The age-old device of using a text is an extremely useful one. A text summarises—or should summarise—what the preacher has to say; and, even if, as is often the case, the congregation forget the contents of the sermon almost straight away, there is just a chance that they will remember the text. As an eighteenth-century divine wisely observed in advising young clergymen, ‘Propose one point in one discourse, and stick to it; a hearer never carries away more than one impression.’The text and the one point of this paper is evident from the title: ‘The philosophy of religion, the banner of a sect.’

IT is an interesting commentary upon the place of theology in our Western culture and society to observe how many of the phrases we normally associate with it carry overtones of conflict and argument. ‘Science and religion’, ‘faith and reason’, ‘reason and revelation’, ‘history and the Gospels’, ‘proof and belief’—not all of them antithetic to one another, but all of them areas within which there has been in the last century in all cases and much longer in some, much violent discussion. So the picture has been built up of theology as contained within a ring of frontiers, across which it seeks to parley with those on the other side, to exchange meanings, to transfer information, if only to the extent of saying what each thought of the other.On one of these frontiers theology had a long conversation with science as to the understanding of the Genesis story of Creation in the light of evolutionary theories, or of the Christology of the two natures and the one Person in the light of modern psychological views of the unity of personality; across another frontier, with the historians as to what constituted the historically credible or possible and as to whether theological presuppositions distorted historical narrative; across another frontier with the sociologists, as to whether human responsibility could still be affirmed in the midst of the vast tissue of modern economic, social and political pressures; again with the moralists, over the reconciliation of grace and freedom and the imperative of morality with the indicative of faith; while time would fail to tell of the Gideons, the Baraks and the Samsons, who have broken swords with philosophers over the veridical nature of religious knowledge, over the proofs of Divine existence and the nature of Revelation.

In the Acts of the Apostles there are ten accounts of individuals or groups of people being baptised. In six of them there is either a statement that the candidate for Baptism believed or a reference to belief in what immediately precedes the account of the Baptism. In the other four cases as well, Baptism was obviously preceded by a response of faith on the part of the candidate; the crowd at Pentecost had been told to repent and receive the Word; Saul of Tarsus had just had a most dramatic experience of conscious conversion; Lydia's heart had been opened to give heed to St. Paul's message; and one form of the story of the Ethiopian eunuch describes Philip as demanding belief as a condition of Baptism, and the eunuch as confessing his belief; if this be a later addition, it provides even stronger evidence that in the practice of the early Church the response, of conscious faith preceded Baptism.

The title given to this paper makes clear what it sets out to do. The ‘mission of the Church’ is the work which the Church is meant to carry out, and the inclusion of the epithet ‘redemptive’ indicates that what is in mind is the Church's mission in relation to the world (she has also her Godward mission of offering worship). The aim, then, is to indicate the principles by which the Church must be guided as she seeks to fulfil her manward vocation, which is one of bringing men to redemption; and I propose to draw out these principles by following three lines, which I call the primary, the secondary, and the tertiary, because I believe that they should always be thought of in that order, though I do not think it possible for any of them to exist without the others. The mission of the Church, primarily, is to bring men into confrontation with God; secondarily, it is to bring men into the fellowship of the Church; tertiarily, it is to redeem society as a whole.

The Church of England in the sixteenth century cast off allegiance to the Papacy and underwent (more especially in the critical years 1549, 1552, and 1559) a considerable measure of doctrinal purification and reformation. The Reformation was in England, however, carried out on conservative lines, and the main dogmas of the Faith, as set forth in the traditional Creeds, were accepted and handed on without question. One of the XXXIX Articles (Article VIII) lays it down that ‘The three Creeds, Nicene Creed, Athanasius’ Creed, and that which is commonly called the Apostles' Creed, ought thoroughly to be received and believed: for they may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture.'

This passage must surely be unique in the variety and contrasts of the interpretations proposed by commentators and theologians. Not only are there at least three main lines of exegesis distinguishable, but within and across these general lines scholars disagree radically as to the source of St. Paul's teaching, its relation to 1 Cor. 15, its value as evidence of the Apostle's thought, and even its basic subject matter. Thus while Windisch (Commentary on II Corinthians, in loc), W. L. Knox (St. Paul and the Church of the Gentiles, pp. 128–43) and Rudolf Bultmann (Theology of the Mew Testament, I, pp. 201–2) regard the passage as evidence that St. Paul had modified traditional Jewish eschatology by introducing Hellenistic themes, Walter Grundmann (articles on εκδημεω,ενδημεω in Kittel's T.W.N.T. II, pp. 62–4), W. D. Davies (Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, pp. 308–14) and Schweitzer (The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, p. 134) maintain that the language can be explained without recourse to direct Hellenistic influence. Whereas Davies (op. cit., pp. 310–11) and Bultmann (op. cit., p. 201) believe that between 1 Cor. 15 and 2 Cor. 5 the Apostle's thought had undergone a significant development, G. B. Stevens (The Pauline Theology, p. 343 note 1), H. A. A. Kennedy (St. Paul's Conception of the Last Things, pp. 264–72), Alfred Plummer (II Corinthians, pp. 160–4), L. S. Thornton (The-Common Life in the Body of Christ, pp. 284–6) and H. L. Goudge (The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, pp. 45–55) deny any such development.