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A Major Reference Tool

The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology. Volume 1, edited by Colin Brown (Zondervan, 1976, 822 pp., $24.95), is reviewed by W. Ward Gasque, associate professor of New Testament studies, Regent College, Vancouver, Canada.

This valuable new work is the English translation, revision, and adaptation of a standard German reference tool that is much beloved by theological students and pastors. It is both easier to use and generally more theologically conservative than the famous Theological Dictionary of the New Testament edited by Gerhard Kittel, which has been recently completed in nine volumes (index volume yet to come). Considering the fact that it is in many ways an improvement of an already proven work, it would seem that it is destined for a long and useful life in its English form. When completed, the NIDNTT (or shall we abbreviate it DNTT?) will be in three volumes, due to appear at roughly one-year intervals.

The first difference from the TDNT is obviously size. The DNTT covers the same basic ground covered by the larger work in three volumes of approximately the same size as the nine in TDNT. (Volumes two and three are expected to be slightly larger than volume one.) However, it should be pointed out that there are Greek words discussed in DNTT that were missed in TDNT, and it seems improbable that any that occupy space in TDNT will be omitted from DNTT, even though the treatment will obviously be much briefer.

The second difference concerns the orientation of the two dictionaries. TDNT is intended for specialists, though it can be used with profit by anyone who has taken the trouble to learn Greek. By contrast. DNTT is designed to be easy for those with little or no Greek or Hebrew to use. Not only are all Greek and Hebrew words transliterated, but the material is arranged according to English word-groupings, so that one does not have to know even the Greek alphabet to find what he is looking for. In addition, there are extensive cross-references and very full indexes, which enable one to find just what he wants. Thus, for example, someone studying Mark 13 would look up “Abomination of Desolation” instead of bdelugma in order to find help in understanding this cryptic term; or one would look up “Church” instead of ekklesia; “Brother” instead of adelphos; “Darkness” instead of skotos; “Enemy” instead of echthros; and so forth. And under each of these headings he would find not merely a discussion of the important Greek terms used in the New Testament but also the larger conceptual context (which scholars nowadays call “semantic field”) and often penetrating exegesis of difficult passages of Scripture.

An important feature of DNTT is the presence of extensive and fully up-to-date bibliographies. This makes the dictionary indispensable for advanced theological students and scholars as well as for ordinary Bible students. Here it is miles ahead of TDNT, whose early volumes are now extremely dated (as is, it might be added, the German original of DNTT). The bibliographies are divided into two sections, the first listing books and articles in English and the second, foreign-language material. This feature alone makes the dictionary an essential reference work in any serious theological library.

A final difference between the dictionaries edited by Kittel and Brown is the theological orientation, though this should not be overemphasized. While DNTT is often more conservative than TDNT, it is not uniformly so. One detects the influences of what we in the English-speaking world would regard as fairly negative German criticism—for example, in the hesitancy to accept the witness of Acts as historically trustworthy. However, these influences have been carefully balanced by the English editor, who indicates reasons for a contrary position on many issues discussed by the original authors and also enlists the aid of British scholars to supplement the original German articles.

It is difficult to say anything negative about a work that is carefully and lovingly produced. I have already found it not only of great personal interest but also of value in my study, and I am sure that I will continue to do so for many years to come. The editor and his team have done a superb job of proof-reading: I noted only one typographical error in my (admittedly hasty) first reading. The only thing I came across to which I took strong exception was the rather desperate article on “Infant Baptism: Its Background and Theology,” intended to balance a superb discussion of “Baptism” by G. R. Beasley-Murray. Whatever the strength of the theological case for infant baptism, this article is certainly out of place in a dictionary of New Testament theology. Still, I suppose it will not do a great deal of harm and may cause some pedobaptist clergymen to buy a copy of the dictionary when they might otherwise not do so.

Another useful feature is a brief glossary of technical terms in the beginning of the volume. Although the dictionary is by no means lightweight, and will be difficult for some beginners, every effort has been made to present the material in a form usable by serious students of the Bible at all levels of experience. I am certain that it will perform a valuable ministry for many.

Seeking First The Political Kingdom

The Trivialization of the United Presbyterian Church, by John R. Fry (Harper & Row, 1975, 85 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Barry H. Downing, pastor, Northminster Presbyterian Church, Endwell, New York.

This book says the author, is not about “your average pooped-out Presbyterian” but rather about the liberal establishment that has led the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. down a theological and financial drain during the past decade. Since Fry was a part of that liberal establishment, his book gives you the same feeling you might have reading an exposé by Spiro Agnew of Richard Nixon’s administration: you believe he may have an inside view of what happened, but you may not think he is the one to take over the fallen kingdom.

Fry offers a theological analysis of what went wrong. He traces the problem back to the Confession of 1967, written by a liberal committee chaired by Princeton Seminary’s Edward Dowey. The confession was built around one key word, “reconciliation,” which Fry says was a fatal mistake. Reconciliation came to mean “peace at any price,” which makes for poor politics. Issues were never confronted head on. Instead, the church became caught up in trivia—therefore, “the trivialization of the United Presbyterian Church.”

The decline, if not the fall, of the United Presbyterian Church as Fry traces it goes something like this: The Confession of 1967 emphasized social action, especially in the areas of racial justice, war, poverty, and sex. In effect, the confession defined a true Christian as a liberal Democrat. The confession was used by leaders to justify more political involvement, leading eventually to the grant of $10,000 to the Angela Davis defense fund.

When this happened, the lay members of the church finally caught on to what was happening and said in clear terms that they didn’t like it. The message was that no more money would be given by local churches for national church work. The Presbyterian Lay Committee soon had a fairly substantial following, protesting the liberal leadership of the church. Fry thinks the Lay Committee has overestimated its influence, but he admits that the main body of Presbyterians is miles apart from its leadership.

Meanwhile, the church hierarchy began a movement of corporate restructuring at the General Assembly and synod level. Fry sees this as a “Peter Principle” gone wild, at a time when the UPC had no money to carry out these structural changes.

What is Fry’s solution? He has none. He closes with a statement of blind faith that the Presbyterian Church will rise from the dead because somehow the Presbyterian lay faithful—if there are any left—will renew the church.

Generally Fry’s book is entertaining and historically accurate. I agree with him that the Presbyterian problem is theological. But I disagree with the way he has diagnosed the illness. The problem did not begin with the writing of the Confession of 1967. The problem began with the fact that the liberals felt a need to write a new confession. Why? Because they did not believe what the church had believed in the past.

Rejecting traditional Christian eschatology with its heavenly kingdom, liberals came to believe that justice could be achieved only through social and political action. Rather than expecting God to bring about justice in a heavenly day of judgment, the church must take matters into its own hands now, and if not through traditional politics, then through radical and revolutionary politics. This led to the political emphasis of the Confession of 1967 and the logic of the Angela Davis grant.

Fry fails to see that the real problem with Presbyterian liberals is that they have abandoned the New Testament. He thinks the main business of the church is to bring about love and justice. Love, yes, but justice, no. Justice is a matter of law, not gospel. Jesus used the word “justice” only once in his recorded ministry. Corrupt men resist justice. The only way to bring about justice on earth is to use violence, and Jesus strictly forbids the church to try to overcome evil with evil.

Jesus does speak prophetically to the rich, but this is eschatology, not politics, as in the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man. Jesus warned of the coming day of judgment. But since some church leaders no longer do more than pay lip service to the idea of that judgment day, they make themselves judge, and politics is their executioner.

Fry is sorry to see the leaders of the Presbyterian Church now in fast retreat from politics to the sanctuary. I am not. The crucified Christ is a symbol not of political victory but rather the submission and humility of a heavenly king to corrupt earthly politics. The real problem in Presbyterian theology is not that the liberals picked the wrong word for the Confession of 1967. That is trivial. The real problem is that some Presbyterians have given up the ethics of the cross and the eschatology of the resurrection. That is not trivial.

Change Churches, But How?

The Problem of Wineskins: Church Structure in a Technological Age, by Howard Snyder (InterVarsity, 1975, 214 pp., $3.85 pb) is reviewed by Robert Case II, pastor, Hope Presbyterian Church, Phoenix, Arizona.

Howard Snyder has given us what he believes is an agenda for future thought on the organic relation between the Gospel of Jesus Christ (the “new wine”) and the church traditions, structures, and patterns surrounding that Gospel (the “old wineskins”). His major premise is that church structures are relative and sociologically conditioned whereas the Gospel is absolute and eternal. He quotes Luke 5:36–39 as foundational to his argument that “new wine must be poured into new (not old) wineskins.” Snyder is to be added to the ever increasing list of church “renewal” authors (e.g., Getz, Stedman, Richards, Bloesch, Girard) seeking to recast evangelically the mold of church structure.

He defines “new wine” as “preaching the gospel to the poor.” Indeed, how a church deals with the poor (not poverty) is the test of apostolicity, in Snyder’s view. He writes. “In God’s world there is no human condition which escapes moral significance, and the poor, and the treatment they receive, are strong indicators of the faithfulness of God’s people.”

He defines the “old wineskins” as that part of the Protestant church which came out of the sixteenth-century Reformation (presbyterian and congregational church government) and did not shed enough of the encrusted Roman Catholic tradition to allow the “new wine” to pour forth once more as it did in the days of the immediate post-apostolic church. He writes. “Regardless of the label, much Protestant ecclesiology is based more on tradition than on Scripture.”

Having thus defined his central terms Snyder lays before us the basic tension in the body of Christ as he sees it: “Renewal in the church has usually meant the church’s rebirth among the poor, the masses, the alienated. And with such resurgence has usually come the recovery of such essential New Testament emphases as community, purity, discipleship, the priesthood of believers and the gifts of the Spirit.” The tension is that the structure of the Reformation-rooted church is unable to respond adequately to this “renewal” or “rebirth.”

This being the case, a “new wineskin” is needed. Snyder takes the tabernacle in the wilderness as the divine model for today’s church structure: “it shows God’s people—the church—as mobile and flexible.” But the model that is used instead is the temple, a sign of immobility, inflexibility, inhospitality, and vanity. Using the tabernacle model. Snyder tries to determine the ecclesiastical remedy for these four woes of our Reformation-rooted church structural heritage.

Rather than being immobile, the church structure ought to facilitate the gathering together of God’s people. The Church is to be organized around the central idea that God’s people are a covenanting, called-out people on a pilgrimage in this hostile world. Secondly, rather than being inflexible, the church structure ought to accommodate itself to functional considerations as it seeks to harbor the beleaguered people of God in an antagonistic cultural setting. Thirdly, rather than being inhospitable, the church structure ought to emphasize community and “peoplehood.” That is, the Church is to concern itself, at least partially, with expressing and demonstrating the charismatic communion of God’s people as they are gathered together by the Holy Spirit. Lastly, rather than fostering vanity, the church structure ought to encourage the priesthood of all believers, with everyone humbly contributing his spiritual gifts for the common good and affirming the “uniqueness and value of human personality.” There are no “super-star” pastors in the reconstituted church.

Snyder’s discussion of the “new wine” as the “preaching to the poor” is a ground-breaking evangelical attempt to get the Church to consider this aspect of its kingdom responsibilities. His survey giving a cultural and historical perspective helps one understand his approach to the problem of church structure. The book is clearly laid out and highlighted to make comprehension rather easy. And the author’s extensive use of notes is welcome.

Snyder refuses to engage in what Kenneth Gangel calls the “franchising syndrome” (This is the way we did it, so copy us), and while this is laudable, it also poses a problem. The practicality of the book is thwarted by the omission of concrete suggestions on just how to implement the restructuring for which Snyder is calling. (Granted, he disclaims the role of blueprint-maker in his introduction.) While he emphasizes the small group (eight to twelve people) as the most efficient and functional component of church structuring, how-to-do-it information (such as that offered by Richards, Stedman, and Girard, to name three) is absent. This I consider a major drawback to this book.

One other major weakness is the apparent cutting of the apostolic umbilical cord to church structure. Snyder seems to deny the sufficiency and normativeness of God’s Word for structuring and organizing God’s people in our age. Does God charge us with the Great Commission and then refuse to reveal to us the structure for carrying out that commission? Snyder draws more upon the unauthoritative (and scanty) history of the immediate post-apostolic church than upon the authoritative (and not so scanty) history of the apostolic church in building his sociological/functional church structure for our age.

Howard Snyder is an erudite, trench-experienced church scholar who has an immense contribution to make to the welfare of the Church of Jesus Christ in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The Problem of Wineskins, however, is itself a pilgrimage—a statement written in the midst of Snyder’s journey to a settled ecclesiastical Canaan. It might have been more profitable had the author waited upon more study and reflection and then come forth with a definitive direction that was more soundly exegeted and tightly reasoned. Until we get this from Snyder, we must rely on ecclesiastical pioneers such as David Mains of Chicago. Ray Stedman of Palo Alto (both of whom endorse this book), and Egon Middelmann of the L’Abri-oriented Grace and Peace Fellowship in St. Louis to help the evangelical churches become the “new wineskins” for our precious vintage of gospel wine.

The Dark Side Of Human Nature

Escape From Evil, by Ernest Becker (The Free Press, 1975, 188 pp., $9.95), is reviewed by Michael H. Macdonald, associate professor of German and philosophy, Seattle Pacific College, Seattle, Washington.

Escape From Evil is a sequel to the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winner, The Denial of Death. Shortly before he died Becker requested that Escape From Evil remain unpublished, but his wife decided to release it. “believing the work to be an eloquent closure of his scientific literary career … [and] realizing that had the time remained, the author himself would have done so for what he considered to be his magnum opus.” His other books include The Birth and Death of Meaning, (second edition, 1971), The Revolution in Psychiatry (1974). Angel in Armor (1975), and The Structure of Evil (1968).

Becker claims he looked man full in the face for the first time in Escape From Evil. For years he refused to admit the dark side of human nature. Here he confronts the tragic reality of human evil. He elaborates on the central theme of The Denial of Death by arguing that it is the fear of death that drives man. The root of human evil lies in man’s urge to transcend this fear and deny mortality. Becker illustrates “how man’s impossible hopes and desires have heaped evil in the world.” Man the animal wants the impossible for an animal in a godless world: an earth that is not an earth but a heaven. Man is cursed with a burden that no other creature must bear, the consciousness of his own impending death. Yet even more than extinction, man fears “extinction with insignificance.” Man needs to know daily that his activity has cosmic meaning, that his life counts in the larger scheme of things.

Becker, writing from a starkly empirical point of view, refers to “the immense burden of guilt on the human psyche.” Here he identifies the significance of man’s need to experience expiation for guilt. In sacrifice man is drawn into the majesty of that which transcends him. Sacrifice has been one way of affirming power over life and, therefore, denying death. Becker arrives at “a logic of killing others in order to affirm our own life,” a concept that may indeed unlock much that our modern minds have been unable to explain. People within a nation join together under one banner to become “a chosen people.” Those who are different are excluded, and the attempt is made to purge the evil (the different ones) from the world (consider Stalin or Mao). Thus Becker sees the same dynamic at work in blood sacrifices, holy wars, and purges: the attempt to reach the infinite. All ideology is concerned with qualifying for eternity, and all power becomes essentially sacred, i.e., power to deny mortality. Through power one can become transformed from small and finite to big and infinite. Yet Becker discovers that not only do power and coercion enslave man, but he himself harbors an “enemy within.” Both Rousseau and Marx are wrong. Human nature is neither good nor even neutral. Societal changes will not cause man’s natural goodness to flourish.

Becker concludes that we moderns have the means for large-scale destruction, and that power is beginning to take devastating tolls. Moreover, masses of people are still being treated as means and not as ends in themselves. He bemoans the fact that neither democracy nor Marxism has led to human equality and freedom, and asserts that man must develop a social ideal that is nondestructive, yet creative and life-enhancing, one that takes into account man’s basest motives. The “hate object” could then be transformed from a race or a class of people to other, impersonal forms, like poverty, disease, and natural disasters.

Becker does a brilliant job of penetrating to the roots of issues. Escape From Evil and The Denial of Death are both likely to become important books for the history of ideas. They answer some key questions about man’s basic motives and his attitude toward the world around him. Becker has immersed himself in both the sciences and the humanities and digested much of modern psychological and anthropological thought. His theory embraces a broad spectrum of current events and issues, from the Viet Nam war to rock festivals and Transcendental Meditation.

