Influenged by Tillich's so-called method of correlation, theologians in recent decades have been inclined to approach existential situations as if they simply raised questions to which the dogmatic tradition provided answers. Accordingly, in my teaching for example, I have often read Camus's The Plague together with Buber's I and Thou, Tillich's The Courage To Be with Brecht's Mother Courage and so on. However, the effect of such correlations has, as often as not, been to set the questions moving in the other direction. The traditional ‘answers’ of theologians have been challenged by the existential concerns of the secular writers. In particular the very raison d'être of theology, the articulation of the transcendent presence of God in the world, has become problematical.Granted that Buber's I-You relationship correlates with Camus's portrayals of authenticity, for instance, why do we need to mention Buber's ‘Eternal You’? Can we even make sense of such talk? Granted that Tillich's types of anxiety correlate with his sense of faithful courage, must his affirmation of life in spite of the negativities of existence be ontologically rooted in some ‘Ground of Being’? As we ponder such questions the existential contexts discussed seem to have evaporated all content from the theological answers.

In his important book The Shape of Christology, John Mclntyre argues that revelation cannot provide an adequate foundation for the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus Christ. He contests Karl Barth's derivation of this doctrine from revelation, and he concludes that Barth and other neo-orthodox theologians place far too much emphasis upon revelation, which is a ‘second-order model’ in early Christianity. As an alternative, Mclntyre contends that a viable doctrine of the divinity of Christ must be based upon redemption, not revelation.

In our programme of missionary training at the Selly Oak Colleges it is our custom to introduce the students at an early stage to something of the wide variety of ways in which Christ is pictured in different cultures. On a wall covered with vivid posters one can see together the Orthodox Pantocrator serenely ruling all the worlds, the Latin American freedom fighter with rifle over his shoulder, the black Christ, the tortured and defeated Victim of the medieval crucifix, and the blue-eyed golden haired boy from the neighbourhood of Dallas, Texas. Beyond these visual reproductions one thinks of the pen-portraits sketched in the innumerable lives of Jesus in the era of liberal protestantism, each reflecting the writer's ideal self-image, all sharing one feature in common—that the Christ portrayed might be a likely candidate for redundancy but an improbable one for crucifixion.

The general aim of an anthropology may be said to be the determination of man's characteristics in his environment. In social anthropology, however, the trend has been to emphasise the environment at the expense of man. The present article argues that a similar tendency prevails in theology's typical description of man as a ‘hearer’ of the Word of God and finds illuminating parallels in Berger and Luckmann's sociology of knowledge. The failure of these two authors to maintain a true dialectic between individual creativity and the formative influences of society appears in connection with their view of human inquiry. By developing George Kelly's model of man as an inquiring scientist, the article attempts to show that a theological anthropology is bound to take the empirical fact of the theologian's own spirit of inquiry into account and also that it must develop a theory of its own activity which overcomes conceptually the tendency to lose sight of man the inquirer in favour of divine grace or human social structures.

Believing as I do that the ‘problem’ of science and religion is not a problem at all, provided that each is seen in the correct way and that each does not try to encroach upon the other, it will be my purpose in this paper to point out some of the difficulties in educating secondary school pupils into this fact. In popular thought, and in the thought of the average pupil, science produces severe problems for the religious believer, and it is assumed that the scientist is the purveyor of truth, whilst the religious believer is one who clings to unscientific beliefs in the attempt to hold on to his faith. In popular thought a scientist could not believe in religion because science has supposedly disproved the foundations of religion piece by piece over the centuries. Such a view, however, of science and religion is totally wrong.

Some form of our familiar distinction between letter and spirit in the interpretation of a text is surely older than written language itself. Whenever understanding becomes problematic—and this includes not only instances when an utterance is opaque or ambiguous, but also those frequent instances in which the obvious meaning of an utterance is not its intended meaning—this distinction may come into play as a way of attacking the problem. We find the distinction useful in our ordinary conversation with one another, when we are trying to decide how to take what someone has just said to us: ‘I know what he said, but how did he mean it? What was the spirit of what he said?’ In irony, sarcasm, understatement, allusion, and other devices of our common speech, there is often considerable divergence between the letter and the spirit of the utterance, or between what is said and what is meant. These distinctions were not invented by hermeneuticians trying to rationalise the devious interpretations to which canonical literatures are sometimes subjected. They have grown up with our language.

