David Lauber. Barth on the Descent into Hell: God, Atonement and the Christian Life.
Burlington , VT : Ashgate, 2004. Pp vi + 186.         cloth, us$89.95. ISBN 0-7546-43341-1

The purpose of David Lauber’s book is an investigation of Karl Barth’s understanding of Christ’s suffering of the wrath of God on our behalf and in our place.

The foil for this book is Wayne Grudem’s article, “He Did Not Descend into Hell: A Plea for Following Scripture Instead of the Apostles’ Creed” [Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 34 (1991) pp. 103-13.] Contradicting Grudem at al points, Lauber asserts relentlessly that the descent into hell is intrinsic to a complete understanding of the substitutionary suffering of Jesus.

The immediate conversation partner throughout is Hans Urs von Balthasar in his perspective on the descent.

Lauber explores Barth’s grasp of the divine condemnation that Jesus Christ bore on behalf of humankind.  While Barth has affinities with Anselm, his understanding of the atonement moves beyond the static, mechanical – even non-biblical transactional – aspects of the Latin view of the cross.  Insofar as Barth relocates the descent in the doctrine of God he avoids the liabilities that have haunted the Latin view of the atonement and its espousal of penal substitution; namely, how the sacrifice of an innocent human changed God’s nature from wrath to love and allowed grace to succeed judgement. Love, rather, provides the sacrifice even as grace precipitates saving judgement.

With Calvin, Barth insists that the curse, punishment and ordeal that Jesus endured in the cross as God’s reaction to sin – specifically, the humanly incomprehensible horror of the dereliction – is the descent; for here Jesus, the ever-obedient Son, was cast into an abyss that no one else can mine or measure.  Unacceptable, then, is any notion that the descent is the exalted Christ’s “journey” wherein he “harrows hell” as he engages the devil and releases captive believers. Neither Friday’s finished work nor Easter’s disclosure of it lends the Church anything to say concerning Holy Saturday.

Lauber contrasts the lattermost point with Balthasar’s exposition of Holy Saturday wherein Balthasar affirms the descent to be distinct from the cross (albeit never separated from it), viewing the descent as marking the defeat of sin and death and acting as a transition from death to resurrection.

Balthasar distances himself from the language of “descent”, arguing that Jesus qua dead can do nothing. Jesus, rather, is taken to the dead. Jesus’ “descent” is first to Sheol of the Older Testament.  In Sheol Jesus, the God-forsaken one, fulfils the judgement that was adumbrated in God’s judgement on covenant-breakers, the judgement that had been pointed to in God’s abandonment, e.g., of Moses, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Job and the Suffering Servant.  Beyond Sheol, however, Christ’s “descent” is an experience of the ‘second’ death. Here Balthasar departs from Barth, as Balthasar insists that God-forsakenness prior to Jesus’ death (“Why have you forsaken me?”) is not the same as God-forsakenness after death.  While diverging here from the Reformed tradition, Balthasar maintains nonetheless that there is nothing insufficient or incomplete in Friday. Still, on Friday Jesus, actively obedient, endures God’s wrath; on Saturday, utterly passive, Jesus is one with the poena damni. In complete solidarity with the dead, he, alone the Son of God Incarnate, is uniquely subject to the arch-torment of rejection at the Father’s hand – which rejection forges hell; i.e., hell is a product of the world’s redemption.

What are the implications of the descent for the Trinitarian life of God? Having exposed Karl Rahner’s discussion of the descent briefly yet convincingly as disguised naturalism, Lauber criticizes Juergen Moltmann at length. Moltmann maintains that the dereliction introduces a rift into the divine life.   At the cross God “becomes” or “turns into” (p. 122) what God formerly was not. God isn’t love eternally. God becomes love only as there is a creation to be loved; i.e., God creates the world as an act of divine self-completion.  More to the point, God has to suffer at the hands of the world in order to be God. Lost here is the particularity of the dereliction as the enacting of sin-bearing atonement. Instead God is now qualified to be an empathic fellow-victim of creaturely brutality even as God is fully constituted God.

Upholding the distinction between immanent and economic Trinities, Barth and Balthasar assess the dereliction regarding Trinitarian implications while avoiding Moltmann’s divagations. Balthasar insists that the eternal intimacy of Father and Son assumes another modality in the economy of the Incarnation as the dereliction occasions a new expression of the eternal love of the Triune God.  Unlike Moltmann, Balthasar maintains that the mission of Jesus is grounded in the eternal procession of Father and Son, even as mission is never collapsed into procession. In this way the effectual specificity of the dereliction is recognized as an event in the life of the Triune God (the dereliction enacts; it doesn’t merely illustrate) while the eternal Tri-unity of God is preserved.

The book concludes with an application of the descent for Christian discipleship.  Disciples can’t bear Christ’s cross, and he won’t bear theirs.  While his is atoning and theirs isn’t, his mandating theirs invites a conversation with Balthasar’s sounding of Colossians 1:24, wherein disciples’ sufferings “complete” what is “lacking” in Christ’s afflictions, even as Christ’s are deficient in nothing.

One mark of a good book is the protracted discussion it catalyzes with its principals and its topic. In this regard Lauber’s book is exemplary.

Victor A. Shepherd

Tyndale Seminary

Toronto

Greschat, Martin; Martin Bucer: A Reformer and His Times.  Louisville : Westminster John Knox Press, 2004. Pp. xii + 340. paper, can$34.50. ISBN 0-664-22690-6. Translated by Stephen E. Buckwalter.

The ligature of Greschat’s fine book is Bucer’s career-long preoccupation: the transmutation – individual, social, institutional, even economic – that Jesus Christ effects in God’s people.   Bucer’s formal theology, occasional writing, and day-to-day activity alike orbited around this epicentre.  Church discipline was a means to the transmutation of ethic and ethos, and for this reason Bucer insisted that church discipline was a nota or “mark” of the church in addition to Word and sacraments (i.e., discipline pertains to the being of the church, not merely to its wellbeing.) He remained aware, however, that any discipline that was merely imposed could only coerce and antagonize simultaneously; the law of God had to be written on the heart. This could be fostered only through smaller fellowships within a congregation, issuing in greater spiritual intimacy and accountability.  Bucer never surrendered his conviction here.

Becoming acquainted with Bucer’s spirit and genius, however, is less straightforward than with other Reformers in that Bucer wrote less.  In fact he appeared to his disadvantage when he had to write; he was at his best when face-to-face with those whose hostility his transparency could defuse and for whom his gift of public speaking (vastly more telling than his written articulation) could birth nuances that evaporated standoffs and advanced understanding, even as his non-acerbic wit melted defensiveness.   In other words, while he was no less talented than other Reformers, Bucer’s gifts were notably different.  He was a conciliator, working indefatigably for Protestant accord amidst intra-Protestant disputes no less jagged than those with Rome . He was the acknowledged father-figure among a constellation of dazzling theological stars in Strasbourg : Matthew Zell, preacher; Wolfgang Capito, theologian; Caspar Hedio, translator from Latin to German. When Calvin sought refuge in Strasbourg (1538-1541) Bucer schooled Calvin in the liturgical order, the singing of psalms, the function of ecclesiastical offices, and the weekly meeting of pastors – all of which Calvin would implement upon his return to Geneva.  From 1534 to 1539 he travelled 12,000 kilometres on difficult and dangerous roads on behalf of Protestant unity.  Between 1538 and 1541 he addressed colloquies at Leipzig , Hagenau, Worms and Regensburg .

Bucer’s major work, De Regno Christi, together with his commentaries on Psalms and Ephesians, remain landmarks in Reformation theology. Still, they seem lonely alongside the prodigious written output of Luther, Calvin and Bullinger (the lattermost having written more than the former two combined.) Plainly Bucer’s formal theological contribution was eclipsed by his possession of gifts and graces beyond theology that the leader of any era needs if the Kingdom of Christ is to gain visibility.

Bucer insisted on identifying the non-negotiable core of the substance of the faith. One aspect of it, he maintained consistently, was justification by grace through faith.  No less crucial was godliness, both individual and social, shaped not by the letter of the Old testament but rather by the justice, equity and mood that the Old Testament aspires to inculcate – with all of this infused by an incursion of the Holy Spirit (in everything he wrote Bucer elevated the Old Testament and magnified the Holy Spirit, grounding both in the Christological concern characteristic of Reformation theology) that alone spared the church deadly, gospel-less legalism. Having identified the core, Bucer then moved outward, in concentric circles as it were, to what was arguable, concluding with the optional, the adiaphora, all the while forging a credibility with Anabaptists, Lutherans and Roman Catholics that would adorn ecumenism today.  While Bucer never denied major problems in the Catholic Church of his day (not least of which for him was the sacrifice of the mass), he insisted unrelentingly that the Church of Rome was church, the Body of Christ. For this reason he could write “I do hope, however, that there are many dear children on both sides, improperly named after men, and thus kept divided.   We should …use all ways and means in order that all God-fearing persons in all camps become united in Christ, our Lord.” (p.104)  Unlike most giants of the Reformation whose written legacy the church will never be without, Bucer’s achievement as conciliator and mentor consisted almost entirely of his influence.

No “Buceran” church or denomination has been named after the man who towered over Strasbourg as surely as Luther did over Wittenberg and Calvin over Geneva . The reason is plain: following Charles V’s defeat of the Schmalkaldic League in 1547, the future of the church lay with territories whose prince-protector could guarantee institutional survival. As a free Imperial city, Strasbourg had no such protector, with the result that the Reformation couldn’t remain fixed there. City authorities made their peace (Bucer would say they compromised) with those bent on overturning the Reformation.  Bucer had to move to England .

Feted at Cambridge University , Bucer was awarded its first honorary doctorate in theology.  Yet the adjustment to England was difficult. In a letter to William Farel he indicated what grated on him: weather, language, food, customs, housing, wine, inefficient fireplaces, “and just about everything else.” (p.245). Centuries later the scope of his theological contribution to the English church was celebrated; better scholarship, however, has soberly concluded that his noteworthy work in his new home appeared in the theological shift from the Catholicism of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer to the Protestantism of the 1552 revision – even though Bucer died one year before it appeared.         When “Bloody” Mary ascended and set about undoing the Reformation in England , she had his remains exhumed and burnt.  Her successor, Elizabeth I, rehabilitated him.

And yet there recrudesces in the characteristically conciliatory, irenic Bucer the horrific anti-Semitism that disfigures Humanists, Magisterial and Anabaptist Reformers alike.   In this regard Bucer, master-Hebraist notwithstanding, exhibited the Church’s age-long inability to understand God’s covenant as indefeasible (despite the Reformers’ preoccupation with covenant.)   Bucer, lamentably, recommended to political authorities that Jews not be allowed to build synagogues; Jews were to be barred from the trades; Jews were to refrain from “blaspheming Christ.” They were to be engaged “in the humblest, most arduous and most trying tasks” (p.157) – namely, sweeping chimneys, cleaning sewers, and disposing of deadstock. Such means, Bucer wrote, would prove to be a “deterrent and a corrective.” (p.157)  Subsequently Jews were permitted to engage in commerce even as they were consigned to the accursed role of moneylender, albeit only under the strictest supervision. The Talmud was banned; Jewish attendance at Christian services designed to convert them was mandated; if Jew and Christian were found living together both were executed. While none of this is extraordinary in light of the anti-Jewish miasma of the era, something better could have been expected from Bucer in light of his massive emphasis on the Old Testament in his programmatic Christianizing of Strasbourg’s social order, and in view of his recognition of Torah as God’s loving, salvation-bringing Word and Way – an understanding that Luther never attained.

Greschat’s book is essential reading for all who investigate the Reformation and who know that the wheels of history are turned as much by who people are unselfconsciously as by what they contrive to write.

Victor Shepherd
Tyndale University College & Seminary
Toronto

MacLeod, A. Donald. W. Stanford Reid: An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy. Montreal & Kingston : McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004.         Pp. xxii + 401. Cloth $80.00 or Paper $29.95     

ISBN: 0-7735-2770-2 (cloth) or 0-7735-2818-0 (paper)

This book is the thirty-first in Series Two of McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Religion. Like the fifty-six others in Series One and Two it endeavours to acquaint readers with determinative aspects of Canadian history, culture and religious life. In exploring the life and work of W. Stanford Reid (1913 – 1996) it fills two major lacunae, the first being the need for a thorough study of a figure whose mark in both university and church (such a two-fold mark wasn’t rare in an earlier era but has become exceedingly rare more recently) renders him formative.  The second lacuna is the need for situating Reid himself in a theological tradition and a Canadian denomination from which he couldn’t be deracinated and on whose behalf he struggled tirelessly, albeit less effectively (it would seem) than he would have preferred.

This book delivers all that it promises.  In its seventeen chapters of approximately equal length it judiciously reflects the able historian’s avoidance of “over-determination;” i.e., it recognizes the interplay of religious, social, historical, economic and national factors.  It begins with the significance of Reid’s foreparents in Nineteenth Century Anglophone Quebec ; it concludes with an exhaustive bibliography of Reid’s writings.  It never drifts, however, from its orientation as advertised in the title: Reid as Calvinist by conviction and history teacher by profession. In substance, style and lucidity it is exemplary.

In the course of mining the profundities, not to say murky depths, of church and university and human psyche, MacLeod traces at least three lodes that are readily discernible.  In the first place the book acquaints readers with a man whose theological carriage was as stark, unalterable and unmistakable as was his larger-than-average physical presence.  Amidst a milieu of doctrinally diluted, ecumenical accommodation Reid is exposed as an unapologetic “confessionalist” (a term MacLeod uses repeatedly as characteristic descriptor.)  In short, while Reid was neither a fundamentalist nor a literalist (his “confessional” conservatism often found him accused of such), he remained possessed of irrefrangible conviction concerning the tenets of the Magisterial Reformers, especially those of John Calvin. Reid’s was not a cultural Presbyterianism, the misty-eyed yen to use the church as a vehicle for preserving bagpipe and haggis.  Neither was his a state-Presbyterianism, coveting the place of the Kirk in Scotland while lamenting the denial of a similar place to the Kirk’s Canadian descendant in the New World . While Reid was known outside the Presbyterian communion chiefly as a Professor of History, first at McGill and then at the University of Guelph (where he headed the history department) MacLeod persists in holding up Reid’s vocation to the ordained ministry, his zeal for preaching and teaching in the church even when he ceased to have a pastoral appointment, and his poimenical concern for fellow-congregants and needy students.

While a mind, like the Word of God it apprehends, is commended for being “sharper than a two-edged sword,” a sharp-edged personality is not. MacLeod, however, always does justice to both, pointing out Reid’s inimitable contribution to Scottish Studies (see the list of graduate students whose work in this field he supervised at the University of Guelph), and keening quietly over Reid’s occasional proclivity to excoriate if not lacerate, which proclivity deprived Reid of institutional support when he needed it most.

With respect to this last point it is sufficient to recall Reid’s refusal to extend congratulations to Dr. David Hay upon the latter’s retirement. Hay had served Knox College as Professor of Systematic Theology for thirty-three years.         In his penultimate year Hay had publicly described evangelicals in the Presbyterian Church as “Rechabites,” “freeloaders and institutional parasites” (p.232.)  Reid, converted at age fourteen by means of a Montreal street-corner evangelist, upheld the evangelical ethos ever after.  A graduate of Westminster Seminary ( Philadelphia ) and its trustee for decades, Reid also exalted the Reformed tradition.  Hay disavowed Reformed evangelicalism.  His remark widened a fissure between him and Reid that would never be bridged. Like his beloved John Knox (Reid had written a major biography of the Scottish Reformer) Reid “neither flattered nor feared any flesh.”

The second lode is MacLeod’s candid tour of the subterranean trade-offs, political favours and power echelons that bedevil any institution. Forthrightly and fairly he identifies, describes and amplifies the machinations riddling the denomination generally and Reid’s situation particularly.  In this regard MacLeod helps readers understand what lurked and why when Reid appeared to be ill-treated on several fronts, and how it was that Reid, if not marginalized, was certainly kept away from key positions and professorships in his denomination and its seminaries.

The third lode is MacLeod’s self-exposure. No doubt unintentionally and certainly unobtrusively yet no less unmistakeably, MacLeod’s “heart” is revealed.  Trained in history at Harvard, currently pastor to a small-city congregation, like Reid he loves the denomination he will not leave.  There is no bitterness here, no self-exempting accusation, no angry denunciation; there is however, the sober acknowledgement that sin blinds and corrupts, with the result that doors providentially opened do close, and opportunities for appointing prophets pass.  While MacLeod has spent much more of his working life as a congregational pastor than Reid did, as Adjunct Professor of Missions at Tyndale University College & Seminary he too is “an evangelical Calvinist in the academy.” Yet he remains himself.

Calvin, loved by Reid and MacLeod alike, said that those who try to mimic a giant in the faith without being moved by the Spirit “are not imitators; they are apes.” (Commentary Matthew 9:20) MacLeod is anything but an ape.

Victor Shepherd

Tyndale University College & Seminary

(STUDIES IN RELIGION/SCIENCES RELIGIEUSES, Fall 2005 )

Watching and Praying: Personality Transformation in Eighteenth Century British Methodism

Keith Haartman

Amsterdam , NY : Rodopi, 2004. xii, 241

This book is the fourth volume in the series, “Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies”. Not surprisingly, then, the book aims passim at a psychoanalytic exploration, amplification and assessment of the personality transformations of those who were the immediate beneficiaries of the eighteenth century Methodist movement spawned and sustained by John Wesley.   Unlike most psychoanalytic attempts at explanation (the book insists on explaining religious development, not merely describing it), Haartman’s doesn’t regard religious experience as inherently pathological.

Haartman’s debt to two notable psychologists, Melanie Klein and Abraham Maslow, is evident and acknowledged.         Klein’s psychoanalytic work with children figures significantly throughout Watching, while Maslow’s concept of self-actualization is melded with such traditional aspects of psychoanalysis as the relation of superego to ego-ideal and the nature of ego reaction.

Drawing on Wesley’s Sermons on Several Occasions (150 sermons in four volumes) and his movement’s journal, Arminian Magazine (published first in 1778, and as Methodist Magazine after 1798), Haartman consistently relates the normative function of the former to the anecdotal function of the latter.         Perceptively he grasps Wesley’s insistence on “salvation” as a present reality (rather than a post-mortem occurrence), and relates it to the psychoanalytic agenda of unconscious-conflict resolution and intrapsychic integration. In all of this Haartman indicates how psychoanalysis provides a tool for understanding the process of the doctrinal tenets that early-day Methodists embodied.

Foundational to Haartman’s entire exposition, and according to him the first stage of religious development, is the unconscious conflict pertaining to childhood stresses: parental punishment, unresolved grief and separation anxiety. (In the 1700s parents were urged not to “spare the rod”; the infant/childhood death rate was higher than 50% in many areas of Britain ; and children were frequently traumatized on account of the untimely loss of parents through sickness and accident.)

The second stage, “justification”, is a form of displacement of ordinary consciousness. Here the accumulation of grief, guilt and anxiety issues in a crisis religiously labelled “repentance”, which crisis ought then to be resolved as the penitent is flooded with an awareness of God’s pervasive pardon, free acceptance, and ubiquitous mercy.         In psychoanalytic terms, the crisis is defused as it proceeds to a punitive ecstasy where new-born believers, rejoicing in their deliverance, apprehend themselves and the entire creation as unfolding within the sphere of God’s omnipresent love.         Concomitantly with this unitive ecstasy, believers recognize and surrender to God’s claim upon them for “inward and outward holiness” (a favourite expression of Wesley’s whereby he means transformation of disposition and conduct alike) – or, once again, unconscious moral insights or ego-ideals can be said to be brought to consciousness.

The third and final stage consists of “watching and praying”.         Ever “watching” believers introspect so as to become increasingly aware of threats to their integration that might precipitate “backsliding”, a regression to the pre-justification stage of development. Ever “praying”, they “practise the presence” (of God), therein conforming to the ego-ideal that the Christian tradition has named “sanctification”.

While Haartman insists that religious ecstasies and unitive experiences pertain to the core of Methodist spirituality, they are not (or at least not necessarily) manic denials of the reality principle.         Notwithstanding the psychological assessment, there remains an ontological assessment that the book appears to overlook; namely, what do psychoanalysis and Wesley (the Methodist movement) affirm to be ultimately real? The ontology of the former is natural; the latter’s is supernatural, the presence and significance of Spirit, that reality which cannot be reduced to the natural world nor to any aspect or dimension of it.         While the book renounces naturalistic reduction, many passages in it suggest the opposite. For instance, in speaking of justification (the Christian affirmation that those “in the wrong” before God are rendered “rightly related” to God), Haartman writes, “In the optimal outcome of the desolation crisis, the lifting of repression allows the ego to regain access to intrapsychic representations of the good parent.”(p.114)         Elsewhere he writes, “…psychic integration, what Wesley deemed ‘growth in grace’”. (p173)         For Wesley these two developments were ontically dissimilar: one could be growing in grace while lacking psychic integration.

Irrespective of the foregoing, Watching displays a thorough grasp of the classical and contemporary psychoanalytic literature. It is replete with helpful insights concerning the Methodist tradition.         It is cogently argued. It is a worthy contribution to the psycho-religious discussion and will foster much fruitful discussion.

Keith Haartman currently teaches at the Institute of Communication and Culture, University of Toronto at Mississauga .

Victor Shepherd

Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology

Tyndale University College & Seminary

Toronto

(STUDIES IN RELIGION/SCIENCES RELIGIEUSES, Fall 2005 )

Watching and Praying: Personality Transformation in Eighteenth Century British Methodism

Keith Haartman

Amsterdam , NY : Rodopi, 2004. xii, 241

This book is the fourth volume in the series, “Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies”. Not surprisingly, then, the book aims passim at a psychoanalytic exploration, amplification and assessment of the personality transformations of those who were the immediate beneficiaries of the eighteenth century Methodist movement spawned and sustained by John Wesley.   Unlike most psychoanalytic attempts at explanation (the book insists on explaining religious development, not merely describing it), Haartman’s doesn’t regard religious experience as inherently pathological.

Haartman’s debt to two notable psychologists, Melanie Klein and Abraham Maslow, is evident and acknowledged.         Klein’s psychoanalytic work with children figures significantly throughout Watching, while Maslow’s concept of self-actualization is melded with such traditional aspects of psychoanalysis as the relation of superego to ego-ideal and the nature of ego reaction.

Drawing on Wesley’s Sermons on Several Occasions (150 sermons in four volumes) and his movement’s journal, Arminian Magazine (published first in 1778, and as Methodist Magazine after 1798), Haartman consistently relates the normative function of the former to the anecdotal function of the latter.         Perceptively he grasps Wesley’s insistence on “salvation” as a present reality (rather than a post-mortem occurrence), and relates it to the psychoanalytic agenda of unconscious-conflict resolution and intrapsychic integration. In all of this Haartman indicates how psychoanalysis provides a tool for understanding the process of the doctrinal tenets that early-day Methodists embodied.