Regrettably, his presupposition is clearly that since there is no deity to save us, man must save himself—however impossible the task. He does an excellent job of identifying the role of guilt, but he does not point to its cause—sin—for he himself feels no sense of sin. Sin is inoperative because the Divine is denied. Our modern world has avoided sin “by simply denying the existence of the invisible dimension to which it is related.” The scientist Becker rejects the Marxist point of view that man is basically good. He concludes, in basic agreement with Christianity, that much of what is wrong with the world relates to the nature of man and the age-old problem of evil. It is a pity that in cutting through to the roots he did not rediscover the whole of historic Christianity. He seems to have come so close to, and yet be very far from, the Truth.

BRIEFLY NOTED

Scholars who are interested in writing for the general reader and are capable of doing so effectively are all too rare, especially in the area of academic biblical studies. But here are books by five outstanding authorities that communicate extremely well: I Came to Set the Earth on Fire: A Portrait of Jesus, by R. T. France (InterVarsity, 190 pp., $2.50 pb); Gleanings from the New Testament, by A. M. Hunter (Westminster, 182 pp., $4.95); First Christians: Pentecost and the Spread of Christianity, by Paul L. Maier (Harper & Row, 160 pp., $6.95); Light on the Gospels: A Reader’s Guide, by John L. McKenzie (Thomas More, 216 pp., $9.95); and To Heal and to Reveal: The Prophetic Vocation according to Luke (Seabury, 179 pp., $8.95).

Most leaders of religious ministries would rather not have to raise money, but for those who can’t avoid it, and for those who do see it as a calling, here are three recent books with practical helps: A New Climate for Stewardship, by Wallace Fisher (Abingdon, 127 pp., $3.95 pb), which sets the broadest context: New Models for Creative Giving, by Raymond Knudsen (Association, 143 pp., $5.50 pb), with such chapters as charitable reminder trusts and instrumentality grantsmanship; and How to Pay Your Pastor More and Balance the Budget Too! by Manfred Holck, Jr. (Religious Publishing Co. [198 Allendale Rd., King of Prussia, Pa. 19406], 121 pp., $6.95), written by an expert. Highly recommended for church finance committees.

A very practical and tested method for learning to speak another language is presented by E. Thomas Brewster and Elizabeth Brewster in Language Acquisition Made Practical (Lingua House [915 W. Jackson, Colorado Springs, Colo. 80907], 384 pp., $10 pb). The book is full of illustrations and charts and takes the user step by step. It was designed with missionaries in mind. An accompanying cassette is available.

Two recent collections of essays seek to honor distinguished evangelical Bible teachers. New Testament Studies, edited by Huber L. Drum-wright and Curtis Vaughan and dedicated to Ray Summers of Baylor (Baylor University Press, 195 pp., $7.95), includes contributions by F. F. Bruce, M. C. Tenney, Fred L. Fisher, Frank Stagg, and others. Interpreting the Word of God, edited by Samuel J. Schultz and Morris A. Inch (Moody, 281 pp., $8.95), has essays written by various faculty members of Wheaton College in honor of their colleague, Steven Barabas. The latter volume has a broader focus and includes an exceptionally fine article on the use of the Old Testament in the New, though both will be of interest to theological students and teachers.

At last there is a manual for the ordinary Bible student who wishes to have a basic introduction to the biblical languages without becoming an expert, or who is frightened by the formidable enterprise of their formal academic study! Do it Yourself Hebrew and Greek: Everybody’s Guide to the Language Tools, by Edward W. Goodrick (Multnomah Press [10209 S.E. Division, Portland Ore. 97266], 250 pp, $9.95 pb) offers some of the basics of the two languages plus, equally important, an introduction to the many tools of biblical study which can be used by those who have learned these basics. The author also gives guidelines for proper biblical interpretation and warns the reader not to abuse his limited knowledge of Hebrew and Greek. Could form a unit in any Bible school or college introductory course or provide the basis of an elective Sunday school class in a larger church. An accompanying cassette is also available.

The name of Armerding is something of a household word in the evangelical community. Now George (brother of the elder Carl, uncle of Hudson and Carl Edwin) joins the ranks of the family authors with an interesting study of all of the references to perfumes and fragrances in the Bible, Fragrance Ascending (Western Book Company [1618 Franklin St., Oakland, CA 94612], 125 pp., n.p. pb). A Song for Lovers, by S. Craig Glickman (InterVarsity 188 pp., $3.95 pb), a guide to the Song of Solomon; Journey with Job, by Thomas John Carlisle (Eerdmans, 94 pp., $2.25 pb), a series of original poems; and Epistles Now by Leslie Brandt (Concordia. 186 pp., $5.95), a rewriting of the New Testament letters in free verse with illustrations by Corita Kent: these refreshingly restate some biblical messages.

The following books will be of interest mainly to biblical specialists and theological librarians: What is Structural Exegesis?, by Daniel Patte (Fortress, 90 pp., $2.95 pb), and Structural Analysis of Narrative, by Jean Calloud (Fortress, or Scholars Press, 108 pp., $3.95 pb), a new literary approach to the Bible arising out of modern anthropological studies. Studies in the Structure of Hebrew Narrative by Robert C. Culley (Fortress or Scholars Press, 122 pp., $3.95 pb) takes a more traditional literary approach to his subject. The fourth and final volume of the famous Grammar of New Testament Greek begun by James Hope Moulton (1863–1917) contains a careful analysis of the Style of each of the New Testament authors by Nigel Turner (Edinburgh, Scotland: T & T Clark, 174 pp.,£ 4.20).

Tribal religions plus a dozen surviving advanced religions are briefly surveyed by Lewis Hopfe in Religions of the World (Glencoe, 308 pp., n.p., pb).

You do not have to believe that the Apocrypha is inspired to appreciate the fact that its varied writings offer much insight into the life and thought of the Jewish people during the intertestamental period. The extensive commentary on I Maccabees by Jonathan Goldstein (Doubleday, 609 pp., $9.00), volume 41 in the Anchor Bible, offers a very welcome mine of historical information. The New Testament Environment by Eduard Lohse (Abingdon, 300 pp., $6.95 pb) begins with intertestamental history, but includes much more. It gives the student an excellent overview of the various cultural facets influencing the culture of Jesus. Specialists will find Aspects of Religious Propaganda in Judaism and Early Christianity, edited by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza (University of Notre Dame, 192 pp., $12.95), of value.

The Latter-day Saints (Mormons) are a fastgrowing rival of historic Christianity. Their missionary zeal, increasing national prominence, and relatively upright lives make them formidable adversaries. Some understanding of them can be gained from a publication of their leading university, Christian Churches of America, by Milton Backman, Jr. (Brigham Young, 230 pp., $9.95, $5.95 pb). A reasonably fair portrayal is given of several major bodies and movements. When describing the Mormons themselves Backman tries to be objective and makes no attempt to cover up their highly unorthodox doctrines. Authoritative statements from the highest Mormon leaders, chiefly on ethical issues, have been compiled by R. Clayton Brough in His Servants Speak (Horizon Publishers [Box 490, Bountiful, Utah 84010], 298 pp., $6.95). The fifty-five topics include birth control (no), card playing (no), Coca Cola (no), dancing (yes), military service (yes), Negro priests (no), tithing (yes). A similar compilation of doctrinal pronouncements would be desirable.

The late Arnold Toynbee’s last book, Mankind and Mother Earth (Oxford, 641 pp., $19.50), is a fitting capstone to his long and controversial career. He narrates the entire history of man, striving to avoid the Western bias that so often afflicts such attempts. His focus is not on comparisons among civilizations as it was in A Study of History. Toynbee did not hold to orthodox Christianity, but he recognizes major influences by religious movements upon historical development, and therefore his approach is worth considering.

Creation, Christ and Culture is an appropriate title for a collection of theological essays seeking to honor Professor T. F. Torrance of Edinburgh, perhaps Britain’s most distinguished and creative living theologian, edited by Richard W. A. McKinney (T & T Clark, 328 pp., £ 5.60). Twenty scholars contributed.

Beyond The Exorcist

Hostage to the Devil, by Malachi Martin (Reader’s Digest Press, 1976, 477 pp., $9.95), is reviewed by William Melden, Lookout Mountain, Tennessee.

It is quite possible that Malachi Martin’s Hostage to the Devil will become one of the essential texts in the dark and difficult field of biblical demonology. While not as scholarly as the theses of Merrill Ungar, nor as overwhelming in scope as the work of Kurt Koch, Martin’s book will be of tremendous value to anyone involved either in studying demonology or in actually grappling with demonic forces.

It is interesting that the publication of Hostage to the Devil coincides with the second re-release of the film The Exorcist. Like the tormented heroes of that grisly, tasteless story, Malachi Martin is himself a former Jesuit professor with considerable experience in the field of exorcism—or, if you prefer, the ministry of deliverance. His book is both a superb piece of theological scholarship and a terribly dramatic narrative. Martin explores the nature of demonic possession, the awful havoc created in the victim’s life, and the power of Christ over Satan and his minions. He offers five detailed case studies of possession and deliverance. His examples are far more gruesome, and potentially offensive, than anything dreamed up by the scriptwriters of Warner Brothers; his final message, however, is one of encouragement, hope, and a strange sort of scarred joy that can be felt only by those who have confronted Satan face to face and seen him defeated.

The victims described in Martin’s case studies are not less “ordinary” than the people we all encounter from day to day. They include a teen-age girl, a popular disc jockey; a Catholic priest who has adopted the “pop theology” of the post-war period, a professional psychologist, and a transsexual. As Martin points out, each of these persons adopted some attitude or ideology that has only recently emerged from the shadows and become “respectable”: the confusion of sex and gender that makes hom*osexuality and even transsexuality “viable options for a contemporary society”; the attempt, by Teilhard de Chardin and others, to reconcile biblical theology and Darwinian evolution; the steady assault on man’s personality that makes possible the hideous reductionism of a B. F. Skinner; the contemporary infatuation with occult phenomena, such as “parapsychology” and “astral projection,” pursuits that open the doors to demonic influence. The pathetic people Martin studied are the real-life victims of such “philosophical speculations.” When we see their sufferings through Martin’s eyes, we begin to understand Paul’s warning in First Timothy 4:1, “The Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons” (NASV).

That warning, and the illustration of its truth provided by Hostage to the Devil, raises a point that the Christian Church must never forget: ideas—philosophies, theories, “vain imaginings”—do not exist in a vacuum. They have consequences. Whether the “doctrine” is evolution, “free love,” dialectical materialism, or reincarnation, it has ramifications and repercussions in the material world. This is one of the little-discussed “occupational hazards” of the professional philosopher or theologian; while he may indeed live in an “ivory tower,” he does not live there alone. The deceitful spirits are always there, ever awaiting the opportunity to swarm into their terrible habitations. This correlation between intellectual activity and demonic ambition is very real, as witness Martin’s book; it is also probably the chief raison d’être for the old Catholic Index.

Aside from the case studies, Hostage to the Devil is distinguished by two sections that are of inestimable value to the student of demonology. The first is the chapter entitled “A Brief Handbook of Exorcism,” in which Martin discusses the mechanics of possession and exorcism and describes the type of person usually chosen by God for the dreadful ministry of deliverance. He rarely chooses a person of great intellect or imagination; such a one would be too receptive to the confusing thoughts and doubts inevitably hurled at the minister during an exorcism by the demon or demons involved. As Martin points out. Satan’s two strongest weapons are deceit and confusion, and these can be deployed with utmost effectiveness against an intellectual, whose mind can easily be led down a thousand “rational” alleyways of defeat. There are obvious exceptions, of course, such as the Apostle Paul (and, presumably, Martin himself), but the rule seems clear enough. As Martin puts it, God usually seems to choose “sensitive men of solid rather than dazzling minds.”

“A Brief Handbook of Exorcism” also includes a fascinating outline of the chronological stages of exorcism, explained to Martin by another, more experienced exorcist. The stages are called Presence, Pretense, Breakpoint, Voice, Clash, and Expulsion; each corresponds to a particular tactic or event used by the demon and/or the exorciser.

The final section of the book. “A Manual of Possession,” is an adequate if not breathtaking presentation of the traditional biblical views of Christ, Satan, and man. Martin wisely avoids a strong Catholic emphasis here; as elsewhere in the book, he emphasizes that it is nothing but the power of Jesus Christ that prevails over Satan and his demons. He does make continual reference to “the Church,” but it is clear that he means the universal church, rather than the church of Rome.

This emphasis on the power and grace of Jesus Christ is the factor that most distinguishes Hostage to the Devil, and makes it far more than merely another book of horror stories. Malachi Martin has met the devil face to face in a way that few of us ever will; and, while he is obviously scarred, he can say, with Corrie ten Boom, “Jesus was Victor, Jesus is Victor, Jesus will be Victor.”

NEW PERIODICAL

Like its Protestant counterpart, the Roman Catholic charismatic movement has differing styles and emphases. Joining New Covenant as a nationally circulating magazine is Catholic Charismatic, a slick-paper bi-monthly issued by a major Catholic publisher, Paulist Press, with a widespread network of editors. The first issue was dated March-April, 1976. Protestant as well as Catholic theological libraries will want to subscribe, and, of course, charismatic Catholics will be especially interested ($7.50/year; 400 Sette Drive, Paramus, N.J. 07652). Bulk rates are available.

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Have you ever carried a bucket of water up a hill? Has anyone ever explained to you that the reason your shoulder is getting twisted or your back is hurting might be that the weight you are carrying is a one-sided strain, that it wouldn’t bother you so much if it were divided in two? Two buckets filled with the same amount of water, carried in two hands, giving a balance of weight on each side, or carried on a yoke fitted across one’s shoulders, make it possible to carry a weight that would be impossible all on one side. When carrying water, carry balanced buckets.

Psalm 89:1 is a good song to sing privately to the Lord at the beginning of a day: “I will sing of the mercies of the LORD for ever: with my mouth will I make known thy faithfulness to all generations.” There are such varied mercies to sing about as we think of the kind thoughtfulness of the Lord in all he has given us. We are to make known his faithfulness to all generations—our parents’, grandparents’, children’s, and grandchildren’s generations as well as our own.

One of the central demonstrations of his faithfulness that we need to make known, and also to sing about privately, is the verbalized communication he gave us. His Word, the Bible, is preserved from generation to generation, so we don’t have to start from zero and discover truth for ourselves in some long trek to a secret cave or guru. “Thy hands have made me and fashioned me: give me understanding, that I may learn thy commandments”: this verse, Psalm 119:37; helps us to recognize that our Creator made us to have the capacity to understand what he has given us in written form. The same psalm says in verse 105, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” Verse 148 speaks of staying awake at night to meditate upon his Word. That Word to us is meant to be clear, understandable, a help day by day in our thinking and meditating as well as in our conduct.

“But why should I thank God for the Bible,” some may complain, “when it mixes me up so? And I can’t understand how God can be God and sovereign and yet how I can have choice and not be a computer.”

We are finite creatures, created by an infinite, personal, perfect God who knows all things. Think about how hard it is to explain something you know to a small child who is getting frustrated because he or she cannot understand the explanation. God is perfect in his knowledge, wisdom, understanding. He is infinite, eternal, unlimited, unchangeable. We are finite, had a beginning not long ago, are limited, are very changeable in our emotions, attitudes, interests, and so on. We are made in God’s image, and so we can think and act and feel and communicate and love. We can make things, be creative in a variety of ways.

Finite and spoiled by sin though we are, we still can think. We can read, listen, and come to an understanding. And God prepared a communication for us that would give us sufficient knowledge about the universe and himself, history and prophecy, how to come to him and how to receive strength day by day.

I think the idea of balanced buckets may help us to recognize something of what we should be doing as we read the Word day by day and ask for strength to do what it says. God has given a balance from beginning to end. We are not meant to carry the heavy bucket of “meaningful choice” or our “significance” while we tip out all the water in the other bucket. The Lord God gave us an equal teaching that he is sovereign, that he has chosen us before the foundation of the world.

“But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that you should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pet. 2:9). “Choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD. And the people answered and said, God forbid that we should forsake the LORD, to serve other gods” (Josh. 24:15, 16).

