Trumpeting Some Good News
Listen to the Green, by Luci Shaw (Harold Shaw, 1971, 96 pp., paperback, $1.95), Six Days: An Anthology of Canadian Christian Poetry, edited by H. Houtman (Wedge [Box 10, Station L, Toronto 10, Ontario], 1971, 144 pp., paperback, $2.50), and Adam Among the Television Trees: An Anthology of Verse by Contemporary Christian Poets, edited by Virginia R. Mollenkott (Word, 1971, 218 pp., $4.95), are reviewed by Elva McAllaster, poet-in-residence, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California.
Good news. Good news. Good news for people who love poetry and love God—and for people who up to now have loved one but not the other. Books are appearing that Christians who like to use mind and imagination will be glad to know about.
Luci Shaw’s Listen to the Green is a tactile and visual delight even before one reads a line of its poetry: the graceful typography, clean spacing on a good quality of paper, and sensitively chosen photographs proclaim this to be a book to savor and keep, or to savor and give away, or both.
The poem titles announce a lithe, eclectic mind. The poems themselves reveal a close knowledge of Scripture, a wide-ranging responsiveness to human experience, a gleeful zest in wordcraft. Awkward touches are not totally absent, but a lovely precision of diction and careful authenticity of emotion are prevailingly present. The poem “Circles” alone is easily worth the price of the book: “I sing of circles, rounded things,/ apples and wreaths and wedding rings,/ and domes and spheres,/ and falling tears …”
Six Days seldom touches the excellence that Listen to the Green sustains, but it contains moments of ecstasy and affirmation and excitement in using words. It also contains creativity not yet under harness and rein: prosiness, murky meanings, distorted syntax trying to stand as profundity, capricious enjambment.
The eight contributors to Six Days speak with very different voices. Among them, clearly young David Toews (Goshen College, ’71) is a writer to listen for in the future. His writing is spare, experimental, compassionate, earnest. His tiny poem, “A Prophet, Maybe,” is worth pages of expository prose. Mat Cupido’s attractive black-and-white line drawings enhance both Canadian and Christian accents of Six Days’ voices.
Adam Among the Television Trees is a far more important anthology. Upon opening it, my first reaction was vexation with myself, that after seeing a published invitation to contributors, I never did find the minutes to ship Mrs. Mollenkott some of my own poems to consider. My second reaction: glee that I didn’t do so. Now, quite impartially, I can blow some trumpet fanfares for her book.
Here is a landmark among publishing events in the evangelical world. Here is a book that ought to be on coffee tables and in conversations in alert Christian homes all over America. (And why stop with the borders of America?)
Carefully defining her project as poems by self-affirmed Christian writers, Mrs. Mollenkott has brought together 201 poems she appreciates, by forty-one contemporary poets: older and younger, from many employments, and from many denominational labels, or none. To each writer, poetry is a genuinely important mode of expression for moments of experience that are genuinely important to him. Although the same might be said for hundreds of equally effective writers who are not represented here, it’s still true of these forty-one.
Some of the poems included are flawed, even badly flawed, but as a whole Adam Among the Television Trees is a book certainly worthy of Mrs. Mollenkott’s vigorous, well-trained, and experienced intellect. (She teaches English at Paterson, New Jersey, State College.) Deciding precisely what one dislikes about the weaker poems will be an immensely valuable exercise for readers at any level of poetic inexperience or poetic sophistication. Deciding precisely what one likes about the stronger poems: well, bring out the trumpets and sound the fanfares.
From The Crucible
Faith on Trial in Russia, by Michael Bourdeaux (Harper & Row, 1971, 192 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Paul D. Steeves, Ph.D. candidate in Russian history, University of Kansas, Lawrence.
Ten years have passed since the opening of a deep schism in the evangelical movement in Russia. This division has proven to be one of the most significant events of the sixties in Soviet society, for what began as a church reform movement has led, by direct and indirect influences, to a widespread civil-rights movement that reaches well beyond the confines of the believing population. Michael Bourdeaux tells the story of the reform movement in this splendid book.
In August, 1961, three Baptist believers, two of them laymen, organized an “Action Group” in a revolt against the national leadership of the so-called Baptist movement. (“Baptist” is a shorthand designation for the evangelicals of Russia, encompassing Pentecostals, Plymouth Brethren, Baptists, and Mennonites.) No substantive doctrinal matters were at issue; the Baptists of Russia are thoroughly committed to biblical orthodoxy. The question that divided the evangelicals was one of political relationships. The official Baptist leadership has consistently followed a policy of co-operation with the civil government. The Action Group rejected this policy and the men who represented it. Very quickly, support for the Action Group came from all over the U.S.S.R. Its adherents began to practice flagrant civil disobedience, for which many were arrested and sentenced.
