CHRISTIANS CHALLENGE THE WORLD

Tim Christian Church must seem a very aggravating opponent. It never knows when it is dead, a fact recognised with exas- perated honesty by the Rationalist Press Association. When

one head has been cut off, it merely grows another. It invariably chooses its own ground for battle, and declines that offered, by its enemy. The day before yesterday the glove was hurled down by those who wished to argue the credibility

of Miracle ; yesterday the assault was made upon the inspira- tion of the Bible ; today the Church is generally invited to

come and be killed on the ethical fields of sexual relationships, and peace and war. But always the instinct of the Christian apologist bids him to decline the particular challenge offered

to him, and reply by uttering his own challenge. In every generation this challenge is differently expressed, but in essence it is always the same. It is to display the fundamental Christian convictions about God and Man, to explain their place in philosophy and their relevance to history, and to refuse battle in all secondary fields until the vital question of the co- herence of human experience is solved. This is virtually to say, " What you urge may or may not be true. But let us begin by arguing about fundamental principles. We have a body of thought and experience, which is not only rational in itself but guarantees the supremacy of Reason. By this theory we can make sense of history, and that is what matters. Can you say the same ? " For the Rationalists it must be most annoying, for they, apparently, are content to live in a world which makes no sense at all.

This instinct to concentrate upon essentials when challenged upon details is common to Christian apologetic down the ages. It is emphasised on the last page of Dr. Selwyn's contribution to the History of Christian Thought—a master-

piece of editing—in the words, " Face to face with such an uprush of paganism, the Church is driven back upon the primitive facts of its Gospel, as the supreme embodiment of God in action." This sentence might stand as a motto for the whole series of books under review. All the writers explain rather than controvert. They justify their generic title—" The Christian Challenge Series "—by themselves sounding the challenge rather than by answering a challenge already sounded. Their challenge consists fundamentally in their witness to the supremacy of Reason and the significant coherence

of History within the Christian system of thought and experi- ence. This challenge they all, in their several spheres, hurl in the teeth • of those whose proudest boast seems to be that

Instinct and not Reason rules their ways, and who prefer to . inhabit a world of which they have not the faintest possibility of making sense, and which they are fast turning into a desert and calling it Liberty.

The books are listed at the head of this review in the order in which they illustrate this principle, and not in any order of merit. -To attempt to arrange them in order of merit would indeed be an invidious task, for there is none which does not

say valuable things both readably and sensibly; and the anony- mous editor of the series is to be congratulated on having kept

every contribution to it on so uniformly high a level. This is a series which does not peter out in the middle, as so many do. Three of the books, none the less, stand above their. fellows.

Canon Mozley's book on the Incarnation covers the whole ground in an incredibly compact manner, and yet gives the impression of leisure' and spaciousness. Dr. Relton's book on the problem of Church and State is not only an historical survey of contributions to this, the thorniest and most . amply documented of Christian Problems, but also most ably expresses a point of view which challenges not only the pagan world out- side, but also a great deal of the social emphasis laid upon the Gospel within the contemporary Church. Briefly, Dr. Relton argues that it is only a Church which is fundamentally a religious society rather than an agency for social reform that can generate the force without which no real social reform is possible. The

Dean of Winchester's History of Christian Thought is written by several hands, which his editorial skill combines within a unity, the uniting principle of which is the perennial Christian insistence upon the supremacy of Reason.

Without Reason there could be no argument, but only instinctive and undisciplined impulses and urges. All these books, being a Christian challenge, are rational and argumenta- tive. They spread out the bones of what Christianity today has to say about itself, its message, and the world. Dr. James lays bare the anthropological, and Mr. Watkin the philosophical pre-conditions of the Christian Gospel. Canon Mozley and Father Thornton make abundantly clear exactly what it is that the Church asserts in its doctrines of the Incarnation of Jesus and His Atonement. Both put the traditional view, but in accordance with modern metaphor and ways of thought. If Dr. Selwyn is right, as he surely is, in suggesting that " the dominant issues of Christian thought for the next generation seem likely to be the theology of redemption, and of the Church as the society of the redeemed," there is no doubting that Canon Mozley's and Father Thornton's books are as fully relevant to modernity as the books of Dr. Lofthouse and Dr. Newsholme. These, in the several spheres indicated by their titles, deal with the application of Christian doctrine to modern social problems.

Here, then, is a group of thinkers who set out a part (not, of course, the whole—no single group could be competent to do that) of the Christian Challenge to the Western World in what Canon F. R. Barry has called " these dubious nineteen-thirties.'' Their books are complementary, not individual. Their contri- butions taken in tow are greater than the sum of them in isolation, though this is still considerable. They who read one will profit. But to read all the eight is to profit more than eight