The imposing Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church,¹ the first of its sort, offers itself “not only to those who through Holy Baptism have been admitted to membership in the Body of Christ, but to all who take an intelligent interest in contemporary culture.” The preface continues:

It is addressed to the needs not merely of those whose primary vocation lies in the Christian ministry or in the professional study of theology or church history, nor even only to the general body of professing Christians who seek information about their faith and its growth, but to the educated public as a whole.

The present reviewer, by the Dictionary’s definition an “infidel” (“A person who has a positive disbelief in every form of the Christian faith”), raised in the Jewish faith but infidel there too, and without pretensions to the professional study of theology, has no justification for this review beyond the hope that he is a member of the educated public to which the book is addressed.

The ODCC, as the Dictionary asks that we abbreviate it, is the work of the Reverend F. L. Cross, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford and Canon of Christ Church, his staff, and over a hundred scholars, a great many of them clergymen in the Church of England. Since “in order to secure the maximum uniformity it was agreed at the outset that all contributions should be subject to such editorial modification and reconstruction as seemed desirable, and that anonymity should be preserved,” the book has a unified character and viewpoint lacking in such pluralist signed works as the Oxford Classical Dictionary. Its viewpoint throughout is High Church Episcopalian, finding its clearest identification with the Tractarian or Oxford revival of the 19th century which sought to restore the Church of England to its Catholic, credal, and ritualistic traditions. The book’s particular hero is Cardinal Newman, the leader of the Oxford Movement and before his conversion to Roman Catholicism its boldest Tractarian. The entry on Newman concludes: “His genius has come to be more and more recognized after his death, and his influence both on the restoration of RC-ism [Roman Catholicism] in England and the advance of Catholic ideas in the C of E [Church of England] can hardly be exaggerated.” Secondary heroes are E. B. Pusey, the leader of the movement after Newman’s defection and Cross’s predecessor as Canon of Christ Church, so strong in the faith that he was suspended from the Oxford pulpit for two years for teaching Roman Catholic doctrine; and John Keble, the brilliant Tractarian and poet.

The aim of the ODCC seems in fact no less than to undo the Reformation, at least for the Church of England. Thus an entry on Middle Ages remarks, “Once viewed as a sterile period, it has come to be regarded as one of the most creative and fruitful periods in the world’s history.” In general, the Protestant character of the Established Church is denied, and its traditions are repudiated. Here, of course, the great stumbling block are the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, agreed upon by convocation under Queen Elizabeth in 1562, which affirm many of Luther’s basic principles: that “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation” (Article 6); “that we are justified by Faith only” (Article 11); that “the Church of Rome hath erred” (Article 19) as General Councils of the Church “may err, and sometimes have erred” (Article 21); that the use of “a tongue not understanded of the people” is “a thing plainly repugnant to the Word of God” (Article 24); that the Roman doctrine of Tran-substantiation in the Eucharist is not only “repugnant to the plain words of Scripture” but “hath given occasion to many superstitions” (Article 27); that the laity must be given the Eucharistic wine as well as the bread (Article 30); that “the sacrifices of Masses” are “blasphemous fables, and dangerous deceits” (Article 31); that marriage is lawful for the clergy (Article 32); and so forth.

Until 1865, “subscription” to all Thirty-nine Articles was required of the clergy of the Church of England and members of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Since then there have been no tests of faith at the universities, and the clergy has been required only to “assent” to the Articles in general. The ODCC explains: “Assent is generally understood to imply a less definite form of adherence than subscription, but there is apparently no official explanation as to exactly what it involves. Perhaps the term may be explained as an undertaking to refrain from teaching anything directly opposed to the standard of doctrine implied, without requiring positive agreement in detail in one’s personal opinions.” The Dictionary entries seem to assent only in this loose sense to a number of the Articles, and when they are discussed the emphasis tends to be on the range of permitted disagreement. A typical comment is: “Much variety of interpretation has been put upon many of them without improperly straining the text, and probably this license was deliberately intended by their framers,” giving as an example the “masterly ambiguity” of Article 17, on predestination.

