Book Briefs: December 10, 1956

Reformed Apologetics

The Defense of the Faith, by Cornelius Van Til. Presbyterian and Reformed, Philadelphia. $4.95.

The importance of this volume can hardly be overestimated; indeed, we believe it to be one of the most significant works in the field of Christian apologetics to have been published for a long time. Those who are prepared to think deeply and who seriously wish to achieve an understanding of the implications of the Christian faith will not fail to find the study of this book a richly rewarding experience. Professor Van Til has not been without his critics, especially on the subject of common grace, and this work is in part a reply to the criticisms which have been levelled against the position he has defined.

In seeking to defend the faith against the assaults of unbelief it is important that the Christian should know precisely the nature of the ground on which he must take his stand. It is also important that he should have an understanding of the ground on which the unbeliever places himself. What, in fact, are the presuppositions, the principles, which govern the outlook of Christian and non-Christian respectively? For the Christian, the brief answer is that it is upon Holy Scripture as the Word of God that he takes his stand. “For the believer,” says Dr. Van Til, “Scripture is the principle of theology. As such it cannot be the conclusion of other premises, but it is the premise from which all other conclusions are drawn” (p. 360).

The unbeliever, on the other hand, will not admit the supreme authority of Scripture, but will endeavour to make himself and his human (and fallen) interpretation of things the center of reference. “In the last analysis,” Professor Van Til declares, “we shall have to choose between two theories of knowledge. According to one theory God is the final court of appeal; according to the other theory man is the final court of appeal” (p. 51).

It is affirmed that “human knowledge is analogical of divine knowledge” (p. 56); the universe has been created by God in accordance with His own all-embracing plan, and man, as one of God’s creatures, is necessarily dependent on the Creator not only for being but also for knowledge. “We could not have existence and meaning apart from the existence and meaning of God” (ibid); for “all facts of the created universe are what they are by virtue of the plan of God with respect to them” (p. 132). Thus the “Reformed apologist assumes that nothing can be known by man about himself or the universe unless God exists and Christianity is true” (p. 317).

Every man, in fact, inescapably knows God, both because this knowledge is constitutional of his being as a creature of God, and also because, wherever he turns, he is confronted with the evidence of God’s activity in the general revelation of the natural realm, as St. Paul plainly teaches when he says that the eternal power and godhead of the Creator are clearly seen from the things that have been made—the visible creation testifies to the invisible Creator. Sinful man, however, suppresses this knowledge of God and worships the creature rather than the Creator (Rom. 1:18 ff.). Hence Professor Van Til asserts that “there are no atheists … All men know God, the true God, the only God. They have not merely a capacity for knowing him but actually do know him” (p. 173).

The essence of sin is rebellion of the creature against the sovereignty of the Creator, unwillingness to know God and to acknowledge His lordship, the desire of man to be independent and self-sufficient by setting up himself in God’s place as the ultimate judge and measure of all things. It is stressed by Professor Van Til that sin is not, although it would like to be, an escape from creaturehood; it is “a breaking loose from God ethically and not metaphysically” (p. 63). The fundamental antithesis between believer and unbeliever consists in this: that the former acknowledges the divine sovereignty and seeks to interpret all things in accordance with God’s revelation, whether general (in nature) or special (in Scripture), whereas the latter refuses to acknowledge the crown rights of the Creator and seeks to make himself the arbiter of all reality and possibility.

The Christian view of man and the world, then, is diametrically opposed to the non-Christian view, with the result that the Christian defender of the faith, if he is to be consistent with his principles, cannot take his stand on the same ground as the non-Christian opponent of the faith.

The point of contact for the Gospel, says Dr. Van Til, “must be sought within the natural man. Deep down in his mind every man knows that he is the creature of God and responsible to God. Every man, at bottom, knows that he is a covenant-breaker. But every man acts and talks as though this were not so” (p. 111).

Another factor that has to be taken into consideration is that of common grace. The antagonism of the unregenerate man to God is in principle absolute; but in practice it is curbed and restrained by the goodness of God. Common grace is defined by Dr. Van Til as “the giving of good gifts to men (by God) though they have sinned against Him, that they might repent and mend their evil ways” (p. 185).

Dr. Van Til insists that “all the knowledge non-Christians have, whether as simple folk by common sense, or as scientists exploring the hidden depths of the created universe, they have because Christianity is true. It is because the world is not what non-Christians assume it is, a world of Chance, and is what the Christians say that it is, a world run by the counsel of God, that even non-Christians have knowledge” (p. 286). In view of previous misunderstandings, Professor Van Til is careful to point out that he does “not maintain that Christians operate according to new laws of thought any more than that they have new eyes or noses” (p. 296).

Both Roman Catholicism and Arminianism come under the author’s fire for the reason that, by assigning a varying measure of autonomy to man, they compromise the authoritative revelation of Scripture and the absolute sovereignty of God in the sphere of knowledge as well as of being, thereby making a consistent and successful defence of the faith an impossibility. But Dr. Van Til’s criticism of apolgetics that is un-Re-formed, or not fully Reformed (that is, scriptural), is always marked by charity and humility. We could wish, however, that he had not used the term Evangelical as a synonym for Arminianism, and we should like to see the word Anglicanism on page 238 corrected to Anglo-Catholicism. We feel bound to inquire, also, whether it is not going beyond the limits of the scriptural revelation to declare that, because the will of God is sovereign in the world, therefore even evil and the fall must have come about within the plan and purpose of God (cv. pp. 206, 309). Not for one moment, of course, does Dr. Van Til suggest that God is the author of evil, but we believe it would be preferable to say that the evil and sin that have entered into God’s world cannot in any respect frustrate His eternal purposes, and indeed that they are overruled by God in such a manner as to work in with and set forward His purposes. The supreme example of this is the event of Calvary.

PHILIP E. HUGHES

The Actor

The Minister Behind the Scenes, by George Hedley. Macmillan, New York. $2.50.

This volume presents the sixth series of the Gray Lectures delievered at the Divinity School of Duke University in 1955.

The author, Dr. George Hedley, taught at the College of Puget Sound, the Pacific School of Religion and Hartford Seminary Foundation before going to Mills College where he is now Professor of Economics and Sociology and Chaplain of the College.

Dr. Hedley has written an interesting and helpful book. While the book is of interest primarily to pastors, it would also prove enlightening to laymen. The writer compares a minister to an actor. The similarity is primarily confined to both being upon a stage. The actor occupies the stage of the theater; the minister, the stage of the world. The actors perform for brief periods of time; the minister never leaves the stage. He is always the minister. There is no release from the “part” he plays.

The book is divided into six lectures. The first three of these are titled: (1) studying the part, (2) knowing the stage, and (3) adapting the script. The first is a call to professional reading, the second, to collateral reading; the third to the preparation of the “script.” His exhortation to pastors to return to the study of the Bible is commendable. However, we cannot approve certain methods of study he prescribes. There is wisdom in his suggestion that pastors study early Christian writings, but one questions some of the recommended commentaries and periodicals. The importance of budgeting our reading time is stressed, as also the necessity of collateral reading. The matters of sermon preparation and presentation are treated in a brief, but helpful, fashion.

Lectures four and five, “Keeping in Condition” (Recreation), and “Checking the Cash,” contain much helpful information. We do take exception to the advisability of the minister becoming a member of lodges and clubs, as suggested by the author. The advice he gives the pastor concerning financial matters is well worth pondering.

The closing lecture, six, “Staying in Character,” speaks of the essential devotional life of the minister. Dr. Hedley emphasizes the need of an appointed time, of good devotional helps, of an appropriate place for the minister’s own devotional period.

The book is well written. It is interesting and informative on many matters pertaining to the Christian ministry. The author’s understanding of the problem involved, his spiritual insight, and his Christian sense of humor contribute toward a book that is well worth reading.

E. WESLEY GREGSON, SR.

Written For God

God’s Word to His People, by Charles Duell Kean. Westminster, Philadelphia, 1956. $3.50.

Dr. Kean, Episcopal rector and Lecturer at George Washington University, is an influential minister, educator and author. His present volume discusses how the Bible came into being, its purpose, scope, essential character and the influences that molded it. The author asserts that the Bible has meaning only insofar as we view it as “the product of the Church’s (i.e., the people of God) life.” The Book and the Life are essential to each other, mutually acted and reacted on each other during the writing, and are therefore of equal authority.

The real process of compiling the Bible was conducted during a 500-year period beginning with the promulgation of the law after the building of the Second Temple, about 439 B.C. During this time a movement was initiated in Israel to establish the ideal commonwealth which Jewish leaders like Ezra and Nehemiah understood to be the nation’s mission in its covenant relationship with God, a commonwealth that would exemplify the divine purpose for the world. The Bible is actually the “life-book” of this process and reflects the changing concept of the ideal commonwealth produced by the interaction of faith and history. Three developments are noticeable: (1) the attempt at the ideal commonwealth as such, (2) the shift of the law instead of the political unit as the bearer of God’s purpose, (3) the Church as the body of Christ in whom men universally are bound to God and one another in love. Fundamental to each stage, however, is the fulfillment of the covenant relationship. In the developmental process the biblical materials underwent many changes, alterations, corrections, etc.

It is amazing what one can read out of the Scriptures after first reading into them a preconceived system, and this constitutes the primary error of this book. The interpretation of the data is thoroughly humanistic to the point that the title is a misnomer. If one accepts Kean’s approach, the Bible is neither divine revelation—the Church’s experience becomes the revelation, if it may be called that—nor is it in any positive sense inspired. The most radical hypotheses of the literary critics are consistently advanced even to the degree that significant characters become “legendary heroes.” At times one is tempted to think that perhaps the Bible was written for God’s, not man’s, edification. The Christology and Soteriology are likewise unsound. Though scholarly and interesting, this is no book for evangelical believers.

RICHARD ALLEN BODEY

Mariolatry

The Virgin Mary, the Roman Catholic Marian Doctrine, by Giovanni Miegge, translated by Waldo Smith, Westminster, Philadelphia. $3.50.

Roman Catholic teaching concerning the Virgin Mary is becoming increasingly important not only to those within but also to those outside the Roman Church. The recent definition and formal establishment of the doctrine of Mary’s assumption is one more step along the road of Roman Catholic development; it is also one more victory for the Society of Jesus, the great promoter of Marian piety. Even more important for Protestants, however, it emphasizes the difference between their views and Roman Catholicism.

For these reasons, this study of the Marian doctrine by Professor Miegge is of great value. As Professor of Church History in the Waldensian Faculty of Theology at Rome, he has not only studied the theoretical but has also seen the practical application of the doctrine. He, therefore, speaks with authority.

His method of discussion is simple and effective. Taking the various titles given to Mary, in what might be called their chronological order of appearance, he examines each in turn. After a careful historical outline of the history of the use of each, he evaluates it in the light of biblical teaching, Roman Catholic and Protestant thinking.

This work may be a disappointment to some Protestants who favor the violent method of approach to any discussion of Romanism. Professor Miegge never raises his voice. He deals with his topic methodically, carefully and soberly. In fact at times one almost feels that he is too much the detached scholar. He quotes the Roman Catholic statements in full. He endeavours as far as possible to be fair and objective in all things.

By this very cool scholarly air he is all the more devastating. For those who wish for reasoning rather than more pyrotechniques his argument is most effective. He shows conclusively that not only is the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Virgin Mary unscriptural, it is anti-scriptural and thoroughly unhistorical. Even the earlier Roman Catholic Church is in conflict with the present teaching which is set forth as divinely inspired.

The final chapter: “Mary in Dogma and Devotion” is the final blow. Professor Miegge there demonstrates with great clarity that despite all the usual emphasis on the Mass, Mary is now at the center of Romanist thought. She, althought a human creature, is the Queen of Heaven, virtually equal to the Triune Godhead. She is the supreme example of man saving himself by his good works. Christ, the Judge, the Lord of the beyond is being ushered out of the picture to be replaced by the human, sentimentalized version of the Virgin. Romanism is thus on the way to becoming, even formally, a non-Christian religion.

