Study of St. Paul among reforming theologians raised high shopes for definitive dogmatic decrees of an ecumenical council which would incorporate the new biblical insights. Cardinal Pole addressed an irenic plea to members of the Council, that they must begin the reform with themselves. One can read into Pole's philippic all the dreams of the Cardinal reformers, marshalled again after the bitter frustrations of 1541 and 1546 at Ratisbon. Pole's homily helps to penetrate the climate of opinion on the eve of the oft-postponed reforming council. There is still only a partial and imperfect understanding of Pole's role at Trent.

The mainspring of Bonhoeffer's theology is his vision of Christ and the resulting Christology. The Cost of Discipleshipseems to me to suffer from a defective Christology. The purpose of this article is to provide evidence for this contention.

In July 1930 Bonhoeffer wrote in the preface to the published version of his doctoral dissertation: ‘The more theologians have considered the significance of the sociological category for theology, the more clearly the social intention of all the basic Christian concepts has emerged. Ideas such as “person”, “primal state”, “sin” and “revelation” are fully understandable only in relation to sociality.’ Two recently published works, a translation of Bonhoeffer's 1933 Christology lectures and John A. Phillips' study of Bonhoeffer's theology, give occasion for examining the meaning of this statement and its importance in understanding Bonhoeffer's thought.

Six centuries ago, in 1368, a man who had been dead only nine years was canonised by the orthodox church and raised to the dignity of Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, and of Cyril as a defender of orthodoxy. The sexcentenary of his death, 1959, saw the publication of three volumes—the first being one of the ‘Mâitres Spirituels’ series, the second an introduction to the study of St. Gregory, and the third and most important a critical edition of St. Gregory's major work: Treatise in defence of the Holy Solitaries. All three were the work of Jean Meyendorf who can rightly claim to have been the first scholar to have offered a full-dress sympathetic study to the west of a neglected and much misunderstood theologian. Unfortunately Meyendorf's work is spoilt by his inability to understand the reformed tradition. Nevertheless he has countered or at least challenged a settled assumption of western theology that the great christological debates saw the end of any lively thinking and dogmatic development in the Eastern Church. Harnack in his History of Dogma Vol. IV was only repeating what was already a long received opinion when he said that from the codification of dogma by John of Damascus those dogmas ‘had become a sacred inheritance from the classic antiquity of the Church but they had as it were fallen to the ground. The worship of images, mysticism and scholasticism ruled the Church’ (p. 352).But even Harnack gives at least a passing nod to St. Gregory when he admits that ‘no doubt another rather important dispute agitated the Church in the fourteenth century–the Hesychastic controversy–but’, he adds, ‘dogma, and to some extent the Church, remained ultimately unaffected’ (p.353).

In recent discussions philosophers have come to some measure JLof agreement as to what they mean by ‘punishment’, although they admit that there can be no sharp line delimiting the use of the term.1 A standard case of punishment (I) must involve the suffering of some unpleasantness by its victim, (2) must be for an offence against rules either legal or moral, (3) must be of a supposed or an actual offender, (4) must be administered by personal beings other than the offender, and (5) must be imposed by the authority upholding the system of rules against which the offence has been committed. We note from this account that punishment so defined necessarily involves suffering. For this reason punishment requires to be justified, for the deliberate infliction of pain is something that Christians would normally refuse to do to others, and something which may be regarded as unjust to its victim, if St. Paul's statement is universally true, ‘I can will what is right, but I cannot do it’ (Rom. 7.18). There may be other ways of dealing with wrongdoers like the Russian correctional colonies intended to provide a largely painless curative treatment for criminals or the approved schools without any corporal punishment desired by a recent Home Secretary, but unless some suffering is involved these are not methods of punishment.

In his great book The Idea of the Holy, R. Otto analysed what he regarded as the ‘a priori’ category of holiness. Holiness properly belongs, he argues, to the sphere of religion. The word ‘is, indeed, applied by transference to another sphere—that of ethics—but it is not itself derived from this … if the ethical element was present at all at any rate it was not original and never constituted the whole meaning of the word’. As Israelite religion develops, the ethical element gains prominence ‘The venerable religion of Moses marks the beginning of a process which from that point onwards proceeds with ever-increasing momentum, by which the numinous is throughout rationalised and moralised, i.e. charged with ethical import, until it becomes the “holy” in the fullest sense of the word. The culmination of the process is found in the Prophets and in the Gospels.’