The Neo-Orthodox Theology of W.W. Bryden by John Vissers (review)

The main purpose of Vissers's book is to explore and assess the contribution of W.W. Bryden, sixth principal of Knox College (University of Toronto) and professor of theology, 1925-1952. To this end Vissers prosecutes a twofold task: an examination of Bryden's role in introducing and magnifying the theology of Karl Barth in Canada, and, in light of Bryden's neo-orthodox convictions, an investigation of the nature and force of Bryden's relentless criticism of Church union in Canada (1925). In the wake of the union that gathered up all of the Methodists and 70 per cent of the Presbyterians, the minority "continuing" Presbyterians perceived themselves as having to identify, articulate, and defend the grounds of their resistance to a development that most of the historic Protestants in Canada had assumed to be God-willed.

Bryden was never persuaded by those who facilely spoke of Church union as one manifestation of the creation-wide reconciliation wrought in Christ. He feared, on the contrary, that those who spoke like this were unwittingly embracing neo-paganism. In the surge of Barth's tidal wave he discerned a theological resource whose substance and logic could expose theological deterioration and help a jarred denomination contend for the integrity of the gospel, and, in the course of helping contend for the gospel, help the Church identify its lamentable (but not irreversible) accommodation and acculturation.

Bryden regarded the churches of his era as having put asunder what God mandates, and the Magisterial Reformation echoes, should be kept together: Word and Spirit, or what God does for us (Christology) and what God does in us (pneumatology). Bryden, astute reader of Reformation theology and Church history, knew that Word divorced from Spirit renders Word lifeless orthodoxy, a rationalism that happens merely to employ religious words in its thinly disguised naturalism; Spirit divorced from Word renders Holy Spirit lethally indistinguishable from human spirit, whether philosophical idealism or psychological optimism or social evolutionism. Bryden saw unerringly that the Spirit alone is the power of the Word, while the Word alone is the substance of the Spirit.

For this reason Bryden was no less convinced that the way ahead for his denomination did not lie in a retreat to biblical fundamentalism or uncritical confessionalism. While the Westminster documents unquestionably had served the Church well and could continue to inform it, no less certainly their theological deficits and deficiencies would have to be specified and corrected.

Throughout the acrimony surrounding Church union and the hostile standoff following it, Bryden remained opposed to the theological indifference on both sides. The pro-union faction appeared theologically apathetic and historically amnesiac, wanting only to construct an "umbrella" large enough to accommodate all who wanted to huddle together under it; the anti-union faction appeared too often to have opposed the union for the wrong reasons: e.g., to preserve Scottish ethnicity or to retain real estate or to re-pristinate Westminster orthodoxy or Reformed scholasticism. The path Bryden chose to tread was lonely and invited rejection at the hands of those who regarded him as an impediment to their cause.

Profoundly influenced by Barth, Bryden was nonetheless never a sycophantic camp-follower. Rather he recognized in Barth not merely a rescuer of the silted-over treasures of Reformation figures like Luther and Calvin but also someone who could help the Canadian Church rethink faith in the judging-saving Word. This Word, supposedly irrelevant (according to the theological liberalism arising from Troeltsch and his school), alone was life-giving.

Bryden's theology, Vissers points out, was at once a theology of revelation (God speaks and acts so as to acquaint us with himself "from above," since no approach "from below"—natural theology—can render sinners savingly intimate with God), a retrieval of Reformation gains, and all of this addressed to a post-Enlightenment people who neither flee modernity fearfully nor fawn over it flatteringly. Bryden's...