The Church is grounded in the Being and Life of God, and rooted in the eternal purpose of the Father to send His Son, Jesus Christ, to be the Head and Saviour of all things. The Church does not exist by and for itself, and therefore cannot be known or interpreted out of itself. Both the source and the goal of the Church are in the eternal love of God which has overflowed in the creation and redemption of the world. God has not willed to live alone, but to create and seek others distinct from Himself upon whom to pour out His Spirit, that He might share with them His divine life and glory, and as Father, Son and Holy Spirit dwell in their midst for ever. God will not be without His Church; the Church is nothing without God. But in God the Church exists as the supreme object of divine grace, and in the Church God is pleased to live His divine life and manifest His divine glory. That is the mystery and destiny of the Church, hidden from the foundation of the world, but revealed and fulfilled in the Incarnation of the Son of God and in His glorious work of redemption, for in Jesus Christ the Church as the redeemed people of God is the crown of creation living in praise and gratitude to the Creator and reflecting with all things, visible and invisible, the glory of the eternal God.

In twenty centuries theological anthropology has hardly seen a more revolutionary method than that proposed by Karl Barth in Church Dogmatics 111.2 of founding anthropology on Christology. At the outset, however, Barth makes clear that ‘there can be no question of a direct equation of human nature as we know it in ourselves with the human nature of Jesus, and therefore of a simple deduction of anthropology from Christology’. That is, Barth intends that the method of theological anthropology avoid monism.

Anyone who enters the batter's box of contemporary theology carrying a bat labelled ‘apologetics’ finds that he has two strikes against him before he even begins. Gone are the days when Christian apologetics held a prominent position in theological endeavour. Today such issues as the nature and situation of man, Christian ethics, the unity of the church, and the task of missions dominate the centre of the theological stage. Undoubtedly this is as it should be and it is not the purpose of this article to belittle any of these concerns. There are, however, certain observations which do bear mentioning with regard to the importance of apologetics for contemporary theology. To begin with, it should be noted that the primary purpose of all theological endeavour is to come to a better understanding of the Christian message and effectively to relate it to man and his situation. Even the above-mentioned areas of contemporary concern all have as their ultimate aim to witness to the new life in Christ. The significance of this fact is appreciated when one realises that apologetics also has this witness as its ultimate purpose. It is clear that apologetics is not unrelated to the basic theological task of this or any age.

‘The doctrinal history of the English Reformation’, writes J. Brilioth, ‘is only of secondary interest; it contains little creative originality, much imitation and compromise. But the problem of the Eucharist took a prominent place from the very start.’ Indeed, he postulates a ‘special Anglican Eucharistic type’, stemming from the Reformation period. It is with the formulation of the doctrine of the Eucharist in the writings of Richard Hooker that this study is concerned. Hooker is regarded as ‘par excellence the apologist of the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 and perhaps the most accomplished advocate that Anglicanism has ever had’. And since it is maintained that ‘the typical Anglican doctrine of the Eucharist was fashioned in the period between Hooker and Waterland’, Hooker's historical importance for the understanding of Anglican Eucharistic teaching is obvious. Not that Hooker's teaching was normative for his successors, for there were deviations both to the ‘left’ and, more notably, to the ‘right’, especially under the Caroline divines. But Hooker's influence was important for the evolution of the ‘central’ churchmanship that was to be most characteristic of the Anglican Church.

More scholarly lances have been broken, with apparently less conclusiveness over Isa. 40–55, the so-called Second Isaiah, than over any comparable section of the Old Testament. Ever since B. Duhm1 published towards the end of last century his epoch-making commentary, two interrelated problems have been at the centre of scholarly discussion.

Amidst all the current discussion of the and of the early Church and the NT meaning of these expressions, there is one word which curiously seems to have been overlooked—curiously, because when it is the preaching of the Word of God which is under debate one would have expected the word to have received more attention than it has.1 Attention has fallen heavily upon —a rare word in the NT, but scarcely at all upon —a very common word in the NT. Indeed in the Acts of the Apostles, a book whose chief theme is the spread of the preaching of the Gospel from Jerusalem to Rome, occurs not at all, only twice (and then in close dependence upon ), but nearly forty times! These figures compel us to pay more attention to the word : if the meaning ‘proclamation’ is important in understanding the , and the meaning of ‘good news’ is important in understanding the , how is the meaning of ‘speaking’ or ‘speech’ important in understanding the designation of the early preaching as ?

It is the purpose of this article to examine how the evangelists used the term in the synoptic Gospels, to see what they and Jesus thought of His words, His speech and its relationship to His being, His person.