In the course of any discussion it is always important to remember or, if one does not know them, to try to find out the ultimate reasons that determine the particular viewpoints and different outlooks of the interlocutors. As a general rule those reasons do not come to the surface at the level on which the discussion takes place. This is not because they cannot be acknowledged—which might well be the case—but simply because it is seldom that anyone thinks of examining himself to discover the grounds upon which he bases his thought. By a sort of instinctive reaction, one is ‘for’ or ‘against’.

This year's topic for the Dudleian Lecture is designated as ‘Roman Catholicism and Protestantism’, or, in the words of the statutes, this lecture is intended: ‘For the detecting and convicting and exposing the idolatry of the Romish church, their tyranny, usurpations, damnable heresies, fatal errors, abominable superstitions and other crying wickednesses in their high places; and finally, that the Church of Rome is that mystical Babylon, that man of sin, that apostate church, spoken of in the New Testament.’.

‘In our half century’, says Professor Gilbert Ryle, ‘philosophy land theology have not been on speaking terms.’ This is broadly true, and many philosophers and theologians seem to be quite content in the knowledge that their respective spheres are isolated from one another. Others, however, are dissatisfied with the prevailing situation, and feel that contemporary philosophy has much to offer theology by way of technique and procedure, and that philosophers display more bravado than wisdom if they rule that theology and religion are beyond the scope of philosophical investigation, and that religious statements are meaningless. Nowhere is the extent of the gulf between philosophy and theology more noticeable than in the field of morals. For example, one has only to consult the indices and bibliographies of books on Christian Ethics and on Moral Philosophy to see just how little overlapping of sources there is. This gives rises to the question whether there is, or ought to be, any common ground between them. Is it possible that representatives of the two camps could engage in profitable discussion? We shall observe certain hesitations and suspicions which the moral philosopher may entertain concerning Christian Ethics; we shall note what appear to be limitations in each discipline as currently practised; and we shall seek to draw certain conclusions. First, let us try to indicate the scope of Christian Ethics.

The Church is grounded in the Being and Life of God, and rooted in the eternal purpose of the Father to send His Son, Jesus Christ, to be the Head and Saviour of all things. The Church does not exist by and for itself, and therefore cannot be known or interpreted out of itself. Both the source and the goal of the Church are in the eternal love of God which has overflowed in the creation and redemption of the world. God has not willed to live alone, but to create and seek others distinct from Himself upon whom to pour out His Spirit, that He might share with them His divine life and glory, and as Father, Son and Holy Spirit dwell in their midst for ever. God will not be without His Church; the Church is nothing without God. But in God the Church exists as the supreme object of divine grace, and in the Church God is pleased to live His divine life and manifest His divine glory. That is the mystery and destiny of the Church, hidden from the foundation of the world, but revealed and fulfilled in the Incarnation of the Son of God and in His glorious work of redemption, for in Jesus Christ the Church as the redeemed people of God is the crown of creation living in praise and gratitude to the Creator and reflecting with all things, visible and invisible, the glory of the eternal God.

In twenty centuries theological anthropology has hardly seen a more revolutionary method than that proposed by Karl Barth in Church Dogmatics 111.2 of founding anthropology on Christology. At the outset, however, Barth makes clear that ‘there can be no question of a direct equation of human nature as we know it in ourselves with the human nature of Jesus, and therefore of a simple deduction of anthropology from Christology’. That is, Barth intends that the method of theological anthropology avoid monism.

Ours is an age not only of discovery but also of rediscovery. By some process of reincarnation in the history of ideas, eras of the past remembered with reproach have successively come to be regarded as wellsprings offruitful thought. Medieval philosophy, once treated with deprecation as illustrating the enslavement of reason to theology, has acquired respect and been reborn in a vigorous neo-Thomism. Reformation thought, considered hopelessly obscurantist by disciples of Enlightenment, has found rebirth through powerful theological spokesmen and a hearing far beyond the confines of the organised churches. Biblical theology, reinvigorated by nineteenth-century investigation of Scripture and given impetus by Reformation doctrinal motifs, has enjoyed a renaissance in recent decades.

This essay will attempt to make some systematic clarity out of the thought of St. Augustine in reference to his conception of evil. The problem of evil is one which confronted St. Augustine at every point of his intellectual development; it is everywhere either to be openly seen or to be perceived lurking just beneath the surface of the question at issue. This assertion, however, needs some qualification as will become evident as the essay develops. The essay will attempt to show that the problem of evil for St. Augustine resolves itself into the problem of the will. This problem is, for Augustine, clearly at the base of man's moral dilemmas. The question of the will of God is at the root of the theological-philosophical doctrines of creation and natural order. The problem of the will comes to the fore as the metaphysical question par excellence; bound up with the question of the motivation of the will (or more particularly here, the question of the ‘cause’ of the defection of the human will) is the arch-problem of the introduction of a dynamic link into the movement from an unmoved Creator to a changing creation. An attempt will be made to point out the bearing of the more overtly theological questions of grace and predestination upon the questions of the will, evil and creation. Of a piece with these concepts is that of the Augustinian epistemology.