“And one Ananias, a devout man according to the law, having a good report of all the Jews which dwelt there, came unto me, and stood, and said unto me, Brother Saul, receive thy sight.… And he said, The God of our fathers hath chosen thee, that thou shouldest know his will, and see that Just One, and shouldest hear the voice of his mouth” (Acts 22:12–14). “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).

“Then the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou earnest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations” (Jer. 1:4, 5). “I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star. And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely” (Rev. 22:16, 17).

How can it be? How can he choose us and call upon us to make a choice? How can we be known before we were born, be chosen for a task before we were born, and yet need to agonize over wanting the Lord’s will and being willing to put the Lord first?

The infinite God has given us truth in his Word. He has given us that which we can handle, can carry. He means for us to carry balanced buckets of truth. When we try to pour it all into one bucket, we are upsetting the balance. When we insist on doing this, we suffer and do not have the comfort we were meant to have.

God is sovereign, and we are not computers, not puppets, but persons with the ability to choose. Both things are true. We don’t have to be fatalists. We can be comfortable being people, and rejoice in not needing to be God. We can turn Satan away when he tries to make us insist on knowing all that God knows, and quote to him one of the last passages in the Bible: “For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book” (Rev. 22:18, 19).

Balanced buckets, with all the words intact, to be carried with comfort.

EDITH SCHAEFFER

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Ninth in the Series “Evangelicals in Search of Identity”

The Touch And Texture Of Georges Rouault

In our century Christian art has fallen on hard times. It must wrestle not only with the perennial question of the relation of faith and art but also with the modern limiting of subject matter to personal experience. In a day when the artist prizes his individuality and vaunts his obscurity, can there be Christian art? What possible role can it play?

Georges Rouault (1871–1958) was one of the rare artists who combined a real faith with a modern sensitivity. Born in a poor suburb of Paris during the bombardment of the Paris Commune, Rouault was of hardy Briton stock and was raised in an artisan’s environment. His first job (in 1885) was as an apprentice in a stained-glass factory. All of this did much to help him develop his feel for the painful texture of life.

But not until 1898, after the death of his beloved teacher Gustave Moreau, did this emotional sensitivity to life touch his painting. By that time he had spent almost a decade in art school; he knew drawing and art history, but as he put it: “I had not taken the time to watch people and life. I was acquainted with religious history … but I knew nothing of suffering.”

His experience with life—with men in the workyards and the barges—touched off a profound religious transformation in the artist. As he explained it: “When I was about thirty, I felt a stroke of lightning, or of grace, depending on one’s perspective. The face of the world changed for me. I saw everything that I had seen before, but in a different form and with a different harmony.”

What was the nature of this experience? Clearly its root was religious. Rouault was a believing Catholic, and while studying with Moreau he had sought out a priest in order to prepare himself for his first communion. The influence during this time of Léon Bloy and of Jacques and Raïssa Maritain led him to an evangelical Catholicism. His life was changed, and his sensitivity as an artist was transformed.

But it would be a mistake to try to understand this change by his verbal confession. Only rarely does he refer to his faith in words. His friend Claude Roulet tells us that Rouault spoke of his faith only three or four times in twenty years. In part this may have been due to his innate taciturnity about intimate questions. But more important, as an artist he made his work his primary confession. He once said: “If I have always been reluctant to discuss these questions, it is because our language is form, color, harmony.” And: “Images and colors, for a painter, are his means of being, of living, of thinking and of feeling.”

What then do we see in his painting? Here too we find surprises. Especially in his early work, his art evinces a dark and melancholy view of life. His musings reflect “a cry in the night, a stifled sob. A suppressed laugh. In this world every day, a thousand unknown persons that are worth more than I labor on and die at the task.” One may wonder if an outlook like this reflects Christianity. Isn’t a Christian supposed to be happy?

Rouault’s contemporaries asked the same question. Some of them—perhaps they were Christians—wondered when he would start showing his “better side.” Rouault’s answer is worth pondering:

“Perhaps one day far off when a true and genuine inner peace will control the mind … of the pilgrim, far from the prostitution of the world. When force will be less visible and more intuitive, secret and discrete, then perhaps I will show my ‘better’ side. For what we see with our eyes and think we touch with our diseased hands and weigh so precisely, is not all there is in this clever and mechanized world.”

Of course, “more than the eyes can see” for Rouault included the reality of Christ’s suffering for sin. In his directly religious painting, Rouault was primarily a painter of the incarnation and passion of Christ. Heads of Christ, portrayals of Christ on the cross, all focusing on the Lord’s sufferings, predominate. Here too one might ask: Why the emphasis on the dark side? Isn’t Christianity about healing and resurrection as well as suffering and death?

Indeed it is. Rouault knew this—he believed and painted the resurrection. But he also knew what his beloved Pascal had felt, that as long as there is suffering in the world the pains of Christ are important. In Pascal’s words, “Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world and we should not sleep during that time.” For Rouault it was the logic of human experience (or should we say its illogic) that drove him to the cross. He brooded:

So little righteous

And certainly helpless, the poor wretch

With the best of intentions,

Trips and falls more than once.

Like Jesus on the road to Calvary

Under the weight of the cross

Wanting to take on our sufferings.

Perhaps such reflections are difficult for us because we have come to believe that Christian things must be “nice.” Of course, that is easily enough said by Christians who are well fed and free. But for many people life is not nice, and Rouault felt this deeply. His faith was an attempt to find in Christ a way to make some sense of life filled with misery.

But it would be a mistake to leave the impression that Rouault’s painting is only dark. If his world is often dark, there is usually a light in the sky. At times (especially in his later works) the light becomes so bright that the whole canvas has a luminous quality. But it was the misery that captured his artistic imagination and brought it to the cross.

It is easy to criticize this emphasis. Christ’s death does more than illumine misery; it atones for sin. And sin is more than suffering; it is also rebellion against God. But these criticisms, while they may be true, are somehow beside the point. Rouault was an artist, not a theologian. His world was the concrete world of flesh and tears. He dealt—as all artists must—with personal and visible reality, with shapes, not with ideas.

We must not expect more from Christian art than it can give us. Rouault’s art records one man’s experience. It is a witness of a personal faith, not a revelation of objective truth. And all human witness is limited. When the Gospel enters a life it comes through a narrow door. And since no one person’s experience is the sum of religious truth, no witness to Christ is perfect. While a witness can point to Christ, it is the Word of God—not the witness—that the Spirit uses to convert others.

But for all that, art can be the visual expression of one person’s faith. We cannot escape it with Rouault. Throughout his work a vivid sense of the reality of sin and grace is as concrete as the figures who fill his canvases. Miserere pictures for us the reality of Rouault’s faith. A blind man reaches out to touch Christ. The caption reads: “Lord, it is you. I recognize you.” That is Rouault’s faith: concrete, intuitive, as sure as the sense of touch. Calvin could have been referring to Rouault when he spoke of the Christian’s knowing the fullness of God in Christ. He wrote: “The believing soul recognizes the presence of God indubitably and, as one may say, touches him with his hand.”

WILLIAM A. DYRNESS

William A. Dyrness is the author of “Rouault: A Vision of Suffering and Salvation” (Eerdmans, 1971).

Larry Norman, And …

A new Larry Norman album generally creates a stir among Jesus music freaks and critics, and In Another Land (SRA 2001), perhaps his best LP to date, should be no exception. He now records on the Solid Rock label (distributed, as are most of the best Jesus rock records, by Word). The controversial Norman explains “Solid Rock” on the inside record slipcase. Part of his defense is worth noting:

“Music is one of the most strategic art forms we have today. It is more widely popular than literature, cinema, poetry, or any of the other art forms. It is also the most portable. Radios fit into back pockets, cassette players weigh less than a textbook, and almost every car has a radio. Most people have access to some kind of record player.”

And like it or not, rock music is what comes from most of these radios, cassettes, and record players.

To me Larry Norman is the best Jesus rock artist around. With a little help from modern technology he manages to change his voice to suit song or mood. His lyrics are always clever and effectively imagistic. No other song shows this success so well as “The Sun Began to Rain”: “A thief fell out of Heaven with some loaded dice/but the lamb rolled a seven back to Paradise/the bread was finally leavened so I had a slice/and the sun began to rain” (verse one). The superbly played loose honky-tonk piano and the vocal technique match the lyrics exactly.

That’s another of Norman’s strengths. He knows how to arrange both his music and his albums. “The Sun Began to Rain” opens side two. With no break he goes right into cut two, “Shot Down,” with an early rock beat and sound. The contrast works.

In “Six Sixty Six” a simple guitar accompaniment of arpeggios shifts between verses to a country-pickin’ flavor. Throughout the album the guitar interludes are well placed and paced, and the one in the lead cut, “The Rock That Doesn’t Roll,” briefly approaches good innovative jazz. The only weakness of this LP is that some of the songs have been previously recorded.

Norman also produced Randy Stonehill’s latest album, Welcome to Paradise (SRA 2002), also on the Solid Rock label. Stonehill doesn’t have the easy way with lyrics that Norman does. His have a studied feel, and the images seem labored. Stonehill uses one style more consistently than Norman, but it wears well. Norman should have paced the album better, mixing long cuts with short ones. That’s the main weakness of the first side. But “Keep Me Runnin’,” which runs nearly six minutes, wouldn’t be as effective if shorter.

Both albums include love songs. But for a larger dose of Christian love music try The Greatest of These Is Love (Myrrh, MSA-6565). That album has songs from nine contemporary Christian artists. Or dip into Danny Taylor’s latest record, A Time For Love (Tempo, S-102). The songs on these albums are a little too much syrup for me, but people who like The Lettermen and other love-song groups should like them.

Originally an ABC album, White Horse by David OMartian is now on the Myrrh label (MSA-6564). OMartian did a superb job producing and arranging his music. He showed selectivity sensitivity by including such love songs as “Fat City” along with religious numbers.

Do you remember “Alley Oop!,” “Along Comes Mary,” or “Cherish”? Well, Gary S. Paxton was involved in one way or another with all those million-sellers. Now a Christian, he’s just released The Astonishing, Outrageous, Amazing, Incredible, Unbelievable, Different World of Gary S. Paxton (New Pax, NP-33005, distributed by Word). Technically the record is well produced, and musically Paxton does some interesting things. I particularly like his echo-chamber imitation of Elvis. The best cuts on the album are “Layed Back” on side one and “There’s Got to Be More to Livin’ Than Just Waitin’ to Die,” both written by Paxton. He balances the album with humorous and serious songs, ballads and rock numbers. Welcome to Jesus music, Gary S. Paxton.

CHERYL FORBES

Ideas

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Just as you can tell the Oligocene Epoch by all the small saurians running about, and the Ice Age by all the ice lying about, and the Stone Age by the boulder that yon Cro-Magnon man is prying off the cliff onto your head, so there are ways by which you can tell that we are now in the Post-Verbal Epoch.

Item: If you want to get people to come out and hear you, you don’t advertise a speech; you call your offering a “multi-media presentation.” The supposition here is that the mere hearing of words is gruel too thin to sell.

Item: Big Bird and Ernie and Bert have replaced McGuffey in the teaching of children. The implication here, presumably, is that children must be regaled with all that is cute and fun (and many of us post-children, incidentally, are fascinated by that bird and those Muppets) if we expect them to learn anything.

Item: Post-verbal utterances like “Oh wow,” “I mean like,” and “Outta sight” have replaced earlier verbal ways of articulating human responses to various situations.

Item: Audio-visual departments, supplying movie projectors, opaque projectors, overhead projectors, slide projectors, film-strip projectors, TV tapes, and one thing and another, have been called in to assist the lecturers in their job of trying to flag down the attention of undergraduates.

We have, it seems, moved into a post-verbal, post-ratiocinative era. We are told that we must see things, feel them, and be pawed, stroked, or inundated by them. Will a man with a book soon be about as timely a phenomenon as a man with a button-hook or an ox-goad?

There may yet be something to be urged in behalf of the man with the book, before we dissolve the libraries the way Henry VIII did the monasteries.

For a start, books are made up of pages full of printed words, and those printed words are nothing more than conventional symbols, as exact as we can get them, by which we humans fix in time and space what we say. Other species do not seem to need to do this: we hear nothing of the seraphim writing things down, and we are almost certain that aardvarks and flatworms don’t. We, somehow, are somewhere in the middle, lacking the ability of the one group to perceive things and understand them immediately and wholly, but needing, unlike the other group, to do something more with things than feel them. The great distinguishing mark of our species is that we do, in fact, articulate things. Whatever we want to say about the singing of whales, the antennae of ants, and the beeping of dolphins, the word “language” has a unique meaning for us. We are more, in other words, than feeling, seeing creatures. We are intellects, and the great exercise of the intellect is articulation.

There are two dangers to be avoided, though. First, we must not suppose that words, much less printed words, are the only method we have of articulating things. There is a sense in which any gesture, any picture, any noise we make, is some sort of articulation. Any of these may give shape to something we want to “say.” But humankind seems, from the beginning, to have been driven by the need to get beyond gesturing, drawing, and groaning. We, for example, could not get this case through to you by waving and sketching and mmphing. Words are an enormous help in bridging the region between our brain and yours.

Second, we are not, of course, merely verbal creatures. Surely this has been one of the limitations of much of Reformation religion: at times it has seemed to approach us all as though we were nothing more than brains, or souls at best. All we need to do is sit and listen to the Word, or sit and read the Word. All the rest of our being is irrelevant as far as worship, say, is concerned. The Hebrews, and various forms of pre-Reformation Christianity, knew better than this.

Still, no matter what else we are doing, somebody somewhere had better keep on writing, and somebody had better keep on reading. The precision and plenitude that language makes possible in the articulation of ideas is indispensable to us human beings. We sink toward brutishness when we disavow our capacity for rigorous discourse—for hewing between worthy ideas and rubbish, for example, and for rousing human imagination to the fiery apprehension of virtue and bliss, and for telling the story.

Telling the story. There it is. Sooner or later the son et lumiére, or the Bayeux Tapestry, or the icon, or the Sacrament itself, must be explained to us. Someone has to tell the story. Why is that man spearing that other man? Why is that lady’s head bent over her infant that way? Why am I eating this wafer? Somebody tell me about it.

Words. Tales. Books. They are a sign and nourisher and guarantor of our humanity—that humanity which needs on the one hand, certainly, to be stroked and roused and thrilled by touch and sight and smell (and hence sex, and liturgy, and audio-visual departments), but on the other, to think and judge and reflect and discriminate, and to articulate exactly the fruits of these latter activities. To treat people, or to act, as though we were either only bundles of sensations or bundles of ideas is to make either the dionysian or the rationalistic error. Christianity, with its doctrine of the Incarnation of the Word, gives the lie to both. On the one hand, the Word became incarnate (we needed to see and touch something); on the other, it was the Word that became incarnate (that eternal Thing which we saw and touched is named by the word Word). These are truths forever written in Heaven.

Language (i.e., words) is the great gift to us men. Insofar as we celebrate the non-verbal at the expense of the precisely verbal, we disavow that gift and hence our humanity. And once we disavow our humanity, what is left?

The making and reading of books is perhaps the primary way by which we acknowledge, use, and glorify that gift.

Freedom Exacts An Ongoing Toll

The death of two American army officers last month in Korea suggests that the free world will continue to pay a price for trying to contain Communism. Certain influential Communists seem intent on pushing the free world into confrontation, or at least in seeing how far they can go without provoking a confrontation. Around the world, this strategy prevails, and on numerous occasions this has been profitable to the Marxists.

The fatal incident was more like a lumbermen’s brawl than a military exchange. The Americans who were killed had been escorting a group of South Koreans in a tree-pruning operation. Their innocent mission was to trim a large poplar so as to improve the Visibility for a command post. The North Korean response was a sudden, brutal assault. It was a tragedy that fit neatly into the preference of the world’s trouble-makers for terrorism rather than open warfare.

Do the Korean Communists really want people to believe that the United States wishes to start another war in Korea? This kind of irrationality calls for subtle initiatives on the part of the West if commitments to South Korea and other countries are to be guaranteed. But this must be done without allowing irrationality to triumph.