Insofar as John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, commonly known as “The Book of Martyrs,” has been the principal household work keeping alive the old Protestant fury in England, one of the consistent efforts of the High Church party has been to discredit Foxe, beginning with attacks by S. R. Maitland, the librarian at Lambeth Palace, more than a century ago. Although Foxe’s general reliability has since been solidly reestablished by J. F. Mozley (in a study published by the Church of England’s Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge), the Oxford Dictionary says flatly of Foxe’s book, “As a work of history, its value is impaired by its author’s credulity and bitterness.” Where Foxe and his party glory in the execution of Roman Catholic martyrs in England, the ODCC says of Fisher and More, “Their execution in 1535 was universally mourned.” Even Richard Hooker, the “architect” of the Church of England, is not Catholic enough, and the biographical entry on him complains of the liberality of his doctrine on episcopal ordination and the Eucharist. The tone used for such modern critics as John Kensit, who opposed “what he believed to be romanizing tendencies in the C of E,” is almost petulant: “increasingly violent and individualist,” “causing considerable friction and disturbance wherever he went.”

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Historically, the great Protestant critics of the Roman Catholic Church have not been distinguished for their temperateness. Wycliffe called adherents of the Pope “the twelve daughters of the diabolical leech.” Luther described the denial of Communion wine to the laity and other abuses as the “Babylonian Captivity” of the Church. The spirit of the Oxford Dictionary is about as far from this as can be imagined. The traditional pre-Reformation martyrs of Protestantism are for the most part blandly repudiated: the Albigenses “were animated by an implacable hatred against the Church” and “because of their unsocial doctrines were a menace not only to the faith of the Church but to ordered society”; “grave excesses and fanaticism brought ill-odour” on the Anabaptists; and so on. “Since the Reformation,” an entry on Antichrist remarks, “the identification of the Pope with Antichrist has been frequently made, esp. in the less educated circles of Protestantism,” from which one would hardly guess that Archbishop Cranmer died affirming it, that such an identification was one of the 104 Articles of the Church of Ireland adopted in 1615, or that it is a tenet of the Lutheran Book of Concord of 1580, to which many Lutheran churches still subscribe.

Many of the Dictionary’s entries on aspects of Roman Catholicism maintain a nice impartiality, e.g. the one on the 19th-century Papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Antonelli, which concludes: “A statesman rather than a prelate, he was loaded with praise by his friends, but regarded as unscrupulous by his enemies.” The entry on Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day is rigorously dispassionate. On such phenomena as the eighteen manifestations of the Virgin Mary to St. Bernadette near Lourdes, the Dictionary confines itself modestly to noting how they are commemorated in the Roman Catholic Church. The cult of saints’ relics, the ODCC explains, “is based on the natural instinct of men to treat with reverence what is left of the dead they loved.” (Article 22, less impressed by natural instinct, says, “The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping, and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints, is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.”) The Oxford Dictionary is critical in two main areas. It hits hard at the wicked and dissolute Popes in history (though no harder than many Roman Catholic historians), and remarks bluntly of an inept Pope, St. Celestine V, “His pontificate was astonishing and disastrous.” Hagiography gets equally short shrift, and the typical description of a saint’s legend is, “An apparently worthless legend.”

