It has been said that nonsense talked about God is still nonsense. To some, this may seem a simple reminder that it is easy to lapse into nonsense when discussing the sublimities of religion. Of late, however, there has been voiced a suspicion on the part of many philosophers that the situation is worse than this. There are those who claim that it is impossible to avoid incoherence when speaking of God. It would be a mistake to place Michael Durrant, one of Britain's more respected philosophers of religion, in the camp of those convinced that God-talk is necessarily a species of nonsense. For one thing, he identifies himself as one who continues to wrestle with the philosophical problems generated by theistic discourse, from within the Church.1 Nevertheless two recently published books by Durrant2 illustrate nicely the view that God-talk appears, at least, to be riddled with fatal, logical infirmities.

Bultmann characterises Christian ethics as an ethics of ‘obedience’. By this he means to keep in the forefront the existentialist conception of man as an encountering being, one whose authentic, as well as inauthentic life is constituted by his response to the demands (and also the blessings) proffered him in the Now of his concrete situation. Since every concrete Now demands decision concerning his self-understanding, man is always confronted with an absolute either/or: to ‘obey’ or not.

It is necessary first of all to consider what is meant by the word ‘typology’. There is a world of difference between the use of τ⋯πoς (‘type’) in the Bible and many of the fanciful interpretations which were called ‘types’ in the early Church, or between the use of typology in modern biblical scholarship and in modern church life. Two main conceptions of typology are to be found today. Recently a number of biblical scholars, notably Gerhard von Rad, have used the term to describe the interpretation of history involved in the ‘promise-fulfilment’ approach to the relationship between the Testaments. Alongside this there are those who perpetuate fanciful kinds of biblical interpretation closely related to allegory and symbolism, referring to them as typology. The place of typology in the Christian use of the Old Testament depends entirely therefore on what is meant by the word.

In 1965, Prof. Bolaji Idowu, President of the Methodist Church of Nigeria, castigated African Christians for being content with imported western theologies which were imperfectly understood and meaningless in the African context. He also lamented the fact that after almost two hundred years of Christian experience in Africa, African Christians have neglected the fundamental task of relating the Gospel message to political, social, and cultural milieux of African peoples. Africans must, Idowu claimed, produce indigenous theologies which will satisfy the deepest, emotional and spiritual needs of Africans.1 When Idowu wrote in 1965, expressions like ‘African Theology’, ‘African Christian Theology’, ‘Theologia Africana’, were hardly, if ever used, though some attempts were made to relate the Gospel message to the diverse social, political, and cultural situations in Africa. In the political sphere, violent winds of change were blowing throughout the continent; the rapid growth of Independent churches was an indication that some African Christians were, at least, dissatisfied with the imported theologies, Church structures, patterns of ministry and liturgical forms, which had been introduced by western Christian missionaries into Africa.