When Hans Küng published his first major work Rechtfertigung—die Lehre Karl Barths und eine katholische Besinnung1 in 1957 great interest was aroused among Roman Catholic as well as Protestant theologians. The book represents a theological orientation which may be regarded as a new phase in the Roman Catholic encounter with Protestantism. Küng, whose orthodoxy has not been questioned by any of his Roman Catholic reviewers, argues that the Barthian and Roman doctrines of justification are in fundamental agreement. The sola fide and the simul Justus et peccator of the Reformation are, according to Küng, also Roman doctrines. Grace, he avers, is not a habitus in man but is the graciousness and favour of God. Justification is therefore primarily a matter of God ‘declaring man righteous’ and only because of this, ‘making him so’. Forgiveness and imputation of righteousness are thus given the primacy denied to them by Roman theology from the Middle Ages to the present day. Küng's Christocentrism determines his interpretation of the biblical witness: the sinner is declared and made righteous in the death and resurrection of Christ so that the sola fide is sustained in and by the sola iustitia Christi. Whether Küng's claim that the Fathers of Trent actually taught the doctrine of justification, merely shifting the emphasis from the one-sided theocentrism of the Reformation to a more biblical anthropocentrism is historically defensible, is not the point at issue in this context.

‘For all his abhorrence of Rome, he was after his manner as good a Churchman as any Pope’. Such, whether it be intended to express approval or the reverse, seems to be a sound judgment on Calvin's churchmanship. To a liberallike Grosclaude, it was indeed his chief fault that he could not rid himself entirely of Roman ideas: that he continued to regard the Church as depository and dispenser of the means of grace, rather than as a free association of like-minded believers. Unity and universality were lost in the general turmoil of the Reformation; but that outcome was the direct opposite of what this allegedly ‘devil-worshipping genius’ had intended; for Calvin stressed, more strongly than any other Reformer, the catholicity of the Una Sancta. And if the ideal of a Free Church in a free state has grown on Calvinist soil, Calvin himself would have repudiated such a deduction from his doctrine of the Crown Rights of the Redeemer. His entire object was to bring human life in its totality under common obedience to God in Christ.

In his introduction to the volume, Letters of Principal James Denney to His Family and Friends, James Moffatt records among a somewhat exiguous collection of Denney's obiter dicta these words: ‘The Church's Confession of faith should be sung, not signed.’ Though Denney was in some ways a champion of orthodoxy, he was also, on occasion, something of a trial to the orthodox; and it may be that there are those who judge that the remark is only what might have been expected of a man whose wife could say to him: ‘James, I think your preaching style has greatly improved since you took to reading those French novels.’ However, it is not my present intention either to defend or to impugn the orthodoxy of Denney's dictum. Since Moffatt has given no indication of the context in which it was uttered, I have taken the liberty of applying it, in the title of this address, to the Old Testament. So to apply it is to echo what the late Dr H. Wheeler Robinson once wrote: ‘the Book of Psalms is not only the living and passionate utterance of Israel's piety at its highest, but also supplies the data for an epitome of Old Testament theology.’ The elaboration of that theme, so far as that may be attempted within the limits imposed by the present occasion, is the task which I have set myself in this Presidential Address.

Anyone who enters the batter's box of contemporary theology carrying a bat labelled ‘apologetics’ finds that he has two strikes against him before he even begins. Gone are the days when Christian apologetics held a prominent position in theological endeavour. Today such issues as the nature and situation of man, Christian ethics, the unity of the church, and the task of missions dominate the centre of the theological stage. Undoubtedly this is as it should be and it is not the purpose of this article to belittle any of these concerns. There are, however, certain observations which do bear mentioning with regard to the importance of apologetics for contemporary theology. To begin with, it should be noted that the primary purpose of all theological endeavour is to come to a better understanding of the Christian message and effectively to relate it to man and his situation. Even the above-mentioned areas of contemporary concern all have as their ultimate aim to witness to the new life in Christ. The significance of this fact is appreciated when one realises that apologetics also has this witness as its ultimate purpose. It is clear that apologetics is not unrelated to the basic theological task of this or any age.

One of the most interesting features of the progress of theology in our day is the fact that some of the best critics of significant Protestant theology are Roman Catholics. This, as is well known, is the case with the work of Karl Barth; and I shall try to show that it is also the case with the work of Paul Tillich. Indeed it needs no effort to show this. Not surprisingly Barth only spares him a reference in a footnote or an occasional sentence. However, for the rest of the Protestant world there has been too much glib quotation and praise of Tillich and too little analysis of his work. Even the volume devoted to him in the Library of Living Theology seems to be woefully inadequate when compared with the meticulous and valuable volumes that make up the series on which it is based, namely the Library of Living Philosophers. Then the Festschrift volume, Religion and Culture, only serves to illustrate my contention, since it is a book occasioned by Tillich rather than one on him. As against the occasional article in Protestant journals there are in Catholic journals nearly a dozen articles on Tillich, all of which are in some way or other critical studies, and more recently we have a monograph on Tillich's Christology by Father Tavard.

