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How to Think Theologically
By Janet Harbison Penfield

THE Library of Living Faith, the first four volumes of which have now appeared, seems to be intended by its sponsors to serve for Christians in the '80s the role played by the widely-read Laymen's Theological Library in the '50s. The Westminster Press as publisher and John M. Mulder, President of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, as general editor have signed up ten writers from various sectors of American Protestantism, all stars of the rising generation, though some are higher in the theological firmament than others.

The four volumes already published and here under review are as follows:

New Life in the Spirit, by Leonard I. Sweet; Becoming Human, by Letty M. Russell; Last Things First, by Gayraud S. Wilmore; The Joy of Worship, by Marianne H. Micks. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982; 120 pp., 114 pp., 118 pp., 119 pp., each paperback volume at $5.95.)

The stylish and handsome books, each about a hundred pages in length, are divided into compassable chapters, and elegantly produced with a common sunburst logo that comes in a variety of colors, so you can tell the Holy Spirit from eschatology at a glance. These books should be extremely useful both to jaded believers who need to hear old truths freshly stated and to a young generation of would-be Christian students, parents, and others who have only a sketchy idea of the jagged history of Christian thought. The study questions attached to each volume are tough ones, and the bibliographies are well-selected.

The general editor, John M. Mulder, notes in a Foreword that "The series is an invitation to readers to become theologians themselves-to reflect on the Bible and on the history of the church and to find their own ways of understanding the grace of God in Jesus Christ." And in an aside, which seminary faculties can ignore, he adds, "Theology is too important to be left only to the theologians; it is the work and witness of the entire people of God."

The books in the series have a common theme: Jesus Christ and the Bible (Christ's cradle). Or maybe it's more the church and how it got that way. All the books share a mainline Protestant slant. Although an

Janet Harbison Penfield for many years wrote for Presbyterian Life (now A.D.) and several other religious journals. She has served on local and national church committees, most recently in connection with COCU.

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exhaustive and well-balanced discussion of neo-Pentecostalism is a feature of Sweet's volume, and liberation theology enters into both Letty Russell's discussion of what it means to be human and into Gayraud Wilmore's book on "Last Things," the collection is middle-of-the-road in theology; perhaps, if the road seems to have been veering a bit to the fundamentalist right lately, these books might even strike some readers as somewhat left of center.

Aside from their common direction, the volumes are idiosyncratic. In this they remind me of that other library, the Bible, where glorious flights like Psalm 8 and dour stretches of early Hebrew mayhem lie between the same covers. As with the Bible, it will be up to readers to pick and choose, not only among the volumes of the series, but within them. The four authors heard from so far express their own personalities and sometimes ride their favorite nags, occasionally farther than I would care to go with them.

I

If you can find the time and money for only one of these four volumes, my choice would probably be Leonard Sweet's New Life in the Spirit. Sweet is a former Methodist pastor in upstate New York and now Provost of Colgate Rochester Divinity School/Bexley Hall/Crozer Theological Seminary. He has a swift wit, and a style that is brilliant most of the time. His alliterations, anecdotes, and aphorisms keep even a sleepy reader alert. Some of the time his brilliance may carry him past the point of meaning, but in an era of dull prose, this error is easy to overlook. As if good writing on a tough topic were not enough, Sweet wrestles seriously with some of the hardest questions in a hard field. Who can catch the Holy Spirit, or talk about that elusive third person of the Trinity for any length of time without falling into bathos or nonsense? Well, Sweet can.

He speaks of the Holy Spirit's power, and struggles to differentiate that power from other powers. Lucid and beautiful chapters deal with discerning the Spirit, the home of the Spirit, the language of the Spirit, and the gifts of the Spirit. Sweet is quotable, and the temptation is to let him say it all. One brief excerpt may suggest the quality of his book:

Whenever you have been loved beyond your lovability, you have had a mystical experience; whenever you have been forgiven beyond your hope, the Holy Spirit has witnessed with your spirit; whenever you forget God, and God does not forget you, you have been engulfed in the mystical (p. 57).

