Secular Christianity

Press, Issue 31095, 25 June 1966, Page 4

Secular Christianity

Secular Christianity. By Ronald Gregor Smith. Collins. 222 pp.

Ronald Gregor Smith is professor of divinity at Glasgow University, and in his latest book, “Secular Christianity” he has produced a work of special interest to advanced theologians who are familar with the writings of Kierkegaard and Karl Barth and other moderns. It is not easy reading and one of its difficulties lies in its unfamilar and even inconsistent use of words. Terms, long recognised in their religious context, such as “Faith” or “Redemption” or “Secular,” are given a new and not very clear significance. To take “Faith” as an example: the author begins well enough by quoting Bultmann; “Faith is obedient submission to God’s revelation in the word of proclamation,” but then, in developing the truth in the phrase “God is love,” he places it within its historical context and sees it as living in a threefold aspect: “There is demand, there is judgment, there is forgiveness,” and then, seeing forgiveness as the meaningful, aspect of God’s loving act in Christ he proceeds: “And so faith may therefore be described as acceptance of this forgiveness.” This is typical of his new and unfamilar presentation.

The author also appears sometimes to tilt at windmills of his own making, as when he says: “So the power of faith cannot be reduced to authoritative demand that you accept a series of pronouncements whose guarantee is, in the last resort, a man made guarantee. . . .” But we might well ask, whoever said that the power of faith did reside in such? Again, in his discussion on faith and reason, the author seems to assume, surely incorrectly, that others see them as constituted in the same order of being and he argues accordingly. In the book’s second section, that dealing with history, the author takes a very specialised view of the meaning of historicity, but he does develop in an interesting way some of the modern views on eschatology and redemption. In fact it is a very satisfactory presentation, in English, of the new theological ideas coming out of Germany. One could feel, however, that

some of his speculative pronouncements may have run ahead of modern Biblical studies and it is on these that they should be based if they are to claim any widely accepted validity. In the chapters on secularism, the author has an easy task in showing defects in the past attempts of the churches to relate to the world around them, but there is a certain feeling that he tends to read history backwards and forgets that men are the children of their own times and environment. Nevertheless, one could not but agree that “A church’s view of faith, its assertions about faith, can be totally irrelevant to the empirical consequences of that faith.” All in all, one gains the Impression that the whole book is written as something of a rebellion against a rather sectional view of faith in the Lutheran sense and that it revolves round the problem of how a system and way of life that is good in itself, could yet contain in embyro the germ of a colossal evil. More specifically, the author seeks some less than simple explanation for the fact that a Christian Germany was the soil in which “the brutality and terror of the Nazi regime,” found root.