Our sympathy goes out to the families of the slain Americans and to those who were wounded. Our hope is that their deaths will stir our consciences. The post-Viet Nam period has produced an indifference toward the Communist menace that must be overcome. We must realize with Solzhenitsyn that détente notwithstanding, the challenge is greater than ever.

Back To School, Parents

As school doors open this month, those Christian parents whose children are entering Christian-run schools should not think that this relieves them of their responsibility for spiritual nurture. Bible teaching in the classroom needs to be corroborated at home. It can easily be nullified by words and deeds—between husband and wife and between parents and children—that are contrary to biblical standards.

These parents should also realize that they are not protecting their children completely from exposure to some of the more sinful aspects of personal and social life. What the children don’t encounter at school they are likely to encounter after school, among their neighborhood friends. And such sins as racism, materialism, chauvinistic patriotism, and self-righteousness are at least as likely to be exhibited in professedly Christian schools as in secular ones.

The majority of Christians send their children to public schools. They realize that spiritual nurture must be provided in the home, in the congregation, and in specialized ministries. (One wonders whether the people who clamour for bringing God back to the public schools seriously think that the presence or absence of a few bland religious rites and references makes much difference one way or the other.)

Now, at the beginning of the school year, is the time for parents to realize the importance of being active in school affairs consistently instead of suddenly appearing on the scene when they are offended by some egregious transgression of Christian standards. Most PTA’s need active members. Most school boards have open meetings, advisory committees, and other channels for parent participation. Parents have no right to complain about the way a school is run if they have not consistently taken part in the affairs of the school and have not become informed about the various options before final decisions are made.

Election ’76—The Push Potential

Not since 1960 have the religious and ethical commitments of our presidential candidates been so carefully scrutinized. In that year the candidacy of John F. Kennedy posed the question whether a Roman Catholic could or should be elected president. Now we have the religious outspokenness of Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter. We also face in 1976 the disillusionment of the American people following the revelation of moral misconduct by leaders of both parties in the executive and legislative branches.

Evangelical Christians are wondering upon what ethical criteria they should base their votes come November 2. A number of factors enter into such a decision, but particular attention needs to be given to one of the greatest and most recurrent questions of politics: What is the proper balance between equality and privilege? As Dr. Paul Henry of Calvin College has observed, “It is especially important that evangelical Christians deliberately focus on this issue, given the fact that many will no doubt be prone to engage in religious moralizing in this election without asking nuts-and-bolts questions about the policy decisions their votes will favor.”

All political decisions are in the last analysis allocative; that is, all political questions relate in some manner to the question of who gets what. Politics deals with questions of distributive justice.

Aristotle, one of the first commentators on politics, saw that distributive justice always involves achieving a balance between two sets of demands. On the one hand, argued Aristotle, there is the democratic impulse in society: men are fundamentally equal in nature (i.e., before God), and their equality in nature should reflect itself in all social, economic, and political relations. On the other hand, there is the aristrocratic impulse: men are unequal in the contributions they make to and the investment they make in a society, and their inequality is justifiably maintained in all social, economic, and political relations.

The same debate continues within society today. There are those who argue that respect for mankind’s equality in nature should reflect itself in the distributive policies of the public sphere. Others contend that the fruits of one’s labor should be respected as earned privilege. One of the central needs in the American political debate is to recognize legitimate rights of property and fruits of enterprise while opposing those social and economic inequalities that deny the claim to God-given equality.

Either of the two impulses cited by Aristotle can, when carried to an extreme, be dangerous to a society. The democratic impulse can overwhelm quality through quantity and can abuse the argument for egalitarianism in order to destroy earned and legitimate privilege. The aristocratic impulse can overlook the rights of the majority by exaggerating the rights of the minority and can abuse the argument for legitimate privilege by extending it to indiscriminate and arbitrary privilege.

These impulses are one of the core distinctions between “liberals” and “conservatives” (the terms are admittedly imprecise) in America today. And it is fair to suggest that the Democratic party currently leans more heavily toward respecting the demand for equality while the Republican party leans more heavily toward respecting demands to protect privilege (which may or may not have been earned).

Evangelical Christians must be warned against romanticizing away this struggle by looking solely at other matters such as the relation of church and state and the moral integrity of candidates, or by headily envisioning evangelicals in the citadels of political power. While these matters merit discussion, evangelicals should never forget that in a fallen world greed (found equally among those who beat the drum for earned privilege and those who beat it for equality of distribution) plays an important role in politics, and that it will use every possible pretense to mask its purposes. Accordingly, Christians should not be surprised when those who find themselves disadvantaged in comparison to others in a society seek to extend the principle of equality at the expense of the principle of privilege. Nor should they be surprised when those who are more advantaged than others in society seek to extend privilege at the expense of equality.

We agree with Professor Henry when he suggests that distributive justice lies between the extremes, and that evangelicals should ask before they vote, In which direction does the nation need a push?

Love In A Circle

Sometimes we speak of man in relation to God as a vertical dimension, and man in relation to his fellow man as a horizontal dimension. This can suggest that a person can have one relationship or the other and need not have both. But the Scriptures also teach that there is a circular relationship among self, God, and others.

John in his first letter speaks of this circularity in the matter of love. “If any one says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother … cannot love God …” (4:20). John recognizes that love for God is something that can grow: “his love is perfected in us” (v. 12). And he specifies as the basis for this growth in the love of God the condition “if we love one another” (v. 12).

We cannot separate an increase of love for God from an increase of our love for others: “this commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should love his brother also” (v. 21). Earlier in this letter, John was quite specific: “if any one has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?” (3:17).

The basis of our love is that “he first loved us” (4:19); he loved us so much that “he laid down his life for us” (3:16). And “if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (4:11). If we continually contemplate the love of God for us, love for others will be, not an optional addition, but an inevitable expression of our love for God.

To complete the circle: not only does genuine love for God produce love for brethren, but the reverse is true as well: “if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us” (4:12).

Occasionally it may be helpful to speak of the vertical and horizontal dimensions of love, but the teaching of John suggests that instead of thinking of love in lines—man to God, and man to man—we should see it as a circle.

Donald Tinder

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Christians like to write books about themselves, and although sales do not necessarily mean readers, presumably somebody out there is at least looking at the books. The purpose of this survey is not to highlight the best-sellers; they receive enough publicity. Instead we want to call attention to books published during the last six months of 1975 and the first six months of 1976 (with a few exceptions) that librarians, students, and readers should know about if they are interested in what’s being written on the Church—past and present—and its members. Apologies for unintended omissions and for questionable judgments are hereby tendered.

GENERAL Franklin Littell has prepared a major aid to the study of the Church’s past in a large-format book, The Macmillan Atlas History of Christianity (Macmillan). Nearly 200 maps and almost as many illustrations are presented with accompanying text. The sixteenth through nineteenth centuries are stressed. For a general overview of the whole course of human events that gives recognition to the religious dimension, see Arnold Toynbee’s Mankind and Mother Earth (Oxford). Reprints by Gale Research Company of two lengthy one-volume reference works are worth noting: The Encyclopedia of Missions edited by Dwight Small et al. (1904) and The Church Cyclopedia edited by A. A. Benton (1883).

A compilation from the works of Christopher Dawson, a leading Christian historian, has been issued as Religion and World History (Doubleday). Essays on the educational philosophies of twenty-six men (only six of whom flourished before 1500) have been compiled by Elmer Towns in A History of Religious Educators (Baker). A less edifying and poorly organized hodge-podge of Jewish and Christian extremists parades before us in The False Messiahs by Jack Gratus (Taplinger). Much more sharply focused is Christ’s Glorious Church by Derek Hill (London: SPCK), a history of Canterbury Cathedral. The role of women throughout Christian history is surveyed by Robert Kress in Whither Womankind? (Abbey) and by Edith Deen in Great Women of the Christian Faith (Harper & Row; reprint of a 1959 work).

A massive study in five volumes by Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England (Princeton), has finally been completed with the volume covering 1603–90. The set as a whole covers 1534–1965. A related, more narrowly focused study is Methodist Worship in Relation to Free Church Worship by John Bishop (Scholars Studies Press). The larger church-historical context is set by Marion Hatchett, a liturgies professor at an Episcopal seminary, in Sanctifying Life, Time, and Space (Seabury). His chapters move from “oral tradition” to “paperback liturgies.” A comprehensive study from a Roman Catholic stance is provided in The Mass: An Historical, Theological, and Pastoral Survey by Josef Jungmann (Liturgical Press).

ROMAN CATHOLICISM Numerous specific studies of Catholic interest are scattered throughout this survey. Of general interest is Where Peter Is: A Survey of Ecclesiology by Edward Gratsch (Alba), in which the development of the papacy from a Roman perspective with divergent eastern and western views is admirably summarized. A Pope For All Christians? edited by Peter McCord (Paulist) includes mostly affirmative essays from representatives of six non-Roman communions. The Catholic Rediscovery of Protestantism by Paul Minus, Jr. (Paulist) focuses largely on twentieth-century developments.

The Triple Crown by Valerie Pirie (Consortium Books) is a detailed but, as the author admits, not highly serious history of the politics of papal electioneering from the fifteenth through the nineteenth century. More contemporary developments are reported journalistically in The Runaway Church by Peter Hebblethwaite (Seabury), which surveys the divergent trends since Vatican II, and, briefly, in Pentecostal Catholics edited by Robert Heyer (Paulist). A historical overview (even including chapters on ancient Greece and Islam) is combined with a long bibliography of the Catholic charismatics, 1967–75, in Perspectives on Charismatic Renewal edited by Edward O’Connor (University of Notre Dame). Three collections of articles from the New Covenant, the leading Catholic charismatic magazine, were compiled by Ralph Martin and published by Paulist: The Spirit and the Church, Sent by the Spirit, and New Wine, New Skins.

THEOLOGIES The most recent volume to appear in the Fathers of the Church series of Consortium Books—number sixty-seven out of a projected one hundred—contains the writings of Novatian, the first Roman theologian to write in Latin. (Can we assume that the nihil obstat and imprimatur appearing in the front of the volume invalidate his excommunication by the then bishop of Rome?) Blanche Boyer and Richard McKeon have teamed up to produce in fascicles a critical edition of Peter Abailard’s Sic et Non (University of Chicago), which will be of interest to scholars. Veteran church historian Ford Lewis Battles gives us a translation of and introduction to the first edition (1536) of John Calvin’s Institution(sic)of the Christian Religion (John Knox), making it available in English for the first time. Banner of Truth has issued in two volumes the long-out-of-print Works of Robert Traill (1642–1716). The first of thirty or more volumes of The Works of John Wesley to be published by Oxford University has appeared under the title The Appeals to Men of Reason and Religion, edited by Gerald R. Cragg; it contains the writings in which Wesley attempted to answer the critics of his ministry and movement. The Theological Papers of John Henry Newman on Faith and Certaintyedited by Hugo M. de Achaval and J. Derek Holmes (Oxford) continues the definitive edition of his writings.

THE EARLY CHURCH A Short History of the Early Church by Harry Boer (Eerdmans) offers the layman an excellent overview of the course of Christianity in the first few centuries of our era. It would be an ideal text for an adult Sunday-school class. At the other end of the scale is Christ in Christian Tradition: Volume One, From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon by Aloys Grillmeier (John Knox), a thoroughly revised and expanded translation of a work written in German and intended primarily for scholars and advanced theological students. Despite the large price-tag, this is an indispensable volume for theological libraries. The University of Chicago is to be commended for reprinting in paperback Jaroslav Pelikan’s The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition.

Documents in Early Christian Thought edited by Maurice Wiles and Mark Santer (Cambridge) offers fresh translations of a selection of extracts from the writings of the early Christian Fathers covering the main areas of Christian thinking. Treating one area of the subject, Ethical Patterns in Early Christian Thought by Australian scholar Eric Osborn (Cambridge) focuses on the New Testament, Clement of Alexandria, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, and Augustine. God Being History: Studies in Patristic Philosophy by E. P. Meijering (Elsevier) is a collection of twelve essays of a technical nature.

Perhaps the most important book published recently in this area is the first full-scale biography of Jerome to be published in English. The author of Jerome is Oxford theologian J. N. D. Kelly, well known for a number of standard works in patristic and New Testament studies, and the publisher is Harper & Row. Certain to be the standard book for many years to come on the life and ministry of this influential, interesting, and often cantankerous early Christian scholar, Kelly’s study is based on solid scholarship and is unusually well written; it will be of interest to scholar and non-specialist alike. Fathers of the Church by Donald W. Wuerl (Our Sunday Visitor) is a popular introduction to the lives of fifteen early church leaders and is slanted toward the Roman Catholic laity. The Rule of St. Benedict, that most influential of all documents relating to monastic life, has now been translated into modern English by Anthony C. Meisel and M. L. del Maestro and issued as a paperback (Doubleday). Unordained Elders and Renewal Communities by Stephen Clark (Paulist) is about the fourth-century ascetic movement and its parallels with today’s charismatics.

THE MIDDLE AGES Church history and European history were essentially one during the Middle Ages; therefore the student of the history of Christianity will welcome the several excellent handbooks that have recently appeared to provide an orientation to this period. Probably the most helpful of these is Syracuse University’s Medieval Studies: An Introduction edited by James M. Powell, which deals topically with ten important areas of study. At a more basic level is One Thousand Years: Western Europe in the Middle Ages edited by Richard L. DeMolen (Houghton Mifflin). A classic in the area that has recently been reissued in two paperback volumes is The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History edited by C. W. Previte-Orton (Cambridge).

Of more narrow interest are The Birth of Popular Heresy by R. I. Moore (St. Martin’s), a collection of annotated documents relating to the rise of religious dissent during the eleventh and twelfth centuries; The Norman Fate: 1100–1154 by David C. Douglas, a discussion of the influence of the Normans on European history and culture during the first half of the twelfth century; and Saint Francis: Nature Mystic by Edward A. Armstrong (University of California), a study of the nature stories in the Franciscan legend. A slender but very attractive booklet entitled simply The Book of Kells (Humanities Press) contains a selection of illuminations from the famous manuscript of the Gospels, edited and annotated by G. O. Simms, and should be of interest to almost anyone.

THE REFORMATION Books on Martin Luther continue to rival those published on Paul for number. Luther’s Theology of the Cross by Walter von Loewenich (Augsburg) is the translation of a seminal German work that has long been influential among scholars and is a must for all serious students. Wrestling with Luther is an introduction to the thought of the Reformer by John Loeschen (Concordia), who finds himself attracted to what is popularly known as “process philosophy” and seeks to reread Luther in this light. Luther and the Mystics by Bengt Hoffman (Augsburg) seeks to redress the balance of many earlier studies, including Von Loewenich’s, which tended to underestimate the creative influence of the writings of the medieval mystics upon the writings of Luther.

The Reformation in the Cities by Yale professor Steven Ozment (Yale) argues that it was the psychological and social freedom offered by Protestantism that largely accounted for its appeal and subsequent success in sixteenth-century Germany and Switzerland. Dealing with the other side of the Reformation is a nontechnical account of The Counter Reformation by G. W. Searle (Rowman and Littlefield), in which the author attempts to show that the Roman Catholic Reformation was not simply a reaction to the Protestant movement. Christianity and Revolution edited by Lowell Zuck (Temple University) centers in the third force of the Reformation, the so-called radicals or Anabaptists, though it also includes the mainstream reformers, two Roman Catholic writers, and the English Puritans. The book itself is a collection of miscellaneous documents testifying to a religiously based concern for human freedom and political reform. Tolerance and Movements of Religious Dissent in Eastern Europe edited by Béla K. Király (Columbia) transcends the historical boundaries of the Reformation, where it begins. Here is documentation of the fact that religious persecution in Eastern Europe did not have to be invented by the Communists.

Four important studies of the lives and thought of various reformers have appeared recently. Pride of place goes to John Calvin, a biography by T. H. L. Parker (Westminster). If you do not have a good biography of the Geneva theologian in your library, consider buying this one. John Ruth has written a new biography of an Anabaptist reformer in Conrad Grebel, Son of Zurich (Herald). John Bale: Mythmaker for the English Reformation by Leslie Fairfield (Purdue) introduces the ex-friar turned reformer-historian-propagandist who is affectionately remembered as “bilious Bale,” an important though lesser-known figure. Evangelical historian John Bray offers a study of one aspect of the theology of another important reformer in Theodore Beza’s Doctrine of Predestination (Nieuwkoop, Netherlands: De Graaf). The two latest additions to the sixteenth-century bibliography series published by the Center for Reformation Research are Thomas Miintzer, a bibliography by Hans J. Hilderbrand, and Caspar Peucer’s Library by Robert Kolb.