In the book’s effort to define the Church of England as a Catholic Church, a great deal of space is expended on justifying the legitimacy of its holy orders. A long article on Anglican Ordinations defends their historical continuity in a line going back to divine institution, asserting against Roman Catholic polemicists that even if the Apostolic Succession was broken with Archbishop Parker under Queen Elizabeth, it was regained with Archbishop Laud at the Restoration. The article on Parker is nevertheless careful to remind readers of his consecration “by four bishops who had held sees in Edward VI’s reign.” The entry on Anglicanism does not seem embarrassed by the fact that “the C of E tolerated, esp. in the later years of the 19th cent. and the earlier years of the 20th, a considerable infiltration of Liberalism,” but the entry on Liberalism suggests that the recovery has been relatively complete. The biography of A. H. Stanley, Dean of Westminster, notes that he “gave much offense to orthodox Churchmen by his invitation to all the scholars who had produced the RV [Revised Version], among them a Unitarian, to receive Holy Communion in the Abbey.” One would never know from the account of Essays and Reviews (1860), “A collection of essays by seven authors who believed in the necessity of free inquiry in religious matters,” dealing chiefly with its violent condemnation by the Church of England, that one of the condemned authors, Frederick Temple, later became Archbishop of Canterbury.

As the Oxford Movement in the Church of England paralleled Ultramontanism in the Roman Catholic Church, the Dictionary points out, so was there a parallelism between Anglican Liberalism and Roman Catholic Modernism. Modernism was quickly crippled by the excommunication of J. J. I. von Doellinger in 1871 and the enormous pressures put on Lord Acton, and it was finally extirpated by the condemnation of Modernist doctrines as heretic by Pius X in 1907, and the excommunication shortly afterwards of such Modernist priests as Alfred Loisy in France and George Tyrrell in England (in Tyrrell’s case, for protesting against the Papal encyclical in two letters to the Times). Excommunication “has in fact been very rare in the C of E,” the Dictionary notes, perhaps proudly, thinking of Dean Stanley and Archbishop Temple.

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Balancing the ODCC’s emphasis on the Catholic tradition of the Church of England in matters of ritual and sacramentalism, there is an equally strong identification with Protestantism in the welcome accorded the revival of Calvinism by Barthian theology, with Karl Barth a hero to balance Newman. The article on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, the key New Testament book for Barth, notes that it was equally important to St. Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Wesley. The enthusiastic entry on Reinhold Niebuhr says, “He has been much influenced by the Dialectical Theology of K. Barth,” and adds that he goes even beyond Barth to reject “the theology of the Creeds in its traditional form” as giving “insufficient place to original sin.” In the entry on Arminianism the Dictionary speaks of the recent “theological revival of Calvinism under the influence of K. Barth,” and the article on Calvinism concludes:

Calvinism suffered severe setbacks through rationalism in the 18th and 19th cents., but recently it has once more come to the fore, esp. through the work of K. Barth, whose influence has been considerable not only in the Protestant Churches on the Continent but also in the C of E. Its attraction for the modern religious mind is probably due to the stress it lays on the omnipotence of God and the nothingness of man, as a reaction against the easy humanitarianism of 19th cent. liberal Protestantism.

Apart from Calvin, the Dictionary explains, Barth’s Dialectical Theology “drew its inspiration from thinkers in revolt against the humanist ideal,” principally Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. Both are treated to very respectful biographical articles, that on Kierkegaard concluding, “His total influence on contemporary thought is very considerable,” and the one on Dostoevsky similarly noting that his ideas “have had a profound influence on the Continent.”

The entry on Atonement says that in recent years “there has been a return to traditional views” under the influence of Barthian theology and its “determination to put the Cross rather than the Manger at the centre of the Christian Creed.” The article on God expounds yet another aspect of the Barthian revolution: “The main trend in the present century has been against immanentism, with a reaffirmation of the Divine transcendence.” The book’s only criticism of Barth, so far as I could see, is the suggestion under Incarnation that “Neo-Protestant theology, under the influence esp. of K. Barth and his school, has sometimes been so emphatic in its denial of immanence as almost to imperil belief in a real Incarnation altogether.” “In recent times,” the ODCC explains, “renewed interest has been taken in the theology of the Church by Catholics and Protestants alike.” This revival of theology is regarded as being almost entirely due to Barth: “His influence has been very deep on the Continent as well as in Great Britain and America, where it has done much to break the reign of the more negative elements of German criticism.”