This book should be very useful to many who wish to understand the present developments which are taking place in the Roman Catholic Church.

The translation by Waldo Smith and the production by Westminster are both very good.

W. STANFORD REID

Mission Study

The Growth of the World Church, by Ernest A. Payne, Macmillan. 6s.6d.

This is a readable little book of 174 pages, with a useful bibliography and index. The title is perhaps a little misleading, and in some senses is rather prejudicial to the book. Dr. Payne provides a brief outline of the history of Christian Missions; this fact is better indicated by the sub-title, “The Story of the Modern Missionary Movement.” After a sketch of the work of those whom he so rightly styles “Forerunners of Advance,” the author provides the reader with an account of the outstanding features of modern missionary enterprise. It is an education to read and is just the kind of book to consider in a missionary study group.

ERNEST F. KEVAN

Review of Current Religious Thought: December 10, 1956

Philip Edgcumbe Hughes

On this occasion I intend to let the layman speak. Because a man sits in the pew “under” a minister it does not therefore follow that he is incapable of making any valuable and constructive contribution to religious thought; nor, conversely, should it be assumed that he is less likely than the parson to perpetrate theological howlers. Unfortunately, however, the temptation to intellectual arrogance on the part of the cleric is such that an occasional reminder that the lay mind has a contribution to offer which merits attention (though not necessarily agreement) may not be out of place. I propose, further, to limit this review to a consideration of only two articles appearing in the current numbers of The Scottish Journal of Theology and The Modern Churchman. In each case the author is a business man of some standing. One Mr. George Goyder, is an Evangelical; the other, Sir Henry Selfe, is a Liberal and the President of the Modern Churchmen’s Union.

¶ Mr. Goyder, writing on “The Relevance of Biblical Justice to Industry” in The Scottish Journal of Theology (Sept., 1956), cogently delineates the Christian approach to the problems which the industrial world of our day presents. He stresses the importance of law, Divine Law, as the only proper basis of both justice and freedom. This is true of the Atonement: “When we belittle the majesty, the awful splendour, of God’s Law as revealed in the Old Testament, we lose an essential in our understanding of Christ’s sacrifice for our sin.” We must be willing, he affirms, “to believe in the Law of God before we can see its relevance to our situation. Just as denial of an absolute justice has brought half the world into bondage to gross injustice, so our refusal to obey and apply God’s Law as the source of social freedom threatens us with social and political upheaval and ultimately with slavery to human laws based on the will of the powerful.” The Ten Commandments provide “a complete summary of the will of God for men in society.” One of the evils forbidden by the moral law is that of usury, which belongs to the command, “Thou shalt not steal.” But in what sense is it possible to speak of usury in contemporary business? Mr. Goyder replies that the sin of usury is committed “when a company exploits the consumer by reason of a monopoly, or when the members of a trades union restrict entry to a trade and then exploit that fact to exact the highest possible wages.”

The scope of industrial justice is not confined to the paying of fair wages. Human relationships, involving not only the workers, but also shareholders, consumers, and the community, and the dignity of human personality have to be taken into account. Accordingly, “justice in industry requires the definition of industrial purpose in social, and not purely in financial terms,” and “our practical problem is to make industrial companies into human associations of persons serving a worthy social purpose.” What of the worker, who all too often tends to be frustratingly swallowed up by the vast impersonal machine of modern industry? “As a child of God,” says Mr. Goyder, “a man needs to be able to serve God in his work. To do this he needs to know what his job means in relation to the whole of which it is a part, and to have some freedom of action to function as a whole person.… It is fundamental to the dignity of man that he should in a real sense ‘own’ his work.” Mr. Goyder’s admonitions are timely, if not overdue, for in British industry today there is desperate need for the Christian spirit, animated by love of God and love of one’s neighbour, if a sense of the dignity and the satisfaction of work well done is to be recaptured.

¶ Sir Henry Selfe’s article appears in The Modern Churchman (Sept., 1956) under the tide of “The Fundamentalist Heresy”; it is however, not merely an assault upon “Fundamentalism” (in which he seems uncritically to include Conservative Evangelicalism), but also the Theology of Crisis, Existenialism, and in general what he calls “irreason.” In his judgment “the impact of Karl Barth on the public mind of this country … has been surprisingly small,” whereas “the simple approach of an evangelical fundamentalist like that of Dr. Billy Graham has obviously had a very wide impact.” The latter, however, is a misfortune which, we are told, must cause “those who are concerned for the future of enduring religion in this country” to be “seriously perturbed.” This state of serious perturbation has apparently been engendered by Dr. Graham’s “fundamentalistic acceptance of the Bible and a form of Christian doctrine which has long been outgrown.” To dogmatize in this way is, of course, to beg the question.

It is probable that most laymen will find themselves in sympathy with Sir Henry when, with special reference to the dialectical theologians, he writes: “It is time that somebody spoke a few words on behalf of the common man.” “Religion,” he goes on to say, “must have meaning for the ordinary man, and any teaching claiming dogmatic authority must at least be intelligibly expressed to the common mind. The Theology of Crisis must be judged by its intelligibility for the thinking layman, and that is almost nil.” He appraises Professor Cornelius Van Til’s book The New Modernism as a “crushing indictment” of Barth and Brunner and a “sturdy defense of the classical Reformed Faith.”

¶ Whatever may be thought of their utterances (and for the Reformed Christian, all utterances, whether lay or clerical, will be judged at the bar of Holy Scripture), it is a healthy sign when laymen take an intelligent interest in matters theological and ecclesiastical. May we be preserved from the easy distinction of the Roman Church between the Teaching Church (ministry) and the Learning Church (laity)! Certainly the church has need of a more vitally interested and more vocally assertive laity.

- More from Philip Edgcumbe Hughes

Cover Story

Evangelist-Theologian: Appreciation of James Denney

Philip Edgcumbe Hughes

“If evangelists were our theologians or theologians our evangelists, we should at least be nearer the ideal church.” So wrote James Denney (1856–1917) in the foreword to his famous work on The Death of Christ (London, 1902, p. viii), a book which displays in a remarkable manner the truth that the evangelical theme of atonement is central in its significance for Christian theology. Equipped with one of the most brilliant intellects of his day, the whole life of this humble and single-minded man was an illustration of the way in which a theologian could be at the same time an evangelist, not only in his preaching but also in his thinking and writing.

Centennial Of Denney’s Birth

Denney was born in Paisley on the 5th of February, 1856; but he grew up in Greenock where he rejoiced in the friendship of that man of genius, J. P. Struthers.

At the age of eighteen his illustrious career as a student in the University of Glasgow commenced. Prizes and gold medals came his way almost as part of the natural order of things, and so outstanding were his abilities that already many visualized him as the future occupant of a professorial chair in the Arts faculty—just which chair might depend on his own choice. His choice, however, fell not on one of the Arts subjects, but on Theology, which he proceeded to study in the Free Church College in Glasgow.

After his graduation in divinity, he accepted a call to be minister of East Free Church, Broughty Ferry. There he spent eleven happy years. His preaching, disciplined, incisive and directed to the consciences of his hearers, was essentially evangelical, and, indeed, was influenced by his reading of the sermons of Charles Haddon Spurgeon. It demonstrated that his belief that “preaching and theology should never be divorced” was not merely a theoretical conviction of the study, but one which he did not fail to put into practice. He was convinced that “the simplest truth of the gospel and the profoundest truth of theology must be put in the same words—He bore our sins” (ibid., p. 282), and he effectively summed up the urgency of the preacher’s task when he wrote: “The proclamation of the finished work of Christ is not good advice, it is good news”; accordingly, “the man who has this to preach has a gospel about which he ought to be in dead earnest” (ibid., pp. 312, 326).

From Pulpit To Professorship

From Broughty Ferry, Denney returned to Glasgow as Professor of Systematic Theology in the Free Church College. Then, in 1900, he exchanged this Chair for that of New Testament Language, Literature and Theology, as successor to Professor A. B. Bruce. By 1915, when he was appointed Principal of the College, his influence and reputation as theologian and leader in the Church of Scotland were second to none. His death took place in June, 1917, when he was at the height of his powers; and his dying, like his living, was marked by unfaltering confidence in the perfect atoning work of Christ.

Centrality Of Christ’s Death

But James Denney still speaks to us today through his writings, and it is to his theology that I now wish to turn.

The significance of Christ’s atoning death for mankind was his preoccupation; it was a theme which ceaselessly gripped him, and the simple reason for this was his conviction that “the death of Christ is the central thing in the New Testament” and that “where there is no Atonement there is no gospel” (ibid., pp. 283 f.). It is therefore not surprising that three of his most important books should bear the titles: The Death of Christ, The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation (London, 1917), and The Atonement and the Modern Mind (third edition, London, 1919).

His exposition of this noble theme is full, fearless and always gracious and crystal clear. With certain theologians who regarded the Incarnation as an end in itself he found it impossible to agree: “The New Testament,” he wrote, “knows nothing of an incarnation which can be defined apart from its relation to atonement … Not Bethlehem, but Calvary, is the focus of revelation, and any construction of Christianity which ignores or denies this distorts Christianity by putting it out of focus” (The Death of Christ, p. 325).

Objective Aspect Of Atonement

Denney recognized the Atonement as in the first place an objective act of God, and, as such, an act which is consistent with God’s whole character. He thus speaks of the “divine necessity—not to forgive, but to forgive in a way which shows that God is irreconcilable to evil, and can never treat it as other or less than it is” (The Atonement and the Modern Mind, p. 82). So Christ went to the Cross, for “God could not do justice to Himself, in relation to man and sin, in any way less awful than this” (ibid., p. 91).

In this vital respect, as Denney perceived, the modern mind is not different from the ancient; for both “the attraction and the repulsion of Christianity are concentrated at the same point; the cross of Christ is man’s only glory, or it is his final stumbling block” (ibid., p. 3).

The Atonement is, in fact, a revelation both of the love of God and of his justice. “Justice,” declared Denney, “is in no sense at war with mercy. The opposite of justice is not mercy, but injustice, and God is never either unmerciful or unjust.… In the divine nature justice and mercy do not need to be composed, they have never fallen out” (The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, pp. 104, 233). The meeting of mercy with justice is seen in the fact of the divine necessity “that sin, in the very process in which it is forgiven, should also, in all its reality, be borne.” No element of the tremendous reality of sin is ignored or evaded by Christ. “On the contrary,” says Denney, “sin is exhausted in His appearance on the cross; the cup is not tasted, but drained.” The ultimate truth about forgiveness was, for Denney, simply this, “that sin is only forgiven as it is borne. He bore our sins in His own body on the tree: that is the propitiation. It is the satisfaction of divine necessities, and it has value not only for us, but for God” (ibid., pp. 161 f.).

Calvary Makes A Difference To God

It was maintained by Denney that “if we say that the death of Christ was an atoning sacrifice, then the atonement must be an objective atonement. It is to God it is offered, and it is to God it makes a difference.” In the ancient Church the death of Christ was universally regarded as “an atoning sacrifice through which sin was annulled and God and man reconciled” (ibid., p. 30); and equally primitive is the conception of Christ’s death as a ransom, the cost of man’s emancipation. These ideas of sacrifice and ransom both “imply that Christ did with God for men something which they could not do for themselves, and which made them infinitely His debtors” (ibid., p. 33). Denney insisted that “we cannot dispense with a work of reconciliation which is as objective as Christ Himself, and has its independent objective value to God.… The world with Christ and His passion in it is a different place from the world without Christ and His passion in it. It is a different place to God, and God’s attitude to it is different” (ibid., p. 236)—and the explanation of this is that it is God’s complete and final act on behalf of sinners: “the one thing needful for the salvation of sinners was once for all done and endured at the cross” (ibid., p. 284).

