In examining the great themes of the Epistle to the Colossians we must ask both what they meant in that ancient world of Asia Minor, so cultured and so superstitious, for which the Epistle was written and what they mean for us today. We must sketch in the background of the Epistle in general terms; then we must turn to the text itself, and finally attempt to expound its meaning in terms comprehensible today. Sometimes it may be permissible to take a glance at the background and seek some lines along which to interpret it before we turn to the text itself. That is the object of this paper.

Is the existence of God a question of fact? Surprisingly, the answer many theologians have given in recent years is, ‘No’. Some of them actually mean that the word ‘God’ refers to nothing at all, so that sentences about God are not fact-stating utterances; but others confine themselves to the more moderate claim that, though there is something to which the word ‘God’ properly refers, this is certainly not an empirical matter of fact, and nor does it imply any empirical facts whatsoever about the world. This more moderate claim is, I think, that of Rudolf Bultmann; and the process of freeing the concept of ‘God’ from all the empirical entailments which have been customarily attributed to it is the programme of demythologising, for the advocacy of which he is well known. In this paper I wish to attack this moderate view, which implies that Christianity could be true, whatever the empirical facts about the nature and destiny of the world; that is, that questions of empirical fact are, not just undecidable, but are actually irrelevant, to the question of God's existence. And I shall refer, in particular, to Bultmann's essay, ‘New Testament and Mythology’ and to the work of the British philosopher, Bishop I. T. Ramsey, who propounds a substantially similar view, though in different philosophical garb.

The problem of the Pain of God is for me a perennial one, for wherever in the Anglican Communion God calls me to minister (with few exceptions) I have been and shall be called upon to assent to the proposition that God is ‘without body, parts or passions’ (Article I of the XXXIX Articles of Religion). My difficulty is simply that, although I am content to admit that God is incorporeus et impartibilis without any qualifications at all, I cannot admit that He is impassibilis without making so many qualifications that the admission almost dies of them. I suspect furthermore that those who are obliged to give general assent to the Westminster Confession of Faith may have a similar difficulty with Chapter II, Section I, which contains the same proposition. The scriptural warrant for it is said to be found in Acts 14.15, where Paul and Barnabas cry to the people of Lystra, ‘Men, why are you doing this? We also are men, of like nature with you, and bring you good news, that you should turn from these vain things to a living God who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them.’ In its context, I understand this verse to imply that God, unlike Zeus and Hermes, is neither fickle nor whimsical, but constant and free to achieve His purpose. As the Greek Fathers would say, He is both autokinetos and tautokinetos.

‘… the ethical question—at least, if it is intended and understood in a way which is meaningful from the Christian and theological standpoint—cannot rightly be asked and answered except within the framework, or at any rate the material context, of dogmatics. True man and his good action can be viewed only from the standpoint of the true and active God and His goodness’ (C.D. 111.4, p. 3). Ethics, for Barth, is a part of Dogmatics. This explains the heavily doctrinal setting of his treatment of the Sabbath commandment. It is part of the doctrine of Creation: the Sabbath is ‘The Command of God the Creator’—the title indeed of Chapter XII, which takes up the whole of volume C.D. 111.4. The nature or character of the God revealed in the Scriptural account of Creation, who in Jesus Christ is also Redeemer and Sanctifier, determines our view of the nature or character of His command. His command is good, and its aim is our goodness, our sanctification, our freedom before God. ‘Man's action is good in so far as he is the obedient hearer of the Word and command of God…. Ethics has to understand the Word of God as the fulness, measure and source of this sanctification’ (p. 4). This doctrine of God is General Ethics. Special Ethics is the teaching of how man is to respond to the command of this God.

It is impossible for any man to give a satisfactory answer to the question ‘What is God's purpose for the Church?’ We can only turn with expectation to Holy Scripture and to the other vehicles of divine revelation. The letter to the Ephesians declares the purpose of God as follows: ‘He destined us in love to be His sons through Jesus Christ, as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth. … To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all men see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things, that through the Church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places’ (Eph 1.5, 9; 3.8–10).

In this paper I propose to show how certain parts of Emil Brunner's ethical theory are related to one another and to answer some possible criticisms of these portions of his theory. In particular I wish to examine what Brunner has to say about how moral decisions ought to be made. Because of the nature of my topic I shall refer mainly to Brunner's The Divine Imperative (tr. Olive Wyon, Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1947).

