In their common acceptance of the immediacy of God and of the dependence of all things upon God, in their common belief in grace and the supernatural, the importance of God's free choice and initiative, and the value of prayer, and in their shared insistence on the immediacy with which the Father can be addressed, the immediacy of the presence of the Risen Lord, and the immediacy of the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit, Roman Catholics and Evangelicals (by which I mean those in the tradition of Luther and Calvin) are in perfect accord; and, as they begin to understand each other's positions better, when this accord is combined with their belief in the importance of assent to God's revelation, to his word as given, in the supremacy of this revelation and its authority as truth from God, the community between them is striking.

The story of the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida forms a pair with that of the deaf man recorded slightly earlier in the Markan narrative (Mark 7.31–37). In both cases the healings appear to have been accomplished only with difficulty and again in both cases physical means were used in the cure. Further, both stories were closely linked to miracles of feeding. This paper, however, does not address itself, in the first place, to the theological interpretation of the story, but sets out to consider the meaning of the odd response of the blind man to his first glimmerings of sight in the context of the healing as a whole.

William Robertson Smith and the heresy trial that secured his place in history apparently have lost none of their many-sided interest or dramatic appeal. It might even be argued that Smith today is as famous — or infamous — as he ever was. The most recent fulllength survey of the Church in nineteenth-century Scotland, for instance, devotes nearly forty pages to a blow by blow account and evaluation of the Smith case, and Professor A. C. Cheyne, in his excellent study of Victorian Scotland's religious revolution, contends that Smith is ‘a man with very strong claims to be regarded as his country's most influential modern churchman — claims only contestable, it may be supposed, by Thomas Chalmers or David Livingstone’.

It is well-known that Karl Barth, in his ringing denunciation of Protestant theology as it had developed in the nineteenth century and into the first decades of the twentieth century, gave especial emphasis to the figure of Fried rich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher. Barth considered Schleiermacher to be the greatest theologian of the liberal Protestant tradition as well as its fountainhead. He expressly and repeatedly repudiated Schleiermacher's theology, and his criticism was often stinging. On one occasion, for instance, Barth denied that his own theological ‘ancestral line’ could include Schleiermacher, because he could only judge that Schleiermacher had never learned the basic point that ‘one can not speak of God simply by speaking of man in a loud voice’.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the Kantian element in the theological method of Karl Barth and, more particularly, to show that this element, which is openly displayed in the Epistle to the Romans, did not disappear after the turn in his thought occasioned by his encounter with Anselm, but was carried over into the Church Dogmatics and forms an indispensable clue to the interpretation of the doctrine of reconciliation, which marks its climax.

I Am grateful to Mr Peter Byrne (‘John Hick's Philosophy of World Religions’, S.J.T., Vol. 35, 289–301) for highlighting some of the central issues for a philosophy of religious pluralism. He starts from the now widespread realisation that it is not a morally or religiously acceptable view that salvation depends upon being a member of the Christian minority within the human race. A more realistic view must be pluralistic, seeing the great religious traditions as different ways of conceiving and experiencing the one ultimate divine Reality, and correspondingly different ways of responding to that Reality. These ways owe their differences to the modes of thinking, perceiving and feeling which have developed within the different patterns of human existence embodied in the various cultures of the earth. Thus, on the one hand the religions are responses to a single ultimate transcendent Reality, whilst on the other hand their several communal consciousnesses of that Reality, formed from different human perspectives, are widely different. To understand this mixture of commonality and difference I have suggested that we should make use of a basic distinction which occurs in some form within each of the great traditions. In Christian terms it is the distinction between God in himself, in his eternal self-existent being, independently of creation, and God-for-us or God as revealed to us. In more universal language it is the distinction between the Real (Sat, al-Haq) an sich and the Real as humanly experienced and thought.