For the larger part of their history, the Christian Churches have taught the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity as central and essential to their faith. Their creeds, councils, and confessions, whatever their differences and whatever range of different interpretations they have permitted, have agreed in affirming that the central figure of the Gospels is to be understood, not only as the revealer of God, but as himself the content of that revelation, God the Son made man for our salvation, and that the doctrine of God implied by that revelation is to be expressed in trinitarian terms. These are still, to a very large extent, the characteristic and peculiar beliefs of Christianity, in its Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant forms. Nevertheless, since the Enlightenment and the rise of modern critical approaches both to scripture and to tradition, the propriety of these doctrines has been questioned. This questioning has been overwhelmingly a Protestant phenomenon, though there have been and are some indications of similar questioning in Roman Catholic theology at the turn of the century and today. Disregarding external critics of Christianity, we can point within the Christian Churches themselves, to rationalist versions of the faith, in which the eternal truths of reason (metaphysical or moral) have been held to constitute the essence of Christianity, deistic versions, which have sought to eliminate the notions of special revelation and divine action in the world, idealist versions, in which the concept of Incarnation has been held to symbolise some universal identity of God and man, liberal Protestant versions, which have singled out either the God-consciousness of Jesus or his teaching as the crucial element in Christianity, and modernist versions, in which the life of the Church itself has been embraced as experientially self-authenticating, irrespective of its origins.

It would appear that one is an apostle of the obvious when speaking of Karl Barth's ‘christological basis’ for the state. According to G. C. Berkouwer, amongst others, to say Karl Barth is to mean simultaneously ‘christocentricism’, especially when speaking of Barth after his deliberate reversal in his dogmatics published in 1932—the date Barth published his Kirchliche Dogmatik after he discontinued writing his Christliche Dogmatik begun in 1927, which he later described as ‘my well-known false start’. But even Berkouwer, who criticises Barth for underplaying the demonic effects and influences of evil through his emphasis on grace, admits that Barth's ‘christocentricism’ has epistemological emphases not found in other theologians:

… Barth underscores with increasing emphasis that all knowledge of God is exclusively determined by and is dependent upon the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and that this is not simply a matter of our epistemology, but that it is directly related to the nature of God in Jesus Christ who is the dominant and all-controlling central factor in the doctrines of election, creation, and reconciliation. Only in Jesus Christ do we meet the true and decisive revelation of God.

Humour is a serious business. The immediate aim of the comedian may be simply to entertain. But if he is successful in his art, his achievement goes far beyond this limited purpose. As much as the scientist or the novelist, the humorist holds the mirror up to man and reflects, often in sharpest focus, aspects of man's condition in and relationship to the world which otherwise might pass unnoticed. Man, after all, is the only animal which laughs, just as he is the only animal which conducts experiments or tells stories. This simple and undeniable fact surely reveals something about the kind of being man is and the kind of world he inhabits. The world is not only a realm of physical order whose regularity man-the-scientist may observe and chart; nor is it only a great theatre where the drama of human history unfolds in which man-the-actor plays and (modestly) directs his part. The world is also comical, and man-the-humorist perceives and participates in its comic structures.

One of the established conjuring tricks of a discussion of this sort is to flatter your audience by pretending that they fully understand the meaning of your central concepts. This way, you exonerate yourself from explaining them, and perhaps thereby conduct the rest of the inquiry in a dark cloud of unknowing. Therefore, to change the figure, in order not to be pulling mythical rabbits from hitherto concealed hats, I propose to put my rabbits on the table ab initio and to reveal my sleeves as empty of all but my arms, by setting before you in a fit of generosity, if not also of madness, a definition. It is a definition of religious education, one from which I shall endeavour to extract what I have to say on the theme. Here it is:

The 1978 Reith Lectures have already proved themselves to be remarkable. It was remarkable in the first place that a clergyman should have been invited to give the lectures at all (they are published as Christianity and the World Order, by Edward Norman, OUP, 105 pp., £1·50). It was remarkable that, whilst telling his listeners that the West is becoming increasingly secular, Norman should nonetheless have devoted them almost entirely to an internal critique of the churches. And it was remarkable that he should have provoked over twice as much personal correspondence from the public as did John Robinson at the time of Honest to God. In the circumstances it may seem less remarkable that a number of distinguished academics have already brought out a powerful critique of the lectures (published as Christian Faith and Political Hopes: A Reply to E. R. Norman, edited by Haddon Willmer, Epworth, 155 pp., £1·75).