Ecumenical Christianity
The Unity of the Church, a Symposium (Augustana Press, 167 pp., $3), is reviewed by Frank Lawson, Minister of St. David’s Presbyterian Church, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
This is one more book for the ever-expanding library on ecumenical theology. It is a symposium of 14 papers presented at various times to gatherings of the Lutheran World Federation. Of the twelve contributors, nine are European and three are North American. The main purpose of the volume—according to the preface—is to give a sketch of contemporary Lutheran thinking on the nature of the Church in the hope that it will lead to a greater unity within the Lutheran Communion itself, as well as among all branches of the Church. Since the Lutheran Communion is one of the largest and most influential members of the World Council of Churches, the volume commands respectful study.
What does ecumenicity mean, and what are its goals? As popularly conceived in the West and widely advertised, it is a movement gathering together the broken fragments of the Protestant Church and making them one in faith and witness. If this is Western, then the book under review must be regarded as European, and the difference is significant. These writers, many of them in the front rank of modern theological scholarship, will not admit that there are many “Churches” that somehow must be fused into one “super-church.” If the unity we seek were simply a matter of organizing into a world-wide institution all those that bear the name Christian, then we should give to the ecclesiastical architects the task of dismantling the present denominational structures and raising up a stream-lined institution to take their place. It might work beautifully, be most efficient, impress the world with its pronouncements, but it would not be the Church.
The Church, as here conceived, “is one” and always has been one. It is God’s gift in Christ and can neither be divided by man nor by man united. What then is meant when the writers use the terms “the true unity of the Church” and “the goal which we wish to reach with our ecumenical efforts?” Disregarding all names and titles, “the Church is where Christ is.” The Church is the congregation of saints in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered. The sin of our disunity, our unhappy divisions, or any other term you care to use, arises at the place where, because of pride, obstinacy and blindness, a church refuses to recognize her unity and oneness “in Christ.” Obstructions to sacramental fellowship arise, for example, when Apostolic Succession is rigidly interpreted, where Baptism is made an iron curtain, and where Quakers abjure all Sacraments. The structure and organizational fashions of the Church are secondary; the unity, the “deeper unity” is reached when the churches acknowledge all others as true members of the body of Christ.
A reading of this book will give depth to much of our superficial thinking on ecumenical Christianity.
FRANK T. LAWSON
Profitable Translation
The New Testament in Modern English, translated by J. B. Phillips (Macmillan, 1958, 575 pp., $6) is reviewed by L. Nelson Bell, Executive Editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
A real service has been rendered by publishing in one volume the four different books previously produced by the translator: Letters to Young Churches (1948), The Gospels (1953), The Young Church in Action (1955), and The Book of Revelation (1957).
No work of an individual scholar has in recent years, received the richly deserved response which has been accorded these translations by Dr. Phillips. Having read all four volumes many times, particularly Letters to Young Churches, my conviction is that every Christian should have a copy of this new volume.
We cannot agree with the author’s translations at every point for in places he paraphrases rather than translates. But if one wishes to get a new thrill from reading the New Testament through new insights and discernment of meaning, let him read this book. One will find it of great profit to take several versions and read them simultaneously. At many points one will marvel at Phillips’ insights, either as commentary or as clarifying of interpretation.
An illustration of the delights which await the reader is found in 2 Corinthians 4:8, 9—“We are handicapped on all sides, but we are never frustrated; we are puzzled, but never in despair. We are persecuted, but never stand alone: we may be knocked down but we are never knocked out!”
Regardless of how many different translations one may own, every Christian will profit by the addition of Phillips’ translation to his equipment for personal devotions and Bible study.
L. NELSON BELL
Church And Society
American Protestantism and Social Issues 1919–1939, by Robert Moats Miller (University of North Carolina Press, 1958, 385 pp., $6), is reviewed by C. F. H. Henry, author of Christian Personal Ethics.
Professor Miller surveys the Twenties and Thirties—the “decades of prosperity and depression”—with an awareness that Protestant social attitudes are an integral and important element of modern American history. The social temperature of American Protestantism between the first and second wars is taken from attitudes of thirteen denominations on questions of civil liberties, race relations, labor, war and peace, and capitalism, socialism and communism.
Dr. Miller professedly writes as a “secular historian”; theology and doctrine, we are told, “are touched on only in so far as they shed light on the social attitudes of the churches.” But the volume soon reflects an underlying theological bias. Criticism of fundamentalism extends beyond its social temper to discounting of its cardinal tenets (p. 154). And what Dr. Miller laments and approves in the way of organized Protestant social action soon reflects an assumed view of the way in which the church is to fulfill its social obligations.