The rebirth of interest in the thought and life of Jonathan Edwards is fully justified, for he was truly one of the greatest philosopher-theologians that America has ever produced. One question of contemporary significance that to my knowledge has not been put to this unique thinker is the question of ‘faith and history’. In other words, the question how Edwards conceived the ground of faith as it relates to historical knowledge has not been raised in the growing body of secondary literature. I would like to put this question to Jonathan Edwards and unfold his answer as he develops it in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections.

The purpose of this paper will be to examine the encounters between Eastern Christendom and the Western Reformation of the Church. The study will include an analysis of the historical background, an introduction to the chief characters involved, and an evaluation of doctrinal issues that have represented the divergent paths of Orthodoxy and Protestantism.

Thomas Aquinas argued that, while revelation alone can supply knowledge of the divine nature, unaided human reason can infer the divine existence from the world's existence. His proofs of God's existence are, in principle, extensions and elaborations of the patristic natural theologies. The Fathers believed that Neoplatonic and Hellenistic speculations about the eternal One, the arche of the cosmos, constituted a ‘natural’ knowledge of God the Father and his creation. God's selfrevelation in the incarnation was placed in the context of this natural theology. Augustine's version of natural theology both summed up the patristic achievement for the West and laid the foundation for Western medieval exploration of the natural knowledge of God. Like Augustine, Thomas believed one could reason naturally from the sensible world to God's existence; unlike him, Thomas reasoned with Aristotle and not Plato. Thomas' ordering of the natural and revealed knowledge of God repeats, then, the patristic sequence: first one proves that God is the first Cause of the world, and then one reasons from revelation about God's redemptive and reconciling relation to the world.

Indian Christian theology has developed in a number of different directions. As we analyse those directions we can detect two main patterns of advance. On the one hand, there is the concern with inwardness and spirituality, the interiority of the Gospel; on the other hand, there is a concern for the outward world and its future as the venue of the new creation brought into being by Christ. Both these concerns have been mirrored in modern Hinduism as it has sought to transmit to modern India the deep spirituality of classical Indian religion and also to reinterpret Hindu doctrines in the light of the context of modern India. Śri Rāmakrishna represents the first concern within modern Hinduism, and Gāndhi represents the other. Indian Christian theology has developed within a culture wherein a concern for the inwardness of one's own spiritual life and a concern for the outward development of the nation were both living issues. In ‘contextualising’ the Gospel in India, Indian Christians have naturally been influenced by both these concerns. Indian Christians have made a contribution to total Christian theology in the areas of inwardness and spirituality. Our particular concern now is to see what they have to say to us on the subject of the humanity of Christ and the new humanity that he has made possible.

At first sight this article would seem to be a critique of the views of Professor W. Marxsen of Miinster, in that it borrows the English title of one of his books and sets a question mark against it, a thing which he steadfastly refuses to do. However, it will become apparent that it is in fact more complementary to his book, and concentrates more on the points of agreement with the thesis contained in it.

Nor are we any longer able to be sure that the evidence of Scripture gives us direct guidance on how we should order our lives or organise our Church in the strange new world, so different from that of the New Testament and from that of Reformation Scotland, into which we have been thrown.’ (The Committee of Forty)

‘It may seem surprising that the question of the correct way to order the church has to be dealt with again and again. Is it really not possible to answer this question once and for all? Is it inconceivable that one could discover definite rules to order our lives at all times? Can the New Testament, the sole plumbline and norm for the church's life according to the unanimous conviction of the Reformers, not supply us with such rules which would be universally valid and permanent?’ (Eduard Lohse)

This surprise to which Lohse refers is perhaps the greater when one considers the confidence with which the Westminster divines felt themselves able to attach scriptural proof texts to their ordinances in their formulation of ‘The Form of Presbyterial Church-Government’, but both the Committee of Forty seeking to find a suitable form of church life for the Church of Scotland today and the Landesbischof of Hannover addressing the synod of his church in Braunschweig as they gathered to discuss a new church order felt that things had changed.

