Canon Raven of the University of Cambridge, in his recently published book, expressed a significant, if somewhat startling, judgment regarding the historical trend of Western theology:

The first adequate theology, still perhaps the noblest ever formulated, [was] the Logos theology of the Greek Apologists, which had its fullest expression in the Christian Platonism of Clement of Alexandria and Origen. … It is one of the tragedies of history that the work of this brilliant succession of Christian thinkers was allowed not merely to come to an end, but to fall into neglect, oblivion and condemnation. If we are to handle effectively the task of elucidating a Christian theology for the twentieth century, we must, I think, ignore all the elaborate structures of later orthodoxy, Catholic and Protestant, which for today are literally irrelevant, and return to the point at which Origen was removed.

During the 19th century a concept, in itself neither religious nor anti-religious, modified the thought of a great number of Americans. This was the concept of gradual development. One application of this concept, which had a profound effect upon Congregational thought, was the assumption that insight into religious truth comes only gradually. This view seemed to threaten all formulations of tradition and all embodiments of revelation which had been assumed to be final and complete. Another concept, closely related to that of development, also gravely disturbed the New England theology of the latter 19th century. There was a revival of stress on the immanence of God within the created world. For certain Congregationalists, divine influence upon man came to be viewed as working wholly through the channels of natural law and natural growth, rather than by sudden invasion from without. To conservatives, this stress seemed to blur a central truth in evangelical theology, the perilous chasm between sinful men and the holy, judging God.

“It is not permitted that country bishops should ordain presbyters or deacons, nor, moreover, may city presbyters do so, without the written permission of the bishop in each parish.” This canon, which is still on occasion cited to uphold presbyterian ordination in the early church,1 so bristles with difficulties, that it is perhaps advisable to refrain from using it to prove anything.