POST-REFORMATION EUROPE The pastoral and devotional heart of the English Puritans is laid bare for the general reader in two new books. The Genius of Puritanism by Peter Lewis (Puritan Reformed Discount Book Service) concentrates on the preaching and pastoral care of these seventeenth-century divines, while The Valley of Vision edited by Arthur Bennett (Banner of Truth) gathers together a selection of prayers and devotional comments by both the earlier and the later Puritan writers. Puritan’s Progress by Monica Furlong (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan) deals with John Bunyan, who is in a class by himself. Written by a journalist rather than a literary critic or a theologian, it is a generally reliable biography and provides a highly readable introduction to this important Christian writer. Roughly contemporary to Bunyan was Blaise Pascal, an evangelical Christian whose influence on French literature was similar to Bunyan’s on English. Strange Contrarieties by John Barker (McGill-Queen’s University Press) opens up new vistas by tracing the influence of Pascal in England during the Age of Reason; a concluding chapter touches on North America. Two books of interest primarily to scholars are Freedom and Authority: A Study of English Thought in the Early Seventeenth Century by Gerald R. Cragg (Westminster), which makes it clear that the seventeenth century was just as revolutionary as the age in which we live, and A Great Expectation: Eschatological Thought in English Protestantism to 1660 by Bryan W. Ball (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill), which documents the fact that there were as many Christians in the sixteenth century who expected Christ to return very soon as there are today. Ball’s study should (but probably won’t) serve as a warning to contemporary prophetic speculators. A similar lesson could be learned from the eschatologically motivated Great Trek of the Russian Mennonites to Central Asia, 1880–1884 by Fred Richard Belk (Herald Press).

Also directed primarily toward the world of scholarship are Contemporary Perspectives on Pietism edited by Donald Dayton (Covenant Press), containing four essays on this German movement that contributed so much—though often misunderstood—to the evangelical heritage, and The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 1757–1765 by Dale Van Kley (Yale). Centering in important personalities who were Christians but whose lives and writings transcend the bounds of the Church are four recent books. Oxford historian A. L. Rouse, combining scholarship with lucidity, offers Jonathan Swift (Scribner’s), a biography of the man best known as the author of Gulliver’s Travels but who also was dean of St. Patrick’s Anglican Cathedral in Dublin. William Paley (1743–1805) was an Anglican philosopher-apologist who had an enormous influence on English thought for more than a century and whose books remained standard texts at Oxford down into the present century. Readers of The Mind of William Paley by D. L. LaMahieu (University of Nebraska) will discover the unacknowledged roots of much of contemporary evangelical apologetics. “Between God and Devil” is an appropriate subtitle for James Wyckoff’s biography of that strange figure whose name is the source of the words “mesmerism” and “mesmerize.” Fritz Anton Mesmer (Prentice-Hall) makes interesting reading, though it is doubtful that the author’s rather extravagant claims for his subject can be sustained. Wordsworth’s ‘Natural Methodism’ by Richard E. Brantley (Yale) is a much needed study of the poet’s indebtedness to evangelical Anglicanism, labeled by the author “the most vital manifestation of the Christian mainstream in late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century England.”

MODERN EUROPE A large number of worthwhile biographies have appeared in recent months. My Love Must Wait by David Bentley-Taylor (InterVarsity) is the story of Henry Martyn, a British missionary who died at thirty-one and whose life continues to challenge scores of students in English universities to devote their lives to missionary service. A man of a later generation who perhaps exerted an even greater influence upon British evangelical life is the subject of George Müller, a new biography by Roger Steer (Harold Shaw) that is appropriately subtitled “Delighted in God.” Charles Kingsley (1819–75), who as churchman, historian, scientist, Christian socialist, and author exerted a profound influence on English ecclesiastical and political life, is the subject of Lady Susan Chitty’s The Beast and the Monk (Mason/Charter); here we have still another example of why “Victorian” has come to be nearly synonymous with “hypocritical.” Albert Schweitzer, who represented a radically heterodox interpretation of the Christian faith, has been served well by biographer James Brabazon (Putnam); even those who deplore his theology have much to learn from this great man’s life.

Do you know that the author of Gulliver’s Travels was dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin? Read about the fascinating Jonathan Swift in a scholarly and lucid biography.

Three new books take their place in the ever expanding bibliography of the life and thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Dissent on Bonhoeffer by David H. Hopper (Westminster); Bonhoeffer: Exile and Martyrdom by Eberhard Bethge (Sea-bury); and The Last Days of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Donald Goddard (Harper & Row). Hopper suggests that Bonhoeffer has been overrated as a theologian because of the historic situation surrounding his death and that people read their own views into his writings because he was not a consistent thinker. Bethge, close friend and biographer of Bonhoeffer, would not agree; rather, he suggests in his latest book that too little attention has been paid to Bonhoeffer’s critical significance. Goddard offers not a theological evaluation but rather an attempted reconstruction of the last two years of Bonhoeffer’s life, and writes with the general reader in view. An author of numerous studies of mysticism who was also something of a Christian mystic herself is the subject of Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941), an excellent new biography by Christopher Armstrong (Eerdmans). Leslie Weatherhead (Abingdon) is “a personal portrait” of the popular English Methodist preacher by his son, A. Kingsley Weatherhead, a professor of English literature at the University of Oregon. Teilhard de Chardin by Doran McCarty (Word) presents yet another “layman’s introduction” to the famous Jesuit scientist and mystical poet whose cult shows some signs of subsiding nowadays. Two well-known Christian writers have recently published their autobiographies; William Barclay, A Spiritual Autobiography (Eerdmans), and Basilea Schlink, I Found the Key to the Heart of God (Bethany Fellowship). Suenens: A Portrait by Elizabeth Hamilton (Doubleday) is the biography of the charismatic Catholics’ highest-ranking supporter to date.

A major scholarly presentation of the social teachings of the Church of England is provided by E. R. Norman in Church and Society in England, 1770–1970 (Oxford). He offers evidence to show that church leaders bucked the establishment more than they backed it.

The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century by Owen Chadwick (Cambridge), professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge, offers a fascinating study of the way the Christian Church lost whatever intellectual influence it may have once had at the very time it was spawning the modern missionary movement and evangelical influence in Protestant Europe was at its greatest heights—a fact that contemporary evangelical hagiographers have failed to grasp. More limited in scope is James C. Livingston’s The Ethics of Belief (Scholars Press), which concerns the crisis of religious belief and institutional commitment in Victorian England from a philosophical point of view. Religion and Atheism in the USSR and Eastern Europe edited by Bohdan R. Bociurkiw and John W. Strong (University of Toronto) and Antireligious Propaganda in the Soviet Union by David E. Powell (MIT) are scholarly studies of the attempt of the present Soviet government to destroy the religious institutions and beliefs of the various religious groups under its influence. Powell’s study is the more systematic of the two, though both are important.

AFRICA There are four welcome additions to the comparatively sparse scholarly literature on African Christianity. African Apostles by Bennetta Jules-Rosette (Cornell) is about the church of John Maranke. Kimbangu: An African Prophet and His Church by Marie-Louise Martin (Eerdmans) is about another of the larger indigenous denominations. G. C. Oosthuizen, a professor at the University of Durban, has written Pentecostal Penetration into the Indian Community in Metropolitan Durban, South Africa and also Moving to the Waters, a more detailed study of the Bethesda group, which is the largest of the dozens of Pentecostal denominations among people of Hindu background in Durban.

LATIN AMERICA The sole entry for this region is a very important one. Protestantism in Latin America: A Bibliographical Guide edited by John Sinclair (William Carey) originally appeared in 1967. The 2,000 classified entries in the first edition are now supplemented by nearly 1,100 more, many of them annotated.

ASIA A major country-by-country survey is provided in The Church in Asia edited by Donald Hoke (Moody). Most of the contributors are missionaries. Asians themselves speak, and reveal the same kinds of differences as their Western counterparts, in Asian Voices in Christian Theology edited by Gerald Anderson (Orbis) and Voice of the Church in Asia edited by Bong Rin Ro of the World Evangelical Fellowship-related Asia Theological Association.

Books on particular countries include Christianity and the New China (William Carey); The Dragon Net by Silas Hong (Revell), a brief treatment of contemporary China; A History of Christianity in Japan by Otis Cary, an 800-page work first issued in 1909 and now reprinted by Charles E. Tuttle Company; Korean Catholicism in the 70s by William Biernatski, Luke Jin-Chang Im, and Anselm Min (Orbis); and Fire in the Philippines by Jim Montgomery (Creation), about the rapid growth of a Pentecostal group with little missionary aid.

Autobiographies of Western missionaries include The Good Hand of Our God by Ruth Hitchco*ck (David C. Cook), who served in China; At the Foot of Dragon Hill by Florence Murray (Dutton), a Canadian surgeon in Korea; and Zeal For Your House by James Walsh (Our Sunday Visitor), a Catholic bishop in China who was in prison there from 1958 to 1970. Also noteworthy is Misi Gete on John Geddie, pioneering missionary to the New Hebrides, written by R. S. Miller and published by the Presbyterian Church of Tasmania.

NORTH AMERICA Canadian historian J. E. Chamberlin in The Harrowing of Eden (Seabury) surveys the sad history of relations between European immigrants and the American Indians, a story in which Christians figured prominently.

Two collections of thoughtful essays on the American experience are The Nation With the Soul of a Church, seven essays written over the past decade by Sidney Mead (Harper & Row), and America in Theological Perspective, thirteen papers, most of which were presented at the 1975 meeting of the Roman Catholics’ College Theology Society. The editor is Thomas McFadden (Seabury).

Two studies of music are worth noting: Songs of Faith, Signs of Hope: Our Heritage of Religious Music by David Poling (Word) and Soul Music Black and White: The Influence of Black Music on the Churches by Johannes Riedel (Augsburg).

As usual, denominational histories and chronicles were numerous. The Christian Churches/Churches of Christ weigh in most heavily with Journey in Faith by William Tucker and Lester McAllister (Bethany Press), written from the perspective of the ecumenically oriented Disciples branch of the movement. A smaller companion is We Call Ourselves Disciples by Kenneth Teegarden (Bethany Press). H. Eugene Johnson of the middle branch looks at The Christian Church Plea and focuses on the history of the movement’s ministry in Duly and Scripturally Qualified (both by Standard).

The Lutherans in North America edited by E. Clifford Nelson (Fortress) is a large volume to which several specialists contributed. The tilt is away from staunch confessionalism.

A book we failed to notice when it was first published but one that belongs in any theological library is The History Behind the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod by George Hutchinson (Mack). Although of necessity concerned extensively with splits and mergers, it is a useful counterpart to the histories of the larger Presbyterian bodies.

The Story of the Latter-day Saints by James Allen and Glen Leonard (Deseret Book Company) is lengthy, documented, and very much an “authorized” story.

Piety and Patriotism edited by James Van Hoeven (Eerdmans) contains eight essays on the interaction between the (Dutch) Reformed Church in America and the larger society.

A major history of the second-largest branch of Mennonites is Open Doors: A History of the General Conference Mennonite Church by Samuel Floyd Pannabecker (Faith and Life). This branch should not be confused with the (Old) Mennonite Church (though they frequently cooperate), whose missionary outreach is popularly related in Being God’s Missionary Community (Mennonite Board of Missions). Mennonite Disaster Services draws from a score of the movement’s branches; a brisk account of its ministry is given in Day of Disaster by Katie Funk Wiebe (Herald Press).

Five books get down to specifics on some doings of the country’s largest Protestant grouping, the Baptists. Rhode Island Baptists by Katharine Johnson (Judson) tells about the state where they began. Baptists in Kentucky, 1776–1976 edited by Leo Taylor Crismon (Kentucky Baptist Convention) is to be commended for including groups other than the sponsoring Southern Baptists. We Were There by Robert Hastings (Illinois Baptist State Association) is about only the Southern Baptists in Illinois (who are much larger in the state than the older Northern [now American] Baptists), whose association was formed in 1907. The story is told through interviews with nineteen representative Illinois Baptists, old and young. It is a way of doing history that should be more widely used; stories told through the lives of real people are much more interesting than interminable lists of dates and meetings and organizational details. Eleven essays on specific aspects of Baptist history honor Robert Baker in The Lord’s Free People in a Free Land edited by William Estep (Southwestern Baptist Seminary). Finally, History of Free Will Baptist State Associations edited by Robert Picirilli (Randall House) is on the subdivisions of the National Association of Free Will Baptists, which has some 2,350 congregations.

One of the most distinctive aspects of American religion is the complexity of the relations between church and state. Church-State Relations: An Annotated Bibliography by Albert Menendez (Garland) is a must for libraries. Only full-length books are included, but there are hundreds of them. Although Menendez is a staunch separationist, the bibliography will serve all interests. A readable overview of developments in America is provided by Glenn Miller in Religious Liberty in America (Westminster). This is perhaps the best recent book on the subject for the general reader. Two major scholarly studies of court decisions over the past couple of decades are The Wall of Separation by Frank Sorauf (Princeton) and Church and State: The Supreme Court and the First Amendment edited by Philip Kurland (University of Chicago). The colonial Baptist contribution to religious liberty is popularly related in Baptists and the American Tradition by Robert Newman (Regular Baptist Press).

COLONIAL AMERICA As usual a number of fine studies appeared. The most difficult but generally well received is The Puritan Origins of the American Self by Sacvan Bercovitch (Yale), who in the tradition of Perry Miller and others teaches in a literature rather than a history department.

Also significant is Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (Norton). Even more explicit on the religious involvement in the nation’s greatest shame are Lester Scherer’s Slavery and the Churches in Early America, 1619–1819 (Eerdmans) and, with balanced attention to Wilberforce and other British evangelicals, Roger Anstey’s The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (Humanities).

Two popular accounts of a well-known migration are Douglas Hill’s The English to New England (Potter) and Francis Dillon’s The Pilgrims (Doubleday).

The Birth of Missions in America by Charles Chaney (William Carey) is a thoroughly documented account of attempts to evangelize the Indians.

The Great Awakening by Joseph Tracy, a major history stressing the New England phase, was first published in 1842 and is now reprinted by Banner of Truth. Two scholarly studies of one of the key figures of the Awakening are Carl Bogue’s Jonathan Edwards and the Covenant of Grace (Mack) and William Scheick’s The Writings of Jonathan Edwards: Theme, Motif, and Style (Texas A and M University).

Thought-provoking essays by Jerald Brauer, Sidney Mead, and Robert Bellah compose Religion and the American Revolution (Fortress). More detailed late-colonial studies include: Notebook of a Colonial Clergyman by Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (Fortress), a Lutheran leader; Bible and Battle Drums by Truett Rogers (Judson), on Baptist minister David Jones; John Witherspoon: Parson, Politician, Patriot by Martha Lou Lemmon Stohlman (Westminster), on a major Presbyterian figure; and From Wesley to Asbury by Frank Baker (Duke), eleven studies on the beginnings of Methodism in America.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA A fair number of major biographies appeared, chief among them being Lamy of Santa Fe by Paul Horgan (Farrar Straus Giroux), an award-winning study of the Catholic archbishop who was a prime figure in the far southwest. High scholarly standards combined with readability are also met in Fanny Crosby by Bernard Ruffin (Pilgrim Press). She is known today for countless hymns but in her own time was widely influential. Elizabeth Seton by Leonard Feeney (Our Sunday Visitor) is a popular-level account of the first native-born Catholic saint. Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White by Ronald Numbers (Harper & Row) treats with considerable documentation the health writings of the Adventist leader.

Four more books on slavery to continue the story of the three mentioned earlier are Harriet Beecher Stowe by Noel Gerson (Praeger), now best remembered for Uncle Tom’s Cabin;The Truth About the Man Behind the Book That Sparked the War Between the States by Frances Cavanah (Westminster), showing that Josiah Henson was no “Uncle Tom”; Levi Coffin and the Underground Railroad by Charles Ludwig (Herald Press); and Major Themes in Northern Black Religious Thought, 1800–1860 by Monroe Fordham (Exposition), well documented from the primary sources.

