Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 125:498 (Apr 1968)
Article: Book Notices
Author: Anonymous

BSac 125:498 (Apr 68) p. 186

Book Notices

Introduction To Theology. By Marianne H. Micks. New York: The Seabury Press, Paperback Edition, 1967. 204 pp. $2.25.

Written from the viewpoint of a “second-generation, post-liberal Protestant” (p. 31), this introductory study of theology presents the theology of contemporary neo-orthodoxy in the traditions of Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr. The author, who is Dean of Western College, Oxford, Ohio, reflects her graduate education career in Columbia University, Union Theological Seminary, New York, and Yale University. The work is totally innocent of contemporary orthodoxy, but the author is quite familar with the leaders of the Protestant Reformation and the early fathers, and the theological controversies in which they figured. The author never really commits herself to theological specifics, but apparently defines faith (after Kierkegaard and Tillich) as that which “involves the total self,…by nature a matter of movement from moment to moment” (p. 168). This introduction to theology, although one-sided and far from historical orthodoxy, is a readable summary of existential contemporary theology.

J. F. Walvoord

Toward An American Theology. By Herbert W. Richardson. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. xii + 170 pp. $3.95.

The provocative essays are an attempted foundation for an ecumenical American theology of the future as shaped by the change of modern culture to a “sociotechnic age” dominated by the sociological, psychological, economic, and political sciences. The death-of-God theologians are criticized as too antiquarian in failing to come to grips with the conception of God that Richardson feels will govern the next cultural epoch, namely, “God as the unity of the encompassing system of social relations” rather than “God as a person” (p. 23).

This book will be of little value to conservative Christians beyond illustrating one more route that modern theology may take after cessation of the death-of-God uproar.

F. D. Lindsey

Christian Primer. By Louis Cassels. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1967. 108 pp. $1.45. Paper.

Books are often written by theologians who are not journalists or by journalists who are not theologians. Regarding the Christian Primer, the latter is true. Cassels

BSac 125:498 (Apr 68) p. 187

is a newspaperman who “arrived at the household of faith after a very long detour through the wastelands of skepticism.” Now he is seeking to give adult answers to elementary questions about the Christian faith. In many areas of doctrine he has merely moved from the wasteland of...