Gazing about himself at the theological landscape in 1967, Gordon Kaufman observed,

… the historical situation has changed and with it the theological task. The great critical questions posed by liberalism and humanism …—questions which could be more or less ignored or overlooked during the crises of recent decades — have come into view once again and are demanding attention. Most notable of all in this respect is the central conception on which the whole theological program rests, the problem of ‘God’, What do we mean by ‘God’? Is this notion intelligible at all to ‘modern man’ or does it depend on outgrown mythological patterns of thought?

Kaufman was not alone in the 1960's in sensing a change in the theological situation. Schubert Ogden saw it as symptomatic of an overall, cultural change. Langdon Gilkey pointed to the rise of the radical ‘God is dead’ theologies as indicative of the truly new element in the present situation: ‘This upheaval, this radical questioning of the foundations of religious affirmation and so of the theological language reflective of it, is now taking place within and not outside of the Church.’ In other words, the meaningfulness of religious language, so long taken for granted while neo-orthodoxy held sway, was now problematic, not just outside the Church, but within as well.

In their common acceptance of the immediacy of God and of the dependence of all things upon God, in their common belief in grace and the supernatural, the importance of God's free choice and initiative, and the value of prayer, and in their shared insistence on the immediacy with which the Father can be addressed, the immediacy of the presence of the Risen Lord, and the immediacy of the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit, Roman Catholics and Evangelicals (by which I mean those in the tradition of Luther and Calvin) are in perfect accord; and, as they begin to understand each other's positions better, when this accord is combined with their belief in the importance of assent to God's revelation, to his word as given, in the supremacy of this revelation and its authority as truth from God, the community between them is striking.

‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God the Father and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all.’ This is an ancient form of benediction very generally used in the Christian church. I should like to take it up here, asking what is meant by ‘the fellowship of the Holy Spirit’? Does the divine Spirit enter into community with us human beings? Does he admit us into his ‘community’ with the Father and the Son? Why does the benediction not talk about divine sovereignty and absolute human dependence in connection with the Holy Spirit? Why does it so emphatically use the word ‘fellowship’ instead?

‘Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?’ This was the question (according to Mt. 11.2ff., Lk. 7.18ff.) with which John the Baptist sent his disciples to Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus replied by pointing to his works among those who embodied the defectiveness of creation, the blind, lame, lepers, the deaf, the poor and even the dead: all those who need the gospel. These are, as Matthew points out, the ‘deeds of the Christ’, messianic signs. Whether John's disciples have received a sufficient answer to their question, is left open by Jesus. But he does bless those who take no offence at what he, Jesus, is and does: salvation is experienced by everyone who ‘hears and sees’ that salvation is here revealed.

The story of the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida forms a pair with that of the deaf man recorded slightly earlier in the Markan narrative (Mark 7.31–37). In both cases the healings appear to have been accomplished only with difficulty and again in both cases physical means were used in the cure. Further, both stories were closely linked to miracles of feeding. This paper, however, does not address itself, in the first place, to the theological interpretation of the story, but sets out to consider the meaning of the odd response of the blind man to his first glimmerings of sight in the context of the healing as a whole.

This paper is an attempt to follow up and expand on the following statement which I made in an earlier paper published in SJT:The Christian doctrine of original sin has no place within a rabbinic system which avoids the crucial difficulty in Christian theodicy — that of the creation of evil ex nihilo at the time of the Fall.

In developing this statement I would like to sound a warning note to NT and patristic scholars who utilise rabbinic sources as background material for the study of early Christianity. It is often assumed that rabbinic texts, along with the literary remains of the other sorts of Judaism in existence in the first century A.D., can be used as a mine of material for illustrating the sort of beliefs with which the early Christians started out and against which they subsequently reacted. Thus, for example, to approach closer to the title of this paper, in considering the famous Pauline passage on the Fall (Rom. 5.12–21), it is customary for NT scholars to marshall all the evidence from the OT, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and rabbinic Judaism to try and explain the origin of the Christian doctrine of the Fall and Original Sin. But all too often the rabbinic evidence is used rather indiscriminately without regard to the date of its origin or to the possibility that rabbinic views on these matters may have changed in the course of the centuries during which the Talmudic literature was evolving.

‘Teaching about Jesus' sonship is not a characteristic or important aspect of Luke's writing’, claims J. D. G. Dunn.1 Indeed the arguments he adduces to support this statement may have some validity. But nevertheless this paper will propose that the concept of Jesus as son may well be the characteristic and most important aspect of Luke's writing. It is vital to state at the outset then that we do not propose to argue with Dunn on his own terms; this study will rather be devoted to consideration of the Lukan concept of sonship from the rather different approach of his narrative technique.

