‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God the Father and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all.’ This is an ancient form of benediction very generally used in the Christian church. I should like to take it up here, asking what is meant by ‘the fellowship of the Holy Spirit’? Does the divine Spirit enter into community with us human beings? Does he admit us into his ‘community’ with the Father and the Son? Why does the benediction not talk about divine sovereignty and absolute human dependence in connection with the Holy Spirit? Why does it so emphatically use the word ‘fellowship’ instead?

‘Teaching about Jesus' sonship is not a characteristic or important aspect of Luke's writing’, claims J. D. G. Dunn.1 Indeed the arguments he adduces to support this statement may have some validity. But nevertheless this paper will propose that the concept of Jesus as son may well be the characteristic and most important aspect of Luke's writing. It is vital to state at the outset then that we do not propose to argue with Dunn on his own terms; this study will rather be devoted to consideration of the Lukan concept of sonship from the rather different approach of his narrative technique.

Controversy forced Luther into a confessional position which history has hardened almost into a kind of denominationalism. The subsequent rise of the ‘Lutheran’ Church, and of ‘Lutheran’ theology, owing to Luther's excommunication and his exclusion from the Roman Catholic Church, have contributed to a general acceptance of this evaluation. Save for a few distinguished Roman Catholic and Protestant scholars, who have worked on the sources and allow Luther to speak for himself, most historians, and certainly the general reader, work on the assumption that Luther is such a ‘confessional’ figure. To find a truer understanding of Luther, of what he was concerned to say to the Church of his day, it is necessary to detach him from this confessional, denominational location by setting him in the Catholic environment in which he was born, in which he was educated, and to which he felt called by God to speak the Word of God. He should be seen as a reformer of a Catholicism which had largely become de-spiritualised and secularised. He offered a reformatio of that which had suffered a de-formatio, and did so for the sake of God, propter deum, as he put it. He sought only to reform a Catholicism which he loved, and to reform it, not as he thought fit, but according to the intent of Jesus Christ and his Apostles, and that on the lines of solid biblical scholarship, authentic tradition and fair argument.

‘We have thus arrived at the answer to our question, What is Darwinism?’ wrote Charles Hodge in 1874;‘It is Atheism.’ As is commonly the fate of great men, Hodge's conclusion has frequently been reduced to mere crusade slogan, more often reported than examined, more often repeated than explained. It is for this reason, then, together with Hodge's formative role in the construction of modern conservative evangelicalism, that I want to turn in the first part of this esssay to his response to Darwin's theory of evolution. Moreover, with the recent emergence of a vociferous and uncompromising ‘scientific creationist’ movement claiming the imprimatur of theological orthodoxy, a reassessment of the reaction to Darwin by the powerful ‘Old School’ Princetonians in its broader intellectual context is, I think, both timely and instructive. And Hodge's central position in that tradition makes reflection on his response to the question a logical place to begin.

Edward Schillebeeckx in The Understanding of Faith (1974, 154) defined or described theology as ‘the critical self-consciousness of Christian praxis in the world and the church’. Others may prefer another definition, but it can be agreed that Christian theology is not revelation and it is not church doctrine; both of these while inevitably formulated within time yet lay claim to, and acquire, a certain degree of timelessness which is neither possible nor desirable for ‘theology’. Theology rather requires a continuous contemporaneity. It is a ‘critical self consciousness’ — an extended intelligent response of men of faith both to the word of God and to their own world. At times it may appear to concentrate more upon that word, as found in the Scriptures, while interpreting and applying it aptly and acutely in the light of contemporary culture; at other times theology will appear to concentrate more upon the contemporary world, or upon some part of it decisively significant for this theologian or the group of christians of which he or she forms part, interpreting it and judging it in the light of scripture. Behind appearances theology, to be true to itself, has always to do both.