Subjective Side Emphasized Also

Yet it must not be thought that Denney failed to appreciate that the subjective aspect of the Atonement is also of importance. One who emphasized, as he did, experience as a theological criterion was not likely to make this mistake. “The work of reconciliation,” he affirmed, “must have justice done to its subjective as well as its objective reference; the doctrine must recognise its ultimate effect in man as well as its value for God” (ibid., p. 109).

It is true that he spoke of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo as “the truest and greatest book on the Atonement that has ever been written” (The Atonement and the Modern Mind, p. 84), but this did not prevent Denney from criticizing the book’s serious inadequacies, nor from appreciating what is of value in Abelard’s view of the Atonement as a demonstration of divine love. Denney urged, however, that “the death of Christ can only be regarded as a demonstration of love to sinners, if it can be defined or interpreted as having some necessary relation to their sins” (The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, p. 79).

Significance Of Christ’s Life

Nor should it be imagined that Denney underestimated the significance of Christ’s life as integrally connected with his redeeming function. His study of the New Testament led him to see that Christ’s life “attains its true interpretation only as we find in it everywhere the power and purpose of His death.” So assured was Denney of this truth that he felt able to define Christ’s life as “part of His death: a deliberate and conscious descent, ever deeper and deeper, into the dark valley where at the last hour the last reality of sin was to be met and borne” (The Atonement and the Modern Mind, pp. 108 ff.). But, thanks be to God, Christ’s death is not the end of the story, for it is followed by His resurrection from the dead. “The New Testament,” says Denney, “preaches a Christ who was dead and is alive, not a Christ who was alive and is dead.… To preach the Atonement means not only to preach One who bore our sins in death, but One who by rising again from the dead demonstrated the final defeat of sin, and One who comes in the power of His risen life … to make all who commit themselves to Him in faith partakers in His victory” (ibid., p. 112).

The Atonement And Our Century

This brings us to the question of the reality of the Atonement for man in this twentieth century. What, to use the modern terminology, is its existential significance, if any? This was a question of which Denney was keenly aware.

But he was first of all convinced of the historical foundations of Christianity. “The whole power of Christianity is in its historical character,” he asserted, “and to replace its sublime and tragic facts by a system of ideas, however true and imposing, is to destroy it altogether” (The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, p. 131).

But it is precisely in relation to this soteriological history that the existential import of Christianity must be perceived. “There is certainly no reconciliation but through the historical Christ: there is no other Christ of whom we know anything whatever. But,” he adds, “the historical Christ does not belong to the past. The living Spirit of God makes Him present and eternal; it is not from Palestine, or from the first century of the Christian era, but here and now that His reconciling power is felt” (ibid., p. 9). In this sense the Christian believer today is no more remote from Christ and His power than was, for example, the Apostle Paul nineteen hundred years ago. Paul was not philosophizing in the abstract or indulging in academic theological speculation when he wrote his epistles. On the contrary, he was writing of what he had himself experienced. He knew the power of the risen Christ as a reality in his own life; and the same has been true of every believer in every age. With this in mind, Denney was even willing to state that “the basis of all theological doctrine is experience” (ibid., p. 199; cf. Jesus and the Gospel, third edition, London, 1909, p. 36). Thus, while maintaining the full historical character of the Christian religion, he stressed that its saving truth is not limited to the past, but is “here, in the living Christ and in the experience of Christians” (ibid., p. 376).

God Demands A Response Of Faith

The response which God demands from man to the finished work of Christ is that of faith. “He must trust himself to such love instantly, unreservedly, for ever,” says Denney. “He cannot negotiate with God about it.… The only right thing to do is to trust it, to let go, to abandon ourselves to it, keeping nothing back” (The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, p. 163). Faith, he explains, is man’s “absolute committal of himself for ever to the sin-bearing love of God for salvation.” Faith, indeed, is “just as truly the whole of Christianity subjectively as Christ is the whole of it objectively” (ibid., p. 291). And when he describes the life of faith as “passionate identification” of the sinner with Christ in trust and love, and as “self-abandonment” to God’s redeeming love in Christ, his words have a genuinely existential ring about them (ibid., p. 324).

Impatience With Creeds

Linked with his emphasis on the criterion of experience was Denney’s dislike of creedal formulations. He felt that there was an ever-present danger lest through their imposition, faith in a person should be displaced, all unconsciously, in favor of faith in articles, and lest any “preliminary demand for orthodoxy” should act as a barrier “between the soul and the reconciling love of God in Christ” (The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, p. 109). It was his opinion that the process of intellectualization of the faith was responsible for the transformation, or deformation, of the primitive Church into “the historic Catholic Church.” The metamorphosis of the Church he summed up in three stages: “first a holy society, then a society of true doctrine, and finally a clerical polity” (Studies in Theology, eighth edition, London, 1904, pp. 193 ff.), or hierarchical institution. This, no doubt, is an over-simplification of history, but that does not mean that there is no truth in it. Here, however, we feel bound to urge, against Denney, that the New Testament shows that the preservation of “true doctrine” was very much an apostolic concern—a concern, that is, of the original Church.

What Denney was contending for was the view of Christianity, “not as a theological system, but as a religious life” (Jesus and the Gospel, p. 381), and he was insistent that no Christian was “bound to any Christology, or to any doctrine of the work of Christ” (ibid., p. 382), but to Christ alone. Not, of course, that Denney disparaged the need for Christians to achieve an appreciation of the intellectual implications of their faith, otherwise he would never have devoted his energies to the task of theology; but he demanded for every believer “entire intellectual freedom” (ibid., p. 384), to think things out for himself. The requirement of subscription to “elaborate creeds” he regarded as divisive in the Church, and he advocated the introduction of a brief and simple affirmation of faith which, by contrast, would stand as a “symbol of the Church’s unity.” The formula he proposed was: “I believe in God through Jesus Christ His only Son, our Lord and Saviour” (ibid., p. 398).

Weakness In Doctrinal Position

Once again, it may be objected, Denney has produced an over-simplification. An affirmation of this sort, simple though it is, presupposes not only a doctrine of the person and work of Christ, but also, if it is to be meaningful, a right doctrine. It cannot be divorced from Christology and soteriology—a fact to which, somewhat ironically, Denney’s own careful and extensive writings bear testimony. To contemplate with complacency, as he did, the unity, under cover of this formula, of Arians and Athanasians (ibid., pp. 402 f.), is to fail to perceive that Arianism strikes at the very foundation of redemption in Christ. We do not dispute that many holding Arian views may at the same time have exercised a vital saving faith in Christ, but that does not justify Arianism any more than the presence of hypocrites among the orthodox disqualifies orthodoxy. Nicene Christology cannot be dismissed (as Denney wished to dismiss it) as “explaining nothing,” nor should an otherwise laudable zeal for unity in the Church be permitted to blind us to the necessity for right doctrine.

It is also necessary to suggest that Denney did less than justice to the scriptural evidence when he opposed the classic doctrine of the Trinity, rejecting in particular the personality of the Holy Spirit, whom he defined impersonally as “an experience which comes to people through faith,” the “experience of power, life, and joy” (The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, pp. 308 f.).

When his work is viewed as a whole, however, such blemishes as have been pointed out are seen to be incidental; but they are blemishes, nonetheless, and candor demands that they should be pointed out, for they indicate a weak point at the basis of his thinking. That weak point, in our estimation, may be described as an undue bias, in an otherwise finely balanced mind, towards a type of pragmatic subjectivism. But having said that, we remember that James Denney, like the rest of us, was not immune to human frailty and inconsistency.

Unity Of New Testament

The radical and frequently destructive criticism of the New Testament which was at its height in Denney’s day, particularly in Germany, caused him to give himself to a searching and systematic study of the New Testament writings, so that he might assess the validity of this criticism. His verdict was that the New Testament is essentially a unity. In his judgment, the contrasts found within it are not oppositions and there is no justification for speaking, as many were then doing, of “antagonism between the gospel of Jesus and that of Paul, or Peter, or John” (ibid., p. 129). Nor did he approve of the view that the thought-forms of St. Paul are antiquated, incomprehensible, and therefore unacceptable to modern man. To speak like this he denounced as “flying in the face of history and experience.” Denney’s answer here, his appeal to history and experience, seems to me to be irrefutable. The Church today, and not least the theologians, should give careful heed to these words which rose from the wisdom and warmth of his evangelical heart: “There have always been people who found Paul intelligible and accepted the gospel as he preached it,” he said. “There are such people still, if not in theological class rooms, then in mission halls, at street corners, in lonely rooms. It is not historical scholarship that is wanted for the understanding of him, and neither is it the insight of genius: it is despair. Paul did not preach for scholars, nor even for philosophers; he preached for sinners.”

These words show us the essential Denney, the man whose great passion was the Gospel of Jesus Christ as God’s remedy for sinful mankind. They show us, in short, one who was truly an evangelist-theologian.

Philip Edgcumbe Hughes, B.D., M.A., is former secretary, Church Society (Church of England); former vice-president, Tyndale Hall.

- More from Philip Edgcumbe Hughes

Cover Story

The Dead Sea Scrolls

Edward J. Young

It was in 1947 that the first discoveries of the remarkable manuscripts, now commonly known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, were made. Already the amount of literature concerned with these scrolls has grown tremendously. Several popular books have been published, to say nothing of numerous articles, both popular and technical; even some books of a technical nature have appeared. It is of course impossible to keep up with this large output, and even a specialist in the Old Testament can do little more than read the more important publications. Sufficient time has elapsed, however, so that it is now possible to speak with some positiveness as to the relationship these scrolls bear to the origins of Christianity. This is particularly needful inasmuch as the idea is widespread that the scrolls were the work of Essenes, and that John the Baptist was once a member of the Essenes, who introduced some of their ideas into Christianity.

The Principal Documents

In this present article we shall seek to present a survey of the principal documents discovered so far and to indicate briefly their relationship to Christianity. In a following article we hope to deal in more detail with the importance of the Isaiah manuscript for biblical studies generally.

The scroll of Isaiah is perhaps the most important of all the manuscript finds, and is certainly the most sensational. It is written on seventeen sheets of leather sewed end to end, in fifty-four columns of writing, and in its entirety is more than twenty-four feet in length.

The manuscript has been dated as belonging to the second half of the second century B.C. If this dating is correct, it is the oldest extant copy of any biblical book. This fact is of the utmost importance, for previous to the discovery of the scroll the earliest copies of portions of the Hebrew Bible were only as old as the tenth century A.D. Here, then, in this new discovery, is a copy of an Old Testament book, antedating by about one thousand years any previously known copies in the Hebrew language. On the whole the text shows a remarkable faithfulness to the Hebrew text already in our possession. There are, however, some minor divergences, principally in the matter of spelling. The importance of such an early witness to the text of the book of Isaiah can scarcely be over-estimated.

The first to identify the scroll, it seems, was a great Catholic biblical scholar, J. P. M. van der Ploeg of Nijmegan, Netherlands. He was granted the privilege of seeing the scrolls, which were at a small monastery in Jerusalem, supposedly built on the site of the house of Mark’s mother, and belonging to the Syrian Orthodox Church. Upon being shown the manuscript of Isaiah, he at once identified it. Later, when it was brought to the American Schools of Oriental Research, an American scholar, Dr. Trever, copied out a passage from the manuscript, which turned out to be the first verse of Isaiah 65.

