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Theological Table-Talk
By Hugh T. Kerr

THE FEEL OF THE WORD

When a private translation of Paul's epistles sells a million copies in the short space of ten years, there must be something to it. This surprising publishing fact is a good point of departure to reflect upon the J. B. Phillips translations. The epistles were printed in 1948 under a title which had been suggested by C. S. Lewis-Letters to Young Churches. The project was undertaken by Mr. Phillips when he was the Vicar of The Church of the Good Shepherd in London during the blitz of World War II. He discovered that young people especially simply did not understand the language of the Authorized Version, so he undertook to translate Paul's words into modern English. Encouraged by the acceptance of what he had done, he turned next to the Gospels, which were published in 1953. The book of the Acts, The Young Church in Action, followed in 1955, and The Book of Revelation in 1957. Now all four separate volumes have been gathered together in The New Testament in Modern English (Macmillan, 1958, $6.00).

In the meantime, as if this were not enough, Mr. Phillips has written a half dozen other works on the Christian faith, and he now serves as Canon Prebendary of Chichester Cathedral. Many of those who have read part or all of the Phillips translations echo C. S. Lewis' original comment on the Pauline book. "It would have saved me a great deal of labor if this book had come into my hands when I first seriously began to try to discover what Christianity was." The publishers say that "there have never been so many requests to quote material from any one book."

What is the secret of the success-not only in the publisher's sense of the term-of these modern translations? In the recently printed omnibus volume, Mr. Phillips supplies a new Foreword which provides some interesting clues. He tells us that a translation should be guided by three principles: first, "it must not sound like a transla-

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tion," second, the translator must not obtrude "his own personality," and third, the aim should be "to produce in the hearts and minds of his readers an effect equivalent to that produced by the author upon his original readers."

It is the last principle surely that marks Phillips as a great translator, for he has succeeded in a remarkable way to transmit the "feel" of the Word, its emotion and excitement. For the scholar, the linguist, the exact exegete, something is no doubt lost in this procedure, so that what is produced may appear to be more of a paraphrase than a literal translation. This is a risk which the translator was quite well aware of, but he was convinced also that a too minute examination of the words might obscure the Word.

One reason why preoccupation with the literal meaning of the Greek language may prove to be a hindrance rather than a help is that later readers may see more in the words than the original author himself saw or even intended. Mr. Phillips' view on this is refreshingly blunt. "I doubt very much," he says, whether the New Testament writers were as subtle or as self-conscious as some commentators would make them appear. For the most part I am convinced that they had no idea that they were writing Holy Scripture."

If this judgment is sound, and some doubtless would dispute it, a whole series of interesting and even radical implications for Bible study and theological interpretation follows. The modern scholarly approach to the Bible has transcended the literal, fundamentalistic dilemma by emphasizing the theology of the New Testament vocabulary, and this in turn has resulted in enormous advances in the understanding of the words as well as the Word. But Phillips has suggested, by the vitality of his translations, an additional dimension peculiarly appropriate for our impressionistic age and our current existentialist concern. "To transmit freshness and life across the centuries"-is the way he sums up his own task as a Bible translator.

WORSHIP AND THE ARTS

The Department of Worship and the Arts of the National Council of Churches has published two new booklets as a contribution to the life and work of the American Churches. A Bibliography of Music and the Church has been compiled by a committee of distinguished

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musical scholars, Theodore M. Finney, head of the Department of Music, University of Pittsburgh, Walter E. Buszin, musicologist on the faculty of Concordia Seminary, and Donald M. McCorkle, Director of the Moravian Music Foundation in Winston Salem, North Carolina. A Bibliography on Architecture for the Church contains the most comprehensive listing of books and articles available. It was assembled by Herbert W. Johe, a member of the faculty of the Department of Architecture at the University of Michigan. (Single copies of these bibliographies are 35 cents each; 2 to 10 copies at 30 cents per copy; II copies and up at 25 cents each. Address orders to Department of Worship and the Arts, National Council of Churches, 297 Fourth Avenue, New York 10, New York. Another bibliography, published last year by the special Commission on Drama, is entitled Plays for the Church and is available at 50 cents.)

For those who would like to know more about this struggling but energetic Department (may their tribe increase!), a personal note to Mr. Marvin P. Halverson, the Executive Director, will receive careful attention. At my request, Mr. Halverson sent me a bulky file of the most fascinating material on the arts and religion which I immediately devoured in one gulp. He will not mind, I hope, a quotation from his letter. "We are," he writes, "severely limited by a lack of funds, even the minimal operation budget not being guaranteed. This has prohibited the development of many of our projects, which is regrettable because we have in our Department some of the most outstanding people in the arts whose readiness to serve is not matched by the willingness of the Churches to underwrite such projects."

