In the following discussion I wish to demonstrate the basic homogeneity of Barth's thinking on the relationship between Divine self-disclosure and Religion. In order to restrict the discussion, reference will be made to the second edition of the commentary on Romans, the first volume of the Church Dogmatics, the essays: ‘The Humanity of God’and ‘The Christian Understanding of Revelation’, and volume four of the Dogmatics— for if there has been a significant change in the structure of Barth's thinking, one must expect to find such evidence in these basic sources. While the primary aim is to explore the relationship between Revelation and Religion, the discussion must necessarily take into consideration a number of secondary relationships which impinge upon the central theme at certain places. These secondary relationships as it happens, vary in accordance with the dialogical situation in which Barth formulates his argument. In Romans for example, the resurrection of Jesus occupies a pivotal position, but in the first volume of the Dogmatics he has shifted his attention to the significance of the Incarnation. Again, however, at the closing stages of volume four attention has swung back to the importance and relevance of the resurrection for Christian faith.

It was the observation of Princeton's James McCosh that ‘the reconciliation between the philosophy and the religion of Scotland was effected by Thomas Chalmers’. That Chalmers’ roots run deep in the soil prepared by the philosophy of Common Sense is indisputable. The Reid-Beattie-Stewart tradition in philosophy provided the backdrop against which the formation and development of Chalmers’ theology was framed. The important questions, however, are how Chalmers appropriated this philosophical tradition, for what ends he employed it, and to what extent it informed the content of his theology. It is certainly the case that Chalmers embraced Reid's repudiation of Locke's theory of ideas on both moral and religious grounds. The ‘constancy of nature’ whose rational and empirical demonstrability David Hume had called into question was crucial for Chalmers, and he attempted to reinstate it with the aid of every intellectual weapon the Scottish philosophers could provide. Furthermore, Chalmers accepted much of the programmatic work of the Common Sense philosophers in their efforts to ground morality and the ‘moral sense’ on a priori laws constitutive of the mind itself.

One of the more promising recent developments in Christian ethics is the attempt to re-think its starting point and its basis in the light of the advances in biblical studies which are recovering for the church the specificity of the biblical perspective. It is true that this concern to take the biblical perspective seriously must go hand in hand with another of the central themes of current ethical thinking, namely, the concern to pay close attention to the data of the concrete situation. Unfortunately, ‘situation ethics’, while commendable in its refusal of legalism and its openness to the givenness of the situation, is frequently lacking in any specifically Christian content, that is, content to which the biblical perspective has made at least some formative contribution. In this regard, the difficult problem is this: how do we appropriate the biblical perspective in such a way that it may illumine the present concrete situation and give shape to ethical decision? Not much progress has been made on the solution of this problem. Although in this article we are only working at one end of the spectrum, namely, one aspect of the biblical basis of Christian ethics, nevertheless we see this as part of the total problem of bridging the gap, for in fact this cannot be accomplished without the re-conceptualisation of ‘biblical ethics’ now taking place.

This article takes as its starting-point certain questions raised by Ernst Käsemann's recently-published essay ‘Das theologische Problem des Motivs vom Leibe Christi’; it is, however, principally concerned with Paul's earlier letters and, more specifically, with I Corinthians, but this is done in the conviction that these writings provide the key to the later ones, and not vice versa.