The Habakkuk Commentary

Another manuscript that has proved of unusual interest is one that scholars have designated the Habakkuk Commentary. It is far shorter than the long Isaiah scroll, and consists of only two pieces, sewed together. It is about five feet in length, and contains the first two chapters of the book with a commentary. It has been suggested that this may indicate that the third chapter had not been added to the book of Habakkuk at that time. Such a conclusion, however, does not necessarily follow, for it is more likely that the commentator found only the first two chapters suitable for his purpose. The third chapter of Habakkuk is actually a psalm and of different style from the first two chapters; for that reason the commentator may not have wished to discuss it.

The work is not a commentary in the modern sense of that term. When the author wishes to comment, he inserts after the verse in question the word pishro, i.e., its interpretation is. Then follow the comments he wishes to make. These comments, however, are not a serious attempt to bring out the meaning of the biblical text. They are simply references to conditions existing in the sect to which the writer belonged. It is for this reason that the work is sometimes described as pesher (a word meaning interpretation.It is a form of this word, pishro, with which the comments are introduced.). Thus, to take an example, the comment on Habakkuk 1:4 may be translated, “its interpretation is, the wicked one, he is the Wicked Priest, and the righteous one, he is the Teacher of Righteousness.” The first part of the comment is lost, although doubtless it began with words that could be translated as we have just done. The Teacher of Righteousness who is introduced in this comment was evidently a member, possibly the leader, of the group to which the writer belonged.

Similarities Are Formal

Without a doubt the Habakkuk Commentary is one of the more important of the Dead Sea finds. Already much study has been devoted to it. At least one large technical volume has been written about it. And it is this “commentary” which, according to many, is supposed to furnish much of the evidence for the view that the teachings of Christianity are to be derived from the group that produced it.

Does the Habakkuk Commentary, however, really support the view that the ideas of Christianity are in some measure to be derived from the group that lived at Qumran near the Dead Sea? The answer to this question can of course be determined only by a careful study both of the New Testament and of the Habakkuk Commentary. Such a study shows that whatever similarities there are between the two are of a merely formal nature. To take but one example, the Habakkuk Commentary in its remarks upon Habakkuk 2:4 speaks of “all who do the law in the house of Judah whom God will deliver from the house of judgment [the court?] on account of their toil and their faith in the Teacher of Righteousness.” At first blush this seems to be very close to the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith alone. In all probability, however, the commentator simply used the word “faith” because it was found in the text of Habakkuk.

Misunderstanding Of Faith

That the commentator did not have a proper understanding of the meaning of the word “faith” is shown by the fact that he links it with the word “toil.” According to the New Testament (in fact, according to the Old Testament also), a man is saved by faith without the works of the law. If salvation is of faith, it cannot be by works, for faith excludes works. Likewise, if salvation is by works, faith is excluded. It can be one or the other, but not both. The Bible makes it clear that salvation is by faith alone. Very different, however, is this Habakkuk Commentary. The commentator teaches that deliverance from the house of judgment will come on account of both works and faith. This is the very opposite of what the Bible teaches.

The Manual Of Discipline

This work consists of five sheets of parchment, forming a scroll of a little over six feet in length, sewn together and comprising eleven columns. It appears to be a manual of instruction for those who wish to be members of the community. According to this document there was to be a kind of communal life. “They shall eat together, bless together and take counsel together” (v. 3). In early Christianity, however, this practice was not compulsory but voluntary (cf. Acts 4:32 ff.). The members of the community were to devote themselves to the study of the Law. They are described as those who “turn away from all evil and hold fast to all that He [i.e., God] has commanded in accord with His good pleasure;—to become a group in the Torah [Law] …” (v. 1, 2).

Did the practices of this group bear any relationship to those of Christianity? What, for example, shall we say about baptism? It is true that the sect whose customs are reflected in the Manual of Discipline engaged in certain lustrations and bathing, which seems to have been for a purificatory purpose. What its nature was, however, is difficult to determine, nor is the manner in which these washings were performed known as clearly as one could wish. It seems perfectly safe to say that they were not similar in purpose to baptism as taught in the New Testament.

The same is true of the communal meal of which the community partook. It must, of course, be noted that the practice of such a communal meal is also to be found elsewhere in the Jewish world, and was not restricted to the group that lived near the Dead Sea. The Lord’s Supper, however, was instituted by the Lord himself for the purpose of showing forth His death till He come (1 Cor. 10:20). Insofar as we may speak of historical roots of the Lord’s supper, they go back to the Old Testament, not to the customs or practices of Qumran.

At this point it is well to note that the community that lived at Qumran was a Jewish one. Whether it is to be identified with the Essenes is an open question. Such identity can neither be proved nor disproved. Inasmuch as the group was Jewish, in the nature of the case it is to be expected that its practices would largely reflect the teachings of the Old Testament, and this is just what we find. The roots of many of the practices of the group go back to the Old Testament, and for this reason we find a superficial resemblance between them and certain teachings of the New Testament. It would be a grave error, however, to assume that the practices of the group actually constituted the source from which the New Testament teachings were derived.

Other Manuscripts

In a short article of this kind it is impossible to do justice to all the manuscript finds. We may simply note one manuscript that is now generally designated “The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.” It contains nineteen columns of writing, and describes a holy war between the descendants of Levi, Judah, and Benjamin (the Children of Light) and the men of Edom, Moab, Ammon, Philistia, and the Kittim of Asshur (the Children of Darkness). There has been much discussion as to the historical references and the background of the document and its contents. Probably it describes the struggles of the Jews with their adversaries down to the Roman period.

Of unusual interest is the scroll containing what are designated the “Thanksgiving Hymns.” These are praises to God, much in the style of the biblical Psalms. They reflect a period later than that of the Old Testament and evidently represent the community at worship. They are largely filled with biblical phrases and thoughts. A comparison with the divinely revealed Psalms of the Bible, however, very decidedly shows them to be far superior to the Thanksgiving Hvmns.

Mention must also be made of three small fragments of Daniel which come from two different scrolls. Two fragments contain parts of the third chapter of Daniel, while the other has the section in chapter two where the language of Daniel changes from Hebrew to Aramaic. On the basis of paleological grounds (i.e., the nature of the script) these fragments have been dated in the late second century B.C., less than a century after the date “critics” give for the origin of the book itself. (Those who do not accept the witness of the Bible to itself usually date the final edition of Daniel at about 165 B.C.). This is most striking, for it apparently shows that two copies of the book were in circulation very shortly after the alleged time of its composition. It begins to look as though this consideration will make more difficult the maintaining of a late date for the authorship of the prophecy of Daniel.

A word must be said about the two copper scrolls discovered in one of the caves. They have finally been examined, and a first report claims that they contain directions for the location of buried treasure. To the best of the present writer’s knowledge, no technical report upon them has yet been made available, so that it is too early to say anything about their significance.

A word may be said by way of summary. Over four hundred fragments of biblical manuscripts have now been found. In fact, there are parts of every book of the Old Testament, with the possible exception of the book of Esther. Not all of this material has yet been made available for study, and it will doubtless be some time before it is ready. Great credit, however, is certainly due those scholars who have made manuscripts available. Is it too early to say anything definite about the effect which these discoveries will have upon biblical scholarship? For our part, we think not. Even now it is becoming apparent that many of the positions that have been held by those who do not accept the infallibility of Scripture must be abandoned. On the other hand, as a result of these discoveries, not one position that the conservatives have held has had to be abandoned or even modified. Not one teaching of the Scriptures has had to go by the board. This is indeed heartening, but it is what we might expect, for the Scriptures were not given by the wisdom of man but are the revealed oracles of the one living and true God.

END

Preacher In The Red

LONG TIME BETWEEN CALLS

A few months ago I paid a hospital call on a young woman of our church who had given birth to a child.

Recognizing that the patient’s room was in the same end of the hospital, and in about the same location, as one recently occupied by another of our parishioners, I ventured to say, “You know, I think this is the very same room that Mrs. A was in after her operation.”

Graciously refraining from laughter, the patient was quick to respond, “Well, if Mrs. A was ever in this room, it was long ago.” Immediately I realized that I was in the maternity ward, and that Mrs. A had borne her last child twenty-five years before.—WILLIS C. ROEBUCK, JR., Pastor, Braes Baptist Chapel, Houston, Texas.

For each report by a minister of the Gospel of an embarrassing moment in his life, CHRISTIANITY TODAY will pay $5 (upon publication). To be acceptable, anecdotes must narrate factually a personal experience, and must be previously unpublished. Contributions should not exceed 250 words, should be typed double-spaced, and bear the writer’s name and address. Upon acceptance, such contributions become the property of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Address letters to: Preacher in the Red, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Suite 1014 Washington Building, Washington, D.C.

- More from Edward J. Young

Cover Story

Three Questions to a Man in Trouble

Galbraith Hall Todd

Text: Job 38:4; 40:12b; 40:15; 41:1

In a world where most persons are filled with a strong passion for publicity and recognition, it is difficult to conceive of an author giving to the world what is unquestionably one of its greatest books and then scorning to blot it with a name.

We do not know the identity of the author of the Book of Job any more than we know who wrote the great Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf, or the Latin hymn of the nativity, “Adeste Fideles.”

We do know that the writings of a Homer, a Dante, a Shakespeare, a Milton, a Goethe cannot approximate the Book of Job. We have long since reached the conclusion of James Anthony Froude, who said that the Book of Job towers up alone, far above all the poetry in the world. We agree quickly with Thomas Carlyle when, in his Heroes and Hero Worship, he describes the Book of Job as “a noble book, grand in its sincerity, in its simplicity, in its epic melody … and its sublime sorrow, sublime reconciliation, the oldest choral melody as of the heart of mankind—so soft and great, as the summer midnight, as the world with its stones and seas.” “There is nothing written,” Carlyle goes on to say, “in the Bible or out of it of equal literary merit.”

The scope of the Book of Job is sometimes lost to us in the loquacity of Job’s would-be comforters. Let us refresh our memories by going over the broad outline of the book.

Job was a God-fearing, clean-living, upright man. He was exceptionally prosperous and in his prosperity he did not forget his religion and his God. He was a man of prayer. He was a man of kindness. The law of kindness was on his lips. Like Barnabas, in the Acts of Apostles, he was a “son of consolation,” whose vigorous, tactful, well-chosen speech gave encouragement and stability to other lives. He was a family man and gave large thought to the spiritual welfare of his children. It was for them that he constantly interceded before God.

Upon this irreproachable man troubles descended in ever-increasing measure. Job was the victim of thugs. Bandits swooped down out of the hills, slaying all of his servants except one sole survivor who brought him the shocking news. Again, Job was the victim of the mercilessness of nature. Lightning struck his shepherds and his sheep in the field. Yet again, a second band of robbers out of Chaldea raided one of his farms and stole his cattle.

Tragedy was not done with him yet. He fell victim to nature’s cruelty once again. The younger generation of his household were holding a family party. The eldest son played host to them in his home. A cyclone struck the house and, when the night of terror and storm was over, the bodies of Job’s seven sons and three daughters were discovered in the debris. The plight of Job’s family reminds us of that tragedy in the spring of 1953 when an entire family reunion group was wiped out in a cyclonic storm in Nebraska.

The victim of criminals and of untamed forces of nature, Job fell the prey of a vile and disgusting disease. His sickness was as humiliating as it was excruciating. His own wife proved to be of no help to his faith. So Job retired to the city dump—a miserable, pathetic spectacle. He resembled a cat or a dog, crawling out to some spot away from public haunt and finding there a suitable shelter in which to expire. As George MacDonald wrote, “Must it not be a deep spiritual instinct that drives trouble into solitude? Away from the herd flies the wounded deer; away from the flock staggers the sickly sheep to the solitary hiding place to die.” Three friends of Job came to his refuge at the city dumping ground. At the outset they maintained a respectful silence. One of the strongest supports in a time of profound sorrow may be the presence of friends who have the grace and good sense to come and be silent. At length Job was moved to speak out against his desperate plight. His bitter questionings may be summed up in a single word: Why? Like many others, he asked, “Why should this affliction befall me?”

