition. Important in the latter category is the Dead Sea Scroll material.

Finegan has adjusted his chronologies in numerous instances. Changes are in decades rather than centuries. The division of the Israelite kingdom is dated 931/930 B.C. in the new edition, and 926 B.C. in the old edition of this work. The Egyptian twenty-first dynasty began, according to the 1946 edition, in 1150 B.C., whereas the new edition gives 1090 as the date.

The factual nature of Finegan’s work accounts in no small measure for its popularity. When controversial subjects are discussed (e.g. the date of the Exodus, pp. 117–121), arguments for the differing viewpoints are given fair hearing and the author presents his own conclusion in cautious terms.

Biblical studies need to be based on historical data. Finegan will help the student to read his Bible in the light of the world in which it was written.

CHARLES F. PFEIFFER

Spiritual Dynamic

Power Through Pentecost, by Harold J. Ockenga (Eerdmans, 1959, 128 pp., $2), is reviewed by Robert B. Dempsey, Pastor of Carlisle Congregational Church, Carlisle, Mass.

The nations are engaged in a race for power that the world might be changed for the better. Ironically, the Christian Church, the only body that could transform the world, is the one that seems least interested in doing so. Often she does not realize her weakness. When she does, she does not know where to find strength.

In this timely volume, the minister of Boston’s Park Street Church presents a soul-searching study of Pentecostal power in the individual experience. It is not a systematic study of biblical pneumatology but a thoughtful presentation of the secret of the unleashed dynamite of the Spirit in New Testament lives. Such a study will best teach us how this power may be unleashed in individuals and in the Church of this decade.

After two introductory chapters, the author examines the experiences of men wherein the power of the Holy Spirit was plainly manifested. The author repeatedly avers the New Testament truth that every believer is baptized, sealed, and indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and that this is entirely different from being filled with the Spirit (pp. 41, 57, 58, 60, 61, 74).

The term “second” is boldly used to describe the experience of being filled with the Spirit. It is a second crisis experience (pp. 61, 81, 125, 127). We do not tarry for the Spirit, but we must tarry for his power in our prayer of confession and consecration (pp. 31, 32, 23, 126). Dispelling any notion about sinless perfectionism (p. 23), the author is clear in stating that sin and self-centeredness are a barrier to power (pp. 14, 22). In fact sin will rob us of power and the fullness of the Spirit (p. 24).

The genuinely converted will earnestly seek to be filled with power through a Pentecostal experience. Christians who do not come to the place of surrender are living truncated, abnormal, and carnal Christian lives. They will lack power to change the world through revival. Like Peter, Stephen, Paul, and Philip, they are urged to yield themselves to the Holy Spirit.

The Church today needs to understand the secret of the power that rocked the first century world, if it is to rock the twentieth century world for Christ. “If the Holy Spirit is here in the Church and in the believers, there is no excuse for our not exercising power” (p. 104).

The weakest part of this most helpful study is Chapter 10 which expounds Acts 19:2: “Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?” A treatment of the meaning of the word “received” would have been helpful. Consistently it has been stated that believers already have the Spirit, and therefore questions directed to present day believers about receiving the Spirit seem inconsistent (pp. 95, 99).

ROBERT B. DEMPSEY

Essentially Theistic

Ancient Judaism and the New Testament, by Frederick C. Grant (Macmillan, 1959, 155 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by H. L. Ellison, author, Christian Approach to the Jews.

Dr. Grant, Professor of Biblical Theology at Union Theological Seminary, New York, has been for many years one of the leading biblical scholars of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Both his standing as a scholar and his conviction of the vital importance of the thesis put out in his present work demand that we consider it seriously.

Unfortunately the title is doubly misleading. The book is really an urgent plea for a return to a humanistic liberalism firmly based on the Bible and also on our classical heritage from Greece and Rome. The Bible is regarded as above all the treasure of the worshiping Church; its interpretation is to be based on strictest scholarship, but its evaluation is clearly to be a matter of sanctified rational subjectivism. The resultant religion is to be essentially theistic, not Christocentric, and ethical. He makes it clear that his evaluation of Judaism, and indeed of the Eastern religions generally, is in relative and not absolute terms, and he looks forward to Christian-Jewish rapproachment.

The other ambiguity lies in the term “Ancient Judaism.” Dr. Grant accepts, at least in general lines, the Wellhausen picture of the Old Testament and makes the Pentateuch in its present form, the Psalter, and considerable portions of the prophets post-exilic. For him ancient Judaism is not merely the religion of the Jews as it developed in the intertestamental period but also that of the Old Testament taken as a whole in the form that the best elements in the time of our Lord interpreted it.

