The question stated in the title of this paper may seem absurd to many who are unacquainted with the concerns of contemporary philosophy. ‘Is language about God fraudulent?’ How strange (they may say) that anyone should be silly enough to raise the question! Because, therefore, the seriousness of the issue and the genuineness of its challenge may not be immediately apparent to everyone, it will not be amiss to sample some of the ways in which innocent-seeming language is liable to mislead. The failure of philosophers to make such preliminary points—which to them are platitudes too familiar to require repetition—may account for the sense of unreality which many non-philosophers find in modern critiques.

To proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord over the world is to make a paradoxical statement. First, in the original sense of the word ‘paradox’, His lordship over the world is contrary to doxa, that is, received opinion, reason and experience. His sovereignty seems to the ordinary mind not less paradoxical than His mighty wonder of healing the man of the palsy which called forth the amazed exclamation: ‘We have seen strange things [paradoxa] today.’ We cannot see, neither can we prove the reality of His kingship. This is meant by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews: ‘Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. … But now we see not yet all things put under him.’ Then another sense of the word is suggested—though probably to non—Greeks only—by the New Testament meaning of the word doxa, glory—‘paradoxical’ being something that is contrary to glory—not simply devoid of it, but appearing as the very opposite of royal splendour and might, as weakness, helplessness, shame and mortality. Also in this second sense the lordship of Christ is highly paradoxical. The visions of the Apocalypse assign power and glory to the Lamb that was slain. And thirdly, in modern usage, the word ‘paradox’ means an apparently self-contradictory statement in which the truth is expressed by two contradictory but necessary propositions. In this sharpened sense of the paradox one would express the lordship of Christ only in terms of those features which indicate His lowly service, weakness, humiliation and shame.

In criticising the Protestantism of the Reformation period, F. R. Barry traces part of its weakness to what he calls ‘the still uncritical attitude of the reforming leaders to Scripture’ which ‘elevated the Jewish sacred books to the same level of status and inspiration as that of the Gospels and Epistles’. There is, he claims, ‘little trace in Calvin … that the Scripture to which he appeals as authoritative embraces the Sermon on the Mount’.

It is true that the theology of Tertullian and Novatian has linfluenced later trinitarian conceptions much more than Hippolytus has. His ecclesiology and soteriology, however, are an important point of transition from Irenaeus' doctrine of the Church and of Union with Christ towards the later conceptions of a mystical sacramental understanding of Union with Christ. Hippolytus is in many ways responsible for the development of a doctrine of participation in Christ expressed as deification or mystical union. His theological interest is limited to a part of Trenaeus' doctrine of participation: to the καινòς ἂνθρωπος, and hence to the Church as the assembly of the saints, the baptised, the just, who possess the Holy Spirit, and are connected with the apostles through the hierarchical episcopate.

The revised orders for the ordination of deacons and presbyters and the consecration of bishops were approved by the C.S.I. Synod in January 1958. The author must confess to some delay in writing this account of them; but this tardiness has at least given opportunity to begin with some comment on the essays Apostolic Succession, by Bishop Noel Hall, and ‘Episcopate’ and ‘Presbyterate’ in the Anglican Ordinal, by Professor J. M. Barkley, which appeared in Vol. 11, No. 2 (June 1958) of SJT.It may be a fruitful line of approach to this liturgical product of C.S.I, to set it beside the Anglican and Presbyterian standpoints concerning ordination, as stated in these essays, and to try and estimate what contribution it makes to the debate.