Did Justin Martyr really have a conversation with Trypho the Jew as he states that he did in his Dialogue with Trypho? And even if he did not, does this text, indirectly at least, give evidence of genuine contact between Christians and Jews? When Tertullian in his Adversus Judaeos reviled Jews for their failure to understand the scriptures in the way he did, was he in fact reviling Jews known to him who actually disagreed with him? Or put another way, do the accusations he makes against Jews give evidence of an ongoing debate with that ancient community?

The first Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology was H. G. Wood. The subject of his Inaugural Lecture given in 1940 was The function of a Department of Theology in a modern University. Appropriately enough he took up the views of John Henry, Cardinal Newman, the one Birmingham theologian whose work is on the way to becoming classic. In the present climate, Newman's book The Idea of a University is worth looking at again. As he showed over a hundred years ago, purely utilitarian values cannot produce good education. Nor can a general acquaintance with a bit of everything. Specialisation and in-depth study is the only way to learn how to think rather than pick up information jackdaw-like. Scholarly grappling with the great minds of the past, the so-called ‘irrelevant’ and ‘ivory-tower’ occupation of those who inhabit an Arts Faculty, is essential for the formation of minds. ‘To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression’ – this Newman regarded as ‘an object as intelligible as the cultivation of virtue’.1 Society needs minds and not just technicians, and in an institution which is concerned with truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, theology is indispensable to the universality which a University should embrace.

The contentions of this essay are three. Our first thesis is that both contemporary philosophical and theological thought stand at an impasse. In philosophy the empiricists emphasise the significance of factual meaning to the exclusion of valuational meaning, while the existentialists stress the importance of valuational meaning to the exclusion of the factual. In theology the conservatives and liberals are united in stressing the historical (Historie) significance of Jesus so as almost to ignore his existential (Geschichte) significance, while the Bultmannians focus on the existential significance of Jesus and minimise the need for factual knowledge.

One reason why the legitimacy of theology as an academic discipline is disputed, is the claim that theology presupposes faith. Such a presupposition, it is said, constitutes a danger for the academic nature of theology and, indirectly, its place in the university; in an academic discipline a scholar cannot proceed from a specific consideration which can not be discussed and which one can not give up without placing oneself outside that discipline, i.e., Christian theology. Therefore, while Christian theology is a valid intellectual pursuit for Christians who reflect on the content of their faith, it does not fall within the contours of an academic discipline which is universally accessible. Such is the rationale, and it involves not only Christian but Jewish and Islamic theology as well and in general all reflection on religion and philosophy of life which is undertaken in particular circles and which proceeds from unverifiable assumptions which lack universal endorsement. In this article we are concerned with the objection that theology is not properly academic (‘wissenschaftlich’) because of its unverifiable presupposition that God exists and its being connected to a particular religious community. Theology presupposes faith, it is said, and the point of dispute is whether any academic discipline may have such a presupposition. Three different things may be implied by this objection.

Much research in biblical studies today concerns itself with hermeneutics, in which biblical scholars attempt to establish principles of interpretation which will do justice to the meaning of the Bible. The need for hermeneutics is apparent for the understanding of any literature and especially of the Scripture since an understanding of the Bible involves the interpreter's subjective element of faith. The Bible in contrast to much literature asks the reader for his interest, his faith, and his commitment to God. Consequently subjective notions and arbitrary fancies frequently play a part in determining what the interpretation should be. Before the reader has been properly disciplined in understanding the language of other peoples living in ancient times, he has set up his own rules of interpretation which satisfy his own predilections but hardly the message of the inspired writer.

The criticism that the Uppsala Assembly of the World Council of Churches did not give sufficient attention to theology is justified. But this fact should be set within the perspective of the deep crisis which the theological world as a whole faces today, and which constitutes the contemporary theological situation. What are some of the factors which have contributed to this situation? One may mention three of them.

