Text and Testimony
William Thomson, Archbishop of York. 1819-1890. By H. Kirk-Smith. (S.P.C.K., 35s.)
The New Humanity. By Bruce Kenrick. (Collins, 12s. 6d.) THAT 'nobody reads the Bible nowedays' is a slogan, and twenty years ago it described what was rapidly becoming a fact. But now the fact has changed, while the slogan is still endlessly repeated. In the interval the Bible, and particularly the New Testament, has reasserted its power and staged a great comeback. This is quite simply a matter of proof, and part of the evidence is the number of modern translations now offered for sale. If there were no demand for them clearly they would not continue to be published. There are already several, and more are in preparation. But among them all it is Canon Phillips's transla- tion which has constituted a veritable publish- ing romance. Now he has completed what must surely be the great work of his life. What was first published piecemeal has now been brought to- gether, and we have the whole of his New Testa- ment in a single, very beautifully produced volume. For private reading Canon Phillips has no serious competitors among modern translators. There is no obscure place in the Authorised Version, such as Ephesians i or Hebrews vii, which he does not make perfectly intelligible, and generally exhilarating as well. For the gradual recovery of Biblical reading in this country he ought to be accorded a large share of the praise, and for epitaph, that is enough.
The infant Church was well established long before the canon of the New Testament was fixed. Its growth in less than 300 years from scratch, or even less than scratch, to the point where it was able to impose its will on the whole of the then known world is still the most astonishing success story in history. The power of this growth was the hand of God upon the spirit of the apostles and their followers, and the tools of their trade were the novel, revolutionary ideas about God and man and life which we nowadays call the theology of the New Testament. When at last Christians got the New Testament they had to be guided in its use by the early Fathers, and we, with another world to win and the same tools to use, have also to be guided by theologians like Dr. Alan Richard- son. What he has written is a scholars' book, pertinacious, exact, compendious, intended for laborious study, not for leisurely reading. But to persevere with it is to find all the New Testament ideas woven into an intelligible pattern of spiritual power. Perhaps the heart of what he is urging is that Jesus brilliantly reinterpreted and broadened the Old Testament scheme of salvation, and that, if this is so, that other old slogan about St. Paul ruthlessly complicating the spiritual simplicities of a young peasant-carpenter simply will not hold water. Dr. Richardson's scholarship is supplemented by the really sumptuous book of this list, the Dutch Early Christian Atlas, the text of which has been translated by Mary Hedlund and Professor H. H. Rowley. Actually, it is much more than an atlas, though it begins with a series of maps, bril- liant and exciting maps, to illustrate the growth of the Church, the spread and power of its litera- ture, and the career of St. Augustine. It is not easy to see how the life of a saint can be expressed in a map, but it really is, and it is something fresh. One has, in fact, never seen better maps than these. But the greater part of the book is given to a long series of the Christian sculptures, drawings, and mosaics of the first three centuries, together with a really admirable running, explanatory text. This is one of the best books on its theme which I ever remember seeing. Its price may look high but for what you get it is cheap.
The Church, built in every age on the Nevi Testament, is led in one era by Apostles and Fathers, and in another by Bishops and Arch- bishops. But men like the two modern Arch- bishops of York, Thomson and Temple, them- selves utterly different, nevertheless made their ministry on the same scriptures which St. Augustine read and St. Paul helped to create. They too knew that they had to lead a Church to win a world. Thomson, who died in 1890, was a man whom not even Mr. Kirk-Smith can make an attractive character, while William Temple Was one whose immense attractiveness no one has ever doubted, or could doubt. When Canon Baker writes of him, 'Many would have gladly given all that they had, their very lives, if they could do him, service,' he speaks the exact truth. No one could possibly have said anything like that about Thomson. Yet he too was a great man. If his relationships with half his clergy and with his Dean were lamentable, and if he was sadly give° to an unbecoming ambition for himself and a eer' tam n nepotism for his clerical relatives, he bril- liantly succeeded where, in our time, only TemPie has succeeded too, in winning for the Church the, regard and loyalty of vast masses of industrial workers, and, perhaps, in this Thomson sig.' ceeded the more fully. Of Thomson Mr. Kirk' Smith has given us a straightforward, compete! biography; and what Canon Baker has given us Is a collection of Temple's essays and addresses 00 all sorts of subjects—incredible that one even him, could speak so expertly on every on! of them—together with an introduction to char; the deepest tenor of his thought on the eternal verities.
With Mr. Kenrick we are, in a sense, taken brici to the spirit of the earliest days of Christendorn. He is deeply conscious of being what he calls '0° the frontier' of the Church's life, and he divides Christians into frontiersmen and the rest. It i5 significant that this book comes out of India. fie sees a great predicament : 'The Church knoVis what God demands of her. But because she &KS not know what God has made her, she lacks the power to obey.' It is to this that he addresses hin2c- self, and so his book is an examination of t115 nature of the Church in the New Testament (thusw complementing Dr. Richardson's), and of h° that works out in terms of the mid-twentieth- century world. There are many poin'ts where one Would like to argue, and all of them are points Where his assertions of modern Christian duty disturb and shake our complacency. Listening to St. Paul or St. Augustine was much like that, too;
and, for that matter, the New Testament, especially when Canon Phillips starts translating it, is never exactly a comfortable book. But in every age it inexorably asserts itself, and these books, taken together, bear witness to this truth.
ROGER LLOYD
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