Martin Kähler lived at the turn of the century when the impact of the methods of historical criticism was being felt acutely by theologians. What can one say about the authority of the Bible for the believer in the light of critical historiography? What can one say about the relation of history and faith if that faith is living faith which is awakened in response to the testimony of Scripture, especially to the apostolic preaching of the Lord's resurrection? Can one say that there is a ground for such faith in results derived from the picture of the so-called ‘historical Jesus’ in the Gospels? It is in the area of questions like these that Kähler has been acknowledged by Tillich, Barth, and Bultmann as a pioneer. Whereas only a few theologians were directly influenced by Kähler's systematic theological work, many regarded his critical position as a harbinger of the future. Barth pays tribute to Kähler for insisting at a time when it cost something to say so that the real historical Christ is the biblical Christ attested by the New Testament as the risen and exalted One. In the course of our essay we shall have occasion to note the positive affinity which exists between Kähler's position and that of Barth. Cullmann has indicated the significance of Kähler for the rise of Form Criticism with its insistence that the Gospels are by nature the Church's witness to its faith as embodied in its preaching.

‘The doctrinal history of the English Reformation’, writes J. Brilioth, ‘is only of secondary interest; it contains little creative originality, much imitation and compromise. But the problem of the Eucharist took a prominent place from the very start.’ Indeed, he postulates a ‘special Anglican Eucharistic type’, stemming from the Reformation period. It is with the formulation of the doctrine of the Eucharist in the writings of Richard Hooker that this study is concerned. Hooker is regarded as ‘par excellence the apologist of the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 and perhaps the most accomplished advocate that Anglicanism has ever had’. And since it is maintained that ‘the typical Anglican doctrine of the Eucharist was fashioned in the period between Hooker and Waterland’, Hooker's historical importance for the understanding of Anglican Eucharistic teaching is obvious. Not that Hooker's teaching was normative for his successors, for there were deviations both to the ‘left’ and, more notably, to the ‘right’, especially under the Caroline divines. But Hooker's influence was important for the evolution of the ‘central’ churchmanship that was to be most characteristic of the Anglican Church.

William Hamilton has recently called our attention to the significance of the idea of the ‘essence of Christianity’ associated with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ‘… It is not at all clear’, writes Hamilton, ‘that the phrase itself does not still have some real usefulness. It is interesting that in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's final papers we have a projected outline for a little book that was to have been called The Essence of Christianity.’ Our aim in this essay is a reassessment of the significance of Ritschl, Harnack and Troeltsch as these sought to illumine from their own theological perspectives the essence of Christianity. We place Harnack and Troeltsch in the ‘Ritschlian School’ in the sense that both acknowledged Ritschl as their teacher and in spite of divergencies from him in their respective theologies nevertheless continued to note their indebtedness to him. We shall show that the effort to define the essence of Christianity is intimately associated in the work of each of these theologians with the search for right theological method.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that the Old Testament and its cognate literature teach about human suffering something usually neglected by those who study this great problem: that human suffering is almost always connected with the life of a community, and sometimes with the creation of a community, under the hand of God.

The late Dr W. F. Howard once wrote that in Hebrews ‘we find side by side, without any apparent sense of incongruity, the Judaic conception of the two ages, and the Platonic conception of the two worlds, the real and the phenomenal’. Dr C. H. Dodd was of the opinion that the Author of Hebrews was ‘profoundly influenced by Greek thought of a Platonic type’, and Dr Vincent Taylor declared that the aim of the Author of Hebrews was ‘to present the new faith in terms which have been suggested by the Platonic philosophy’. Dr Taylor went on to express the view that the Author of Hebrews ‘may not have read the writings of Plato, but he is certainly influenced by the Platonic principle of the antithesis between the heavenly Idea, which is the real, and the earthly Copy, which is transient and temporal’. The late Bishop Rawlinson described the Author of Hebrews as ‘a Jew, perhaps, of the Alexandrian school, at once Biblical theologian and Platonist’.

More scholarly lances have been broken, with apparently less conclusiveness over Isa. 40–55, the so-called Second Isaiah, than over any comparable section of the Old Testament. Ever since B. Duhm1 published towards the end of last century his epoch-making commentary, two interrelated problems have been at the centre of scholarly discussion.

The New Testament interpretation of the Cross is the starting point for the doctrine of Incarnation and of Atonement. Their relationship is governed by the emergent elements, which are both central and permanent.

At the present time a considerable amount of attention is being paid to the eschatology of St. Luke's Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, largely as a result of the publication in 1954 of Professor Hans Conzelmann's Die Mitte der zeit,1 which has recently been made available in English under the title, The Theology of St. Luke.2 In addition to this work, Professor C. K. Barrett's Luke the Historian in Recent Research3 must now be mentioned.