This twelfth chapter of the Dogmatik is an exposition of the ethical teaching which follows upon an understanding of the doctrine of creation. Further chapters on ethics will come at the end of the volumes on reconciliation and redemption and Barth notes that the whole complex of state, community and law must wait for more thorough treatment until the next volume is completed. Here we have a generous and moving exposition of man's freedom in relation to God; his freedom in the community of male and female, parent and child, near and distant neighbours; his freedom for life with due evaluation of reverence for life, its protection and its industriousness; and his freedom within appointed limits where opportunities do not recur, where each person has his ‘station’ and must live with the honour appropriate to his limitations. The exposition follows the formal lines worked out in the volume on man. It is studded with careful reviews of the more important recent books dealing with the themes under discussion. In this field Barth shows the greatest respect for Schleiermacher who of course worked out his theology with a profound sense of the richness and complexity of human life, though here, as well as in his grasp on the Gospel, Barth's understanding seems to be both richer and more sensitive. The distinctive feature of the work is its firm adherence to the conviction that ethics, as the doctrine of God's command, exhibits the law as a form of the Gospel, grounded everywhere in the knowledge of Jesus Christ and of God's gracious election of man to covenant fellowship with Himself in Christ.

Converging lines of thought suggest that it may be timely to revive the memory of the ‘great, little man’, Thomas Halyburton. There is a new emphasis on the distinction between the knowledge of hearsay and the knowledge of the heart (the distinction which Robert Barclay had in mind when he contrasted ‘the saving heart-knowledge’ with ‘the soaring, airy head-knowledge’). A whole school of thought has grown up around the importance of the I-Thou relation. Karl Heim made a particularly notable contribution to the discussion of the theological problem uncovered by this philosophy, namely the question to what extent our knowledge of God is analogous with our knowledge of the other person; and in his God Transcendent he underlines the fact that, when we pass from one ‘dimension’ of thought to another, it is not by the way of syllogistic reasoning, but by a species of illumination. Side by side with this movement of thought has gone an increasing interest in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, who, drawing a sharp distinction between the natural sciences on the one hand and the humanistic studies on the other, sums up his wide and stimulating research in the principle, ‘We explain nature; but we understand the human spirit’.

In an age like the present, when the good will to establish a reasonable order of international life on earth is beset at every turning by impediment and frustration, there exists a temptation, if not to think of history as irredeemable, at least to moderate considerably our confidence in the relevance of Christianity to mundane affairs. We should not be surprised to find an increased tendency to mysticism, or if the hold of external reality over the mind is too strong to permit such with-drawal of the soul into itself, a lapse may set in towards an apocalyptic judgment on history with a hardened sense of the opposition of God to the world. In evangelism the effect may be to give preference to the Home Mission task of the Church over its Foreign Mission and ecumenical commitments. Certainly a change has come over the face of things and over our own temperaments since the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910. There has been a screwing down of the lights. There has been a retractation of many hopes. In 1910 the Christian Churches stood on the tip-toe of missionary enthusiasm. The doors were swinging open in all lands to the entrance of the Christian Gospel. The day of the Son of Man was believed to have come near. Optimism with relation to history was of the order of the day. Today the world-scene has grown clouded and ambiguous.

It Was significant of H. R. Mackintosh and his whole theological position that he made his class for the preparation of sermons a part of his course in theology. He often declared that the test of theology is whether it will preach well. When we first heard it, it may not have carried conviction. But experience taught us how true it is.

Professor Mackintosh considered that the task of theology was to assist the proclamation of the Gospel. In his eyes theology was not an academic study but a practical one, because the Gospel is not so much the explanation of life as the cure of its disorder. It was his duty as a theologian to explain and justify the doctrine of the Church. But he never forgot that it would be the duty of his students when they became ministers of the Church to translate that doctrine into proclamation and appeal. If such preaching carried conviction and strengthened faith, then the theology behind it would be justified. To take an example-he used to draw a distinction between the positive and negative sides of the doctrine of election. He argued that the positive form of the doctrine is a conviction of believing experience. It declares that faith rests upon the grace of God which was directed towards the believer before ever he responded to it, and that he can count upon it to sustain him to the end.

