304 - The New Community In Christ; Essays On the Corporate Christian Life

The New Community In Christ;
Essays On the Corporate Christian Life
Edited by James Burtness and John Kildahl
207 pp. Minneapolis, Minnesota, Augsburg Publishing House, 1963. $4.50.

Nine scholars, mainly "second generation" post-1945 doctorands, have here presented the case for the Christian life as a matter not of personal experience alone but of corporate participation as well. From the vantage

305 - The New Community In Christ; Essays On the Corporate Christian Life

points of their respective specialties, the authors of these essays-addressed initially to a variety of audiences-all seek to provide some form of corrective for the sometimes excessive individualism which has prevented otherwise earnest believers from seeing the Christian life whole.

From the vantage point of biblical and especially New Testament study, James H. Burtness, Roy A. Harrisville, and David M. Granskou accentuate the corporateness of the Christian life. A similar accent comes from the side of doctrine and ethics, in historical as well as contemporary perspective, as given by Kent S. Knutson, Carl E. Braaten, and Loren E. Halvorson. The same concern is expressed by John P. Kildahl in clinical psychology. And, as if to wrap up their subject in a spatial hermeneutic, the layman, Osmund R. Overby, deals with architecture and community in Protestantism.

All but the last named are graduates of Luther Theological Seminary (Saint Paul, Minn.); and the four contributors from the biblical field all earned their Th.D. at Princeton Theological Seminary. That Professor Otto Piper was their adviser is more than coincidence; for he has played a significant role in drawing bright young thinkers of Norse Lutheran background across denominational and confessional lines and into a wider experience of "the new community in Christ." Clustered around these four alumni are the other authors, who earned doctorates at Harvard, Union, Chicago, and New York University.

Normally a review would deal with the substance of a book; but this book, as a symposium, is itself a sign of the times. For Lutheran theological scholarship in America is now gravitating to men who have early in their careers experienced ecumenical and corporate aspects of their own confessional legacy, and are telling others about it. From this personal angle, as well as from what is ably described as "the new community in Christ," these essays are an invitation to creative theological discourse.

E. Theodore Bachmann
Lutheran Church House
New York, New York