Everywhere in Europe the translations of the Bible into the evernacular languages have been the strongest help towards Reformation. It would be a very attractive task to study in detail, to compare and to summarise the history of the Bible in the Reformation movement, from West to East and from South to North in Europe.2 John Knox tells us that, when the Act of Parliament of 1543 allowed the Scriptures to be read freely, this was ‘no small comfort to such as before were held in such bondage that they durst not have read the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, nor articles of their faith, in the English tongue, but they should have been accused of heresy. Then might have been seen the Bible lying almost upon every gentleman's table. The NT was borne about in many men's hand.3 By these words is given no doubt a true and striking picture of the general situation in Scotland in those days and this may be true also for the beginnings of the Reformation in other countries some decades earlier. The Scots reformer adds that, although for reasons of profit many acted in an inexcusable way with the new book, ‘yet thereby did the knowledge of God wondrously increase and God gave his Holy Spirit to simple men in great abundance’.

Now this is my first thesis: that the Bible in the early Reformation was passionately desired, not for the book as such, nor to have it as a weapon against the Church and its superfluous appendages, but as a help to find a better way to God.

Necessary being' is one of the terms by means of which Christian thought has sought to define the difference between God and man. The notion of necessary being, applied to God and withheld from man, indicates that God and man differ not merely in the characteristics which they possess but more fundamentally, in their modes of being, or in the fact that they exist in different senses of the word ‘exist’.

That such a distinction, however it may be best expressed, is essential to the Christian concept of God is agreed virtually on all hands. Paul Tillich in our own day emphasises the distinction to the extent of using different terms to refer to the reality of God and of man respectively. Human beings and other created things exist; God, on the other hand, does not exist, but is Being-itself. This is the most recent way of formulating a discrimination which has been classically expressed in the history of Christian thought by the idea of the necessary being of God in contrast to the contingent being of man and of the whole created order. There are, however, two importantly different concepts which may be, and which have been, expressed by the phrase ‘necessary being’. ‘Necessity’, in a philosophical context, usually means logical necessity, and gives rise in theology to the concept of a being such that it is logically impossible that this being should not exist. But this is not the only kind of necessity referred to in philosophical literature.

Christian Baptism is rooted in the Baptism of John. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the excavation of Qumran have clearly shown that the Baptism practised by the Primitive Church had little in common with the daily washings of the Jewish sects. Our Baptism is an eschatological event. The foundational significance of the Baptist's ceremony performed in the Jordan river is emphasised by the fact that in all the four Gospels it is described as the beginning of Jesus' messianic ministry. The Gospel of John also informs us that Jesus shared in the Baptist's mission (John 3.22), even though He obviously left the actual ministration to His Disciples (John 4.2). Thus the Baptism which Jesus Himself commanded (Matt. 28.19–20), was the continuation of the eschatological ceremony started by the Baptist, though enriched by the reference to the messianic work of Jesus. The unique character of John's Baptism lies in the Word of God by which he is commanded to call Israel to repentance, to baptise them and to proclaim to them that his work is to usher in the establishment of God's final rule (the ‘Kingdom’) in this world. By accepting Baptism the Jewish people will be able to escape the final Judgment of God. The connexion in which the Word of God here stands with the eschatological events makes particularly plain what it means when God reveals Himself.

The following sketch on the role of the laity (a) in the Church (b) in the world is the result of study by a group of laymen. During the course of the study four questions arose: (1) what is the meaning of ‘laity’? (2) what is the place of the laity in the Church? (3) what is the meaning of Ministry? (4) what is the ministry of the laity? In seeking to formulate a lay self-consciousness, especially vis-à-vis the Ministry, we answered these questions as summarised here and came to the general conclusion that laity and ministry are correlative and polar forces in the life of the whole people of God. The laity is ministered to in the Church by the clergy, and then becomes the ministry to the world. Let us examine these four questions.

(a) I Peter 2.9 (‘But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people …’) affords the most pregnant description of the term laity. Admittedly there is a note of lyricism in the turn of phrase, yet the sense of what the laos is gains rather than loses thereby. The meaning is enriched if one approaches the sentence liturgically rather than homiletically. No doubt the laos is a ‘chosen race’ by election and covenant, a ‘royal priesthood’ through its mediatorial position, a ‘holy nation’ set among the nations of this sinful world (a meaty text indeed for any preacher!).

The word liturgy in the New Testament seems to express a thing already complete in itself, not requiring association with architecture. The minister, the people, the bread and the wine, are the essential association of living souls and earthly elements. The Christian temple built in three days is an edifice not made with hands. The Christian worshipping, fulfilling the duty of liturgy, is a person not of this world and only in this world for a time. He treads this earth lightly, looking for the appearing of His Lord to build a new earth, and introduce a state of things where human dimensions of length, breadth and height become something else and infinitely greater, associated with the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. The New Testament uses the word liturgy in the context of expectation of this development which can only be described in language seeming to exclude the thought that a building fit to house this Christian worship can be made with hands. The word church never means the house itself. It means the people, the living stones out of which the temple not made with hands is built. Thus what we call the apostolic age would not have thought it an affectation, when recently an Anglican presbyter, introducing from his church on Saturday evening television a programme for the next day to consist of the liturgy for that day, said, ‘This building is not the church, but the Church meets here.’

For whom, and with what special purpose, was St. Matthew's Gospel written? The thesis of this paper is, that it was written after the Fall of Jerusalem by a Jewish Christian for the Great Church, which by then was predominantly Gentile, with the special purpose of bringing to Gentile Christians the moral and spiritual teaching which Jerusalem had preserved and which they sorely needed.

One problem of Matthew is this: that the Evangelist, while reproducing with great care the testimony of the sources which he accepts as authoritative (namely, Mark, Q,, and M which contained the tradition of the Church of Jerusalem over which St. James had presided), does not attempt to reconcile them. As we shall see, it is hard to think that if our Lord said that ‘till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished’ (5.18), He could also have said ‘It is not that which enters the mouth that makes a man unclean, but that which comes out of his mouth is what makes him unclean’ (15.11, cf. Mark 7.15), since this saying repeals the whole of Leviticus 11, on unclean foods. Again, if He commanded His disciples to do and observe all that was laid down by the Scribes who sat on Moses' seat (23.1–3), how could He have so trenchantly criticised the Tradition of the elders as leading in actual cases to breach of the Fifth Commandment (15.1–9, cf. Mark 7.5–13)?