The greatest weakness in the book is the author’s failure to grapple seriously with the New Testament’s presentation of the problem of the Jew. For him Matthew 27:25; John 8:44; 1 Thessalonians 2:16 would be blots on “any sacred books.” Our Lord’s condemnation of the scribes and Pharisees, his rejection by the Jews, and Paul’s agonized argument in Romans 9–11 are dealt with most superficially or not at all. Paul is even depreciated as a Hellenist to the greater glory of Palestinian Pharisaism.

The last defect we would mention may be due more to the publishers than to the author, for it is a growing defect in American books. Though the author complains rightly of the inability of most to check statements by reference to original sources, he has made it almost impossible for his readers to do so. There is no bibliography and we are given only four footnotes and rare indications of authorities. As a result only the specialist reader will be able to judge whether the strong and often sweeping statements and judgments are correct, as they often are, or whether they are controversial and debatable, or biased and unfair, or sometimes even simply false.

We appreciate Dr. Grant’s deep sincerity and his reaction from many perversions of truth in Christian circles made apparent by the horrors of Hitlerism. We quite understand why it received the 1958 award of the Christian Research Foundation, but we cannot recommend it except those who are sufficiently experts hardly to need it.

H. L. ELLISON

Marxism

Foundations of the Responsible Society, by Walter G. Muelder (Abingdon, 1959, 304 pp., $6), is reviewed by Irving E. Howard, Assistant Editor, Christian Economics.

Dr. Walter G. Muelder, author of Foundations of the Responsible Society, is dean and professor of social ethics at Boston University School of Theology. In this volume, he betrays an awareness of the thought of the so-called neo-orthodox theologians, if not of the orthodox, but he is himself a religious liberal of the old school. What is more significant, he holds uncritically several Marxist dogmas. Thus, he states on page 53: “Karl Marx, for example, showed that class conflict characterized Western society.” This Marxian dogma of the inevitability of class conflict in a capitalistic society has distorted much modern thinking. However, both Kenneth Boulding and Ludwig von Mises have shown that a capitalistic market economy makes for peaceful cooperation while government intervention in a planned economy produces tension, conflicts, and war. Of course, this is the contrary to what Dr. Muelder assumes. One should read the Foundations of the Responsible Society with the understanding that it has been written from a Marxian point of view.

The early American political philosophy, which produced our Constitutional system, is ridiculed without being identified. The core of that philosophy was fear of government. Says Dr. Muelder on page 108: “Too much thinking about the state today is rooted in fear.…” While agreeing with opponents of the omnicompetent state, Dr. Muelder continues by describing the function of government in such a way that it implies a government with power equal to any totalitarianism. “The state takes logical and ethical precedent over the economic order,” says Dr. Muelder as he continues an argument for a welfare state which extends beyond national boundaries. A government with the power to do all that Dr. Muelder wishes to have it do would be a government with too much power to be controlled by the so-called “democratic process.” Indeed, the government Dr. Muelder describes looks like a lamb with compassion for the welfare of people, but, if realized, such a government would “speak like a dragon.”

Since Dr. Muelder reports the various ecumenical conferences as though they represent the synthesis of “Christian” thought, this book is valuable as documentary evidence of the direction the ecumenical movement is taking in social ethics. It is valuable for little else. It offers no biblical insights into the problems discussed. It misrepresents both capitalism and the political philosophy of the American Constitution. Nevertheless, it is a persuasive book which uses a descriptive approach and makes a pretense of scholarly objectivity while it is, in truth, a clever example of special pleading for the welfare state.

IRVING E. HOWARD

Neglected Heritage

Freedom and Federalism, by Felix Morley (Henry Regnery, 1959, 274 pp., $5), is reviewed by Carl F. H. Henry.

A champion of limited government and of free enterprise traditions against socialist encroachments, Felix Morley’s political perspective cherishes America’s neglected heritage of Federalism. With the blurring of representative government into majoritarian democracy, he warns, “the era of the American Republic” may be “drawing to a close” a scant two centuries after its beginnings. The implementation of centralized government, rather than the dispersal of political power, is the corrupting evil.

Although more an idealist than a biblical theist in temperament, Dr. Morley is alert to the political implications of Christianity. He views the maintenance of limited government as a moral issue, its preservation as much dependent upon the alertness of the churches as upon legislators and law courts. “The growth of Big Government goes hand in hand with the loss of Big Convictions” (p. 240).