The ordeals of the Baptist dissidents are detailed in a veritable flood of illegal documents that have poured into the West. Professor Bourdeaux has ably distilled these materials to produce a lucid, reliable account of a drama that has by no means concluded. The account includes verbatim court records, texts of dissenters’ petitions, and extracts from their literature. This material is the stuff of which sensational books are easily made. It must be said to his credit that Bourdeaux resists that temptation.
Unfortunately, Bourdeaux presents a tendentious picture of the tensions among Russia’s evangelicals. His sympathies obviously lie with the dissidents, and he shows too little sensitivity to the position of the legal Baptist leaders. He unfairly depicts them as dupes of the Communists. In his description of the formation of the legal Baptist council, Bourdeaux wrongly implies that the Communists found some faceless Baptists and turned them by fiat into executives of the church. He faults these leaders for not resisting the pressures placed on them by the Khrushchev anti-religious campaign, without facing realistically the alternatives confronting them. He prejudices the case against them by repeatedly asking of them an explanation for actions which he himself admits they took under duress and of which they have publicly repented.
It is lamentable that Bourdeaux makes no attempt to discuss the complex ethical questions of political collaboration by church leaders in the Soviet setting. He simply assumes that collaboration is cowardly and worthy of censure. It is the non-collaborators who are “brave” and “dedicated.” He has failed to explore the kind of courage and moral suffering entailed in the decision, evidently taken by the legal Baptists, that obedience is the proper expression of submission to established authority, even when that authority is aggressively atheist. The moral issues here are profound; Bourdeaux’s book provides many data with which to begin exploring them.
In the final analysis, one can hardly find a better statement of the worth of this book than the author’s own concluding sentence: “From the crucible of their experience, Russian Christians have—and will continue to have—much to teach us.” Will we learn?
Let’S Be Consistent
The Beginnings of the Church in the New Testament, by Ferdinand Hahn, August Strobel, and Eduard Schweizer (Augsburg, 1970, 104 pp., $2.25), is reviewed by Daniel P. Fuller, dean of faculty and associate professor of hermeneutics, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.
Here three German theologians attempt to show by “up-to-date theological research”—as post-Bultmannians, it would seem—how the early Church is inextricably bound up with the nucleus of disciples that the historical Jesus gathered around himself. Bultmann found nothing about Jesus’ teaching or life style to be essential for Christian faith. By contrast these men affirm that the recollection that Jesus had summoned men to be his disciples was essential to the post-Easter faith shared by the New Testament authors. This summons possessed an authority so absolute that men believed that in Jesus “was God’s act of grace, the event in which the reign of God came upon men, made them whole, and called them to obedience.”
Hahn’s essay spells out the terms of discipleship laid down by the historical Jesus. Strobel argues that in the death of Christ, God gave full authority to these terms of discipleship that Jesus had taught. What was primary in the Easter event, according to Strobel, was that God’s confirmation of Jesus’ life style and teaching somehow came to the disciples objectively in “a personal encounter with the living Christ and his Word.” Schweizer then proceeds beyond Easter to show that the authoritative grace of God, so evident in the earthly Jesus’ call to discipleship, is at the base of the varied ways in which the New Testament writers witness to Christ.
The primary emphasis of each of these essayists is that the unique authority by which the historical Jesus called men to discipleship is the indispensable kernel of the New Testament and of all Christian faith. As post-Bultmannians, however, they want to preserve this New Testament emphasis on Jesus’ unequaled authority while bypassing its teaching about Jesus’ person. Hahn, for example, says, “It would be a mistake to attempt to explain [how Jesus could make such a radical demand on men] with the help of the titles [Christ, Lord, Son of Man, Son of God] which were given to Jesus by the early church.” But according to Hahn, Jesus’ unique authority in calling and gathering disciples is to be fundamentally explained by “the fact that God had acted in Jesus.” Easter brought this fact home to the disciples, so that thereafter “a different and stronger emphasis than previously is now placed upon the Person of Jesus Christ.”
According to the post-Bultmannians, this early Christian emphasis on the person of Christ was and is not essential to faith. But how is it possible to conceive of God acting finally and absolutely in affirming the life style and teaching of one who (according to post-Bultmannians) could be of no different quality than other men? The early Christians did not find it possible to be indifferent to Jesus’ person while stressing that God had made him authoritative. If one wants to affirm God’s absolute authority in Jesus, it would seem more consistent to declare, as did the New Testament writers, that he has this authority because he is God’s only Son.
