The Book of Genesis' story of how Adam and Eve were created innocent and brought about their own Fall evokes at least this particular kind of puzzlement: How could the two originally created and perfectly innocent humans, living in the presence of God and his supreme goodness, be persuaded to defy God and his special commands?

Perhaps the most striking feature of 1 Jn. is the teaching which it contains on sin. On the one hand there is the attitude taken by the author in 1:8ff- the Christian ought not to sin, but in fact does. He cannot claim to be sinless without lying. Nevertheless, if they confess their sins, Christians are consistently being forgiven through Christ. On the other hand there is the teaching in chapter three that the Christian does not sin and indeed cannot sin. This teaching is recapitulated in chapter five. The purpose of this article is to show that, far from being inconsistent, the writer of 1 Jn. is perfectly orthodox in his doctrine of sin and is, in fact, writing in a way completely appropriate to the circumstances.

John Hick begins his essay on verification by agreeing that ‘there are many different concepts of God’. Thus, at the outset of considering the problem of verifying any one concept, we are faced with a plurality. This complicates the question, since some concepts of God relate more easily to verification than do others. But Hick opts at the outset for a strong meaning for ‘verification’: the removal of ignorance or uncertainty concerning the truth of some proposition. Of course, we are faced with the question of whether ‘dealing with God’ really means dealing with propositions. All this aside, it is clear that some classical notions of God defy verification while others fit more easily.

His chapter title ‘Childish arguments for images at the Council of Nicaea (787)’, in John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, suggests the bitter and painful divisions that have arisen in the Church over the issue of image veneration. From Biblical through Patristic to Reformation times, Iconodule, Iconophile and Iconoclast dissension has remained unresolved. Calvin's 'disgust' at Nicaea IPs ‘absurdities’ and Orthodoxy's anathemas against Calvinist ‘heretics’ are symptomatic of the widespread disagreement and divergence in the Church over this fundamental question of the Faith.

Man, Sartre once wrote, is ‘nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.’ If he is to bejudged, therefore, it will have to be on the basis of his actions. As long as he is alive, however, his actions remain incomplete; he may continue in the same general direction, doing more or less the same kind of things he has always done, or he may change his course, thereby giving his life a totally different meaning. It was just such a change that Kierkegaard was hoping to find in Bishop Mynster. Mynster, he believed, was betraying Christianity by the kind of preaching he did and the kind of life heled; but he could redeem himself by declaring that it was not really the faith he was proclaiming, but rather some watered-down version of it. Kierkegaard therefore waited till the Bishop died and only then, after all his acts were complete, did he begin his famous ‘attack on Christendom’. Up till April the fifteenth 1980, the day Sartre died, it was likewise possible that a dramatic change would take place — perhaps a confession, like Aquinas’, that all he had written had merely been ‘straw’. But that was not to be; apparently Sartre died, not regretting anything he had said or done. This does not mean necessarily that the way is now open for an ‘attack on existentialism’; but it does mean that Sartre has become himself totally, as he would have put it, and we are in a position to apply to him those words that Inez, a character in Huis Clos, applied to Garcin: ‘One always dies too soon — or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are — your life and nothing else.’