Foundational to Haartman’s entire exposition, and according to him the first stage of religious development, is the unconscious conflict pertaining to childhood stresses: parental punishment, unresolved grief and separation anxiety. (In the 1700s parents were urged not to “spare the rod”; the infant/childhood death rate was higher than 50% in many areas of Britain ; and children were frequently traumatized on account of the untimely loss of parents through sickness and accident.)

The second stage, “justification”, is a form of displacement of ordinary consciousness. Here the accumulation of grief, guilt and anxiety issues in a crisis religiously labelled “repentance”, which crisis ought then to be resolved as the penitent is flooded with an awareness of God’s pervasive pardon, free acceptance, and ubiquitous mercy.         In psychoanalytic terms, the crisis is defused as it proceeds to a punitive ecstasy where new-born believers, rejoicing in their deliverance, apprehend themselves and the entire creation as unfolding within the sphere of God’s omnipresent love.         Concomitantly with this unitive ecstasy, believers recognize and surrender to God’s claim upon them for “inward and outward holiness” (a favourite expression of Wesley’s whereby he means transformation of disposition and conduct alike) – or, once again, unconscious moral insights or ego-ideals can be said to be brought to consciousness.

The third and final stage consists of “watching and praying”.         Ever “watching” believers introspect so as to become increasingly aware of threats to their integration that might precipitate “backsliding”, a regression to the pre-justification stage of development. Ever “praying”, they “practise the presence” (of God), therein conforming to the ego-ideal that the Christian tradition has named “sanctification”.

While Haartman insists that religious ecstasies and unitive experiences pertain to the core of Methodist spirituality, they are not (or at least not necessarily) manic denials of the reality principle.         Notwithstanding the psychological assessment, there remains an ontological assessment that the book appears to overlook; namely, what do psychoanalysis and Wesley (the Methodist movement) affirm to be ultimately real? The ontology of the former is natural; the latter’s is supernatural, the presence and significance of Spirit, that reality which cannot be reduced to the natural world nor to any aspect or dimension of it.         While the book renounces naturalistic reduction, many passages in it suggest the opposite. For instance, in speaking of justification (the Christian affirmation that those “in the wrong” before God are rendered “rightly related” to God), Haartman writes, “In the optimal outcome of the desolation crisis, the lifting of repression allows the ego to regain access to intrapsychic representations of the good parent.”(p.114)         Elsewhere he writes, “…psychic integration, what Wesley deemed ‘growth in grace’”. (p173)         For Wesley these two developments were ontically dissimilar: one could be growing in grace while lacking psychic integration.

Irrespective of the foregoing, Watching displays a thorough grasp of the classical and contemporary psychoanalytic literature. It is replete with helpful insights concerning the Methodist tradition.         It is cogently argued. It is a worthy contribution to the psycho-religious discussion and will foster much fruitful discussion.

Keith Haartman currently teaches at the Institute of Communication and Culture, University of Toronto at Mississauga .

Victor Shepherd

Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology

Tyndale University College & Seminary

Toronto

 (The Toronto Journal of Theology, Fall 2004)

John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch. Cambridge , Eng. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp vii + 144. paper, $19.00 ISBN 0-521-53846-7.

The ligature of this book is as unmistakeable as Webster aspires to render it irrefragable; namely, while it is never to be denied that biblical texts have a “natural history,” what characterizes such texts isn’t this history but rather their role in the saving economy of God’s self-communication. In short, this function “is ontologically definitive of the text.”(p. 19) Admitting the assistance that cognate social and literary criticism renders the exegete, Webster relentlessly prosecutes his thesis: the essence of Scripture (he capitalizes the word everywhere) isn’t one with the ontologies presupposed by cognate disciplines; the ontology of Scripture is unique just because there is no substitute for the service it renders the self-bestowing God who ever remains ontically sui generis and whose self-communication is therefore logically singular. In short, Webster’s book sustains his conviction that Scripture is rightly understood only as it is apprehended in accord with its dogmatic purpose, fellowship with the Holy God.

While the book is principally about Scripture, it can be about this only as it is simultaneously no less about gospel, church and theology. Accordingly Webster declares concurrently, “[I]n following God’s address of the church in Holy Scripture, theology cannot be anything other than a commendation of the gospel.”(p. 132) Situated in an era where many find theology freighted with almost every concern except the gospel, Webster’s pronouncement will reverberate as both manifesto and gauntlet.

The book consists of four chapters, each of which describes a feature essential to “an orderly dogmatic account of what Holy Scripture is.”(p. 1) In the first chapter, “Revelation, Sanctification and Inspiration,” Webster insists that Scripture is a human artefact and the church’s use of it a human event. Yet since Scripture is acknowledged Holy, it is related to God in a way that the creation-at-large is not. Specifically, Scripture is an aspect of that revelation whose author and content is the self-bestowing God who genuinely gives himself to us salvifically without giving himself over to us. God ever remains Lord of that revelation whose substance God alone is, and Scripture ever remains the unsubstitutable occasion of its reoccurring. In this context sanctification is that act whereby God authentically uses human creatureliness without thereby suggesting that God’s action here renders revelation naturally apprehensible or Scripture’s substance philosophically determinable. Wisely avoiding “naming names” (e.g., post-Reformational Protestant Scholasticism) Webster cogently argues for the subordination of inspiration to revelation. (To invert this is to misconstrue both.) He insists that inspiration is neither objectification (this would elevate the inspired “product” above the activity the reality it attests) nor spiritualization (this would render the church the locus of inspiration rather than the text.)

In the second chapter, “Scripture, Church and Canon,” Webster is unambiguous: “The definitive act of the church is faithful hearing of the gospel of salvation announced by the risen Christ in the Spirit’s power.”(p. 44) Yet he disclaims anything approaching bibliolatry: to speak of Scripture is to speak for the sake of the action of God; i.e., while Scripture is not the object of faith it can never be separated from the faith that God alone quickens.

In a masterly discussion of canon and canonization Webster voices the most direct disagreement of the book when he faults Robert Jenson for the latter’s insufficiently qualified assertion (Systematic Theology, Vol. 1. Oxford : OUP: 1997, p. 27) that the canon is the church’s decision rather than acknowledgement. Jenson’s deficiency here Webster deems to leave Scripture in the church’s control, whereas faithful submission to Scripture defines the church. The same deficiency denatures Scripture as the instrument of God’s judgement on the church. Canonization, Webster argues, is not the church’s achievement but rather the event of the risen Christ’s bringing his people to account for his sovereign efficacy through the witnesses he has commissioned.

In the third chapter, “Reading in the Economy of Grace,” Webster advances his preference for “reading” to “interpreting” Scripture, since the latter term is freighted with literary, psychological and philosophical considerations amounting to qualifications that humans “bring” to the text, when Scripture as viva vox Dei requires self-renunciation as spiritual qualification. Here Webster distances himself from Schopenhauer’s typically modern “anthropology of reading” wherein reading results (supposedly) in an unthinking absorption that obviates the “immediacy of judgement” (p. 69), a free, creative, spontaneous act. The revelation that Scripture attests and in which it is included contradicts Schopenhauer at every point as grace frees cognition from self-deception and spontaneity from arbitrariness. Reading , then, so far from mindless absorption, is a human activity that paradoxically confesses, “Nothing in my hand I bring.” Perspicuity, similarly, is an implicate of soteriology as faith discerns the inherent splendour of the gospel.

“Scripture, Theology and the Theological School ,” the final chapter, explores the place of Scripture in the curriculum of theological institutions. Cherishing the theo-logic of the Magisterial Reformers, Webster ransacks Ursinus’ A Hortatory Oration to the Study of Divinity. He contrasts Ursinus’ preoccupation with the substance of Scripture to the methodological self-consciousness that haunts contemporary theological discussion and obscures the gospel. Like Calvin before him, Webster gladly admits pietas alone to direct theological learning to holiness, without which theological endeavour becomes vicious. At the same time his emphasis on pietas by no means denigrates the place of office. So far from Spirit-less bureaucratization, “office” confesses that theology has been appointed to warn the church where and how it is capitulating to an idolatrous proclivity to domesticate the Word. Theology will honour its authoritative office only as is claims no authority for itself but forever points away from itself to that Word whose authority can never delegated, relegated or shared.

While the book’s thesis tolls the author’s disagreement with approaches to Scripture that claim to be theological yet disdain dogmatics, the tone of the book can only be described as judicious understatement. Aware that his point is unpopular in much of Anglo-American divinity, Webster takes pains to ensure that if there has to be a stone of stumbling it won’t be his style. His most tendentious points never so much as hint at rabies theologorum. At the same time subtlety never fosters opacity. Certainly compressed, the book is nowhere turgid or confused. Modestly it claims to be no more than a sketch when in fact it is a lode whose riches can be mined . Unflinchingly it has planted the flag of dogmatic priority concerning Scripture in that citadel whose putative guardians claim every scholarly reason for recognition except the reason: the God who is known only as he reconciles recalcitrant sinners, thereby relieving their blindness. For they are made partakers of that reality which Scripture attests and whose coherence dogmatics exposes.                                                              1102 words

Victor Shepherd

Tyndale University College & Seminary

Toronto

(Toronto Journal of Theology, Spring, 2004)

Oberman, Heiko Augustinus; The Two Reformations: The Journey from the Last Days to the New World .  New Haven : Yale University Press, 2003. Pp xx + 235. Cloth $65.99 Can. ISBN: 0-300-09865-5

Published posthumously, this book concludes the prolific, always profound writing of a Reformation historian who had previously produced dozens of books in four languages: Dutch (his native tongue), German, French and English. While perhaps appearing anti-climactic in the wake of his prize-winning The Harvest of Mediaeval Theology and Luther: Man between God and the Devil (this earned him the Historischer Sachbuchpreis for what Germany deemed to be the most significant history book, 1975-1985), the work crowns a contribution to church and university that few can equal.

The book consists of ten chapters that illustrate Oberman’s broad expertise concerning the diverse ingredients yielding any event in historical occurrence. Chapter I, “The Gathering Storm”, for instance, probes the manifold aspects of the Fifteenth Century, examining such determinants as the devastating impact of the Black Death, the suppression of Church conciliarism and the simultaneous appearance of political conciliarism, and the role of the Modern Devotion in shifting the common understanding of “religious” life from monasticism to Christian faith. Having begun his career as an intellectual historian at Oxford and Harvard, Oberman moves on, in Chapter II (“Luther and the Via Moderna: The Philosophical Backdrop of the Reformation Breakthrough”) to trace the lodes that are admittedly only one factor in the Reformation but by no means dismissible.

Subsequent chapters discuss, inter alia, the differences between Luther’s anti-Judaism and Erasmus’ anti-Semitism. Soberly Oberman concludes that while Luther admitted the baptized Jew to be Christian while Erasmus did not, Luther’s failure lies not so much in what he did but in what he failed to do: uniquely positioned at the end of the mediaeval period to “detoxify the central poison in Christian doctrine” (p. 83) – namely, supersessionism – Luther instead failed to announce the undeflectability of the covenant-keeping God with respect to the Jewish people.

Thoroughly conversant with the vernacular and classical languages of the Middle Ages and the Reformation, as well as with the most subtle nuances of mediaeval thought and life, Oberman characteristically brought to his métier an appreciation of diverse “locations” and their interconnexion. Here he was ahead of his time for most of his life, maintaining for decades what historians, pressured more recently by social scientists, have come to admit as essential: namely, the matrix of the political, economic, literary, social, intellectual, military, and religious factors that together determine historical developments. Oberman had long known that the isolation or elevation of any one of them rendered the historian’s work one-sided, inaccurate and misleading.

In a moving investigation of the doctrine of predestination, for instance, and its function with respect to the Reformed understanding of faith, Oberman sensitively discusses the location of Calvin and his followers as refugees. Hounded out of France and later out of Switzerland (1538-1541) Calvin remained a refugee virtually all his life, becoming a citizen of Geneva only in 1559, five years before he died. His theology, written for a pursued people permitted no rest on account of Counter Reformation persecution, aimed at sustaining those whose faith could not survive, let alone thrive, unless they knew that Christ’s grip on them was greater than theirs on him; in a word, they had to know that their life in Christ was rooted in an eternal appointment that no earthly treachery could undo. While acknowledging that most people in the Reformed tradition today are embarrassed by Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, Oberman more sympathetically probes the psycho-social situation of the refugee, quoting several times Calvin’s haunting comment, “We have no other place of refuge but his (i.e., God’s) providence.” (p.150) For homeless, stateless, hapless refugees, God’s hand – never to relax and drop them into that “abyss” that Calvin did not doubt – remained the sole, saving solace.

In the same vein Oberman brings to light the role of social location in the well-known fact that the Jewish people have fared much better in Reformed lands than elsewhere. Before Calvin, Luther and Zwingli had adopted the Augustinian notion, pregnant with horrors for Jewish people throughout the Middle Ages, that Jews wandered refuge-less inasmuch as God had consigned them to misery on account of their non-recognition of Jesus. It was only when Calvin and those he sustained found themselves forever wandering just because of their recognition of Jesus that they began to re-read scripture and to find in it the promise that no human violation of the covenant induces God to abandon us. As a result the Jewish people gained the support of Calvinist Christians even as the latter gave up a theology whose barbarity, rooted in ages-old supersessionism, had tormented neighbours wanting only to honour the covenant forged with Abraham. Pursuing the same point, Oberman unobtrusively corrects those who maintain that only in post-revolutionary France , avowedly secular, was the Jew allowed to become a citizen: in fact Jewish people were granted citizenship in Calvinist Holland by the end of the Sixteenth Century.

The book concludes with its longest chapter, “Calvin’s Legacy: Its Greatness and Limitations.” While these fifty-three pages may appear scant satisfaction to Oberman readers hungry for the tome on Calvin he had been working at for fifteen years, they are replete with riches available nowhere else in the literature. Only in Oberman, for instance, do we read that while Calvin is reputed for his mountain peak commentaries on Romans and Hebrews, 2^nd Timothy remained his favourite in all of scripture.

Rich in substance, the book is redolent with the humble faith of an intellectual giant who cherished Calvin’s strengths, admitted his weaknesses, and was unashamed to say with Luther, “We are beggars” – and then to add himself, “These beggars are kings.”

Heiko Augustinus Oberman         1930—2001     Requiescat in pace.

Victor Shepherd

Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology

Tyndale Seminary

Toronto .

Canadian Evangelical Review, Fall 2003

Jenson, Robert W.; On Thinking the Human: Resolutions of Difficult Notions ( Grand Rapids : Eerdmans, 2003) Pp. xii + 86. $23.99 Can.

This brief book’s compression is unparalleled among recent, shorter offerings in theology. Readers of Jenson will not be surprised at this feature, since they have seen as much in his always-rigorous, representative work over several decades: God After God: The God of the Past and the Future as Seen in the Work of Karl Barth — 1969; then more recently America ‘s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards — 1988; and more recently still, his two-volume, magisterial Systematic Theology — 1997, 1999.

At the same time, his characteristic compression does not issue in opacity; on the contrary it is lucid throughout, even as the most diligent readers will find themselves having to sit straighter in their study chair. For this book is no little challenge for the theological neophyte. It presupposes more-than-modest familiarity with the history of Christian thought, and, equally, considerable philosophical sophistication together with an appreciation of postmodernism.

Then who will profit from the book? Maturer thinkers who need to think in new patterns and with a new vocabulary most certainly will gain from it, along with any and all who by vocation or avocation are concerned with understanding the profundities of what is uniquely human: social scientists, philosophers, cultural historians, literary critics, and politicians (whose work, ultimately, is the trusteeship of what is publicly owned as the human good.) While not written for the theological beginner, the book could well drive such a person, after the pattern of Jenson’s beloved Luther, to a despair that to be relieved only through delving into the cited works, mountain peaks in thought, among which Jenson moves with accomplished ease. Regardless of where a chapter begins or what paths it pursues, it “comes home” invariably where all humankind can alone be “at home”: participation by grace in the innermost life of the Triune God. Plainly the doctrine of God (i.e., the doctrine of the Trinity) is the ad quo and the ad quem of all Jenson’s thought. This fact alone is noteworthy, for in today’s “therapy culture” even theological texts concerned with “thinking the human” are expected to be, and lamentably too often are, religionized glosses of the social sciences. Jenson, however, insists that what it is to be a human being can be known only with reference to the Triune God; and for this reason, any reflection on “difficult notions” pertaining to the human must be reflection ultimately on who God is in himself eternally — which is to say, who and what we are in relation to him, since God has not willed to be God without us.

The book begins with “Thinking Death” and concludes with “Thinking Love. In between are four more chapters, “Thinking…Consciousness, Freedom, Reality, Wickedness.” Each chapter takes one (or several) theologian and philosopher as interlocutor. Thereafter it investigates the topic at hand by viewing it from several angles, always in conversation with philosopher, theologian, assorted assessors of culture, and Jenson’s own evaluation of contemporary social trends. (He is not afraid, for instance, to liken “our eugenics by mass execution” to those of the Nazis. He has in mind, of course, the cavalier deployment of abortion.)

Perhaps the best way that a reviewer can introduce the book is to acquaint the reader with the substance and style of any one chapter. “Thinking Wickedness” was begun the Monday following the terrorist attack on New York City. Denying all facile notions of “moral equivalence” (suffering engendered elsewhere through American foreign policy legitimates the sort of slaughter of “9/11”), Jenson nonetheless acknowledges that human wickedness, however cursorily discussed or denied in shallow pulpits of modernity, has been and deserves to be a matter worthy of theological diligence. He reaches back to the work of Michael Illyricus Flacius, the Gnesio-Lutheran excoriated by the Philipists (intellectual descendants of Melanchthon;) Flacius insisted that fallen human nature is substantially wicked. The Philipists pointed out, of course, that if this were the case then “people” would not be so much fallen as obliterated; redemption would be impossible; and the Incarnation could never have occurred. At the same time, Jenson is unhappy with the Philipists’ wording in the Formula of Concord (Lutheranism’s classical doctrinal statement) that in the wake of the Fall humans are sinners only “accidentally” rather than “substantially” (Concord herein using these terms with utmost Aristotelian precision, since “accidental” leaves our sinnership too remote from who we are, all humankind now “Teflon-coated.”) Next he probes the matter of individual identity, its adherents presupposing that identity has to do with what is “in us” rather than with our relationship to what is outside us. From here he makes a big step (but not a leap) to a discussion of ontological contingency, humans, of course, always possessed of contingent being only. Then he points out that substance, strictly speaking, is substance only if it perdures through time and beyond time, since temporality renders finite substance inherently impossible. (His footnote “reminds” readers that the only serious theological error he finds in Thomas Aquinas is perhaps the latter’s failure to probe eternity/time sufficiently critically.) Next he expands his previous assertion on how we are identical with ourselves not in virtue of what is within us but rather in virtue of what (Who) we are within; for in truth we are within the “within-ness” of the inherently triune life of Father, Son and Spirit. Finally he argues with exquisitely nuanced progression how it is that only when the triune community and all created community are finally one will there be resolved that human wickedness which is more than accidental (despite “therapeutic” protestation) yet cannot be “substantial,” as Flacius’s opponents knew.

In an era when so very much theology appears to have forgotten that theology is to be about God, this book is sustained witness to Jenson’s preoccupation with the doctrine of God — which preoccupation, the reader will conclude, arises just because nothing less than God fills the horizon of Jenson’s thought and life.

Victor Shepherd       Tyndale University College & Seminary

Webster, John. Holiness. Grand Rapids : Eerdmans, 2003. Pp. ix + 116. Paper, $26.99 Can.

ISBN: 0-8028-2215-0

Those familiar with Webster’s magisterial works concerning the practical import of Karl Barth’s theology (e.g., Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation and Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought) will not be surprised to find this book exemplifying the same learning, wisdom, and turn of phrase that sears insight after insight upon mind and heart. Neither will they be surprised to find here sufficient evidence that it is precisely the most recondite theology which most consistently and most profoundly assists the Church in its daily life, worship and mission. Webster’s opening sentence, “This book is a Christian theological essay on holiness” (p.1), declares his agenda. The four chapters of the book deliver the promised substance.

Webster is unapologetic concerning his orientation and logic: theology is holy speech; holy just because it is generated by, bound to and disciplined through the Holy One whom it aspires to serve. And since “The self-giving presence of Christ in the Church is the law of the holy” (p.2), theology can be articulated only in the Church. In turn the Church’s stammering attempt at speaking for God can be protected only by a proper fear of the Church’s Lord.

Throughout chapter one, “The Holiness of Theology”, Webster sustains his contention that theological thinking about holiness is itself an exercise in holiness. In this vein he develops the leitmotif of “holy reason.” Here Webster avoids twin pitfalls: capitulation to modernity’s brazen confidence that reason is unimpaired, and capitulation to postmodernity’s lament or sneer that reason’s integrity can never be recovered (or perchance never existed.) Cogently he argues, from several different angles, that it is grace alone, known in faith, which restores reason’s integrity inasmuch as reason is an aspect of humankind in its entirety, and it is this entirety which is included in the history of sin and reconciliation.

In “The Holiness of God” Webster’s Trinitarian focus comes to the fore. Rejecting any non-ostensive understanding of God, he insists that God’s simplicity, for instance, isn’t an undifferentiated unity in God that logically precedes God’s tri-unity (as in much Protestant Orthodoxy) but rather God’s “irreducible ‘this-ness’, executed in the drama of his works.”(p.38) Distancing himself from Rudolf Otto, Paul Tillich and Friederich Schleiermacher, for whom “the holy” was chiefly a religiously generic, humanly experienced phenomenon rather than God’s presence and action, he avers that “the holy” is the undiminished majesty of God in its most intimate saving relationship with us. Here Webster’s ringing affirmation is the ligature for several related considerations: e.g., the positive, sanctifying aspect of God’s holiness is characteristically prior to the wickedness-destroying aspect, the latter being merely the merciful militancy of the former; God’s jealousy is holy love’s refusal to allow the creature to forfeit itself by setting the terms on which it will live before God.

In “The Holiness of the Church” Webster maintains that the Church is holy not because of any ontological participation in God but solely on account of its vocation. For this reason he remains critical of “social trinitarianism”, the notion that the Church becomes not the witness to God’s saving incursion because first an heir of it, but becomes rather part of the being of God on account of the Church’s participation (in Hegel’s sense) in the Triune life of God. Here Webster identifies two implicates: the undervaluation of the free majesty of God and the concomitant drift toward divine immanence, as well as the compromising of the perfection and sufficiency of God’s work in Christ. At the same time he judiciously cautions against a similar two-fold reaction: a false spiritualization in which the humanness of the Church is denied, together with a dualism where God and the human are necessarily deemed mutually exclusive. Denying that the holiness of the Church is visible as if holiness inhered the Church, Webster nonetheless glories in the earthliness of the Church by insisting that the Church’s holiness is visible as the Church visibly hears ever again the promise and command of the gospel, confesses its sin in penitence and faith, bears witness to the world, and pleads with God for God to hallow his own name.