The modern world is filled with persons suffering multiplied distresses. During his radio preaching, the late S. Parkes Cadman received this melancholy communication: “I am a man seventy-four years of age and I find myself utterly unable to explain the following situations. In 1895 my wife, sick with melancholia, took her own life. In 1901 my eldest son died of a fever. In 1920 my eldest daughter committed suicide during a period of mental depression. In 1921 my only remaining son and his two children burned to death in their own home. My questions about life can be summed up in one word, Why?”

In the face of a situation like that, what word is there from the Lord?

When Job reached the end of his questionings, God spoke. He asked three questions of Job. These three questions are found in the latter chapters of the Book of Job. They are questions equally applicable to the man in trouble today.

The Question Of Nature

The first question God asked Job was, What do you really know about the mysteries of nature? What do you really understand about the mysteries of science? “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” Where were you in creation’s morning? What do you know about the mystery of life and nature, about its origin and preservation? Where were you “when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

God directed Job to the wonders of creation, so little of which man can fathom. What do you know about the mystery of the sea? Long ago Lord Byron wrote, “Man marks the earth with ruin. His control starts with the shore.” In a very recent and popular book, The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson reaches the conclusion that, with all of our modern scientific instruments, the mysteries of the sea will never be solved.

What do you know about the mysteries of light? We would paraphrase the question, What do you know about the mystery of electricity? Thomas A. Edison, who explored the realms of light more than any other in our age, said, “No one knows one seven-billionth of one per cent about anything.”

What do you know about the mystery of rain? “Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew?” What do you know about the mystery of snow?” “Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail?” While under the shadow of a crushing bereavement, James Russell Lowell exquisitely interpreted Job’s question:

I stood and watched by the window
The noiseless work of the sky
And the sudden flurries of snowbirds,
Like brown leaves whirling by.

I thought of a mound in sweet Auburn
Where a little headstone stood;
How the flakes were folding it gently
As did robins the babes in the wood.

Up spoke our own little Mabel,
Saying, “Father, who makes it snow?”
And I told of the good All-father
Who cares for us here below.

Again I looked at the snowfall,
And thought of the leaden sky
That arched o’er our first great sorrow,
When the mound was heaped so high.

And again to the child I whispered,
“The snow that husheth all,
Darling, the merciful Father
Alone can make it fall.”

[Reprinted by permission of Houghton-Mifflin Company.]

What do you know concerning the mystery of the stars? “Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?”

What do you know about the strange instincts of the animal kingdom, the little wild things that share with us the mystery of life, the beasts of the field whose ways are still past our finding out?

The most distinguished scientists have had to stand awed and baffled before the opaque depths of life. They have to exclaim with Job, “We are but of yesterday, and know nothing.” Or with Paul, “Now we see in a mirror darkly, we know in fragments.” Or with Socrates, “One thing I know, that I know nothing.” Or with Emerson in his teasing epigram, “Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.” Or with Herbert Spencer, who declared that in its ultimate nature, life is incomprehensible. Or with Ernest Haeckel, who, though he was possessed of a certain arrogance in his claims which would cause one to suppose that for him the mysteries of science were a diminished domain, made the confession, “We grant at once that the innermost character of nature is just as little understood by us as it was by Anaximander and Empedocles twenty-four hundred years ago, by Spinoza and Newton two hundred years ago, by Kant and Goethe one hundred years ago. We must even grant that this essence and substance become more mysterious and enigmatic the deeper we penetrate into the knowledge of its attributes.” Honest science is brought back repeatedly to the confession that the world grows more mysterious the more we know about it.

In the mysterious realm of nature we have to trust to the wisdom and greatness, the goodness and integrity of God. Like the marsh hen in Lanier’s poem, secretly building her nest and ordering her uncertain flight on the greatness of God, we have to repose our confidence in the God to whom the darkness of nature is as light. If we trust him in the mysteries of nature, shall we not trust him as completely in his mysterious, providential dealings with us?

The Question Of Evil

The second question which God addressed to Job in his trouble, and which he addresses to us is, What do you really know about the mystery of evil? “Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him. Look on every one that is proud and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.” Can you “tread down the wicked in their place?” What do you really know about evil when it is treated as a theological problem? What do we know about its origin, its continuance in a world governed by God, the manner in which it is overruled and even used for his glory?

What do you know about evil as a social problem? Do you really comprehend the motives for the crime and violence now menacing the nation, “the black fringe around our society,” as the late Joseph Fort Newton once called it?

Not long since I visited the beautiful campus of Williams College at Williamstown, Massachusetts, with its venerable memories of Dr. Mark Hopkins, the physician turned preacher and philosopher, of President Garfield and John Bascom, and of William Cullen Bryant, who as a seventeen-year-old college student there wrote his immortal “Thanatopsis.” It was there, too, that the Haystack Prayer Meeting was held, which was the fountainhead of the American foreign missionary movement. That very summer day as I stood under the elms of Williamstown, the newspapers printed the story of two brothers from that historic and cultured community, aged twenty-three and eighteen, who that week had embarked on a series of criminal exploits that led them eventually into the mountains of Pennsylvania. In the presence of so much that is noble and exalting and good, how can young men launch out on careers of crime? More perplexing than the episode of those boys from the hills of western Massachusetts is the sinister course followed by some who have enjoyed the advantages of a devout and godly parentage in the formative years of life. One thinks of the renegade sons of the priest Eli, and of the sons of the prophet, Samuel, who brought disgrace upon their fathers. It is always baffling to see children, who have been born and bred in Christian homes and have been environed by the purest Christian influences, degenerating in lives grown sordid and stained and sodden.

We know little of evil as a psychological problem. Long ago the inspired Psalmist anticipated the modern depth psychologist who probes the recesses of the subconscious in order to explain human behavior. The Psalmist asked the question, “Who can understand his [own] errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults.” Jeremiah expressed the same thought, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

We know but fragments concerning evil as a theological, social and psychological problem. God’s provision for the forgiveness of our sins is no less beyond our poor powers to understand. We are “lost in wonder, love, and praise” as we contemplate the plan of salvation from sin. Through his atoning sacrifice of himself, in his death on the cross, Christ satisfied the divine justice, procured our pardon before the holy God, and was made sin for us (although he knew no sin) that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

God’s power to change human life is as mysterious to us as his plan of salvation. His only begotten Son’s blood can make the foulest clean—as white as snow—releasing men and women from the thralldom of evil, lifting them out of the horrible pit, out of the miry clay, setting their feet upon a rock, transfiguring the worst of characters into the best.

We trust the mystery of evil, its existence and control, its redemption and conquest to God. Should we not also trust him in the quite inscrutable dispensations of his providence?

The Question Of Death

The third question which God addressed to Job in his perplexity and which he puts to us is, What do you know about the mystery of death? What do you know about that undiscovered country which lies beyond the last door of life?

God said to Job, “Behold now behemoth,” and again, “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?” Behemoth indicates the hippopotamus and leviathan the crocodile. In 1850 Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote in an essay, “I have seen the hippopotamus both asleep and awake and I can assure you that awake or asleep he is the ugliest of the creatures of God.” In the mythological imagery of Egypt and the ancient East, the hippopotamus and the crocodile always represented death and the realms of the dead. In the symbolism of the Coptic church of Egypt in the early centuries, Christ is depicted standing upon a crocodile. Our Lord is thus shown in the splendor and power of his resurrection triumph over sin and the grave.

We know little of that soft, fascinating sleep men call death. We know little of that strange country of the beyond. It is sufficient for us to know that Christ demonstrated by his resurrection that he has the keys of death and the realm of the dead. It is sufficiently reassuring for us to know that as Richard Baxter, the Puritan divine, has said, “Christ leads us through no darker rooms than he has been before.” It is adequate comfort for us to possess the confidence that when we lie down to sleep for the last time, or when we watch our loved ones put out to sea, Christ stands at the gateway of immortality as our Savior and friend.

My knowledge of that life is small
The eye of faith is dim,
But it’s enough that Christ knows all,
And I shall be with him.

We trust our heavenly Father in the mystery of nature, in the mystery of evil and in the mystery of death. Should we not trust him through all the changing scenes of life?

At length Job in his experience passed beyond a mere intellectual concept of God to a knowledge of him as Father and* friend. “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee.” Job had found the God of his life, to whom he could say, Thou art mv God! Thou art the God who loves and cares for me and all whom I love here and beyond the bounds of vision.

We who know God in Christ trust him as the creator of the ends of the earth, the one in whom all things cohere, the redeemer who by his cross and precious blood answers the problem, sounds the doom and interprets the uses of evil. He is the Lord of life and death who “abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”

In a time when the faith of many was shaken and beclouded, Washington Gladden wrote these serene lines which voice the ultimate faith of Job and of all those whose hope and trust is stayed on the Lord Christ, and on the Father who sent him into the world and is with us as he was with him:

In the bitter waves of woe,
Beaten and tossed about
By the sullen winds that blow
From the desolate shores of doubt,
When the anchors that faith had cast
Are dragging in the gale,
I am quietly holding fast
To the things that cannot fail.

In the darkest night of the year
When the stars have all gone out,
I know that courage is better than fear,
That faith is better than doubt.
And that somewhere beyond the stars
Is a love that is better than fate,
When the night unlocks her bars
I shall see him and I will wait.

Galbraith Hall Todd, D.D., is minister at Arch Street Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia.

- More from Galbraith Hall Todd

Cover Story

Pathos of Hungarian Protestantism

M. Eugene Osterhaven

The tragic developments in Hungary have involved a large and flourishing Protestant community there. Twenty-eight percent of the population is Protestant; of these, twenty percent are Reformed and six percent Lutheran. They have been suffering with their compatriots in the recent attempt to throw off Soviet domination and gain freedom.

Saga Of Suffering

Suffering is not a new experience for Hungarian Protestantism, however. Its history is a moving tale of glory and of woe. It is glorious because of the eagerness with which a large majority of the population at one time accepted the Reformation of the sixteenth century; because of the centers of learning which it founded and has maintained for centuries; because of its impact upon Magyar culture; and because of its loyalty to the faith through centuries of oppression and persecution. It is a tale of woe because of the almost incredible sufferings imposed upon its adherents by Turk and Romanist who expressed only contempt, in those centuries, for the Word of God and the re-forming people who sought to live by it.

The historian d’Aubigne writes that “it was by a kind of thunderclap that the Reformation began in Hungary.” Its spread was so rapid that within a few years, by 1525, the five royal, free cities in upper Hungary had already embraced the faith re-formed according to God’s Word. The following year, however, the first note was struck in a melancholy strain which threatened to develop into the funeral dirge of Hungarian Protestantism. For on the fateful twenty-ninth day of August, Suleiman the Magnificent, the Turkish Sultan who was to cause all Europe to tremble, killed the Hungarian King, the flower of the nobility, a long line of aristocrats, and annihilated the Hungarian army. The reverberations of the battle of Mohacs were heard in every hamlet and peasant home in the country and served as an ominous warning of difficulties ahead. For more than a century and a half the Turks dominated most of the country and the flower of Hungary’s youth and manhood sought to stem the Moslem advance and save Europe.

A more severe persecution, however, was experienced at the hands of Jesuit and Hapsburg representing respectively ecclesiastical and secular imperialism both of which were in the service of Rome. Whereas Turkish masters fought their battles for the glory of Allah, the other, more devastating, oppression was done in the name of Jesus and might well have destroyed the easternmost European rampart of Reformation Christianity had not the Prussian, English and Dutch governments intervened in its behalf. Cut off from the rest of Protestant Europe, with the help of God and occasional help from fellow Protestants, the Magyars maintained a virile evangelical witness.