A study of the origins, acts and efficacy, aims and ends of worship according to Friedrich Schleiermacher. Worship originates in inexpressible feeling, is ‘incarnate’ within a particular community, and functions dialectically. Worship consists of singing, preaching, prayer, baptism, the Lord's Supper and the ‘Power of the Keys’ (forgiveness). The efficacy of these acts derives from the mission and ministry of Christ, supported by the power of the Holy Spirit, and made effective through human action, insofar as it is conformed to the divine governance of the world. The chief aim of worship is to communicate the ‘religious moments in life’. Viewed negatively, worship can have no real or intended impact on God. Viewed positively, worship ends in the perfection of the common consciousness of the church. At its best, worship assists the human community in its proper development by ‘tuning us in’ to those feelings and dispositions that will best help us to act in accord with God's design. When this is true, worship can be said to truly continue and reflect the mission and ministry of Christ.

This article was sparked off by reading Gerald O'Collins' admirable book Interpreting Jesus (Chapman, London 1983), in which he sets out for the benefit of Roman Catholics an account of Jesus which should both measure up to what traditional christology says about him and take account of modern biblical criticism. Towards the end, following the lead of Karl Rahner, he opts for a doctrine of two consciousnesses in the incarnate Word, a divine and a human: ‘his real human consciousness (which he had individually as a man) was neither replaced nor interfered with by his divine consciousness (which as Logos he shared/shares with the Father). Since consciousness is on the side of nature and not of person, Chalcedon's doctrine supports this kind of distinction between Christ's human and divine consciousness’ (p. 190). A little later on the same page he adds: ‘through the incarnation the eternal Son became humanly conscious of himself in his relationship to his Father. He now perceived his divine “I” or self in a human way. Thus in this unique case a human consciousness was able to “seize” a divine Self, albeit in a human way.’

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's liberal use of spatial concepts in constructing an ecclesiology served his theological purpose in the articulation of a concrete ecclesiology. In particular, Bonhoeffer uses the themes of taking-up-space and the visibility of the church. The visibility of the church is depicted as a proclamatory space, a liturgical space and an ordered space, all encapsulated in the concept of Lebensraum. Within this space, witness is given to the foundation of all reality in Jesus Christ. The church is the place where this reality is proclaimed; a space no bigger than that required to serve the world in witness to Christ. As opposed to any idea of a ‘privatised’ or individual space, Bonhoeffer insisted on the public and territorial nature of this space as essential to the church's witness, for it was in this very visibility that the church gains space for Christ.

Lebensraum, an idea popularised by Adolf Hitler and incorporated into the foreign policy of the Third Reich, was a highly charged political concept taken over by Bonhoeffer to represent a living space diametrically opposed in form to that proposed by the Reich. A useful way of thinking about the Christian form of Lebensraum as proposed by Bonhoeffer is to regard it as the space in which the ‘social acts that constitute the community of love and that disclose in more detail the structure and nature of the Christian church’1 are to be demonstrated and observed. These ‘social acts’ are built upon the foundational concepts, first found in Sanctorum Communio, of Stellvertretung or vicarious representative action, Miteinander or church members being with-each-other, and Füreinander or church members actively being for-each-other. Bonhoeffer proposes that, as its life is lived out in this way, the church will take the form of its suffering servant Lord. It is in this particular space and no other, grounded and upright in Christ, that Christians are to live their lives in witness to Christ.

The sole influential Scottish lay theologian, Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, was born in Edinburgh on 13th October 1788, the fourth son of David Erskine, a W.S. of distinguished ancestry, a member of the Church of Scotland who bought the estate of Linlathen near Dundee but who died in 1791. So Thomas spent much of his boyhood at Airth Castle in a quiet privileged atmosphere under the devoted care of his maternal grandmother, Mrs Graham. She was a devout Episcopalian whose influence mellowed his Presbyterian inheritance so that he came to favour episcopal forms. Though holding a deep religious faith, he never became a communicant member of any Church, though he attended Episcopal, Presbyterian and Congregational services.

