The Christian And The State
Caesar’s or God’s?, The Conflict of Church and State in Modern Society, by Peter Meinhold, translated by Walter G. Tillmanns (Augsburg, 1962, 170 pp., $4), is reviewed by Clifford L. Stanley, Professor of Systematic Theology, The Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary, Alexandria, Virginia.
The main theme of the book is the relation of church and state, a relation which, as the subtitle suggests, often nowadays takes the form of conflict. A familiar threefold approach is used in presenting the subject—exegetical, historical, systematic.
Besides the major theme there are two closely related minor inquiries, “Revolution in the Name of Christ,” and “The Church and War.” The threefold outline is used in presenting each of these also. A word may be said about them in passing. Though insisting that “the traditional opinion that Luther rejected without qualification any resistance or revolution … must be modified thoroughly” (pp. 107, 108), the author admits that “the whole complex of the right to resist and of revolution … was not probed sufficiently within the Lutheran Church” (p. 111). The author admits candidly that totalitarianism presents a new order of problem for which adequate precedents are not to be found in the tradition.
In presenting “The Church and War,” Meinhold gives a great deal of weight, as does the ecumenical movement, to the “historic peace churches.” Nevertheless he follows the major churches in their acceptance of the Augustinian “just war.” The result is a complicated attitude in which there is little complacency. Meinhold tests the “just war” concept by the new atomic weapons and finds it to be valid still.
In 1959 Bishop Otto Dibelius published a book entitled Higher Authorities. The book aroused a discussion in which Hanns Lilje and others participated and in which the present volume finds its occasion. Dibelius’ book deals with Romans 13, the primary passage concerned with political government.
The following is an interpretation of Meinhold’s exposition of Romans 13. God’s relation to the state is twofold, direct and indirect. God expresses his vengeance through the state. The Christian, on the other hand, is supposed to express only love, never vengeance. The state therefore contemplates the existence of sin. It is an anticipation of the Last Judgment. The existence of the state is consequently provisional and temporary. The state is according to the will of God when it acts lawfully, whether according to the “tables of the law” or “the law written on the heart.” The state stands between God above and man below. It is faithful to God when it is lawful, to man when it protects liberty. These are the two criteria of the state. It is interesting to conjecture how much the emphasis on liberty derives from Meinhold’s stay in America, to which he alludes on page vi.
The state serves the demonic powers as well as God, but God has overcome the demonic powers and so rules the state indirectly in this way.
The role of the state is to protect human life from chaos resulting from human sin. When it does this it has its limited justification and is to be obeyed by the Christian as part of his duty to God. When it denies its limits (between law and liberty) it becomes a rival of God and is to be denied, as in Revelation 19:20.
Meinhold traces the relation of church to state in the centuries between New Testament times and the present. There is the “Caesaro Papism” of the Eastern Church of Constantine, paralleled by the supernational church conception of the West. The rising Germanic tribes preferred national or territorial churches. Charlemagne combined the imperial and national ideas. The struggle between pope and emperor was a contest between Charlemagne’s idea and the old western supernational church conception. The end of the middle ages saw a return to the national territorial conception of the church. With Luther, the ruler, for the period of the emergency, was to be a kind of “emergency bishop.” Calvin both separated church and state more than Luther (as under Bible and natural law respectively) and united them more (the church as the conscience of the state).
In recent times both state and church have altered. The church has increasingly become or let itself be made into “an association of believers” rather than “a spiritual entity.” The state has cut itself off from the Christian revelation and become secular, based on natural law, the consent of the governed, its own inherent powers as an end in itself. The modern totalitarian state represents a difference both in degree and kind from the secular power state which preceded it. For Meinhold the Christian at the best lives in a tension between the “now” and the “not yet,” between church and state. He is bound to both. Government as such belongs to this time. But the totalitarian state is not a “higher authority” (p. 61) and the Pauline words about obedience are no longer valid (pp. 62–67).
Reading for Perspective
CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:
* The Word in Worship, by Thomas H. Keir (Oxford, $3.50). A solid exposition of the Reformed liturgical tradition which boldly defines preaching as: Hear the Word of the Lord! and worship as actual response to God.
