History for the Undogmatic

William Alva Gifford has spent his past 15 summers playing golf and writing a book. At each summer's end he has come back to Montreal's Cooperating Theological Colleges (affiliated with McGill University), where for 30 years he has taught the history of religion. This year he can show the results of his 15-summers' labor: a 600-page volume, The Story of the Faith (Macmillan; $5). Published this month, it was sure to bring Professor Gifford many a letter of praise and protest.

Gifford's views are those of a forthright "modernist" to whom orthodoxy is merely another word for fossilization. He sees all theology as in constant need of revision and reconstruction in the light of religious experience rather than patristic authority. Dogmatists will find plenty in Dr. Gifford's pages to make them jump. The book's final chapter is an eloquent statement of the position of Protestant liberals. Excerpts:

"Having turned back long ago from Canon Law and Scholasticism to the Bible, Protestantism ought now to go behind the Bible to Christ himself. So doing, it would be confronted again by that distinction between the Gospel and the teachings that is so clear in the Epistles of St. Paul. The Gospel is the primitive Church's interpretation of the mission of Christ, and was later to be compressed into the Rule of Faith and the Apostles' Creed. The teachings are the precepts of Christ, preserved in the parables of the Lord and the Sermon on the Mount.

"Protestantism was a return to the primacy of the Gospel, and so continued for 300 years. Once more, however, the Gospel is losing its ancient place. This time the teachings are supplanting it.. . ."

The Road to Christ. "To make this tendency explicit is the only road to one more invigoration of the faith; for that road leads back to the parables of the Lord and the Sermon on the Mount, where one is again among elemental and universal things, as one is not when engaged with the sacrificial ideas and Messianic hopes of Judaism, that were incorporated into the Gospel.

". . . The way to Christ is very straight and very narrow. It leads towards love for one's enemies, prayers for the persecutor, a preference for giving before receiving. It leads away from both contemporary nationalism and contemporary economics. The churches are not likely to take it, unless--which is not impossible--the ghastly confusion of world politics and economics should work in the churches the grace of a sudden conversion."

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