The Legitimacy Of Biblical Criticism
The New Testament and Criticism, by George Eldon Ladd (Eerdmans, 1967, 222 pp. $3.95), is reviewed by David H. Wallace, professor of biblical theology, California Baptist Theological Seminary, Covina.
For more than a century the battle over the legitimacy and necessity of biblical criticism raged. Now it is all over, except among a rear-guard sector of Protestantism that is either openly hostile or else uneasily querulous about the whole venture. Dr. Ladd, professor of New Testament exegesis and theology at Fuller Seminary, attempts in this volume to redefine the word “evangelical” so as to secure for biblical criticism a rightful place within the spirit of this adjective.
The eight chapters endeavor to confirm the central thesis that “the Bible is the Word of God given in the words of men in history.” The introduction views the rationalistic criticism of the radical school as motivated by metaphysical, not scientific or historical, considerations. Therefore criticism itself is neutral; its acceptability is determined by the presuppositions that animate it.
The first chapter asserts that the Bible is properly called the “Word of God” in that it faithfully discloses God’s saving acts in history plus their authoritative interpretation. That is, divine event plus interpretation yields revelation. Chapter 2 is a statement of the nature of historical criticism: it involves evaluation, sifting, analysis, and scrutiny, not negative judgments against the Bible. Ladd swiftly reviews the history of criticism as stemming from the Enlightenment, and discusses its rationalistic origins. Last, he shows the positive results of the historical-theological method, which is not merely tolerable but mandatory for all competent study of sacred Scripture.
Textual criticism is the subject of the third chapter, in which the general problem of text transmission and accuracy is spelled out, especially in relation to the King James Version. The author states that “the careful reader will doubtless discover a few undetected errors in the present work” (p. 56), and the prophecy is fulfilled two pages later, where Pope “Damascus” instead of Pope Damasus is cited. Another error, in Greek, appears on page 65. Linguistic criticism shows that the Word of God is couched in human speech, which is itself the legitimate object of scientific inquiry. Language, which is a human phenomenon, is not static but dynamic, and so words change their meaning; thus scholarly criticism is necessary for ascertaining the meaning of a text. The fifth chapter deals with literary criticism, especially in connection with the Gospels. The doctrine of inspiration does not demand as a precondition any independence of one Evangelist from another; on the contrary, Luke states that he made use of other sources.
Form criticism, that bête noire of con-temporary biblical criticism, is the subject of the next chapter. Naturally the Bultmann school comes under close review. Ladd handles it deftly pointing out its weaknesses of presupposition and method and yet casting light upon its value and contribution. I wish he had said “some form critics” instead of “form critics” (p. 163), for not all form critics are driven by the foundational ideas to which Bultmann and his school subscribe, especially in respect to historical skepticism and the gospel tradition.
Reading For Perspective
CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S REVIEW EDITORS CALL ATTENTION TO THESE NEW TITLES:
• Christy, by Catherine Marshall (McGraw-Hill, $6.95). Readers of A Man Called Peter will heartily welcome Mrs. Marshall’s first novel, a warm and moving story set in the Appalachian hill country, scene of her own upbringing.
• Who Speaks for the Church?, by Paul Ramsey (Abingdon, $2.45). A brilliant critique of the procedures in political policy-making exhibited by the World Council of Churches at its Geneva Conference on Church and Society.
• The Davidson Affair, by Stuart Jackman (Eerdmans, $3.50). In the vivid immediacy of a news documentary, novelist Jackman grippingly re-creates the events surrounding the death and resurrection of Jesus “Davidson.”
The seventh chapter is given over to a discussion of historical criticism. Ladd shows that the mighty acts of God took place within history and are therefore historically contingent. However, this contingency does not compromise the finality of the divine act itself but affects only its human circumstance and expression. This chapter is a sound defense of the historical method. Ladd assesses its necessity and utility but also delineates its limitations for determining final revelational truth. That is, historical criticism by reason of its nature and method can neither confirm nor disestablish the fact that God was in Christ.
