It was out of this profound religious experience of Luther—the depth of which is far from being plumbed in this verse—that his concept of grace was formulated, a concept which in its broad outline indicated the main lines of discussion for subsequent Protestant theology. Like Paul and Augustine before him, his theology was the outgrowth of an experience so traumatic that the whole course of his life was irrevocably transformed.‘Driven into a monastery by fear of the wrath of God and by the desire to earn divine forgiveness and approval by meritorious works, he discovered that it was impossible to secure peace of mind by such a method, and was finally led to believe that the only road to peace lay in repudiating all righteousness of his own, and depending wholly upon the free grace of God in Christ.’

It is the purpose of this introductory, critical survey to indicate some major contributions of Rudolf Bultmann and his successors, and to describe some of the more important problems which have been raised by these contributions.

Paul Tillich did not contribute a detailed essay to the discussion of the programme of ‘Entmythologisierung’ (demythologising) as did Karl Barth or Karl Jaspers. However, it will not escape the reader of his works that Tillich has often expressed his views on this theme, though it be only by a brief reference. The question of the interpretation of myth has not only engaged him during the last decade; on the contrary, more than 30 years ago, Tillich had explained his position in systematic form in the article on myth in the 2nd edition of Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Tillich has not substantially departed from the essential points of this position. On the one hand, Tillich is concerned with the fundamental distinction between unbroken and broken myth, and on the other hand, with the equally characteristic relation which he draws between myth and symbol. These definitions and questions permit us in the following detailed interpretation to construct a form adequate to Tillich's thinking. First we will present Tillich's understanding of unbroken myth, and second, his definition of broken myth, which in its determining points is an interpretation having recourse to his definition of symbol.

It is ironic to reflect that Newman explicitly said that he did not wish his life to be written and that during the last few years something like a dozen biographies of him have appeared, some of which indeed tell us nothing new. At last we have—at any rate as far as material is concerned—as full a biography as we can hope to get. This is Miss Meriol Trevor's two-volume work based on the unpublished material at the Birmingham Oratory. As one would expect, Miss Trevor tells her story very well, but her portrait of Newman is marred by a too sentimental approach to her subject, and this may lend credence to the view, which has been widely canvassed, that Newman is an enigmatic figure. This is extremely strange in view of James Anthony Froude's description of him as ‘the most transparent of men, and Newman's own assertion that it was most repugnant to his nature to conceal things. Father Dessain rightly repudiates the suspicion that there was anything in Newman himself to hide and has decided not to help perpetuate this notion of the mystery of Newman by publishing a selection of the letters rather than the voluminous correspondence in its completeness. Seldom indeed has a man been at more pains both to understand himself and to reveal the workings of his mind, and seldom has anyone had greater mastery of lucid expression to enable him to say what he meant.

Of all our theological disciplines Christian ethics appears to be the one most open to attack. However careful the modern exponents of Calvinism have been in setting forth the truths of God's sovereignty and human depravity, they have sometimes used language which suggests that, since all good actions are the outcome of God's grace, ‘Christianity transcends morality altogether, and there is no such thing as a Christian ethic’. Again the apparently rigorous determinism of both Dialectical Materialism and Freudian Psychology has been interpreted in popular thought as removing every possibility of moral responsibility, for men's actions are thought to be as mechanistically determined as all other events in physical nature. Today the emphasis on personal decision in much existentialist thought is a welcome reaction against such determinisms whether theological or scientific. Yet the very demand for a new recognition of human freedom has sparked off a new attack on the Christian ethic, at any rate as this has been taught in the tradition of the Church. This ethic is now being labelled authoritarian, puritan, legalistic, rigoristic, heteronomous and the like, and it is taken for granted that these are all derogatory terms. If we are to seek a slogan for this new attack, we cannot find a better one than the familiar, if not quite accurate, translation of the saying of St. Augustine, ‘Love and do what you like’, and it is by examining this principle, that we shall try to gain some light on the position of Christian ethics today.

These verses form a clear and independent section, summing up in memorable and penetrating phrases the criticism levelled by Isaiah the prophet against the religion of his contemporaries.