One of the books that I’m working my way through this year is Redemptive History & Biblical Interpretation: The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos, edited by Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. I’m in the homestretch now, with a handful of Book Reviews published in The Princeton Theological Review (among others).
The review I read today was of the book Jesus and the Gospel: Christianity Justified in the Mind of Christ by James Denney, D.D. It was published in 1909, and is likely not that easy to find a copy of now. But after reading this first paragraph from Vos, you might not want to:
Dr. Denney’s latest book puts us under the strange necessity of heartily praising its contents and at the same time deploring most deeply the main purpose for which it was written. We confess to having seldom read a book productive of such a sudden and painful revulsion of feeling, from a sympathetic and enthusiastically admiring state of mind to one of sharp protest and radical dissent, as the work before us. Dr. Denney’s style and manner of presentation are so brilliant and yet so warm and genial, he carries us along so easily, so absolutely compels our belief in the irrefutableness of his argument, that, when he proceeds to make the disagreeable application, we find it more than ordinarily difficult to arrest the momentum of conviction acquired and turn our minds all at once in the opposite direction. The sense of disillusionment at the close is so poignant that it inevitably gives rise to the question, whether perhaps the profound agreement in which we imagined ourselves to be with the writer was not after all a delusion, arising from a misinterpretation on our part of the real drift of the discussion, so that, if we had only read more carefully and between the lines, we would have disagreed from the beginning. Whether the case lies actually as just stated or whether it is a simple instance of non sequitur between approved premises and a false conclusion, we find it extremely difficult to decide.
The review goes on for another 6 pages (in this edition, anyway). Pound for pound, I’ve never been able to convey so much in any post about a book as Vos does there. The following pages are just icing on the cake (he has a lot of great things to say about the book—it’s the rest of it that Denney might not have appreciated)
Read Irresponsibly, but please Comment Responsibly