I Can remember the deep sense of mystery that possessed me when as a child I was told that only about one-eighth of an iceberg appears above water. It was perhaps one's first contact with the concept of the ‘assessable unknown’. In later years, in experiments in displacement and specific gravity in the physics laboratory, one learned how the conclusion had been arrived at—learned, indeed, how to assess the unknown for oneself. But increasingly one became aware that the process had its limitations: that while there were certain ‘unknowns’ which could be so thoroughly or so accurately assessed that they scarcely continued to merit the title ‘unknown’, there were others where the mystery remained. In some cases the assumption was justified that one's knowledge would increase as one grew older: or, on a more general world-view, it was warrantable to suppose that the sum total of human knowledge of any particular phenomenon would increase with the passing of time and the continuance of human research, until the day arrived when the phenomenon in question became, by general consensus, more ‘known’ than ‘unknown’.

That Christians must believe in miracles is indubitable, for their religion substantially rests upon the miracle of the resurrection. However there have been a number of criticisms of miracles as both unintelligible and unreasonable. This paper will attempt to answer these criticisms and to show that the notion of ‘miracle’ is intelligible and that to believe in miracles is reasonable.1 To do this, the following four criticisms must be answered in some way:

(1) The very concept of ‘miracle’ is a self-contradictory or in some other way incoherent notion.

(2) The empirical evidence given for miracles has always been inadequate to substantiate a rational belief.

(3) Judging from past experience, one can always rule out even the possibility of miracles.

(4) A miracle can never be shown incapable of a natural and scientific explanation, at least in principle.

The first half of the fifth century saw the emergence of the christological controversy which led to the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The two chief protagonists were Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius, the Antiochene monk who became patriarch of Constantinople in 428. There are several different ways of regarding the conflict. On one level it involved the political and ecclesiastical rivalry between Alexandria and Constantinople. From another point of view it was a struggle between the Alexandrian and Antiochene Christologies. This essay will attempt to present some reflections upon a third aspect, the exegetical dimension of the Nestorian controversy. The two words currently used to describe patristic exegesis are ‘typology’ and ‘allegorism’. I shall argue that, although there is good reason for supposing the two methods to have been antipathetic, they do not come into direct conflict with one another in the Nestorian controversy. This judgment can be made, first, because Antiochene hostility to allegorism cannot be connected with the christological controversies and, second, because the exegetical differences which marked the Nestorian controversy cannot be described as differences of method. Such a conclusion demands redefinition of the exegetical dimension of Nestorius' struggle with Cyril, and I shall conclude by suggesting some lines upon which redefinition might proceed.

One of the big questions which agitated the minds of theologians and laymen alike in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was whether or not the doctrine of the Trinity was scriptural. The controversy raged throughout the United Kingdom and extended to the shores of America where the eminent preacher William Ellery Channing embraced the Unitarian cause.

Enquiry into the precise meaning and historical use of theological terms is not in fashion in these days, as is amusingly pointed out in a recent issue of Time magazine.1 Under the heading, ‘Right you are if you say you are’, there appears a dialogue, from which I quote:

Expositions of the Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist usually concentrate on their meaning as between God, the Church itself and the individual candidate or communicant. J. S. Whale, for example, in Christian Doctrine1 speaks of the Communion as (a) Memorial, (b) the Mediation of God's Presence, and (c) the Union of the Historical with what is beyond History. Or again, the Scottish Manual of Church Doctrine2 defines Baptism as follows: ‘The outward part in this Sacrament is washing with water in the Name of the Holy Trinity. The inward part is “engrafting” into Christ, regeneration, remission of sins, and giving up to God.’ The Lord's Supper is explained3 as a supreme act of worship, a commemoration, the oblation of all possible praise, the utmost act of prayer and intercession, and a supreme means of grace. Only at the very end of the Chapter on Ordinance do we find these words4: ‘Further still, Christ is the propitiation not for our sins only but for the sins of the whole world. Laying hold of Him for its own need, the soul apprehends its debt to remember the need of the world without, for which Christ also died.’ This thought, which makes the Communion a reminder of the need to evangelise only, has a very strong flavour of pietism and ‘separateness’. One could find oneself at one with this even when celebrating in the secrecy of the Catacomb.