* Man: The Image of God, by G. C. Berkouwer (Eerdmans, $6). A leading Christian theologian puts the light of Scripture to man, the image of God who has now become a danger to himself and his neighbor.
* The Impact of American Religious Liberalism, by Kenneth Cauthen (Harper & Row, $6). Excellent presentation of American theological liberalism in which author measures its impact on post-liberal theology.
The book is stimulating, informative, and useful. It suggests, as is generally the case, a few questions and problems. Something might have been said about the deepening crisis of secularism which furnishes the larger context of Meinhold’s immediate concern. The secularization of the state is not self-explanatory nor is it the only instance of secularization. Furthermore there are different degrees and applications of secularization. Archbishop Temple remarked that Nazism was apostasy whereas Communism was heresy.
Second, church is defined a lot less adequately than state in the volume. Meinhold suggests rightly that the church is “a spiritual entity” rather than a mere “private association of believers.” But of what sort is the spiritual entity? If church means the holy People of God, the folk called into being by the revelation of God in Christ, is church any closer to ecclesiastical institution than to political? There is to be a “church” over against a “state,” but is the former indiscriminately “God’s” whereas the latter is admittedly “Caesar’s”? We get the same indefiniteness in the case of Augustine’s two “Cities” (see Barber’s introduction to The City of God in the Temple Classics edition).
Finally, is there no more positive evaluation of man’s political life to be derived from Christian revelation than St. Paul gives us in Romans 13 and that Augustine and Luther, for their reasons, give us? I have in mind the state that Christians make or could make. Here the state, while not perfect, is intended for man’s welfare, a positive goal. The Greeks understood it so, as in Aristotle’s political philosophy and Plato’s Republic. Do Christians have to impart such a positive attitude to the state if they are to have it, as in Thomas Aquinas or some form of “natural law”? Of course it is a little awkward to ask the question just now. The ages of faith when Christians might have labored more positively were under the domination of negative conceptions of man’s political life. Now the state, as in New Testament times, is increasingly in unchristian or even antichristian hands.
CLIFFORD L. STANLEY
Superior Fiction
The Eternal Fire, by Poul Hoffmann, translated by David Hohnen (Muhlenberg, 1962, 432 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Roderick H. Jellema, Instructor of English, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.
This book, the second part of Hoffmann’s Moses trilogy, is a sequel to The Burning Bush, which was published last year. The massive, panoramic vision which Hoffmann attempts to create moves on in this volume from the plagues in Egypt through the building of the Tabernacle.
With commendable artistic vigor, Hoffmann weaves his novel with the stuff of biblical history, archaeology, symbolic foreshadowing of Christ, and disciplined artistic creation. We come to feel the Israelites as real people, sometimes shockingly like us—people who doubt and brawl, who suspect their leaders, who lose faith and regain faith and misunderstand, but who somehow prevail. Their prevailing is more gift than achievement. Moses, God’s leader, comes through as his people must have seen him: silent, angry, powerful, mysterious, and yet, in the loneliness of his misunderstood commission, gentle and slightly pathetic.
The novel gains force and perspective by shifting its focus occassionally to the “outsider” non-Israelites. Their reactions to the stench of sacrificial slaughter and clever arguments against the “foolishly” excessive claims for Jahweh are almost our own. Almost. The strength of Hoffmann’s Christian vision wins out.
This is an ambitious novel. One cannot help feeling at times that it tries too hard for the spectacular and the massive—as though Hoffmann were attempting to interest the late Cecil B. De Mille in picking up the motion picture rights.
But it is definitely superior religious fiction. It—and the other volumes in the Moses trilogy—deserve careful attention and wide reading.
RODERICK H. JELLEMA
Good From Aaron To Zuzim
The New Bible Dictionary, edited by J. D. Douglas and others (Eerdmans, 1962, 1375 pp. plus plates and maps, $12.95), is reviewed by Everett F. Harrison, Professor of New Testament, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.
The surface facts about this work can be summarized readily—a single volume of completely new material sponsored by the Inter-Varsity Fellowship and prepared by 139 contributors from various parts of the world, mainly British, but including some American and continental scholars. More important is the quality, and about that there is no question. This is a first-rate production that will have to be reckoned with by students of the Scriptures everywhere.