In the final chapter, “The Holiness of the Christian”, Webster highlights the difference between the Christian’s holiness and contemporaneity’s concern with “spirituality”, the latter too often hedonistic self-fulfilment. Instead he maintains that holiness is rooted in and finds its stable basis in forgiveness and reconciliation. He continues this “otherward” direction by complementing a reinvestigation of Calvin’s “mortification” with a refreshing exploration of holiness as divine appointment to obligatory service of the neighbour. Put most pithily, the believer’s holiness in Christ means “by the Spirit’s power I am separated from my self-caused self-destruction, and given a new self, enclosed by, and wholly referred to, the new Adam in whom I am and in whom I act.”(p.84)

Everywhere the book exudes an irenic spirit as Webster gently exposes inadequacies (e.g., Schleiermacher) while identifying strengths (Juengel, Staniloae, Augustine.) It rescues a crucial topic from the hands of religious romantics. It depicts an able theologian at work, zealous for God’s honour and the edification of the Church.

Victor Shepherd

Tyndale Seminary, Toronto

Thomas Clark Oden. The Rebirth of Orthodoxy: Signs of New Life in Christianity. San Francisco : Harper, 2003. Pp. xi + 212. Cloth. $39.99 Can. ISBN: 006009785X

Readers of this book might be advised to begin with Oden’s autobiographical statement, “A Personal Odyssey”( pp. 82-96), wherein he speaks candidly of his captivity to modernity, which captivity he unhesitatingly describes as “chauvinistic” in its arrogant, groundless assumption that the newer is invariably better than the older, the novel better than the tested, the speculative that titillates self-important knowledge elites better than the profound that has gained the consensus of the people of God. He then testifies to a conversion at the hands of God not in a spirit of self-advertisement but in confidence that the grace which brought him up out of the theological “miry pit” will use his testimony to do as much for those who still languish in it.

An American Methodist clergyman, Oden immersed himself in Bultmann’s anti-Incarnation and anti-Resurrection reading of the New Testament, then in Marxist economics, psychoanalysis, the human potential movement, feminism, abortion advocacy. All of this was gathered up in an unabashed politicization of the church’s mission; it issued in the shallowest spiritual faddism.

Oden’s turnaround began when Will Herberg, a Jewish colleague at Drew University whose recent acquaintance with classic Judaism found him returning repentant from the “far country” of communism, insisted that Oden would remain a dilettante until he studied his own tradition, particularly the “paleo” colossuses of the East and West alike: Athanasius, Basil, Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus, as well as Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory the Great. Oden’s recovery put him on a theological trajectory that he is still pursuing thirty years later.

Oden’s commitment to orthodoxy (the lower case letter is important, since the churches of the West as well as the East are included) is a repristination of “integrated biblical teaching as interpreted in its most consensual period”. (p.29) By “consensual” he means “the teaching that has been duly confirmed by a process of general consent of the faithful over two millennia.” (p.29) Plainly he honours tradition. Tradition ought never to be pitted against scripture since it is the conduit of scriptural teaching, even as scripture remains the unnormed norm of tradition while tradition aspires to be the faithful recollection of scripture. Without referencing G.K. Chesterton, Oden resonates with Chesterton’s understanding of tradition as the church’s memory. And just as amnesiac people whose lack of memory means they have no identity and cannot be trusted, Chesterton argued, “amnesiac” churches that disavow tradition can only be treacherous.

Oden pretends nothing else, having been himself both perpetrator and victim. Still, just as he is persuaded of orthodoxy’s soundness so is he convinced of the resilience and militancy of the regenerating power of the ancient faith. Orthodoxy has proved itself such, for it has withstood persistent assault at the hands of mainline denominations that have married modernity and mobilized their vast resources in the service of the ideologies and “isms” now characterizing denominational programs, publications, and seminaries. Oden argues that the World Council of Churches, whose outlook is incarnated in the U.S.A. in the multi-denominational collaboration housed at 475 Riverside Drive , New York City , was manifestly unravelling in the 1960s as it veered toward neo-paganism, shamanism and animistic primitivism. By its meeting in 1998 in Harare , Zimbabwe , the WCC had thoroughly betrayed the vision of its founders at the 1948 inauguration in Amsterdam . The only sounds emerging now from this “old” ecumenism are its death rattle.

The “new” ecumenism, on the other hand, is deliberately grounded in ancient consensus, upholds the distillations of the ecumenical councils, recognizes the arrears of sin even in believers, and remains critical of failed modern ideas (e.g., of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche) that have proved lethal amidst world-occurrence.

Oden cautions readers against confusing “new” ecumenism, orthodoxy, with “neo-orthodoxy.” For the latter (he makes some exceptions for Karl Barth) never was really concerned with the Fathers, life in Christ, liturgy, prayer, discipline, spiritual formation, sacramental live and pastoral care. Sound theology and Spirit-invigorated people, always essential to each other, emerge from a worshipping community whose doxological confession is matched by its willingness to suffer for the One it extols.

In light of the emphasis on ancient wisdom written, readers are not surprised at Oden’s reiterated reminder that much modern biblical study amounts to speculation concerning oral traditions that preceded the written text of scripture, together with a magnification of the supposed difference between the oral and the written. The “new” ecumenism, orthodoxy returning, recognizes that Holy writ is the primary source, ground and norm of all Christian (and Jewish) teaching. Unlike their modern counterparts, ancient exegetes looked to the whole of written scripture to illumine each part.

Yet it must not be thought that Oden is naively nostalgic, denying all substance to current concerns. He endorses the legitimacy of the “fairness revolution” (the attempt at redressing social inequities that are sheer iniquities) even if he deplores an approach whose consequences tragically include deepened inequality. He contends, however, that orthodoxy is the ally of the “fairness revolution” in that it corrects the latter’s blind spots, supplies it with a perspective it cannot acquire itself, and lends it staying power. In the same way orthodoxy supports the current concern for diversity, inclusion, tolerance and empathy. What, after all, is more diverse than an ecumenical consensus that included ethno-racially diverse spokespersons from lower Egypt, North Africa , Asia Minor and France ? (Not to mention the fifteen ethnic identities listed in Acts 2.)

While orthodoxy is inherently irenic in its service of the Prince of Peace, it unashamedly upholds the boundary-definitions inherent in Christian teaching. For this reason the critical aspect of orthodoxy, always bent on being constructive, honours in its polemics the faithful who have the courage to say “No”, apart from which their “Yes” would mean nothing. Sophia worship, for instance, is an excrescence whose appearing rightly elicits the faithful’s “No.”

The last chapter in the book, “Recovering the Classic Ecumenical Method,” also the longest, is a masterly presentation of the work and wisdom of Vincent of Lerins (c.450 C.E.) Known for his aphorism, Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est (“What has been believed everywhere, always, by all people”,) Lerins has furnished a key that has repeatedly unlocked the fetters of the church’s cultural captivity. Oden is his most persuasive in his articulation and deployment of Lerins’s “What has been believed….” Skilfully, patiently, cogently Oden acquaints the present-day Christian (who is now beginning to feel almost sectarian) with the nuances that had to be deployed in the fifth century and will have to be deployed in any era. Expansively but not verbosely Oden articulates the force of ubique: the faith that the church confesses the world over; of semper: the faith confessed by the apostles first and confessed thereafter; ab omnibus: the faith confirmed by an ecumenical council or a broad consensus of ancient Christian writers, affirmed by the laity and expressed in the church’s liturgy. Then Oden illustrates his exposition by juxtaposing “What if…?” to each of Lerins’s expressions: What if — a part of the communion rejects the whole? — a “new gospel” is preferred to the apostolic faith? — ancient witnesses themselves might be wrong? — no conciliar precedent is defined? He concludes the chapter by illustrating all of this by means of critical irruptions in the church’s history: the Donatists, the Arians, Mary as “Theotokos,” Appolinaris, Tertullian, Origen. Oden’s pellucid presentation in this chapter is worth the price of the book.

No less valuable, however, is his consistent inclusion of Judaism within the orthodoxy he espouses. Without trace of that supersessionism which has bedevilled the church and therein excoriated the Jewish people, Oden’s exquisite attention to scripture finds him admitting the place of Israel as Israel in God’s economy concerning church and world. Judaism, having awakened too from its modernistic miasma, is recovering its identity in scripture and the rabbinic tradition forged coincidentally in the Patristic era. Never discounting the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, Oden is glad to say that through the Nazarene, Gentiles have been brought into the faith of God’s covenant with Israel, there being only one covenant (albeit renewed in Christ) as surely as there is only one God. In all of this Oden remains convinced that Jews, no less than the church, have something decisive at stake in the recovery of classic Christianity, even as Christians have as much at stake in the recovery of classic Yiddishkeit.

  Oden’s challenge is as unmistakeable as it is undeniable: “Can classic Christians and confessors of apostolic faith in the mainline churches cooperatively form a plausible accord that effectively resists the apostatizing temptations endemic within the unregenerate mainline?” (p.141) Since the evangelical churches are now seemingly indistinguishable from the mainline in their neglect of long-term memory and in their cultural accommodation, Oden’s question ought to haunt all Christians alike.

Victor Shepherd
Tyndale University College and Seminary

(International Journal of Systematic Theology)

Perkins, Robert L. (editor). International Kierkegaard Commentary (Volume 21): For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself! Macon, GA.: Mercer University Press, 2002. Pp. xii+374. $45 US.

With the completion of Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the ‘Philosophical Fragments’ (1846) Kierkegaard intended to cease writing. Finding, however, that he could not deny himself, his “second series,” penned non-pseudonymously, began four years later with the appearance of For Self-Examination.

The “second series” highlights theological issues that Kierkegaard finds in Luther or Nineteenth Century Danish Lutheranism. In a country where the church is established a virulent, militant “Christendom” is inevitable. Galvanized by the extent to which the Peace of Westphalia (it rendered the religion of any political ruler the religion of the people) had diluted the gospel, perverted Lutheranism, profaned the church, and misled most concerning the gift, claim and suffering of genuine faith, Kierkegaard’s two works under discussion in the twelve essays of Vol. 21 of the IKC speak to Christians of any persuasion of the insidiousness of “Christendom.”

In the first article Lee Barrett explores the cruciality of “authorial voice” in Kierkegaard’s non-pseudonymous writings; e.g., poet, penitent, humorist, aspiring-yet-deficient Christian. He argues that an appreciation of the differences in authorial voices is not a post-Kierkegaard agenda of literary criticism read back into him; rather it is to see how Kierkegaard himself relates voice and meaning. Drawing on British philosopher J.L. Austin’s understanding of “performative force” in language, Barrett insists that the meaning of existentially significant textual communication does not inhere the text. In other words, the meaning of the text is controlled, at least in part, by the end which the author intends; i.e., by how the text performs or is meant to function. In illustrating his thesis Barrett contrasts FSE & JFY! with Works of Love. The latter aims at clarifying love, stimulating it, and magnifying its attractiveness. The former aims at awakening pained awareness of one’s failure in all of this, together with repentance and self-abandonment to the grace God proffers.   This contrast, however, is no contradiction. Liturgically, for instance, both are needed in the service of praise and penitence. Barrett’s point remains, however, that a text’s content is always related to its intent, and this in turn to the form of communication. He concludes, “…a neutral, omniscient authorial metaperspective is not available.”(p.35) Communication is always context-specific.

Craig Hinkson explores Lutheranism’s divagations as successive Luther images, amounting to a contradiction of Luther, appeared in Melanchthon’s humanism, Chemnitz’s orthodoxy, Arnold’s pietism, the Enlightenment’s Rationalism, and finally Goethe’s “Luther personality” giving rise to Germany’s culture and its spirit. First Luther’s thought was co-opted by the orthodox who re-introduced Aristotle as a buttress for theology. The pietists, rightly discerning the dimension of the “heart” in Luther and rightly resisting Melanchthon’s intellectualist veer in the doctrine of faith, pointed out that pure doctrine and pure faith were not the same. At the same time, pietism’s undervaluation of doctrine born of revelation inadvertently supported the rationalism lurking in Melanchthon. Orthodoxy found its zenith in an Enlightenment that claimed to be able to demonstrate doctrine philosophically. By now the operative image was Luther as the champion of autonomous reason (Luther himself had called this a “whore.”)   Hegel provided a philosophical legitimization of Kulturprotestantismus. Goethe insisted that Luther’s character was the only noteworthy feature of the Reformation.   Kierkegaard set his face against the conglomeration of Luther images, unambiguously announcing the purpose of his authorship: “I have wanted to prevent people in ‘Christendom’ from existentially taking in vain Luther and the significance of his life.”[1]   Derided as an eccentric, Kierkegaard found vindication only as Luther was discovered anew in the Twentieth Century.

Lee Barrett returns to argue compellingly that despite Kiergkegaard’s insistence in FSE and JFY! that Christians are characterized by what they do, Luther’s priority of grace-engendered faith is not denied. In fact it is the latter that grounds Kierkegaard’s understanding of the three uses of the law. With respect to the third use Kierkegaard magnifies gratitude for gratuitous salvation as the motive for wanting to follow “Christ the Prototype,” even though this following necessarily entails the world’s hostility and the believer’s consequent suffering. In view of a gratitude that fuels self-forgetfulness, believers are relieved of the “probabilities” inherent in those whose shrewd calculating creates a “self” they can never afford to forget. While gratitude is the Christian’s initial motive, the Christian’s more exalted motive is apprehension of love’s inherent loveliness (God’s). (Here this reviewer finds a parallel to Jonathan Edwards that could have been probed and would have proved fruitful.) At the end of the chapter Barrett teases the reader with the suggestion that the Christian as agent must cooperate with grace in some sense. The reader could wish that Barrett had explored in Kierkegaard the logic of non-synergistic cooperation, presupposed glaringly in “Ludvig-and-his-stroller,” and found lucidly in the Patristic notion of gratia operans/gratia cooperans.

In light of Bonhoeffer David Law examines FSE as a protest against “cheap grace.” “Justification by grace through faith” has been reduced to a formula that can be recited mantra-like as a means of avoiding the gospel. At fault, says Kierkegaard, are the following: meticulous biblical scholarship whose logic is at odds with the logic of scripture and that ends in obscuring the Word it purports to serve, an apologetic whose rationalism is the sphere in which doubt is addressed (supposedly) even as the self-same rationalism legitimates and magnifies doubt, a failure to understand that doubt concerning the truth disappears as truth is done, non-acknowledgement that “new death” (“dying to” self) is essential to “new birth,” and the confusing of “subjectivity” with selfism. Law faults Kierkegaard for failing to grasp the gospel’s redressing of social inequalities. The reader may ask whether all social inequities are ipso facto social iniquities, and ask again if Kierkegaard’s “oversight” is in fact his refusal to reduce the gospel to ideology.

Murray Rae challenges Barth’s assessment that in the dialectic of the gospel Kierkegaard ultimately weights condemnation more heavily than grace. Addressing Barth’s complaint that Kierkegaard’s imbalance issued in a legalism that deadens, saddens and sours, Rae corrects Barth’s misapprehension: Kierkegaard is not guilty of an imbalance wherein the announcement of forgiveness and reconciliation in Christ fails to uplift but leaves hearers despairing still of their unworthiness.   Rae brings together Kierkegaard’s illustration of the birds of the air and the lilies of the field (they are alike carefree), the fact that the Prototype with his unconditional demand is also the Redeemer, and the latter’s unconditioned gift of reconciliation that eclipses our condemnation. The aforementioned atonement (incomprehensible apart from our utter condemnation) exalts disciples and renders their discipleship acts of trust in it. Such publicly enacted trust serves as witness. Whereas the Enlightenment, not understanding that reason is culturally conditioned, prefers “reasons” that explain condemnation, reconciliation and obedience, Kierkegaard insists that witnesses alone declare Truth to be accessible by S(s)pirit; which witnesses, he notes, doubt never afflicts. In the same vein Rae exonerates Kierkegaard in the face of Barth’s accusation that believers are left ransacking their hearts for the love wherewith they are to love others. Drawing on Works of Love as well as FSE and JFY!, especially “Ludvig-and-his-stroller,” Rae indicates neighbour-love to be the outworking of God’s transformative love in atonement-embracing sinners; i.e., love is Spirit-facilitated. Rae concludes his correction of Barth by showing that the Prototype’s unconditional demand is also unconditional promise: “You shall love” means both “you must love” and “you will unfailingly love,” for in Christ the law has been fulfilled.

Sylvia Walsh investigates not so much an issue raised chiefly in FSE and JFY! but rather the theme of self-denial everywhere in Kierkegaard. In the course of her examination she introduces English-speaking readers to a protracted dispute between two Swedish scholars, Torsten Bohlin and Valter Lindstroem, on whether Climacus’s understanding of dying to immediacy in the Postscript conforms to Kierkegaard’s subsequent interpretation of it. Is Kierkegaard ultimately sin-denying or life-denying? Walsh, thoroughly acquainted with the subtleties in Kierkegaard and his commentators, adroitly steers the reader through the dispute, then moves on to yet another commentator, Marie Thulstrup, and assesses the latter’s insistence that any shift in Kierkegaard’s understanding of “dying to” arises from a shift in his view of nature. Having identified and probed the many nuances in this disputed topic, Walsh concludes that Kierkegaard’s “dying to” entails not the negation but the transformation of the immediate, natural, pagan and human dimensions. Lest readers regard the conversation as arcane, she hauntingly ends her article with the reminder that “dying to,” according to Kierkegaard, means that the Christian will die twice over: when repudiating selfishness, and when incurring and accepting the hostility of a world whose “self-denial” and “love” are the abysmal inverse of Christianity’s.

Paul Martens expounds the role of the Holy Spirit in FSE and JFY!, maintaining that Kierkgaard here says more about the Holy Spirit than anywhere else. Only the Spirit saves “dying to” from corrupted self-assertion, collapses earthly hope into hopelessness thereby giving rise to “hope against hope” (Romans 4:18), and keeps arduous discipleship from being inherently enervating. Only the Spirit, according to the parables of the Royal Coachman in FSE and JFY! respectively, drives the Christian ahead on the Way and at the same time stills all attempts at self-making for the sake of a self divinely wrought. Martens indicates that for Kierkegaard too the Spirit alone leads people into the Church, exalts the Redeemer and vivifies the Word. In short, the Spirit alone ensures that all that is urged in the two books concerns an encounter with God.

Louise Carroll Keeley confronts the putative misogyny in Kierkegaard with a moving, lyrical exploration of the riches embedded in FSE‘s apparently patriarchal “And You, O Woman.” Arguing that the substance of Kierkegaard’s “silent woman” may be exemplified by men, Keeley searches the depths of silence, domesticity and joy. Silence is not the artificiality of deliberate wordlessness; it is rather attentive listening to the eternal Word amidst the world’s noise. Predated by the Word, silence injects into the present its “beneficent power,” and because pregnant with the Word silence orients one to the future by directing one’s action. Silence alone can render one aware that one is constituted by Another. And since what one hears in silence one subsequently does, so far from isolating one from others silence connects one to them. In the same manner Keeley indicates how Word-besotted silence renders a house a spiritual home, and how Word-fostered joy sheds temptation as joy overcomes the divided mind that temptation always exploits.

In an approach reminiscent of A.J. Heschel who, when faced with younger Jewish people complaining that they did not understand Torah told them that if they only did it they would understand it, John Whittaker explores Kierkegaard’s insistence that only as we do the truth do we believe it. In probing Kierkegaard here Whittaker distinguishes between objective religious truth and the means by which it is known. Objective religious truth can be known only “subjectively,” only in “inwardness,” only as one inhabits truth that is essentially transformative. Herein Kierkegaard insists that the authority of God’s Word is never inferred and never generated by something outside that Word. Aware of the nature of scriptural authority, believers renounce all attempts at explaining why God’s Word is believable. Ultimately, then, the authority of the bible is the capacity of Jesus Christ (the “Prototype”) to transform readers and conform them to him as they read the book that attests him.

Julia Watkin probes the nature of Kierkegaard’s analogy of scripture as “The Letter from the Lover.” In this regard she examines chiefly the matter of biblical criticism and the extent to which it might erode what Kierkegaard calls “one’s acceptance of Christianity.” Rightly she points out that if the “Prototype” and the “God-man” are necessary for faith, and if criticism could establish that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, then no one is “equally free” to “accept Christianity.” (CUP) Concerning the Incarnation Watkins’s work will precipitate protracted discussion for here she points out that Kierkegaard never indicates why the appearance of the God-man is necessary to the occasion of faith, and insists herself that any number of situations may serve as such an occasion. Thereby she supports the agnostic/atheist offspring of Kierkegaard who affirm the possibility of “truth is subjectivity” while denying what Kierkegaard deemed to lie behind it. Since Watkin maintains that the universe’s lover is “capable of writing all kinds of love letters (p.313),” she appears to leave the reader with too little help and perhaps Kierkegaard himself misrepresented when she concludes with, “yet, as with every communication, people need to be alert as to whether it really is a love letter that they are looking at (p.313).”

David Cain probes dialectic in Kierkegaard through Kierkegaard’s rejection of “cheap victory” amidst pseudo-Christian triumphalism: the star (of victory) is in the cross, not the cross in the star. Then Cain returns to an examination of the Law-Gospel arrangement, only this time in a way that recalls the logic of the Heidelberg Catechism: Bad News, Good News, Gratitude born of Good News as the sole, sufficient motivation of Christian discipleship. Gratitude, Cain insists, is “Christian motivation for staying ‘in the striving (p.323).'” Cain crowns his essay on Kierkegaard’s dialectic from the Journals and Papers (1:993): “…infinite humiliation and grace and then a striving born of gratitude — this is Christianity.”

Martin Andic concludes the volume and the four essays on Kierkegaard and scripture through a comparison of the “mirror” of the divine in both Kierkegaard and Socrates. His principal point is that Kierkegaard, in affirming the reading of scripture to be a divine way to self-knowledge, “contrasts the Christian view with the Socratic one too sharply” inasmuch as “Socrates, the pagan…did seek to know himself precisely before God (p. 355).” Andic proceeds to prosecute his thesis that for Socrates “We become like God by selfless righteousness that will never do wrong no matter what worldly good we must forfeit and regardless of what worldly evil we have to endure. Kierkegaard says that we become spirit and… acquire the love of God by doing God’s Word and suffering whatever comes. Both call for dying to self and worldliness, and for both it is humility and justice that unite us to God, the self-effacing service of truth that makes us living mirrors.” (p. 357) Here Andic’s article will surely provoke much discussion as to whether Socrates did or could seek to know himself before “God;” i.e., is Socrates’ “divine” the Holy One of Abrahamic faith who renders himself Incarnate? Is the formal similarity in Socrates and Kierkegaard a material identity? Do Socrates and Kierkegaard remain congruent if Christ-wrought grace and faith are deleted from the latter?