The Department, however, has already achieved much. It has succeeded in initiating conversations between artists, theologians, and churchmen "almost for the first time in American Protestantism." As the Department's Report for 1957 put it: "As a consequence there has not only been a mutual growth in understanding, but persons in the arts have had an opportunity to see their vocation in religious terms and ministers have obtained a larger conception of the Church's task in our culture." Apparently it is easier to draw the artists into such conversations than the spokesmen for the Church. The Report notes "the hiatus between Protestantism and the arts which has prevailed for generations and in some cases for centuries." And it observes gloomily but truthfully: "The legacy of neglect, indifference, and occasional hostility [on the part of

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the Churches] is of such magnitude that merely to initiate conversation and establish communication through a common vocabulary is a program for decades rather than years."

DIALOGICAL PERSONALISM

This is a fancy way of speaking about Martin Buber's seminal book I and Thou, first published in Germany in 1923, translated by Ronald Gregor Smith into English in 1937, and this year republished in a Second Edition with a new Preface by the translator and a new Postscript by the author. Dialogical personalism is Smith's term for describing Buber's mutual and reciprocal converse between I and It and I and Thou, and it is an apt description of the dialogue involved on the personal or interpersonal level. The wide currency of words like interpersonalism, meeting, encounter, acceptance, etc. among contemporary theologians, psychologists, psychotherapists, sociologists, and others, is some index to the influence which Buber's book has exerted. A Second Edition is needed, for the book-a sort of theological-philosophical poem-deserves and demands a second reading.

The opening sentences, here run on and not printed as separate paragraphs, set the stage of the personal dialogue. "To man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold attitude. The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words which he speaks. The primary words are not isolated words, but combined words. The one primary word is the combination I-Thou. The other primary word is the combination I-It; wherein, without a change in the primary word, one of the words He and She can replace It. Hence the I of man is also twofold. For the I of the primary word I-Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I-It."

There are three, perhaps really four, sides to these equations: the relation of the I to the world of It, to the world of Thou (which is distorted when a He or She becomes an It), to the THOU, and to the I who is in these relationships. "And in all the seriousness of truth, hear this: without It man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not a man."

Martin Buber is, of course, a Jew; perhaps a very "mystical" Jew; perhaps with one foot on the threshold of Christianity. But when

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he speaks of the I-Thou between man and God, he implies a direct, immediate relationship without benefit of mediator or incarnation. Yet curiously Buber's influence has been felt most strongly among Christian thinkers, and it is not as odd as it might seem to include his name in a little book recently edited by George L. Hunt, Ten Makers of Modern Protestant Thought (Association Press, 1958). In any case, in Buber's book the two traditions of Judaism and Christianity, as Gregor Smith observes, "interact and illuminate one another in a remarkable and moving way."

In the meantime, Buber has written other books, some highly suggestive, and all building upon and presupposing I and Thou. In the new Postscript to the Second Edition, where we might look for fresh comment by the author on his little classic, however, there is nothing new. Indeed, after reading the book again, or for the person who may read it for the first time, the Postscript is not only unnecessary, it is a distinct disappointment, an intrusion whereby the author gets in his own way and stumbles over himself. Which perhaps only means that the little book was bigger than the author himself realized.

PROTESTANT PHOBIAS

An explanation of what disturbs Protestant Churches in America today was offered recently by a well-known Roman Catholic theologian. Father Gustave Weigel, S.J., addressed a meeting of the Catholic National Conference on Convert Work at St. Paul's College in Washington. The fears, inner tensions, and anxieties of Protestants, he said, are occasioned by the rise and development of American Catholicism. He noted, for example, that "a partial cause for Protestant enthusiasm for ecumenical union is the fear that a splintered Protestantism will be weak against the united Catholics." And he observed further that Protestants' fears about a possible Catholic President of the United States grow out of the same concern. "What really frightens them is the feeling that a Catholic President would be a shattering proof that Protestantism is not the national religion."

There is no doubt some truth in these observations, and it is good to hear them from such a straightforward spokesman as Father Weigel. They at least allow us to see what others think our real

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problems are. But they are also only partially true, and many Protestants would scarcely recognize themselves in these characterizations. They may indeed be concerned about Roman Catholic ecclesiastical and theological pretensions, but not at all concerned to set the course of Protestantism as over against Romanism. That was the Reformation struggle and it still continues in some respects, but American Protestantism has its own history and integrity and does not need to define itself as anti- or non-Roman.