Here is loyalty to the Word of God without obscurantism. Difficulties are faced courageously and fairly, as biblical data are expounded in the light of the scholarly research of our time. For this reason university students as well as seminarians will find satisfying treatment of the problems they face in the classroom. Some articles may prove a bit heavy for the layman, but in the main he should be able to make his way and find the journey rewarding.
One of the best features of the dictionary is the allocation of adequate space for the handling of subjects which by their nature require extensive treatment. This gives the writer an opportunity to make a contribution rather than merely summarize what has been said elsewhere. To illustrate, the theme of the Messiah, one which is much discussed in our time and which needs careful interpretation, gets superb treatment in this volume. Other subjects, such as archaeology, call mainly for description, and this too is ably done.
It is possible that here and there the driving interest in the historical tends to play down the theological. For instance, in the article on the Church, there is no reference to our Lord’s prediction in Matthew. The Virgin Birth is passed by. Yet on the whole the balance is good.
Some surprises are to be found in the volume, such as an article on Muslim Traditions of Jesus Christ, and a rather elaborate article on Cosmetics and Perfumery.
Let no one recoil at the price; this volume is many books in one. Even the most thrifty will not be disappointed.
EVERETT F. HARRISON
Generally Good
Church and Kingdom, by Raymond O. Zorn (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1962, 228 pp., $3.75), is reviewed by George Eldon Ladd, Professor of Biblical Theology, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.
Standing in the tradition of Reformed theology, Zorn discusses the relationship between the Kingdom of God and the Church. The Kingdom of God is defined as the rule of God which will one day come to eschatological consummation but which has also entered into history in the person and ministry of Jesus Christ. The Church is the people of this Kingdom who have become the successors of the Old Testament people and therefore the embodiment of the true Israel. “The Church … is a present manifestation of the Kingdom of God and in her the Kingdom’s transforming power operates and from her its life and blessedness flows to form an oasis in the desert of this world’s sin and misery, darkness and death, to which the thirsty traveller may come and drink deeply at the wellsprings of salvation” (p. 81). Zorn argues that the Church and Kingdom will become synonymous in the eschatological fulfillment. In the mean-time, the Church has a task in the Kingdom of God. In the third section of the book, the author outlines this task in terms of the Church’s battle against the kingdom of darkness and its influence upon the individual, the family, the state, and society as a whole.
Unfortunately the book is marred by over a score of typographical errors, especially in the reproduction of Greek and Hebrew words. In the reviewer’s judgment, the author errs in his interpretation of Oscar Cullmann’s eschatology and of premillennialism. Furthermore, it is confusing to say that the Kingdom of God and the Church ever become synonymous. The Kingdom of God is the rule of God and the realm in which God’s rule is realized, while the Church remains the redeemed people of God who receive the blessings of the Kingdom but can never be identified with it. On the whole, however, this is a very worthwhile and profitable book.
GEORGE ELDON LADD
Theology That Preaches
God Loves Like That!, The Theology of James Denney, by John Randolph Taylor (John Knox, 1962, 210 pp., $3.50), is reviewed by William Childs Robinson, Professor of Historical Theology, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia.
In content this book is great preaching of the Gospel; in voluminous research and able presentation it is the work of a competent scholar; in excellent format it is the work of a careful press.
Denney is pre-eminently the preacher of the Cross of Christ. He bids us come to the redeeming Cross and realize, GOD LOVES LIKE THAT! This is the diamond point; here the cup is drained. Denney was loyal to the New Testament presentation that there was a necessity in the nature of God himself for the whole redemptive work of Christ. The grace of God which is free to us was not cheap for God. It cost him the giving of his only Son for us and for our salvation.
Denney brings back, clarifies, and defends such terms as substitute, satisfaction, penal, sacrifice, redemption, and reconciliation as a past act in which God is the doer and yet the One who is reconciled. God as it were takes our part against himself. In the Cross he meets his own righteous demands and averts the wrath that otherwise hangs over sinners. Denney insists that “propitiation” is the only key to Paul’s Gospel; this is a word which we cannot discard (The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, pp. 152, 161, 236). Moreover, this term can be defined only in relation to God: “to have an overpowering assurance of the love of God as it is revealed in Christ the propitiation and to be filled with the Holy Spirit are the same thing.”
