The biblical narrative describes the progressive course of creation ending with man. Man appears as its culmination, as a centre on which all the planes of the world converge, a ‘microcosm’. But, ‘created in the image of God’ he is also, according to the Fathers, a ‘microtheos’. This central position of man explains the normative subjection of nature to man as to its cosmic logos, as to one of its multiple hypostases. Man ‘cultivates’ nature, gives a name to creatures and things, ‘humanises’ them. His direct relation with the Creator is constitutive of his being.

The foundation of Christian belief,' states Paul Tillich, ‘is not the historical Jesus, but the biblical picture of the Christ.’1 This statement is only now beginning to elicit the serious comment that one might expect from the statement of so great a theologian as Paul Tillich. Tillich's penetrating analysis of the meaning of Jesus as the Christ is a profound contribution to the Christian understanding of the Incarnation. Donald Baillie was surely right, too, in expressing his enthusiasm for Tillich's christological interpretation of history when he stated that there seemed to him to be ‘deep truth … in the idea that Christology stands for the Christian interpretation of history as against other interpretations’.2 Even Tillich's claim that ‘to practise Christology does not mean to turn backward to an unknown historical past or to exert oneself about the applicability of questionable mythical categories to an unknown historical persoanality’,3 contains a refreshing and valid emphasis upon Christology as living existential faith rather than arid theoretical speculation. Yet Christianity has always maintained that its foundation is Jesus of Nazareth in whom the Word of God became flesh. Tilliach's Christology must therefore stand or fall on this christological question which he regards as quite subordinate: the question of the historical basis of the biblical picture of the Christ. If the foundation of Tillich's Christology is “not the historical Jesus, but the biblical picture of the Christ”, how much importance Tillich does actually allow the historical dimension in his Christology must be carefully examined.

It was out of this profound religious experience of Luther—the depth of which is far from being plumbed in this verse—that his concept of grace was formulated, a concept which in its broad outline indicated the main lines of discussion for subsequent Protestant theology. Like Paul and Augustine before him, his theology was the outgrowth of an experience so traumatic that the whole course of his life was irrevocably transformed.‘Driven into a monastery by fear of the wrath of God and by the desire to earn divine forgiveness and approval by meritorious works, he discovered that it was impossible to secure peace of mind by such a method, and was finally led to believe that the only road to peace lay in repudiating all righteousness of his own, and depending wholly upon the free grace of God in Christ.’

After a short preliminary consideration, we shall discuss some presuppositions of our theme in parts A and B and then only in part C, as a summary, present the whole theme. This method will necessitate some minor repetitions, but it should serve to cast some light on the contemporary situation.

The word ‘soul’ is extraordinarily difficult to define. There was no generally agreed teaching about the soul in the Christian Church until the Middle Ages. According to Aquinas, who here as elsewhere follows Aristotle, the soul is an individual spiritual substance, the ‘form’ of the body. Both body and soul together constitute the human unity, though (here Aquinas appears to depart from Aristotle) the soul may be severed from the body and lead a separate existence, as happens after death. The separation, however, is not final, as the soul, in this differing from the angels, was made for the body.

It is the purpose of this introductory, critical survey to indicate some major contributions of Rudolf Bultmann and his successors, and to describe some of the more important problems which have been raised by these contributions.

The thesis of the present essay is that the Westminster Confession represents a synthesis, unique among documents of confessional status and authority, of two intellectual and spiritual motifs which, at first look, might appear to represent almost opposite extremes: thoroughgoing philosophical rigor and radical biblicism. I shall undertake to explicate this thesis by an analysis of three areas of doctrine: those concerning God (including Christology), the so-called ‘natural man’, and revelation and authority. Under each of these three headings I shall present certain relevant material from the XXXIX Articles as a background ‘foil’ against which the contrasts as well as the similarities of the Westminster Confession may perhaps stand out more clearly.

Our primary concern in this article is the problem of time as understood by St. Augustine. In pursuit of this concern we must consider, secondarily, the viewpoint of Plotinus—one of the two Neo-Platonists whose writings influenced the general shape of St. Augustine's thought. Thus we shall proceed to: (1) an exposition of St. Augustine's theory; (2) a brief statement of Plotinus' view; (3) an analysis of their similarities and differences, aimed at clarification of the unique aspects of St. Augustine's concept.

In his own time and thereafter Albrecht Ritschl's criticism of metaphysics was much debated. He insisted that his basic criticism was directed against those varieties of metaphysics which adopted a priori and deductive methods as a basis for our inquiry concerning God and His relationship to the world. Yet he recognised the significance of philosophy in his effort to vindicate an appropriate theological method. In this essay we shall show that his method of attempting to elucidate the characteristic features of theological discourse is primarily that of a critical empiricism which recognises the reality and activities of the Christian community as the proper locus for identifying the area within which theological discourse is meaningfully carried on.

To ask ‘What place has tradition in Reformed theology?’ is to court from many adherents of that theology a vehement reply: ‘None!’ And such an answer is justified: there is ample evidence to show that at the time of the Reformation tradition was rejected. But there is also evidence to show that some elements of tradition were retained, and that in recent years its place has been reassessed. Those three ideas—rejection, retention and reassessment—provide suitable headings for our present study.

