‘Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?’ This was the question (according to Mt. 11.2ff., Lk. 7.18ff.) with which John the Baptist sent his disciples to Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus replied by pointing to his works among those who embodied the defectiveness of creation, the blind, lame, lepers, the deaf, the poor and even the dead: all those who need the gospel. These are, as Matthew points out, the ‘deeds of the Christ’, messianic signs. Whether John's disciples have received a sufficient answer to their question, is left open by Jesus. But he does bless those who take no offence at what he, Jesus, is and does: salvation is experienced by everyone who ‘hears and sees’ that salvation is here revealed.

This paper is an attempt to follow up and expand on the following statement which I made in an earlier paper published in SJT: The Christian doctrine of original sin has no place within a rabbinic system which avoids the crucial difficulty in Christian theodicy — that of the creation of evil ex nihilo at the time of the Fall.

In developing this statement I would like to sound a warning note to NT and patristic scholars who utilise rabbinic sources as background material for the study of early Christianity. It is often assumed that rabbinic texts, along with the literary remains of the other sorts of Judaism in existence in the first century A.D., can be used as a mine of material for illustrating the sort of beliefs with which the early Christians started out and against which they subsequently reacted. Thus, for example, to approach closer to the title of this paper, in considering the famous Pauline passage on the Fall (Rom. 5.12–21), it is customary for NT scholars to marshall all the evidence from the OT, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and rabbinic Judaism to try and explain the origin of the Christian doctrine of the Fall and Original Sin. But all too often the rabbinic evidence is used rather indiscriminately without regard to the date of its origin or to the possibility that rabbinic views on these matters may have changed in the course of the centuries during which the Talmudic literature was evolving.

The sole influential Scottish lay theologian, Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, was born in Edinburgh on 13th October 1788, the fourth son of David Erskine, a W.S. of distinguished ancestry, a member of the Church of Scotland who bought the estate of Linlathen near Dundee but who died in 1791. So Thomas spent much of his boyhood at Airth Castle in a quiet privileged atmosphere under the devoted care of his maternal grandmother, Mrs Graham. She was a devout Episcopalian whose influence mellowed his Presbyterian inheritance so that he came to favour episcopal forms. Though holding a deep religious faith, he never became a communicant member of any Church, though he attended Episcopal, Presbyterian and Congregational services.

The centenary of the death of the Russian writer F. M. Dostoevsky (1821–81) is not merely an anniversary like any other, but a landmark in human history which deserves to be noted, observed and reflected upon. It is not just by chance that his novels and stories are still being read appreciatively, particularly by non-Russian speakers who have no background in Russian culture. Furthermore, it is not simply a desire to penetrate the secrets of the Russian heart, the peculiarities of the Russian character or the Russian style of life that creates their interest in his writings. Dostoevsky did of course reflect his own age and describe the situation in the Russia of his time, and it is valuable to study this aspect of his work. But it is not the whole. From the depth of his sensitive heart and with his prophetic finger this writer touched on something not exclusively Russian, but universal, global, even cosmic. He introduced philosophy and theology into a story in such a way that even a hundred years later everyone can find something familiar and personal in it, irrespective of his culture and language. He unearthed seeds which bore shoots many years later. He reflected in a Christian way on the crops and the future of what had been sown, and traced the mechanism of the historical process, not merely from the political and socio-economic point of view, but in human terms. This is probably the most significant feature of Dostoevsky's work.

Few people in our time have been more deeply concerned with thinking into each other again the inner substance of the evangelical and catholic emphases in the Church of Jesus Christ, than Oscar Cullmann. This has been especially evident in the way in which he has consistently sought to penetrate into the essential harmony of the Gospel that not only underlies the whole history of the Church but underpins the divisions between the Evangelical Churches and the Roman Catholic Church, bringing his unusually fresh understanding of the NT and the Early Church to bear constructively upon the areas of discord and friction, not least in respect of the concept of the Papacy. His many writings reveal unparalleled sensitivity and appreciation for the centrality of the biblical message, the sanctity of tradition and the continuity of worship in the redeemed life of the people of God, which have allowed him to bring together, without compromise, the concentration upon the core of the Gospel which has characterised the Evangelical Churches and the universal task and unifying order which have characterised the Catholic Churches.

Last year John Paul II published his encyclical, Laborem exercens (LE), and Roman Catholic social teaching was so much the richer for it. Only his illness prevented the encyclical from being published on the day of the ninetieth anniversary of the first encyclical on the question of work, Rerum novarum (1891), written by the great pope of the ‘social question’, Leo XIII. LE was intended to contribute to the ‘immortal fame of the encyclical, Rerum novarum’, as Pius XI said of his encyclical Quadragesimo anno (1931). This indicates a basic continuity of LE with the developments in Roman Catholic social teaching set in motion by Rerum novarum. In fact John Paul II explicitly states his intention to remain in organic connexion with these developments. And indeed, with respect to the content of the encyclical, one finds hardly anything fundamentally new.