Fifty years after 1776, de Tocqueville noted that the American churches, shorn of state support, wield more influence than the established churches abroad. In the nineteenth century American churches passed judgment on prostitution, prison and asylum conditions, slums, child labor, inferior citizenship of women, inadequate schools, civic corruption, plutocracy and sweat labor. Reflects Professor Miller: “The impetus given by organized Christianity to the attack upon social evil in America is beyond calculation. Remove the example of Christ and the devotion of Christian ministers and laymen form the history of reform in America and progress would need to be measured in inches not miles” (p. 11).
Although rejecting pacifism, Dr. Miller nonetheless insists that the attitude of the Protestant churches toward war has reflected their environment more than transcendent loyalties. He finds the same ambivalence in their attitude toward slavery, although he traces the antislavery movement to the Christian ethic.
The churches were unprepared to meet the challenge of modern, urbanized, industrial America. The Prosperity Decade saw a partial deadening of social Christianity. The form taken by the dominant assault upon its problems was that of the social gospel. A number of its prophets “believed only the Socialist road led to the Kingdom of God”; all held that the Kingdom was to be inaugurated in history by evolutionary immanence. While its worth and contributions were questioned as shallow and inadequate by mid-century, the social gospel, Dr. Miller would assure us, was “a rich and useful legacy … to the Protestant churches of 1919” (p. 13).
Dr. Miller fails to grasp the deeper issue of the nature of the Church’s mission. He rightly laments the pulpit’s onesided concentration on individual sins rather than social evils. But he has only scorn for those who hold that “the regeneration of individuals and not the reformation of the social order” is the proper function of the churches (p. 18). Noting that the fundamentalist-modernist controversy sapped the energies of the churches, he bestows what praise there is exclusively on the modernists (p. 21). While he rightly notes the correlation between “theological and economic and political conservatism” (p. 348), he tends to dismiss religious sympathy for capitalism as economically motivated, and to gloss over the profoundly unbiblical nature of collectivism. Criticism of socialism by conservative churchmen is disparaged.
This volume nonetheless remains a prime resource book for any survey of Protestant social attitudes and action in 1919–1939. The history shows how readily the mind of Christ was identified with prohibition, pacifism, socialism and so forth. Reinhold Niebuhr and neo-orthodoxy are credited with providing social action with a theological underpinning lacked by the social gospel, but Dr. Miller notes that “on the level of practical action there remained basic similarities.… It would be hard to distinguish between the records of some social gospel champions and some neo-orthodox adherents in the realm of politics, economics, civil liberties and race relations, however much their basic theological premises differed” (p. 346). What Dr. Miller might have noted is that the social endorsements of the day are often negotiated by secular agencies, and that church agencies have readily added a counter-signature, while the next generation of Christians remains confused as to the identity of the bank on which the original loan was drawn. Dr. Miller notes that the two greatest crusades of the churches—to abolish liquor and war—failed.
CARL F. H. HENRY
Thrilling Escape
Signs in the Storm, by Joseph Nemes (Abingdon, 1957, 224 pp., $3), is reviewed by Wick Broomall, professor of theology at Erskine College, Due West, South Carolina.
This book, written in the first person by a young Hungarian Christian who escaped from a Communist prison camp, is a thrilling account of one man’s wit and faith against the Russian authorities.
The events recorded took place during four months in 1949. The treatment of Nemes and his friends by the prison commandant and guards is given in all of its lurid details. The providential escape from the prison camp during an electrical storm is dramatically described. The long trek to freedom is portrayed with scintillating skill. With a faith that will not die, Nemes interprets all these things as “signs in the storm.”
At times the author seems to display very little common sense in dealing with the Communists. Some parts of the story seem to be somewhat embellished. But perhaps this appearance of unreality is due to the fact that truth is always stranger than fiction.
If Russia should ever take over the free world, the faith and endurance of the author of this book should encourage those who will be called upon to endure similar incarceration.
WICK BROOMALL
Pertinent Essays
They Met at Philippi, by Carroll E. Simcox (Oxford University Press, 1958, 174 pp., $3.75) is reviewed by Merrill C. Tenney, dean of Graduate School, Wheaton College.
