Book Reviews -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 109:436 (Oct 1952)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous


Book Reviews

The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr. By Edward J. Carnell. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids. 250 pp. $3.50.

Reinhold Niebuhr has come to be regarded as the American representative of neo-orthodoxy in much the same light as Karl Barth is the symbol of crisis theology in Europe. The analysis of his theology is the key to much of the current intellectual movement among American liberals.

Professor Carnell of Fuller Theological Seminary in previous publications had already proved himself a brilliant apologist for conservative Reformed theology and his analysis of the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr is an important contribution to contemporary theological literature.

Approaching his task from the standpoint of philosophic apologetics, Dr. Carnell offers first an analysis of neo-orthodoxy explaining its rise and relevance to the contemporary theological scene. His treatment is excellent, pivoting on the rise and decline of the doctrine of divine immanence in liberal theology. He shows further that neo-orthodoxy as represented in Niebuhr begins with man—his nature, sin, need—and answers the problem essentially in dialectical terms which ultimately extract from man himself the solution to his problem. The reader is left with the inevitable conclusion that neo-orthodoxy is different in most essentials from orthodoxy as represented in the Reformed tradition and that it denies such essentials as the infallible inspiration of the Scriptures, the deity of Jesus Christ, the efficacy of blood atonement, in particular the cross of Christ, and the doctrine of a bodily second advent of Christ.

From the standpoint of dispassionate weighing of facts and theories, general scholarship, documentation, literary quality, and argument, the volume can be graded excellent. Criticism which might be made would be directed more at the author’s purpose than at the book itself. The aim of the book is to provide a scholarly analysis and answer to

Niebuhr. The author has brilliantly achieved this purpose, and the conservative theological world is his debtor.

The volume might have served a wider public, if the author had wished, by reducing the vocabulary to more ordinary limits. For instance, “three fundamental reasons why Niebuhr cannot accommodate the metaphysical doctrine of Christ into his existentialism,” in ordinary English could be reduced to, “three reasons why Niebuhr rejects the deity of Christ.” It is, however, difficult to reach the scholarly world unless one uses its vocabulary. Perhaps this also explains the almost total avoidance of Scripture citation while at the same time the author obviously accepts the Bibl...

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