266 - New Testament Tensions and the Contemporary Church

New Testament Tensions and the Contemporary Church
By Carl S. Dudley and Earle Hilgert
Philadelphia, Fortress, 1987. 199 pp. $10.95.

This book is an excellent contribution to the integration of social science research with the more traditional historical-critical study of the Bible. Both authors are professors at McCormick Theological Seminary, Carl Dudley in Church and Community and Earle Hilgert in New Testament. They model well the interaction of two disciplines in the service of historical-theological reflection for the witness and work of the church today.

The book builds much of its approach on the interpretive model of cognitive dissonance (especially with reference to Leon Festinger and John Gager) for understanding the early church's responses to the shock of Jesus' crucifixion and the nonoccurrence of the parousia. It discusses five tensions of the early church with relevance for the church today: community formation, the energy of counterculture Christianity, faith crisis and Christian witness, using conflict constructively, and rituals of structure and mystery.

Perhaps the most profound and disturbing observation revolves around "the basic nature of conflict in the New Testament era. From both a theological and sociological viewpoint., the controlling tension in early Christianity throughout the period we are studying was between counterculture and acceptability." The church today, certainly in the United States, does not have such tensions, theologically or sociologically, with its cultural context.

David M. Scholer
Northern Baptist Theological Seminary
Lombard, Ill.