Converging lines of thought suggest that it may be timely to revive the memory of the ‘great, little man’, Thomas Halyburton. There is a new emphasis on the distinction between the knowledge of hearsay and the knowledge of the heart (the distinction which Robert Barclay had in mind when he contrasted ‘the saving heart-knowledge’ with ‘the soaring, airy head-knowledge’). A whole school of thought has grown up around the importance of the I-Thou relation. Karl Heim made a particularly notable contribution to the discussion of the theological problem uncovered by this philosophy, namely the question to what extent our knowledge of God is analogous with our knowledge of the other person; and in his God Transcendent he underlines the fact that, when we pass from one ‘dimension’ of thought to another, it is not by the way of syllogistic reasoning, but by a species of illumination. Side by side with this movement of thought has gone an increasing interest in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, who, drawing a sharp distinction between the natural sciences on the one hand and the humanistic studies on the other, sums up his wide and stimulating research in the principle, ‘We explain nature; but we understand the human spirit’.

In recent discussions the doctrine of the Church has been approached from an unusual angle, by way of certain conceptions found in the Old Testament, such as the Covenant, the Remnant, and the Suffering Servant. In this article I propose to examine the validity and significance of this approach.Is it legitimate to use the Old Testament in this way as a source of Christian doctrine? If so we must be quite clear what we are doing and why we are doing it. The importance of these ideas in the history of Israel is generally agreed. Their influence on the New Testament is obvious. But can we make them into normative and formative principles in the life of the Church for all time? In so doing we are not merely borrowing certain moral and religious ideas from the legacy of Israel and adding them to the store of Christian truth. That is a common practice which needs no special justification, because it does not affect the basis of Christian doctrine. Any theological jackdaw can collect whatever suits him from the prophetic writings and use it in building a Christian nest. But we are going to the Old Testament for the foundation plan of the Christian Church. We are applying the promises and attributes which belong by historic right to the sons of Abraham to the mission and destiny of the Church of Christ. There is a big assumption here which is too often taken for granted.

The consideration of this problem is important for at least two reasons. In many countries there are reports of an increasing decline in public morals and of growing dishonesty and corruption in the life of the body politic. This is taking place at a time when the established religious systems are being subjected to the pressure of pseudo-scientific secularism on the one hand and the claims of modern alternative faiths on the other. Clearly the two developments are interconnected. Yet, to judge from the burden of many public utterances of responsible leaders, including the now important and significant ‘Moral Re-armament’ Group, the close dependence of moral truth and the truth about the character of reality is not realised. Most people are content to mutter the usual platitudes—‘Honesty is the best policy’, ‘Do please try to be good and speak the truth’. But the problem of truth is more complicated than our naīve moralists would have us believe.

In his booklet The Teaching of the Church regarding Baptism, p. 46, Karl Barth discusses a curious Lutheran view ‘that baptism effects something quite different in children and in adults’. He adds, in a footnote: ‘Is it clear in present day missionary work, where there seems to be agreement in a double practice of baptism, that such presupposes a double teaching regarding the meaning of baptism?’ As a missionary, I should like to answer emphatically ‘No!’ When we are baptising a convert from another faith after careful preparation, and when we are baptising the infant child of believing parents, we are doing essentially the same thing.

In the days of Jesus and of Paul the Jewish religion had become to all intents and purposes a religion of the Law, a religion of which the central feature was the observance of the statutes, the commandments, and the judgments once delivered to the people by the agency of Moses. The Law had indeed so far replaced the Temple at the heart of the Jewish faith that that faith was able to continue and endure, as a religion centred in the Law, even when the Temple had been destroyed. It was the Law that differentiated the Jew from his Gentile neighbours, and the Law was his pride and his glory. Yet it is against the Law that Paul delivers one of the most emphatic and sustained attacks in the entire corpus of his letters.

The structure of this section, which is one of the two large blocks of teaching in Mark (the other being chapter 13), may be indicated as follows: That this is a composite section is fairly obvious. In v. 1 Jesus is sitting in a boat and in v. 36 he is apparently still in the boat, but vv. 10–20 presuppose a different scene. As things stand it is not clear to whom the teaching in vv. 21–32 was addressed. Are we to conclude from its relation to vv. 10–20 that it was addressed to the disciples alone, or are we to conclude from its relation to vv. 33 f. that it was addressed to the multitude? It seems likely that we have to do here with a number of originally independent pieces of tradition which have been brought together in several stages to form an artificial unity. Vv. 10–20 disturb the unity of scene of a grouping of parables and sayings which is probably itself artificial. But vv. 10–20 themselves are not originally a unit. Vv. 11–20 give a double answer to the disciples' question in v. 10. V. 13 (with the singular ‘this parable’) presupposes a question about the meaning of the particular parable and would follow on v. 10 quite smoothly. It is true that the plural ‘the parables’ in v. 10 might suggest a more general question, but it need not; and one wonders whether it represents a correction made in order to make the insertion of vv. 11 f. easier.