Here is the eleventh Kapitel of Barth' Dogmatik, and the entitles it The Creator and His creation. Its three great themes are: God's Fatherly Providence, the “Negation” (Chaos or Void) of which He rules and against whose opposition He safeguards His creatures, and the ministry of angels. Before he passes on from the first to the second article of the creed, Barth promises a further Kapitel dealing with the ethical doctrine which rests on our understanding of God as Creator. The doctrine which he has to expound and establish in this sector of the theological field is at once the most familiar and the least secure element in the Christian outlook of modern men. We all know the kind of thing we are expected to say about God's Fatherly care. Professor Farmer's book, The World and God, gave substantial help towards saying it in the modern climate of thought. But there are plenty of signs that Christians tremble in face of the obligation to relate the vast and complex range of experience to the action of God. It becomes increasingly difficult to speak as though the wealth and variety of cosmic reality can be intelligibly related to the God who reveals Himself in Jesus Christ and to the action which He takes at that focal point. And what one expected from Barth was a rethinking of the doctrine of Providence on a Christological basis. What he has to say is not excitingly novel.

Liberal theology since Harnack has failed to make much sense of the patristic axiom, ‘Not assumed is not healed’. Harnack is severe: ‘The mystical doctrine of salvation and its new formulas had not only no Scriptural authority in their favour, but conflicted also with the evangelical idea of Jesus Christ.’ More recently Maurice Wiles questioned the cogency of the axiom, negatively on the grounds of difficulties in the idea of ‘divinisation’ and of the corporate nature of salvation, but positively on the grounds of a quite different understanding of what salvation means. ‘If salvation be thought of in personal terms’, he argues, ‘then its effective outworking is through the experience of divine grace in the human soul. Whatever media may be involved, the locus of salvation is the sphere of ordinary personal existence in which God establishes fellowship with man.’

The King James Bible was widely celebrated in 2011 for its literary, religious and cultural significance over the past 400 years, yet its staunch critics are important to note as well. This article draws attention to Catholic critics of the King James Bible (KJB) during its first 300 years in print. By far the most systematic and long-lived Catholic attack on the KJB is found in the argument and afterlife of a curious counter-Reformation text, Thomas Ward's Errata of the Protestant Bible. This book is not completely unknown, yet many scholars have been puzzled over exactly what to make of it and all its successor editions in the nineteenth century – at least a dozen, often in connection with an edition of the Catholic Douai-Rheims Bible (DRB). Ward's Errata, first published in 1688, was based on a 1582 book by Catholic translator and biblical scholar Gregory Martin. The book and its accompanying argument, that all Protestant English Bibles were ‘heretical’ translations, then experienced a prosperous career in nineteenth-century Ireland, employed to battle the British and Foreign Bible Society's campaign to disseminate the Protestant King James Bible as widely as possible. On the American career of the Counter-Reformation text, the article discusses early editions in Philadelphia, when the school Bible question entered the American scene. In the mid-nineteenth century, led by Bishop John Purcell in Cincinnati, Bishop Francis Patrick Kenrick in Philadelphia and Bishop John Hughes in New York City, many Catholics began opposing the use of the KJB as a school textbook and demanding use of the Douai Rheims Bible instead. With reference to Ward's Errata, they argued that the KJB was a sectarian version, reflecting Protestant theology at the expense of Catholic teachings. These protests culminated in the then world-famous Bible-burning trial of Russian Redemptorist priest, Fr Vladimir Pecherin in Dublin, in late 1855. The Catholic criticisms of the KJB contained in Ward's Errata, which was reprinted for the last time in 1903, reminded the English-speaking public that this famous and influential Protestant version was not the most perfect of versions, and that it was not and never had been THE BIBLE for everyone.

Many readers will have access to J. Armitage Robinson's valuable note on the meaning of pleroma in his Ephesians (Macmillan, 1903), containing not only some important illustrative quotations from secular writers and from the Old Testament, but also a famous critique of the findings of previous scholars, in particular of J. B. Lightfoot.1 The present article is an attempt to consider once more, but only in outline, the meaning of the root pler-(“fill”, “fulness”, etc.), and to show, in rather more detail, its bearing on the theology of the New Testament.