In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

980 BOOK REVIEWS life by giving it and is set free by making himself a servant even unto death...." (p. 45) The second part (pp. 61-1fl0) takes up "The Early Church and Paul" and is done by J. Pathrapankal and L. Legrand. Here the complexities of the early missionary work of the Church and particularly of St. Paul are analysed. While Paul evangelized in the traditional sense of the word, he was also a missionary in the more radical sense because of his constant and primary witness to Jesus Christ. The third part (pp. 1fl1-168) deals with "Evangelization in the Johannine Writings" and is done by M. Vellanickal. Here evangelization is expressed in its most profound sense since it is more than mere verbal communication; it is bearing constant witness to an experience of faith. " Evangelization in Jn is a twofold process of experiencing and sharing the Christ-event. This takes place through the realization of the life of faith in Christ, whereby Christ, the Word, becomes the interior source of a genuine Christian life. Hence evangelization in Jn takes the concrete form of ' Witnessing! " (p. 167) The work cannot be praised too highly as a positive contribution to New Testament theology and as a basic study of a most important issue in Christianity today. Although no publishing date is given, the date of December 8, 1978, appears at the end of the preface. There is an inde'IC of Scriptural quotations. Mt. St. Mary's of the West Norwood, Ohio EuGENE H. MALY Inspiration in the Non-biblical Scriptures. By IsHANAND VEMPENY, S. J. Bangalore: Theological Publications in India, 1978. Pp. 280. This is an intriguing book for many reasons. The author apologizes unnecessarily for his sometimes quaint English, which is usually quite acceptable . His choice of language, of course, has been dictated by pragmatic considerations in respect to the situation of the Church in India. The same considerations have dictated the abandonment of some scholarly paraphernalia , and rightly so: " After spending some thirty working hours in consulting the available books and and the readily accessible libraries and pandits for finding out a reference to a Mahiibhiirata saying which the ordinary Indians versed in the vernacular literature can quote from memory, the author felt that the spending of so much time with so little advantage to the general topic, is an unjustifiable luxury in the present Indian situation." The scholarship, like the language, is quite adequate to its purpose. BOOK REVIEWS 981 The book deals with a problem that is not unique to India but is particularly acute in India where the Church has long existed-we are reminded that the Church is older in India than in most European countriesand has existed alongside other religious traditions even more venerable and, for that matter, deserving of veneration. The scriptures possessed by these traditions are only one aspect of a larger ecumenical question, it is true, but they nevertheless do pose the question. The author's basic thesis is fairly simple, and fairly plausible. First of all, the great world religions may no longer be regarded as so many aberrations by an ecumenical church but rather as genuine ways to God divinely willed as such for a majority of mankind, in the past as in the foreseeable future. The writings which these religions regard as sacred ought, therefore, to be related somehow by the Church to the writings of the Judeo-Christian scriptural canon, the writings which the Church has always regarded as sacred. The traditional term that expresses the sacred character of Scripture is inspiration. So far so good. The book bogs down through no fault of the author or of his thesis but only because of the inadequacies of the categories within which the question of inspiration has traditionally been argued, which occasion all sorts of difficulties for him. He wants to establish a basis for the sacred character of non-Christian scriptures by appealing to the canonizing process while at the same time precluding additional sacred scriptures from Christianity. Thus he is forced into the questionable distinction between Old Testament religion as scripture-producing (namely, the scripture which the Church inherited) and Christianity as not...

pdf

Share