The times seem to have passed when one could give without JL hesitation a positive answer to the question concerning the meaning of theology for church and society. The traditionally privileged status of theology in European culture had become problematical. In Eastern Europe this has occurred in a direct and frontal ideologically intensified way. However, in Western Europe it has been rather indirect and concealed, but of perhaps even greater consequence in light of the discrepancy between the still existing privileges of ecclesiastical institutions and the in reality largely secularised cultural climate. For many contemporaries theology has become a curious, if not dubious, matter. One is somewhat justified in speaking of the ‘end ofthe protected season for theologians’.

But is this ‘end of the protected season’ simply to be identified with the ‘end of theology’? Some tend to this conclusion—even among theologians. I would reject this conclusion, however, and not as the result of a dogmatic prejudice, but out of the personally felt and ecumenically reflected experience of an Eastern European theologian. The hour when the church and its theology lost some of their privileges has proved in no way to be the end, but rather the beginning of a new, certainly narrow, but more credible path, which in the long run might be perhaps even more efficient in view of our role in church and society. We should not overlook this experience—it is valid, mutatis mutandis, also for other situations. The end of the ‘protected season’ need not be only troublesome, but can at the same time be an opportunity: an opportunity for a new credibility.

Some years ago, the editor of the Scottish Journal of Theology asked me to review what was, to me, an interesting and important book which amounted to a systematic attack on the existence of God, at any rate on the validity of the traditional theistic proofs of classical and modern systematic theology. In addition, such other bases of belief in God as authority revelation, historical event, and religious experience were treated, with the aim of showing that they cannot substitute for a failed philosophical theism. However, some mental block prevented me from completing the review proper. The root of the matter was that, in my Bachelor of Arts degree at Sydney University, my philosophical course had involved a system of atheism which I have recognised ever since to be more rigorous and cogent than any others, and I am not alone in this feeling. In particular, I felt that Professor Flew was in a stronger position than most philosophers of the prevailing modern British schools, but that this was because he approximated more than most to what I had learnt at Sydney, and that a still further approximation would tighten his case still more. The professor in question, the late John Anderson, was a Clydesider whose family background was the familiar Leftwing agnosticism and whose training was Absolute Idealism; in his later development, he reacted against both these elements, but his agnosticism hardened into a positive atheism.

John Mcleod Campbell died one hundred years ago in J February 1872, and hence it is fitting that at this time we consider the contribution and insight of one of the greatest (if not the greatest) of our Scottish theologians—whose voice we need to hear again today.

Through more than forty years of his career, Paul Tillich painstakingly developed a vision of an ontological conflict between space and time. In developing this vision, Tillich proceeds from an existential and phenomenological perspective. An entire doctrine of reality is presupposed and time is conceived of as temporality and is ontologically identified with the primordial ‘depth’ or inner infinity of all being and reality. Such time is in some sense subjective, intuitively known, and immediately given.

It is now some seventy-five years since the problem of myth in the Old Testament tradition was first formulated in any detail by Gunkel. He drew attention to mythological elements in the tradition of Israel which could not be explained merely in terms of fortuitous parallelism with other myths of the ancient orient. He saw that much of this mythology could be traced to Babylonian and Assyrian sources; but he set out to examine how the myth had come into the Old Testament and how it had been made to conform to the thought and understanding of Israel. He dealt with such various themes as the Creation, the Flood, Rahab and Leviathan and tehōm He noted how mythological figures, such as the Dragon in the Sea were linked to historical persons and events, e.g. the hubris of the sea-dragon is the hubris of Pharaoh and Egypt in Ezekiel 29 and 32.