The Price Of ‘Relevance’
The Decline and Fall of Radical Catholicism, by James Hitchcock (Herder and Herder, 1971, 228 pp., $6.50), and Authority and Rebellion, by Charles E. Rice (Doubleday, 1971, 252 pp., $5.95), are reviewed by James P. Degnan, associate professor of English, University of Santa Clara, California.
Both these books make essentially the same point: The reforms—radical and not so radical—that started in the Roman Catholic Church during the early 1960s have proved disastrous for the church. James Hitchcock, who identifies himself as a church progressive (as that term was understood in the fifties), makes the point succinctly. Even though conservative critics of church progressives and radicals have during the past decade often been “mean-spirited and fanatical,” he writes, they nevertheless have been “correct in virtually every particular [my italics] of their criticism of reform and in their prediction of the effects it would have on the Church.”
There is, Hitchcock writes in partial illustration of his point, “scarcely a single traditional doctrine of the Church which is not seriously questioned by some prominent [Catholic] theologians, not excluding the existence of God.” Thomism, he continues, “has disappeared almost without a trace.” The sacraments are largely ignored; the Virgin Birth is denied; the “Eucharist is regarded as at best a symbolic meal”; and “not only is papal infallibility repudiated, but often episcopal and priestly authority as well.…”
All this, Hitchcock points out, was supposed to result into a “renewed,” a revitalized, a “freer” church—one that would attract dramatically increased numbers of lay converts and of candidates for the religious orders. But the precise opposite has happened. Vocations to the religious orders are at an all-time low, and Catholic laymen are leaving the church in droves. At this stage, Hitchcock contends, “no one can predict with any certainty that the Church will have a visible existence by the end of this century.”
Of the two books Hitchcock’s is clearly the more readable and convincing. Rice’s book, though filled with interesting, often fascinating detail, (his chapter on the chaos and idiocy that church radicals have introduced into certain Catholic universities is especially fine), emerges more as a hodge-podge of unsubordinated notes than as a tightly sustained argument. And his optimistic conclusion—that the Church, by somehow returning to a clearly defined orthodoxy, will again flourish—seems, on the basis of the inadequate evidence he adduces, nothing more than wishful thinking.
Some years ago, in an article for CHRISTIANITY TODAY, I remarked that when various leading Catholic liberals and publications—e.g., Leslie Dewart, Father Gregory Baum, Father Eugene Shallart, Michael Novak, Daniel Callahan, Father Robert Adolfs, Commonweal, The National Catholic Reporter—succeeded in persuading people that concern about matters of faith (such questions as, Is there a world of the spirit?, Is there a heaven and hell?, Was Christ truly divine?, Is the soul immortal?) is “irrelevant” or “childish,” and that the Church at its most “relevant” and desirable is really nothing more than an international social-welfare agency, then people of good sense were simply going to demand in justified disgust: Who needs the Roman Catholic Church? Why not simply beef up UNESCO?
It seems to me that these two books amply document what I said.
Newly Published
Is Your Family Turned On?, by Charlie W. Shedd (Word, 148 pp., $4.95). The result of an essay contest, “Why I Don’t Use Drugs,” is now a book. Creative and imaginative, with good layout. Deserves a wide circulation, among both users and nonusers.
Despair: A Moment or a Way of Life?, by C. Stephen Evans (Inter-Varsity, 135 pp., paperback, $1.50). Hope has disappeared for twentieth-century man. We see this in literature, painting, and films. Evans, concentrating on specific works of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus, and Heller, explores the development of despair in a search for hope. Intellectually gripping and spiritually exciting.
Truth and Expression, by Edward MacKinnon (Newman, 212 pp., $7.50), and Words and the Word, by Kenneth Hamilton (Eerdmans, 120 pp., paperback, $2.95). These two books are both about words and the search for truth. But Hamilton’s is concrete, defined, and directed, while MacKinnon’s is a rambling study in useless verbosity and frustrating abstractions.
The Future of Our Religious Past, edited by James M. Robinson (Harper & Row, 372 pp., $18.95). English translation of fifteen essays selected from the Festschrift to Bultmann in 1964. Most of the “big names” in academic theology are represented.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian of Reality, by André Dumas (Macmillan, 306 pp., $7.95). English translation of a well-received, comprehensive study.
Church and Cinema, by James M. Wall (Eerdmans, 135 pp., $4.50). The Christian Advocate managing editor (a movie connoisseur) builds a convincing case for the cinema’s importance to Christians. He asserts that films offer a presentation of reality that can enrich our lives—a film need not be inherently religious to benefit the Christian viewer. A valid and long overdue discussion.
The Gospel and Authority: A P. T. Forsyth Reader, edited by Marvin W. Anderson (Augsburg, 199 pp., $5.95). Eight journal articles published 1899–1911 by a leading British evangelical theologian.