What would James Denney’s reaction be toward a translation of the New Testament which eliminates the word propitiation and replaces it with such weaker terms as “expiation” and “remedy,” or demotes the term “redeem” to “free” or “release,” or “wrath” to “retribution,” and “God’s wrath” to the “day of his retribution”? On the basis of his Foreword one dares to hope that Professor A. M. Hunter and his Aberdeen students will stand with Denney rather than with the New English Bible in these matters.
Neither Denney nor this able account of him is wholly consistent. On page 140 Denney’s testimony is marshalled against the current demythologizing of the Gospel, but on page 149 Denney is cited as describing the early accounts in the Bible as myth. Another matter of concern is Denney’s depreciation of the historical creeds in the interest of such a brief statement as, “I believe in God through Jesus Christ His only Son, our Lord and Saviour.” The writer of this book admits that “all that has proceeded in our study” serves to make this brief creed intelligible. But if after several years of research and voluminous reading to make it intelligible to himself, it takes Taylor 161 pages to make this intelligible to us, how great are the dangers for those who without this background take such a brief statement of faith as adequate.
In spite of careful work, slips occur. The Greek word for propitiation is misspelled on page 75, and on page 171 gospels should be gospel.
Yet the purpose of this review is to congratulate the author on his fine workmanship, to acknowledge our great indebtedness to him, and to bespeak for his valuable work the largest possible reading. Among the excellencies are the fine pithy sayings collected from Denney’s writings and oral teachings. Of these, perhaps CHRISTIANITY TODAY will appreciate most the one reported by Hunter: “If kings were philosophers or philosophers kings, we should have the ideal state, according to Plato. If evangelists were our theologians or theologians our evangelists, we should be nearer the ideal Church.”
WILLIAM CHILDS ROBINSON
Behind The Bamboo
The Church in Communist China, by Francis Price Jones (Friendship, 1962, 180 pp., $3.50, also in paperback at $1.95), is reviewed by L. Nelson Bell, Executive Editor, CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
The author is probably more competent to write on this subject than any other man in America. For 36 years he was a missionary in China, and since 1951 he has been editor of the China Bulletin. It was in this latter capacity that Dr. Jones amassed the information for this book.
Of necessity much of the blurred picture of the Church in China today must come from current church publications. All of these are published under the watchful eye of a hostile government, and many church leaders have become active and vocal protagonists of Communism. For this reason one must carefully read between the lines to ascertain the true situation. This the author has done.
It is hard for Western Christians to evaluate what is taking place through basic compromise with Christian principles on the one hand, and through the innate ability of the Chinese to “bend with the wind” on the other. That grievous compromises have taken place, we know. That some Christians have stood firm, even unto death, is also known.
The author’s explanation of the collapse of the Nationalist government presents, we believe, a partial and biased viewpoint. Had he lived in the interior of China where the Nationalists were making such marked advances until the outbreak of the war with Japan, his evaluation of their worth might be more favorable.
We believe that all who are interested in how Christianity fares under Communism should read this hook. We also believe that there is a vigorous group of Christians in China, often worshiping and witnessing in secret, and probably growing in numbers.
Boards and individual missionaries can learn lessons from this book. One danger all missionaries and mission boards should guard against: choosing leadership for the Church, rather than waiting for the obvious leading of the Holy Spirit. Many of the most vigorous supporters of the Red regime in China are men whose leadership in the Church was vigorously fostered by missionaries.
The lesson for the future is that the Church has no ultimate hope of anything less than ruthless opposition wherever Communism takes over. Wherever there is “peaceful coexistence” between the two, compromises have been forced on the Church.
Above all else, this book helps one realize the spiritual vigor of Christianity and the folly of opposing that which is of God. It should also lead Christians of the West to a deeper sense of the obligation to pray for our brothers behind the Bamboo Curtain.
