In 1520 Luther wrote To the Christian Nobility urging 27 proposals for the reformation of the Church. One of these called for the reform of the universities. Taking up the humanist principle of returning to ancient sources, its aim was to encourage the intensive study of Scripture. Four years later Luther developed this proposal when he wrote To the Councillors of all German Towns, That they should Establish and Maintain Christian Schools. Luther started from the rediscovery of the Gospel; his concern was that this precious experience might be lost again, and that the ‘thunderstorm of God's Word’ might move away. Appropriate forms of education therefore needed to be developed both for young people and for the clergy, in order that the rediscovered Gospel might be preserved: ‘Whoever can grip and hold must grip tight and hold fast.’

The Reformed churches have frequently regarded the Reformation in ways that are contradictory but without seeing the contradictions. On the one hand the Reformation is assumed to be the common and binding heritage of Fundamentalists, the various Presbyterian churches throughout the world, the Southern Baptists, the Taizé Community, even the avant garde of the Second Vatican Council and BonhoefFer's ‘Protestants without a Reformation’. ‘Justification by faith’, ‘the priesthood of all believers’, ‘the Bible alone’ and often ‘no Bishops’ are catchwords, said to be common to all, and somehow entailing each other.

The root ts-d-q found in the Old Testament has always presented its interpreters with a challenge. It is the root from which modern versions usually offer us the word ‘righteous’. Actually two problems arise over it, for from this root we have both a verb and a noun. So we must discover in the case of the noun, what the feminine form tsedaqah actually means and how it differs from its masculine counterpart, tsedeq, if at all; and, in the case of the verb, what tsedeq means in the Qal as well as in the Hiphil, as hitsdiq.

This article is concerned with the relation of ‘religion A’ to ‘religion B’ in the thought of Søren Kierkegaard. The point of departure for my study is a disagreement with the views of Walter Lowrie, one of the most prolific translators of SK into English and the author of the extensive and competent biography, Kierkegaard (Princeton, 1938). Lowrie's main discussion of the question at hand occurs in his introduction to the Postscript. If my alternative thesis has any merit, it is indeed unfortunate that English readers are confronted with Lowrie's understanding of the matter before they have had a chance to form a judgment of their own.

In a recent excellent review of Barth's Dogmatik III/2 (Scottish Journal of Theology, March 1949) the Rev. W. A. Whitehouse found himself unable through the exigencies of space to deal, save in the briefest way, with that great section of the book which treats of man in his time. Very rightly he appealed for a speedy translation, for only thus could the scope and richness of the treatment of this theme become apparent to those who do not read German. It is indeed the case that any summary of this section which extends to over two hundred and fifty large pages, and in which the thought moves forward with the most careful precision while continually opening out new perspectives, must appear somewhat jejune and lifeless. In responding therefore to the request of the editors to provide such a summary I find myself confronted with a most difficult task. I can only request readers to read what I have written in conjunction with Mr Whitehouse's article and with that of Professor Souček which follows it. In that way a summary, unsatisfactory as it must be, may not be entirely useless.

In light of current discussions in theological ethics, Karl Barth's ethics can be understood within the dialectical relationship of ‘postmodern’ and ‘realism’. Barth shifts theological ethics beyond anthropocentric Kantian or naturalist inspired ‘modern realism’ on the one hand, and a nihilist or deconstructionist inspired ‘postmodern antirealism’ on the other. Beginning with the centrality of the Word of God, Barth deconstructs modern (anthropocentric) moral realism, while at the same time reestablishing this same moral realism on theological grounds, which ironically moves it beyond the claims of postmodernism itself. What makes Barth's thought post-modern, then, is not his similarity to antirealist and deconstructionist thought, but his departure from its secular and anti-theological assumptions. Barth's ‘postmodern realism’, therefore, not only provides a way for contemporary theological ethics to dialectically be critical and hopeful, deconstructive and constructive, decentering and centering, but does so from the anti-anthropocentric and anti-secular standpoint of the Word of God.

In recent essays Professor John Hick has argued that serious theological consideration of the relationship of Christianity and other world faiths has become in the present generation for the first time unavoidable; that this must lead to a revolution in theological thought so radical that it can be spoken of as ‘Copernican’; and that the consequent reshaping of Christian doctrine, for which he has made a number of suggestions, cannot but change in deeply significant and quite unprecedented ways the traditional teaching of the Church. In this paper I wish to raise some questions about this ‘Copernican Revolution’, the exact nature of which is not made as clear as we might expect, as a theological response to the present situation, asking whether it is helpful in inter-religious dialogue and acceptable as an account of Christianity, of other living faiths, and of the relation between them.