The higher criticism of the Bible, in other words, has been replaced by something more positive. “Since the World War of 1914-18,” the Dictionary explains (Barth’s commentary on Romans appeared in 1919), “the approach of scholars to the NT has shifted. A ‘post-critical’ period has begun, in which the interest in literary and historical questions has declined. More attention is paid to the theology of the Bible and to the interrelation of different parts of the OT and the NT.” Under Bible Exegesis the Dictionary notes, “K. Barth is the chief representative of a return to a more dogmatic and conservative method.” The tendency of the ODCC is to dismiss the higher criticism of the Bible as a mere 19th-century aberration, although Origen in the third century, Eusebius and St. Jerome in the fourth, were “higher critics” in every sense of the term, as were many of the Reformers.

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The writers of the ODCC in general take a fairly conservative line on Bible criticism. They accept, or at least treat respectfully, its more moderate conclusions, particularly where the agreement of scholars is overwhelming. In regard to the Old Testament: “large sections” of the Book of Jeremiah were not written by the prophet; “the popular belief that David was the author of the whole Psalter can no longer be sustained”; the Song of Solomon “is prob. an anthology of love poems of varying length, ascribed to Solomon and his beloved (the ‘Shulamite’) and their friends”; the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah are “generally supposed by modern scholars” to have been written much later than the time of Nehemiah, that is, to be pseudepigraphic. Similar judgments are made about the New Testament: the author of the Book of Revelation is neither the John of the Fourth Gospel nor the Apostle John; “it is widely held” that parts of Second Corinthians do not belong in it; “some modern scholars” have questioned the genuineness of the Epistle to the Ephesians, “but the problems have not received any agreed solution”; along with Origen and Luther modern scholars “almost unanimously consider” the Epistle to the Hebrews pseudepigraphic; the authenticity of the Pastoral Epistles “has been frequently denied by NT critics.”

For the bolder conclusions of higher criticism, or the more radical critics, the Dictionary shows little respect. C. C. Torrey questioned the historical existence of Ezra, “but this drastic critical hypothesis has received little support”; F. C. Baur denied the Pauline authorship of all except four Epistles, but his book “roused a storm of controversy”; W. C. Van Manen rejected the authenticity of all St. Paul’s Epistles, but “his opinions attracted attention more as curiosities than for their intrinsic importance.” The notion that Jesus was a mythical rather than a historical person is misunderstood by identifying it with Strauss’s Life of Jesus, which certainly assumes a historical Jesus, and the theory’s actual proponents are ignored or dismissed. C. F. Dupuis, P. C. A. Jensen, Georg Brandes, and P. L. Couchoud are not mentioned; Arthur Drews is tossed aside as a “German anti-Christian apologist”; and the leader of the movement, J. M. Robertson, gets no biographical entry, but along with W. B. Smith is named as among “a small group of critics” who denied the historical existence of Christ and were promptly refuted by P. W. Schmiedel. The long article on Jesus Christ entirely ignores the proponents of the myth theory, and none of their many volumes is listed in the extensive bibliography of “Other works from many different standpoints.”

