92 - Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Study of the Faith

Christian Faith:
An Introduction to the Study of the Faith
By Hendrikus Berkhof
Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, l979. 568 pp. $20.95.

Given the current narcissism in Christian thought, this book deserves attention. Berkhof is as serious about the content of the faith as he is about our response. He attempts to restate the Christian truth to the contemporary secular mind in a meaningful way. Though theology is a science, it is "first and foremost an art," thus requiring learning as well as some expression.

The author is a Dutch theologian of the former state church of the Netherlands (the Hervormde Kerk) in which he is a counterpart to G. C. Berkouwer, his friend in the Dutch Gereformeerde Kerken. Both write theology in a manner that reflects the agonies and the changed reality of the post-World War II world. For both, theology must be as concretely practical as academically intellectual.

Berkhof facilitates his aim by employing a larger and a smaller print. The former is for all readers, the latter for those interested in more depth from a historical perspective. This dual objective is not easy, though accomplished here with considerable success.

Treating theology as an art, and thus personal, the author borrows freely from Barth as well. His theology is relational, not in the Bruce Larson sense, but reflected in God's determination to engage humanity through a divinely established covenant. Like Barth he insists that the Christian faith is knowable only within the context of ancient and modern Israel. The Jewishness of Jesus must be recognized, and election must be defined in terms of community rather than individuals. God can be understood, not as he-is-in-himself, but in his determination to be our God by becoming human, an insistence that carries the view that God's attributes must be defined in terms of God's assumed stance toward us, rather than directly in terms of the divine essence. He also reflects Barth's tendency toward a modalistic trinitarianism, rather than God as three persons existing side-by-side within a single basic unity. And like Barth, his thought is highly Christocentric; without a "fall" there would nonetheless be an "incarnation."

On the other hand, Berkhof is not slavishly Barthian. He believes that the "revelational event" occurs "on the plane of history, in consecutive and connected historical events." And he is perhaps most un-Barthian in the tribute he pays to prologemena, believing that the Christian religion is best understood if approached within the realities of religion in general.

First published under Chrisielijk Geloof in 1973, this book now

94 - Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Study of the Faith

appears for the first time in English. For this, the publisher deserves credit. The book is a lucid, readable, substantive, and fascinating discussion of aspects of the Reformed faith that have long needed question. Past neglect of such challenging, critical evaluation goes a long way to account for the low estate into which theology has fallen in most Reformed, and particularly Presbyterian, churches.

James Daane
Fuller Theological Seminary
Pasadena, California