Rebuilding the Christian Commonwealth by John Andrew III (University Press of Kentucky) investigates the role of the early New England missionaries to Hawaii, 1800–1830.

Four specialized studies indicate the diversity of American religion: The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815–1865 by Jay Dolan (Johns Hopkins); Carthage Conspiracy: The Trial of the Accused Assassins of Joseph Smith by Daniel Oaks and Marvin Hill (University of Illinois); The Kingdom or Nothing: The Life of John Taylor, Militant Mormon, by Samuel Taylor (Macmillan); and Pioneer Preacher by Gordon Spykman (Calvin College), on A. C. Van Raalte, a leader among Dutch immigrants to the midwest.

Two major and sympathetic studies of Protestant developments that continued into the present century are The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism by William Hutchison (Harvard) and The Social Gospel by Ronald White, Jr., and C. Howard Hopkins (Temple University), the latter of which contains excerpts from numerous primary sources. See also Rauschenbusch: The Formative Years by Klaus Jaehn (Judson).

TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA Theologies emanating from the academic world have had a major influence on church life in this century, but it can be claimed that the grass-roots experiences of which tongues-speaking is the most prevalent have been far more significant. In the past few years academic studies of the Pentecostal movements have been appearing in increasing number (along with, it should be added, a deluge of first-person testimonies). Aspects of Pentecostal-Charismatic Origins edited by Vinson Synan (Logos) collects eleven scholarly essays, mostly by advocates, that point out the diverse strains that fed the movement(s). All Things Are Possible: The Healing and Charismatic Revivals in Modern America by David Edwin Harrell, Jr. (Indiana University) features the “name” healers and evangelists since World War II. The New Charismatics: The Origins, Development, and Significance of Neo-Pentecostalism by Richard Quebedeaux (Doubleday) gives a thorough overview of the movement organizationally, practically, and doctrinally. The author’s purview includes Britain as well as America, and he offers a well-documented guide to what is from any perspective an organizational thicket. Admirably summarizing social-scientific and ecclesiastical studies on the impact of tongues-speaking on both Protestants and Catholics, both earlier and more recently in this century, is Kilian McDonnell’s Charismatic Renewal and the Churches (Seabury). He concludes that most research has been prejudiced. For still more information, see a 1974 classified bibliography by Watson Mills, Speaking in Tongues, issued by the Society for Pentecostal Studies (Box 23027, Houston, Texas 77028). Of related interest is Keswick: A Bibliographical Introduction to the Higher Life Movements by David Bundy (Asbury Seminary Library).

While Pentecostalism burst afresh upon this century, older institutions continued, but rarely in settled routines. Division in the Protestant House: The Basic Reasons Behind Intra-Church Conflicts is by Dean Hoge (Westminster), a sociologist who presents data from the United Presbyterians with suggestions of counterparts elsewhere. Another United Presbyterian study. In But Still Out by Elizabeth Howell Verdesi (Westminster), shows how women gained and lost power bases—twice. Uncertain Saints by Alan Graebner (Greenwood) studies the laity of the Missouri Synod Lutherans, who, despite Luther’s talk about the priesthood of all believers, have generally taken a back seat to the clergy in the affairs of their denomination. Black Church in the Sixties by Hart Nelsen and Anne Kusener Nelsen (University Press of Kentucky) is basically sociological. So is the study of the generation in Gastonia, North Carolina, that followed the one made famous in Liston Pope’s 1942 book, Millhands and Preachers. The restudy of religion and social change is, with a similar coupling, entitled Spindles and Spines and was written by John Earle, Dean Knudsen, and Donald Shriver, Jr. (John Knox). (Other sociological studies of recent years are listed in a chapter on religion in Sociology of America: A Guide to Information Sources by Charles Mark [Gale Research Co.]. The lengthy American Studies Information Guides series, of which it is the first to appear, is to have a whole volume devoted to religion and philosophy.) A less turbulent but interesting story is the centennial history of Calvin College, Promises to Keep by John Timmerman (Eerdmans).

Of the numerous more or less biographical studies we mention Never Look Back by John Sheerin (Paulist), on John Burke, a Washington-based Catholic leader in earlier decades; Graham: A Day in Billy’s Life by Gerald Strober (Doubleday), which is really on a composite day; To Tell the World by Rex Humbard (Prentice-Hall), an autobiography: Martin Luther King, Jr. edited by Flip Schulke (Norton), movingly illustrated; Let Our Children Go! by Ted Patrick (Dutton), the man who deprograms allegedly brainwashed cult devotees; The Death and Life of Bishop Pike by William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne (Doubleday), who find a lot to admire despite his adultery and alcohol abuse (not to mention his various doctrinal aberrations); and The Happiest People on Earth by Demos Shakarian (Revell), the leader of the Full Gospel Business Men.

The provocative essays reflecting on recent developments in evangelicalism that have been appearing in Carl Henry’s Footnotes column in CHRISTIANITY TODAY are available in book form as Evangelicals in Search of Identity (Word).

The WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES The organization’s official report on its activities between its two most recent major conclaves was published as Uppsala to Nairobi: 1968–1975 edited by David Enderton Johnson (Friendship). The fifth assembly itself was reported briefly in Nairobi 1975 by James Kennedy (Forward Movement) and officially at length in Breaking Barriers edited by David Paton (Eerdmans).

- More fromDonald Tinder

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All of Christendom prays, but the methods and conceptions of prayer differ widely. Recent books on prayer can be separated first into the categories of Protestant and Roman Catholic and then subdivided. In this survey we will first look at a representative book in each camp, Protestant and Catholic: Harold Lindsell’s When You Pray (reprint by Baker, 182 pp., $2.95 pb), and Bernard Häring’s Prayer: The Integration of Faith and Life (Fides, 145 pp., n.p.). Lindsell is the editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, and Häring is a professor at the Academia Alfonsiana in Rome.) Then we will consider other books in subdivisions of each camp.

I. The Protestant Books

Lindsell’s approach in When You Pray is, he says, “explanatory, not apologetical; it is didactic, not hortatory.” He demonstrates the faith stance of prayer. But prayer is also work: “It demands of men all that they are and have.” The reader is invited to consider the laws and problems of prayer and the things that hinder it. The chapter on hindrances is one of the best; among the fourteen that are discussed, every serious reader will find clues to what bedevils his prayer life. The book ends with a chapter of outstanding illustrations of answered prayer. Actually, the entire book is a treasure trove of illustrations from the lives of illustrious evangelicals of yore: Matthew Henry, G. Campbell Morgan, E. M. Bounds, Robert Speer, George Whitefield, Charles Spurgeon, Hudson Taylor, and many more. No new seas are crossed in this book, but deep waters are stirred.

The books on the Protestant side may be generally divided into three approaches: evangelical, traditional churchly, and charismatic.

A. Evangelical. Cecil Murphey, the pastor of Riverdale Presbyterian Church in Georgia, is the author of an excellent personal and group book entitled Prayer: Pitfalls and Possibilities (Hawthorn, 153 pp., $3.50 pb). He is useful and common-sensical, especially on the topic of prayer and healing. Murphy writes with a pastor’s perspective and relates numerous incidents from his pastoral experience. He maintains a nice balance between the august Martyn Lloyd-Jones approach to God in prayer and the approach of the uncomplicated people of this world who need to pat the Lord on the shoulder. The thirty readable chapters average five pages and conclude with challenging questions.

Ray Stedman, a pastor of the dynamic Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto, California, is one of the pioneers of the “body life” concept of the church. That concept permeates his new book, Jesus Teaches on Prayer (Word, 184 pp., $4.95). Stedman mixes traditional practices and innovative ideas, and comes across well in a popular style. Readers may debate his understanding of the “true Lord’s Prayer” as John 17. Although he appreciates occasional “amens” that punctuate pastoral and group prayers, he closes all twelve of his chapters with carefully framed formal prayers, thus suggesting that spontaneous prayer isn’t the only kind for evangelicals.

A third author is the prolific Lehman Strauss, who offers Sense and Nonsense About Prayer (Moody, 123 pp., $3.95). Strauss tells us he’s not an expert on the philosophy of prayer, but he acquaints us with what he knows about its practice—and he does it well. He kicks away the nonsense of evangelical extremes and knocks in some sense about praying in Jesus’ name, fasting, and other areas of chronic confusion.

Next come three more specialized books. Healing, Confession, Prayer (AMG, 143 pp., $1.75 pb) is an exposition of James 5:14–16 by Spiros Zodhiates. It is designed for those who are fascinated by frequent references to the aorist tense but who have no working knowledge of Greek. Zodhiates is helpful in getting grips on such matters as the place of elders, oil, and confession in prayers for healing. What Happens When Women Pray (Victor, 144 pp., $1.75 pb) by Evelyn Christenson is a good group book that comes with a leader’s guide. William Krutza’s whimsically titled How Much Prayer Should a Hamburger Get? (Baker, 91 pp., $1.25 pb) is designed for teen-agers but is good for adults as well. It is a compilation of articles that appeared chiefly in Eternity and Christian Herald.

B. Traditional Churchly. These three books cannot be said to be anti-evangelical, but the accent is not there. (Nor can the evangelical books cited above be considered anti-traditional churchly, but again the accent is not there.) The Jesus Prayer (Fortress, 96 pp., $2.50 pb) by Per-Olof Sjogren, the dean of Gothenburg Cathedral in Sweden, is a lovely meditation on the ancient formula “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me.” More heady is Yes to God (Abbey, 133 pp., $3.95 pb) by Alan Ecclestone, a Church of England priest. A book that takes children seriously is Johanna Klink’s Teaching Children to Pray (Westminster, 78 pp., $1.95 pb). This book, translated from Dutch, is somewhat in the austere Reformed manner, which is preferable to the treacle-laden approach common to children’s religious instruction in America.

C. Charismatic. I do not subscribe to the charismatic teaching, but in my judgment two of the better Protestant charismatic books on prayer are If My People … (Word, 153 pp., $3.25 pb) by Jimmy and Carol Owens, and Catherine Marshall’s Adventures in Prayer (Chosen, 96 pp., $4.95).

Ii. The Catholic Books

Virtually all the Roman Catholic books on prayer recently available for review lean toward the charismatic movement. Bernard Häring’s Prayer: The Integration of Faith and Life ought to be read by every Protestant interested in the obscuring of theological lines encouraged by the charismatic movement. Häring is Catholicism’s foremost moral theologian and a fecund author. What he says is often profoundly provocative.

Häring closes each chapter of his book with prayers that are models of form and substance. Yet we note that at the heart of his theology is a “theology of glory”: “In the mainstream of Catholic tradition—indeed in all Christian churches—there has always been a high appreciation of religious experience. The Old Testament concept of ‘the glory of God’ is generally linked to a deep experience of God’s holiness and to overwhelming joy in the experience of God’s presence.” From that premise Häring proceeds to an appreciation of “gatherings of pentecostals or charismatic renewal groups”: “they sing in tongues, and even though they have not previously practiced, all the voices join in one great harmony. This is a symbol of what shared prayer is in its deepest theological meaning.” And then he passes into syncretism: “I know a group of missionaries in Africa who are regularly invited into numerous Mohammedan villages to meditate with the inhabitants. They read a part of the Koran and, even more often, the parables of the gospel. All participate with great enthusiasm, expressing their thoughts and feelings, and praising the Lord together.” The “theology of glory” easily makes room for pneumaticism and syncretism. Classical Protestantism sees this as the burial of sovereign grace.

The other Roman Catholic books float between charismatic traditionalism and evangelicalism.

A. Charismatic-Traditional. Peter Hocken, priest and teacher of theology at Oscott College in England, is a judicious charismatic who carefully integrates charismatic impulses into liturgical and disciplined outlines. His Prayer, A Gift of Life (Paulist, 126 pp., $3.95) is a well-written corrective to some charismatic extremes. He notes: “It is an unfortunate though largely unintended consequence … that the impression is given that the Holy Spirit is a plus factor; you have ordinary Christian prayer, and then you have ‘prayer in the Spirit’ or charismatic prayer.”

A curious book is Drugs and the Life of Prayer (Eerdmans, 95 pp., $1.65 pb) by the chaplain of the Sorbonne, Jean-Claude Barreau. Intellectually it is on a par with the one by Ecclestone. Theologically it is in the tradition of the Roman Catholic mystics, is charismatic, and tends toward syncretism: “Even nonbelievers can have this sort of awakening, and so share in the experience of the spiritually-minded of whatever creed. For as we have said already, these techniques of awakening are not peculiar to Christianity. In Islamic circles, sufism, for example, devotes a lot of time to them.”

B. Charismatic-Evangelical. Two books that make much of the Protestant “praise” promoter Merlin Carothers, regrettably, are Healing of Memories (Paulist, 101 pp., $1.45 pb) by Dennis and Matthew Linn, both of whom are Jesuits, and Inner Healing (Paulist, 85 pp., $2.25 pb) by Michael Scanlan, president of St. Francis Seminary in Pennsylvania. Actually, these two books are exceedingly more balanced than the works of Carothers. The authors do not regale the reader with fantastic stories of miraculous interventions. Their interest in Carothers mystifies me. However, their emphasis on the therapeutic value of prayer is well taken, and there is much good in both books.

A book whose content could pass for Protestant is Ralph Martin’s Hungry For God (Doubleday, 168 pp., $5.95). Martin is a major leader in the Catholic charismatic movement, is the editor of the New Covenant, and lives, with his wife and children, in the Word of God community in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

This highly influential leader does not mention Carothers, but he refers glowingly to Campus Crusade, Bill Bright, Tozer, Hallesby, and C. S. Lewis. Martin’s understanding of salvation is noteworthy: “Prayer is not God’s primary way of coming to us. We are saved by faith in Jesus, and not by our efforts at prayer or at anything else, including morality. Many of us are in need not of new techniques or a new understanding of prayer, but of a reconsideration of where we stand as regards Jesus of Nazareth.”

Martin would appear to be in a class apart from the other authors of his communion. Yet we note, not syncretism, but an ecumenism of the Spirit: “Today I remain a Catholic, not through inertia, but by conviction, yet I have been immeasurably strengthened and formed by my contact with evangelical Protestantism and the twentieth-century pentecostal movement.” But an incident Martin relates leads directly to the heart of the matter for all Protestants. He tells about a friend who asked Kathryn Kuhlman to autograph one of her books. She wrote: “To Al, there’s more, there’s so much more. Kathryn.” That reminds me of Catherine Marshall’s recent book entitled Something More. Is there more, that which is called “the baptism in the Holy Spirit” and is manifested in ecstatic prayer, among other phenomena? What is there in evangelicalism that has led to but stopped short of this development, except for the charismatics? It is this more that Frederich Dale Bruner called the summa summarum of Pentecostalism in his seminal critique A Theology of the Holy Spirit. Evangelical Protestants, descendants of the recoverers of the pristine freedom of justification by faith through grace, must be clear about where they stand at this historic nexus between Catholicism and Protestantism provided by the charismatic movement.

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Although Jacques Ellul’s academic training and his teaching at the University of Bordeaux have been in law, sociology, and history, he has long been concerned with the shape of Christian behavior as much as with the shape of the world. Christians are commanded by God to be very much in the world. Yet, by virtue of their relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, they are to be distinctly not of the world. This role demands, on the one hand, realism regarding the character of the world, and on the other hand, knowledge of and obedience to the Word of God.

Over the past thirty years, Ellul’s reputation has been most broadly established through his studies in sociological “realism,” especially The Technological Society, The Political Illusion, and Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (all three available in Vintage paperback editions). At the same time, however, he has published a steady stream of biblical, theological, and ethical studies. His latest, The Ethics of Freedom (Eerdmans, 517 pp., $13.50) is by far the largest and most important Christian “answer” to the situation of the world that Ellul has yet made. It is the first “main volume” of his projected series on Christian ethics.

All of Ellul’s work is interrelated, but four earlier volumes are of particular importance as anticipations of The Ethics of Freedom. Two of these are the early works The Theological Foundation of Law (1946; English translation 1960) and The Presence of the Kingdom (1948; English, 1967). More important, for its discussion of the relation between hope and freedom, is Hope in Time of Abandonment (1972; English, 1973). Finally, there is To Will and To Do: An Ethical Research For Christians (1964; English, 1969).

