Bernard E. Jones

Book Reviews : Another Quest

Knowing Jesus Today is published by the author, the Reverend Dr John Bradshaw ([1984] £6.00, pp. 246, from 2 Netherwood Close, Solihull, B91 1 DU). Dr Bradshaw has had a varied experience of some years in theological training in Oceania followed by a lengthier period as Senior Lecturer in Psychology in the University of Aston. He draws on his experience of verbal traditions in Oceania and on his psychological study of the human memory to reconstruct or authenticate the portrait of Jesus given in the Gospels. Taking the moral and intellectual development of the twemiethcentury individual as the norm, the author concludes that Jesus developed rapidly and achieved great

Book Reviews : Prism Breakers

text draws heavily on the example of the Methodists, who have the best statistics, and whose pattern of growth and decline is typical of Nonconformity and, in this century, of all major Protestant churches. These statistics show rapid growth in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Methodism attracted many recruits from nonchurch-going families, some of whom lapsed very quickly; stabilization from the 1840s to the 1880s, when recruitment fell, but fewer members left; a short period of relative decline; and since 1906 an absolute decline, becoming acute in the 1960s, as recruitment from outside sank very low, and the general secularization of society made it hard even to hold on to members’ children. Though dynamic evangelism has sometimes been rewarded, they argue that the number of potential converts at any given time depends on social factors over which the churches have little control. In particular, developments in the later nineteenth century substantially undermined the appeal of the churches; urbanization, state education and the leisure industry, scientific progress, a higher standard of living (reducing the need for supernatural aid). Some smaller churches are growing, but the authors see no prospect of wider revival. Unfortunately, the highly condensed text is unequal to the complexity of the subject. There are interesting ideas here, but most were expressed better in Gilbert’s ’Religion and Society in Industrial England’ or Currie’s ’Methodism Divided’.

Book Reviews : Gift and Call

cernment displayed by Professor Frederick Copleston S.J. is to produce a triumph of learning that defies description. In A History of Philosophy Vol. IX; Maine de Biran to Sartre (Search Press,;E7-00, pp. 480), Professor Copleston brings his series to a close with an extensive description of French philosophical thought from the Revolution to the present time. The text is divided into three major sections and contains an excellent fifty-page bibliography. The first section deals with the writings appearing between the Revolution and the classical positivism of Auguste Comte. With admirable economy of expression and succinct statement of his subjects’ positions, the author moves from the post-revolutionary views of De Maistre, Lamennais and others to Ideologist thought and the influential writings of Maine de Biran and thus to Eclecticism and to Comte. The

The Faith-Ladder

OVER fifty years ago William James described the process whereby a man may move from unbelief to belief. He had already analysed it carefully in The ~Vill to Believe and then gave an admirable summary in A Pluralistic Univeyse : ’ A conception of the world arises in you somehow, no matter how. Is it true or not ? you ask. It might be true somewhere, you say, for it is not self-contradictory. It may be true, you continue, even here and now.