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Theological Table-Talk
By Hugh T. Kerr

CHRISTENDOM AND THE POPULATION EXPLOSION

One of the touchy and unmentionable aspects of the imminent population explosion is the consequent diminishing quantitative status of Christianity. Simply in terms of numbers, Christendom seems doomed to decrease while non-Christian populations increase. Most of the religious discussion so far on the population problem has been related to the Roman Catholic ban on medical and mechanical birth control, but this is perhaps not such an insoluble issue as many Protestants think. New York City's tax-supported municipal hospitals have recently worked out a compromise, and in spite of the Papal Encyclical Mater et Magistra which upholds the traditional ban, some Catholics look for gradual shifting of official opinion, as for example, Dr. John Rock, an eminent Roman Catholic gynecologist, in an article in the July, 1961, issue of Good Housekeeping (reprinted in the September Reader's Digest).

There are, of course, political and economic aspects of the problem. Nehru has said: "Our five-year plans have no meaning if the population grows at a rate one can never catch up with." American aid to India, for example, must include an escalator clause or fail of its purpose. Yet India's population is rising at the rate of eight million a year.

For the first time since the Great Commission, Christianity will have to reckon with the new, formidable obstacles to going forth and making disciples of all nations. Obstacles are not new to Christendom's history, but heretofore "advance" and "outreach" were challenges to be exploited, opportunities to be welcomed. Our generation has not been so sanguine as Mott's with its confident call for "the evangelization of the world in this generation." But only a few years ago a distinguished Church historian titled the last in a seven-volume set of historical studies on Christian expansion as Advance Through Storm.

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World political changes, especially in Asia and Africa, have punctuated the glorious (or so it seemed) "foreign mission enterprise" with what amounts to a full stop. Now the population explosion implies an even more dire consequence for Christendom. Far from "advance," Christendom will not be able to hold its own; it will continue to slip quantitatively as the Christian population inexorably recedes far behind the burgeoning non-Christian masses.

James Reston of The New York Times put it bluntly: "It may be that the greatest menace to world peace and decent standards of life today is not atomic energy but sexual energy." And we may add that it is ironic that Christianity which has laid such stress on the solidarity of the family and the place of women and children in society should now be confronted by a domestic fertility that threatens its own future.

Mathematics and theology create a peculiar emulsion. Kierkegaard warned us against "the big number," against thinking that essential Christianity can be measured by the number of people (and especially the right sort of people) who espouse its cause. Some would say that the doors to Christian expansion and indigenous evangelization are not yet and never will be closed. Some would invoke eschatology as the only feasible and practical doctrine for a time like this. Others would welcome the painful lesson of learning to live as a minority movement, noting that Christianity has always been in the minority anyway. Clearly this is a matter the World Council of Churches will have forced upon it, and New Delhi seems the logical place to begin.

"AND THERE WAS LIGHT"

The metaphor of light as applied to Christ in the New Delhi theme, "Jesus Christ the Light of the World," would appear to be a primal, obvious, and Biblically-theologically meaningful symbol. But metaphors and symbols are slippery things, unpredictable, elusive, arcane. Light is a universal and elementary way of speaking of many things, and there may be special reasons why this is an apt image of the Christ for our age.

Note, however, that while certain Biblical uses of light may still be dynamic, not all subsequent light-figures are so. I used to sing a lilting refrain in Sunday School:

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Come to the Light, 'tis shining for thee;
Sweetly the Light has dawned upon me;
Once I was blind, but now I can see:
The Light of the world is Jesus!

That now sounds cloying, insipid, and quite inappropriate for the grim realities of today. So too Holman Hunt's splendiferous velvet and satin Christ, in his well-known painting The Light of the World, while still magnificent and regal to many would seem to others a prime example of that "sweetness and light" sentimentality of yesterday which today is obsolescent, meaningless, and actually harmful to the cause of Christian evangelism. This is cheap criticism, of course, for the really hard question is: "If Holman Hunt's way is not our way, then how do we portray Christ as light?"

Perhaps we need to remember that light is one of those couplet symbols that necessarily requires its opposite or complementary if it is to be fully understood. In the Genesis account of creation, light is the work of the first day, but even prior to light "the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep." Light is the radiant result of the divine creativity; it isn't just there to begin with in an obvious sort of way; "and God said, 'Let there be light.' "

Our age, more so than the nineteenth century, ought to be able to understand that light comes out of darkness. In spite of electric light (neon-wise the world was never brighter, gayer) we are today especially concerned with darkness, with the pre-creative void, with dim, hidden recesses of the self, with senseless violence and savagery, with pre-civilized lust and orgy. The novels and dramas and paintings of our time represent in awful detail the light-less world in which we live. All the more reason, we may say, for exhibiting Christ as Light of the World.

But reflect also that even the Christ figure in every age has most often and most successfully been presented in terms of the passion, death, and crucifixion rather than in terms of the resurrection or ascension. Grünewald's Isenheim Crucifixion has a wide appeal today, but his Resurrection companion-piece is contrived and unreal.

