The foundation of Christian belief,' states Paul Tillich, ‘is not the historical Jesus, but the biblical picture of the Christ.’1 This statement is only now beginning to elicit the serious comment that one might expect from the statement of so great a theologian as Paul Tillich. Tillich's penetrating analysis of the meaning of Jesus as the Christ is a profound contribution to the Christian understanding of the Incarnation. Donald Baillie was surely right, too, in expressing his enthusiasm for Tillich's christological interpretation of history when he stated that there seemed to him to be ‘deep truth … in the idea that Christology stands for the Christian interpretation of history as against other interpretations’.2 Even Tillich's claim that ‘to practise Christology does not mean to turn backward to an unknown historical past or to exert oneself about the applicability of questionable mythical categories to an unknown historical persoanality’,3 contains a refreshing and valid emphasis upon Christology as living existential faith rather than arid theoretical speculation. Yet Christianity has always maintained that its foundation is Jesus of Nazareth in whom the Word of God became flesh. Tilliach's Christology must therefore stand or fall on this christological question which he regards as quite subordinate: the question of the historical basis of the biblical picture of the Christ. If the foundation of Tillich's Christology is “not the historical Jesus, but the biblical picture of the Christ”, how much importance Tillich does actually allow the historical dimension in his Christology must be carefully examined.

The word ‘soul’ is extraordinarily difficult to define. There was no generally agreed teaching about the soul in the Christian Church until the Middle Ages. According to Aquinas, who here as elsewhere follows Aristotle, the soul is an individual spiritual substance, the ‘form’ of the body. Both body and soul together constitute the human unity, though (here Aquinas appears to depart from Aristotle) the soul may be severed from the body and lead a separate existence, as happens after death. The separation, however, is not final, as the soul, in this differing from the angels, was made for the body.

To ask ‘What place has tradition in Reformed theology?’ is to court from many adherents of that theology a vehement reply: ‘None!’ And such an answer is justified: there is ample evidence to show that at the time of the Reformation tradition was rejected. But there is also evidence to show that some elements of tradition were retained, and that in recent years its place has been reassessed. Those three ideas—rejection, retention and reassessment—provide suitable headings for our present study.

We have long been accustomed to thinking of the great prophet of the exile, whose words are recorded in Isa. 40–55, as the seer who first discerned plainly the truth that Yahweh is the only real God in existence, and who drew the inference that He must therefore be the God, not of Israel only, but of all men the world over. But we have not always borne in mind the way in which this revelation came to the prophet. This was no sudden disclosure, unrelated to Israel's previous experience of Yahweh; it was a revelation indeed, but it came to the prophet through the travail of his own and his people's experience in Babylon.

In his contribution to the volume Essays in Christology for Karl Barth, Professor D. M. Mackinnon wrote as follows: To acknowledge the supremacy of the Christology is to confess that finality belongs somehow to that which is particular and contingent, to that which has definite date and place, to that which is described by statements that are not ‘truths of reason’, or, in more modern language, ‘necessary propositions’. Further, it is to involve the confession of faith inextricably with the deliverances of flickering human perception and observation; indeed, the paradoxical and bewildering character of this involvement is clearly recognised in the New Testament itself, where, for instance, in the Fourth Gospel, the reader meets highly sophisticated discussion of the relations of seeing and believing. If he is a philosopher, as perhaps some of those for whom the author intended his book may have been, he will recognise a certain familiarity in the often tense and emotionally charged dialogue: he may even find in it, not simply echoes of the Platonists, but curious anticipations of what men of profoundly sceptical and critical intellect like Kant and Hume were later to write on the limitations of human sensibility, imagination and understanding.

To James 2.14–26 we may give the title, Of true faith. The clue to the understanding of the section is the fact (very often ignored) that in verse 14 (‘What doth it profit, my brethren, if a man say he hath faith, but have not works? can that faith save him?’) the author has not said, ‘if a man have faith’, but ‘if a man say he hath faith’.1 This fact should be allowed to control our interpretation of the whole paragraph. The second ‘faith’ in the verse is to be taken as in inverted commas. By ‘that faith’ (ἡ πίςτις) the writer means that thing which the man in question wrongly calls ‘faith’; he does not imply that he himself regards it as faith. When this is recognised, it is clear that the burden of this section is not (as is often supposed) that we are saved through faith plus works, but that we are saved through genuine, as opposed to counterfeit, faith.