This article concentrates on the double foci of its sub-title which may be described as biblical and ecclesiastical, or historical and contemporary. It does not intend to offer a plan for the evangelisation of the Jews, but rather a perspective from which the Christian church may rethink an issue which has been with it from its inception.

Our peculiar dignity as persons seems to rest on our freedom of action, since freedom of action is required to make sense both out of moral responsibility and out of the God—man relationship. Indeed, the possession of freedom seems to be a (if not the) major justification for claims that humans are in an important way images of God. Furthermore, the most promising theodicies all ascribe a good portion of the evil experienced in the world to the free actions of human beings.

There was once a man who, upon asking about Presbyterianism, was handed the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Having read it, he replied: ‘This is all very well; I now understand the official beliefs of Presbyterians. But I am after not just beliefs, but the reality of everyday life: what is it like to be a Presbyterian? How does one distinctively feel about himself and the world, and to what practical consequences does this lead?’

Tillich claimed often and vehemently that the risk of faith in Jesus as the Christ ‘lies in quite a different dimension from the risk of accepting uncertain historical facts’.1 The ultimate concern expressed in and through Christology is free from the contingencies of history and the consequent possibility of falsification. Yet many critics have accused Tillich of making covert historical assumptions in an inconsistent manner, thus failing in practice to make good his claims. I wish to defend Tillich on his own systematic grounds from such criticism, but also finally to raise the question whether his grounds are tenable.

Whether or not one may wish to call it a renaissance in the doctrine of the Trinity, there has been a notable resurgence of interest in trinitarian thinking in recent theology. Some of the most suggestive contributions have been made by two theologians whose works are generally regarded as ‘eschatologically’ oriented. In a volume recently published in English as The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, Jürgen Moltmann attempts to develop a comprehensive doctrine of the trinitarian being of God taking up and expanding themes already set forth in such earlier works as The Crucified God, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, and several journal articles dealing with the ‘trinitarian history of God’. Throughout these works Moltmann was concerned to demonstrate the openness of the being of God for man and history and toward the future. The trinitarian differentiation and unity of God, he argued in various ways, is to be closely identified with the events of salvation history, especially the cross of Jesus. In his most recent book, he attempts to systematise this approach to the doctrine of God through a ‘salvation historical’ and ‘social’ doctrine of the Trinity. This work represents a major contribution to trinitarian thought and is both complex and wide-ranging in its treatment of the subject. It will be our concern here simply to investigate some of the major themes related to the problem of God's relationship to history, that is, God's ‘historicality’.

It has often been alleged that the liturgically-minded incline to indifference toward preaching and it must be confessed that Christian history has demonstrated that this is a plaint not wholly without foundation. The church has had its enthusiasts whose ardour for correctness in worship both in general character and in minute detail has left them somewhat short of concern for what has traditionally been deemed a high point in the Reformed cultus, the preaching of the Word. There has been a school of thought — now virtually it is to be hoped extinct — which was apt to exalt ‘worship’ above ‘mere preaching’. It developed partly no doubt in welcome reaction to another school of thought equally reprehensible in its lack of balance which relegated all of the service that preceded the sermon to the category of ‘preliminaries’. Any polarisation of worship and preaching, however, must be deprecated, for every part of the Christian cult is ‘worship’, and the sermon is an integral part of the cult. ‘The Word of God’, says the Roman Catholic scholar, Ambrosius Verheul, ‘read in the Epistle and Gospel must become a real message from God to us, men of the present, in the concrete circumstances of the world in which we live. Therefore Bible-reading demands an explanation. The Bible-reading evokes preaching, the homily, connecting with the content of what has been read.’