Its angle of vision chiefly theological rather than philosophical, this volume exhibits Kierkegaard’s oneness with key dimensions of Luther; it distances Kierkegaard from theological and ecclesiastical distortions in Lutheranism; it develops themes that Kierkegaard scholarship has overlooked heretofore; and it challenges readers to reread the Dane where contributors’ readings appear tendentious.

Victor Shepherd , Tyndale University College and Seminary, Toronto.

[1] On My Work as an Author, Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.) p.17.

 (CANADIAN EVANGELICAL REVIEW, Spring, 2003)

Oldstone-Moore, Christopher; Hugh Price Hughes: Founder of a New Methodism, Conscience of a New Nonconformity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999) Pp. x + 393. $82.95 CAN.

ISBN: 0 7083 1468 6

This fine book, published in 1999, appears to have lurked in a Sheol-like underworld for several years, only recently to emerge among the living. It ably acquaints readers with the vision, theology, courage and suffering of a Methodist giant who applied himself relentlessly to the challenges his era brought before him.

The book aims at providing a critical analysis of the ideas and work of Hughes. Herein it sheds light on aspects of British history treated only slightly elsewhere. Along the way it schools readers profoundly in the origins of the ecumenical movement in Britain , Methodism’s contributions to the women’s movement, and the nature of the “Nonconformist Conscience.”

Hughes (1847-1902), the most prominent spokesperson for British Methodism during the latter half of the 19^th century, maintained that two matters characterized modernity: the rise of learning among the masses (together with the newly politicized workers’ demand for social democracy), and the concomitant rise of cultured Christians. The latter’s apprehension of and zeal for the Kingdom could guide, support and elevate a movement that would heal class divisions (they were worse in Britain than anywhere on the Continent) and defuse the social evils that frustrated society in its appointment to reflect the glory of God. To his life’s end Hughes tolled the six evils that he had identified as especially iniquitous: slavery, drunkenness, the social evil [sexual impurity with its attendant degradation and disease], ignorance, pauperism and war. Yet in all of this he never proffered panaceas, always insisting that a deepening of the spiritual life in clergy and leaders remained Methodism’s most urgent need.

Knowing the allegiance that the Free Churches enjoyed in Britain , Hughes urged them to shed their inferiority and assert themselves as the vanguard of renewal. His first target was the liquor traffic. Knowing that Hogarth’s painting, ” Gin Lane ,” was no exaggeration, he insisted that liquor-abuse and misery were alike cause and consequence of each other. Both would have to be attacked.

Next he turned to the “Contagious Diseases Act”, meant to limit the spread of venereal disease. In fact it amounted to government sanction of prostitution. It also violated the human rights of women, subjecting them to invasive examinations. Since the Act pertained only to women, it enforced a double standard; since it was applied only to “common” prostitutes, it thickened class distinctions; since its real purpose was to provide VD-free fornication for armed forces personnel, it was reprehensible. Prostitutes, said Hughes, were dealt with “as sewers are treated” by sanitation engineers; they were dehumanized. (Congregationalists and Baptists shrank from his “indecent” public pronouncements.) The Establishment “packed” on him, some of its members glad to avail themselves of sexual opportunities rendered as risk-free as possible. Hughes remained unintimidated. His work here typified his lifelong, “holistic” conviction: the spiritual well-being of the individual, together with a just social life, and all of this supported where possible by parliamentary legislation urged by Christians.

Yet it must never be thought that Hughes was a thinly-disguised leftist who advocated social dismantling. He both supported and profited from the meetings of the Holiness Convention, reconsecrating himself to God in 1875, vowing his “all” to God without qualification or reservation. His rededication here coincided with his recognition that he had expected more from politics than it could deliver: only utmost spiritual renewal could effect national transmutation. Not surprisingly, then, his pastorates in an upscale London suburb and in Oxford found his ministry reverberating with evangelistic urgency. Yet always aware that “heat” and “light” belong together, he gained an advanced degree in philosophy from the University of London , and also introduced 1000-seat lecture halls into new Methodist church buildings, insisting that the farthest-ranging education of the laity was now non-negotiable in the Methodist ethos.

At the same time he knew that evil is most entrenched when most systemic. For this reason he came to embrace “socialism”, yet always a socialism informed by evangelism and, reciprocally, an evangelism infused with socialism. He was the first prominent Wesleyan preacher to declare himself a Christian socialist. “Have your right hand on political economy, your left on works of socialism, and before you the open Bible,” he urged every minister. (His “socialism” meant “social alleviation;” it never approached Marxism, advocating neither social levelling nor a state-planned economy.)

Hughes’ greatest achievement was the Forward Movement. The Methodist church was singularly positioned for this in that it was zealous for evangelism, assumed responsibility for the social well-being of people (Anglican claims to social reconstruction Hughes deemed insufficiently evangelical) and could form a new national consciousness. Convinced that Anglicanism was duplicitous on account of its relationship to the governing classes, Hughes felt that only Methodism could address social horrors in Britain . When it was reported that parents sold 13-year old daughters into prostitution for as little as five pounds, Hughes expostulated, “Can there be found a more shameful abuse of the power of wealth?” A colleague made such a purchase to prove it could be done, and then published an account of it in the Pall Mall Gazette. While some Methodists recoiled from tough confrontation, Hughes was adamant. The challenge he recognized here he deemed to be Methodism’s crossroads: either it demonstrated its capacity for effecting spiritual renewal with consequent social and national renewal (private charity, for instance, could never address systemic poverty) or it faded into the obscurity of a backwater sect.

Crucial to the Movement was the formation of the “Sisters of the People.”   These “Sisters” were more than the centuries-old deaconesses who had customarily administered material relief. Rather they promoted women’s equality, lobbied aggressively for social transmutation and political liberation, and preached at open-air services. Foregoing vows, they lived together and dressed distinctively. They were anything but mere soup-ladlers.

The Movement’s greatest crisis concerned overseas missions. It came to light that Methodist missionaries in India lived far above the people they were sent to serve, were paid far more than Methodist preachers at home, and accommodated their gospel to the Brahmins among whom they glided. (American Methodist missionaries in India , it was noted, were paid far less yet seemed vastly more effective.) The contradiction was resolved, but not before Methodist officialdom, embarrassed and angry, nearly censured Hughes.

The Movement’s greatest notoriety concerned Charles Stewart Parnell and the controversy around Irish Home Rule. Long a supporter of the latter, Hughes was aghast when the Irish continued to support Parnell despite his protracted adultery with Kitty O’Shea, wife to an Irish member of Parliament. “What is morally wrong can never be politically right,” Hughes repeated as often as he reiterated purity to be a political principle. In the wake of the conflagration Nonconformists gathered around him more tightly than ever.

In the second surge of the Movement he gave himself unstintingly to the recovery of the Church’s unity. Attacked by the high-church faction of Anglicanism, he pronounced it a threat to religious freedom, insisting that Free Church Christians were true “Scriptural Catholics.”   His leadership here was recognized in his election as first president of the National Council of Evangelical Free Churches.

Soon elected as well (1898) as president of the Methodist Conference, he reminded everyone that the local congregation remained the heart of the church: “I am very glad you have put a circuit minister in the chair.” From his chair he continued to press for old age pensions, better education for the socially underprivileged, and improved housing for the poor. Yet even more ardently he struggled for Methodism’s emphases: the necessity of conversion and Christian perfection, the latter being self-forgetful love for God and neighbour in self-abandonment to the Kingdom’s future in the world.

Hughes had brought English spiritual life out of 19^th century doldrums; he had rendered Nonconformity a political force; he had seen Methodist laity become the people’s leaders through such developments as the Trades Unions. In it all the luminosity of Jesus Christ had remained the “whence” and “whither” of his life and work.

Upon learning of Hughes’ desire to enter the ministry, his father, a physician, had said, “I should rather my son be a Methodist preacher than the Lord Chancellor of England.” Thirteen years after Hughes’ death David Lloyd George, chancellor of the Exchequer and soon to be prime minister of Great Britain, unveiled a portrait of Hughes and told the huge crowd what he had been thinking when he had attended Hughes’ funeral: “There lies silent the greatest spiritual force my generation has produced for a generation.”

[Victor Shepherd: Professor of Historical Theology: Tyndale Seminary, Toronto ]

 (Toronto Journal of Theology Fall 2003)

Jehle, Frank. Ever Against the Stream: The Politics of Karl Barth, 1906-1968.

Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. Pp. vi + 117. Paper, us$22.00. ISBN 0-80828-4944-X

   “A silent community, merely observing the events of the time, would not be a Christian community,” wrote Barth in 1944 as he reflected on his decade-long political struggle in Germany and Switzerland. Jehle relates how Barth exemplified his conviction that Christians, caught in political treachery, may and must act politically just because God’s grace alone lends the state its legitimacy and informs it of its task. So far from being thanked for his contribution here, Barth was never acclaimed in his native land. Four days after his death (December, 1968) a memorial service to honour him was held in the Basel cathedral, with no representative of the federal Swiss government attending. Three months earlier the funeral of Karl Jaspers, Basel’s famed philosopher, had seen many politicians on hand.

The book begins with Barth’s 1906 admission to Zofingia, Switzerland’s oldest student union. Already the twenty-year old was theologically astute and politically alert, thanks to the Swiss Reformation legacy of Zwingli, Oecolampadius and Calvin. Informed by them Barth’s political criticism quickly became diverse and discerning, comprehending a socio-economic arrangement whose “glass ceiling” kept able students out of university on account of their working-class background, as well as Germany’s “unbearable militarism” and Russia’s “Cossack terror.”

In 1907 Barth met Christoph Blumardt (the younger) and owned the latter’s awareness that the entire creation is “sighing for redemption”, and therefore can never itself be the kingdom of God. Soon his exposure to Harnack found him both profiting from the giant’s brilliance and disagreeing with his rapprochement between kingdom and culture. The historical criticism of Harnack’s liberal school was insufficiently critical, Barth concluded, mesmerized by the mystery of documents rather than by the mystery of their subject matter.

While World War I had sealed Barth’s departure from liberal theology, nascent fascism quickened his penetration of that anti-Semitism which he ever after maintained to be its “innermost centre” — never a mere feature of it. As early as 1922 he pronounced German anti-Semitism a “Christian impossibility”, even as church leaders were actualizing it and Barth was telling them they were re-paganizing church and nation alike. In 1925 he denounced Lutheran Theologian Paul Althaus’ sacralization of politics, finding no surprise in Althaus’ subsequent adulation of Hitler as a “pious and faithful sovereign.” In the face of even the theologically sophisticated who announced, “Christ has come to us through Adolf Hitler”, Barth persevered: the enemies of the Jewish people are the enemies of Christ. For this reason he fumed when the Pastors’ Emergency League sought to protect clergy of “non-Aryan descent” but failed to protect Jewish people in general, and then had to oppose benefactor Georg Merz (who had underwritten the publication of Barth’s 1922 Romans) when Merz supported the law forbidding Jews to assimilate, assimilation being an Enlightenment degeneracy. Barth faulted the Confessing Church when its Bishop Wurm commended the minister of justice for the latter’s fight against a Judaism that was inherently subversive morally, religiously and economically. By now he was isolated theologically and politically.

Deported to his native Switzerland, Barth continued to lecture on theology and the state until, in 1941, his telephone was tapped. His outspokenness was thought to threaten Swiss neutrality — even as Emil Brunner’s bathetic bromides were left untouched. At war’s end Barth campaigned for the humane treatment of Germany, never hesitating to endorse its guilt yet insisting that grace always entails a new beginning — only to be accused of harshness when he labelled Nazi depredations “inhuman.”

As World War II gave way to the Cold War, Barth didn’t carry the fight to communism as he had to Naziism. Jehle readily admits a measure of naiveness in Barth. Barth had said that communism was so far from Naziism’s brutalities that “they shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath.” Stalin couldn’t be compared with Nazi “charlatans.” Barth defended himself: communism aimed at something good, however awry it went; Naziism had aimed at nothing good. Still, Jehle insists that Barth never romanticized communism and soon recognized its hideousness.

Unquestionably the exploration of Barth’s correspondence with East European theologians is a major strength of this book. As vigorously as he opposed those who wanted to make Naziism an article of Christian faith, Barth wrote Bereczky, a pro-Communist Hungarian theologian that no political arrangement can be made such an article. And when Hromadka (Czech) proffered a theological endorsement of communism, Barth wrote that his “theology” was really a “particular kind of philosophy of history” that had been seen in the German Christian theologians as early as 1933.

At least one topic in the book is theologically provocative and should prove fruitful: Jehle maintains that Luther’s “Two Kingdoms” doctrine, pilloried for abetting Germany’s political accommodations, is virtually indistinguishable from Barth’s theology of politics. Both thinkers wanted to desacralize politics, thus freeing Christian obedience in the political realm.

The book brings readers face-to-face with Barth’s discernment, wisdom, realism and energy; above all, however, with his courage — much needed since, according to Jehle, “He never said what others wanted to hear.” Barth strikes this reviewer as a megaphone for the cry of Zwingli, Barth’s Swiss predecessor: “Not to fear is the victory.”

Text of review (excluding publishing details at top): 855 words.

Victor Shepherd

Tyndale Seminary

Toronto

Jeremy S. Begbie, Theology, Music and Time: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Pp xiv+317 ISBN: 0 521 44464 0 or 0 521 78568 5 (pb)

Books abound on the theological significance of music. (One need think only, for instance, of the many discussions of Bach’s chorales.) There has been, however, a dearth of material on the “musicality” of theology. Specifically, there appears to have been no treatment, theologically learned and musically accomplished in equal measure, of those aspects of the created order for which time is more than merely the complement of space. Here Begbie has filled a lacuna in both the theological and musical disciplines. One of his mentors, Victor Zuckerkandl, points out, “There is hardly a phenomenon that can tell us more about time and temporality than can music”. Begbie illustrates the assertion by exposing the reader to the kind of temporality essential to music, and thence to the kind that he deems to inhere and order the world at large. In light of the role of time in music, Begbie explores features of music (rhythm, metre, resolution, repetition) that he finds helpful additionally in providing new perspective on traditional themes of the faith: creation, salvation, eschatology, election, ecclesiology. The book’s sublime achievement remains an imaginative exploration of gospel truth in which the significance of music’s temporality, together with the assorted temporalities that are constitutive of the cosmos, are theologically related to each other through being related primordially to the temporality of God’s incursion in the Incarnate Son.

Yet Begbie’s book attempts even more: it aims at showing that music can enable theology to do its job better. Despite the fact that music is at best half-articulate (everyone maintains it “communicates” but no one knows precisely what) Begbie insists that music can deepen our knowledge of God. In the course of showing how music may and must sophisticate theology he indicates how music’s deployment of time assists theology in providing resources for understanding the temporality of the created order from a new perspective, for rejoicing in the inescapable “time signatures” of human existence, and for acquainting us thereby with previously unnoticed angles of vision that deepen theology’s grasp of the depths of creation, of our “fit” in it, and of the wisdom of the Creator of it all. Not least, he illustrates how a knowledgeable grasp of life’s “metres” and “rhythms” also highlights several unconscious yet untoward distortions that have skewed theological thinking.

Yet nowhere does Begbie attempt a “natural” theology of music that holds up music as a source of revelation, the nature of music thereby acquainting us with the nature of God. The book, rather, holds up everywhere Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God, as the event in which we are made the beneficiaries of God’s redemptive and creative gifts through the activity of the Holy Spirit.

Similarly the book nowhere submits to the older (i.e., late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century) notion of Kulturprotestantismus. According to Kulturprotestantismus, supported by many thinkers in one era of Germany’s intellectual history, the kingdom of God is understood in terms of developments within history, the culmination of which is a cultural achievement whose genuine richness only the philistine would deny. Yet as world-occurrence was soon to make manifest, the richest cultural achievements are not the kingdom of God, are not revelatory, have no power to redeem (whatever else they might do as a creaturely good), but rather can be and have been co-opted by powers that few have hesitated to pronounce demonic.

The Introduction includes two groundwork chapters, “Practising music” and “Music’s time.” In the former Begbie acquaints readers lacking musical expertise with the nature of music. Music-making, for instance, is “the intentional bringing into being of temporally organised patterns of pitched sounds.” In accommodating the musically uninformed Begbie points out features of sound that are unarguable as soon as we ponder them yet which we should fail to note had he not drawn our attention to them; e.g., we can see only what our visual “space” contains at one moment. (We can’t see in a room, for instance, what is behind us.) On the other hand, in the same room we can hear simultaneously the several sounds (as in a three-note chord) that occupy the same aural space.

In “Music’s time” he explicates aspects of music that he will return to throughout his book. Tonal music of the west, for instance, “goes somewhere”; its teleology is reflected in the constantly repeated pattern of tension and resolution; the resolution “gathers up” what has preceded and finds rest, even if the rest is only fleeting and an ingredient in the next sequence of sounds (“hyperbar”) that is itself a meta-exemplification of tension and resolution.

Plainly rhythm and metre pertain to music’s directionality. In fact temporality in music is manifested primarily through rhythm interacting with metre, the latter being chiefly a patterned succession of beats (e.g., “waltz time”), while the former is articulated by tones. (We hear the tones that acquaint us with the rhythm, and sense the metre through the rhythm.) Rhythm and metre, together giving rise to waves of tension and release, prevent the “time” of music from being no more than the linear regularity of metronomic monotony.

In this chapter Begbie demonstrates a “realist” conviction that the temporality that is one of the structures of the world at large is just that; it is not projection. Temporal patterns are found, after all, throughout life’s “clocks” from the macro-scale to the micro, from the larger rhythms of sleep and digestion through the smaller rhythms of the central nervous system (e.g., heartbeat) to the micro rhythms of subliminal neural impulses. Time is simply basic to human order; time is a function of the way things are intrinsically related. More to the point, music’s time-intensiveness is connected not merely to the temporality of the human mind and body but to the temporalities of the physical world at large in which diverse human temporalities participate. Begbie maintains, in his consistent realism, that much of the creation’s intrinsic temporality (e.g., bodily kinetic impulses) are implicated in the music we hear; part of what we experience through music is this intrinsic temporality. Temporality, then, is not the environment in which music occurs; it is a crucial part of what music is — of what everything is. Music is meaningful, then, not because of its representational power (unlike some forms of painting it largely lacks this) but rather through the interplay between music’s temporal processes and the manifold temporal processes that shape our lives.

In this regard the reviewer is reminded of a remark he heard from violinist Isaac Stern (d. 2001) when last he spoke in Toronto. A promising young violinist played for Stern and admitted she couldn’t get the phrasing of the music correct despite re-phrasing it repeatedly. Stern told her to sing the part. “I have a poor voice and I don’t want to sing”, she told him. “Sing the violin music anyway”, he told her. She did, and the phrasing fell into place immediately. “You see”, continued the old master, “when you sing you have to breathe. Breathing is a natural, temporal event; the breathing that is part of singing will acquaint you with the natural phrasing — the timing — of the violin music.” The point that Stern made about the relation between the timing and rhythm of breathing, a human occurrence whose “realism” no one denies, and the realism of the phrasing of the music; this relation, an intertwining of music with the temporality of the world at large and also with the temporality of the Incarnate one through whom and for whom all things have been made, Begbie explores ingeniously and articulates compellingly everywhere in the book.

In the second major section of the book “In God’s Good Time”, Begbie exposes and distances himself from the Greek philosophical understanding of time that continues to haunt the church, principally through the influence of Augustine. Hellenistic philosophy undervalued the ontic significance of time, insisting that only timeless existence is true existence. In the light of God’s incursion in the Word Incarnate, however, a proper recognition and affirmation of time corrects Augustine’s neo-Platonic deficits, insisting instead on (i) the world as the venue of God’s salvific activity, with an emphasis on Jesus Christ’s engagement with the totality of the creation; (ii) the work of the Spirit who directs all creation to its fulfilment. Having noted the Hellenistic-Augustinian difficulty with time’s reality, Begbie addresses its comparable difficulty with time’s goodness. Here he probes Augstine’s De Musica, noting that Augustine restricts his reflections on music to rhythmics and metrics concerning the way (thanks to Plato, his successors, and the realm of Forms) the mathematical ratios they illustrate riddle the universe. For Augustine the significance of music lies not in music’s sounds but in its mathematics, musical theory helping us to grasp immaterial reality, and thereby moving the soul from the tainted world of sense (music’s sounds would only fix it there) to the realm of intelligibility. While Augustine can speak positively of music, then, he does so not because of a temporality that God has authored and blessed and pronounced “good” without qualification but rather because music’s mathematics enables the mind to grasp a timeless eternity of pure intelligibility.

Begbie’s emendation is swift and sure. (i) Music demonstrates the possibility of ordered change (i.e., change need not imply chaos); music shows us that subjection to time doesn’t imply a warped creation, a deficient good. (ii) Music shows us that “taking time” — in the several senses of this expression (we need think only of the time Jesus spent “doing nothing” in the wilderness, without which the time he spent elsewhere would have been fruitless) — is inherently good and humanly enriching. (iii) Since a crucial aspect of music is the resolution of tension, the protraction of such tension deepens our capacity for waiting. Begbie notes the place of “waiting” in scripture, and of course never confuses waiting with waiting around or loitering. Waiting, both musically and scripturally, heightens anticipation. Waiting reminds us that we are not the lords of time. (iv) Music reminds us of different time-structures: things happen at different times, in different times, at different rates. (v) Music reminds us of the temporal limits of our finitude. Here Begbie repudiates the Hellenistic identification of finitude with fallenness, temporality and goodness (on this understanding) being mutually exclusive.

Since life is finite or limited, transience is inescapable. The transitions inherent in music (music is always the succession of sounds, never the “piled up” coagulation of sound) are ordered, glorious and enriching, and direct us to the manner in which life’s transience can be fruitful. Furthermore, since Jesus Christ is God’s gracious engagement with time, our temporal limitation and inescapable transience remind us that we live by grace — and die by the selfsame grace. (As a pastor who has stood at deathbeds for over thirty years the reviewer has come to grasp what the writer of Ecclesiastes meant when he wrote, without any hint of bitterness or futility, that in God’s good ordering there is indeed a time to die.)

