Book Reviews -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 114:456 (Oct 1957)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous


Book Reviews

The Presbyterian Enterprise. Maurice W. Armstrong, Lefferts A. Loetscher, Charles A. Anderson, editors. The Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1956. 336 pp. $4.50.

This volume is a source book of Presbyterian history and abounds in the “stuff” of which historical narratives are made. No weighty, musty tome, it rather abounds in interest and life. The collaborating authors have brought before the mind’s eye the flesh and bones of the church’s history by means of diary excerpts, sermon selections, Assembly opinions, theological definitions and differences, and private and public announcements.

The editors introduce each illustrative document with sufficient description and strikingly little opinionated editorial comment. The choice of representative documents is both interesting and good. The historically minded and thoughtful lay or schooled reader will find here the high-water marks of sound and conservative systematic theology along with controversial liberalism and reaction. The clear and lofty spirit of Biblicism of Hodge, A. T. Pierson and Warfield, as captured in these documents, finds faint echo in the documents of more recent decades. These rather remind one of a turbulence created by the unprecedented speed of events of a war and postwar world.

Production of this type of a volume calls for careful weighing and evaluation of the contribution as well as significance of each document selected as expressing the “mind” of a given period. The authors have excellently succeeded.

R. A. Renfer

Rediscovering The Words Of Faith. By Charles T. Sardeson. Abingdon Press, New York, 1956. 124 pp. $2.00.

The basic words of the Christian faith are examined in this book and rewritten in terms of neo-orthodoxy by the author who is pastor of the First Lutheran Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

One of the significant dangers of neo-orthodoxy, whether it be that of Barth, Brunner or Aulen, is that objective Christian truth is rewritten in the terms of objective experience. The form of doctrine is retained but the content becomes whatever the participant in the religious experience has experienced. Thus in such a book as this the presentation of key doctrines which are vitally related to the experience of the believer is often excellent and stimulating. It is so in this author’s presentation of the life of grace which is the finest chapter in this book.

His concept of revelation is typically neo-orthodox, judgment is a constantly recurring crisis experience of this life, and the atonement is God becoming reconciled to the sinner, not the sinner becoming reconciled...

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