But Sweet is more than merely lyrical. In addition to situating the Spirit very firmly and specifically in Bible and church, he takes on some hard present-day questions. He discusses the neo-Pentecostal movement in terms both caustic and compassionate, emphasizing the infusion of fresh fire Pentecostals have kindled in the churches, and, at the same time putting glossolalia in sensible perspective. He goes into the mooted problem of the presence of the Spirit in faiths other than Christian, and

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takes a squarely orthodox stance on the issue. Sweet is too good a scholar to go overboard for any single metaphor in speaking of the Spirit

II

The other three volumes in the fledgling Library of Living Faith have considerable virtues of their own. Letty Russell, who teaches at Yale, writes on Becoming Human, with the stress on the "becoming" part, the hope available even when we feel ourselves least human. Conversion, reversal, and God's grace may yet change things, she tells us.

Russell's chapters take off from some biblical passage, most frequently a story. Two examples: the man called Legion who had so many demons in him he didn't know who he was ("Searching for Humanity"); the Samaritan woman at the well ("Not Quite Human"), a story that says maybe the ones we think are losers are nearer human than the visible winners. Russell's concern for relations between women and men leads her to place particular emphasis on reinterpreting the stories of the Creation and Fall. Several conclusions emerge, among them: all human beings need to be helpers, as all need to be helped; "human beings are created to live in community." And "Growth in our humanity takes place as we learn to be helpers by being helped" (p. 104).

Russell tells the old truths with new freshness and in a prose that avoids all sexist terms-there is hardly a pronoun in a packet-and yet the literary style remains graceful. Russell's own experience in the East Harlem Protestant parish and in the national YWCA in a tense time of its history feed naturally into her thinking.

People talk and write best about what they know best, so it is little wonder that if Letty Russell recalls a childhood when the other kids called her "Letty Spaghetti," Gayraud Wilmore's Last Things First draws heavily on the black religious experience in America.

Wilmore, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor at Colgate Rochester, leads us doggedly through centuries of debate about the end of the world and the Second Coming of Christ. These are complicated and fascinating forests, but a more interesting part of Wilmore's discussion for me was his reflection on the African concept of time-lots of present and hardly any distant future - a concept that makes black Christians more inclined to view the Kingdom proclaimed by Jesus as in some sense already here, or at least just coming into view. Wilmore makes this double-barreled and presently widely-accepted concept of the Kingdom come vibrantly alive, particularly so in his last chapter, "Following the Leader in Life and Death." His exposition of the meaning of discipleship is particularly limpid.

Wilmore draws most of his quotations and examples from the black church, and relies heavily on black spirituals with their compelling references to a world to come that is just around the corner. "The true church," he writes, "will always teach that if we follow Jesus in faith and obedience, death has no terror and life no end. We go to meet our Leader

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and we will find in him a victory that is not available on this side of the grave" (p. 107).

Least to my taste of the four volumes so far published in this series is Marianne Mick's The Joy of Worship. Another reviewer might find this volume, sensitive and learned as it is, a help, particularly in the area of private prayer. For me, the parade of early church fathers surfacing like raisins in rice pudding is a distraction. I would like to know more about them- - or less. Perhaps I am supposed to have their biographies at my fingertips. The general tenor of this volume, with its comparative neglect of the concept of community in worship, and total absence of discussion of the contributions of drama, dance, contemporary worship forms that are more than just voguish, is a bit too high church for my taste.

When Micks devotes most of a page to the problem whether there are six gifts of the spirit or seven (depends on which part of the Bible you read), I tend to yawn. When she explains the historical reasons why we stand to pray, I murmur, "But some of us don't." But all this is carping, I am sure. One great gift to me of The Joy of Worship was a renewed encounter with my all-time, world-class favorite early church father, Theodore of Mopsuestia. He never fails to make me happy.

I do not wish to imply that Wilmore's book or Sweet's are totally devoid of aridities. I could have done without quite so exhaustive a treatment of millennialism for all its forms as Wilmore offers. Sweet lost me in his discussion of filioque. Of the many readers I hope his book will have, I imagine the majority would have trouble distinguishing Nicea from Athanasius. To do Sweet justice, he winds up his exploration into the ancestry of the Holy Spirit by suggesting that "the whole controversy over filioque ought to be retired to a theological rest home. There are more interesting things to fight about" (p. 34).

A good many of them are battled with in these first four volumes of the Library of Living Faith. The six authors who are still to be heard from will have to go some to sustain a comparable level of insight and brilliance.