The final chapter, entitled “Comparative Religions Criticism,” is an analysis of the so-called religionsgeschichtliche Schule of Bousset, Wrade, and Reitzenstein. This hypothesis, which has been brought over en bloc into the Bultmann school, is highly vulnerable because of the cluster of uncriticized assumptions lying at its heart. This school may itself be brought under criticism by use of the very tools that many reject as destructive of the validity of the Gospel.
My greatest reserve about this timely and scholarly volume concerns not the subject nor the author’s skill but rather his persistent use of the word “evangelical.” Apart from a few comments on pages 32 and 171, Ladd gives no exact definition of the word. Wasn’t it Augustine who once commented that he knew what time was until he was asked to define it? Many positions Ladd claims as “evangelical” could be affirmed also by many modern Roman Catholic biblical scholars, or by the “chastened liberal,” or even in some cases by members of sects or heretical groups that also claim a “high” view of Scripture. Is “evangelical” used in contrast to sacerdotal (Roman Catholic) or to liberal (Harnack or Bultmann)? It seems to me that the word points to a mood generally gathered around a loyalty to the Bible but is incapable of much precision of thought beyond this. The larger and prior question of Christology is undiscussed. Can one be “evangelical” and subscribe to a failing or indifferent view of Christ? Or can one have an orthodox Christology and yet fail to meet the standards of the “evangelical”?
This book was written for those who consciously identify themselves as evangelicals in the hope of stimulating them to gain a larger and more coherent understanding of the science and art of biblical criticism. It therefore deserves a wide reading within this element of Protestantism.
Double-Barreled Attack
Enemy in the Pew?, by Daniel D. Walker (Harper & Row, 1967, 240 pp., $1.95, paper), is reviewed by William E. Boslough, chairman, division of biblical studies, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California.
Enemy in the Pew? was written “to help the layman know his job and feel its challenge.” Its author, an experienced pastor, has read much of the decade’s negative literature on the meaning and mission of the Church but still looks optimistically to the future. His preface sets the tone of the contents:
There are problems but they can be faced and handled. God is not dead. The church is not a pawn in The Secular City. Thousands of churchmen do not find the pew very “comfortable.” Many laymen have already thawed out if indeed they ever were God’s Frozen People. And the ranks of Christian churchmen have been full of people who were Honest to God long before Bishop Robinson ever thought of writing a book by that title.
There is a revolution in the Church so critical that the sincere layman must assay its demands. It calls for a shift from activity to depth, from membership to discipleship, from amorality to morality in matters of human decency. One of the problems is that the Christian layman has forgotten who he is. He has lost his self-confidence and forgotten “the dignity of being a layman.” He must become aware of his worth (Christ died for him) and his royal blood (he is a child of God). With this knowledge a churchman stands tall.
We continually tend to become entangled in the superficial:
It doesn’t seem to get through to us that it is possible for a man to receive a friendly greeting at the door, worship in a strikingly beautiful sanctuary, attend Sunday School in a pleasingly decorated and air-conditioned room, receive a friendly letter from the pastor, and a well-meaning visit from laymen without ever getting the faintest hint of what the Gospel of Jesus Christ is all about.
And so there is need for a theological orientation. Our “major problems are theological. They stem from bad religion.” The Sunday service is essential. Here “encounter with God” must take place. Laymen must become literate:
Real churchmanship involves knowledge of the Bible, familiarity with the workings of one’s denomination, awareness of the emerging world church, and an understanding of the meaning of the Christian faith for our highly technical and complex culture.
What the Church needs is men and women who think clearly and act lovingly.
This is a double-barreled book. One barrel is directed regularly at the clergyman who doesn’t know where he is headed, and the other barrel at the layman who follows blindly and unconcernedly. Walker does not write theology or methodology. The enemy in the pew is the satchel of negative ideas that govern the actions of irresponsible churchmen. Neither layman nor clergyman can read this little volume without being challenged by its clear thinking, its honest analysis of a tragic situation, and its positive approach to down-to-earth Christian responsibilities.