CARL F. H. HENRY

Sermon Methodology

We Prepare and Preach, edited by Clarence Stonelynn Roddy (Moody Press, 1959, 190 pp., $3.25), is reviewed by H. C. Brown, Jr., Professor of Preaching, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Throughout the history of Christianity successful preachers have stimulated other ministers to give more diligent attention to the art of preaching. But alas, it is also true that some undiscerning preachers have imitated and copied in toto their more talented brethren and have thereby destroyed their own creative talents. The level of pulpit excellence rises and falls to the degree that the mass of ministers is motivated toward copying or creativity. Blessed is that capable preacher who can convey to his fellow ministers “abiding principles” without causing them to become slaves to homiletical minutiae or without encouraging them to become “addicted to plagiarism.”

Creative practice should produce creative principles and rules, and these in turn should make for better practice in the next generation. In recent years several volumes of sermon methodology by successful contemporary preachers have been compiled for the purpose of improving preaching. This volume by Clarence Roddy is another volume attempting this task. It makes available biographical sketches, sample sermons, and personal homiletical theories of William Ward Ayer, Donald Grey Barnhouse, Howard W. Ferrin, J. Lester Harnish, Robert G. Lee, J. Vernon McGee, Harold John Ockenga, Alan Redpath, Paul Stromberg Rees, Wilber Moorehead Smith, and J. R. W. Stott.

The reader should study and analyze, compare and contrast, and agree and disagree with Roddy’s contributors if he is to receive full benefit from this book. Since these men are individualistic in their methods, the reader wall profit most by making a personal homiletical synthesis from the preaching theories expressed. When the digest has been prepared, then let the reader pass judgment on the various parts of his synthesis. This book has much to teach the careful and thoughtful reader.

H. C. BROWN

Inter-Testamental Period

Between the Testaments, by Charles F. Pfeiffer (Baker, 1959, 132 pp., $2.95), is reviewed by Edward J. Young, Professor of Old Testament, Westminster Theological Seminary.

What occurred in Jewish history between the close of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New? This is a question upon which many Christians are ill-informed. To many the period is hazy, and it is difficult to keep events clearly in their proper order. One need has been for a concise, popular history of the period that would help to place events and people in their proper perspective.

That need has now been filled. The present work is a popular history dealing with the period between the two testaments. It treats of matters in a popular, readable style, and whets the appetite for more. Despite the concise nature of the book, the author has managed to include a tremendous amount of useful material and to do justice to all the principal events. Even the Dead Sea Scrolls are included, and the author is most competent to deal with these.

Helps are provided for further study. The reading of this excellent little work should make the general outlines of the period clear to anyone. The writing of the book must have been a difficult task, but Dr. Pfeiffer has done a most creditable job. This book is ideal for young people, and indeed for anyone who wishes to understand the period of which it treats.

EDWARD J. YOUNG

Limitation Of Offspring

Planned Parenthood and Birth Control in the Light of Christian Ethics, by Alfred Martin Rehwinkel (Concordia, 1959, 133 pp., cloth $2.25, paper $1.50), is reviewed by E. P. Schulze, Minister, Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer, Peekskill, N. Y.

Rehwinkel defines planned parenthood or birth control as “the voluntary limitation of possible offspring by artificial means.” Having listed hygienic, eugenic, and economic considerations, he concludes that “there are times and circumstances in the life of a married couple when they are free to practice birth control with a good conscience and that the method employed is of no maerial importance from the moral point of view.”

It was the late Dr. S. Parkes Cadman, a man not to be suspected of strong evangelical leanings, who said: ‘The only proper form of birth control is self control.” Sublimation has its virtues. Rehwinkel, however, holds continence in low esteem, regarding it as being under normal conditions “contrary to nature and undesirable from a psychological point of view.” With regard to contraceptive devices he seems to have no such scruples.

The command, “Be fruitful and multiply,” has not yet been repealed, and children are still “an heritage of the Lord.” Let us be thankful that our own ancestors did not deprive us of the opportunity of temporal and eternal life. Let us thank God that Leah did not stop with three boys and that Jesse had an eighth son named David; else the Messiah had not come. In gratitude, let the omniscient Father of us all determine the size of our families. He does it with infinite wisdom, and often permits us fewer children than we wish. And yet one may look upon the subject of birth control with considerable equanimity when we view the wholesome desire for children manifested by most young married couples, and the likelihood that the people who are best fitted, spiritually and morally, to be parents are the least apt to limit the number of their offspring.

Rehwinkel, a professor at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, has written one most excellent book, The Flood. Probably the outstanding influence of the present work—whatever the intention of its author may have been—will be to foster a sexual life divorced from its basic purpose and responsibilities.