In Western culture, religion and the sciences often have found themselves to be more and more at odds since the period of the Enlightenment. The change which that era brought to the Christian community could be illustrated as follows. The analogy is perhaps a bit overdrawn, but it does indicate how important the historical shifts were. During the earliest phase of Christian belief, Christianity had to compete with other religions as one fruit-bearing tree within a varied orchard. When the Christian religion became established and dominant in the Middle Ages it tended to cause other trees to wither and die because of its enormous and on occasion darkening size. During the Reformation a radical pruning took place which gave life not only to the Protestant branch but also a new vitality to the Roman Catholic branch. What the Enlightenment represented was the first pervasive suggestion that most fruit trees — perhaps even the orchard — were unnecessary. One could find individual precursors of such attempts as well as a number of people during the Enlightenment who found various religions satisfying. But at no time in the history of Christianity had a large segment of the intellectual culture been so fascinated with the idea that religion in most all of its forms might be useless.

William Robertson Smith and the heresy trial that secured his place in history apparently have lost none of their many-sided interest or dramatic appeal. It might even be argued that Smith today is as famous — or infamous — as he ever was. The most recent fulllength survey of the Church in nineteenth-century Scotland, for instance, devotes nearly forty pages to a blow by blow account and evaluation of the Smith case, and Professor A. C. Cheyne, in his excellent study of Victorian Scotland's religious revolution, contends that Smith is ‘a man with very strong claims to be regarded as his country's most influential modern churchman — claims only contestable, it may be supposed, by Thomas Chalmers or David Livingstone’.

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.’

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.

Controversy forced Luther into a confessional position which history has hardened almost into a kind of denominationalism. The subsequent rise of the ‘Lutheran’ Church, and of ‘Lutheran’ theology, owing to Luther's excommunication and his exclusion from the Roman Catholic Church, have contributed to a general acceptance of this evaluation. Save for a few distinguished Roman Catholic and Protestant scholars, who have worked on the sources and allow Luther to speak for himself, most historians, and certainly the general reader, work on the assumption that Luther is such a ‘confessional’ figure. To find a truer understanding of Luther, of what he was concerned to say to the Church of his day, it is necessary to detach him from this confessional, denominational location by setting him in the Catholic environment in which he was born, in which he was educated, and to which he felt called by God to speak the Word of God. He should be seen as a reformer of a Catholicism which had largely become de-spiritualised and secularised. He offered a reformatio of that which had suffered a de-formatio, and did so for the sake of God, propter deum, as he put it. He sought only to reform a Catholicism which he loved, and to reform it, not as he thought fit, but according to the intent of Jesus Christ and his Apostles, and that on the lines of solid biblical scholarship, authentic tradition and fair argument.

It is well-known that Karl Barth, in his ringing denunciation of Protestant theology as it had developed in the nineteenth century and into the first decades of the twentieth century, gave especial emphasis to the figure of Fried rich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher. Barth considered Schleiermacher to be the greatest theologian of the liberal Protestant tradition as well as its fountainhead. He expressly and repeatedly repudiated Schleiermacher's theology, and his criticism was often stinging. On one occasion, for instance, Barth denied that his own theological ‘ancestral line’ could include Schleiermacher, because he could only judge that Schleiermacher had never learned the basic point that ‘one can not speak of God simply by speaking of man in a loud voice’.

‘We have thus arrived at the answer to our question, What is Darwinism?’ wrote Charles Hodge in 1874;‘It is Atheism.’ As is commonly the fate of great men, Hodge's conclusion has frequently been reduced to mere crusade slogan, more often reported than examined, more often repeated than explained. It is for this reason, then, together with Hodge's formative role in the construction of modern conservative evangelicalism, that I want to turn in the first part of this esssay to his response to Darwin's theory of evolution. Moreover, with the recent emergence of a vociferous and uncompromising ‘scientific creationist’ movement claiming the imprimatur of theological orthodoxy, a reassessment of the reaction to Darwin by the powerful ‘Old School’ Princetonians in its broader intellectual context is, I think, both timely and instructive. And Hodge's central position in that tradition makes reflection on his response to the question a logical place to begin.