Exploring yet more deeply the theme of transition in terms of tension and resolution, Begbie notes the theological significance of delay and patience, together with the relation of patience to steadfastness amidst suffering and the refinement of character amidst hardships. Sensitively he unfolds the way in which delays, in music and in the spiritual life, are fraught with provisional gratifications. (Music eschews instant gratification; the spiritual life ought to eschew them.) Each provisional gratification magnifies expectation of final gratification. Each closure in music (e.g., the end of a phrase) is related intrinsically through time to every other closure (the end of a movement) and ultimately to final closure (the end of the piece.) The Christian life, set between Christ’s Resurrection and his Parousia, similarly advances by means of provisional fulfilments, all of which are gathered up in its eschatological crowning, the ultimate “hyperbar” in Christian understanding and living. Music’s temporality, Begbie notes judiciously, not only gives us resources for theological reflection on God-given temporality but even becomes itself an event in the salvific process through the worship and witness of Christians.

Music, everyone is aware, is highly repetitive; good music, never cloyingly so but always “sameness with a difference”. Begbie illustrates this truth from the first movement of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony where the repetition is unusually protracted. Even as key and instrumentation change, the sound pattern is repeated tirelessly. In the hands of a skilful composer repetition — needed to preserve a musical piece’s identity whenever tonal modifications threaten to obscure that identity — both heightens tension and concurrently effects resolution, only to use the matrix of tension/resolution as the tension feature in the next hyperbar.

As with music, the repetition of the eucharist stabilizes, for through it God recalls the Christian community to the cross and the cross’s transformation. Yet since the eucharist rebinds Christians to the cross of the One who comes only to seek and save the lost, it destabilises by sending Christians back into a world of turbulence, turpitude and treachery, yet always with renewed hope for the world. And just as the proper deployment of variation essential to the profoundest repetition doesn’t deny the integrity of the initial appearance of the theme, so the eucharist’s repetition, modified by liturgical variation that forestalls dreariness, doesn’t deny either the singularity of “crucified under Pontius Pilate” or the sufficiency of Christ’s finished work.

Repetition in music never means that what has been repeated then falls back into vacuity. Musical repetition, then, parallels the biblical understanding of remembrance. Biblically to remember is to have a completed event in the past become the operative actuality in the present. Eucharistic repetition lies within the orbit both of musical repetition and biblical remembrance: what is past becomes the operative actuality of the present in the event of the repetition. Once again Begbie shows the reader how theology can be done through music.

The third section of the book, “Time to Improvise”, begins by discussing the relation of constraint and freedom, proceeds to articulate the place of constraint and freedom inherent in jazz improvisation, and gathers all of this up in a brilliantly argued reinvestigation of the gift-giving and gift-receiving, akin to that found in jazz, which Paul deems to characterize the mutual fruitfulness of Jews and Gentiles within the church.

Begbie introduces this final section by probing the work of two modern composers, Pierre Boulez (French) and John Cage (American). While they represent two contrasting approaches (Boulez is preoccupied with musical organisation, Cage with “just let it happen”), their music sounds similar just because both have shed the constraints of tradition, eagerly cancelling musical memory. Yet just as the amnesic person lacks an identity and is therein wholly determined by occurrences within and without, so Boulez and Cage have forfeited musical identity for the sake of a “freedom” that finds them courting determinations of which they seem to be unaware. To be relieved of constraints is to be in bondage to necessity of some sort, even that of chaos.

While improvisation might appear to the musically naïve to be no more than liberation from constraint, the improvisation characteristic of jazz presupposes uncommon constraint. In fact just because jazz maximizes improvisation it is the musical idiom most subject to the constraint of metre. (The pace of jazz metre is virtually unvarying.) Probing more profoundly the nature of jazz improvisation and its reliance on constraint, Begbie notes that constraint fosters contingency, and contingency is never without risk of mistake, even risk of failure. Yet the contingency that improvisation is by definition is also a contingency that allows musicians to take up “mistake” and weave it into the texture of the work. Plainly, then, jazz’s contingency-improvisation shows us how we are allowed to fail and yet not fail irretrievably. What matters is how “mistake” and “failure” area incorporated finally in the music as performed, heard and cherished. Space to fail ever remains essential to superlative jazz performance.

The foregoing, rich in itself, appears to be propaedeutic to the final chapter, “Giving and Giving Back”. Here Begbie luminously relates the exchange of “gifts” between actors (where one actor’s “gift” to another actor in the course of a performance may be either “blocked” or “returned”) as well as the gift exchange between jazz musicians; Begbie relates these to the mutual gift-giving and receiving of Jewish and Gentile Christians described in Romans 9-11.

In Romans 9-11 Paul agonises over the Jewish rejection of the Messiah. Begbie maintains that a legitimate way of reading these chapters is to understand them as Paul’s attempt at introducing the Roman Church to the improvising strategies of God. Jew gives to Gentile. (Gentiles, wild olive branches, have only lately been grafted into cultivated tree trunk that Israel is.) Yet it is Jewish rejection on a larger scale that has spelled Gentile acceptance. And it is Gentile acceptance that will issue ultimately in unparalleled blessing for Jews.

The ground of the improvised Jewish/Gentile exchange, of course, is the grand exchange enacted by God in Christ on behalf of us all. While this exchanged isn’t mentioned in Romans 9-11, it is presupposed throughout the passage because articulated in detail in Romans 1-8. God’s gift of the gospel presupposes God’s rejection of the refusal rooted in Adam’s sin and the ensuing hostility that issued in the death of God’s Son. Christ is the “return” of the wholly obedient covenant partner. Christians are those whom the Spirit brings to share in the exchange and continue to share in its dynamic.

Begbie then extends all that he has said concerning Romans 9-11 to the pastoral issue between Jew and Gentile in the Roman Church over the consumption of meat previously sacrificed to idols. Each has a gift to give and a gift to receive, the “improvisation” of it all necessary in that nothing could be pre-planned even as the welcome/acceptance/reception both have already received from Christ is the “metre” that alone makes any spiritual giving/receiving possible.

Begbie’s sharpest criticism concerns John Taverner. Transparently sincere in his recognition of Taverner’s genius, Begbie nonetheless takes issue with the theology that Taverner attempts to embed in his music. Taverner regards music as an Ikon (sic), “a real presence…lifting our minds and hearts above this earth (where we are exiled for a time) into Heaven, our true ‘Homeland'”. Begbie advances the following theological cautions. Has Taverner undervalued the Incarnation in which God confirms creaturely reality and its goodness? Has he understood that in Jesus Christ God has embraced all the features of our fallen humanity (deprivation, pain, loss) and made them the material of salvation? Has he grasped the manner in which God’s eternity has been opened up to us not through Ikonic beauty but through an ugly death? Does his understanding of the eschaton deny the restoration of the creation and suggest instead its cancellation?

The philosopher Martin Heidegger maintained that language is the “house of being”. To say the same thing differently, being is a function of language. To be sure, Heidegger would never deny the converse: language is a function of being, albeit in the relatively small sphere wherein words denote or describe objects. Vastly greater, however, is the sphere wherein being is a function of language. Here the force of language isn’t that we have more words in our vocabulary and can thereby bamboozle; expanded language, rather, creates a world and admits us to a world that is vastly richer than the world inhabited by someone with meagre language. Here language doesn’t describe an already-existing world but rather gives rise to a universe imperceptible to those for whom language remains only a function of being.

In the spirit of Heidegger, Begbie’s book acquaints us with yet another house, for metre and rhythm are similarly a “house of being”. For our awareness of the fact, nature and ubiquity of the “rhythm over metre” that is exemplified in music and riddles life everywhere facilitates an ever-expanding universe we should otherwise never know and enjoy.

Dr Victor Shepherd, Professor of Historical Theology

Tyndale Seminary, Toronto.

( CANADIAN EVANGELICAL REVIEW  Spring 2003) 

Cottret, Bernard; Calvin: A Biography (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2000. Translated by M.W. McDonald. Pp xv + 376. $45.99 CAN.)

In the final pages of his fine book Cottret asks, “Can one attempt a balanced portrait of Calvin that avoids the two usual ruts of monotonous piety or systematic denigration?” Cottret’s biography proves that one can. Written out of “wonder and exasperation”, his wonder arose at the genius of a thinker who not only authored the single most influential book of the Reformation but who also gave rise to a culture whose imprint can be identified throughout the West. His exasperation arose at the “bigotry of fellow Christians” who appeared eager to adulate Calvin but reluctant to admit his frailties.

A Protestant lay-Christian who preaches occasionally in his local congregation, Cottret is the founding chairperson of the Department of Humanities at Versailles-Saint-Quentin University in France. Awarded a prize for his biography Cromwell, he has also published substantive books on the Huguenots in England and the Political writings of Bolingbroke. Regardless of the topic addressed, however, he brings to all his work the skill for which French historians of modernity have gained their deserved reputation: a grasp of social history that forever keeps before readers the truth that intellectual life never occurs in a vacuum; rather it unfolds in a political, economic, military matrix. This matrix need not eclipse an intellectual revolution that is nothing less than Copernican; still, its bearing upon it cannot be denied, particularly with respect to the assaults, afflictions, and reactions that the makers of history evince. In this regard readers need only to note a fact found in few discussions of the Reformation and of the acerbic voice of its proponents; namely, that France was at war with the Hapsburgs from 1521-26, 1536-38, 1542-44, and 1551-59. All students of Calvin are alert to the significance of 1536 and 1559, the publication dates of the first and final edition of the Institutes. Cottret invariably recalls readers to the manifold turbulence and treachery, even occasional triumph, that are the context in which unforgettable theology is written and from which clay-footed theologians and leaders emerge.

Not surprisingly, then, a major strength of this book is found in the learning, discernment and assessment exemplified in the many excurses that adorn the book. His discussion of Renaissance humanism, for instance, details the influence the Renaissance had in providing at least the “tools” for the Reformation, even as it refuses to reduce the Reformation to an aspect of the

Renaissance. While divergences from the Renaissance ultimately overcame the Reformation’s continuities with it, Cottret admits that “Calvin remained, like so many other Reformers, a prodigal son of humanism.” In this regard Cottret probes thinkers who never fully sided with the Reformation as well as to those who did, noting precisely what humanism could do and what it was never going to do for “reformists” like Erasmus or Lefevre D’Etaples and “Reformers” like Calvin. D’Etaples (1460-1536), for instance, continued to believe that internal reform was possible for the Church whereas Calvin insisted it was not. Still, D’Etaples’ work is significant. He translated the bible into French, therein calling down the Church’s denunciation for maintaining that the three “Marys” (of Bethany, of Magdala, and the sinner) were just that, rather than three descriptions of the one “Magdalene.” Despite D’Etaples’ fine work on scripture, however Cottret correctly cautions us against “‘Protestantizing’ to excess this evangelical, who was devoted to the word of God.” Since he was “closer to the Reformers in his silences than in his words”, Cottret judiciously concludes, “What reason is there to annex him to either camp?”

In the same vein readers are brought up to date through brief expositions of Guillaume Briconnet, Marguerite de Navarre, and Gerard Roussel — not to mention his informative “digression” on the 15^th century translations of the bible into Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, and Czech, all of which predated the Reformation, and all but one of which resisted it. And no student of Calvin can afford to pass up Cottret’s recapitulation of the history of Geneva, not to mention the nature, function and history of catechisms in the context of Calvin’s 1542 Catechism.

Yet it should not be thought that Cottret’s concern with social history beclouds his theological perception. Reading scripture aright he concurs with Calvin that even the risen, ascended Christ “must be in agony until the end of the world.” Admitting the place of Romans in the genesis and ethos of the Reformation, he maintains that “justification by faith” does not do justice to the theological identity and power of the French Reformation: Hebrews must be acknowledged as no less influential — paramount, in fact — just because Hebrews consistently extols the sole, sufficient sacrifice of Christ, thereby terminating definitively all discussion of merit, indulgences, and the horribilissimum, the sacrifice of the mass. Non-Reformers like Lucien Lefebvre elevated Romans but not Hebrews, and were able thereby to avoid that break with Catholic theology that entailed a break with the Catholic church.

Similar theological insight is evident as Cottret explores Calvin’s writings — major, minor, polemical, pastoral — as they appeared year after year. Probing Calvin’s first theological publication (his first script was a humanist discussion of Seneca’s De Clementia), Cottret concludes that Psychopannychia both aimed at refuting the Anabaptist notion of “soul sleep” and signalled Calvin’s awareness that Plato’s notion of the immortality of the soul and a Christian affirmation of the resurrection were ultimately incommensurable. And of course Cottret admires the architectonic elegance, symmetry and beauty of Calvin’s best-known work. “One enters the Institutes as though into a cathedral…a stone structure built to last.” Perceptively he acknowledges that Calvin exhausted himself through preaching just because preaching was not merely one of many important features of Protestantism but rather was “the very essence of the Reformation.”

Cottret’s masterly historical treatment explodes many myths, one being the oft-parroted pronouncement that Calvin tyrannized Geneva. In fact Calvin had to struggle relentlessly in the city, not least in order to forfend the encroachment of city’s Council upon matters pertaining to the life and discipline of the church. Only after 1555 was Calvin accorded the civic support he had long sought. Similarly dispelled is the notion that Calvin was self-important and craved seeing everything he said appear in print. Calvin knew that the sermon is an aural event, and the printed sermon is therefore (partially) denatured. Still, he bowed to public importuning and allowed his sermons to be published.

At the same time, Cottret’s book raises questions for this reviewer. While Cottret comes close several times to declaring the Christological revolution at the centre of the Reformation, he seems not to grasp that for the Reformers theology is Christology. To be sure, he admits that succeeding editions of the Institutes indicated that Christ was the “heart of the system”, but he does not exploit the Christo-logic that drove the Reformation theologically and rendered it qualitatively different from Catholicism with abuses subtracted and justification by faith added.

Similarly this reviewer is disappointed to find repeated several times over the misunderstanding that Zwingli expounded a “merely symbolic” notion of Holy Communion. Zwingli did not, and Calvin simply misread Zwingli on this matter. Cottret insists throughout that Calvin was never ordained. Admittedly, no record exists of Calvin’s ordination. Yet in light of what Calvin writes about the ordained ministry and the pastoral office, it is surely unreasonable to assume that the chief pastor of Geneva, who deplored the purported ministerial irregularities of the Anabaptists, would live to fulfil the functions of the ministry (“my ministry is dearer to me than life”) yet resist the church’s authorization.

Quoting Bernard of Chartres, “We are dwarfs, perched on the shoulders of giants; that is why we may be able to see farther than they”, Cottret gladly admits that Calvin remains such a giant for him. At the same time, Cottret has shown himself to be anything but a dwarf.

Victor Shepherd Professor of Historical Theology Tyndale Seminary
10 Dec. 02

(CANADIAN EVANGELICAL REVIEW Spring 2003)

 The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (John Webster, ed. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp xiii+312. ISBN: 0 521 58560 0)

Already recognized for his studies in Barth, Webster has only confirmed the reputation he gained from his earlier discussions (see his Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation [1995], Barth’s Moral Theology [1996], and Karl Barth [2000]) in the collection of essays he has introduced and edited.

The book will do much to expose those to whom Barth is unknown with the substance, rigour and significance of his theology. It will also help dispel many of the myths that continue to circulate about him (e.g., that his theology is time-worn and reflects a preoccupation with issues that are obsolete today and may even have been in his era.) At the same time it will enhance conversations that look back to him in order to gain theological weight and look ahead from him in order to engage contemporaneity in his spirit.

As expected, the book treats Barth’s articulation of topics that will always be discussed just because they are the essential “building blocks” of the Christian faith: Trinity, scripture, providence, salvation, among others. In addition, however, it engages issues in light of his theology that more recent developments have rendered unavoidable: feminism, religious pluralism and postmodernity.

Some of the authors whom Webster includes are familiar to those involved in current systematic theology generally or Barth studies particularly: Alan Torrance, Colin Gunton, Bruce McCormack, Trevor Hart, George Hunsinger. Others are lesser known:, William Werpehowski, Katherine Sonderegger, J. Augustine di Noia. The roster is chiefly Protestant but does include several Roman Catholics. (In this regard it is important to note that Hans Urs von Balthasar (d. 1986), the major Roman Catholic commentator on Barth, is deemed throughout the book to be a worthy interpreter.)

While it is widely recognized that Barth opposed the Nazi menace, forfeited his teaching position at the University of Bonn, and was deported to his native Switzerland, many non-Europeans failed at that time to grasp how important Barth was in forming, informing, equipping and encouraging beleaguered pastors, parishioners and leaders amidst the trials of the Reich and its Zeitgeist. Without him the Barmen Declaration would never have appeared; with him hope arose in the wake of the newly-exposed insufficiency of liberal theology, ascendant from Schleiermacher (whose ability, if not his orientation, Barth admired) to World War I. In the wake of Hitler’s defeat English-speaking theology discerned his importance for those he had helped, honoured him by reading him and recognizing his role in the “Biblical Theology” movement of the 1950s and 60s, and then quietly set him aside as the newer voices of Moltmann and Pannenberg were heard, not to mention the more radical cries of Liberation Theology and special interest groups. While the Torrance family seemed almost single-handedly to keep Barth from disappearing entirely in the English-speaking world, Barth’s work began to recover a hearing amidst, for instance, the faculty of theology at King’s College, London. Now it appears that the Swiss thinker’s work is regaining appreciation as magisterial in a way that reflects the recognition rightly accorded the Sixteenth-Century Reformers. Webster’s book can only expand this development as the essays highlight the need constantly to rethink the “faith once for all delivered to the saints” in light of present-day challenges and rearticulate that faith in contemporary thought-forms and vocabulary. Barth, of course, never pretended that he had said the last word, wanting only, like the donkey that assisted Jesus, to be of service to his Lord through the church’s proclamation. At the same time, the content of these essays will leave readers knowing that any theology which ignores Barth’s “word” will always lack the density and resilience needed to help the church out of its current malaise.

In his introductory chapter Webster points out the fact and manner of Barth’s putting theology on a new footing and pointing it in a new direction, adding that “The significance of Barth’s work in his chosen sphere is comparable to that of, say, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Freud, Weber and Saussure in theirs, in that he decisively reorganized an entire discipline.” Webster then identifies crucial points in Barth’s formation: his disillusionment with his liberal teachers who deemed theology to legitimate national self-aggrandizement (his disillusionment ultimately giving rise to the “bombshell” Romans commentary), his work on Anselm with its concern to explicate the understanding of the faith that believers always seek, his confessional orientation wherein he saw that theology didn’t need extra-theological considerations to legitimate it or facilitate it. Here (and in other books) Webster differs from many overviews of Barth, insisting that there wasn’t a “turn” in Barth’s work that neatly divided it into two disparate parts, an earlier “dialectic” and a later “dogmatic.” Instead Webster maintains that there were certainly differences in emphasis, but not in substance: Barth’s dogmatic concerns were evident from the start, while his dialectical style he retained to the end. By way of illustrating his point Webster maintains that the earlier Barth underlined, “How is God God for us?”, and the later Barth, “How is God God for us” as Barth’s work on the covenant came to the fore.

The book concludes with Alasdair Heron’s appreciation, “Karl Barth: A Personal Engagement.” Here he indicates his debt to Barth even as he identifies matters that he thinks need to be addressed: Barth’s non-interaction with natural science in a century when scientific concerns were dominant, Barth’s formal recognition of historical-critical biblical exegesis accompanied by his material non-deployment (virtually) of it, and the proclivity of Barth’s ecclesiology towards individualism and congregationalism.

In between these “book-ends” much is found to inform, edify and delight the careful reader. Christoph Schwoebel’s essay, “Theology,” holds no surprises but faithfully, patiently, and profoundly explores the logic of Barth’s work. Francis Watson, a New Testament scholar from Aberdeen, will startle many with his claim that Barth’s use of scripture aids and abets the recovery of theological exegesis when so much biblical scholarship preoccupies itself with theological vacuity. (Critical minutiae are featured, says Watson, when scripture isn’t understood in terms of the economy of God’s self-utterance and self-bestowal.)

The most startling essay appears to be George Hunsinger’s discussion of Pneumatology. While Barth has frequently been criticized for a preoccupation with Christology whose one-sidedness moves him in the direction of doctrinal scholasticism, Hunsinger defends Barth not weakly by reminding us that Barth died before his Church Dogmatics were completed but aggressively by exposing and exploring the dynamic interconnectedness of Barth’s thought; e.g., “Whereas from the standpoint of reconciliation the work of the Spirit served the work of Christ, from the standpoint of the redemption the work of Christ served the work of the Spirit.” Hunsinger follows this with his essay’s manifesto: “A comprehensive discussion would show that, in Barth’s theology, the saving work of the Spirit is trinitarian in ground, Christocentric in focus, miraculous in operation, communal in content, eschatological in form, diversified in operation, and universal in scope.” He then proceeds to develop most of these themes. If his exposition is correct, the accusation against Barth concerning Pneumatology has to be reconsidered.

Colin Gunton, however, upholds the customary accusation in “Salvation,” the essay that appears to be the sharpest disagreement with Barth in the book: “It is here [i.e., participation in Christ] that we become particularly aware of the relative underweighting of the pneumatological and ecclesial dimensions of Barth’s way of speaking of the appropriation of salvation….It simply cannot say all that a doctrine of the Spirit is supposed to say.” Gunton goes on to fault Barth for collapsing Christ’s ascension into his resurrection, for expounding Christ “as a kind of Platonic form of humanity” so that salvation is already achieved and people need only to be informed of it, for restricting the scope of salvation to humans, for understanding the priesthood of Christ in terms on his divinity but not his humanity.

The essay that will do most to vindicate Barth through correcting a misapprehension (especially among North Americans) is Wolf Kroetke’s “The Humanity of the Human Person in Karl Barth’s Anthropology” wherein he highlights Barth’s understanding of the human not in terms of the natural or the religious or the cultural but simply that partner whom God wills not to be without and therefore cherishes eternally.

At his eightieth birthday celebration Barth remarked, “As a theologian one can never be great, but at best one remains small in one’s own way.” In the upside-down (better, capsized-but-righted) world of the Kingdom, the small are rendered great. Webster’s book will find the reader assenting to this gospel paradox concerning the man commonly regarded as the greatest theologian since the Reformation.

Victor Shepherd, Tyndale Seminary, Toronto.

