Those who oppose the use of the biblical account of creation in classes in science often do so in the spirit with which the great formalist, Hilbert, sundered pure and applied mathematics. One day he was asked to substitute in a class at a nearby technical school for his colleague, Felix Klein, where Klein used his intuitive approach to mathematics to obtain practical applications. Hilbert said to the engineers, ‘I understand that there are those.who feel there is some conflict between pure and applied mathematics. But this cannot be. Sie haben nichts mit einander zu tun.’

In November 1981 I was asked to speak as a historian to the Karl- Heim-Gesellschaft in Schloss Craheim in Germany on ‘The Resurrection of Jesus Christ’, and specifically to consider the question of the Resurrection both as an act of salvation and as a matter which admits of historical research. This request placed me in a dilemma as I was faced with the task of making not only historical but also theological statements based on the Easter texts in the Synoptic Gospels. The occasion seemed to me, however, to be a suitable opportunity to say something about the types of historical questioning and about the customary methods used in our branch of scholarship, and thereby to show the difficulties in applying such questionings and methods to texts which as ‘Word of God’ proclaim acts of salvation. The following paper is therefore concerned with the legitimate aims and limits of historical research, and is also designed to show the application of historical method to the Scriptures. The paper is substantially that which was delivered to the Karl-Heim-Gesellschaft, and may serve as a reminder that, when theologians claim to speak as historians, they cannot ignore the customary methods used in historical scholarship. The procedure is briefly this.

In determining the meaning of the expression ‘the substance of the Faith’, it seems right to go back to the act of the Scottish Parliament in 1690 which ratified the Westminster Confession of Faith ‘as the publick and avowed Confession of this Church, containing the summe and substance of the doctrine of the Reformed Churches.’ There the WCF was regarded as containing the sum and substance of some thirty Reformed Confessions, including the Scots Confession, the First and Second Helvetic Confessions. These confessions expressly acknowledged the ancient Catholic Creeds and Conciliar Statements of the Church, the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Formulations of Ephesus and Chalcedon, and the so-called ‘Athanasian Creed’, and embodied all their main statements as essential articles of belief. This was true of the WCF which, as James Denney once pointed out, ‘contains everything that is in the Nicene Creed’ (Jesus and the Gospel, p. 39If). That is to say, there was no move away from what the Athanasian Creed and the Second Helvetic Confession called ‘the Catholic Faith’, although the basic articles of faith handed down through the Creeds were set within a confessional frame of distinctively Reformed character. It was inevitable, therefore, that a distinction was made between what Samuel Rutherford called (Due Right Presbyteries, p. 13) ‘a confession dejure, what everyman ought to believe, as the Nicene Creed, and the Creed of Athanasius’, and a wider summation of teaching common to ‘true Reformed Protestant religion’.

In a recent article in this journal, Professor Wiebe has attempted to discard the traditional thesis about the relationship between faith and reason in Kant's critical philosophy and substitute a decidedly novel and superficially attractive interpretation. While traditional readings of Kant's theology have taken his denial of knowledge in order to make room for faith at more or less face value and have thus attributed to him a rather different sort of theology, Professor Wiebe rejects this polarity of knowledge and faith. Kant's faith, according to Wiebe, is a ‘cognitive faith — a source of belief that can quite legitimately, even if only in a weak sense, be referred to as religious knowledge’. This claim in turn rests upon the assertion that the traditional distinction between belief and knowledge is untenable, that ‘… “knowledge” and “justified belief” are indistinguishable’. Wiebe would thus recast Kant's claim of denying knowledge to make room for faith to denying theoretical knowledge to make room for practical knowledge. Kantian faith then, ‘is not outside the realm of reason, but is rather one aspect of reason, as is knowledge’. It is in this sense that there is ‘a basic continuity in Kant's thoughts on religion with the theologies of the past’

In Otto's mature philosophy of religion, as presented in Das Heilige, religions are viewed as consisting of both rational and non-rational elements. While religions have to do with theoretical and moral ideas, they are nonetheless not finally dependent on these. Rather, these rational components are ultimately referable to an object or ‘subject’ that can only be apprehended in a non-rational ‘unique original feeling-response’ that is the innermost core of all religions. The analysis of this non-rational numinous core of religion, and of its connection to religion's rational factors, is the overall aim of Das Heilige, indeed of Otto's work as a whole.

Isaac B. Singer's great short story ‘Gimpel the Fool’ is a tale of redemption. It embodies in its delightfully exaggerated characters a central notion of process thought — that a human person is a coming together of his/her past in a way that is always open to a new future. The story reminds us that human interdependence is so profound that by our actions we can not only transform the meaning of our own past and future, but we may also radically affect the meaning of the past and the possibilities for the future of those closest to us.