In recent discussions the doctrine of the Church has been approached from an unusual angle, by way of certain conceptions found in the Old Testament, such as the Covenant, the Remnant, and the Suffering Servant. In this article I propose to examine the validity and significance of this approach.Is it legitimate to use the Old Testament in this way as a source of Christian doctrine? If so we must be quite clear what we are doing and why we are doing it. The importance of these ideas in the history of Israel is generally agreed. Their influence on the New Testament is obvious. But can we make them into normative and formative principles in the life of the Church for all time? In so doing we are not merely borrowing certain moral and religious ideas from the legacy of Israel and adding them to the store of Christian truth. That is a common practice which needs no special justification, because it does not affect the basis of Christian doctrine. Any theological jackdaw can collect whatever suits him from the prophetic writings and use it in building a Christian nest. But we are going to the Old Testament for the foundation plan of the Christian Church. We are applying the promises and attributes which belong by historic right to the sons of Abraham to the mission and destiny of the Church of Christ. There is a big assumption here which is too often taken for granted.

The main theme of this paper is that, whereas in general, Greek thought sharply distinguishes and indeed opposes the notion of ‘word’ and the notion of ‘act’, the thought of the Old Testament so closely associates the two that it can use one term for both; and further that while traces of the Greek attitude are certainly to be found in the New Testament, yet it is the OT attitude which is dominant. It will be maintained that recognition of this fact is of the utmost importance for the understanding of NT thought in general, and in particular is relevant to an understanding of the NT view of (I) God and History, (2) The Incarnation.

The description ‘making Christians by sacraments’2 which has sometimes been employed by leading Baptist circles in Sweden has indeed almost become a catchword, intended to be used against the larger churches and to set the stamp of low worth upon them. Above all it is meant as a rebuke because of the way in which they receive their members. The term is undeniably most fitting and, in more than one respect, significant. The churches have always gone on the presupposition, and with more or less insistence stressed the fact, that their members become Christians by means of a sacrament, i.e. baptism. They are confirmed in the Church's fellowship by means of another, i.e. the Lord's Supper. The churches cannot defend themselves against the accusation that the term ‘making Christians by sacraments’ implies by trying to explain away or lessen the significance of the sacraments nor have they any wish to do so. Such a defence would involve nothing less than a denial of the facts. Without the least embarrassment, however, the churches can defend themselves by maintaining that the practice described as ‘making Christians by sacraments’ is the only one which corresponds to the attitude of Jesus and the Early Church towards the nature of the Christian fellowship and that only where it is practised can the real nature of the Christian Gospel be fully indicated.

The purpose of this study is to elucidate the significance underlying the concept of miracle in the world of Old Testament thought and theology, in the hope that the results attained may shed fresh light upon something which touches the very centre of religious life and is a frequent cause of genuine doubt and perplexity for modern man. Perhaps the word miracle itself is ambiguous in this connexion, for it has gathered around itself a penumbra of associations derived from its use in our modern scientifically determined modes of thought and speech. Broadly speaking the background which it implies is that of nature conceived as an independent system presupposing fixed laws or if, with the more modern scientific outlook we reject the notion of materialistic determinism and mechanism, then, at any rate, we must substitute for ‘laws’ the tendency for uniform patterns and processes to emerge. Against such large uniformities, miracle, in the modern sense, stands out somewhat sharply as an exception, mysterious and apparently inexplicable, repugnant in its arbitrariness to the spirit of pure science. Such presuppositions do not exist in the Old Testament World of ideas where we are confronted by a type of thought which is through and through theological rather than philosophical and scientific. The corner-stone of the Old Testament system of ideas is the primacy of God as self-existent Creator whose creative activity is unceasing, upholding and interpenetrating by His watchful redeeming care all that is.