Paul Tillich did not contribute a detailed essay to the discussion of the programme of ‘Entmythologisierung’ (demythologising) as did Karl Barth or Karl Jaspers. However, it will not escape the reader of his works that Tillich has often expressed his views on this theme, though it be only by a brief reference. The question of the interpretation of myth has not only engaged him during the last decade; on the contrary, more than 30 years ago, Tillich had explained his position in systematic form in the article on myth in the 2nd edition of Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Tillich has not substantially departed from the essential points of this position. On the one hand, Tillich is concerned with the fundamental distinction between unbroken and broken myth, and on the other hand, with the equally characteristic relation which he draws between myth and symbol. These definitions and questions permit us in the following detailed interpretation to construct a form adequate to Tillich's thinking. First we will present Tillich's understanding of unbroken myth, and second, his definition of broken myth, which in its determining points is an interpretation having recourse to his definition of symbol.

The great theme of the apostolic preaching in the Acts of the Apostles is ‘Jesus and the Resurrection’. The Resurrection also forms the climax of the creeds; and it has been taught as the end of man's salvation by the Church ever since, despite the threat of militant scepticism without and humanist rationalisation within.

This paper seeks only to attempt a clarification of Bultmann's thought and to suggest several criticisms in the interests of clarification. A recent commentator on Bultmann says, ‘Although Bultmann's thought is more widely understood now than it was prior to the debate, misunderstandings of it still abound even in substantial analyses of his work.’

We have long been accustomed to thinking of the great prophet of the exile, whose words are recorded in Isa. 40–55, as the seer who first discerned plainly the truth that Yahweh is the only real God in existence, and who drew the inference that He must therefore be the God, not of Israel only, but of all men the world over. But we have not always borne in mind the way in which this revelation came to the prophet. This was no sudden disclosure, unrelated to Israel's previous experience of Yahweh; it was a revelation indeed, but it came to the prophet through the travail of his own and his people's experience in Babylon.

It is ironic to reflect that Newman explicitly said that he did not wish his life to be written and that during the last few years something like a dozen biographies of him have appeared, some of which indeed tell us nothing new. At last we have—at any rate as far as material is concerned—as full a biography as we can hope to get. This is Miss Meriol Trevor's two-volume work based on the unpublished material at the Birmingham Oratory. As one would expect, Miss Trevor tells her story very well, but her portrait of Newman is marred by a too sentimental approach to her subject, and this may lend credence to the view, which has been widely canvassed, that Newman is an enigmatic figure. This is extremely strange in view of James Anthony Froude's description of him as ‘the most transparent of men, and Newman's own assertion that it was most repugnant to his nature to conceal things. Father Dessain rightly repudiates the suspicion that there was anything in Newman himself to hide and has decided not to help perpetuate this notion of the mystery of Newman by publishing a selection of the letters rather than the voluminous correspondence in its completeness. Seldom indeed has a man been at more pains both to understand himself and to reveal the workings of his mind, and seldom has anyone had greater mastery of lucid expression to enable him to say what he meant.

John Owen was the main exponent of the classic Independency of the mid-seventeenth century. He was no mere sectary, the very antithesis of the fanatic; a highly intelligent and highly educated man; and a voluntary, not a compulsory, Nonconformist. From a writer as systematic and as magisterial as Owen it should be possible to gain some light on the meaning of the Lord's Supper for his generation of Dissenters.

The Psalter is in some sense a microcosm of the whole Old Testament. On many topics the ideas found in the whole are expressed in condensed fashion in the part. So it is with the topic of divine forgiveness. Much, though not all, of what other Old Testament writers have to say on this subject is said also by the psalmists.

In his contribution to the volume Essays in Christology for Karl Barth, Professor D. M. Mackinnon wrote as follows: To acknowledge the supremacy of the Christology is to confess that finality belongs somehow to that which is particular and contingent, to that which has definite date and place, to that which is described by statements that are not ‘truths of reason’, or, in more modern language, ‘necessary propositions’. Further, it is to involve the confession of faith inextricably with the deliverances of flickering human perception and observation; indeed, the paradoxical and bewildering character of this involvement is clearly recognised in the New Testament itself, where, for instance, in the Fourth Gospel, the reader meets highly sophisticated discussion of the relations of seeing and believing. If he is a philosopher, as perhaps some of those for whom the author intended his book may have been, he will recognise a certain familiarity in the often tense and emotionally charged dialogue: he may even find in it, not simply echoes of the Platonists, but curious anticipations of what men of profoundly sceptical and critical intellect like Kant and Hume were later to write on the limitations of human sensibility, imagination and understanding.

Of all our theological disciplines Christian ethics appears to be the one most open to attack. However careful the modern exponents of Calvinism have been in setting forth the truths of God's sovereignty and human depravity, they have sometimes used language which suggests that, since all good actions are the outcome of God's grace, ‘Christianity transcends morality altogether, and there is no such thing as a Christian ethic’. Again the apparently rigorous determinism of both Dialectical Materialism and Freudian Psychology has been interpreted in popular thought as removing every possibility of moral responsibility, for men's actions are thought to be as mechanistically determined as all other events in physical nature. Today the emphasis on personal decision in much existentialist thought is a welcome reaction against such determinisms whether theological or scientific. Yet the very demand for a new recognition of human freedom has sparked off a new attack on the Christian ethic, at any rate as this has been taught in the tradition of the Church. This ethic is now being labelled authoritarian, puritan, legalistic, rigoristic, heteronomous and the like, and it is taken for granted that these are all derogatory terms. If we are to seek a slogan for this new attack, we cannot find a better one than the familiar, if not quite accurate, translation of the saying of St. Augustine, ‘Love and do what you like’, and it is by examining this principle, that we shall try to gain some light on the position of Christian ethics today.

At least it may be said of the Epistle of James that it escapes the ‘woe’ of Luke 6.26 (‘Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you!’).