… the reliability of the kerygmatic tradition must not be questioned, for otherwise the eschatological event to which the kerygma testifies would be implicated in the relativity of all historical knowledge.

The title of this paper is neither provocative nor immediately arresting but it is at least descriptively accurate. These are remarks. They are only remarks. Their aim is to notice certain elements and direct (or perhaps I should say re-direct) attention to a classic in Christian literature. Part of what is meant in calling something ‘classic’ is that it addresses what used to be called without embarrassment ‘the universally human’. In these fragmented times of the sociological-political-economic-psychological-and-what-have-you person that expression has all but lost meaning. We find it difficult to recognise anything as classic and thus all but impossible to learn anything of lasting importance. What follows is an attempt to indicate at least a few of the ways in which The Imitation of Christ applies to us. In order to do this I must also indicate certain confused and misleading tendencies in the way we take our faith, tendencies which Thomas à Kempis was well aware of and for which he provides a corrective. My presentation may cause offense, however, and that offense may cause one not to take the book seriously. That would be a shame. The last thing I want is to get in the way of the book. There are many reasons for not taking the book seriously—all of them bad. There is one reason to take it seriously, and that reason is as deep and as rich and as painful as human existence.

The doctrine of justification, for Luther the articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae, was for the authors of the report Doctrine in the Church of England (1938) not worth mentioning. Here, however, the members of the Archbishops' Commission on Christian Doctrine were not representative of the Anglican tradition as a whole which has not been remiss in attending to the matter of justification. The doctrine presents a challenge to the Anglican attempt to find a via media and there are pronounced oscillations of emphasis in the Anglican tradition on this question, represented by Bishop Bull and J. H. Newman on the right and Hooker and F. D. Maurice on the left. Newman's Lectures on Justification provoked further efforts to find a synthesis and led, by the end of the nineteenth century, to a restatement of the doctrine of justification within Anglican theology, which though in certain respects catholic in form, was definitely evangelical in spirit.

Anyone who attempts to assess Max Weber's study of ancient Judaism must adopt two stances, those of the Old Testament specialist and of the sociologist, and I shall use these two view-points to provide the main structure of this article. I hope, nevertheless, to avoid becoming completely schizophrenic by drawing the two interpretations together in a final section. I should also make it clear that the discussion is based mainly upon those essays which were translated by Gerth and Martindale as Ancient Judaism, although these by no means exhaust the studies which Weber made of Hebrew religion.