We may begin our survey of Protestant theology where Karl Barth left it off in Die Protestantische Theologie im Neunzehnten Jahrhundert, which he ended with the observation that for all his popularity and following, Ritschl failed finally to carry the day. Theology moved on beyond his moral evaluation of Christ. Even those under the influence of Ritschl did not simply repeat what he had said—e.g. Wilhelm Herrmann. In May 1900 Adolf Harnack's The Essence of Christianity was published. Harnack's aim was to demonstrate what the various Churches and Christian communities held in common: that God is our Father and the human soul is of infinite value. As to the Gospel of Jesus Christ he declared, ‘Not the Son but the Father alone has a place in the Gospel proclaimed by Jesus’.

What is to be thought of St. Anselm? That question is likely to recur with the approaching completion of the new and definitive edition of Anselm's works by the Scottish firm of Nelson. This paper attempts to give a limited answer by a fresh consideration of Anselm's character, with special reference to his Meditations and Prayers.

Anselm is generally acknowledged to be one of the great thinkers of medieval Christendom. His powers as a meta-physician are amply displayed in his Monologion and Proslogion, while his Cur Deus Homo marks one of the milestones in the Church's progressive apprehension of the mystery of the Atonement. So powerful indeed is the impact of these treatises that Anselm has been compared with St. Augustine. Augustinus redivivus is a proud title; but Anselm has been thought worthy to bear it.

The consideration of this problem is important for at least two reasons. In many countries there are reports of an increasing decline in public morals and of growing dishonesty and corruption in the life of the body politic. This is taking place at a time when the established religious systems are being subjected to the pressure of pseudo-scientific secularism on the one hand and the claims of modern alternative faiths on the other. Clearly the two developments are interconnected. Yet, to judge from the burden of many public utterances of responsible leaders, including the now important and significant ‘Moral Re-armament’ Group, the close dependence of moral truth and the truth about the character of reality is not realised. Most people are content to mutter the usual platitudes—‘Honesty is the best policy’, ‘Do please try to be good and speak the truth’. But the problem of truth is more complicated than our naīve moralists would have us believe.

In a service of the right kind God speaks to the congregation, and the Holy Spirit opens the hearts and lips of the congregation to reply. The means by which the inscrutable God comes out of the ‘Light unapproachable’ is His ‘Word’. It has been the will of God to limit His self-revelation to mediation through the ‘Word’. This self-revealing ‘Word’ makes itself known in two ways:

Firstly, God became man in Christ. He has thus entered our field of vision. From Christ's words and acts and from His character discernible behind them, the Father's nature, heart and will towards us are discerned, so far as such discernment is given to man. Christ is that aspect of God which is turned towards us. He reflects the rays of God, so far as human eyes can bear their light. As making known God's heart and will, Christ is therefore in a special sense ‘God's Word’. To describe Christ as the Word of God is to give a fully adequate picture. It is as the Eternal Word of God that the Risen Lord is in the midst of His faithful.

The second of the seven sacraments of the medieval church, confirmation, consisted of anointing with oil and signing with the sign of the cross, and was restricted to the episcopacy. The Reformers rejected this sacramental confirmation, on the grounds that in this form there was no scriptural warrant for it, nor was there any gospel promise attached to it. Likewise they were opposed to a rite that by its restriction to the episcopacy had come to be known as ‘the bishoping’.

This is a very serious subject. Perhaps we are afraid to speak about it because of the controversies that once raged between pietism and the orthodoxy of Protestant scholasticism, controversies that have not yet been settled. Let us not forget, however, that even scholasticism spoke of conversion. There is a hymn by Paul Gerhard which runs:

The need for conversion is never forgotten. The only difference between orthodoxy and pietism in this respect concerns the manner in which this need can be met. The claim that is made upon us radically alters our whole life: conversion means a complete reversal. We know from personal experience as well as from the experience of others the feeling of apprehension when someone tries to ‘convert’ us. We may want to avoid a certain house or a particular group of people because we feel: ‘They want to convert me.’ Perhaps that feeling is caused by misunderstanding, for turning to God is joy—that is a fact that is often overlooked when we speak of conversion. But the challenge remains: Be converted.

In his booklet The Teaching of the Church regarding Baptism, p. 46, Karl Barth discusses a curious Lutheran view ‘that baptism effects something quite different in children and in adults’. He adds, in a footnote: ‘Is it clear in present day missionary work, where there seems to be agreement in a double practice of baptism, that such presupposes a double teaching regarding the meaning of baptism?’ As a missionary, I should like to answer emphatically ‘No!’ When we are baptising a convert from another faith after careful preparation, and when we are baptising the infant child of believing parents, we are doing essentially the same thing.