Can ‘God-Talk’ Be Studied?
God-Talk: An Examination of the Language and Logic of Theology, by John Macquarrie (Harper & Row, 1967, 255 pp., $6), is reviewed by William J. Samarin, associate professor of linguistics, The Hartford Seminary Foundation, Hartford, Connecticut.
What bothers me about many proponents of “modern theology” is their ambivalent attitude toward modernity. On the one hand, they declare the need to face up to a secularized world that believes in a “self-regulating cosmos” in which events are described by other events equally immanent in the world. It is for this reason that mythological thinking is obsolete and the word “God” taken from its lexicon is dead. The other side of this ambivalence is a reluctance to adopt the methodology that led to secularism: namely, empiricism—the investigation of the stuff out of which the universe is made.
This book illustrates this inconsistency in modern theology. It is a book about religious and theological language. Its author, professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary (New York), advocates a hermeneutic that is almost as modern as New York’s Museum of Modern Art. All talk of God as another being, for example, a being different in kind from ourselves, must be relegated to an anti-quarium.
But his arguments for the renovation of theology, which are linguistic arguments, are not based on the findings of scientific linguistics. The book contains no reference to any recent study in linguistics proper or in the related disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and psychology. According to Macquarrie, “those who have made language the specific theme of their researches” are philosophers! So his single chapter on “some general reflections on language” is not fact-oriented but conjectural and reflective.
To say that God-Talk is like a chair with a shortened leg is not to say it can’t be sat on. The problem it considers is crucial to theology, and the treatment of the problem is impeccable. The book reads easily in spite of the difficult nature of the subject. Macquarrie reveals himself as an astute logician who can make an excellent case for yet another application of existentialism.
The ostensible purpose of God-Talk is to deal with theological language. And this Macquarrie conceives of as a problem: “how in a human language one can talk intelligibly about a divine subject-matter,” or how one can understand what a theologian means when he talks about God, angels, immortality, sin, grace, and so on. He takes up the problem by first examining how Bultmann, Barth, and Tillich solved it. Their weaknesses demand a better understanding of the nature of language, and particularly of theological vocabulary. For him this means appreciating the context of a discourse—that it involves something said by someone, to someone, about something. The seed of existentialism is planted here, and it bears full fruit in a stimulating discussion of the implications of “linguistic philosophy” (which is philosophy and not linguistics!).
This treatment of religious language is not all in abstract language. One chapter deals with its varieties as exemplified in a specific writing of St. Athanasius: De Incarnatione. And three chapters deal with three modes of expression found in religious language: mythology, symbolism, and analogy. Each of these contributes, the author says, to our understanding of the ultimate nature of things, but analogy is crucial.
If this book were truly about “how” people talk about the divine and what they “mean” when they use words like sin, it would be read by those linguists and anthropologists, even “secular” ones, who are interested in the way humans use language. But God-Talk cannot be recommended to them, because it is, fundamentally, an argument for the validity of religious faith. It is a book in the field of apologetics. These are the author’s own words: In “faith” there can be no certitude, but “the more we can show that God-talk has a coherent logic, the more it is shown that in God is a reasonable faith.”
However, Macquarrie would not like it said that he was advancing another argument for the existence of God, for he rejects the possibility of establishing the “truth” of faith on the basis of empirical arguments. Yet this is precisely what he seems to be doing. His thesis is that human language reveals a cognitive function: it shows that man perceives something about the universe (about being) that is otherwise unknown and unknowable. He would reject the reductionism of secular science, asserting that “man is the ontological entity, because he not only has being, like any other entity, but has his being disclosed to him, so that he has the potentiality to become the being to which Being as such manifests itself, gives itself and entrusts itself. ‘God’ is the religious name for Being as experienced in a faith-awakening revelation.”
