The problem of Scripture and tradition is again causing much discussion both among Catholic and among Protestant theologians. It is certainly no exaggeration to say that since the Reformation this question has never been so much to the fore as it is today. And the outstanding characteristic of this discussion is the fact that both sides realise the problem can no longer be posed in the same way as it was during the Reformation period, and especially during the period of great religious controversies after the Reformation. That is a good sign, for it is the first condition for progress in interconfessional discussion. The development of the Roman Catholic and Reformation Churches, and especially the new theological situation, compel us to re-examine the teaching of Scripture and of tradition, and the relation between them. This research is now being carried out very thoroughly by both confessions—but the situation is still by no means clear; it remains very complex. From both confessions we are waiting to hear what the outcome will be.

I am not here concerned with the harmony of faith and reason, but rather with the inner meaning of faith as an acceptance of truth on the Word of God. The second half of the article will indicate a difference of emphasis among Protestants and Catholics as to the connotations of the word ‘faith’. It will attempt to justify the Catholic tradition, while suggesting that the difference of emphasis need not necessarily imply lack of common ground for mutual understanding.

It is appropriate to begin this presentation with an extended citation from Luther, where this founder of ‘Protestant thought’ develops what he means by ‘justification by faith’. We read in the Large Commentary to the Galatians:

Faith lays hold upon Christ and has Him present, enclosing Him as the ring encloses the precious stone which is set in it. And he who is found to have laid hold upon Christ with such a faith and have Him in his heart, God counts for righteous. This is the reason or the merit through which we receive the forgiveness of sins and righteousness. Because you believe in Me, says God, and because your faith lays hold upon Christ, whom I have given to you to be your Justifier and Saviour, therefore be thou righteous… And it is altogether necessary that God accepts us or counts us as righteous, first because we are not yet in this life wholly righteous, rather in this life sin always remains in the flesh. This sin remaining in the flesh God purges from us. Further we are also sometimes abandoned by the Holy Spirit and fall into sin, like Peter, David and other saints. But then we may always fall back upon this doctrine, that our sins are covered and that God will not impute them unto us (Rom. 4.7f).

It is important for the historian that he should exercise a salutary scepticism towards his materials and his sources, but even more important that he should adopt this detachment towards himself, and when confronted by apparent confusion and contradiction in some great figure of the past, to ask whether perhaps he himself as historian may be asking the wrong questions, and evaluating another century in the themes and categories of a later age. This is particularly true about Luther's doctrines of the Church. For while there is no doctrine of the Church which does not somewhere blur its edges (by reason of the eternal and eschatological dimension intersecting the empirical and historical plane) and Luther's is no exception, there is I think a demonstrably consistent core to his teaching, from the beginning to the end of his career.

A century of intense research on Mark has largely failed to reach generally accepted conclusions either as to the theology of Mark, or as to the degree of legitimacy and the methodology of using Mark as a source for discussing Jesus. This confusion in Marcan research is due in large measure to a failure to reach clarity as to Mark's understanding of history, a problem which should logically have been resolved before any attempt was made to use Mark as a historical source for the study of Jesus. The nineteenth century, reaching its climax in H. J. Holtzmann, assumed that since Mark was the earliest gospel it was most historical, i.e. that Mark wrote history with much the same presuppositions as did the modern historian. History consists in the interaction of human wills and actions, and is to be explained by locating the causal connexions in the intentions and actions of men. For example, Mark 6.14–29 records the beheading of John by Herod; the next paragraph records Jesus withdrawing to privacy for rest with the disciples. Mark was assumed to mean—although remarkably enough he in no word hinted it—that one event followed chronologically upon the other and was caused by the other.

A few years ago a leading Scottish theologian drew attention to the recent tendency among continental Protestant theologians to ‘write off: natural theology. This, he suggested, had been accepted with undue complacency by certain Scottish writers, and he rightly drew attention to the fact that there was a great, indeed a predominant, tradition in the Christian Church, which accepted natural theology, and that among Scottish theologians, no less a man than Thomas Chalmers would have been shocked at the suggestion that natural theology was invalid.

The aim of the following paragraphs is to say something which, without exhausting the topic or even examining anything like every instance of prayer recorded in the OT, will yet permit us to form some opinion of what the Hebrew thought he was doing when he turned to God in prayer. I had better make clear at the outset that I am confining myself almost exclusively to prayer as between man and God, for until I started looking around I had no idea how indefinite are the boundaries of prayer; one writer even includes remarks on the musical instruments of the Bible! Inclusions more easily justified are the ascriptions of praise to Yahweh; but I have thought it better on the whole to confine myself to the field of petition and intercession, i.e. where the pray-er asks for something; since, on the whole, prayer—at least on the more primitive level—might be defined without being too wide of the mark, as man's attempt to get God to meet a particular need—a need very often, according to the ancient view, brought about and inflicted upon him as a punishment for some dereliction of duty.

It was the constant assumption of the Israelite that happiness was the condition intended by Yahweh to be the normal state of the good man:

Blessed [i.e. happy] is the nation whose God is Yahweh. (Ps. 33.12)