Ravages Of War

A reading of the history of the Magyar Reformed Church enables one to understand how it could survive during the past two decades of our era. Raped and looted by the vast armies of two powerful countries, Germany and Russia, during World War II, Hungary’s condition became tragic. The lurid details can be read in such reliable reports as those of the Swiss Legation in Budapest which state, in part, that, when the Soviet armies occupied the country in the spring of 1945, rape was “so general—from the age of ten up to seventy years—that few women in Hungary escaped this fate.” Almost every home, every shop, was entered and looted several times with almost everything of value taken. In that agricultural country there was hardly a domestic animal, a wagon, or a piece of farm machinery to be found. Factories were stripped but a $300,000,000 reparations debt was demanded of the prostrate country, the debt, according to John F. Montgomery, United States Envoy Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Hungary, actually amounting to $1,100,000,000 because the currency exchange rate was specified as that of 1938 and a five percent a month penalty for delay in delivery was imposed. During the war two complete harvests had been lost and the Central European drought of 1947 ruined most of that one. The one bright spot in this picture was the witness of the Church in Hungary. Throughout the struggle there had been faithful preaching of the Word of God. The Reformed community heeded the advice of its presiding superintendent who exhorted it, ringed about with apparently insuperable difficulties, to look “inward and upward.” In May, 1947, the Synod of the Reformed Church solemnly declared that, in view of the circumstances through which its members had passed, all who desired to retain church membership should re-affirm their faith with the following declaration:

I give thanks to God, my heavenly Father, for receiving me into His Holy Church, into the communion of the believers of Jesus Christ, through the sacrament of baptism. I remember also my profession and vow made at confirmation through which I gained admittance into the communicant fellowship of the congregation. And now, in order to become a full-fledged member of the Church and as a renewal of my confirmation vow, I declare before God and this congregation, that I desire to be a loyal, obedient, and self-sacrificing member of the Reformed Church. For this reason I promise and pledge that I shall attend regularly the services of worship and the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper; that I shall submit to ecclesiastical discipline; that I shall rear my children of the Reformed faith in that faith; and that I shall participate in the material support of my Church and in her benevolences according to my ability. In all these resolves I pray for the effective help of God’s Holy Spirit.

This unprecedented action of the Synod was a potent factor in the strengthening of Hungary’s evangelical witness. Reporting on that witness, Dr. Stewart W. Herman, in an address to the Lutheran World Action conference, stated that Hungary was “experiencing the greatest religious revival to be found in all Europe.” The effort to put the Church back on its feet in the thick of the struggle, the speaker said, is “the hope of Europe.”

Protestant Valor

The tragedy of that struggle has deepened in these last days and Hungarian Protestantism lies in agony with the rest of the country. The complete story we do not yet know. But we do know that much of the leadership of the Small-landholders Party, overthrown in the revolution of 1948, hated by the victorious Communists, and active in the most recent revolt, came from the Protestant Church.

In 1848, an even century before the Communist coup, there was another great war for independence with a finale similar to that which we have just witnessed. Led by a Protestant, Louis Kossuth, Hungary’s greatest patriot, that effort to achieve freedom from foreign domination seemed assured of success until crushed by the might of Russia which, then as now, feared the popular demands for freedom by suppressed peoples. Again it has been Russia the Communist rulers of which, by their own admission, have liquidated millions of their own countrymen to consolidate their power which has steam-rollered the heroic, and pathetic, Hungarian quest for freedom.

In a moving address delivered a decade ago, Dr. Charles Vincze, leading Hungarian-American pastor now deceased, closed with these words:

The Magyars of the past stormy centuries, while defending their own way of life and that of the Western World, against the onrushing hordes of Mohammed, used the Savior’s name for a battle cry. ‘Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!’ they shouted, while facing the onslaught and laying down their lives for a West that never really knew or appreciated them or even cared to do so. In spite of all the unfavorable experiences of the past, all the Magyars that are really Magyars turn once more toward the West and in the name of Jesus ask for the kind of life which they so self-sacrificingly helped to preserve for the West.

That request has become a cry. It is a cry from a Hungary which today is in the throes of death. The free world has heard it. May God give us the courage and strength to respond.

M. Eugene Osterhaven, Th.D., is Professor of Systematic Theology, Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Mich.

We Quote:

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

President of the United States

… Our minds and hearts turn to Almighty God, in grateful acknowledgment of His mercies throughout the year.… It is also fitting at this season that we should consider God’s providence to us throughout our entire history.… Humbly aware that we are a people greatly blessed, both materially and spiritually, let us pray this year not only in the spirit of thanksgiving but also as suppliants for God’s guidance, to the end that we may follow the course of righteousness and be worthy of His favor.… Let all of us, of whatever creed, foregather in our respective places of worship to give thanks to God and prayerful contemplation to those eternal truths and universal principles of Holy Scripture which have inspired such treasures of true greatness as this Nation has achieved.—From President Eisenhower’s 1956 Thanksgiving proclamation.

Douglas Macarthur

Commander, Occupational Forces in Japan, 1945–51

I called upon America for Bibles. An offer of a hundred thousand was raised by me to ten million with an ultimate figure of three times that number.… Although I am of Caesar, I did try to render unto God that which was his. And I even dare to hope that through this resurgence of religion, Japan will in the struggle that lies ahead be indissolubly confirmed against any whose doctrines embrace the deadly poison of atheism. It might prove more potent than bullets or bayonets or bombs—or even bread.—In an address, Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, Jan. 26, 1955.

- More from M. Eugene Osterhaven

Majestic Music of the King James

Paul K. Jewett

On the eve of the release of the Revised Standard Version, Lowell Thomas, eminent news commentator, read excerpts from the Prophet Isaiah in the King James version and added—prophetically—“Pretty hard to beat.” Time has confirmed his judgment. The older version, like “ol’ man river, he jus’ keeps rollin’ along.”

It is easy to answer that the masses are prejudiced in favor of the old and suspicious of the new. But the King James itself had to begin as a lowly new version, pelted with charges of “bad theology, bad scholarship, and bad English.” It appeared without trumpet blast or public proclamation; it waged a running battle with the Geneva Bible for half a century and in this time completely took the field on the strength of its superior merit alone. In contrast to this the American revisers combined the advantage of organized sponsorship in high ecclesiastical places with access to a more accurate critical text, better scholarly equipment to understand Greek and Hebrew, and the lesson of the American Standard Version, “strong in Greek, weak in English.” And yet for all this, the King James, Gulliver-like, with its Lilliputian burden of colons and commas, verse and chapter divisions, is walking off with the victory. Why is this so? One reason that overshadows all others, it would seem, is the vastly superior literary quality of the older version. The King James is a work of art, the Revised Standard a compendium of scholarship; the one is literature, the other reading material.

To many, the element of literary excellence may seem inconsequential. Was not the New Testament written in vernacular Greek? Is not the Bible the book of the masses, and what do common people care about poetry? Anyway, our concern should be with the content of revealed truth, not its literary form.

Unconvincing Plea

I think these arguments are specious. It is true that the Greek of the New Testament is common Greek and in many of the books destitute of literary embellishment. But why should we not rejoice in the fact that the Bible in our mother tongue excels the original as literature? If the New Testament was written in the silver age of Greek and the King James in the golden age of English, is it not all Providence? The apostolic Christians worshipped in crypts and sand pits. Should we then tear down our cathedrals and seal up our organs?

Although it is a most significant feature of our Protestant heritage that the Bible is the book of the common man, to suppose that he is so circumscribed by the mundane realm of factual existence that he never breathes the rare atmosphere of poetry is an error as egregious as it is common. As Louis Untermeyer once observed, in A Treasury of Great Poems, we cannot escape poetry. To call an orange Sunkist, to name a melon Honeydew, capitalizes the power of poetry for the man in the street.

True, accuracy of thought is of paramount importance, yet we should never forget that men feel as well as understand, and what they understand with feeling they understand best. Here the incomparable literary quality of the King James, the music mingled with the meaning, is without a rival in its evocative power. The multitudes who never give a serious moment to literary analysis hear the majestic music of the King James as surely as the scholar—more surely than some Hebrew and Greek scholars.

How out of touch some scholars can be with this dimension is shown in the way the revisers translated Paul’s hymn to love (1 Corinthians 13). Love is the most beautiful thing in all the world, and with unerring literary instinct the King James translators have convinced us of this by giving us a supremely beautiful translation of this passage. The revisers, on the other hand, have left it a literary shambles. The same may be said of the unbelievable freedom with which they have handled the Psalter. Recognized as the peak of sacred poetry, with language exquisitely rich and resonant, the Psalter has not only been altered but ruined. In the King James we have poetry printed, unfortunately, as prose; but in the R.S.V. we have prose printed as poetry. Says Dorothy Thompson (“The Old Bible and the New,” Ladies’ Home Journal, March, 1953):

I have tried to read the new Bible with an open mind, and without prejudice, indeed with humility and with respect for so great an effort … But I am compelled to say that I find the new text inferior on nearly every page to the one it seeks to supplant and for reasons that I think I can define. It is weaker, less vivid, defective in imagery, less beautiful and less inspired. And I, at least, do not find it easier to understand.

But someone may still persist that the King James, beautiful as it is, is absolutely wrong in many places. This is undoubtedly true. The finest gems have flaws and there may be sand in the marble of the Parthenon. But shall we tear down the whole edifice for the sake of a few stones? This procedure becomes highly impracticable when we consider that those who have the wit to raze the old lack the genius to remake it.

But someone else will say that, though the King James is not hopelessly corrupt, it is fast becoming archaic. Since language is constantly changing, it is only a matter of time till the venerable version of our fathers takes its place on the shelf with Chaucer. Now this may happen, but if it does no one but the devil can contemplate it with glee. Our King James Bible is not a dispensable luxury of our English Protestant heritage. It is rather a part of us; it has permeated our culture in warp and woof; it is fused with our literature, our liturgy, our hymnody. Our situation is quite different in this respect from that of our Roman Catholic neighbors. All that Rome had to do to replace the Douay New Testament in 1941 was to announce its successor, an unwitting testimony to the negligible place of the Bible in the piety of its devotees. As a commonwealth changes the color of its automobile plates, so they changed their Bible. But fortunately we as Protestants have not the machinery to expedite such a change, nor is the biblical orientation of our piety so superficial that it can easily sustain such a macromutation.

Role Of New Version

Why then labor to bring new versions to the birth? What do we gain but an overpopulation of inferior species? The private modern-speech translations of individual scholars are most stimulating and edifying (e.g., Phillips’ Letters to Young Churches), but we have nothing to gain and everything to lose by multiplying versions, which claim the official sanction of the church as a whole. The first effort of 1886 and 1901 split the British and American churches and, had it succeeded, would have given the English-speaking church two vastly inferior Bibles in the place of one good one. And now with the R.S.V. we have in the American church three Bibles, even as the medieval church had three pontiffs during the Great Schism. If we multiply our Bibles as we have multiplied our denominations, we will only confuse people the more and psychologically, if not theoretically, undermine their sense of the authority of Scripture. The common man always speaks in the singular of THE BIBLE, which is no mere phonetic accident, but an unerring instinct. Variety is not always the spice of life. We need several Bibles about as much as the Roman Church needs several popes. If we are serious about ecumenicity, we would do well to preserve the one thing we really have in common, i.e., our King James Bible. We therefore conclude that the King James ought not, even as it cannot, be replaced.

But the question still remains, what to do. Even if we grant that our age has not the creative powers to produce a worthy successor to the version inherited from our fathers; even if we say with all conviction, like the man who tasted old wine and refused the new, that we are standing by our King James Bible; will our King James stand by us? Will not time, whose art turns all things to dust, take it from us as surely as the weather will carry the mountains into the sea? Though as literature it will abide forever, from the perspective of the centuries can it endure as a vehicle of revelation for the common man?

