Gordon Clark: Review of Man in Community, by Russell Phillip Shedd (The Reformed Presbyterian Advocate)

1963. Review of Man in Community, by Russell Phillip Shedd. The Reformed Presbyterian Advocate. December.

Man in Community by Russell Phillip Shedd. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Mich. 209 pp., $1.95

In politics, in sociology, and in philosophy, the relation between part and whole, individual and group, is an important question. In the Old Testament the question concerns the relation between the Israelite and Israel, the covenant, the sins of the parents visited upon the children; in the New Testament it concerns the relation between the believer and the Church, the sinner and Adam, and the Body of Christ. Dr. Shedd's study canvasses the Biblical material in great detail.

Although this material indicates a "solidarity" of some sort, one must be careful to make precise what sort it is. Does a blood cell have existence and individuality apart from the blood stream? Is man just a cell in society? Is he its product? Or is he an individual in his own right? 

Dr. Shedd dislikes individualism. He accepts a weak argument from C. H. Dodd to prove that man is not an individual, that the ego does not remain throughout all changes, and that insofar as man can be called an individual, he is so simply because he is part of the group from which he emerges.

Yet one must question whether the sociological collectivism of the Bible (if that is what one wishes to call it) can best be understood in terms of (Platonic?) Realism. If we are realistically in Adam, and if "the one is the many and the many one" (p. 110), would it not follow that every sin of Adam, and not just his first sin, is also our sin? And if there is a realistic solidarity of priest and victim, is the goat a realistic member of the group? Can there be a vicarious sacrifice in a realistic philosophy? Apparently not; for although in some places the author speaks of substitution, he finally says, "We have found fault with those views which describe the relationship of Christ to the Church as forensic and unrealistic" (p. 157).

There is, I believe, a fundamental fallacy in the construction of the author's argument. While he admits that "Ye are God's temple" and the "olive tree" are metaphorical (pp. 174-176), yet he insists that solidarity, as in "the Body of Christ", must not be considered figurative. Because of this, metaphors are transmuted into metaphysics and the exegesis becomes twisted.

Gordon H. Clark