The invitation to pay a tribute to my friend, Principal John Baillie, on the occasion of his attaining the biblical three score years and ten, and his consequent retirement from duty in New College, Edinburgh, stirs memories that go back half a century and more.

It may sound a bit presumptuous to speak of the architecture of a dogmatics which is not yet complete, but the size and scope of Professor Barth's Church Dogmatics to date would seem to justify our attempt to examine its outer structure in order to discover the basic dynamic principles involved in this Protestant ‘Summa’. In following this procedure, however, we should be aware that we are working backwards, for, unlike the many dogmatics in which the Christian Faith has been forced into a pre-established mould, Professor Barth has been willing to cast the mould in accordance with the demands of the Faith itself. This is not to deny in any way the obvious human element involving meticulous planning and unusually sensitive organisational skill, but is to state clearly that the Church Dogmatics is not a system conforming to the dictates of human reason, but is a bold yet humble attempt to write a systematic theology which conforms to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. As such, the architectural plans must necessarily result from obedient and faithful listening to the Word of God spoken to the Church, and all future designs must remain fluid and prepared for unexpected changes.

Perhaps an astrologer would claim that due to some remarkable astral influence the year 1955–6 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on 27th January 1956; the centenary of the death of Sören Kierkegaard on 11th November 1955, and the seventieth birthday of Karl Barth on 10th May 1956. The three dates are being suitably observed by music-lovers and scholars the world over. But something more than a disposition of the stars links their names together. For if, as we believe, Kierkegaard and Barth, like Luther and Calvin in the sixteenth century, represent the end of an epoch and the dawn of a new era, then according to both men, Mozart is the herald of a new age. Though Mozart lived in the eighteenth century, he actually represented the end of the Age of Absolutism in which he lived and which lingered on in idealism and contemporary existentialism. At the same time he marked the beginning of a new day in which men would begin, not with expressions of their own consciousness, but with grateful praise to the Creator who has revealed Himself totheir consciousness. In Mozart's music Kierkegaard believed he had heard a No to the past: to man who is the measure of all things. Barth, on the other hand, believes he has heard a Yes to the goodness of God's creatures. Not that Mozart himself was a sort of Hegelian synthesis.

Justice, according to Aristotle, is giving to every man his own. But what is a man's own, and how is it to be determined relative to what belongs to other men? We call fair distribution between persons by the name of justice, and in doing so we acknowledge that justice stands over and between men as something prior to and outside a man's will or even the State's will. The moment we invoke ‘justice’, we in fact appeal to a supreme Being as the source of justice. Either God disposes of the world, determines the order of His creatures, and endows them with the qualities necessary to that order, or justice is based on power, and the expression of justice is the edict of the State. Either there is a Supreme Lawgiver who is the source of Jus or right and therefore of law, or there is no objective right but only the will of the powerful. Hugo Grotius agrees with the Stoics in deriving Jus from Jove.

In the Westminster Confession, the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, a section with the definition of a sacrament precedes the sections interpreting Baptism and the Lord's Supper (W.C.F., Chap. 27; L.C., Qq. 161, 162, 163; S.C., Q.q. 91, 92). In considering these it is important to remember that the authors of these statements were not interested in propounding a sacramental theory of religion for its own sake. They were confronted with an existing sacramental system and practice which appeared to them as idolatry and superstition. What we find then in our standards is not academic discussion but polemical and critical reaction to an existing situation with a view to cleansing the worship of God from error and corruption. The starting point in Scripture and the institution of Christ ensured that the essential points were brought into prominence. Nevertheless it is legitimate to inquire whether some of the elements and emphases in the teaching have not been influenced and affected by the historical situation, the general outlook and atmosphere and the modes of thought of that time.

In the first volume of The History of Israel (Oesterley and Robinson), Dr T. H. Robinson points out that at the time of the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel, Judah remained loyal to Assyria, and he goes on to suggest1: ‘It is possible that some part of the more southerly hill country was handed over to Ahaz, for we know that the Assyrian monarchs did take this means of rewarding vassals who had remained faithful when those around them were in revolt.’ Some confirmation of this, as Dr Robinson points out, may be found in the fact that some twenty years later when Judah did rebel on the death of Sargon, Sennacherib claims to have captured forty-six fortified cities of Judah, for as the narrative of Sennacherib's Third Campaign from the Taylor Cylinder says: ‘But Hezekiah of Judah, who had not bowed himself under my yoke, forty-six of his fortified towns, fortresses, and small cities in their neighbourhood innumerable, with casting down of battering-rams and assault of siege-engines, with attack of infantry, of mines … I besieged, I captured.’ (See Burney's Notes on the Hebrew Text of the Books of Kings, Appendix 5.) The biblical records refer to ‘all the fenced cities of Judah’ (cf. 2 Kings 18.13) and to ‘Sennacherib's being encamped against the fenced cities’ (see 2 Chron. 32.1).