“When I see you setting off down the road on Monday morning,” the village schoolmaster once said to me, “I sometimes wonder if you are regarding human life as radically as you did when you were preaching in the kirk the day before. You seem, somehow, easier-minded about it. You come into the school. What, honestly, do you see there? A fine bunch of children, going on their pleasant way to become decent men and women—or are they really heading for a life which is rooted in the world's evil, a life out of which you'll tell them in a few years they must be saved by the grace of God?

“And then on the Tuesday morning,” he went on, “you're off to the Presbytery. Now, tell me honestly, don't you meet together pretty much as any other body of people would do—to transact your business, to express your opinions, and to come to the judgment which your own experience has led you to hold? And yet your distinctive characteristic is supposed to be that you believe that human experience and human judgment are shot through with a deadly evil. You say that you distrust yourselves, that ‘of yourselves you can do nothing aright”—but I can't say that you look or sound particularly like people who are distrusting themselves. You say in your opening prayer that you want to be over-ruled and corrected—but you'll forgive me for saying that you don't seem very often to go through the process during the meeting that follows.

John Polkinghorne FRS (b.1930), the Cambridge Professor of Mathematical Physics turned Anglican parson enjoys unrivalled opportunities as an apologist for the Christian faith to those with a general scientific education. Without reading a word of his writings, many Christians will be encouraged to know that a distinguished professional scientist is so firmly persuaded of the truth of the Christian faith as to resign a prestigious professional position and embrace the far from prestigious calling of a Christian minister in the secular environment of today. Some who embark on his books may not understand all the scientific allusions, but they will be impressed by his testimony that orthodox Christian belief can exist in harmony with the scientific worldview and vocation.

I fear I may have little new light to throw on this difficult subject; but I love Ignatius, and should like to think that others may be drawn into the same affection. I propose, (I) to consider the meaning of the question; (2) (my main purpose) to say something of the Episcopate in Ignatius; (3) to venture a few remarks on later history.

We confess Holy Baptism as the act of grace of our Lord and Saviour fesus Christ, by which, on the command and promise of His Word, we are sealed in a second birth to eternal life as sons and heirs of His eternal Kingdom and members of His holy Church, in order that by the Holy Spirit, in His Word and faith, we may be daily baptised into His death and raised with Him.

The final phase of jonathan Edwards' work centers around his defense of Calvinism against ‘Arminianism’. Along with certain tendencies in this ‘Arminianism’, which included its undermining of the unconditionality and freedom of the grace of God and its narrowing of the conception of God to those attributes acceptable to current cultural standards, it also held to the view that the human will is not determined by God or nature, or anything prior to its own acts, butis ‘self-determining’, possessing ‘a certain sovereignty over itself and its own acts’, thus determining its own volition. The notion of ‘indifference’, the mind's being ‘in equilibrio’ prior to any ‘act of volition’, was essential to the Arminian conception of liberty, as was ‘contingence’, understood as a lack of connectedness to any prior chain of causation.

Church union schemes have for some years past tended to hinge upon a special service of ‘commissioning’ by which the ministries of various existing denominations should be unified. This pattern of unification, commonly associated with North India, has been attacked on the grounds that it gives ‘an impression of evasion and dishonesty’.1 It is held by many that it encourages some to believe that the commissioning is an ordination, and others to believe that it is not. And while this may be true of some present-day advocates of such schemes, it is not true of their origin. There was a quite clear theological interpretation to services for ‘unifying the ministry’, though in the opinion of this writer a false one. As we shall see, it was held that in a divided church there was no longer one ministry, but a number of parallel ministries, all defective until such time as they should be added together. It is the purpose of this survey to record the rise and fall of that idea amongst Anglicans, who have been particularly prone to it, over the past fifty years.

Anabaptist theologians who vie for the most convincing theory of divine non-violence in the contemporary ‘atonement debate’ quite often fail to appreciate the contributions of medieval scholars such as St Thomas Aquinas. Of course, that failure does have a rationale. Aquinas does, indeed, support various systematic expressions of a satisfaction theory of atonement. In doing so, he insists upon God's violent solution to the problem of sin and also employs language fraught with quid pro quo, mercantile and penal images. Aquinas does attempt to ‘correct’ Anselm and rearticulate the satisfaction theory of atonement; however, his expression of that motif still hinges upon the divine demand for remuneration, balanced accounts or an economic transaction in order to repair the damage done by sin. God's desire for this redemptive reparation results in the necessity of the violent death of an innocent man. Consequently, although Aquinas expresses the notion of necessity differently than Anselm, his theory also necessitates, at best, divine complicity with violence and, at worst, divine insistence on violence. Anabaptist theologians who remain true to the tradition's pacifist roots rightfully cry ‘foul’ in response to Aquinas’ theory. If Jesus of Nazareth fully reveals the character of God as indicated in John 14:7 with the words, ‘if you have seen me, you have seen the Father’, theories of atonement which depict God as condoning or requiring violence do not harmonise with the life and teachings of the man Christians call the Prince of Peace, especially if that violence pertains to the redemption of a loving God's good creation. As a result, those who oppose the implicit divine violence embedded in Aquinas’ satisfaction theory of atonement may opt to disengage with him, to expel him completely from the conversation. Yet I suggest that non-violent atonement theologians pause and rethink their indictment of the angelic doctor. Satisfaction remains the prevalent theme surrounding Aquinas’ atonement motif, but it is not by any means the only image he brings to bear on the topic. In fact, throughout his ruminations on the passion of Christ, St Thomas focuses explicitly on the unfathomable, extravagant and immeasurable divine love as the primary motivation for God's desire and subsequent actions to redeem and restore a sinful humanity. I suggest that, given Aquinas’ emphasis on divine love, Anabaptist theologians may well discover a satisfying interlocutor for further theological conversation which carries significant implications for the life of the church. Indeed, scholastic savants such as Thomas Aquinas still do warrant a place at the communal table.