Such generous and sympathetic recognition of the ecumenical importance of Anglicanism as that expressed by Professor Manson in his paper on Church and Intercommunion1 is always both inspiring and humbling to Anglicans who feel the pain of separation from their Christian brethren. They believe that God is calling the Anglican Church to play a difficult but important role in the healing of Christian divisions, and cannot but be encouraged when they find, among members of other Churches, an appreciation of what Professor Manson calls the ‘immense ecumenical potentiality’ of Anglicanism. But if Anglicanism is to be in any real sense an ‘instrument of ecumenical rapprochement’, both Anglicans and non-Anglicans must understand clearly what it is and what it is not; much confusion exists because it has been misrepresented both from within and from without, by those who would have it, or suppose it to be, something other than it really is. To define Anglicanism, how-ever, is far from easy, for it has an elusive and, indeed, a unique quality, but I hope to suggest in this paper certain lines at least along which better understanding may be sought, and to remove one or two of the more obvious misconceptions which tend to confuse discussion and to exacerbate controversy.

In the first part of this article we shall have a look at several features of this passage: discussion of the empty tomb, of the discrepancies between our several sources, and of the question whether Mark intended to end his Gospel with 16.8, we reserve for the second part.

According to all four Gospels women were the first to receive the news of the Lord's resurrection. According to Matthew, the Markan appendix and John it was also a woman or women who first saw the risen Lord, though Luke would seem to agree with Paul in representing Peter as the first to see Him. Is this precedence of women in the Easter narratives of the Gospels significant?

Baptizo and baptisma are words whose lexicographical history either originates in, or has been radically altered by, Christian usage. In the LXX the former, in addition to an instance of its common classical meaning, to overwhelm or to sink, occurs in a quite untechnical sense in a few religious contexts. It is employed to describe Naaman dipping in the Jordan (4 Reg. 5.14), Judith performing purificatory ablutions during her sojourn with the unclean Gentiles, and ritual washing after contact with a dead body (Judith 7.7; Sirach 31, 34.30). Here the word retains its original sense of dip. It is only with the Evangelists' account of John that it takes on a technical significance and denotes a particular religious rite.

In 1899 Burkitt posed a question to which no answer has yet been given. It was as follows: ‘It is still more surprising and instructive to find that “salvation” is identified by the Syriac usage with “life”. Σωτ⋯ρ is Mahyânâ, “Life-giver”, and “to be saved” is “to live”. This is the more remarkable, as Syriac has several words meaning “to deliver”, “to protect” and “to be safe and sound”. May we not therefore believe that this identification of “salvation” and “life” is the genuine Aramaic usage, and that the Greek Gospels have in this instance introduced a distinction which was not made by Christ and his Aramaic-speaking disciples?' If Burkitt is right, it is evident that quite a new light is thrown on a number of instances in the NT where the word σᾡζω occurs. This can be seen at once as one thinks of the somewhat negative ‘Saviour’ becoming the more positive ‘Life-giver’. Theologically also, however, there is a difference in meaning, which Burkitt remarked on a few years later. ‘The use of ḥajē,ē life, to render σωηρἱα and σωτ⋯ριoν, instead of some word meaning “deliverance“, together with the corresponding equivalent verb ḥj' and σᾡζɛσθαι belongs rather to theology and philosophy than to linguistics.'

In the days of Jesus and of Paul the Jewish religion had become to all intents and purposes a religion of the Law, a religion of which the central feature was the observance of the statutes, the commandments, and the judgments once delivered to the people by the agency of Moses. The Law had indeed so far replaced the Temple at the heart of the Jewish faith that that faith was able to continue and endure, as a religion centred in the Law, even when the Temple had been destroyed. It was the Law that differentiated the Jew from his Gentile neighbours, and the Law was his pride and his glory. Yet it is against the Law that Paul delivers one of the most emphatic and sustained attacks in the entire corpus of his letters.