L. NELSON BELL
Newman Looked East
Philosophical Readings in Cardinal Newman, edited by James Collins (Regnery, 1962, 446 pp., $7.50), is reviewed by Franklin T. Van Halsema, postgraduate philosophy student at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Mark Pattison, the Oxford don of a century ago, thought that the importance of his contemporary, John Henry Cardinal Newman, as a philosopher was limited by a failure to support his dialectical and rhetorical skills with sufficient philosophical learning. But at least the influential role played by Newman in the intellectual histories of many who have followed him into the Church of Rome attests a continuing philosophical appeal which, while it does not decide it, establishes the relevance of the question about Newman’s philosophical importance, and invites a more philosophical answer to it than Pattison had either reason or opportunity to offer. Pattison would direct those who are much taken with Newman to consider “on how narrow a basis of philosophical culture his great gifts were expended.” Those who undertake the evaluation of Newman’s thought may find it more instructive to ask not simply about the breadth of the base, but about the nature and the intrinsic validity of the expenditure.
Such an assessment of Newman’s thought has been rendered much less difficult by the anthology of his philosophical writing recently compiled and edited by James Collins of Saint Louis University. The selections which he has collected from the wide range of Newman’s writings—theological, ecclesiastical, literary, and personal—and has introduced with his notes and a substantial opening essay, afford a better chance than the several other anthologies of his work can afford for disengaging Newman the thinker from Newman the tractarian, controversialist, and apologete, and for applying steadily to his thought only those criteria which are germane to him as a philosopher. The material organized around four topics displays the unity of his thinking in epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of society and culture, and the philosophy of religion: “the concrete way of knowing,” “human knowledge of the personal God,” “religion and social development,” and “the relation of reason and faith.” Not everything of philosophical significance in Newman is recorded or represented here. Perhaps a section could have been developed, for example, embodying his aesthetic criticism, such as is contained in the extremely suggestive essay on Aristotle’s Poetics. But it is not Collins’ purpose to be exhaustive, and he restricts himself to four areas which, he hopes, “can furnish something new to traditional minds and something relevant to contemporary minds.” His 400-page reader seems certain to advance the understanding of Newman’s thought both within Christianity and without.
The competence and success of editor Collins in planning this book, however, do not alone make it valuable. It has an interest value which derives from the interest intrinsic to its subject. If this volume deserves the close attention of serious students of the current situation in theology and philosophy, it is because of some remarkable features of Newman’s thought itself. Newman’s relevance to contemporary philosophy, particularly linguistic analysis, phenomenology, and existentialism, Professor Collins has pointed out in his opening essay. To spell out his specific relevance for contemporary Protestant theology is not possible here, but it may not be out of place to sketch some reasons why philosopher Newman is worth intensive study by Protestant theologians.
One of the things that emerges from Collins’ anthology is a picture of Newman which destroys any confidence that we might somehow gauge his philosophy by his ecclesiology and churchmanship. It would be difficult to guess, especially from some of the writings elicited by the circumstances of his defection from Anglicanism in 1845, how different from the usual Scholasticism his philosophical thinking really is. The medieval sources of his thought are negligible, and although, as Collins justly remarks, “he did not want to stand in contradiction” to the exponents of Scholastic philosophy and sought to avail himself of their constructions, he had little patience with contemporary Scholastic philosophers, and once complained that their “etiquette” sorely impeded the progress of “the free Church of God.” This implied no rejection of Aristotle, for whom Newman had his own admiration, based on firsthand acquaintance with more than the logical and metaphysical treatises which were the main interest of medieval thinkers and a main influence on Latin theology. If Collins’ picture is true, Newman owes considerably more to the Greek East and the Christian philosophers of Alexandria than to Augustine or Aquinas and the Latin West. Medieval civilization he was not so ignorant as to despise, but neither so mistaken as to romanticize. Since Christianity, he once wrote, “has not compelled the intellect of the world, viewed in the mass, to confess Christ, why insist as a great gain on its having compelled the social framework of the world to confess Him?”
