Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 13:2 (May 1951)
Article: Reviews Of Books
Author: Anonymous

WTJ 13:2 (May 51) p. 155

Reviews Of Books

R. A. Knox: Enthusiasm. A Chapter in the History of Religion, with Special Reference to the XVII and XVIII Centuries. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1950. viii, 622. $6.00.

The author calls this volume “the Book”, the kind of book which “is the whole of a man’s literary life” (p. v). When something like this happens in connection with a member of the Knox family, the result is bound to be worth attention. With the death of Bishop E. A. Knox, one of the most vigorous and most respected leaders of the Evangelical wing of the Church of England vanished from the terrestrial scene. He left behind him three sons who have enlivened England these many decades past. E. G. V. was for years editor of Punch, the master of ceremonies of English humor as well as a contributor himself; Wilfred L. offered many learned New Testament studies to the grist of discussion from the standpoint of an Anglican Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge; our present author, Ronald A., is a monsignor of the Roman Church and one of the more sparkling of the cultured apologetes for that faith in England. His pen is ever busy and he has just completed, singlehanded, a translation of the entire Scriptures.

As a master of English phrase, Ronald Knox stands high. “The satirist of the Provincial Letters was a man, I think, who was hard put to it all his life to restrain his fidgets” (p. 201); Luther became “the father of a national establishment whose gross humours his theology of imputed righteousness did nothing to purge” (p. 398); “Herrnhut was to eighteenth-century Protestantism much what Moscow is to twentieth-century Socialism; you feared to accept its alliance” (p. 406); “nothing reveals the preconceptions of a mind like its exclamation marks” (p. 482); “I think Whitefield was one of those men who possess genius unalloyed with any vestige of good taste” (p. 490); and, finally, of the theological differences between Wesley and Whitefield, “never were theologians so resolved to make a molehill out of a mountain” (p. 496).

As may be observed from the foregoing, these flashes sometimes have more wit than wisdom. This phenomenon is further apparent in lengthier passages. For example, there are several pages concerned with the genius of Luther and the Reformation which conclude with the statement that

WTJ 13:2 (May 51) p. 156

“the theology of grace and good works” was “a by-path, and some would say a blind alley, … into which all the great figures of the Reformation followed him (Luther); so that to us this controversy appears integral to the very nature of Protestantism, whereas in fact it is a side-issue” (p. 130). I can only murmur humbly, Comment superfluou...