What is the ultimate seat of authority to which Christian theology makes its appeal?' Dr Whale in posing this question says that answers fall into three great and distinctive types. ‘The first type emphasises the authority of the Church’ while ‘the second type emphasises the sole authority of the Bible’ and ‘the third type may be loosely described as mystical—its constitutive principle is the “Inner Light”'.1

Church union schemes have for some years past tended to hinge upon a special service of ‘commissioning’ by which the ministries of various existing denominations should be unified. This pattern of unification, commonly associated with North India, has been attacked on the grounds that it gives ‘an impression of evasion and dishonesty’.1 It is held by many that it encourages some to believe that the commissioning is an ordination, and others to believe that it is not. And while this may be true of some present-day advocates of such schemes, it is not true of their origin. There was a quite clear theological interpretation to services for ‘unifying the ministry’, though in the opinion of this writer a false one. As we shall see, it was held that in a divided church there was no longer one ministry, but a number of parallel ministries, all defective until such time as they should be added together. It is the purpose of this survey to record the rise and fall of that idea amongst Anglicans, who have been particularly prone to it, over the past fifty years.

It is already possible to consider Barth's work as another turning point in the historical background of the present theological situation. But it is also still necessary for contemporary theology to come to terms with Barth. This is especially true of his treatment of the doctrine of universal salvation—apokatastasis. Modern Protestant theology has defined three basic answers to the question of the particularity of election: double predestination, Arminianism, and universalism. The question is whether Barth simply presents a strong and moving case for universalism, or whether he actually breaks out of these options and offers a new possibility for understanding the problem and therefore new possibilities for its resolution.

The Fourth World Conference on Faith and Order, meeting at Montreal in July 1963, recommended the renewal of the study of the Ministry, within a new programme of theological study to be initiated by the Faith and Order Commission. As was noted at Montreal, the Ministry had not been the subject of Faith and Order study for twenty-five years. There were good reasons for this. While the Ministry continued to be the thorniest of the practical problems facing union negotiators, it was widely agreed that theologically it had failed and would continue to fail to yield to a head-on treatment. Only in the light of the doctrine of the Church, considered in its christological and eschatological dimensions, would the Ministry appear in a form that could draw Christians together in church union. So, without altogether losing sight of the hope that something helpful could be said about the Ministry, Faith and Order turned, first to the doctrine of the Church, and then, in the period after Lund, to a study of Christ and the Church. Now the time has come to return to the Ministry, in the light of the work done at these deeper levels of Christian doctrine.

These two verses, though formally (since God is not directly addressed but referred to in the third person) a wish or ‘prayer-wish’, are really tantamount to a prayer. The structure of the sentence may be indicated as follows: (i) God is named (‘the God of peace’); (ii) an adjectival clause follows (as very often in collects); (iii) the first part of verse 21 expresses the substance of the petition; (iv) the whole is concluded by a doxology. A most perceptive and stimulating commentary on these verses is afforded by Philip Doddridge's paraphrase, ‘Father of peace, and God of love’, to which we shall refer from time to time.

One of the most controversial issues dividing Calvin scholars has to do with Calvin's understanding of God as the author of Scripture. Specifically the issue is this: did Calvin believe that the Scriptures were verbally inspired in such a way that they can be identified without qualification with God's Word and therefore held to be infallible?

In 1611, Robert Leighton was born into the era of the Church of Scotland's 1610 Accommodation between the Presbyterian and Episcopalian systems of church government. The Episcopalian Bishop of Dunblane and Archbishop of Glasgow between the ages of fifty and sixty, was the same man as had been the Presbyterian Parish Minister at Newbattle between the ages of thirty and forty. Leighton's especial significance is that he represents in his own person the very kind of accommodation which the signatories of the Joint Report on Anglican-Presbyterian Relations (1957) were aiming at, and which is an ecumenical possibility which will obviously continue to be explored.

In spite of all the gaps in the Church's tradition, it has become clear how strong the continuity of creed and liturgy, even of office and law, has been through the centuries.2 The history of diakonia, however, presents a strangely divergent picture. Admittedly Christ's command of love has been proclaimed in an unbroken line, but the actual loving deeds of the Church, their forms and institutions, show a striking discontinuity. Diakonia will break out with charismatic vigour and direct men for centuries to new ways of service, then it suddenly collapses and only a few venerable ruins remain. This has little to do with favourable or unfavourable political conditions. Diakonia never blossomed more richly than in the times of persecution under a Decius or Diocletian; and the Church was never relieved of more service than under Christian rulers through the secularisation of the West in recent centuries. Either it proves itself man's true help in time of need, or it dies a quick death (cf. Matt. 5.13).