Yet he is not more characteristically a modern than he is a Scholastic philosopher. Indeed, when Pattison spoke of Newman’s deficient philosophical culture he had in mind his imperfect acquaintance with Kant and Hegel and his insularity with respect to the main stream of modern thought. Pattison’s Memoirs records Dean Stanley’s remark: “How different the fortunes of the Church of England might have been if Newman had been able to read German.” A more recent observer than Pattison or Stanley, though perhaps not a more perceptive one, thinks that such criticisms overlook that “one of the charms of Newman is his pure Englishness.” Such interpretations aside, it does appear that Newman underwent no important continental influences; and while his philosophy probably owes something to provocation by it, it was not developed under the pressure of rationalism versus empiricism.
Probably one of the reasons for this is that the deepest ground and occasion for Newman’s philosophical thinking is religious; that is, it issues immediately from concern with the problem of the relation of God and man rather than with a problem about the relation of subject and object such as Descartes bequeathed to other modern philosophers. This does not mean that Newman is insensible of the concerns or insensitive to the anxieties of the modern mind. The most striking clue to his part in it is that his most significant philosophical work is performed in the same area which occupies the greatest attention of and costs the most energy to the more celebrated modern philosophers: the examination of the human understanding. In the spirit of his countrymen Bacon and Locke, Newman claims to examine the mind’s operations “not according to a priori fitness, but according to the facts of human nature, as they are found in the concrete action of life.” The crucial distinction between assent and inference, worked out in running dialogue with Locke’s Essay, and the whole doctrine of the “implicit reason” or “illative sense” are won by forsaking perhaps the empiricist school, but certainly not, as Newman sees it, experience or experiential, empirical method. In his jealous protection of faith’s certitude from dependence on reason’s probabilities he bears comparison with Kierkegaard; but also with Kant, in his passion to avoid irrationalistic fideism and in his seeking in the experience of moral obligation the key to the connection between “national assent” and “real assent.” While the context and eventual conclusion of his inquiry concerning and critique of human understanding do indeed distinguish him, it can be said that his recognition of the crucial importance of such a critical task, as well as the fact and the manner of his executing it, show his involvement in modern philosophy even where he cannot be simply identified with it.
At least part of the explanation why Newman’s thought is not a true specimen either of Scholastic or of modern philosophy lies in its Greek patristic inspiration. Early in his philosophizing as a Christian he took as his prototypes not Aquinas, nor Augustine, but the Alexandrines, Clement and Origen, whose philosophy of a sacramental universe he never ceased to admire. His Apologia records his ecstasy upon first looking into it. “The broad philosophy of Clement and Origen carried me away; the philosophy, not the theological doctrine.… Some portions of their teaching, magnificent in themselves, came like music to my inward ear.” The same work records his debt to Bishop Butler, who along with Locke exerted, according to Collins, the most considerable modern philosophical influence on Newman; yet it is remarkable that half of the debt is for the principle of analogy which Butler fonnulates with the help of his famous quotation from Origen. It is important to note Newman’s stress on “the philosophy, not the theological doctrine,” because it contains a clue to the catholic appeal to Christian thinkers exercised by the Roman Catholic theologian as a philosopher. However regrettable the fact otherwise may be that Augustine played less of a formative role in his development than could have mitigated his incapacity for appreciating the thought of the Reformers, the roots of his thought in the early Greek, Eastern Christian tradition guarantee its relevance to each of the branches of Western Christianity which claim the great Latin doctor as their own. When B. F. Westcott, the renowned Greek scholar, wrote that no sadder fact existed in the history of religious thought than that “Augustine had no real knowledge of Greek,” he was not expressing irreverence for Augustine, disloyalty to the Reformation, or mere pride in his profession. Without pretending that it had no grave defects of its own, he was thinking of that “type of Greek Christian thought which has not yet done its work in the West,” the thought from which are absent many of the typical dichotomies and tensions that, originating in Augustine, characterize Western theology, govern many of the traditional differences between the Roman and Reformation churches, and, among other things, left the Church unprepared for her violent clash with science in the modern age. Newman deserves to be read on his own account. Yet it is not impossible that some students of his philosophy may indirectly be encouraged to take up the writing of the Alexandrians themselves. If so, Westcott would probably encourage us to pardon Newman for not knowing his German.
FRANKLIN T. VAN HALSEMA