But Father Weigel is an astute man, and Protestants must take seriously his analysis as at least one way in which Catholics think of Protestants. It would be interesting to know what Catholics would make of the Protestant feeling of disgust over the way Catholics re- acted to the death of Plus XII and the election and coronation of John XXIII. Protestant appreciation for the late Pope's devout character and efforts for world peace was widespread and spontaneous. But the death-bed accounts of the Pope's last hours, the embalming of the body, and the parades attending the burial seemed to many Protestants like a cult of death rather than an expression of the resurrection victory. Similarly, the pomp and ceremony, to say nothing of the reams of publicity releases which were given full coverage everywhere, of the new Pope as he came to office, might be expected, Father Weigel, to arouse Protestant sleeping fears that the Roman Church is more a temporal state than a Church of Jesus Christ. This, too, would be only a partially true statement from the side of Protestants. But one recalls a forthright comment of Martin Luther which Catholics today might ponder. "It is," wrote Luther, "a horrible and frightful thing that the ruler of Christendom, who boasts himself Vicar of Christ and successor of St. Peter, lives in such worldly splendor that in this regard no king nor emperor can equal or approach him. . . . He wears a triple crown, when the greatest kings wear but a single crown; if that is like the poverty of Christ and of St. Peter, then it is a new kind of likeness."

THE HERE AND THE HEREAFTER

When two foremost Biblical theologians turn their attention to eschatology, we may look for light from their treatment of this basic but amorphous doctrine. Published within a year of each other,

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two small books on the subject deserve special attention-for what they do not say as well as for what they do say. Rudolf Bultmann, the famous demythologizer of Marburg, delivered the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in 1955, and they are now printed under the title The Presence of Eternity: History and Eschatology (Harper, 171 pp., 1957, $3.00). Oscar Cullmann, of Basel and the Sorbonne, gave the annual Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality at Harvard, also in 1955, and this address has been published as Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament (Macmillan, 60 pp., 1958, $1.25). The one tends to emphasize the here of eschatology, the other the hereafter.

Bultmann's position is summarized in a concluding paragraph. Noting that "the question of meaning in history has become meaningless" because "man does not stand outside history" but is himself involved in history, he asserts that "history is humanity" and "the meaning in [not of] history lies always in the present, and when the present is conceived as the eschatological present by Christian faith the meaning in history is realized." Paul, according to Bultmann, says that "for the believer who is 'in Christ' the decisive event has already happened." Even more emphatically in the Fourth Gospel the resurrection of the dead and the last judgment are present in the coming of Jesus." Bultmann's position has been intimated before in other books; it is his existentialist demythologizing as applied to eschatology. Its virtues are obvious, in making the future real here and now, in relating the "indicative" and the "imperative" of Christian faith, and in accenting the believer's "openness" to the hereafter. Like C. H. Dodd's "realized eschatology" it nevertheless ignores altogether what the British interpreter chose to call the residue" of eschatology-the element of sheer finality and ultimate consummation.

Cullmann is also a demythologizer-not of the Biblical record which he takes seriously but of the history of Christian doctrine. The question of his title is answered unequivocally. "The teaching of the great philosophers Socrates and Plato can in no way be brought into consoriance with that of the New Testament." That is to say, immortality and resurrection suggest an infinite qualitative difference in spite of the fact that in Christian doctrine the Biblical and Greek views have been combined. Cullmann also insists with Bultmann on the present reality of the victory over death won by

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Christ in his own death and resurrection. But Cullmann reverts to his well-known illustration, in his book Christ and Time, in which the victory of Christ's resurrection is likened to the decisive battle in a war which really settles the outcome even though the war continues on to Victory Day.

Thus Cullmann makes a place for the "residue" of eschatology, the futuristic consummation which carmot-against Bultmann-be confined to the present. This permits Cullmann to develop in a somewhat new form the doctrine of "the intermediate state" Or "Soul sleep." He is convinced that the New Testament and especially Paul put off the resurrection until "the last day" and that-against Barth-the individual does not enter into the fullness of the resurrection life at death. But while looking to the hereafter (because of the character of the here in Christ) and thus able to retain the Biblical mythology of the future, Cullmann is nevertheless led by his " soul sleep" position into something approaching the Greek view which separates the "soul" from the "body." He is aware of this "approximation," but insists that the Biblical view remains radically different.

The cynics among us may conclude that the two Biblical theologians cancel each other out. A more sober estimate would be, that in their own characteristic way they not so much solve as illustrate the perennial problems of eschatology which, after all, is the doctrine of hope. "We are saved by this hope, but in our moments of impatience let us remember that hope always means waiting for something that we haven't yet got. But if we hope for something we cannot see, then we must settle down to wait for it in patience" (Rom. 8: 24-25, Phillips).