The purpose of the present paper is to determine the exact nature of Marx's atheism by delineating the extent to which he draws from Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach for his own quite distinctive critique of religion. This is an important question inasmuch as it sheds light on Marx's singular view of religion. For if Marx takes the content of his critique of religion from Bauer—not, as is commonly supposed, from Feuerbach1—then Marx's atheism is of an extremely militant sort. Such a conclusion would have far-reaching implications.

The freedom of God is a major theme in the theology of Karl Barth. He treats of it at length in several places in the Church Dogmatics. It is a basic constituent of the being of God, and it plays a central part in the systematic connection between the being of God and his acts, as that is developed in the doctrine of election. It is the latter that will be examined in this article.

The picture of the hilltop city in Mt. 5.14b is an image within an image. It is one of those pictures employed by Jesus which is almost too familiar to us; its meaning appears on the surface to be perfectly simple and obvious, so that although frequently cited in support of various arguments, it is rarely subjected to scholarly scrutiny. It will be argued here that, far from being a casual illustration or simple cliché, it in fact constitutes a profoundly theological statement on the part of Jesus.

The dissimilarity test is one of the more important criteria used in the revived quest for the historical Jesus. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the dissimilarity test, and to reconsider some aspects of its use.

There is no doubt that the writings of Karl Barth give evidence of a critical attitude to the anthropocentric theology of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This critical attitude springs both from the failure of nineteenthcentury theology to make significant inroads into the twentieth century due to the traumatic experience of the first World War, and from Barth's own tlieology as it developed in the post-war years through to the early 1960s. Hence, to expound the relationship between Karl Barth and anthropocentric theology is a two-sided task. On the one hand, his attitude to nineteenthcentury theology may be assessed from his investigations of the theologians of that period. On the other hand, this critical attitude must of necessity be related to and contrasted with his own theological development. In this article, I shall be concerned to examine his attitude to anthropocentric theology in the light of his own developing theology.

Christianity, whatever else it may be, is a set of emotions. It is love of God and neighbor, grief about one's own waywardness, joy in the merciful salvation of our God, gratitude, hope, and peace. To be a Christian is to have these and other emotions, and so if it happens that I do not love God and my neighbor, if I do not find my sins abhorrent and find joy in my redemption, if I am not grateful, hopeful, and at peace with God and myself, then it follows quite clearly that I am not a Christian, though I was born into a Christian family and reared in the bosom of the Church, am baptized and confirmed and willing in good conscience to affirm the articles of the Creed.

The parable of the Tares is introduced by Matthew into the third of the major discourses he attributes to Jesus, a discourse for which he relies heavily on both Mark 4 and Q (Matt. 13.16f = Luke 10.23f; Matt. 13.31f 33 = Luke 13.18f, 20f). While lacking any full parallel in either of these sources, the parable does recall in varying ways several other synoptic traditions, (i) The Markan parable of the Seed growing Secretly/Patient Husbandman (Mark 4.26–29) occupied in the Markan sequence the position now occupied in the Matthaean scheme by the parable of the Tares. Moreover, the occurrence of verbal reminiscences of the former in the latter has not infrequently impressed interpreters: anthrōpos, katheudein, sītos, blastanein, chortos, karpos, therismos, prōton. While some of these might be attributable to correspondences natural in the coverage of similar subject-matter, not all of them are necessary to such coverage (e.g. katheudein), not all of them are common words (e.g. blastanein), and the aggregate of all of them cannot easily be written off as coincidence, (ii) The parable of the Sower, with its appended interpretation (Mark 4.3–8, 14–20 = Matt. 13.3–8, 18–23), provides a precedent within this discourse for an explanation based on a series of 1:1 allegorical correspondences (see particularly, in the case of the Tares, vv. 37–39, which provide the basis for a summarising explanation in vv. 40–43: hōsper…).