But Macquarrie cannot escape the dilemma he so much wants to avoid. If there is anything at all true about language, it is that it is empirical: we hear and use it. In the final analysis, a linguistic-existential understanding of religious beliefs must be empirical. And although we learn much from philosophical exercises like the one demonstrated by this book, we would be a lot better off if we started with a franker appraisal of the empirical foundations of religious phenomena.
From The Unconscious Depths
The Face of the Deep: The Religious Ideas of C. G. Jung, by Charles Bartruff Hanna (Westminster, 1967, 203 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by Alvin Quall, professor of education and philosophy and director of graduate studies, Whitworth College, Spokane, Washington.
Dr. Charles B. Hanna, a practicing psychiatrist, has taken key concepts from six of C. G. Jung’s writings and has analyzed them in terms of theological considerations. The theme of The Face of the Deep is that man has failed to use the resources available through his unconscious. To be fulfilled, man must draw from the depths of his being, which consists not only of that which presently impinges upon him but also of a collective unconscious (racially inherited psychic material that is present in the individual unconscious) that profoundly affects what he is and what he may become.
Jung used the term “the powers” in his conception of God; these “powers” go beyond the consciousness of man and show themselves in the events of a person’s life. In dealing with God and the God-image, Jung expresses a faith that God is not only far away but also omnipresent.
To describe “God and the Dawn of Consciousness,” Jung uses much symbolism. Here his approach will be rather unacceptable to those who hold a conservative view of the Scriptures, for he refers to records prior to the creation account in Genesis and frequently speaks of “myth” in describing monotheism.
The Face of the Deep criticizes man’s attempt to gain a rational understanding of salvation. Jung believed that man is too scientific in his approach to the understanding of sin and of the means by which one may be redeemed from guilt.
The book emphasizes that man should give attention to the mysteries that undergird his being, for only in this way can he truly know God and become a completely “whole” person.
Taking The Race Question To Heart
The Segregated Covenant, by William A. Osborne (Herder and Herder, 1967, 252 pp., $5.95), and Black Power—White Resistance, by Fred Powledge (World. 1967, 282 pp., $6.95), are reviewed by Richard L. Troutman, professor of history, Houghton College, Houghton, New York.
When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, many Americans heaved a sigh of relief. The ten years since the Supreme Court decision banning segregation in public schools had been filled with boycotts, marches, demonstrations, and not a little violence. Now the Negro had his rights, and America could return to business as usual.
But the race issue would not down, and the Negro revolution that began in 1955 when Mrs. Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give her seat on a bus to a white man has now grown to the point where it is undoubtedly America’s most painful problem.
In The Segregated Covenant William Osborne describes the role played by the Roman Catholic Church in breaking down segregation in areas where it exercises a dominating influence—churches, schools, and hospitals. Osborne, a professional sociologist, is especially concerned with the efforts of the church ince the announcement by the American bishops at their historic 1958 meeting that “the heart of the race question is moral and religious” and that “segregation cannot be reconciled with the Christian view of our fellow men.” This is a more forthright position, by the way, than many Protestants have taken.
As Osborne points out, however, it is one thing for the hierarchy to state the official position of the church and quite another for the membership, north and south, urban and rural, to respond in practice. Officially, all Catholic institutions everywhere in America are open to Negroes, but population trends have resulted in “more de facto segregation in Catholic parishes than ever before.” And the Catholic response to discrimination in jobs, public accommodations, and housing, even on the part of bishops and clergy, has been halting.
One leaves this book with the impression that whatever progress the Catholic Church has made on the race issue is the result of factors external to the church. Osborne emphasizes that the church moved only after the federal government and the civil-rights movement had created a climate favorable to action.
One would think that in a book on race relations the opinions of Negroes themselves would be important; but virtually none are presented in this book.
It is the wide gulf between words and action that troubles Fred Powledge in Black Power—White Resistance. Whites will not enjoy this book. The author, a native Southerner and a free-lance writer, lays bare the paternalism and hypocrisy that have characterized white response to this “new civil war.”