To Will and To Do is formally connected to The Ethics of Freedom as it is the “first half of the first volume” that is to be the Introduction to Ellul’s ethics. To Will and To Do deals with the origin and character of the various “moralities of the world” and shows their relation to biblical Christian ethics. The second half of the Introduction, as yet unpublished, will “sketch the conditions which a Christian ethics should fulfil and … outline the problem of social ethics” (The Ethics of Freedom, p. 7). The three “main volumes” are planned around the Pauline “theological virtues” of faith, hope, and love. The “ethics of freedom” corresponds to “hope” and has been published first because Ellul believes that hope and its partner freedom are the site of the decisive conflict in our era. Eventually, Ellul plans to publish an “ethics of holiness” corresponding to “faith” and an “ethics of relationship” corresponding to “love.”

In his introductory comments to The Ethics of Freedom, Ellul argues that hope is man’s response to God’s work for him, above all in Jesus Christ. It is not mere emotion but a “way of living.” Freedom, then, is God’s gift to us in response to our hope. But freedom is not to be reduced to a matter of independent, autonomous man’s making choices; rather, it is a life of discipleship to Jesus Christ going beyond the confines of the world’s options. It is “the coming of something new into the world with a creative adherence to an inexhaustible good” (p. 11).

The Ethics of Freedom is divided into four sections. In Part I, “Alienated Man and Liberation in Christ,” Ellul describes the determining and conditioning forces making this a world of “necessity” and “alienation” (in the Marxian sense: alienation from the self, from work, and the like). He adds that this is another way of saying that man is sinful and in bondage. From within this situation man is indeed without hope. However, God has been incarnated in Jesus Christ. The Word of God has decisively broken the powers that bind and lead to death. This is above all true in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but the “temptation of Jesus” episode is also given as a paradigmatic example of the true, revolutionary freedom of Jesus.

Thanks only to Jesus Christ, we too have the possibility of redemption from our bondage. In fact, Ellul argues, it is only in relation to bondage that freedom really takes on its meaning. Via the cross of Christ, the fatality, necessity, and alienation of the world open up to an inspiring vision of hope and freedom. In a most interesting discussion Ellul digresses to treat the “problem” of the Christian claim to a monopoly of true freedom. Notwithstanding the historic unfreedom of the Church, Ellul makes a ringing declaration of the uniqueness and centrality of Jesus Christ for freedom.

In Part II, “The Object of Freedom and the Will of Man,” Ellul gives a long and valuable exposition of freedom. Freedom is a “power” and a “possibility,” the “climate” and “situation” of the whole Christian life. Ellul endorses Barth’s description of “freedom for service of God” and then develops freedom in relation to the self, the “powers,” and revelation.

This last section, “freedom in relation to revelation,” gives the fullest expression yet of Ellul’s view of Scripture. It has, in my opinion, two outstanding merits. (1) It is a thoughtful, stimulating meditation on revelation and hermeneutics that will contribute to our own discussions of this critical area. (2) It is a demonstration of how a very “high” view of Scripture can arise out of an ecclesiastical and theological environment quite different from what Americans have lived in. Ellul steps on both fundamentalist and “new hermeneutic” toes, but he is unquestionably on the side of those who read Scripture as the authoritative Word of God.

Ellul then practices his exegesis on the Pauline statement, “All things are lawful, but not all things edify” (1 Cor. 10:23). The first half of that statement is a manifesto showing the incredible breadth of our freedom. The second half, however, shows us again that true freedom is always of the twofold orientation toward love of neighbor and the glory of God—an orientation and a guide to freedom that Ellul states repeatedly throughout the work.

In Part III Ellul discusses “The Assumption of Freedom.” It is essential, he argues, that Christians take on (“assume”) and incarnate their freedom. Freedom is not a kind of opus operatum imposed by God. It is essential, and not just for our own life; it is also essential for the world that there be present a people living out Christian freedom. We assume that freedom by recognition (of our alienation, of our liberation in Christ) and then by action. Ellul warns against the perils of falling again into bondage as we assume our freedom—bondage to law or morality, to the flesh or cultural approval, to the pursuit of “happiness.”

Part IV, “Implicated Freedom,” is the longest section of the book. Ellul discusses the meaning of our calling as “pilgrims and strangers” and the importance of recognizing our priorities of evangelism, mission (defined as “presence”), and mediation (i.e., acting as agents of reconciliation). In our living out of these roles, “dialogue and encounter” are the first steps of freedom. Then, as our realism has established the forms and limits of the world, our freedom will be expressed in “transgression,” “risk,” and “contradiction.” The law of liberty and the command of God lead us to transgress and desacralize the world’s idols. We live out the “risk” of trusting in God rather than the world’s various securities. Again, though, this is far from capriciousness or situationism and iconoclasm for their own sake. The glory of God and love of neighbor are necessarily served by these acts of freedom in obedience or else the acts are illegitimate. Jesus and the Scriptures furnish us with the paradigms.

There follows a series of discussions of “concrete implications” for political life, freedom movements in the world, religious freedom, work and money, marriage, sex, and family. Each is a worthy addition to the literature on the subject. Aside from the discussion of freedom in relation to revelation, mentioned earlier, the most provocative discussion in the book will be, I suspect, the one in which Ellul argues for a kind of strategic anarchism in Christian political behavior. Given the monolithic totalitarian-tending state apparatus (East and West), Ellul suggests that a form of anarchist strategy is the only one radical enough to challenge and open up the system. He does not exclude other forms of action, of course, nor is he suggesting anarchism as a total solution or as a dogma. Read before reacting!

It is tempting to say that the content of the first 368 pages of The Ethics of Freedom could have been more coherently presented in half the space! That, however, would not be “Ellul” any longer. Ellul’s style is to approach his points first from one path, then another, then another. This makes for some apparent repetition, but the total result is the creation of a thorough, impressive case. So it is no accident, and ultimately no failing, that we must go through 368 pages of discussion of freedom before getting 150 pages of concrete implications! The latter are often hard to appreciate without the former.

The Eerdmans publishing house and translator G. W. Bromiley are to be thanked for making this very large volume available to us. For a second printing, such a large and important work deserves the addition of a good subject index and a complete bibliography of works cited. And in both text and notes the references to secondary literature, including Ellul’s own, are often sloppily and inconsistently given; these should be improved.

In general terms, it will be noted that Ellul intends his ethics to be realistic, biblical, Christocentric, and eschatological. We have already noted the stress on realism and on Scripture. There will be disagreement as to just how realistic and how biblical he has really been, but even if not all are won over to his positions, all will be challenged. Further, this is a Christocentric ethic: everything is based on Jesus Christ, in whom we have hope and faith and from whom we receive freedom and guidance. Finally, this is an eschatological ethic: Christian behavior is inflected toward the future much more than the past. It is the coming Kingdom of God that shapes Christian behavior, not axioms deduced from “orders of Creation,” the Mosaic Law, or Thomistic natural law (to give only three examples). All four of these aspects come together in a constant emphasis on the radical tension between Christ and culture. Just as the Incarnation was unique, unconditioned, specific, free, loving, and glorifying to God, so also should be Christian behavior by virtue of our life in Christ.

Another way of describing the total thrust of The Ethics of Freedom, and of most of Ellul’s previous work for that matter, is to say that Ellul “takes everything away” from us. He removes our commonplaces and securities, destroys our idols, crutches, and supports, ruthlessly strips away our justifications, and attacks our conformity to the world and lack of faith in Christ. Both through sociological criticism and through biblical exposition, he leaves us with no way out, with the exits sealed off, with no hope. But wait! In this work, more than any since The Presence of the Kingdom (1948), Ellul gives it all back with what can only be described as an inspiring vision of hope and freedom.

The effect of this strategy is to give all activists pause, to pull us back from our relentless plunge into frenetic activity in the world. We are helped to assess the reality of the world more profoundly and hear the Word of God more attentively. Then we are led back into the fray in obedience to our Lord. After everything has been closed off. The Ethics of Freedom throws open the doors, batters down the walls, and opens out on a whole new life of freedom in service of God and our neighbor. “The radical devaluation of everything in society is accompanied by the revaluation (the only one) that everything, by the grace of God, may be able to serve the kingdom” (p. 312). It can hardly be disputed that this approach exemplifies, on the level of contemporary Christian ethical discourse, the pattern of “leaving all,” “hating all,” and embarking on the path of radical discipleship to Jesus Christ that is repeatedly given in the Gospels.

If there is one larger “weakness” in The Ethics of Freedom, I believe it is the slim role given the “Church,” understood as the body of believers. We will have to wait for the remaining volumes of Ellul’s ethics before making a final judgment, of course, and my own suspicion is that the ethics of holiness and relationship will remedy this weakness to some extent. To date, however, including The Ethics of Freedom, 99 per cent of Ellul’s ethics focuses on (1) the monolithic, collective forces of our society, and (2) the individual (in a very obvious appreciation of Kierkegaard).

On the one hand we have those collective forces and structures of our society, made the more ominous by the “powers” connected to them; on the other hand we have “God and the individual disciple,” the last line of resistance to the technological society. Ellul does protect himself against one kind of objection by saying that Christian ethics is “individualistic” but not private, i.e., our behavior has a social referent, love of the neighbor (p. 210). However, “social transformation” by Christians comes only “by the accumulation of a vast number of individual decisions” (p. 478).

When Ellul mentions the Church, it is usually in condemnation of its lack of freedom, its bureaucratization, its institutional rigor mortis, and so on. Now it is not to be denied that the ideology of our era is overwhelmingly collectivist and destructive of the individual: Ellul is right in radically resisting this. It is just as true that the institutional church must be wary of conforming to these sociological trends. And it must be noted, in fairness, that there are scattered references to the Church along the lines of which I speak. The Church is important in Ellul’s discussion of hermeneutics, for example. And in his most positive statement by far: “It is on the basis of a church which is a strong body and community that this [living out of freedom] is possible for the layman” (p. 298).

My point is that much more could be, and needs to be, said about the role of the “body of Christ.” After all, the New Testament envisions believers never as isolated individuals per se but as “individual members of a body, whose head is Christ.” And while the collective structures and forces of our society have “powers” active in them, the body of Christ has the “power of the Holy Spirit.” The presence of God’s Spirit is not merely an individual matter, nor the accumulation of “individual presences” when we gather together. Further, New Testament social ethics makes a distinction between “love of neighbor” and “love of the brethren”; both are essential, but they are not strictly identical. I am saying not that Ellul denies this but that it is the least developed aspect of his ethics. This is the point at which I believe an Anabaptist conscience has most to say to brother Kierkegaard and his Danish Lutheran experience and to brother Ellul and his French Reformed experience!

At any rate, The Ethics of Freedom is a brilliant and welcome contribution to Christian ethics. It will challenge both activist and ethicist to be less conformed to the world and to be transformed toward the image of Christ. It should also be a challenge to American evangelicals to begin to produce creative, substantive, and faithful work in the area of ethics, especially social ethics. For where among us is there anything comparable to the work and general importance of Ellul?

Donald Tinder

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It’s one thing to write a book that helps the reader know something; it’s quite another to write a book that really helps the reader do something. Here is a personal selection of twenty good “how-to” books published during the first half of 1976. They are not necessarily the best books on the topic, nor even the best recent books. But if you are at all interested in the subjects, you are likely to find in these books at least some practical help. Often you will find a great deal of help.

MARRIAGE The people who will most object to The Act of Marriage by Tim and Beverly LaHaye (Zondervan) are the ones who need it the most. The subtitle aptly describes the outlook: “The Beauty of Sexual Love.” In some ways this is a Christian counterpart to the secular best-seller The Joy of Sex. It will doubtless stir “fundies in their undies” jibes; the conservative credentials of the authors are impeccable. Some readers may think the LaHayes are still a bit too cautious, but their basic intention is to celebrate the God-givenness of pleasurable sex within marriage. Moreover, they deal quite specifically and at length with technique. This is an outstanding book, in my judgment, for both married and soon-to-be-married Christians.

BIBLE STUDY Foundational to Christian belief and practice is the study of the Bible. Regrettably, many Christians merely read Scripture and let authoritative teachers tell them what it means. What one hears and reads must supplement, not replace, one’s own serious Bible study. The Joy of Teaching Discovery Bible Study by Oletta Wald (Augsburg) is meant to help teachers introduce their students to personal Bible study. The companion book for the students is The Joy of Discovery in Bible Study, released late last year. The two new books sensibly replace an older combined edition that has won widespread acclaim over many years.

DISCIPLESHIP John White, a psychiatrist who formerly ministered to students in Latin America, has called his practical handbook for Christian living The Fight (InterVarsity). If praying, studying the Bible, getting guidance, getting along with fellow Christians, witnessing, and the like are struggles for you, here’s your book.

Another book that faces up to struggles, indeed stresses their positive value as God’s “pruning” for greater fruitfulness, is Andre Bustanoby’s You Can Change Your Personality (Zondervan). Bustanoby was formerly a pastor and is now in full-time counseling, and the book grows out of his experiences in both ministries. He discusses various personality types and the adaptive and harmful ranges of behavior within them. Like the rest of the authors in this selection, he goes beyond simply theory to give practical suggestions for change that can promote spiritual maturity.

Another kind of struggle is “how to make the best use of your time and abilities,” the subtitle of Strategy For Living by Edward Dayton and Ted Engstrom (Regal). These two leaders with World Vision have been conducting seminars on managing time for several years, and now they offer what they’ve been saying in book form. If you feel overwhelmed, make time to read it. (Here’s the place to slip in an extra book, a valuable reprint: How to Save Time in the Ministry by Leslie Flynn [Baker].)

EVANGELISM Sharing God’s Love by Rosalind Rinker and Harry Griffith (Zondervan) has chapters on ten categories of persons to whom the Christian might witness, including spouse, opponent, casual contact. This book will be helpful for all Christians, and especially for those who are too tied to following a certain procedure in witnessing, regardless of whom they are encountering.

The author of Every Christian a Soul Winner (Nelson), Stanley Tam, is a businessman with a very widespread ministry of evangelizing and of encouraging others to evangelize. A book like this could provoke a “that’s easy for him to say” reaction, but Tam comes across as genuinely concerned with helping the vast majority of Christians who are not like he is but who do want to be more used by God to introduce others to Christ.

What should happen when someone becomes a Christian? Gary Kuhne provides an answer in a thorough manual, The Dynamics of Personal Follow-Up: The Art of Making Disciples (Zondervan). Too often new believers are pretty much left to fend for themselves. This book is aimed at the Christian who wants to help the convert get off to a good start. (The Fight, mentioned earlier, is a good book for the convert himself.)

It is much easier for a writer to help a reader think than to help him do. These books successfully help the reader to act.

Church Growth: Everybody’s Business by E. LeRoy Lawson and Tetsuno Yamamori (Standard) is a little different from the others in this category. It does not go into detail on techniques, but it does tell how to evaluate both the situation in one’s own church and the attempts to spread the Gospel at home and abroad. Its chapters include “How Can I Make My Church Grow?” and “Where Should the Missionary Dollar Go?” For those who want more, the same authors and publisher issued a textbook last year, Introducing Church Growth.

COUNSELING Just as it is widely recognized that all Christians should evangelize even though only a few are primarily evangelists, so we are coming to recognize that counseling should not be left solely to full-time pastors or counseling specialists. The well-known Christian psychologist Gary Collins has written How to Be a People Helper (Vision House) specifically to help the ordinary disciple to be a counselor and to know when professional assistance is called for.

CONGREGATIONAL LIFE The books mentioned so far tend to focus on the individual and his relations with others. Those in the remaining categories treat corporate aspects of Christianity more directly.

Strategies For New Churches by Ezra Earl Jones (Harper & Row) features nitty-gritty chapters like “site selection” and “planning and financing a building.”

In All Originality Makes a Dull Church (Vision House) Dan Baumann looks at nine mostly well-known, differing congregations (including Thomas Road, Coral Ridge, Peninsula, Church of the Saviour) in order to find out what other congregations can learn from them.

Somewhat similar is the approach of C. Peter Wagner in Your Church Can Grow (Regal). He uses numerous illustrations to undergird a presentation of seven vital signs of a healthy church with brief pointers on how to move in the right directions.