Where the Oxford Dictionary does not repudiate the higher criticism, it sidesteps it in a variety of fashions. Thus the story of Eden contains “a fundamental truth about man in his relation to God, even if the truth is held to be there conveyed in legendary form”; the purpose of Genesis “is not so much to offer exact science and accurate history as to record the progressive character of the Divine revelation and to indicate the spiritual mission of the Israelite people”; the Gospel according to St. Mark “gives us a patchwork of tradition; but on analysis every part of it bears witness, in its own way, to a ‘Jesus of History’ behind it.” Sometimes the treatment seems almost disingenuous. A tiny entry on the prophet Elisha says “He had not the individuality or strength of character of his predecessor” Elijah, but significantly neglects to mention that he anticipated many of the miracles of his successor Jesus, among them healing, raising the dead, and multiplying the loaves. An entry on Bethlehem nowhere says that it translates as “house of bread,” and is thus a peculiarly fitting birthplace for Jesus who said of the bread “Take, eat; this is my body.” There is the repeated claim that the Gospels were written by their reputed authors, since “It is unlikely that tradition would wrongly have assigned a Gospel to so unimportant a character” as Mark or Luke, an argument that would make the apocryphal books of Enoch and Baruch authentic. The entries on Nazarene and Nazirite fail to suggest a connection, nor is there any mention under Nazareth that there does not seem to have been any such place before the 3rd or 4th century. The long article on St. Paul pays no attention to the many demonstrations (by Jewish and Christian scholars) that Paul’s ignorance of the Hebrew Bible and of Jewish custom makes it impossible for him to have been the rabbinically trained strict Pharisee of the New Testament report. Lastly, the writers of the Oxford Dictionary are sometimes surprisingly credulous: Sir Leonard Wooley’s excavations at Ur are taken “to indicate a historic foundation for the Babylonian tradition of a very widespread flood”; and the death of Solomon is dated “c. 933 B.C.” with all the boldness of Archbishop Ussher and no additional evidence.

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Where the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church may prove most disturbing to readers not of its persuasion (and, one might hope, to many who are) is in its arrogance. Thus the entry on Capital Punishment concludes, “Its abolition in certain countries, however, and the great diminution since 1800 of the number of crimes punishable by death in others, may legitimately be ascribed to Christian enlightenment” (perhaps the author means the enlightenment of Christians). The entry on Slavery concludes, “It is now generally condemned on account of the almost inevitable abuses accompanying it, and of its opposition to the spirit of the Gospel.” And how odd to find that the Scriptures of the Mandaeans are “a farrago of inconsistent teachings,” so unlike our own well-ordered Bible.

The Dictionary tends to be particularly harsh with the aggressively evangelical Protestant sects. Of the English Ranters of the 17th century: “Their revolutionary and immoral doctrines made them the object of deep suspicion.” Mormon history “has been marked by constant internal dissensions and strife with the Federal authorities.” The Christian Science Church was founded after Mrs. Eddy’s recovery from “various ailments, generally held to have been of a hysterical nature,” and “Its teaching on the unreality of matter, sin, and suffering conflicts with the fundamental Biblical doctrines of the Creation, Fall, and Redemption.” Jehovah’s Witnesses “can hardly be regarded as a religious society, since, acc. to Rutherford’s own statement, they hold that ‘religion is against God.’” Their periodicals “carried on a vigorous propaganda against the British Empire as well as against all institutional religion. The RC Church, the C of E, and the Free Churches are the constant butt of abuse in these publications, which deny most of the fundamental Christian doctrines.” A biographical entry on Judge Rutherford notes, “In 1918-19 he served a term of imprisonment at Atlanta (Georgia) for insubordination and disloyalty, and he was frequently accused of fraudulent practices, even by his own followers,” and credits him with being the author of “innumerable pamphlets propagating his subversive views.” A biographical entry on C. T. Russell, Rutherford’s predecessor and the founder of the sect, notes that “In 1909 his wife obtained a divorce on the grounds of his immoral conduct with members of his ‘Church’ and he went abroad for a time,” and concludes: “Despite the great parade of learning in his books he was unable to name in the courts the letters of the Greek alphabet.”

The ODCC seems remarkably callous to cruelties committed by the Church against dissenters and heretics. The entry on Secular Arm explains: “The Church has not felt justified in imposing in her own tribunals penalties which involve mutilation or death, but the Church courts have had to deal with some cases, chiefly those of heresy, in which it was felt that sterner punishments were needed than they could impose. The assistance of the secular arm was therefore sought.” The article on Oxford boasts: “The close and continuous connection with the life of the Church is shewn by the trials of T. Cranmer, N. Ridley, and H. Latimer in the University Church of St. Mary,” which is surely a peculiar way of saying that three English Protestant martyrs, educated by Cambridge, were burnt by Oxford. An entry lists The Spiritual Works of Mercy: “There are traditionally seven: (1) converting the sinner; (2) instructing the ignorant; (3) counselling the doubtful; (4) comforting the sorrowful; (5) bearing wrongs patiently; (6) forgiving injuries; (7) praying for the living and the dead.” The Oxford Dictionary perhaps aspires only to the first three.