Generally speaking the Christian catholic tradition has been more uniformly well disposed than protestantism towards the idea of the imitatio Christi. In protestantism there is a perceptible nervousness about using the term at all. This has been particularly the case since the time of Luther. His final antipathy to the ideal became the orthodox protestant tradition on the matter. Luther was critical of the ideal of the imitatio Christi, partly because he was repelled by the excesses of some of the sects where it was being interpreted in a crudely liberal way (e.g. among the Anabaptists) and partly because he became convinced that the ‘imitation’ of Christ conflicted with the essence of the Christian gospel as he had come to interpret it. He found himself unable to reconcile the presuppositions of the practice of the imitation of Christ with his doctrine of justification by faith. The imitation of Christ he believed must inevitably involve a denial of grace and conceal an incipient doctrine of works.

Luther did, however, leave a more positive legacy to Christian thinking about the imitatio Christi. This was his distinction between imitatio and conformitas. Imitatio he disliked because he thought it suggested some human moral endeavour to emulate Christ undertaken apart from the work of the Spirit in grace. He preferred to speak of conformitas to Christ: the Christian life as a process of conformation to Christ through the work of the Creator Spirit.

Though rarely addressed in a direct way, the theology of God's perfection is a central point at issue in contemporary Christian dogmatics. A good many debates of the moment turn on how the perfection of God's life is to be conceived: debates about the relation of the so-called immanent and economic Trinity; about the propriety of explicating the person and work of Christ through the metaphysics of divine and human natures; about the applicability of kenosis to account for the relation of the divine Word to the human career of Jesus; about the constitutive significance of temporality for the being of God; and much else besides. Recent disagreements amongst Barth scholars about the issue of the relation of the doctrine of divine election and the doctrine of the Trinity are in some measure animated by differing conceptions of the perfection of God, and one of the many ways of profiting from Dr Pitstick's book is to read it as, in part at least, an essay in defence of a certain construal of divine perfection. Indeed, one of my hopes for the book is that, once the noise of battle has subsided and the wounded have been dressed and taken to shelter, we may be able to engage peaceably and constructively with some of the material dogmatic issues to which it has drawn our attention. I do not propose to comment in detail on Dr Pitstick's evaluation of Balthasar; any judgements I might reach would be those of a mere amateur, one of those Protestants who in the 1970s discovered in Balthasar something which kept us reading Roman Catholic theology after Lonergan had wearied us and before we had been pointed to the treasures of ressourcement theology. Instead, I want to draw out from the book three doctrinal topics of capital importance: the ‘finished’ character of the redemptive work of Christ on the cross; the relation between theology and economy in the doctrine of the Trinity; and the doctrine of the hypostatic union – in all of which topics, of course, we are pressed to attend to the perfection of God and the acts of God.

My title, which is stolen from a collection of learned German essays edited by Ernst Käsemann (Das Neue Testament als Kanon, 1970), may sound remote from the concerns of the practical ministry. But the academic question here raised has profound implications for all our understanding, proclamation and practice of the gospel. My exposition will fall into three parts. First I shall make clear what, historically, were the theological motives governing the establishment of a fixed canon of New Testament scripture, and I shall discuss the question of how far the aims of the early Church in this matter may be considered, in the light of modern critical scholarship, to have been achieved. Next I shall show that today also we are faced by problems similar to those which the principle of a New Testament canon was designed to meet, and I shall try to indicate what part the canonical New Testament may still play in helping us to meet them. Thirdly, I shall draw some consequences for worship, preaching, evangelism, ecumenism, and ethics from the principle of a New Testament canon and from the actual content of the canonical New Testament. In conclusion, I shall briefly consider the place of the canonical New Testament in the problem posed by the particularity of Christianity's historical origins and the universality of its claims. Space will obviously forbid anything more than the giving of hints on all these questions.