(University of Toronto Quarterly,  Vol.72:1, Winter 2002-03)

George Emery. The Methodist Church on the Prairies, 1896-1914 McGill-Queen’s UP xxi, 260

Emery, professor of history at the University of Western Ontario, supplies a scholarly monograph discussing prairie church history in the era of the Laurier settlement boom. Its approach differs from that of John Webster Grant’s The Church in the Canadian Era (1967) and Neil Semple’s The Lord’s Dominion (1992.) Grant’s overview does not feature the magnification of prairie developments in the decade-and-a-half that Emery deems crucial, while Semple’s assessment of Methodist history from the standpoint of the socio-economic privilege and power of central Canada is considered inaccurate. The book focuses on the history of a particular Christian institution (The Methodist Church in Canada, arising from the union of several Methodist bodies in 1874 and 1884), rather than on non-institutional religious history. It prosecutes social history informed through rigorous deployment of quantitative evidence. It traces the shift from an earlier Methodist preoccupation in the west with aboriginal peoples to the concern for Caucasians as the lure of “grain gold” (wheat) saw vast migrations into the prairie provinces from the Maritimes, central Canada, Britain, continental Europe, and the U.S.A.

While owning the Wesleyan root in Canadian Methodism, Emery maintains nonetheless that the Canadian expression, especially on the prairies, evolved as novel and therefore unforeseeable developments required extraordinary flexibility and adaptability. The missioners faced formidable challenges. Prairie hardship, for instance, required men mobile and young enough to be bachelors (bachelors were five times as numerous proportionately in the adult population over twenty as they were in Ontario) when bachelors in east or west were utterly uninterested in the church. The non-Anglo-Saxon people, the “tired and poor” of eastern Europe, lacked the sophistication of North Americans. (Ninety per cent of Alberta’s Ukrainians, for instance, were illiterate, and often regarded schooling as a frill.) Prairie cities, the largest by far of which was Winnipeg, discovered that urban existence chilled concern for the Creator even as it spawned wretched slums. Such challenges, however, merely fanned the enthusiasm of spokespersons such as the principal of Alberta College (Methodist) who predicted a population of fifty million for the North Saskatchewan Valley.

Emery acquaints the reader with the tensions inherent in a denomination when clergy had to be male while women were found disproportionately in church services, when educational standards for ordination were not relaxed even as the west was desperate for clergy, when Methodism was the single largest Protestant denomination in Canada while the majority of Ontarians who claimed Methodist affiliation were never found at worship, when prairie church leaders were divided over whether it was in their interests to have power-wielding boards located in Toronto.

Emery’s macro-investigation of the Church on the prairies is balanced by his micro-approach to Methodism’s two major undertakings: the All Peoples Mission in Winnipeg and the Star Colony of Ukrainians northeast of Edmonton. The Winnipeg mission began with Slavic people but developed quickly into a multi-ethnic outreach. Its first superintendent, James S. Woodsworth, scorned the faith of the church catholic even as scores of workers under him did not. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, preferring the subsistence farming of the old country to incipient agribusiness, forsook prairie grasslands for the forested park-belt northeast of Edmonton. Missioners here laboured indefatigably, not least in providing medical services and schooling for children. Most of the women Methodists were graduates of Victoria College, University of Toronto; Edith Weekes, who pioneered a Ukrainian-English dictionary, had been awarded the gold medal in modern languages at Victoria.
Throughout his treatment Emery recognizes that human beings are endlessly complex. His social history is commensurately nuanced and unfailingly sensitive to wounds and wonders that may puzzle yet perdure. Eschewing both sycophantic hagiography and contemptuous superiority concerning those whose work he assesses, he recognizes Methodist missioners to have done their best with the equipment they had, and all of this amidst hardships so severe, for instance, that the clergy drop-out rate was three times higher in the west than in central Canada.

Emery’s social history includes, perforce, discussions of Methodist popular religious expression. He does not attempt an exploration of the academic Methodist theology ascendant at this point in Canada’s history. That work would complement his book and fill a lacuna in Canadian intellectual history.

(VICTOR SHEPHERD)

(book review to be published in the Fall 2002 issue of
CANADIAN EVANGELICAL REVIEW.)

The Promise of Trinitarian Theology: Theologians in Dialogue with T.F. Torrance (Elmer M. Colyer, ed. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Pp. xi+355. ISBN 0 7425 1293 2

Colyer’s third book on Torrance (following How to Read T.F. Torrance: Understanding His Trinitarian & Scientific Theology and The Nature of Doctrine in T.F. Torrance’s Theology) is a collection of essays by eight American scholars, two British, and one of British extraction (Alasdair Heron, for many years now professor of Reformed theology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.)

The purpose of the book is multiform: to provide an introduction to Torrance and his theology; to acquaint readers with Torrance’s career, publications, and the secondary literature he has precipitated; to provide a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of Torrance’s theology; to be a theological event itself through engaging a major thinker of the twentieth century; to assist theologians and natural scientists in their common membership in realist-determined disciplines; to provide resources for historians and historical theologians concerned with Scottish, ecumenical or Reformed theology; to trace the appropriation of Karl Barth’s theology in the English-speaking world.

David Torrance, a younger brother, opens the discussion by acquainting the reader with the influences that helped mould Torrance’s faith, character and missionary zeal as a minister of the gospel. Born to Scottish missionaries in China, Torrance remained throughout his life sensitive to the difficulties surrounding the prosecution of the gospel there, visiting the country several times following retirement. Although an academic theologian throughout most of his working life (he was a pastor for ten years before his appointment to Edinburgh), Torrance thrived on his vocation to the ministry and his commission as missionary to a world whose mind-set was dominated by the natural sciences. This chapter is crucial if Torrance is to be repatriated with those from whom he is currently alienated, for the public image of Torrance is that he is an intellectually reclusive theoretician with no interest in the turbulence of people’s everyday lives, a one-sided cerebralist who, despite his oft-proffered disclaimer, seems to substitute doctrinal refinement for the one to whom it points, an abstract thinker who has never faced concrete danger. Torrance’s wartime decoration (the MBE for bravery) contradicts the lattermost point, while David’s disclosure of the sheer humanness, pastoral concern, and warm heart of Torrance evaporates remaining criticisms.

Alasdair Heron comments on Torrance’s relation to Reformed theology, correctly pointing out that while Torrance cherishes the sixteenth century Reformers he does not follow them slavishly, and wholly distances himself from seventeenth century Reformed scholasticism with its Aristotelian underlay, its notion of limited atonement, its schematizing distortions, and its doctrine of predestination (all of which, Torrance laments, adversely affected Scottish Church life.)

Andrew Purves highlights Torrance’s characteristic use of the homoousion, especially his identification of its epistemological and soteriological significance (as well as deployment of this significance), the relation of incarnation to atonement, and the twofold mediation of Christ (humanward and Godward.)

Gary Deddo provides the only published discussion of Torrance’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Here he dispels the myth that Torrance is a crypto rationalist in Reformed disguise. Deddo speaks of the Spirit’s place in the intra-Trinitarian relations as well as in the triune God’s relation to the world. Concerning the former it is apparent that the being of God, for Torrance, has to be “onto-relationality.” Concerning the latter it is evident that according to Torrance Holy Spirit entails the sovereign lordship of God over the creation, thereby forestalling any confusion between Holy Spirit and human spirit, experiences, or subjectivity — even as Spirit ad extra is God most profoundly relating himself to the specifically human.

Colin Gunton explores Torrance’s doctrine of God, drawing attention to three major items. The first is the triune economy where Torrance insists on the homoousion of the Spirit, apart from which there would be an epistemological hiatus between God’s economic action and God’s eternal being. The second is the eternal trinity. Here Gunton describes Torrance’s use of the Cappodocian Fathers, preferring Gregory of Nazianzus to Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea inasmuch as the latter two have about them a trace of Origenist subordination. The third is the help Torrance has rendered to the churches of the east and the west by insisting that the Spirit proceeds from the Father’s being, not merely the Father’s person, rending the question of procession “‘from the Father and the Son’ or ‘from the Father through the Son” superfluous, and thereby undercutting the filioque standoff. (It might be noted that while Torrance is gracious and irenic as he responds to contributors in turn, he is uncharacteristically sharp in his reply to Gunton. Repeatedly he says, for instance, “Gunton’s faulty contrast at this point…”; “I wonder whether Gunton is aware…”; and “Prof. Gunton gives little attention to the way in which I have sought to clarify the issues involved….”)

George Hunsinger investigates Torrance’s approach to the sacraments, noting that the vicarious humanity of Christ is the central element in Torrance’s understanding of baptism and the key to his view of the Eucharist. The priesthood of the incarnate Son is the “hinge” as Christ both gives himself to us perpetually in the Eucharist and offers us eternally to the Father. Hunsinger praises Torrance for his improvement on the sacramental positions of both Calvin and Barth. Since Torrance’s reply to Hunsinger is the briefest in the book, it would appear that Torrance has little to add to what Hunsinger has said on his behalf.

Ray Anderson plumbs Torrance as practical theologian, insisting that Torrance’s reputation as practically irrelevant is groundless. Insisting rather that Torrance is “a practical theologian par excellence” on account of the latter’s love for and assistance to the multidimensional praxis of the Church, Anderson also draws attention to Torrance’s rich experience of Christ and his readiness to speak of it. Evangelicals will note that when Anderson concludes his chapter by asking Torrance if he wouldn’t ordain homosexual persons in light of the “new humanity” of Christ that permits the ordination of women, Torrance unambiguously replies that homosexual activity is sin and therefore must be repented of and forsaken.

Kurt Richardson advances a thesis concerning the mystical apprehension of God in the context of revelation and scripture. While Richardson qualifies “mystical” so as to accommodate Torrance on this topic, Torrance is gentle yet firm in his disagreement: “Dr. Richardson seems to presuppose the very notion of mysticism or the mystical which I set aside. What I am concerned with is humility before God, not with some special or esoteric way of thinking.”

Elmer Colyer reviews Torrance’s juxtaposition of “science” and “theology”, reflected most pointedly in the award-winning book, Theological Science. Here Colyer reminds the reader of Torrance’s insistence that any discipline is wissenschaftlich when the specific subject matter governs how we know it, how we think about it, and how we formulate knowledge of it in accordance with its nature and reality. Torrance claims no novelty here, gladly acknowledging his debt to the Alexandrian theologians, especially the sixth century John Philoponos.

The final two chapters examine closely the relationship of Torrance’s thought to that of natural scientists, particularly Albert Einstein. Christopher Kaiser, holding a doctorate in astrophysics, compares Torrance and Einstein on the intelligibility of the cosmos and its correspondence with the structures of human rationality. Mark Achtemeier notes the places where Torrance charts the relationship of theology to science, and concludes by comparing Nicene Christology’s dissonance with Newtonian science and Nicene Christology’s vindication in the newer (Einsteinian) science. In his comments Torrance acknowledges his debt to James Clerk Maxwell’s earlier work in electromagnetism and force fields, even as Einstein admitted Maxwell to underlie his notion of relativity.

Despite having published several volumes on the doctrine of God and despite his scholarship in Reformation theology, Torrance was never allowed to lecture on the doctrine of God at New College, Edinburgh, and upon his retirement was succeeded by a Roman Catholic. Thanks to Colyer’s indefatigable work in the United States, however, Torrance may have found, in the twilight years of his life, an appreciation seemingly denied him in his native Scotland.

Victor Shepherd, Tyndale Seminary

(book review to be published in the Canadian Evangelical Review)

A Scientific Theology, Volume I: Nature (Alister E. McGrath. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001. Pp. xx + 325. ISBN: 0 0028 3925 8

McGrath established his reputation two decades ago with Iustitia Dei, his landmark study of justification. Subsequently he published much on Reformation themes, then attempted popularizing (e.g., Studies in Doctrine), and now appears to have returned to what seems to be his métier: rigorous reflection that comprehends his twin areas of expertise, historical/systematic theology and natural science. Readers of McGrath’s recent T.F. Torrance: An Intellectual Biography (1999) will recognize in A Scientific Theology his debt to Torrance’s notion of “theological science” (which McGrath prefers to call “scientific theology”), as well as the fruit his immersion in Torrance has borne and promises to bear yet.

While working towards his Oxford doctorate in molecular biology McGrath found himself “commissioned” to explore the relation between Christian theology and natural science, in conversation with history and philosophy. The subordination is crucial for his agenda. He advances natural science as the fitting ancilla or “maidservant” of theology in that science and theology alike are intrinsically realist. Both are “scientific” in the sense of the German wissenschaftlich; i.e., the method of investigating any subject is mandated by the essence and structure of the subject under discussion. Both attempt to give an ordered account of a reality that lies beyond them. Philosophy, on the other hand, has customarily brought to theology metaphysical presuppositions and implicates that have controlled the theological enterprise, effectively denaturing it. History, on the other hand, can be allowed to “converse with” theology but ought not to be its ancilla in that history lacks the realist base found in natural science. In addition, in the hands of social scientists, history becomes historicist; the social sciences move illegitimately from the truism that all knowledge is historically located to the totalitarianism that all knowledge is historically determined. In this regard the social sciences are committed to a naturalist worldview in which theology is disdained; natural scientists, however, more profoundly (and more humbly) recognize the boundaries of their discipline, pronouncing no a priori disqualification.

McGrath has subtitled Volume I Nature. He insists that “nature” isn’t synonymous with “the universe” or “the created order,” in that “nature” is a socially mediated concept, highly interpreted. (One need only think of depictions of nature that vary from “moral educator” to “book of God” to “red in tooth and claw” where only the fittest survive to a “machine” akin to those of the industrial era.) Volume II, Reality, will be a critique of non-realist positions in theology, together with an examination of why theology must be an a posteriori, non-Idealist, discipline in its account of reality. Volume III, Theory, will address parallels between theological doctrines and scientific theories.

In the book’s first chapter, “The Legitimacy of A Scientific Theology,” McGrath maintains that since the Word or logos that became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth is the ground of creation, the selfsame logos or rationality must be embedded in the creation, thereby giving rise to that intelligibility inhering the contingent realm which renders science possible. Foundational to McGrath’s programme, then, is his conviction that the doctrine of creation grounds the necessity (not merely the legitimacy) of a positive working relationship between Christian theology and natural science. McGrath’s convictions here contrast his critique of process theology’s provincialism, the latter being “a transitory phase in the development of Protestant English-language theology after the Second World War.” Utterly damning, from McGrath’s standpoint, is the fact that while process theology “may be of interest to some, it is implausible to most, especially in the intellectually hard-nosed scientific community.” In other words, process theology is useless in view of McGrath’s exploration of the methodological parallels between Christian theology (which for him entails the Chalcedonian definition of Christ) and natural science.

While upholding genuine science McGrath always remains aware of the danger of an ersatz “scientism.” He recognizes scientific conclusions to be provisional. What is crucial for theology isn’t the ever-shifting “conclusions” but rather the constant methods and assumptions by which scientific investigation proceeds. For this reason theology must always be engaged with science but must never ground itself in science. The church must revisit Scripture continually in order to ensure that scientific assumptions of earlier eras haven’t been incorporated into the teaching of the church.

Returning to his critique of “nature” McGrath maintains that the notion is helpful only if it is given ontological foundation by the Christian doctrine of creation. Naturalists, unaware of the social construction of “nature,” paradoxically remain unaware that “nature” isn’t natural, and therefore remain unaware that the notion is virtually useless in critical intellectual discourse. While deconstructionists have readily pointed out the mere construct, they are unable to deconstruct the natural sciences, since these are inherently impervious to the postmodern agenda.

Having exposed “nature” McGrath proceeds to probe the Christian doctrine of creation. He distinguishes among the understandings of creation found in Genesis (the creaturely is ontologically distinct from the divine), the Prophets (creation is an aspect of God’s lordship of history, therein attesting the subjugation of chaos and the imposition of order), and the Writings (patterns may be discerned in the creaturely realm, which discernment profits the wise.) In turn the New Testament yields the notion of creation ex nihilo, its twofold significance being an affirmation of the Christological determination of the creation and a negation of the world’s eternity and also of Gnostic dualism. Thanks to its having been fashioned at the hand of God, the creation possesses a goodness, a rationality and an orderedness, all of which are essential if scientific probing of contingent being is to occur. In other words, science flourishes in a world understood from the perspective of the gospel.

“Implications of a Doctrine of Creation”, the second last chapter, discusses principally the negative effect of the Fall on God’s knowability, the inversion of Feuerbach’s notion that because we long for God thereforeGod can be no more than human projection, and the role of mathematics as the “language” of the universe.

All of these are germane to McGrath’s final chapter, “The Purpose and Place of Natural Theology.” Following Torrance’s essay, “The Problem of Natural Theology in the Thought of Karl Barth,” McGrath deems illegitimate any natural theology that is a rival of revealed theology or an alternative to it. Agreeing with Torrance and Barth in all respects here he concludes that natural theology “lacks the epistemic autonomy required to permit it to be, or become, a theological resource in its own right.” He agrees with Barth that natural theology is ineradicable, and with Torrance that it is fitting as long as operates within the knowledge of God that grace-wrought faith alone yields. Admitting that natural theology’s conclusion of “Being-in-general” pales alongside the gospel’s disclosure of God as Father, Son and Spirit consubstantially, McGrath insists vigorously that a natural theology that “knows its place” (i.e., resists legitimating humankind’s craving for self-justification and domestication of the gospel) has a crucial role in demonstrating the consonance between revelation and the structures of the world. In light of his accomplishments in both natural science and theology, McGrath’s purpose in preparing this book (along with the two subsequent volumes) looms hugely in the last few pages of the book: “The recovery of a properly configured natural theology can serve as the basis for a critical theological engagement with both the world and the sciences which seek to give an account of it.”

Is this the role of such a reconfigured natural theology? Will it function as a bridge helping to end the isolation of faculties of theology? Is McGrath’s seemingly uncritical, end-of-book co-opting of Wolfhart Pannenberg in the service of his agenda aware of the reservations other theologians have expressed concerning Pannenberg? Need natural science exclude philosophy from philosophy’s customary conversation with theology?

Perhaps we should await the appearance of Volumes II and III before making an assessment. Notwithstanding what he proposes concerning the role of natural theology, McGrath’s book thoroughly acquaints readers with “scientific theology” in the context of creation.

Victor Shepherd, Tyndale Seminary

Law and Gospel: Philip Melanchthon’s Debate with John Agricola of Eisleben over Poenitentia.

(Timothy J. Wengert. Grand Rapids: Baker Books,1997. Paperback Pp.231)

Martin Luther maintained that whether or not one is a theologian is announced by whether or not one can profoundly distinguish law and gospel. In a book that evinces a perceptive reading of history, expertise in the subtleties of Reformation theology, and an ability to discern precisely where and why the gospel may be at risk, Wengert acquaints readers with the relation of law to gospel in two of Luther’s theological sons. He probes chiefly Melanchthon’s commentary on Colossians (in its three editions of 1527, 1528 and 1534), noting the subtle changes Melanchthon made as he interacted with theological publications and correspondence generated by developments in church, princedom and empire. The controversy — is poenitentia to be associated with law (Melanchthon) or with gospel (Agricola) — was the occasion of the first assault Melanchthon sustained from within the Wittenberg “family.” The outcome was plain: Lutheran theology deemed Melanchthon’s conclusions normative, and thereafter repudiated Agricola’s position as sub-evangelical in that it failed to honour a crucial aspect of the Word.

Wengert leaves untranslated both poenitentia and its German equivalent, Busse, on the grounds that the word can mean “repentance,” “penitence” or “penance” (the verbal form poenitentiam agite or tut Busse yielding “repent,” “be penitent” or “do penance”), the nuances here having everything to do with the controversy then and the reader’s assessment of the matter now.

It is in light of the above that each disputant’s characteristic dread must be understood. Melanchthon feared lawlessness and a faith that substituted one’s inner comfort and security for trust in God’s forgiveness through Christ’s sacrifice extra nos; Agricola feared a return to the rules and regulations of Rome. In this regard Agricola eliminated all consideration of law from the Christian life, denouncing Francis, Dominic, Bernard, the Fathers who upheld good works, and even the Council of Nicaea. Deploying an inaccurate (because non-Biblical) analogy, he maintained that faith can live without works just as the soul can live without the body. Christians, needing no law, travel a Mittelstrassen, free from good and evil works alike. Evil works do not deny their righteousness; good works do not attest it. Since the law’s accusation leads only to resentment and anger, never to confession and faith, the gospel alone highlights sin, magnifies grace and induces poenitentia. Christians are free from the law without qualification.

Unlike other Wittenberg theologians, Agricola began not with the distinction between law and gospel but with the Christian’s self-understanding: we are born children of Adam and therefore of wrath; by the promise of Abraham (i.e., the gospel) we are brought forth children of God. God gave the law to render us aware that he is not unmindful of us. When sinners hear the law, however, they are so thoroughly terrified that they attempt to divest themselves of its yoke even as they blame God for their predicament. Largely ignoring Melanchthon’s insistence on the first “use” of the law (to restrain civil disorder), and disagreeing with Melanchthon’s second (to direct the conscience-smitten to Christ), Agricola maintained that law-engendered terror simply drives people away from Christ. Only the gospel promises (including those found in the Old Testament) induce poenitentia. Poenitentia is therefore a mark of faith, not a mark of the person in the process of coming to faith.

As early as 1521 in his Loci Communes and 1525 in his commentary on Exodus Melanchthon had insisted the law to be essential: apart from it we lack necessary knowledge of our sinnership before God, are not impelled to seek help in God’s mercy, and cannot even truly hear the gospel. Agricola replied that humans have an aversion to anything that pains; the law can therefore arouse only hatred of it and of the law-giver himself, never yielding the slightest knowledge of sin.

The controversy, now at full flood, found its way into a plethora of catechetical materials. From 1522 to 1529 Wittenberg saw the production of sixty-two printings of thirteen different instructional booklets. Melanchthon, a prolific contributor, argued that the law-aroused conscience pleases God in that God never fails or forsakes any whom his law has terrified. Agricola replied in an idiosyncratic reading of Colossians 2: Paul says that Christians are to come to a knowledge of God’s great secret, Christ himself, and not be seduced by the face of an angel, pretty words, philosophy — or even God’s laws. Colossian 1:3-8, believers’ necessary fruit-bearing, he simply explained away.

The raging debate was taken up into the Visitation Articles of 1527 when all evangelical pastors were examined concerning their theological understanding; it became the substance of the two conferences in Torgau Castle in autumn of the same year. In it all Agricola insisted that God should be loved for his own sake and not as a provider of refuge. Melanchthon agreed, yet insisted that sinners before the holy God need a refuge; furthermore, since the “old” creature dogs even the “new” creature in Christ, sinners continue to need the law on their way to loving God for his own sake.

As the dispute over the law intensified Melanchthon came to see that his understanding of forensic justification required a third use of the law (his “third use” being subsequently taken up and elaborated hugely in the thought of Calvin and the Puritans after Calvin.) Believers whom the law has directed to Christ are not justified by the law but continue to need the law as the vehicle of their obedience on account of the imperfection that remains in them. From 1534, then, Melanchthon articulated that use of the law which forestalled the facile criticism that the Protestant Reformers, espousing forensic justification, eschewed good works. Believers’ good works please God in that God honours the aspiration wherewith believers express their desire to obey him and their gratitude to him. Unquestionably Agricola’s consistent undervaluation of the Decalogue stimulated Melanchthon in his articulation of the relation of law both to the inception of faith and to the expression of faith.