E. P. SCHULZE

The Fundamentals

God Hath Spoken, by T. Roland Philips (Eerdmans, 1959, 181 pp., $3), is reviewed by Massey Mott Heltzel, Minister of Ginter Park Presbyterian Church, Richmond, Virginia.

The great Glasgow preacher, Norman MacLeod, often visited a certain elderly, sick lady in his congregation. On every occasion she would place her ear horn to her ear and say, “Now, Normie, gang ower the fundamentals.”

That is what Dr. Philips does in this book of sermons. He goes over the fundamentals. He deals only with the great biblical themes. He lets the reader hear again and again the good tidings of God’s saving grace. He rides no theological hobbies, but presents a rounded view of the Christian faith.

The author served nearly 40 years as pastor of the Arlington Presbyterian Church in Baltimore. From his pastoral experience he draws effective illustrations for his sermons. He deals with profound matters in simple terms and his down-to-earth language has clarity and force. The sermons are straightforward and hard-hitting. Here is a sample: “I buried a man who belonged to a certain fraternity. They had a service at the grave, and in the ritual they said this: ‘We cannot hope to see beyond the veil. We can only seek for truth, and hope that we shall find it.’ Well, that may be true of them, but that is not true of me. I am not seeking for truth. I have found it. I am not hoping. I know.”

This book is not what could be called gripping. The reviewer admits that, in spite of the good qualities just mentioned, he did not find the sermons interesting. This is due not to the themes handled, but to something in the manner of handling, for the reviewer finds the “fundamentals” not only interesting, but exciting. He would not give this book as a Christmas present to a minister friend. But he would, without hesitation, give it to a seeker after basic Christian truth.

MASSEY MOTT HELTZEL

Maps And History

Rand McNally Historical Atlas of the Holy Land, edited by Emil G. Kraeling (Rand McNally & Company, 1959, 88 pp., including 22 maps in color, 70 photographs and line-cut maps, and a Table of Early History, $2.95), is reviewed by William Sanford LaSor, Professor of Old Testament, Fuller Theological Seminary.

This volume is essentially a reprint of the maps and some of the other materials in the Rand McNally Bible Atlas (1956), together with a very brief sketch of early history in the form of extended captions for the illustrations. While it is a useful work, it is too brief for serious study and too much vitiated by the uncertainties of extreme critical scholarship. The reproduction of the Dead Sea Isaiah Scroll (Plate 5) is upside down.

WILLIAM SANFORD LASOR

The Apostolic Idea

Preaching to Meet People’s Needs, by Charles N. Pickell (New York: Exposition Press, 1958, 82 pp., Bibliographies, $3), is reviewed by Andrew W. Blackwood, Author of Leading in Public Prayer.

The subtitle, ‘The Meaning of the Acts as a Guide for Preaching Today,” accurately describes the contents and purpose of this little book. It opens up a field that has been strangely neglected. Preaching bulks large in the Book of Acts, but there is in print no adequate discussion of the preaching by Peter or Paul, as an example of what to preach today, as well as how and why.

The author has read the appropriate literature by C. H. Dodd and others. The book reaches sound conclusions about the preachers and the preaching of apostolic times as ideals for today. In his Boston ministry, according to my friends there, this young man’s pulpit work follows these ideals.

His book will serve any student or class as a suitable guide for a fresh and rewarding way of dealing with the Acts. The subject deserves fuller development and discussion of the good ideas in this book.

ANDREW W. BLACKWOOD

Seminary Centennial

A History of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, by William A. Mueller (Broadman, 1959, 256 pp., $4), is reviewed by Richard L. James, Minister, of the Riverside Christian Church, Jacksonville, Fla.

When an American institution passes the hundred year mark, it deserves an appraisal from the perspective of history. Professor Mueller does this in an interesting manner. Though of primary value to Southern Baptists, the book will assist others in appreciation of the development of theological education in America.

Professor of philosophy of religion at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Dr. Mueller approached his task largely from the biographical viewpoint. He follows the development of the seminary by concise accounts of the lives of its founder, the presidents, and faculty members.

The separation among Baptists and the organization of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845 left the South without a source of training for its ministry. To meet this need Southern Seminary came into existence. It was a difficult struggle and its achievement owed much to James P. Boyce, John A. Broadus, Basil Manley, Jr. and William Williams, the “Faithful Four” who constituted the founding fathers and original faculty.

Under James P. Boyce, the Seminary pioneered in the study of the Scriptures in the English language in contrast to the practice of other institutions which specialized in Bible study in Greek and Hebrew. The development of a system of electives in the curriculum was also in keeping with the experimental spirit of the founder.

The shadows of the founders have lengthened into an institution celebrating its centennial, and the story makes for fascinating reading.

RICHARD L. JAMES