THE NEW TESTAMENT STUDENT AND BIBLE TRANSLATION (Vol. IV of THE NEW TESTAMENT STUDENT), edited by John H. Skilton. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., Phillips· burg, New Jersey, 1978. 241 pp. $5.00, paperback. Reviewed by Rev. Jerome Julien, pastor of the First Christian Reformed Church of Pella, Iowa.

Generally the essays in this volume are on the subject of Bible translation. Eugene A. Nida, Roger Nicole, J . Gresham Machen, J. B. Phillips, Raymond B. Dillard, Jain Murray, J . Barton Payne, and John Skilton are among the contributors. Problems related to translation are discussed. Besides, five other essays are included: one about the New Testament work at Reformed Bible College, two on prophecy by Robert Strong, one each by Jay Adams and Simon Kistemaker.

THE END OF CHRISTENDOM, By Malcolm Muggeridge. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids. 1980 62 pp. paperback. $2.50. Reviewed by the editor.

This book consists of two Pascal lectures by the long time British editor and wit and late convert to Christianity. They are entitled “The End of Christendom” and “But Not of Christ.” The writer evinces a keen interest in Blaise Pascal, the 17th Century mathematical genius (whose one fault Muggeridge finds was his inventing the computer). Pascal was a defender of Christianity in his fragmentary Pensees, and an adherent of t he Jansenist movement which his Roman Catholic Church repudiated because of its doctrine of Predestination. (He ought to be better known among us.) Muggeridge also expresses a deep debt to Solzhenitsyn, the famous Russian writer who was converted to Christianity in a prison camp. Muggeridge is at his best in criticizing the Enlightenment and the way its followers, the liberal establishment, are destroying the Christian church and our whole society. “Previous civilizations have been overthrown from without by the incursion of barbarian hordes. Christendom has dreamed up its own dissolution in the minds of its own intellectual elite” (p. 17). His grasp is less firm and his counsel less sure in defining the positive hope of the gospel to which we must cling as men’s follies bring upon our civilization God’s judgments. He does point to that, but his generalizations, intriguing as they often are, lack the Biblical definitions that we need.

One might get the impression from his title and lectures that in discussing the “end of Christendom” he was dismissing the organized church as vanishing like the Roman empire. Answering a question after the last lecture, he corrects that impression: “It entirely depends on whether the churches remain true to the Gospel of Christ, whether they truly expound his Gospel, whether they truly express his revelation. If they do, then clearly they won’t die, even though in some aspects they might come to grief. It depends entirely on that. There’s no other factor in the thing. They wouldn’t succeed because they had great wealth or because they had great power or because they attracted very brilliant people. None of that would count, unless they are really and truly doing what our Lord said, ensuring that his light shine. If they do that, then their part is assured” (p. 58).

One of the writer’s comments on Pascal is especially interesting:

Next to the genius of Pascal’s words I would draw your attention to the beautiful lucidity of his mind, the wonderful clarity of his thought. Like all true believers he was deeply skeptical. His intelligence was wonderfully astringent and critical. It is one of the fantasies of the twentieth century that believers are credulous people, sentimental people, and that you have to be a materialist and a scientist and a humanist to have a skeptical mind. But of course exactly the opposite is true. It is believers who can be astringent and skeptical, whereas people who believe seriously that this universe exists only in order to provide a theater for man must take man with deadly seriousness. I believe myself that the age we are Jiving in now will go down in history as one of the most credulous ever. How could anyone look at television advertisements without reaching that conclusion? All those extraordinary potions that are offered to make your face beautiful, those things you can swallow to make your breath fragrant, are all apparently believed in to the extent that people buy the products. I have often thought that if I were a rich and adventurous man instead of an old and rather broken down one I should bring over a witch doctor from Africa and subject him to a course of television advertising and see how he would react. I think he would be green with envy. To think of all that weary slogging from African village to African village to dispose of his love potions and his jujus, while here in the Western world, the most highly educated, the most progressive, the most advanced part of the earth, there is a reservoir of credulity beyond his wildest dreams (p. 5).

Our training in or bent toward skepticism must give way to faith in God’s Word, but when confronted by the naivete of the intellectual conformists of our age, we need, indeed, to become much more healthily critical and independent that we usually are.

Muggeridge’s comment on evolution too is intriguing (p. 59). I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious and hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has. I think that I spoke to you before about this age as one of the most credulous in history, and I would include evolution as an example. I’m very happy to say I live near a place called Piltdown. I like to drive there because it gives me a special glow. You probably know that a skull was discovered there and no less than five hundred doctoral theses were written on the subject and then it was discovered that the skull was a practical joke by a worthy dentist in Hastings who’d hurriedly put a few bones together, not even of the same animal, and buried them and stirred up all this business. So I’m not a great man for bones. Read the book for a delightful and telling criticism of the mentality of our age and of its destructive influence also in our churches and schools.