The name of Rudolph Bultmann has recently become specially associated with the proposal to demythologise the New Testament and reinterpret it in terms of a Christian existentialism. The discussion of this proposal will be further stimulated by the recent publication in English of Kerygma and Myth, which contains Bultmann's original essay on the subject and a selection of the contributions made by German scholars in the ensuing controversy. It appears to the present writer that insufficient attention has been given in discussion to the connexion between Bultmann's opinions on the historical Jesus and the proposal now so prominently before us. It may be that in Bultmann's teaching there is an underlying interplay between his criticism of the history and his hermeneutic proposal; such that on the one hand his estimate of the historical Jesus is influenced if not controlled by his general philosophical and theological assumptions, while on the other hand his radical conclusions regarding the history have tended to lead him to his extreme position as an interpreter.

The subject of this paper abounds in historical problems of an extremely intricate nature—some of which arise through the theologically close association of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit with the doctrine of the Holy Trinity; but others of which are rooted in a number of more particular controversies in which the Greek Fathers were involved concerning the Holy Spirit. Among the latter are to be found such questions as the precise identification of the persons against whom many of the Greek writings were directed, for example, who the ‘Tropici’ were, with whom Athanasius deals in the Letters to Serapion, whether ‘Pneumatomachi’ was a generic term used to describe a variety of different heretics, or a proper name referring to an identifiable group existing in one particular place, whether Macedonius was a Macedonian, and so on. Included in the intricate historical problems raised in our period, there is that of accounting for the revival towards the middle of the fourth century of an interest in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit— whether it was due to the developing influence of asceticism, or simply a reaction to a latter-day Arianism working itself out belatedly in heresy concerning the Holy Spirit, or more subtly, whether it was due to a necessity felt by the Church to give substance to the Person and Work of the Holy Spirit, now that the doctrine of the Trinity had replaced the doctrine of the Logos as her central and dominant doctrine.

The readers of this Journal have been told how the Church of South India's Order for the Lord's Supper first took shape (‘The Making of a Liturgy’, by the Rev. L. W. Brown, SJT, 4.1, March 1951). The Order has been studied in many countries; and indeed, of the English edition, more copies have been sold outside India than inside it! Some readers may like to know how it has worn. I report a full discussion of it in detail: the work was interesting to me, just because we were not handling large ideas with open minds; we had to consider details, and to decide one way or another.

There is probably no activity of man at once so congenial to his instincts and baffling to his intelligence as the worship of God. Worship may be described as congenial to man's instincts since it exists, and has existed, in some form or other in every human society, and is a recognisable impulse in even the most secularised product of a modern sceptical world. It may be described as baffling to his intelligence since it escapes the definitions of our scientific culture, and is, in fact, so unaccountable on any merely rational view of human nature that rationalism has handed the problem over to the psychologist to explain in terms of repressions, mother-fixations, infantile-regressions and the like. This modern rejection of worship with the surface of the mind, coupled with the persistence of the instinct in powerful and often perverted forms is worth examining in the light of the enduring summons of the Christian Church to the worship of Almighty God.

The great German scholar Martin Dibelius is said to have expressed his admiration for the Scottish Church during a visit to Scotland some years ago by declaring: ‘You have not yet lost the masses.’ The attitude of the masses towards the Church largely depends on the attitude of the Church towards the masses. This applies to the modern Church as much as it applied to the Church in which the Gospel was first proclaimed. Martin Dibelius himself stated in his work on Form-criticism (Die Formengeschichte des Evangeliums, 1933, pp. 50, 54, 64) that in the Gospels the multitude forms an impersonal choir whose main function it is to express amazement and admiration.