We have come to a point where one must speak as an expert, or risk the role of a dilettante. But not to speak at all would end the discussion, as some modern plays end, leaving the frustrated spectator to supply his own denouement. Let us then address ourselves further to this question.

Theoretically it is true that no version can endure forever, but this is no reason for sitting on our hands. The fate of the King James a million years from now has no more bearing for us than the second law of thermodynamics for the current price of real estate. Had we expended half the scholarly energy in saving the King James that we have spent in efforts to supplant it, we should have come a long way on the path to a solution.

The first and most obvious thing that needs to be done is to modernize the physical form of our received Bible. It is common knowledge that the King James has undergone such revision in the past. In 1613, just two years after the original printing, a second edition appeared with more than four hundred variations. Other revisions occurred in 1629 and 1638 and in 1762. In 1769 the Oxford edition appeared with much modernization of spelling and punctuation. It is almost unbelievable, but true, that this is the current form of the text. In nearly two hundred years we have hardly converted a colon to a semicolon. Why is this? Do we believe that God wrote the King James with his finger on tables of stone? If we can give up inspired Hebrew vowel points and Holy Ghost Greek, must we canonize the commas of the King James? Why could not an ecumenical committee of experts, working jointly in England and America, solve this problem to the satisfaction of all? If a King James version, word for word as it now appears, were to be given a new form to this limited extent, it surely seems that the archaic punctuation would surrender its dominance to the new.

Having leaped this hurdle, the next step might be to cast the poetry as poetry and the prose as prose, giving the later the form of the modern paragraph rather than the present chapter and verse arrangement. Even the most rabid defenders of the King James admit that our chapter and verse divisions are not inspired.

Though long overdue, the changing of actual words should wait till these less controversial alterations have generally ingratiated themselves with the people as a whole. Perhaps marginal notes could be used to prepare readers gradually where usage is becoming archaic or the text is quite different from the best MSS evidence. In any event, when the changes are made, the task should be approached as one for experts in English primarily and only secondarily for Hebrew and Greek specialists. In other words, if in the mind of those best able to judge, a given usage has become archaic, then let the experts in English choose a new word or phrase, in consultation with those who know best what the Hebrew and Greek actually says. Under no circumstances should many such changes be made in a given generation, and rarely, if ever, should a change be made in those areas affecting received literary parlance or the common idiom of personal piety and public worship. Every literate person knows, for example, what the expression “God forbid” means. There is, therefore, no excuse for changing this to “let it not be” or “by no means.” The same goes for “plow with my heifer,” “skin of my teeth,” “whited sepulchre,” and the like. As for the idiom of personal and public piety, the decision of the American revisers of 1901 to substitute “Jehovah” for “Lord” was a blunder for which there can be no other word than crude. To delete from the Bible the most common name of deity in our language and insert “Jehovah” was enough, in itself, to doom their effort. The recent revisers had the good sense to go back to “Lord” in the Old Testament. One could wish that they had restored the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6 to its common form. We are pleading, then, for principles of translation, that not even the architects of the R.S.V. have been able altogether to ignore. The advantages of a procedure along the lines outlined above are obvious. First, by pursuing such a course we would, first of all, preserve our King James version, the greatest version of the Bible ever achieved. In the second place, we would bequeath it to our children in a form that would enable them to hear the Word of God in language not only meaningful but magnificent.

Paul K. Jewett, Ph.D., is Professor of Systematic Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary and author of Emil Brunner’s Concept of Revelation.

- More from Paul K. Jewett

Cover Story

‘Rediscovery’ of a Gutenberg Bible

Don Cleveland Norman

It is part of the wonder surrounding my interest in the Bible that, on the 500th anniversary of the completion of the Gutenberg Bible, I should have rediscovered (pinpointed it for scholars is perhaps more exact) a copy which virtually nobody knew was missing.

The last of five twentieth-century censuses of this famed Bible listed 46 copies known to have survived—32 in Europe and 14 in the United States. Two copies, when exhibited outside their regular habitat in recent years, were insured for $500,000 each. So high is the value placed on the first Bible, and believed by many to be the first book, printed from movable type in the Western world.

A year ago, in writing on the Gutenberg Bible for a national magazine, I closed the piece with an unconscious prophecy: “Someday, somewhere in the world, there may be another discovery like the one in the peasant’s home in Olewig; or there may be another library like Sir George Shuckburgh’s. And in our land of free enterprise no one can stop us from dreaming that one of us may locate the next copy of the most expensive book in the world.” (The reference to Olewig and Shuckburgh is to the last two copies of the Gutenberg Bible rediscovered.)

Despite these words, when I started planning late in 1955 a pilgrimage to all the libraries in the world containing original Gutenberg Bibles, I never dreamed that my journey would be instrumental in pinpointing for scholars Copy Number Forty-seven of this almost priceless Bible.

Time For A Census

My plan was to examine and photograph each copy, gather bibliographical and human interest material about each, and publish a 500th Anniversary Illustrated Census of the Gutenberg Bible. Nothing like it had ever been done before (I did not propose to plow the ground so ably furrowed by scholars like Seymour de Ricci, Paul Schwenke, and others), and 1956 was the time for making this census. According to a handwritten note by Vicar Henry Cremer of the Collegiate Church of St. Stephen in Mainz, Germany, he completed rubricating Volume II of the Gutenberg Bible, now in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, on August 15, 1456 (Volume I was finished nine days later).

It was important, it seemed to me, that someone should make a “hand count” of all the Gutenberg Bibles in the world. In no other way could their locations be exactly established. As a matter of record I found three changes, not previously listed. The Berlin copy is now in the library at the University of Tubingen, Germany. The Pelplin, Poland, copy is at the Museum of the Province in Quebec, Canada. And another of the three Leipzig, Germany, copies (one had been previously reported) is not in its former place. Most of these Bibles were removed at the time of World War II for safekeeping.

On August 15, 1956 (exactly 500 years after the earliest authenticated date connected with the Gutenberg Bible), I sat with Dr. Aloys Ruppel, director of the Gutenberg Museum and vice president of the Gutenberg Gesellschaft, in the library of his home in Mainz, Germany, the city where the famed Bible was printed.

Neglected Copy In Mons

I had already been in Europe 25 days at that time, and was able to bring him greetings from his many friends among the librarians. This genial Gutenberg scholar turned to me suddenly, in the course of our two-hour visit together, and asked if I knew of the Gutenberg Bible at Mons, Belgium. I told him I had heard of a Belgian copy from a friend in Geneva, but had thought it might be only the Leipzig copies on loan, until I had learned in Leipzig that this was not the case.

Then unfolded the story of how the librarian at Mons, Dr. M. A. Arnould, had stopped off at Mainz on a trip to Munich and had showed the Gutenberg Museum staff some photographs of the Mons copy, convincing as to its genuineness. Naturally excited, I told Dr. Ruppel that scheduled visits to German libraries would delay my seeing the Mons Bible a week, but I would eagerly work toward that day.

So at 11:30 on the morning of August 22 a member of Bourgmestre Fernand Demarbre’s cabinet guided me up the narrow cobblestone streets of Mons to the Bibliotheque Publique on Rue Marguerite Bervoets, where Dr. Arnould greeted me. We had time only to introduce the subject of my visit before lunch, which took place in one of the city’s few recently constructed buildings. The food was excellent, the atmosphere peaceful—unlike many a warlike scene Mons had witnessed in its 1300-year history. Here the British first met in World War I. The Germans occupied the city in World War II. Early, the bloody religious repression of the Duke of Alba, the wars of Louis XIV and Louis XV, had all left deep scars on the city of Mons. But after each she has made a valiant recovery, with the result that today Mons takes pride in having preserved a large part of her rich heritage from the past. As capital of the province of Hainaut, the city is known afar as a cultural center, to which its several outstanding museums bear eloquent testimony.

After lunch we crossed the cobblestone passage between Dr. Arnould’s office and the exhibit hall. He took a huge key and unlocked the great door to a room filled with treasures; the library is rich in rare tomes. The Gutenberg Bible, Volume I only, was in a glass-covered case. Dr. Arnould opened it and placed the Bible on a table before me.

On examination I saw that the Mons copy was quite incomplete. It contained, as he told me, only 220 of the 324 leaves in Volume I. It was bound in a brownish leather the library identifies as nineteenth-century. Excessive humidity had taken its toll of the Bible’s lower margins, some of them being almost completely eaten away near the spine. As I leafed through the volume, page by page, I found the first of big missing sections—twenty leaves between Genesis 16 (folio 10 verso) and Exodus 6 (folio 31 recto). The next was from the end of the Book of Ruth (folio 128 verso) to 2 Kings 5 (folio 149 recto). The third, from the last page of IV Esdras (folio 260 recto) to the end of the volume (folio 324 verso), comprised 64 leaves. These accounted for the 104 missing leaves.

First American Interest

Back in his office, Dr. Arnould gave me some clues as to the reason for this copy’s having escaped general notice so long. It had been willed to the city, along with his other valuables, by Canon Edmond Puissant at his death in 1934. Until recent years, it had remained in the Puissant Museum, with his other books and works of art. Dr. Arnould, after becoming librarian in 1950, wrote about the Bible in papers of local interest. It received wider publicity in November, 1955, when it was exhibited in Brussels by the Belgian Bible Society. Several newspapers wrote about it as “the only example of the Gutenberg Bible in Belgium,” but for some reason these accounts seem never to have crossed the Belgian frontier. In January, 1956, another article by the Mons librarian appeared in the German monthly, Deutches Pfarrerblatt. To my knowledge, however, only one German scholar wrote for further information. And Dr. Arnould said I was the first American with a scholarly interest in the Bible to view the Mons Gutenberg.

This was the highlight, of course, of a journey which carried me 16,500 miles through twenty-nine cities in twelve European countries this summer. Before the year is ended, another 9,000 miles will be added as I visit the American libraries.

Irony Of Our Times

It is part of the irony of the twentieth century that we should have to “rediscover” a Gutenberg Bible only five centuries after its appearance. It reflects the great change which has taken place in our outlook—from faith to secularism. Printing’s first great end-product was the Bible. No more would it be necessary tediously to make copies by hand. The common man would be able to possess his own copy of the Word. But a free press before long became preoccupied with other end-products—and, in many cases, the Bible was forgotten.

The Mons copy of the Gutenberg Bible remains a symbol of every neglected Bible with which bookshelves in the West are heavily populated.

Don Cleveland Norman, Th.B., is religion editor of The American People’s Encyclopedia, managing editor of The New Analytical Bible, and former executive secretary of the Chicago Bible Society.

- More from Don Cleveland Norman

Eutychus and His Kin: November 26, 1956

HYPERTENSION

The fall Angst Lectures by the Professor of Dialectical Theology from Zwischen den Zeiten were fabulous. Einstein didn’t touch this chap for extrapolating in another dimension. His polysyllabic prose inspired me to try a cadenced reply:

Do you find it essential to be existential
Since you’ve been up-ended in time?
Dialectical tension describes your suspension
For you dare not ignore Kierkegaard’s either/or nor
Expect to find reason or rhyme
In a life where the moment foments that sheer torment,
The crisis of being in time.
But before such deep pathos descends into bathos
And poetry drowns in a shriek,
I would venture to ask if this temporal casket,
Inner lined with red woes, is the cause of neurosis
Which we existentially seek?
As we trace all our crime to this framework of time, since
We’re for the time-being too weak.

We are told that the blame must be ours just the same though
The fall did not happen in time.
By the sheerest invention we hold fast our tension.
Sharing Adam’s declension outside this dimension
In new super-temporal time.
But in all this two-timing our ego is climbing …
Existence! So tragic-sublime!