LEADERSHIP Management training is crucial to business and government, but Christian organizations, both congregations and specialized agencies, have been slow to recognize its necessity. Olan Hendrix has served as a pastor and in various other leadership roles. His Management For the Christian Worker (Mott Media or Quill) is basic and well done.

They Cry, Too! What You Always Wanted to Know About Your Minister But Didn’t Know Whom to Ask (Hawthorn) is by Lucille Lavender, a pastor’s wife. Many a minister will wish everyone in his congregation would read this book. The author not only presents the problems but also gives helpful suggestions on how to do something about them, to the benefit of both pastor and people.

SUNDAY SCHOOL The longest book in this selection (400 double-column pages) is sure to have something for everybody: The Successful Sunday School and Teachers Guidebook by Elmer Towns (Creation), a well-known writer on the subject.

From a somewhat different theological stance comes the much shorter New Life For Your Sunday School (Hawthorn) by Iris Cully, a former professor at Yale Divinity School.

PREACHING In view of the number of person-hours invested weekly in listening to or preparing sermons, anything that leads to even slight improvement is significant. Preaching the Good News by George Sweazy (Prentice Hall), professor of homiletics at Princeton, is a full-length textbook that can serve as a refresher for the old grad (and thereby for his congregation).

Preaching For the People by Lowell Erdahl (Abingdon), a Lutheran pastor, is briefer but packed with pointers.

SERVICE More and more books and articles seek to raise Christian consciousness about widespread human needs. Much more difficult to produce are books that tell specifically how Christians can do something to help. See Peace on Earth Handbook by Loren Halvorson (Augsburg), which is described as “an action guide for people who want to do something about hunger, war, poverty and other human problems.”

- More fromDonald Tinder

Cheryl Forbes

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When you read Matthew or Luke or one of Paul’s letters, do you ever wish the authors had told you more of what happened or had told it in a different way? Many readers would like to know about dress or hair. Emotions. Reactions to the important events in Jesus’ life. Jesus’ boyhood. What people said to Paul. Even insignificant actions or conversation by New Testament characters. Not every moment of every life was a moment of deep drama with far-reaching consequences. Many involved with the trial of Jesus, for example, did not understand that he was anything more than a country rabbi gone ambitious.

The Bible approaches this vivid descriptive level at times. Arguments between Peter and Paul, the fear experienced by certain apostles, impetuousness, reluctance to change the status quo. But the Bible is not a novel. It gives us what we need to know about the work of God in our lives. The gaps in its accounts are not weaknesses but strengths in two important ways. First, they point to the truth of Scripture. Too many details with no loose ends or vague statements would indicate a man-made product. A first-rate novelist would not construct the books of the Bible as we find them. Second, God in giving the Bible to us in that form feeds the imagination of writers. In theme and plot the Bible is the major source of Western imagination.

The Bible does not produce complacency or satisfaction. It disturbs us; we cannot be satisfied when we read it. For those whose imaginations are highly developed, it raises questions like “How did that happen?” “Why did Pilate or Elijah or Peter react that way?” The Bible brings a writer’s imagination to boil. What comes from that imagination depends on how good he is at his craft, but also on how intuitively he reads Scripture. In other words, his spirit must be as well honed as his imagination and language.

A greater burden lies on the person who wants to tell a story about familiar events. If the initial event that triggered the tale has more body, more of a ring of truth about it, the novelist has failed, despite the skill with which he wrote. Henry James, who got ideas from newspaper items, wisely chose those buried on page twenty or thirty. Although more and more people are unfamiliar with the details of Scripture, the broad outline of Jesus’ life has not yet fallen into intellectual obscurity.

Many novelists have tried to retell certain events of the Bible, and in recent years quite a few such historical or biblical novels have been published by major houses. Few of these writers combine the three criteria I suggested: sensitivity of spirit, a well honed imagination, and effective language. Most of us know of the “classics” in the field, Ben-Hur, The Robe, and in recent years Dear and Glorious Physician and Great Lion of God. Ben-Hur made a better film than novel; the book has the worst characteristics of late nineteenth-century prose. And its didacticism quickly wearies the reader.

Those biblical novels published in the past few years fall into two categories: historical, told from either the first-or third-person point of view, and contemporary, set in the twentieth century but concerned with New Testament events. The Word by Irving Wallace (Simon and Schuster, 1972) is the best known in the latter category. The Gospel According to James, younger brother of Jesus, has been found and authenticated, and it gives new life to the old faith. But it turns out to have been fabricated by a man seeking revenge on the church. The Judas Gospel by Peter Van Greenaway was published by Atheneum at about the same time (1972), has the same basic plot structure—a new gospel has been found—but differs in perspective. An authenticated papyrus is found that destroys the foundation of the church. To protect his church and the religion of millions, a priest commits several murders.

Wallace, who knows something about evangelical circles (CHRISTIANITY TODAY and Zondervan are mentioned), received a great deal of publicity, and The Word sold well. Van Greenaway remained relatively obscure. The Judas Gospel, though hardly a great book, deserves better. Van Greenaway shows more skill as a writer and paces his plot to keep the reader moving. Despite an interesting story, Wallace manages to be turgid and cliché-ridden. He interjects unimportant and boring sexual matters into his tale, something Van Greenaway never does. Wallace’s women are all alike and could have come from the cover of any Playboy issue. He presents us with a cast of one-sided characters. Van Greenaway centers his tale around one priest, whose degeneration is psychologically and spiritually convincing. He avoids creating just a sophisticated murder mystery. Both tales reach the same conclusions: religion, Christianity in particular, is false, a crutch of weak persons, but perhaps necessary to remain sane in a mad world.

Warren Kiefer uses the same basic plot in The Pontius Pilate Papers, published this year by St. Martin’s. A discovery of ancient scrolls contradicts the account in Scripture of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus by Pontius Pilate. After some international detective work, intrigue, a murder or two, and some incidental romances, scholars and archaeologists find that the scrolls have been forged (the papyrus original, the contents faked). But Kiefer cleverly leaves the conclusion open; perhaps, he hints, the person responsible for revealing the forgery falsified his findings. Why? To protect Christianity. Although the story is not badly written and is certainly interesting, it uses the new-Dead-Sea-Scrolls plot as an excuse for a Helen Maclnnes-like mystery tale.

All three of these novels fail in one way or another to be what I think a good biblical novel should be. Primarily, the sensitive spirit is missing. A writer like Grace Livingstone Hill uses fiction to preach evangelistic sermons; these writers use the familiar events of Scripture to preach a kind of hedonism. Both purposes are equally illegitimate in the art of writing fiction. And in the hands of untalented to mediocre writers, the result is stultifying. John Milton wanted to “justify the ways of God to men” in his seventeenth-century version of a biblical novel, Paradise Lost, and even he, for all his genius, failed to bring it off in a wholly satisfactory way.

Brothers by Chayym Zeldis (Random House, 1976) is the most recent of the first-person narratives. It is unwieldy and farfetched in both theme and plot. The story is told by Jesus’ half-brother, who longs for power and dedicates himself to achieving that power in the Roman government. He makes an expedient marriage, eventually kills his wife, takes a Roman hom*osexual lover, and plans to overthrow the Romans in Galilee. In the attempt, which fails, he loses everything. But he still has his half-brother, Jesus, who was given away at birth to a barren woman, Mara, and her carpenter husband. He decides that the greatest power is the power to influence future generations to believe what he wants them to. Jesus is the instrument through which he plans to achieve it: “And I said to Simon Peter as we walked, ‘Now the Truth is dead. And the Lie will live.’ And Simon Peter was silent. And in his silence was his confirmation.… And I turned to the first disciple of the four and commanded him to take up his writing materials, and he did as I bade him and when he was ready, I spoke unto him, saying, ‘In the beginning was the Word.…’” So Zeldis concludes his novel. What has he said? The fantastic plot conflicts with the novel’s realistic structure. He never makes the reader believe in the possibility of his story. As a character study of a power-crazed person, it also fails. Even Iago wasn’t that diabolical.

Not all the recent biblical novels are virulently anti-Christian. Three other first-person narratives are strikingly orthodox, and two of the three are worth owning and deserve more than one reading. Nicholas Roland’s story of Nicodemus, Who Came By Night (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), brings the culture of Jesus’ time to life. The Sanhedrin and Jewish law, not fully explained in Scripture, become clearer in this novel. Although Jesus doesn’t appear in the story, he is considered by Annas as an up-and-coming rabbi, a possible candidate for election to the Sanhedrin. That is a convincing reason for the fierce, sudden hatred the priests showed toward Jesus. Roland vividly depicts the people who surrounded Jesus as they slowly came to understand who their rabbi was. Who Came By Night also is amusing in spots. Most people who write biblical fiction seem convinced—to the detriment of their stories—that humor had no place in first-century Judea.

Roland in the author’s note tells us that the novel “is written within an orthodox Christian framework.” We did not need that assurance. But Roland knows his audience and understands that many Christians dislike having Scripture expanded in fiction. So he explains what he invented and where he got his historical information. Paul L. Maier uses the same technique in his novel Pontius Pilate (published in 1968).

Another fine book came out late in 1975, The Little Book of Sylvanus by David Kossoff (St. Martin’s). Kossoff is the “translator” of a supposed historical document. Sylvanus, a skeptical witness to Pentecost, interviews others who also were in Jerusalem on that day. The tone is quietly humorous and inquisitive, without any melodrama. The style is appropriate to the tone—clean, concise, tidy. Both tone and style grow from the character, Sylvanus; nothing is out of place in this small volume. We know Sylvanus is fictitious, yet Kossoff makes him live. Just such a character must have been present at Pentecost, a careful, logical, but bewildered person. Sylvanus fits the spirit of Acts. Kossoff conveys the truth of Scripture in a way that is unusual among writers of biblical fiction, for Sylvanus does not believe what he witnessed. In “The Preamble” he tells us, “So let it be said at once that I possess no such faith or belief [in miracles and the supernatural].”

Sylvanus is never converted; he remains skeptical to the end. But the reader may be. Kossoff says in his initial note, “It may be that Sylvanus did not exist. But his Little Book exists; this is it. And, if the existence of the author is in doubt, no such doubt need exist about that of which he wrote. He wrote of what Luke wrote. Of what the Beloved Physician told, so, in his own way, tells Sylvanus.”

His way is gentle. And matching that gentleness are lovely line drawings by Charles Keeping. Kossoff invents other memorable characters, too, whose personalities are outlined vividly, yet economically. Nafti the storyteller. Arram of Parthia, linguist and dealer in precious stones. Shalat, Sylvanus’s companion. And the apostles as Kossoff portrays them pulsate with life. Kossoff brings a sense of wonder and freshness to familiar events.

The other recent first-person tale, Leonard Wibberly’s The Testament of Theophilus (William Morrow, 1973), is likewise written from an orthodox perspective. It provides some interesting details about the life of slaves in the first century, as well as economics and court life. But the wooden style prevents the book from conveying the same sense of immediacy that The Little Book of Sylvanus conveys. Wibberly, too, functions as a translator of an actual document. As in Maier’s novel and in Theo Lang’s Word and the Sword (Delacorte, 1974), Pilate plays a central part. These three books present three different Pilates, with differing versions of his rule in Judea, his relation to the Jews, his attitude toward Sejanus, and his handling of Jesus’ trial. In each of the books, the presence of the Zealots is more apparent than in the New Testament. The portrayal of certain events of the day—such as using the temple corban, God’s holy money, to build the aqueducts or displaying the Roman military insignia in Jerusalem—gives one a sense of how insignificant Jesus, a Galilean rabbi, must have seemed at the time. Even though the writing may seldom rise above mediocrity, these stories provide a needed perspective, making the history-shaking events surrounding Jesus seem even more spectacular.

Each of these biblical novels includes some interesting piece of history that most of us do not know and usually don’t get in Sunday school and church. For that reason, these books have a value rather like that of the maps of ancient lands included in most Bibles. Commentaries may give the same information, but few of us read them. And the facts told as a story are more interesting and easier to remember than the same facts in an encyclopedia entry. A good example of this kind of usefulness is found in Justus by Arthur L. Lapham (Concordia, 1973), which gives a very fine account of how the Sanhedrin conducted a trial.

Generally such novels do not deal with Christ’s birth; his passion is the more popular topic. Two From Galilee by Marjorie Holmes is the most recent and best-known exception. Holmes should have anticipated Kossoff in using a low-key style. Her love story of Mary and Joseph is melodramatic, cloying in tone and pedestrian in language. Balthazar, the Black and Shining Prince (Westminster, 1974) shows that a good Christmas novel is possible. Alvin Lester ben-Moring, a Presbyterian minister, writes the story of the three Wise Men for children, though adults, too, will appreciate it. The illustrations by John Gretzer add to the book’s appeal. Ben-Moring’s sentence structures and vocabulary are on roughly the same level as Holmes’s; he simply uses his tools better, and therefore more lucidly.

The only Old Testament tale in the lot has just been published by Tyndale: The Mantle by William H. Stephens. He treats the pagan rituals realistically, conveys the sexual aspect of pagan worship without resorting to Hollywood hoopla. Both his Elijah and his Elisha are more than one-dimensional characters.

This sampling represents the types of biblical fiction being written. Most of these novels have one thing in common: mediocre writing. Only a few flaunt disbelief in Scripture or take unnecessary liberties with history as recorded in the Bible. Although, as I began by saying, biblical novels can satisfy our desire to know more than the Bible tells us, most of them fall too far on the side of melodramatic total revelation. We want our imaginations presented with possibilities, but not at the expense of the mystery of Scripture. Kossoff and Roland manage to keep the mystery while they try to fill in the biblical blanks. The balance is delicate, difficult to achieve and maintain. When successful, such a novel can feed both the imagination and the spirit.

As I followed his gaze the light seemed to change, and the ceiling, which was fairly high, began to shimmer and glow. At first I thought the vibration of the roaring noise was making my eyes play tricks, for above us there seemed a blanket of fire, suspended, floating. The glare was intense now, and I shut my eyes for a moment, sure that my mind was deranged by the vast thunder in my head. I felt Shalat’s fingers dig into my arm and I again looked up. My eyes saw, but my brain would not, still does not, accept it. Above us, using the roar of the wind for its own sound, was a ceiling of flames, pointing downward. There was no heat, although the colour and hunger of the flames was fierce. As we stood, hypnotized, the flames began to group, then to divide, then to change shape, so that now above us there were swords, or crosses, pointing down. But they were not shapes of light, they were of fire. They were made of flickering roaring fire—for now the noise belonged to the flames.

There was no terror in the room, no fear. The people hardly moved. The men on the platform not at all. They seemed transfixed, exalted.…

Now the swords of fire began to move in a way that was almost beautiful. They moved gently, past and across each other, changing places, forming into lines. Above the audience, the lines were broken here and there, there were gaps. But above the heads of the men on the platform the row was complete. For the first time I saw Joseph, at one side of the platform, facing us. He was very pale, with his head back, looking up at the flickering sword pointing down at him. He looked happy, fulfilled, as though a wait was ended.

Now there was a change in the sound. It changed key, steadied. It became less of the elements, more vocal, or choral almost. No music, or words. A single sustained note, extraordinarily agreeable and pleasing to the ear. As this change in the sound took place so did the movement of the swords of fire cease. They, like the sound they made, also steadied, and then, awesome to see, began slowly to descend. There was about an arm’s length, perhaps a little more, between the tip of the flame and the head below it, and the downward movement was gentle, as though to allay terror, to comfort, to bless. But there was no terror.

I was aware also that there was now no movement either. Only the crosses of fire had movement; in their burning, and in their descent. The people were like stone. Then, all at the same time, the sword tips touched heads. So gently; almost playfully. No one flinched. All seemed to know, to be quite unsurprised, that no burning or scorching would take place.

It was a strangely peaceful, and beautiful moment.

Then all began to change. The crosses of fire faded and their light followed. At the same time the high continuous sound began to die away. People began to move, as though coming to life, awakening from sleep. It was not quick, the change. The large room seemed dull after the brilliant white light of the swords; very quiet after the great noise. The eyes grew accustomed again to the ordinary sunlight. There was a sort of pause; gentle, a relief.

Then suddenly,frighteningly, human noise began.

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