The title of this paper indicates an exploration; the indefinite article implies that it is (perhaps necessarily) expressed in personal terms. Putting and responding to questions like this one is very much a custom of our time; a time of questioning, when we are disinclined to accept the forms of tradition and the pronouncements of authority. We assume that it is normal and necessary, for Christians, to ask themselves what they mean when they use the traditional language of Christian doctrine: to ask themselves how these are related, on the one hand, to the experience to which they are intended to give intellectual shape and, on the other, to the intellectual processes which we use when we try to understand more manageable kinds of experience. Do we accept such language and in what sense? Do we want to reinterpret it? I suspect that most of us have asked ourselves the question that Bonhoeffer, in his prison-cell, came to see as the central one: ‘What do we really believe, in the sense that we hang on to it with our lives?’ Notice that he uses the word ‘We’; he thought of faith as something shared, something corporate. But he had to do his own thinking. And if you feel that need you can’t.in good faith, suppress it.

It is in this sense that my paper will be an individual and personal one. I haven’t any distinctive experience to offer you; and what I have to say will, I think, be of general rather than of personal interest. Still, since it does come from an individual I ought to say something about the background of temperament, experience, orientation and interest which lie behind it, and which may help you to place what I have to say, and therefore to assess it for yourselves.