In view of Karl Barth’s “Gospel/Law” reversal of Lutheranism’s “Law/Gospel” and current Lutherans’ continuing disagreement with him, not to mention a contemporary Christianity seemingly devoid of ethical rigour, the dispute that Wengert’s exemplary research and lucid explication illuminates is as germane today as it was contentious in the Sixteenth Century. Melanchthon’s uncompromising “Where there is no fear there is no faith” needs to be pondered as the relation of fear to faith is probed in every era.

Victor Shepherd Tyndale Seminary

(This book review will appear in the Canadian Evangelical Review, Spring 2001)

The Binding of God: Calvin’s Role in the Development of Covenant Theology by Peter A. Lillback. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001. Paperback Pp.331.

This book is the latest in a series (of seven so far), “Texts and Studies in Reformation and Post-Reformation Thought.” According to editor Richard Muller (Calvin Theological Seminary) the series aims at filling in gaps in our knowledge of the intellectual development of Protestantism in the sixteenth century and at addressing myths concerning Protestant orthodoxy of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Lillback affirms his book to be the first to provide a taxonomy of assorted views of Calvin’s covenant theology, and the first to provide a complete summation of it. He probes the role of the covenant in Calvin’s theology with a view to assessing the extent to which Calvin’s thought in this regard underlies the preoccupation with the covenant found in later Protestant Scholasticism and the latter’s characteristic use of it. His conclusion is that “Calvin’s hemeneutical application of the covenant is central to his entire system.” As expected, Lillback upholds substantial continuity between Reformers and Protestant Scholastics and disagrees most strongly with Calvin scholars (e.g., T.F. Torrance) who find Scholastic thought a declension from the Genevan’s.

Lillback divides his book into two major sections: “The Genesis of Covenant Teaching: The Conception of the Covenant in Calvin’s Historical Context” and “The Genius of Calvin’s Covenant Thought.”

In the first section Lillback discusses mediaeval covenant motifs, contrasting the stream of Augustine and Staupitz (the Reformed Augustinian Superior whose advice, “Contemplate the wounds of Christ”, enlightened a young Luther perplexed over predestination) with those of the Gabriel Biel’s nominalism and Tauler’s mysticism. While the Augustinians repudiated the notion of merit, the nominalists deployed it thoroughly in their finessing of “congruent” and “condign” with respect to the covenant, even as the mystics insisted on a “natural covenant” that presupposed an ontological structure to humankind which gave it an inalienable spiritual connection to its Creator and a natural capacity to turn to God.

The early Luther’s search for a gracious God edged him away from a merit scheme, and by 1517 the Wittenberger had shed all mediaeval vestige of the covenant as binding God to reward humankind for its having prepared for grace. Luther’s characteristic notion followed immediately: God’s saving promise as the core of the covenant rather than human responsbility. Luther’s conviction here underlies his bifurcation of law and gospel, the covenant pertaining to the latter alone: “alien” righteousness is God’s gift as promised to believers, law lacking any intrinsic relation to the gospel.

As the Reformation gained force in Switzerland the Reformed there, like Oecolampadius, maintained that Christians are found in the same covenant as Israel. Zwingli too insisted on the continuity of the covenants throughout scripture, establishing therein the Reformed conviction that infant baptism is rooted in, and is to be understood in light of, Israel’s practice of circumcision. Zwingli maintained that the ordinances do not confirm faith (nothing external can do this) but instead signify the covenant. Lillback sees Zwingli’s struggle with the Anabaptists and the latter’s denial of covenant-continuity as a watershed: the inception of covenant consciousness in Reformed thought.
In 1527 Bullinger, another Swiss Reformer, penned the first study of the covenant to be produced in the church. It affirmed the covenant to be the “chief point of religion.” All of scripture is to be referred to Genesis 17 (God’s covenant with Abram.) At this point there appeared what has never disappeared from Reformed thought, the conviction that there is ultimately one covenant only that God has forged with Abraham and his Christian descendants, “old” and “new” pertaining merely to modes of administration. In the same vein Calvin’s use of the covenant permeates his discussion of all theological topics, even as Lillback admits that the covenant doesn’t provide the organizational structure for the Institutes.

For Calvin the essence of covenant is the mutual binding of God and people. With respect to God the covenant is unconditional; with respect to the people, conditional upon their obedience. The Abrahamic covenant, operative today, distinguishes believers from unbelievers. Jesus Christ is its “heart”, while justification and sanctification are its two “great benefits.”

Certain to prove controversial, concerning the obedience of believers, is Lillback’s discussion of the form of “works” righteousness that he says appears in Calvin. Calvin scholars have long noted the concept of “double justification” in Calvin whereby believers together with their sin-riddled works are acceptable to God only insofar as grace justifies both them and what they offer. Lillback speaks at length of a “works” righteousness that stands before God, albeit as a “subordinate” righteousness to justification. Here he affirms a contradiction between Calvin and Luther, since the latter “could not see any righteousness in any human action before a holy God.” In the same way Lillback’s pronouncement, “Luther’s understanding of justification by faith alone had no room for inherent righteousness while Calvin’s view required it as an inseparable but subordinate righteousness”, will provoke discussion among Reformation scholars.

Lillback’s discussion of Calvin’s use of the Scholastics’ “Covenant of Acceptance” will prove no less controversial. He maintains that both Calvin and mediaeval scholastics agree that good works are acceptable to God only by a covenant; they disagree insofar as the scholastics understand works to be covenant-graced so as to merit salvation. Lillback adds, “Calvin admits that he is indebted to them.” Again, many Reformation scholars will ask if Calvin didn’t repudiate them.

Lillback expounds with approval elements in Calvin that other scholars find tangential, contradictory, or “surd.” One such is the distinction between the scope of covenant and election, the former being wider than the latter. He maintains that covenant is the means whereby God administers salvation, whereas only the elect are saved. “General election” or covenant, the same as “common adoption”, must be ratified by “special election” before anyone is rendered a beneficiary. Again, what Lillback uncritically expounds, other Calvin scholars have found to be highly problematic.

The question of whether there is a covenant of works in Calvin’s theology is a major consideration in the book. Lillback admits that Calvin never used the expression; this is not to deny he used the concept. Still, Lillback’s thesis here appears less substantial as he argues that there are concepts in the Institutes that are “conducive” to the notion of a pre-fall covenant, which covenant “appears warranted” to be called a covenant of works, since this is how it “functions.” He admits Calvin’s exposition here to be merely “rudimentary and inchoative”, yet it “seems in certain ways to adumbrate the covenant of works of the federalists.”

Readers may suspect special pleading here, particularly when Lillback deploys arguments of “lesser and greater grace” in Calvin to distinguish between a prelapsarian covenant and the covenant of law, and then concludes sweepingly that “Calvin’s system can be presented as a series of lessers to greaters.”

There remains another reading of Calvin. When Lillback, for instance, insists that for Calvin the covenant “contains” Christ and has Christ as its “foundation”, readers will want to ask whether Christ illustrates and/or instantiates a covenant lying behind him or is himself the covenant. Would not Calvin’s Christology, particularly his understanding of the Mediator, entail as much? Did not Oecolampadius imply this when he insisted that God first makes a covenant with Christ, which covenant God fulfills for his people in Christ?

Lillback’s book does much to advance the conversation among those who uphold either convergence or divergence with respect to Calvin and post-Calvin Scholasticism. The conversation, however, has by no means been concluded.

Victor Shepherd    November 2001

Elmer M. Colyer. How To Read T.F.Torrance: Understanding his Trinitarian & Scientific Theology. Downers Grove , IL : InterVarsity Press, 2001. Pp 393. Paper, n.p. ISBN 0-8308-1544-6.

This book is a comprehensive discussion of the work of a Scottish theologian whose output has been prodigious and profound. Thomas Torrance has long been recognized a seminal thinker in the Reformed tradition and the most important English-speaking theologian of the past fifty years.   Influenced particularly by Athanasius, Calvin and Barth, Torrance has yet eschewed becoming a clone of any of them and instead has forged a re-articulation of Protestant theology that has remained in constant dialogue with those whom Protestant theology has largely ignored (e.g., the Nicene Fathers), as well as with those with whom few theologians are able to converse: leading physicists. (In recognition of his competence Torrance has been admitted to several learned scientific societies.)

Introduced to Torrance as an undergraduate, and having wrestled with him for decades, Colyer assists both the new reader who needs an overview of the Torrance corpus as well as the experienced reader who wants an index to it. He displays a mastery (but not a domestication) that encourages readers to explore Torrance themselves, guides them through the focus and argument of thirty-plus books and three hundred articles, expounds in detail the major themes of his work, and provides a lexical aid to words and expressions that recur characteristically.

Colyer prefaces his exposition with a twenty-page biographical overview, noting the significance of Torrance’s early years with his missionary parents in China, his multi-faceted education, his military experience (including his decorations for service at the front in World War II), his academic achievements, publications and recognitions, and finally his preoccupation with the mission of the church and with the tenor of his work in light of his vocation as “theological evangelist.”

Recognizing the architectonic that the doctrine of the Trinity provides for all of Torrance’s work, Colyer apportions his book into four, equal-length sections: “The Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ” (the discussion here including the mediation of Christ — the title of Torrance’s most widely-read book), “The Love of God the Father” (with an exploration of contingent being and its relation to the Creator), “The Communion of the Holy Spirit” (including a protracted comment on the church and its ordained ministry), and by way of integration and summation, “The Triunity of God & the Character of Theology.” (This lattermost section discusses such philosophers and scientists as Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Newton , Einstein, Polanyi.)

The book accurately and adequately treats the features of Torrance ‘s thought that readers have found illuminating on account of Torrance ‘s angle of vision and his “theological instinct.” The homoousion is pre-eminent among these because foundational of all else. Colyer concurs in Torrance ‘s pronouncement that this is “the ontological and epistemological linchpin of Christian theology.” Since the Father and the Son are of the same nature, Jesus Christ is the revelation of God and not merely a revelation of a truth concerning God or an aspect of God. In the same way, because the Spirit possesses the same nature as the Father (and the Son), we are united to God by God himself: nothing besides God can unite us to God.

Torrance ‘s absorption with the homoousion, of course, is one with his absorption with the doctrine of the Trinity, “the ground and grammar” of Christian thought, faith and discipleship. Here the exposition is exceedingly fruitful as the implications of the “onto-relations” in God are identified: what God is in himself he is toward us, and vice versa, there being no dark, arbitrary recesses in God; human knowledge of God can only be a predicate of God’s self-knowing; love is what God is (not merely what God expresses), since the eternal love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father renders unnecessary something other than God (the creation) for God to love; the Holy Spirit is that “objective inwardness” which forestalls the “evangelical rationalism” that is otherwise prone to arise as a rationalistic apologetic, rather than the action of God, is thought to render the gospel credible; the economic Trinity must be grounded in the ontological Trinity lest God’s acts fail to include God’s person.

The vicarious humanity of Christ is related to both the above, and is shown to ground the church and to contradict the specific distortion of the “Latin heresy” and the illogic of limited atonement.

Other characteristic aspects of Torrance ‘s work stand out. Among these is the aversion to all theological speculation concerning what God can do or cannot do in the light of what God has done: given himself up to humiliation, suffering, degradation and death in the Son — all of which means that the doctrine of God’s sovereignty, for instance, must be understood as the efficacy of the cross rather than as the capacity to coerce. Natural theology is exposed as the improper attempt at attaining a knowledge of God from a point outside God, thereby rendering the human the measure of the divine. Included here too is Torrance’s willingness to speak of a genuine novum in God’s life, since both the Incarnation and the creation of the world are nova for God, and as such force a reconsideration of such traditional notions as God’s impassivity and impassibility. Colyer succinctly acquaints the reader with the emphasis Torrance has always placed on theology as scientific, “scientific” being properly predicated of any discipline whose methodology is governed by the nature of the object it investigates.

Colyer’s presentation of the filioque controversy, allowing Torrance to familiarize us with what east and west each wanted to preserve as well as fend off, together with the correct meaning of theopoiesis, shows Torrance to be truly Reformed; i.e., thoroughly catholic.

Most profoundly Colyer brings us face-to-face with a servant of the gospel whose humility eclipses his massive learning, as Torrance gladly acknowledges that the simplest believer knows more of God than the most erudite theologian will ever be able to say.

Colyer mirrors as much himself, having learned from Torrance that theology and doxology ceaselessly imply each other. Our apprehension of God fosters gratitude even as our non-comprehension leaves us adoring.

Victor A. Shepherd

Tyndale Seminary

Toronto

(Terry, the text of my review is 1005 words. You had allowed me 1000. Is this acceptable?)

(presented 12 May 2001 at “The Jazz of Life” symposium, Trinity College, University of Toronto)

A Comment on Jeremy Begbie’s Theology, Music and Time

Nowhere does Prof. Begbie attempt a “natural” theology of music that holds up music as a source of revelation, the nature of music thereby acquainting us with the nature of God. The book, rather, holds up everywhere Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, as the event in which we are made the beneficiaries of God’s redemptive and creative gifts through the activity of the Holy Spirit.

At the same time the book nowhere submits to the older (i.e., late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century) notion of Kulturprotestantismus. In Kulturprotestantismus, supported by many thinkers in one era of Germany’s intellectual history, the kingdom of God is understood in terms of developments within history, the culmination of which is a cultural achievement whose genuine richness only the philistine would ever deny. Yet as world-occurrence was soon to make manifest, the richest cultural achievements are not the kingdom of God, are not revelatory, have no power to redeem (whatever else they might do as a creaturely good), but rather can be and have been co-opted by powers that even the non-charismatic among us have described as demonic.

Prof. Begbie’s book aims, rather, at theologizing through music. Since music tells us more about time than does any other cultural phenomenon, it theologizes specifically through a discussion of time as an essential feature of music. And by probing time in its significance to music, it discusses the theological significance of that temporality which is essential to the entire created order and which God has pronounced “good” without qualification.

In my work as a teacher of theology I have found that students bring with them several misunderstandings that can be traced to their assumption that Plato, particularly in his discussion of time and eternity, is an ally of Christians. The same misunderstandings, I have found, haunt the parishioners whose minister I was in the course of decades of pastoral work. Prof. Begbie’s book highlights these misunderstandings as rooted in a flight from time; specifically, a refusal to cherish the necessity and goodness of the temporality of the created order. I list several of them now.

[1] In his homooousion, where Father and Son are said to possess the same rather than merely similar substance, Athanasius distinguishes between “God in the form of the human” and “God as human”. Students put forward “God in the form of the human” as an affirmation of the Incarnation when in fact it is a denial, God now merely masquerading as human. The Incarnation is reduced to the illustrative, illustrating a truth that lies behind it, where even the “illustration” is dysfunctional because deceptive. To speak accurately of the Incarnation, “God as human”, however, commits us to the temporality of God. On account of the Platonic notion that haunts the church everywhere (in part because it lurks in the Fathers everywhere), temporality and eternality are deemed mutually exclusive. Since God’s eternality is never denied, God’s temporality has to be. The consequent denials are legion, not the least of which is the denial that God suffers.

[2] Since eternity pertains to our ultimate blessing, and eternity is commonly understood as timelessness rather than as fulfilled time, time is suspected as an impediment to that blessing. This flight from temporality entails a flight from the body and its attendant earthliness, not to mention its attendant earthiness. In contrasting a doctrine of creation with Plato’s Timaeus, I set the students the exercise of distinguishing between the erotic and pornographic. Few are able to articulate the distinction; fewer still appear to have the intra-psychic freedom to acknowledge that the erotic is a God-ordained good and is to be received with thanksgiving. More generally, temporal existence pertaining to any of the senses is deemed inferior to a realm of pure spirit (so-called) that has to do with intelligibility. (When, for instance, I ask students about the role of the sense of smell, both literal and metaphorical, in scripture, they are startled to learn that scripture discusses it at all.) While students suspect sin’s distortion everywhere in the created order, they make an exception for intelligibility, thereby indicating the extent to which rationalism has supplanted a biblical understanding of revelation.

[3] A confusion is made between temporal existence and fallen existence. On this point Prof. Begbie discusses Augustine at length. Augustine, however, is not alone. In the theological turbulence of Reformation-era Lutheranism, the gnesio-Lutherans, represented by Matthias Illyricus Flacius and opposed by Philip Melanchthon, maintained that in the wake of the fall humankind is essentially depraved. Paul Tillich says as much himself inasmuch as he equates existence with estrangement. If sin is humankind’s essence, then plainly the fallen creature is no longer human at all, the image of God having been effaced rather than merely defaced. Similarly, if sin is the essence of humankind, then redemption can only render us non-human. When Prof. Begbie opines that many people aren’t “at home” in time [71], his assertion is only confirmed when theologians as diverse as Augustine, Flacius and Tillich exemplify a common confusion.

[4] Students espouse an organic notion of the kingdom of God that borrows from the liberal myth of progress. History is deemed to progress, and the kingdom of God is the crown and completion of the progress. Oddly, those students who are most hostile to any notion of biological evolution (for which there is evidence) are often quickest to endorse a notion of historical progress (for which there is no evidence), thinking that faith must affirm a historical inevitability that is benign. Lost here is the biblical category of promise and fulfilment, wherein promise and fulfilment, alike events in time arising from the act of a person, alike depend on God’s grace.

[5] Most distressingly, in the wake of their denial of the temporality of God students espouse a notion of God’s sovereignty that equates sovereignty with sheer power, sheer arbitrariness. Here it is maintained that if God is truly God, then God can do anything at all, anything he wills. Never considered is “What is it that God wills? How is what he wills related to who he is? What is meant by ‘power’?” (Students are always surprised to learn that power is the capacity to achieve purpose.) Most tellingly, on account of their religious environment, students are reluctant to admit that we humans have no fitting idea at all as to what God can or cannot do. We know only what God has done: in his Son, for our sakes, he has given himself up to suffering, degradation, and the death of profoundest self-alienation.

While the cross has many meanings at many levels, it surely means at least that there is no limit to God’s vulnerability; the resurrection in turn means not that vulnerability has been left behind but rather that there is no limit to the effectiveness of God’s vulnerability. Sovereignty has to be understood in terms of the triumph of a vulnerability limitless with respect to God’s self-exposure and protracted in time.

Since Incarnation, cross and resurrection occur in time, plainly time is affirmed as real; time is the theatre of God’s self-disclosure and self-bestowal; time is the venue of that obedience whereby we “glorify God in our bodies”, and of that instance of obedience which is self-forgetful exultation and praise. Here the students need another book from Begbie; namely, Theology, Dance and Time.

To grasp the temporality that Prof. Begbie probes relentlessly is indeed to find, as he declared, our theologizing assisted. When he speaks of the interplay between the temporal processes of music and the temporal processes that riddle human existence in its multidimensionality, from the “micro” of heartbeat to the “macro” of the change of seasons, I am reminded of a remark I heard from violinist Isaac Stern when last he spoke in Toronto. A promising young violinist played for Stern and admitted she couldn’t get the phrasing of the music right. As often as she re-phrased her playing it wasn’t right. Stern told her to sing the part. “I have a poor voice and I don’t want to sing”, she told him. “Sing the violin music anyway”, he told her. She did, and the phrasing fell into place immediately. “You see”, continued the old master, “when you sing you have to breathe. Breathing is a natural temporal event; the breathing that is part of singing will acquaint you with the natural phrasing — the timing — of the violin music.” The point that Stern made about the relation between the timing and rhythm of breathing, a human occurrence whose “realism” no one denies, and the realism of the phrasing of the music; this relation, an intertwining of music with the temporality of the world at large and also with the temporality of the incarnate one through whom and for whom all things have been made; this matrix I found discussed most profitably throughout the book.

The chapter “In God’s Good Time” provided a framework and an articulation for so many matters that I had had in mind and heart for years yet for which I hadn’t been given useable tools. The first section in this chapter discusses the manner in which time demonstrates that there can be ordered change, that change need not imply chaos. Change is chaos, or at least the threat of chaos, of course, where the frozen fixity or immobility of Greek metaphysics is ascendant, the Greek eternal being the unchanging. Yet according to Isaiah the creator of time asks us, “Behold, I am doing a new thing. Do you not perceive it?” Jesus expects his people to be able to read “the signs of the times.” And discernment of the genuinely new, the new-at-God’s-hand, is the principal gift of the Spirit in the book of Acts.

“Taking time”, the second part of this chapter, recalled for me the time that Jesus spent repeatedly, deliberately, in the wilderness, without which the time he spent elsewhere would have been fruitless. And since “natural processes have an inherent time-structure”, according to Barbara Adams whom Begbie quotes, I felt myself vindicated for the time I am free to “waste”, as it were, instead of having to fill up needed leisure time with something that is deemed to be productive and therefore not actually leisure at all. Time spent waiting recalled for me the scriptural connection between waiting and watching. For God’s people waiting is never “waiting around”, loitering; still it is waiting. Not stated in the book but presupposed nonetheless is the fact that the New Testament word for “wait” combines the two concepts of tension and endurance. Tension, of course, together with resolution, goes to the heart of music, as does endurance, since music, unlike fine art, inherently entails protracted temporal process.

“Temporal differentiation” found in even the simplest music, attests the marvellous variety in the creation and the wisdom needed to avoid forcing “our time” on everything and everyone.

The “Limited duration” of music is one with the limited duration of all creaturely existence. Limited duration is inherent in finitude, finitude as such being not evil but rather an instance of transience. Music bespeaks fruitful transience; i.e., transience that doesn’t reflect a resented futility but rather a welcome transition at God’s hand. As a pastor who stood at deathbeds for thirty years I came to grasp what the writer of Ecclesiastes meant when he wrote, without any hint of bitterness or futility, that in God’s good ordering there is indeed a time to die.

In the chapter “Resolution and Salvation” once again I found an articulation for and exposition of the truth that the “time” of anticipatory yet delayed “closures” within a piece of music points to eschatological anticipation, surely the ultimate “hyperbar” in Christian understanding and living. Our eschatological anticipation is fraught with partial fulfilment “on the way” to the final fulfilment, each partial fulfilment serving to quicken steadfastness, to warn against a premature identification of hope with sight, yet also to reassure us of the substance of hope and the imminence of its appearing.

