The religious traditions in which the members of this Fellow-J. ship stand are at one in asserting that salvation is both needful and available. They are moreover at one in asserting that the prescribing and the provision of salvation take place within history, and that those who apprehend and appropriate it are historical beings.

The contentions of this essay are three. Our first thesis is that both contemporary philosophical and theological thought stand at an impasse. In philosophy the empiricists emphasise the significance of factual meaning to the exclusion of valuational meaning, while the existentialists stress the importance of valuational meaning to the exclusion of the factual. In theology the conservatives and liberals are united in stressing the historical (Historie) significance of Jesus so as almost to ignore his existential (Geschichte) significance, while the Bultmannians focus on the existential significance of Jesus and minimise the need for factual knowledge.

Bonhoeffer's Ethics demonstrates the depth of his christolJcentric theology. Every theme has at its very heart the action of God in the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. His work of substitutionary atonement and reconciliation becomes the basis for man's ethical responsibility. From this basic observation, we can see that Bonhoeffer will have nothing to do with a theology or ethics in which man is seeking the answer to the nature of his own being or the foundation of his own action within himself. ‘It is necessary to free oneself from the way of thinking which sets out from human problems and which asks for solutions on this basis. Such thinking is unbiblical. The way of Jesus Christ, and therefore the way of all Christian thinking leads not from the world to God but from God to the world’ (E 356).1 It is the seriousness with which he takes revelation and the inversion of the priorities of ‘liberal’ and ‘existential’ theology which is rigorously applied throughout his Ethics. Even in his Christology the question of ‘who’ Christ is is given priority over ‘what’ Christ did, though the person and work can never be separated.

The criticism that the Uppsala Assembly of the World Council of Churches did not give sufficient attention to theology is justified. But this fact should be set within the perspective of the deep crisis which the theological world as a whole faces today, and which constitutes the contemporary theological situation. What are some of the factors which have contributed to this situation? One may mention three of them.

The Westminster Directory for the Public Worship of God, 1645, acknowledged by Presbyterian Churches throughout the English-speaking world, emerged at a time of political controversy, when an attempt was made to achieve liturgical uniformity in England and Scotland, and therefore must be understood not only in terms of the theology which it embodies, but also in terms of the social and political revolution of which it was a kind of liturgical manifesto. The immediate context was that of a national struggle for freedom, a revolt from all forms of ‘catholic’ authoritarianism (Charles I, Archbishop Laud, divine right of kings, the papacy, Erastianism, etc.) and a rising suspicion of anything that savoured of imposed form and ritual.

In his book In the end, God… Dr J. A. T. Robinson argues for luniversalism from two myths of the end, one taken from Matthew 25.31–46 and the other from Paul (London: James Clarke, 1950, p. 99 f). If the two myths were both taken from the sayings of Jesus his argument would be immeasurably stronger, though it is fair to add that he does see them both being represented in the present in John 3.17–18 (p. ioo).2