Concerning the Ministry

Extract

The Ministry of the Church is a reprint of the reviews of the muchdiscussed volume, The Apostolic Ministry, which have appeared in The Record, to which has been added a preliminary chapter by Bishop Stephen Neill. For its scope and size it is about as good as anything could be; and it is highly satisfactory to find that progressive Evangelicals within the Church of England are rousing themselves to vigorous and effective warfare against a theory of the Church and ministry whose doctrinal implications strike at the very heart of their Evangelicalism. Something like a note of “righteous wrath” can be heard from time to time in these articles, and inasmuch as this note is sounded in the tones of first-rate scholarship, it is very welcome. The task of the writers was indeed a formidable one. They had to deal with a volume vast in bulk, heavily weighted with erudition, and abounding in historical constructions and generalisations of a very far-reaching kind. The number of effective criticisms which they have been able to make within so small a compass is really astonishing.

In the main, they have concerned themselves with three lines of attack. They have set themselves to show first of all how slender are the assured historical data from which so vast a web of theory has been spun.