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The book’s arrogance toward Judaism seems equally striking. “Hence,” says the article on Bible, “the OT was ordained as the possession of the Church to whom (and not to the Jews) Christians held that since the Coming of the Lord it primarily belonged.” Thus Aaron is “a type of Christ,” the Burning Bush is “a type of the Blessed Virgin,” and so on. “Theism,” says the entry on that topic, “is in various forms the view of the world common to all Christian philosophers, and, in a less perfect form, also required by the Jewish and Mohammedan religions.” Jewish monotheism is elsewhere identified as “deism.” Dean Milman’s History of the Jews was distinguished by “the freedom and freshness with which he handled the OT narratives, treating the Jews as an oriental tribe.” Mixed marriage is defined as “A marriage between Christians of different religious allegiances.” The brief and inadequate entry on Covenant makes no mention of what Jews regard as the fundamental Old Testament covenant, the covenant of circumcision with Abraham; and the writer of the entry on the parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel According to St. Luke apparently has no idea that the parable is an anti-Semitic anecdote.

The Dictionary describes the achievements of a long line of Jewish converts to Christianity, from Johann Pfefferkorn in the 16th century (who devoted himself to the destruction of all Jewish sacred writings) to Michael Solomon Alexander in the 19th (who translated the Book of Common Prayer into Hebrew), and praises the missionary work that “resulted in some very talented converts.” The biographical entry on General William Booth of the Salvation Army notes his “partly Jewish origin” and his “shrewd commercial sense.” The entry on Ghetto is entirely factual, with no hint of disapproval, and the entry on St. William of Norwich says, “This is the first known case of the blood accusation against the Jews; but as the authorities took no action, the account is open to much suspicion,” which suggests that the writer believes in Jewish ritual murder, and would not suspect an account where the authorities had taken action.

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The Dictionary’s attitude toward science can only be called cavalier. There is no entry on Charles Darwin, while Darwinism itself is dismissed in twelve lines; but there is a lengthy account of T. H. Huxley, concluding, “Huxley had few claims to be considered an exact thinker.” Do the authors of the Oxford Dictionary really believe that they have been ordained with the power to bind and loose in the realm of exact thought? Do they mean, for example, that Huxley was an inexact thinker as compared with St. Anselm, with his doctrine that Original Sin is transmitted by our “seminal identity” with Adam? Or St. Augustine, with his distinctions between dulia, the reverence proper to saints, hyperdulia, the reverence proper to the Virgin Mary, and latria, the reverence proper to God alone? Are they comparing Huxley with the scientists who have distinguished between Ascetical, Moral, and Mystical Theology, or between the Church Militant on earth, the Church Expectant in Purgatory, and the Church Triumphant in Heaven?

Secular philosophy is handled very respectfully in the Dictionary, and there are long entries on philosophers and various philosophic terms, but the social sciences are treated quite as insolently as is evolutionary biology. The entry on Anthropology knowledgeably defines Sacred Anthropology, the study of man as contrasted with God or angels in regard to “his creation, elevation to supernatural status, and his fall,” but is woefully inadequate on secular anthropology, mentioning only Java Man and “handicraft-work,” with no book on the subject later than 1912 in the appended bibliography. Of modern psychologists we are told that they “frequently interpret sin mainly as psychological disorder, often teach that the forms of temptation rooted in the appetites are primarily natural instincts, which as such ought, at least to some extent, to be satisfied.” As might be expected, Freud’s “disciple” Jung is the only acceptable psychologist: “Jung’s ideas have found much approval also among students of religion and led to some fruitful developments.”