All my formal music training was classical; only recently have I come to appreciate jazz. For this reason the chapter on improvisation was the most moving part of the book for me, specifically the understanding of improvisation as “giving and giving back.” Prone as we are to “thingifying” (or trying to “thingify”) all that pertains to persons, the mutuality of “giving and giving back” that presupposes the irreducibility of persons found me pondering not only Begbie’s discussion of Romans 9-11 but also the work of a thinker whom the church needs to recover, Martin Buber.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger maintained that language is the “house of being.” To say the same thing differently, being is a function of language. To be sure, Heidegger would never deny the converse: language is a function of being, albeit in the relatively small sphere wherein words name or describe objects. Vastly greater, however, is the sphere wherein being is a function of language. Here the force of language isn’t that we have more words in our vocabulary and can show off more readily; rather, expanded language creates a world and admits us to a world that is vastly richer than the world inhabited by someone with meagre language. Here language doesn’t describe an already-existing world but rather gives rise to a universe imperceptible to those for whom language remains only a function of being.

As I read Prof. Begbie’s book I began to wonder if it couldn’t be said, in the spirit of Heidegger, that metre and rhythm are another “house of being.” Admittedly, temporality as such is common to the created order. Still, I can’t help wondering if our awareness of the fact, nature and ubiquity of the “rhythm over metre” that is exemplified in music and riddles life; I can’t help wondering if one’s awareness of this doesn’t facilitate an ever-expanding universe we should otherwise never know and enjoy.

Victor Shepherd, Tyndale Seminary, 12^th May 2001

Titus Chung,   Thomas Torrance’s Mediations and Revelation.

Farnham, U.K.; Ashgate, 2011. Pp. xx + 205. Hardcover, US$77.60. ISBN 978-14094-0570-2.

Chung’s purpose is to explore the logic and substance of revelation in the work of Thomas F. Torrance, highlighting throughout the book the role of mediation in all of Torrance’s thought, not privileging any one tome but acknowledging that Torrance’s most explicit discussion is the sustained argument found in the latter’s The Mediation of Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992).

In his investigation Chung carefully distinguishes between mediation (biblically understood) and immediacy.  While he never quotes Kierkegaard to the effect that immediacy is paganism, he plainly endorses Kierkegaard’s assessment. And while he never formally states the difference between mediation and inference or deduction, he is evidently aware that according to Hebrew logic any deity that is inferred or deduced or concluded is  eo ipse an idol, since the identifying characteristic of the Holy One of Israel is the self-disclosing speech/act that renders all inference not only unnecessary but also impossible.  In short, immediacy and inference alike presuppose a deity other than Yahweh. The living God is known non-immediately (only the creaturely realm can be known immediately) yet non-inferentially, since human recipients of God’s grace are included by the Spirit in the divine/human Son’s knowledge of the Father.

Accurately reflecting Torrance’s concern in his many discussions of mediation, Chung begins his exposition with a discussion of Israel and its ardent, oft-anguished wrestling with God wherein its life with God and its disciplinary suffering under God formed it as the “womb” that nurtured and gave birth to Jesus. In Israel’s history under God there were fashioned the categories – such as sacrifice, priest, king, sin, salvation – by which Jesus Christ was to be understood and the language in terms of which he was to be described, announced and commended.

As Chung moves from a discussion of Israel as the locus of God’s self-revealing activity to the locus of the Word incarnate, Chung probes Torrance’s reiterated distinction between anhypostasia and enhypostasia. Enhypostasia means that Jesus Christ is human with the humanness with which all humankind is human, apart from which he would lack representative and substitutionary significance. Anhypostasia means that in order for the Son or Word to become incarnate he must be incarnate in a particular human individual. Apart from anhypostasia no incarnation has occurred; apart from enhypostasia, the incarnation possesses no significance for anyone beyond Jesus of Nazareth.

Chung’s exploration of the foregoing forms the bridge to his examination of dualism and Torrance’s hallmark aversion to it. In his theological work spanning almost seven decades few matters drew Torrance’s ire more than the dualism that he regarded as having disfigured theology for centuries. Dualism – between fact and meaning, soul and body, eternity and time, act and being – warped theology and above all theo-epistemology wherein a hiatus appeared between our knowledge of God and God’s knowledge of himself. Humankind’s knowledge of God was distorted by assorted speculations instead of rightly being seen as an implicate of God’s knowing himself, the latter a predicate of God’s own intra-Trinitarian life.

In light of the above Chung fittingly guides readers to Torrance’s searching, searing criticisms of Arius in the realm of Christology and Newton in the realm of physics. Athanasius (Torrance never relaxed his admiration for the latter’s homoousion apart from which Torrance always insisted the gospel would have been lost) remained as pivotal for Torrance in theology as  Maxwell, Einstein and Polanyi did in science, not least because of the lattermost’s sustained argument for the presence of a personal yet non-subjectivistic element in all knowing, scientific included. Newton’s dualism divorced God from the world and rendered God unknowable as surely as Arius’ Christology rendered Jesus Christ neither divine nor human and therefore divorced from both at once.

Chapter three, “The Epistemological Realism of Theological Science,” traces Torrance’s epistemological debt to Albert Einstein, particularly Einstein’s insistence that science progresses not by guesswork concerning the cosmos but rather as aspects of the objective world under investigation become transparent to patterns of intelligibility that inhere them; almost exude them, as it were. Science is possible only because there is a match-up between patterns of intelligibility in the natural world and the pattern or structure of human intelligence. Apart from this correspondence no one could think truthfully about the natural world. Inspired by Einstein, Torrance went beyond him in relating the correspondence between patterns of intelligibility in the cosmos and of intelligence in humans to the rationality or intelligence of the Logos, the second person of the Trinity, the one through whom all things have been made (John 1:3) and therefore whose inner principle or rationality has been imprinted upon God’s creation. As theologian Torrance maintains that only the Logos (Incarnate) is the sufficient ground for the phenomenon Einstein spotlighted.

From here Torrance explores revelation concerning its inherent logic, which logic ‘stamps’ itself upon humans as their reason – its structure survived the Fall but its integrity concerning knowledge of God did not – is now healed by grace to facilitate a non-speculative knowledge of God that can claim to be realist in the above sense as surely as scientific knowledge is realist. The remaining chapters of the book apply the material in the first three chapters to an examination of Torrance’s understanding of scripture, preaching, sacraments and church.

Doubtlessly Chung will be challenged with respect to the use he makes of Paul Tillich. In the course of comparing Tillich and Torrance Chung suggests areas where Tillich may supply a corrective to deficits in Torrance Chung claims to have identified. Are these putative deficits actual? Specifically, has Chung misread Tillich’s notion of correlation? And has Chung failed to understand the nature of theological trajectories in Torrance and Tillich that are not merely different but disparate?

The book is marred by gravely defective English.  Punctuation is incorrect and inconsistent. Non-idiomatic English expressions jar the reader on every page: e.g., “David’s [David Fergusson’s] initial supervision was consequential in setting my research in firm footing” (Preface); “The period between the two [nineteenth-century biblical criticism and postmodernism], of which Thiemann regards as leading the discipline into a blind alley, cannot be spared the influence of either” (p. xiv); “Torrance’s discourse of baptism does not end as his scripture” (p. 162); “…the referential relation between language and the objective reality of which it signifies” (p. 112); “Tillich although is unequivocal in the tenet of ‘directedness,’ his deterministic emphasis remains very much on the structure of the question” (p. 74). Most upsetting, perhaps, with respect to non-idiomatic English and sub-academic assessment is “Torrance is not the ordinary Barthian of regurgitation.” (pp. xiv-xv)

Worse are the numerous instances where the English word used is simply incorrect: e.g., “…a window to identify dualism as the threat that has to be harnessed resolutely” (p. 43); “…it is suffice at this juncture….” (p. 188); “…so that we are able to relate to divine compulsiveness” (p. 106); “On this note, the hypostatic union of Christ and his homoousion with the Father are impinged” (p. 40);“…Torrance underpins that the ultimate ‘hearing’….: (p. 188)  (Throughout the book Chung uses “underpin” repeatedly when he seems to mean “affirm” or “emphasize” or “insist.”)

Ungrammatical sentences keep readers off-balance everywhere in the book, force a re-reading, and frequently end in an irksome opacity: e.g., “Only by the epistemic dynamic of the Spirit that such trans-formal experience is made possible, so that as human we are able to know….” (p. 105)
The misrelated modifier (not to say the pointlessness ) is evident in “Being a theologian, Torrance’s articulation is expectedly theological.” (p. 71)
Readers are similarly rattled by the non-parallelism of verb tenses: e.g., “The guiding question is whether Torrance’s explication of the work of the Spirit….We would engage Kruger and Gunton….” (p. 94).

Worst of all, and indefensible, are the countless instances where major authors such as Torrance, Gunton and MacIntyre are misquoted: e.g., “…the various sciences themselves, ranging from physicals and chemistry…: (p. 175); “…they are already on the way that leads to the really existence of God” (p. 179); “It must not conceal us that such language…” (p. 78); “…the one who prefects the creation…” (p. 101).

Much work remains to be done on this book before it can be recommended to those interested in the contribution Thomas F. Torrance has made as theologian, logician of science, and the manner in which theology is deemed ‘scientific’ in the German sense of wissenschaftlich. Torrance characteristically argued that theology, like science, was marked by its own logos. For both disciplines the method of investigating any subject is mandated neither by speculation nor by importing another academic discipline (e.g., philosophy) but by the essence, structure and inner logic of the subject under discussion as the subject-matter forges within the thinker categories for understanding it in conformity with its own inherent logic as both (science and theology) attempt to give an ordered account of a reality that lies beyond them.

Victor Shepherd
Tyndale University College & Seminary
Toronto, Ontario
Email:  victor.shepherd@sympatico.ca

Thomas C. Oden, John Wesley’s Teachings: Volume 1, God and Providence

Oden’s scholarly versatility is noteworthy: see, for instance, his three-volume systematic theology, his multi-volume exploration of pastoral theology and practice, his study of the church in Africa, his examination of the Early Fathers, and his Patristic commentaries on Scripture. His current project, John Wesley’s Teachings, will eventually include volumes three (pastoral theology) and four (ethics and society). Reflecting the order of Wesley’s adherence to classic consensual Christian teaching, the work is an expansion of Oden’s earlier John Wesley’s Scriptural Christianity (1994), albeit four times longer.

Always unashamed that his ‘home’ is the Methodist tradition; always cognizant of Wesley’s catholicity, substance and particular gift to the Body of Christ; always unapologetic in the face of the weighty contributions of the Lutheran and Reformed traditions, Oden has once again expounded the angle-of-vision on theology, discipleship and community embedded in Wesley’s astute fusing of the riches of Anglicanism, Puritanism, and Pietism – with all of this enlivened by the Spirit-infusion characteristic of Methodists and their charismatic descendants.

Oden’s stated purpose is to forefend the oft-heard criticism that Wesley did not think systematically; to render Wesley’s vast patrimony available to the non-professional contemporary reader; and to increase accessibility through reducing archaisms and ambiguities.

Sternly Oden exposes the ignorance of those who think Wesley soteriologically shallow: “There is not a shred of Pelagianism in Wesley.” (v.2, p.240) Emphatically he refutes those who regard the Methodist movement as mawkish: “Especially odious to Wesley was a sentimental hymnody….” (v.2, p.95) Relentlessly he supports Wesley’s insistence that theological novelty is eo ipse heresy, since the truth and reality of the gospel is found in the apostolic confession of Jesus Christ and in the ecumenical, consensual affirmation of it found in the following four centuries. Judiciously he insists that while Wesley is a child of the West (i.e., unambiguously Protestant, ‘justification by faith’ never compromised), Wesley’s Protestantism is rooted in the Eastern Fathers no less than in the Western. Realistically Oden reminds the reader that while some might regard Wesley’s descendants as merely one more family among the dozens in the universal church, in fact Wesley’s understanding is proving at this moment to be the theology of evangelization globally: in Latin America (albeit with a Pentecostal infusion), in Continental Europe and, not least, in Russia. Profoundly Oden highlights Wesley’s theology as neither one-sided nor shallow; while rooted in antiquity it is more readily acknowledged and owned today than are the ersatz theologies that marry modernity only to find themselves widowed shortly.

Oden warns readers that “Only two subjects in the Wesley literary corpus place serious intellectual burdens on the ordinary reader, and this [i.e., predestination] is one of them (original sin being the other).” (v.2, p.157) Wesley’s articulation of original sin is his longest treatise, while Oden’s discussion of predestination is the longest chapter in the two volumes under review. Sidestepping no biblical issue, Oden develops, without discomfiture or defensiveness, Wesley’s protracted discussion of angels (parenthetically noting that Wesley’s angelology intrigues audiences more than anything else Oden says about Wesley.)

Unerringly Oden highlights Wesley’s accentuation of sanctification as transformation in this life, emphasizing the difference now in those who embrace the Saviour who releases believers from sin’s power or grip no less than from sin’s guilt. In such a judicious balance of justification and sanctification Oden points out Wesley’s insistence on the equilibrium of Christology and Pneumatology, or what God does for us in the Son and what God effects in us through the Holy Spirit; for a one-sided elevation of Christology issues in “formalism” (a frigid orthodoxy that fills the mind yet freezes the heart) while a one-sided elevation of Pneumatology issues in “enthusiasm” (an inflamed subjectivism that welcomes irrationalism). Wisely Wesley upholds the Spirit-invigorated restoration of reasoning’s integrity while eschewing philosophical rationalism.

Thanks to his extensive and intensive knowledge of Wesley, Oden can direct readers to documents wherein are found ready-to-hand deposits or concentrations of key themes. For instance, all of Wesley’s major points concerning the Holy Spirit are stated summarily in his “A Letter to a Roman Catholic” (1747); the quickest route to Wesley’s Christology is found in his “Order for the Administration of the Lord’s Supper” (1784); and the foundational documents for Wesley’s understanding of justification by faith (he never disagreed in the slightest with the Magisterial Reformers on this point) are the “Doctrinal Minutes,” the distillate of the first three Annual Conferences (1744-1746).

Christians of Pentecostal persuasion will profit from Oden’s thorough discussion of Christian Perfection. Oden points out that ‘perfect’, in Wesley’s understanding, is informed not by the Latin perfectus (faultless, admitting no development) but by the Greek teleiosis (a self-abandoned aspiration to self-forgetful love of God and neighbour).

Since Wesley names double-predestination “the very antidote of Methodism,” nothing less than a “lie” that renders God satanic, Oden patiently explores the nature and logic of prevenient grace, the merciful activity of God that ‘comes before’ sinners are even aware of their need of grace and only by means of which they can respond to saving grace. In this regard Oden faithfully reflects Wesley’s attentive reading of his Patristic mentors and the logic of prevenience at every stage of the Ordo Salutis.

Oden has performed a fine service in appending helpful bibliographies at the conclusion of each section of each volume, thereby directing readers to books and articles that amplify or situate any one item of Wesley’s theology. Since Wesley’s theology is entrenched in sermons, letters, journals, diaries and numerous tracts, footnotes indicating where corroboration of Oden’s interpretation can be found, especially in the lesser-known repositories of Wesley’s thought, are invaluable. An appendix paralleling the Jackson Edition (1829-31) and the Bicentennial Edition (1975-) of Wesley’s Sermons will save serious students no little time and spare them much frustration.

Victor Shepherd, Tyndale University College & Seminary, Toronto.

John Vissers, The Neo-Orthodox Theology of W.W.Bryden.

The main purpose of Vissers’ book is to explore and assess the contribution of W.W.Bryden, sixth principal of Knox College (University of Toronto) and professor of theology, 1925-1952. To this end Vissers prosecutes a two-fold task: an examination of Bryden’s role in introducing and magnifying the theology of Karl Barth in Canada, and, in light of Bryden’s neo-orthodox convictions, an investigation of the nature and force of Bryden’s relentless criticism of church union in Canada (1925). In the wake of the union that gathered up all of the Methodists and seventy per cent of the Presbyterians, the minority “continuing” Presbyterians perceived themselves as having to identify, articulate and defend the grounds of their resistance to a development that most of the historic Protestants in Canada had assumed to be God-willed.

Bryden was never persuaded by those who facilely spoke of church union as one manifestation of the creation-wide reconciliation wrought in Christ. He feared, on the contrary, that those who spoke like this were unwittingly embracing neo-paganism. In the surge of Barth’s tidal wave he discerned a theological resource whose substance and logic could expose theological deterioration and help a jarred denomination contend for the integrity of the gospel; and in the course of helping contend for the gospel, help the church identify its lamentable (but not irreversible) accommodation and acculturation.

Bryden regarded the churches of his era as having put asunder what God mandates, and the Magisterial Reformation echoes, be kept together: Word and Spirit, or what God does for us (Christology) and what God does in us (Pneumatology). Bryden, astute reader of Reformation theology and church history, knew that Word divorced from Spirit renders Word lifeless orthodoxy, a rationalism that merely happens to employ religious words in its thinly disguised naturalism; Spirit divorced from Word renders Holy Spirit lethally indistinguishable from human spirit, whether philosophical idealism or psychological optimism or social evolutionism. Bryden saw unerringly that the Spirit alone is the power of the Word, while the Word alone is the substance of the Spirit.

For this reason Bryden was no less convinced that the way ahead for his denomination did not lie in a retreat to biblical fundamentalism or uncritical confessionalism.  While the Westminster documents unquestionably had served the church well and could continue to inform it, no less certainly their theological deficits and deficiencies would have to be specified and corrected.

Throughout the acrimony surrounding church union and the hostile stand-off following it, Bryden remained opposed to the theological indifference on both sides. The pro-union faction appeared theologically apathetic and historically amnesiac, wanting only to construct an ‘umbrella’ large enough to accommodate all who wanted to huddle together under it; the anti-union faction appeared too often to have opposed the union for the wrong reasons: e.g., to preserve Scottish ethnicity or to retain real estate or to repristinate Westminster orthodoxy or Reformed scholasticism. The path Bryden chose to tread was lonely, and invited rejection at the hands of those who regarded him as an impediment to their cause.

Profoundly influenced by Barth, Bryden was nonetheless never a sycophantic camp-follower. Rather he recognized in Barth not merely a rescuer of the silted-over treasures of Reformation figures like Luther and Barth but also someone who could help the Canadian church re-think faith in the judging-saving Word. This Word, supposedly irrelevant (according to the theological liberalism arising from Troeltsch and his school), alone was life-giving.

Bryden’s theology, Vissers points out, was at once a theology of revelation (God speaks and acts so as to acquaint us with himself ‘from above’ since no approach ‘from below’ –  natural theology – can render sinners savingly intimate with God), a retrieval of Reformation gains, and all of this addressed to a post-Enlightenment people who neither flee modernity fearfully nor fawn over it flatteringly. Bryden’s major work, The Christian’s Knowledge of God (1940, republished at Cambridge: James Clark & Co., 2011) embodied these convictions. In line with Barth’s characteristic emphasis he maintained that God’s speech is simultaneously God’s act: supremely at the cross God did something that was cosmos-altering, not merely said something. Correspondingly humankind’s declared response, “I believe,” is simultaneously act: faith is that gift of God which must be humanly exercised, humanly experienced and humanly exemplified. Not least, Bryden, aware that evangelism regularly heads the New Testament lists of ministries of the Spirit, insisted that a theology was useful only to the extent that it invigorated the church’s evangelistic ministry. Not surprisingly, two evangelical giants to whom he remained indebted in this regard were Reformation historian T.M. Lindsay and theologian James Denney.

Vissers helpfully informs the reader of the formative influences bearing upon Bryden, of the intellectual currents flowing in early twentieth-century Canada (e.g., the philosophical idealism then in vogue at Queen’s University and whose conflation of the divine and the human was thought to be essence of Christianity), of the varieties of Continental and Scottish Calvinism that had found their way to the New World, and of Bryden’s social awareness wherefrom he consistently protested, in the name of the gospel, glaring social inequities that were nothing less than iniquities.

A major highlight of Vissers’ book is its chapter on Bryden’s theology of the Holy Spirit. Bryden rightly recognized a serious underemphasis in Barth’s thought, the work of the Holy Spirit in regenerating sinners, assuring them of their new nature in Christ and bringing forth such fruits of the Spirit within them as to transform character. This operation of the Spirit begins with God’s address to sinners, God’s address being nothing less than God-in-person speaking to us so as to render us persons.  (Not mentioned in the text but presupposed is the biblical notion that humans are the only creature to whom God speaks, God’s address being one of several ways of understanding what it is to be made “in the image and likeness of God.”) The Spirit, therefore, has everything to do with one’s experience of the living God (not merely with acquiring information about God), and with one’s awareness that God’s address has occasioned a crisis within the sinner that can be relieved only as the sinner embraces the crucified one whose arms have already embraced her. Reading the New Testament closely in this matter Bryden correctly recognized the emphasis given to the work of the Holy Spirit, that power of God which Christ uniquely bears and bestows, and the concomitant emphasis on faith’s experience of Christ. Where Barth had appeared reluctant to discuss Christian experience lest he be accused of pietism, Bryden boldly forged ahead, confident he had read the apostles aright. Bryden’s talk of “Christ mysticism,” then, was not a religious vagueness blurring creator and creation or melding sin and righteousness. Rather it was a Spirit-fostered apprehension that the cross exposes the sinner as enemy of God, and simultaneously a Spirit-facilitated inclusion of the sinner in Christ’s life, which inclusion entails an intimacy that finds language forever inadequate. In expounding the scope and depth of the Spirit’s work Bryden was helped chiefly by John Calvin, recognized among Reformation scholars as ‘the theologian of the Holy Spirit.’

Implied in Bryden’s insistence on the reality of the Spirit was his insistence on the reality of the church, the creation of the Spirit. Eschewing a voluntarist notion of the church Bryden rejected the widespread notion in North America that the church is an association of like-minded individuals whose commonality happens to be Christianity. Rather he averred, with the Reformers, that the church as Body of Christ is divinely constituted as the elect in Christ “before the foundation of the world.” (Ephesians 1:4) and to which individual believers are admitted by faith.

Bryden did not lack opponents. Fulton Anderson, formidable chair of the University of Toronto’s philosophy department, fumed over Bryden’s doggedness concerning sin’s distortion of reason. Frank Beare, church historian at McGill University’s Presbyterian College, deemed Bryden’s theology a “chain” that crippled its catholicity. Yet James D. Smart, one of the twenty-plus students of Bryden who became professors, pronounced him an exemplary representative of the Reformed tradition.

While Bryden’s work is now more than half-a-century old it remains timely. Note, for instance, his discovery, as early as the 1920s, that the church was understood less as the community of the Spirit joyfully embracing the crucified and more as a locus of business expertise and management technique.

Vissers’ book will find readers eager to probe Bryden’s major work (in print once again) and therein assess the influence of a continental giant on a major Canadian thinker who, like Barth, never scoffed at the vocation of village pastor. It provides insight into the genesis, challenges and resilience of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. In looking back to the latter’s most formative theologian it may even suggest a way forward for a denomination that struggles as much now as it did in 1925.

Victor Shepherd
Tyndale University College & Seminary
Toronto, Ontario
Email:  victor.shepherd@sympatico.ca