The leaders of the Protestant Reformation not only intended a revival of personal piety; they aimed as well to reshape the corporate forms of religion. They did not convert individuals to the Protestant faith only to abandon them to a state of religious detachment. Rather, the Protestant Reformers labored to rebuild the church and felt themselves called to be agents of its restoration. They steadfastly believed that the Holy Catholic Church had been instituted by God for the nurture and fellowship of souls and that outside of this body there exists ‘no ordinary possibility of salvation’. Accordingly, the founders of Protestantism laid great emphasis upon the nature and function of the church. Ecclesiology was a notable and principal part of their theology.

The centenary of the death of the Russian writer F. M. Dostoevsky (1821–81) is not merely an anniversary like any other, but a landmark in human history which deserves to be noted, observed and reflected upon. It is not just by chance that his novels and stories are still being read appreciatively, particularly by non-Russian speakers who have no background in Russian culture. Furthermore, it is not simply a desire to penetrate the secrets of the Russian heart, the peculiarities of the Russian character or the Russian style of life that creates their interest in his writings. Dostoevsky did of course reflect his own age and describe the situation in the Russia of his time, and it is valuable to study this aspect of his work. But it is not the whole. From the depth of his sensitive heart and with his prophetic finger this writer touched on something not exclusively Russian, but universal, global, even cosmic. He introduced philosophy and theology into a story in such a way that even a hundred years later everyone can find something familiar and personal in it, irrespective of his culture and language. He unearthed seeds which bore shoots many years later. He reflected in a Christian way on the crops and the future of what had been sown, and traced the mechanism of the historical process, not merely from the political and socio-economic point of view, but in human terms. This is probably the most significant feature of Dostoevsky's work.

Edward Schillebeeckx in The Understanding of Faith (1974, 154) defined or described theology as ‘the critical self-consciousness of Christian praxis in the world and the church’. Others may prefer another definition, but it can be agreed that Christian theology is not revelation and it is not church doctrine; both of these while inevitably formulated within time yet lay claim to, and acquire, a certain degree of timelessness which is neither possible nor desirable for ‘theology’. Theology rather requires a continuous contemporaneity. It is a ‘critical self consciousness’ — an extended intelligent response of men of faith both to the word of God and to their own world. At times it may appear to concentrate more upon that word, as found in the Scriptures, while interpreting and applying it aptly and acutely in the light of contemporary culture; at other times theology will appear to concentrate more upon the contemporary world, or upon some part of it decisively significant for this theologian or the group of christians of which he or she forms part, interpreting it and judging it in the light of scripture. Behind appearances theology, to be true to itself, has always to do both.

The institution of the office of elder in the Reformed Church in the sixteenth century was an innovation in the traditional structure of the western Catholic Church and the canonical pattern of its ministry. There were precedents for something like this in the Waldensian and Bohemian (later Moravian) Communities in the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, and there still are features corresponding to it in the leadership of congregational life in Greek Orthodox Churches arising out of the overlap between the worshipping congregation and the cultural community. In the Reformed Church itself the eldership came to be more closely associated with the ministry of Word and Sacrament which has had the effect of linking together ‘clerical’ and ‘lay’ service within the corporate priesthood of the Church and in the operation of its ‘sacral courts’ at synodal, presbyteral and consistorial levels. The eldership has certainly been a source of inner cohesion and stability in the life of Reformed Churches, leaving upon them characteristics of particular significance in the ecumenical fellowship of Churches.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the Kantian element in the theological method of Karl Barth and, more particularly, to show that this element, which is openly displayed in the Epistle to the Romans, did not disappear after the turn in his thought occasioned by his encounter with Anselm, but was carried over into the Church Dogmatics and forms an indispensable clue to the interpretation of the doctrine of reconciliation, which marks its climax.

Few people in our time have been more deeply concerned with thinking into each other again the inner substance of the evangelical and catholic emphases in the Church of Jesus Christ, than Oscar Cullmann. This has been especially evident in the way in which he has consistently sought to penetrate into the essential harmony of the Gospel that not only underlies the whole history of the Church but underpins the divisions between the Evangelical Churches and the Roman Catholic Church, bringing his unusually fresh understanding of the NT and the Early Church to bear constructively upon the areas of discord and friction, not least in respect of the concept of the Papacy. His many writings reveal unparalleled sensitivity and appreciation for the centrality of the biblical message, the sanctity of tradition and the continuity of worship in the redeemed life of the people of God, which have allowed him to bring together, without compromise, the concentration upon the core of the Gospel which has characterised the Evangelical Churches and the universal task and unifying order which have characterised the Catholic Churches.