Occasionally a catch in the Dictionary’s voice suggests that the arrogant tone actually conceals anxiety. The article on Toleration that begins so boldly “Christianity, which claims to be the only true religion, has always been dogmatically intolerant,” ends with a whimper: “The modern problem is not so much one of toleration for other religious convictions as that of the preservation of religion in view of the general indifference and secularization of life.” The entry on Christian notes that in modern times the word has tended “in nominally Christian countries” to lose any credal significance and mean only something “ethically praiseworthy” or “socially customary.” Another entry sadly recognizes the difficulty of keeping all these shiny Indian clubs spinning: “Popular ideas about the Trinity, in intention orthodox, often tend to be tri-theistic in expression” (as does, we might note, the Apostles’ Creed, with its statement that Jesus Christ “sitteth on the right hand of the Father”). Running through the book there is a nervous attempt to blame all sorts of things on contemporary secularization, a typical example being: “In the present century the growth of unbelief and superstition has encouraged the revival of astrology in certain quarters.” The entry on Burial Services, however, gives the show away: for the Christian, death should be an occasion for joy, but “the prevalence of merely nominal Christianity made such joy not always fitting,” and the date of the change is given as the 8th century. There is a suggestion that Hitler and the H-bomb may change it all: “More recently the recognition of demonic forces in contemporary civilisation has led to a renewed theological emphasis on the gravity of sin, in the spirit of St. Augustine and the Reformers.” At the same time, there is a fear that the lower-class origins of Christianity (those Jews, that cow’s stall) may alienate the better people, and the article on Jesus Christ is quick to point out “Jesus is once called the ‘carpenter,’ or stone mason, but the family though manual workers were not necessarily ill-educated.” (Surely St. Joseph could have named all the letters of the Greek alphabet in court.)

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No double-column work of fifteen hundred pages could be quite so monolithic, and of course the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church is not. Some of the entries show a genuine Christian charity toward enemies or opponents: the great persecutor Julian the Apostate did attempt “to reform the morals and elevate the theology of paganism, himself giving (it must be allowed) a conspicuous example of austerity and purpose”; the Puritan controversialist John Owen was “always tolerant and fair,” and “Many of his writings show deep spiritual insight and a firm grasp of NT Christianity”; John Wesley was beyond doubt “one of the greatest Christians of his age.” Some of the tensions that assenting to the Thirty-nine Articles accumulates are worked off on art and literature, where the entries tend to be boldly opinionated: Fra Angelico’s “greatest artistic talents lay in his use of brilliant colour and his powers of decoration”; Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna “though poorly constructed as a dramatic work, contained some fine lyrics”; and so forth. Some of the book’s entries in the fields of ecclesiology, liturgeology, and the study of vestments are frankly aesthetic, so that an account of a Yorkshire abbey concludes: “To-day the abbey lies in ruins, but the greater part of the exquisite Early English cruciform church remains, with many of the altars in situ.”

But some of the ODCC is written in a theological jargon so clotted as to be almost incomprehensible, like the remark about Leontius of Byzantium: “He was a staunch upholder of the Chalcedonian Christology which he interpreted on Cyrilline principles, introducing the notion of the Enhypostasia.” There are inexplicable omissions: in particular one misses an entry on Simone Weil. Some topics of chiefly American interest are similarly slighted, among them Covenant Theology, and the Universalist Church. Apparently the greater part of the book was written before the Dead Sea Scrolls made their impact, and the half-dozen mentions of the Scrolls are added on as afterthoughts without the revisions they require in traditional opinions. Thus the entries on Bible, Damascus Fragments, Essenes, Gnosticism, Logos, and Manuscripts of the Bible had been superseded by the time they appeared.