Blaming time and existence, we keep at a distance
The guilt of primordial crime.
We are evil and covet, we sin and we love it
As did Adam before us; but Christ to restore us
Lived sinless in calendar time.
Both our fall and salvation took place in duration
In that frame of creation, that time of decision,
That daily and commonplace time …
Momentous significant time!

EUTYCHUS

HODGE PODGE

How you are going to bundle together the World Christianity of today, and unscramble it, I don’t yet see. It certainly needs doing. I only wish some Power might be given, a la Omar Khayyam, to “Shatter it to bits and then remould it nearer to our heart’s desire.” It certainly is a hodge podge today. Enclosed is my subscription.…

C. TELFORD ERICKSON

Claremont, Calif.

Your magazine seethes with intellectual dishonesty. It should have been stillborn. Maybe it will die an infant.

Why do you fundamentalists-literalists feel that you and everyone else must swallow a rotten egg every morning before breakfast in order to prove religious faith?…

DAVID C. PAUL

Kyle Methodist Church

Kyle, Texas

Read with delight your first issue and gladly become one of the pioneer supporters.… We need a good religious journal that will command respect, have weight, and be quoted. Who knows whether thou art come to the churches for such a time as this.

GEORGE MCPHERSON HUNTER

First Presbyterian Church

Mannington, W. Va.

I feel that the theological point of view which you represent is barren.…

CHARLES M. KNAPP

Almira Community Church

Almira, Wash.

A welcome corrective to the idea that true conservatism is obscurantism.… Hand in hand with the upsurge in Biblical evangelism, your periodical will contribute to a renewed and scholarly orthodoxy.

ELVIN L. CLARK

Baptist Temple Church

Louisville, Ky.

It was with exuberance that I have read the publication.… Such an impact has been in-the-need for too many years.

MISS ARDIS JOHNSON

Bryan University

Dayton, Tenn.

I readily agree to differences of opinion, but … I cannot see that Almighty God has so endowed some few—or a few thousand—people with the infallible truth … May God bless your paper that it might be a mark of true unity, and not of diversity, among the Christians of the world.

FRANK D. MEDSKER

Colstrip Community Church

Colstrip, Montana

FORMULA FOR SUCCESS

Congratulations! The 3 year subscription shows my confidence in this venture, which has been badly needed. Publish something soon that will really help us with respect to: (1) healing, (2) the cults, (3) Pealeism, (4) soulwinning. Avoid denominational controversies and promotional schemes. Stay on a scholarly level.…

JOHN KENNETH OSBORN

Rosebush, Mich.

Praise the Lord for such a publication.

WILLIAM G. NYMAN JR.

Washington, D.C.

Perhaps a paper with as wide a contributing staff as CHRISTIANITY TODAY may arrive at a solution, from the Scriptures, which would bring together the diverse and often warring elements of Fundamentalism.

ROBERT A. WILDERMAN

Woden, Iowa

Why not a column entitled “Christianity on Stamps” for the stamp collectors among us?

Philadelphia, Pa.

LOUIS A. J. MEYER

Could you run a children’s page, so that my twelve-year-old could form the habit of reading CHRISTIANITY TODAY early?

Portland, Ore.

A. C.

ANNUAL INDEX

I saw so very much of permanent value that I plan to save every copy and put it into a note book.… An index published yearly would be a big help.

LANE ADAMS

Decatur, Ga.

• For the convenience of libraries and of subscribers saving their copies, CHRISTIANITY TODAY will print an annual index of articles, editorials, reviews and special features. The first such index will appear in Volume 1, Number 26.—ED.

Bible Text of the Month: Isaiah 9:6

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6).

In the text there is a constellation of titles; and such a constellation, as, were it not for the blindness of the human mind and the obstinacy of the human heart, one should think, would be sufficient to confound all the Arianism and the confraternity of heresies upon the Divinity of Christ, to the end of the world.—HORAE SOLITARIAE.

It is manifestly impossible to associate these words of majestic prophecy with any other than the Messiah himself, and the Christian Church throughout the centuries has found here the certain attributes of the living and victorious King of the hearts of men, the only One able to deliver and to save the soul in its desperate plight and to lead men into the new and better way of the commandment of God.—W. FITCH.

When it is said that his name should be called, it does not mean he should actually bear these names in real life, but merely that he should deserve them, and that they would be descriptive of his character.—J. A. ALEXANDER.

He is given, freely given, to be all in all to us, which our case, in our fallen state, calls for. God so loved the world, that he gave him. He is born to us, he is given to us, us men, and not to the angels that sinned: it is spoken with an air of triumph, and the angel seems to refer to these words in the notice he gives to the shepherds: Unto you is born, this day, a Saviour.—MATTHEW HENRY.

Wonderful

Consider him in any point of view, either as God or man, or as God and man in one person; he is altogether wonderful. If we contemplate his works, both of creation and redemption, we shall find some legible characters of the wonderful Lord indelibly written upon them all.—HORAE SOLITARIAE.

By the first title he arouses the minds of the godly to earnest attention, that they may expect from Christ something more excellent than what we see in the ordinary course of God’s works, as if he had said, that In Christ are hidden the invaluable treasures of wonderful things (Col. 2:3). And, indeed, the redemption which he has brought surpasses even the creation of the world.—CALVIN.

Counsellor

There is no need for him to surround himself with counsellors; but without receiving counsel at all, He counsels those who are without counsel.—FRANZ DELITZSCH.

This word has been sometimes joined with “Wonderful,” as if designed to qualify it thus—wonderful counsellor. But it expresses a distinct attribute or quality. The name counsellor here denotes one of honourable rank; qualified to advise or counsel; one who is fitted to stand near princes and kings as their advisor. It is expressive of great wisdom, and of qualifications to guide and direct the human race.—ALBERT BARNES.

Mighty God

That the same person should be “the mighty God” and a “child born,” is neither conceivable nor possible, nor can be done, but by the union of the divine and human natures in the same person.—JOHN OWEN.

He is the mighty God. As he has wisdom, so he has strength, to go through with his undertaking; he is able to save to the utmost; and such is the work of the Mediator, that no less a power than that of the mighty God could accomplish it.—MATTHEW HENRY.

For if we find in Christ nothing but the flesh and nature of man, our glorifying will be foolish and vain, and our hope will rest on an uncertain and insecure foundation; but if he shows himself to be to us God and the mighty God, we may now rely on him with safety. With good reason does he call him strong or mighty, because our contest is with the devil, death, and sin, enemies too powerful and strong, by whom we would be immediately vanquished, if the strength of Christ had not rendered us invincible.—CALVIN.

For if we find in Christ nothing but the flesh and nature of man, our glorifying will be foolish and vain, and our hope will rest on an uncertain and insecure foundation; but if he shows himself to be to us God and the mighty God, we may now rely on him with safety. With good reason does he call him strong or mighty, because our contest is with the devil, death, and sin, enemies too powerful and strong, by whom we would be immediately vanquished, if the strength of Christ had not rendered us invincible.—CALVIN.

Everlasting Father

The title Eternal Father designates him, however, not only as the possessor of eternity, but as the tender, faithful, and wise trainer, guardian, and provider for his people even in eternity.—FRANZ DELITZSCH.

His fatherly care of his people and tenderness toward them are everlasting. He is the author of everlasting life and happiness to them, and so is the Father of a blessed eternity to them. He is the Father of the gospel-state, which is put in subjection to him. He was from eternity, Father of the great work of redemption: his heart was upon it; it was the product of his wisdom, as the Counsellor; of his love, as the everlasting Father.—MATTHEW HENRY.

The prophet is describing the nature of the Messiah, and therefore gives us his name, as the name of his nature. He is not describing the mode of his existence with the Father and Holy Spirit, but his essence as true and very God. For this reason, the application of this name to Jesus Christ by no means militates against the doctrine of the Trinity, or the peculiar relation of Christ in that Trinity; but establishes and confirms it. For if Christ be the Everlasting Father, and if there is but one God, the Father; then Christ being God, that divine person, who is usually styled the Father, must be of one essence with him, or there would be two Gods. And if these divine persons be of one and the same essence, they may bear the character of Father to all their creatures relatively, which they do not bear to each other, considered in the sacred essence, respectively. Thus the I ord Christ, though he is not the Father respecting the personality in the Godhead, is very properly and justly denominated Father respecting the universe of beings; for he created them all, as well as supports them all, by his power.—HORAE SOLITARIAE.

Prince Of Peace

The pole star of this constellation of titles, “Prince of Peace,” speaks to the deepest needs of the human heart; it is of utmost comfort and reassurance to every believer individually, and to the people of God as a community. In the first instance, it contained a particularly desirable promise to Israel. The nation was constantly harassed by war, their little land being the cockpit in which the surrounding great powers often waged their battles. Peace was the supreme longing of the true Israelite. It was promised in the reign of the Messiah. How appropriate also, in that respect, is this title of Christ to our own war-ridden generation! Through the reign of the Prince of Peace alone will real peace come to this earth, not only for Israel, but all nations.—HERBERT F. STEVENSON.

This is a Hebrew mode of expression denoting that he would be a peaceful prince. He would seek to promote peace. The tendency of his administration would be to restore and perpetuate peace. This expression is used to distinguish him from the mass of kings and princes who have been warriors and conquerors, and who have delighted in conquest and blood. In contradiction from all these, the Messiah would seek to promote universal peace and concord, and the tendency of his reign would be to put an end to wars and conflicts, and to restore harmony and order to the nations.—ALBERT BARNES.

Through the coming of Christ, as the angels sing, true peace will come on earth. Here in the first place is meant peace with God and a peace given by God through Christ. And when the inner harmony is there because the human soul has peace with its Lord, peace also spontaneously comes about in mutual relations between human beings. It is the work of Christ to bring peace into all human relations—in man’s relation to God, to himself (his own feelings, desires, and the like), to his life’s circumstances (calamities and trials), and to his fellow-men.—NORVAL GELDENHUYS.

Fulfillment

It is difficult to avoid the natural and striking application of the words to Jesus Christ, as the promised child, emphatically born for us and given to us, as the Son of God and the Son of man, as being wonderful in his person, works, and sufferings—a counsellor, prophet, or authoritative teacher of the truth, a wise administrator of the church, and confidential adviser of the individual believer—a real man, and yet the mighty God—eternal in his own existence, and giver of eternal life to others—the great peace-maker between God and man, between Jew and Gentile, the umpire between nations, the abolisher of war, and the giver of internal peace to all who being justified by faith have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.—J. A. ALEXANDER.

The name Jesus is the combination of all the Old Testament titles used to designate the Coming One according to his nature and his works. The names contained in Isaiah 7:14 and 9:6 are not thereby suppressed; but they have continued, from the time of Mary downwards, in the mouths of all believers. There is not one of these names under which worship and homage have not been paid to him.

—FRANZ DELITZSCH.

The kingdom of God is near.

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Reformed Apologetics

The Actor

Written For God

Mariolatry

Mission Study

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Centennial Of Denney’s Birth

From Pulpit To Professorship

Centrality Of Christ’s Death

Objective Aspect Of Atonement

Calvary Makes A Difference To God

Subjective Side Emphasized Also

Significance Of Christ’s Life

The Atonement And Our Century

God Demands A Response Of Faith

Impatience With Creeds

Weakness In Doctrinal Position

Unity Of New Testament

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The Principal Documents

The Habakkuk Commentary

Similarities Are Formal

Misunderstanding Of Faith

The Manual Of Discipline

Other Manuscripts

Preacher In The Red

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The Question Of Nature

The Question Of Evil

The Question Of Death

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Saga Of Suffering

Ravages Of War

Protestant Valor

We Quote:

Douglas Macarthur

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Unconvincing Plea

Role Of New Version

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Time For A Census

Neglected Copy In Mons

First American Interest

Irony Of Our Times

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Wonderful

Counsellor

Mighty God

Everlasting Father

Prince Of Peace

Fulfillment

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