The Christian’s Knowledge of God by W.W. Bryden (review)

First published in 1940 and out of print for decades, Bryden’s book requires an introduction acquainting readers with an orientation to the book, an overview of its contents, and a guide to its theological argumentation. The most thorough and most comprehensive introduction to Bryden remains Vissers’s 300-page monograph, a reprint of his doctoral dissertation, The Neo-Orthodox Theology of W.W. Bryden (James Clarke, 2011). Readers requiring a quicker entry into Bryden’s major work, however, are adequately served by Vissers’s 17-page preamble to the present volume. Here they are acquainted with the diverse theological currents of that era, the convolutions of the Church scene in Canada, philosophical preoccupations in the academic environment of the seminaries, social and economic anguish in Canada as the Second World War followed the Great Depression, and, not least, the tensions within the Presbyterian Church in Canada.

The last, having lost 70 per cent of its members and more of its clergy to the newly formed United Church of Canada, now sought to honour its Reformed parents (even as there was substantial disagreement on what this entailed) and reforge its identity as “continuing” Presbyterian. To do this it would have to re-pristinate the proclamation of the gospel, aiming, like the Church of every era, to adapt the message to its hearers while simultaneously refusing to adopt their mindset, lest, in a commendable effort at communicating, the grand counter-miracle lamentably occur once again as wine was turned into water. Bryden, cognizant of the latest developments in biblical criticism and historical investigation, and unreservedly appreciative of them where they were sound and useful, knew them to be servants of the “judging-saving Word of God” (his favourite, emphatic summation of the Christian message) but never its master.

Summarily Vissers informs readers of Bryden’s family background, the formative influences of his formal education, his appreciation (but not sycophantic adulation) of Karl Barth and the latter’s contribution to the Church’s self-understanding and mission, the opposition Bryden found within his own denomination as “continuing” Presbyterians often appeared to “continue” for a sub-gospel reason, and Bryden’s relentless criticism of the Church union movement, predicated, as it was, not on a common ownership of the gospel but on business techniques pertaining to mergers and acquisitions.

Anything but a cultural Philistine, Bryden unambiguously declares his appreciation of the work of historical critics, and this for several reasons, not least of which is they have helped recover the Reformation distinction between Word of God and the words of Scripture. At the same time, Bryden is unsparing in identifying the theological errors of highly regarded critics who locate Jesus’s uniqueness in his moral perfection, thereby tacitly denying the incarnation (and consequently the atonement).

Bryden’s “God and the Philosophers” evinces his reiterated warning that theology, left unguarded, always degenerates into philosophy. Such a “philosophy” retains a Christian vocabulary and thereby deceives the unwary yet is no more than speculative. It fails to grasp Truth: the cosmos-renewing reality of God’s incursion, for nothing less than an act of God can remedy humankind’s sin-wrought predicament. In this regard Bryden reiterates the gospel as the power of God for humankind’s salvation, distancing himself from the liberal preference for power-less, comparative religion wherein the gospel is viewed as essentially ideational and therefore to be understood and evaluated in terms of its concepts. Here Bryden’s affinity with Emil Brunner is obvious: theism is the lethal enemy of the gospel.

Recognizing that liberal theology has continued to speak of revelation and redemption while emptying the terms of all apostolic content, Bryden highlights what liberal theology finds embarrassing: the apocalyptic dimension of all New Testament thought. (Here he anticipates Ernst Kaesemann.) The affront to the holy God is nothing less than horrific; and if the category of apocalyptic horror is unfashionable for the fastidious, Bryden reminds them of...