This reviewer has noted a few errors or confusions, and scholars will surely find many more. The information that Bar-Cochba’s real name was “Simeon” is credited mysteriously to “the Jews”; actually we get it, like most of our information about the Second Revolt, from his surviving coins. An entry on E, one of the narratives believed to be embodied in the first books of the Bible, says the Elohist writer “regularly” calls God “Elohim”; actually, he does so only until God reveals his true name to Moses, after which he too calls God “Jahveh.” Bodisatva is defined as “a title of the Buddha”; more correctly Bodhisattva, it is the stage of spiritual perfection just below that of the Buddha. The entry on taurobolium identifies it with the worship of Cybele and Attis, but not Mithra. An entry on Joanina Southcott says that her sealed box of prophecies was opened in 1927 and proved to contain a woman’s nightcap and a lottery ticket; that was someone’s practical joke, and the real box has not yet been opened, since her conditions require an Archbishop of Canterbury willing to open it. Theosophists are identified as regarding “Christ as purely human,” as they certainly do not.

Where it is not wrong, the Dictionary is often maddeningly vague. It says of the Roman Catholic Biblical Commission, “Among its most notable decisions are those on the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch (1906), on the authenticity and historicity of the Fourth Gospel (1907), and on the Synoptic problem (1912),” without explaining what was decided. It refers to Emerson’s “extremely unconventional views on the Eucharist,” without revealing them; it says that Archbishop Lang “played an important part in public affairs in connection with the abdication of Edward VIII,” without saying what part; it notes that Charles Péguy “had a strong faith in the Eucharist which domestic circumstances made it impossible for him to receive,” without taking us beyond that teasing point; it says of St. Peter, “There are considerable historical reasons for believing that his tomb in St. Peter’s in Rome is authentic,” but cites none of them. Occasionally a cross reference promises an entry that is not produced.

Where the Oxford Dictionary delights is in its odd and relatively useless information, the gleanings of thousands of unavailable and specialized publications (as well as of such standard works as the Dictionary of National Biography and the Oxford English Dictionary). One can thus learn that the theft of a book from the Ambrosian Library at Milan is a sin from which only the Pope can absolve; that there have been Binitarians as well as Trinitarians and Unitarians; that St. Catherine, martyred on a wheel, is the patron saint of wheelwrights and attorneys; that the Ethiopian Church still circumcises; that St. Francis of Assisi is thought to have made the first crèche; that the Eastern Church forbids fourth marriages; that “tawdry” is derived from the cheap finery sold at the fair of St. Audry or Ethelreda; that barrel organs and trumpets called “vamping horns” were widely used in 18th-century English churches; and that the Wandering Jew made an appearance in Salt Lake City in 1868. There are some wonderful characters, ranging from St. Alphonsus Liguori—a prominent Neapolitan lawyer who realized the transitoriness of earthly glory and renounced the world when his client lost a hundred-thousand-pound lawsuit on a technicality—to Jenny Geddes, a Scottish vegetable-seller who achieved immortality by throwing her folding stool at the bead of the Bishop of Edinburgh in St. Giles’ Cathedral when the hated Scottish Prayer Book was introduced.

In places, the Dictionary even reveals a dry wit. We learn of Canaan: “Of the original inhabitants (called Canaanites) some survived, and appear to have had a reactionary influence upon the development and maintenance of Hebrew monotheism.” Of St. Gemma Galgani we are told: “Apart from her conviction of occasional diabolical possession, her spiritual life was normally peaceful.” An account of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem remarks: “The scene on Sunday mornings, when the various rites, all with music, are proceeding simultaneously, is unique in Christendom.” On Obscurantism, “Christians have sometimes been charged with it by secular critics, and professing Christians have also sometimes made the charge against one another, but it has rarely, if ever, been admitted.” On the doctrine of the early Church, based on Matthew 22:14 (“For many are called, but few are chosen”), that the number of the damned is considerably larger than the number of the saved: “The tendency of most modern theologians who have been bold enough to seek an answer to this and other such questions has been towards a more optimistic view.” With such leaven to leaven the lump, perhaps even the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, for all its black sins, may yet, in later editions, be numbered among the saved.

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¹ Oxford University Press, 1492 pp., $17.50.