How in a time of such gloom and murkiness can light, especially Christ-the-Light, be expressed? Accompanying these rambling paragraphs are three prints which may or may not help to answer that question. First is the poster prepared by the World Council of

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Churches for the New Delhi Assembly and the design used for the preliminary study booklet. The theme is expressed verbally and only incidentally by the Calvary silhouette. Significantly Christ the Light is here related not to the brilliance of Easter morn but to the darkness of Good Friday-perhaps more accurately to the dark before the dawn.

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Let There be Light!

Rejoice and be glad for God has said, "Let there be light," and there was light. Such is the power of His Will, even to personify the Light of His love in flesh to dwell among us, full of grace and truth. Let us not turn from the Light which is born within us by the power of the Holy Spirit. Let not the Light be hid under a basket; let the city on top of the hill be seen. In the face of all impending doom let us walk as children of Light without fear. Though the earth be swallowed up in the midst of the sea or in a ball of fire, the Church prevails against all things, even the gates of hell. Let there be Light.

The second item, "Let There Be Light," is a church bulletin suggestion from the ecclesiastical supply house, Sacred Design Associates. Vice-President Grant Gilderhus says that five of his associates have been through seminary (Lutheran) and that three have been in the pastorate. They are trying to raise the artistic standard of church supplies and among other things they consult with

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architects and ministers on liturgical matters. (For further information address: Sacred Design Associates, Box 5452, Minneapolis 8, Minn.)

The third print is of a two-ton hammered aluminum statue by Pierre Bourdelle which has recently been mounted on the facade

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of the American Field Service headquarters in New York. A downward stooping figure represents "Service" giving "Light" to today's youth. Celebrated for volunteer ambulances in two world wars, Field Service is at present conducting a teen-age international scholarship program. Under its auspices 950 American young people spent last summer with families in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

THE NEW AGNOSTICISM

There is nothing new about it in some ways. It still argues that reason is no reason for believing. It still stops short of defiant atheism or blatant unbelief. Suspending judgment, it is noncommittal, unengaged, though not necessarily uninterested. Huxley and Spencer latched onto "agnosticism" as the best word for the science-motivated position of nineteenth century evolutionary thinking mid-way between theism and atheism. It was a word coming out of and well suited to yesterday's science-religion debate.

The new agnosticism, especially prevalent among today's young people, differs from the generation-ago variety in two important respects. First, it is disinclined to get excited over the intellectual theological discussions of previous days. It is not strictly anti intellectual. Even the "gentleman's C" of yesterday's casual crowd has given way to a new scholarly perspective. It just doesn't believe that the traditional theological questions are worth discussing on the usual sort of intellectual level since they can be neither proved nor disproved, and they don't touch the real heart of religion anyway.

The second characteristic of the new agnosticism is its view that religion by and large is irrelevant and unnecessary. There is nothing very arrogant or daringly heretical about this view. It may be uttered more as a wail than a cheer. But taking a hard-headed and un-phony glance at things, religion does seem to many to have little or nothing to say or do with the great burning issues of the day. It's all rather sad, perhaps, but there it is. Religion may still serve some inner personal purpose as integrative potential. It may still, for whatever reason, cement the family-all that praying together and staying together stuff. But as a fulcrum for getting real leverage on nuclear disarmament, on race, on Asia-Africa, and a hundred other headline screams-not a chance. Perhaps it should, maybe even it could-but it doesn't.

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It will not do to analyze this mood hoping to show how flimsy it is. What the new agnosticism deserves is the best that theologians and churchmen can offer. Something of the long-lost intellectual integrity of Christian faith must be restored for our generation, and the Churches must make fresh creative thrusts if they are not to become mere sanctuaries, meditation chapels, where nothing is said, no decisions are made.

THE N.E.B.

There is something curious about the mixed reception given The New English Bible (The New Testament, Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, 1961). Almost without exception the new translation by the British committee is hailed as a brilliant piece of Biblical and textual scholarship. As Henry Cadbury noted in his excellent review (THEOLOGY TODAY, July, 1961), even when one dissents from the choice of new words and phrases in this translation, one must still grant that the translators had their reasons for doing what they did.

The mixed reception referred to has nothing to do with the technical side of N.E.B. but rather with the changed climate of both religious and secular thinking today. In America, we have since 1946 been getting used to the R.S.V., and with so much success that in many areas, theological seminaries for example, it has virtually superseded the King James. (That durable monument of seventeenth century prose, by the way, is celebrating its 350th birthday concurrently with the appearance of N.E.B.) New translations of the Bible invariably meet with cautious and critical appraisal, and the reason is not textual, theological, literary, or political (as when the translators of R.S.V. were accused by some of Communist affiliation). The reason is usually sentimental and nostalgic. A new translation suggests both the inadequacy of the old familiar text and the changed life and thought situation which requires up-dating if the archaic is to be modernized. But to change is to die a little.