How to Talk to God When You Aren’t Feeling Religious, by Charles Merrill Smith (Word, 223 pp., $4.95). Points out the incongruities in every Christian’s life with wit, sensitivity, and humility. Those who read this book should expect to be seared by Smith’s branding iron.
Toward a Theology for the Future, edited by Clark H. Pinnock and David F. Wells (Creation House, 329 pp., $4.95). Eleven evangelicals write on such topics as “The Outlook for Biblical Theology,” “A Discussion with Hans Küng,” “The Future of the Church,” and “Ethics in the Theology of Hope.”
The Pilgrim Way, by Robert M. Bartlett (Pilgrim, 371 pp., $12). A well-illustrated, lively, yet scholarly account of the settlers of Plymouth colony, focusing on the years before 1620 and on the Pilgrims’ pastor, John Robinson.
Herbert W. Armstrong and His Worldwide Church of God: A Bibliography, by John D. Pearson (Pearson Publishers [2698 Fessey Ct., Nashville, Tenn. 37204], 10 pp., $1). Useful for those combating this growing heretical movement.
Early Christians Speak, by Everett Ferguson (Sweet, 258 pp., $7.95). A scholar in the Church of Christ (non-instrumental) looks chiefly at second-century practices of baptism, the Lord’s Supper, church organization, and style of living. Many brief extracts from ancient authors preface each chapter.
Biblical Theology, Volume One: Old Testament, by Chester K. Lehman (Herald Press, 480 pp., $15.95). The long-time head of the Bible department at Eastern Mennonite presents an introductory survey text.
Church History in the Age of Science: Historiographical Patterns in the United States 1876–1918, by Henry Warner Bowden (University of North Carolina, 269 pp., $10). Since the issues within the historical profession of several generations ago are still unresolved, this is a timely collection of essays.
Pulpit Speech, by Jay E. Adams (Presbyterian and Reformed, 169 pp., paperback, $3.50). Designed as a classroom text but adaptable for home study by the preaching teacher at Westminster Seminary.
Scientific Studies in Special Creation, edited by Walter E. Lammerts (Presbyterian and Reformed, 343 pp., $6.95). Another selection of articles first published in Creation Research Society Quarterly, 1964–68.
Wisdom the Principal Thing, by Kenneth L. Jensen (Pacific Meridian [13540 39th Ave., N.E., Seattle, Wash. 98125], 167 pp., paperback, $2.95). Sermons on Proverbs reflecting the style of the widely known expositor Robert Thieme.
Man in Transition: The Psychology of Human Development, by Gary R. Collins (Creation House, 203 pp., $4.95), and The Christian’s Handbook of Psychiatry, by O. Quentin Hyder (Revell, 192 pp., $4.95). Introductions by evangelical practitioners to their respective approaches to understanding and helping men, especially Christians. Simple without being simplistic.
Herod the Great, by Michael Grant (American Heritage, 272 pp., $12.95). Fascinating account of the crafty politician who ruled Judea at the time of Jesus’ birth. The interesting photographs add to the book’s value. But the author considers the biblical account of Herod’s massacre of the children to be myth, not history.
Historiography: Secular and Religious, by Gordon H. Clark (Craig, 381 pp., paperback, $7.50). The well-known Christian philosopher interacts with various secular and religious views of the meaning of human events.
The Sayings of Jesus in the Churches of Paul, by David L. Dungan (Fortress, 180 pp., $6.95), and Mark—Traditions in Conflict, by Theodore J. Weeden (Fortress, 182 pp., $6.95). Two technical studies of the first-century Church. The one on Mark is highly speculative, but the study of Paul shows his continuity with the Synoptics.
A Body of Divinity, by John Gill (Sovereign Grace, 994 pp., $10.95). A 200-year-old comprehensive systematic theology by one of the leading Calvinistic Baptists.
Bible, Archaeology, and Faith, by Harry Thomas Frank (Abingdon, 352 pp., $12.50). A well-illustrated, large-size introductory survey of ancient Palestine and its neighbors to the time of Paul.
The Infallibility Debate, edited by John J. Kirvan (Paulist, 154 pp., paperback, $1.95). Three Catholics and a Protestant reflect on Küng’s well-known book questioning papal infallibility.
No Man Is Alien: Essays on the Unity of Mankind, edited by J. Robert Nelson (Brill, 334 pp., 48 guilders). Thirteen essays, mostly by Americans, honoring W. A. Visser ’t Hooft, long-time leader of the World Council of Churches. Sample titles: “Signs of Mankind’s Solidarity,” “Mohammed and All Men.”
New Trends in Moral Theology, by George M. Regan (Newman, 213 pp., paperback, $3.75). A good introduction to recent Catholic ethical thought.