Powledge is an angry young man. He is angry because the North has adopted the South’s favorite trick, tokenism, as “an excellent device for keeping the neck of the Negro firmly under foot of the white man while allowing the white man to proclaim his belief in tolerance.” He is angry about the way the war on poverty (“the war on poor people”) has been handled, and judges it a “widespread failure” unless the maximum feasible participation of the poor becomes a reality. And he is angry with those liberals who think that “sweet reason” is sufficient to disarm those who frustrate the Negro’s struggle for equality.
Powledge is also a pessimistic young man. He fears that if social change is to come to America, “it is to be ushered in not by sweet reason … but quite possibly by more violence and hatred.” In a moving passage, Powledge writes that “too many years have passed, too many hurts have settled into open wounds, too much blood has flowed, too many people are convinced now … that nothing will change.” And in view of the riots that many Northern cities have recently experienced, one may ponder his observation that America “may well already have become a nation of hate and fear … where riots will be commonplace and where parks will be empty … and where tolerance is ridiculed.”
Black Power—White Resistance is a spirited, moving book with valuable insights into the attitude of the new left. Every concerned American ought to read it.
How Many Parts To Man?
The Biblical Meaning of Man, by Dom Wulstan Mork (Bruce, 1967, 168 pp., $4.95), is reviewed by H. Leo Eddleman, president, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Is man a trichotomous, dichotomous, or unitary being? The author approaches this old question with a freshness of style and a convincing measure of logic. In chapters 1–8 he deals with his subject comprehensively. In chapter 9, however, he is less than convincing in discussing “living wholly.” This may be the result of his monastic background.
At no point does he resolve the problem of biblical terminology in First Thessalonians 5:23. Does the absolutistic nature of man’s unity still hold? Are the terms “spirit, soul, and body” used for descriptive, analytical, and possibly eschatological purposes only? Is there a chronological or temporary disruption of the unified nature of personality from the time of death till resurrection?
On the whole, however, Dom Mork gives evidence of wide reading and deep comprehension of his subject.
Paperbacks
The Dialogue of Christians and Jews, by Peter Schneider (Seabury, 1967, 196 pp., $1.95). A sensitive discussion of the relations between Jews and Christians down the centuries that faces the tragedies of the past with candor but concludes optimistically that mutual understanding will draw the two groups closer together.
God and Evil, by William Fitch (Eerdmans, 1967, 183 pp., $2.65). This study, subtitled “Studies in the Mystery of Suffering and Pain,” throws welcome light on a vexed question: Why does a God of love permit human affliction?—or, at a deeper level, Why is there irrational evil in a God-designed universe?
The Miracle of Mark, by Roy A. Harrisville (Augsburg, 1967, 128 pp., $1.50). An original treatment, written with verve and insight, of Mark’s Gospel, seen as a sermon on the mission, death, and exaltation of Christ that follows the pattern of Philippians 2:6–11; but the author runs into difficulties over Christ’s enthronement, which is absent from Mark’s ending.
The History and Character of Calvinism, by John T. McNeill (Oxford, 1967, 470 pp., $2.75). A paperback edition of a standard work on Calvin and his influence in the old and new worlds. A postscript of four pages, written for this edition, updates the bibliography and annotates source material.
Exegetical Method: A Student’s Handbook, by Otto Kaiser and W. G. Kummel (Seabury, 1967, 95 pp., $2.95). Two notable European biblical scholars aim to introduce the first-year B.D. student to the scientific methods of biblical criticism, and offer much useful information. The approach is moderately conservative—by German standards—but the twenty pages of notes are absurdly technical and off-putting.
The Hermeneutic of Erasmus, by John W. Aldridge (John Knox, 1966, 134 pp., $2.75). A joint Zürich-Richmond, Virginia publication in the series, “Basel Studies in Theology.” Hermeneutics is an O.K. term today, and this historical study may have light to shed on the current debate with the observation that “the basic criterian of any hermeneutic must be the content of the revelation itself”; but we face a different set of problems from those of the sixteenth century.