New Biblical research has made new translations not only desirable but possible. And it is unlikely that either R.S.V. or N.E.B. will celebrate a 350th birthday-for one thing the English language is now changing more in decades than it did in centuries. The old verbal literalism has lost its stranglehold (even fundamentalist Bib-

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lical scholars indulge in higher and lower criticism), and this has freed the translators to translate ideas as well as words. In the meantime the science of semantics has made inroads and more recently philosophical analysis has taught us to question our words and propositions in a new radical way. Psychology and the behavioral sciences have provided a new kind of hermeneutical handle, and comparative anthropology with the Dead Sea Scrolls have cautioned us against too-easy affirmations about Biblical uniqueness.

One of Barth's earliest essays and still one of his best was entitled "The Strange New World within the Bible." Bultmann has been more impressed with the strange old mythological world of the Bible which he thinks is a non-conductor of the Gospel for modern man. Those who look to N.E.B. for a less strange or a less mythological world will be disappointed. Clarity and simplicity of phrasing, occasional windows on dark corners of difficult texts, pleasing type and format-all these are helpful and welcome. But those who expect too much of a translation will feel short-changed. The Bible is the Bible and no translation by itself can smooth over its "how odd of God" strangeness. "The unspiritual man simply cannot accept the matters which the Spirit deals with-they just don't make sense to him, for, after all, you must be spiritual to see spiritual things" (I Cor. 2: 14, Phillips' translation).

The translators' task, like the Reformation which did so much to bring the Bible to the people, is a continuing responsibility and an unending pilgrimage. One reason why many expect too much and feel disappointed with what they get is because they want to jell the Bible into a mold that will last for at least 350 years. But we need not only new and better translations of the Bible, we also need continuing study of the Scriptures to interpret them not only historically, grammatically, textually, but in such a way as to make the Word of God living and meaningful for our day and age. The interpreter, whether he be pulpit preacher or Sunday School teacher, picks up where the translator leaves off.

BIBLICAL LINGUISTICS AND KERYGMATIC THEOLOGY

In what is everywhere recognized as the revival or renewal of Biblical theology in the past twenty-five or more years, linguistic analysis

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has been a prominent trademark. Whether in the form of popular word studies or more technical philological etymologies, a new concern for the "original languages" of Scripture quickly filled the vacuum left by the general abandoning of verbal inerrancy. Biblical " scholars" such as Pedersen and Boman as well as Biblical theologians such as Barth and Torrance have been operating for years on the principle of correlation between Biblical linguistics and kerygmatic theology.

To be sure, Sunday-by-Sunday preachers were often left far behind in the avant garde discussions of linguists and kerygmatists. So The Interpreter's Bible of recent vintage, eager to please all, divided its text between "exegesis" (for the birds, linguistic plumage) and "exposition" (for the bees, homiletical species).

A spanner has now been tossed into the well-oiled machinery of these comfortable and uncontested correlations. A maverick has appeared without warning within the midst of the Biblical herd. A little book, erudite and linguistic as can be, neatly question marks all the working assumptions of twenty-five years of Biblical "scholarship." The Hebrew-Greek dichotomy has been knocked for a loop with a haymaker between the hiphil and the aorist. The agitator is James Barr, formerly of New College, Edinburgh, and recently appointed Professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. His weapon: The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford Press, London, 1961, 313 pp., 37 s. 6 d.).

Barr's book deserves a careful critical review but its impact is sure to raise controversy (and perhaps dust) among the Biblicists and kerygmatists and a few comments on the thesis of the argument may be here. Two major assumptions in recent Biblical theology seem to Professor Barr to require fresh scrutiny: first, there is the common distinction that Greek is static while Hebrew is dynamic, etc. Second, there is the widely-held and highly useful notion that Biblical faith redeemed and baptized both Hebrew and Greek so that specifically Biblical words illustrate and mirror Heilsgeschichte or God's saving events. The first axiom has been underscored of late in Thorleif Boman's Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (1960). The second, since 1933, has been identified with Kittel's " monumental and definitive" Theologisches Worterbuch zum, neuen Testament.

Barr's point is not to dispute differences between Hebrew and

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Greek ways of thinking or to disparage in any way the affirmations of the kerygmatic theologians. His point is the quite simple but sharp one that these assertions cannot be deduced from the Biblical language itself. So-called scientific Biblical linguistics consequently has been wedded all these years to didactic, polemic, and kerygmatic presuppositions. The argument here is not theological but linguistic, and Barr is saying that the Biblical "scholars" have not been scholarly enough, that Biblical linguistics has paid little attention to the whole development of general semantics or to philosophical language analysis, and that the kerygmatists have hoodwinked the Biblicists into an "unsystematic and haphazard" methodology. The result of all this "will almost certainly lead to a distortion and wrong assessment of linguistic evidence."

More of the argument cannot be disclosed here, but Barr's book is the sort of critical adventure that opens up unexpected problems and possibilities. It has an itchy kind of persistence from within the Biblical perspective that will be annoying and disturbing to Biblicists of all kinds. The kerygmatists will dance to keep their balance as the rug is pulled from under them. But even more important will be the practical implications for Biblical translation, exegesis, and preaching.