Something new in commentaries is offered in this little book on Philippians. It divides the text of the Epistle into 25 sections, each of which is a devotional essay on its own section of text, given in original translation by the author. The interpretation is practical rather than theological, and is fresh and pointed in its application. The new translation is informal, but accurate. The approach is topical, and consists of a series of connected essays rather than of a technical examination of the text. It should be useful to the pastor who will find in it many good thoughts and quotable sentences.
MERRILL C. TENNEY
Doctrine Of Sanctification
Perfectionism, by Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, edited by Samuel G. Craig (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1958, 464 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by John R. Richardson, Minister of Westminster Presbyterian Church of Atlanta.
For an understanding of present day types of “perfectionism,” this book contains the most important part of Dr. Warfield’s original 1000 page, two-volume study. It begins with a discussion of Oberlin Perfectionism in four sections: (1) The Men and the Beginnings, (2) Mahan’s Type of Preaching, (3) The Development of the Oberlin Teaching, and (4) The Theology of Charles G. Finney.
The author points out that the old Oberlin Perfectionism has had marked influence upon many contemporary groups such as the Arminians, Wesleyans, Quakers, Quietists, and particularly the Keswick and Victorious Life Movements, although these later movements would be glad to have us forget the sources out of which they have sprung.
This seems to be one of the values of this book. It is corrective as well as instructive. It shows the danger of departure from the Reformation doctrines of sin and grace, and provides a magnificent exposition of the biblical doctrine of sanctification.
The chapter on “The Victorious Life” and the appendix on “Entire Sanctification” are of particular help and relevance to the minister and well-informed layman today. Some very devout Christians may not enjoy discovering their pet men and movements “weighed in the balance and found wanting” in these sections of the book. Nevertheless, in honesty they must bow to the logic and fidelity of the author to the whole Word of God, systematically, consistently and sensibly handled.
It will also be seen that Warfield himself was a thorough-going perfectionist. Moreover he did not regard Perfectionism as an unattainable ideal. A Christian may be and in fact is certain to become absolutely perfect in all departments of his life. “May the God of Peace,” says Warfield, quoting Paul, “sanctify you wholly and may there be preserved blamelessly perfect your spirit and soul and body, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” We are now in the process of becoming perfect. Complete perfection, however, awaits the Second Coming. A fuller understanding of this and kindred problems of the Christian life await the careful reader of this volume.
JOHN R. RICHARDSON
Biography
New Light on Martin Luther, by Albert Hyma (Eerdmans, 1958, 287 pp., $3.50) is reviewed by J. Theodore Mueller, professor of systematic theology at Concordia Seminary.
Here is a new Luther biography, written by a professor of history at the University of Michigan who, for the past 30 years, has taught an advanced course on the history of the Reformation and in 1951 published an opus magnum, Renaissance to Reformation. Dr. Hyma approaches his subject sympathetically and almost every page of his biography reveals the deep admiration which he has for the “Father of the Reformation.”
But he believes that the “Luther Film of 1953” did not quite correctly depict the great Wittenberg Reformer, a charge which the reviewer supports since, despite its essential historical accuracy so far as it goes, the film was “hollywooded” to make an impression on the plebs. Professor Hyma also raises the charge that Luther’s pre-Reformation work, leading to the posting of his theses in 1517, has not been given sufficient attention by historians. So also the author believes that while the “young Luther” has been the object of considerable investigation, Luther in his later years, from 1525 till his death in 1546, has not been adequately represented. Criticism is directed against Luther also for his lack of a program for uniting the German people into a strong Protestant nation, able to resist effectively the Counter Reformation. The reviewer cannot agree to every criticism of the learned author, whose reading has been extensive in the area which he treats. Nor is his new book intended for such as desire to learn the elemental facts of the Lutheran Reformation. It is rather a scientific investigation for students who already are well acquainted with the subject; and these, no doubt, will thank Dr. Hyman for his clear, frank and often helpful views which purpose to give Luther a far higher rating than many have accorded him.
By the grace of God Luther has given to the modern world many blessings—a clearer understanding of the pure Gospel of salvation by grace through faith in Christ, the pattern of a good popular Bible translation, the noble example of a Christian home, the blueprint of Christian education in primary and secondary schools, the ennoblement of the common man and of common labor—these are just a few.
Luther certainly was not without faults and shortcomings. But he was no politician. What he wanted was to be a simple teacher of the Gospel, dedicated to the divine truth as presented in Scripture. Upon that divine Word he staked his whole life and work, his ultimate objective throughout the Reformation being to bring Christ to the nations.
J. THEODORE MUELLER
