Alasdair Maclntyre has argued that, despite its ‘rhetoric of consensus’, modern society is irreducibly pluralist since it lacks the basic condition necessary for securing agreement on the truth of competing convictions — namely, some background consensus as to the nature and procedures of rationality. Even if the possibilities of affirming truth in the public sphere may not be quite as grim as Maclntyre makes out (and it seems to me to universalize an apt description of American public society), we are nonetheless still left with disconcerting questions as to the nature of public truth. Has public discourse been relativised into competing truth-claims? Is it possible to speak now of a common public world, of society, at all? Or of rationality? Indeed, if truth cannot be made the subject of public agreement, can we really speak any more of truth at all? How, in this situation, can Christianity claim to have an absolute and universal Truth? And how might it gain a public hearing for its truth?

In contemporary Scottish culture the subject of predestination is guaranteed to evoke a variety of reactions ranging from horror and disgust on the one hand to laughter and ridicule on the other. It is viewed by some as a nightmare scenario devised by Christian theologians in their worst moments, while for odiers it is a ludicrous aberration of the medieval and Reformation mind. It is perceived frequently as the trademark of a theological mindset which is marked by harshness, legalism and a fatalistic attitude towards life. A clear example of this is Edwin Muir's biography of Knox which writes vitriolically of the oppression and tyranny of the predestinarian religion that was imported from Calvin's Geneva.

Early in his career Edward Bouverie Pusey paid visits to Germany, as a result of which he wrote a book, revealing the influence of both Hegel and Schleiermacher, on the development of German theology. Then came some form of personal crisis, as a result of which he repudiated the book, seeking out second hand copies in order to destroy them, and in his will requiring that it never be republished. The event was tragic not merely for Pusey's personal life, but because it can be taken as symbolic of the fate of English theology since then. As one commentator remarks, it was an attempt to answer modernism by ignoring it. ‘If modernism could not be defeated by intellect, it must be defeated by piety.’ As Stephen Sykes has pointed out, for nationalistic reasons – for it is the nationalist tendency of some tractarianism which is here the point – a breach between the different European traditions was opened and has meant that English systematic theology, never very strong, has suffered injuries from which it has not yet recovered.

Hans-Georg Gadamer and Michael Polanyi are interestingly close and yet surprisingly different. I want to illustrate their closeness and divergence at certain crucial points, and then draw from the comparison certain wider implications for understanding authorial intention and textual autonomy on the one hand, and genre and the nature of a gospel on the other.

Observers of the theological scene over the past twenty years have witnessed the growth of what can only be described as a new way of doing theology. That theology, like all disciplines, should be subject to change and innovation is unsurprising; neither is it surprising that new fashions or movements should – to appropriate some words of John Clare: