In the introduction to Theology and the University John Coulson writes ‘… we ask for a laity better educated in their religion.’ The Old Testament is the soil from which that religion sprang: it will not be necessary to have to justify its inclusion in any syllabus for lay religious education. Anyone who honestly tries to penetrate into a field of study quickly realises how vast it is and how little he knows about it; this is particularly true of the Old Testament, but before I say why I think this is so I want to tell you why I am speaking to you about it. It is not because I claim any particular knowledge of the Old Testament but because I am a student of it and have tried to teach others about it, from eleven-year olds to theological students and ordinary lay people.

It may be no accident that the examiners in the Honour School of Theology at Oxford commonly find that the worst performance in the examination is in the paper on the Four Gospels. If this is a symptom that candidates approach that paper with a certain diffidence, it is not too difficult to find an explanation. For among all the subjects which are usually included under the term ‘theology’, the study of the New Testament and in particular the study of the gospels is the one where the committed Christian is likely to find both his chief joys and his deepest sorrows. We hope to indicate the joys before we have finished, but we shall begin with the sorrows.

Some of you may remember those morning inspections in the army which were so rigorous that the soldiers would on the night before have the bedclothes perfectly folded, their equipment perfectly laid out and then sleep on the floor. We are familiar with systems of dogmatic theology rather like this—perfectly arranged, logically coherent, and in the last resort separate from life and useless to men, indeed harmful to them in that men are deprived in their attempt to lead a Christian life of precisely that help which Christian doctrine ought to give: just as the purpose of inspection is efficiency, and efficiency is frustrated if inspection results in a soldier's missing a good night's sleep.

The variety of ways in which the study of theology may be incorporated into the ‘General B.A.’ degree, as it is called in most of our universities, is great. The structure of this degree is itself by no means uniform, and many universities are engaged in a revaluation or re-organisation of general studies. All this makes the drawing-up of blue-prints unrelated to particular circumstances an academic exercise without academic relevance. The ‘Proposals’, however, are primarily a statement principles; and it is as well to clarify principles independently, and before the onset, of the inevitable complications of their being put into practice.