There has been much discussion of the logical propriety of religious language in recent years. The debate has been one in which lines of attack and defence have been fairly strongly drawn, often in an atmosphere of contention in which the humbler task of establishing the nature and context of religious utterance has been comparatively neglected. Without gain-saying the importance of exploring the logical implications of religious language it may yet be contended that those implications will be more clearly perceived when the facts about the subject are better known.

This essay is written out of a sense of urgency. Christians have emerged from two centuries of vigorous battles with scientists, philosophers, and historians who attempted to reduce the Bible to their own disciplines. Under these battle conditions, Christians have fashioned the weapon of an unassailable supernaturalism which attested to the divine origins of the Sacred Scriptures and to the divine assistance necessary for infallibly interpreting them. Supernaturalism has been tried in conflict and has not been found wanting. The successes of supernaturalism, however, have so blocked our access to (and distorted our sense of) the natural origins of the Scriptures and the natural skills necessary to interpret them, that the Christian's best weapon is rapidly working for his own self-destruction. In swinging it so mightily, he has lost his balance. And, while he has saved his own life, his unbalanced position is unwittingly calculated to injure his own children—those who were to be the future generation of Christians.

In an earlier paper, I attempted to analyse the primitive apostolic discernment of triunity on the basis of a phenomenological model of religious discernment (Otto, Eliade, Ramsey) and a recent biblical study of the prayer life of Jesus (Jeremias). At the close of that paper, I suggested that Hilary's doctrine of the Trinity might be especially meaningful in the terms of such an analysis, thus providing a possible connexion between the empirical life of Jesus and the high doctrine of the fourth-century fathers. In the present study, I wish to examine Hilary's approach in more detail in order to see how the basic discernment motifs found in the gospels (especially John) unfold into the complex set of propositions that has long since become the hallmark of orthodox trinitarianism.

The earlier theology of Karl Barth (particularly as represented in the second edition of his Commentary on Romans) had as one of its most significant characteristics a great emphasis on the ‘Godness’ of God, on God as ‘Wholly Other’ than man and (following Kierkegaard), on the ‘infinite, qualitative distinction’ between God and man. This was clearly an attempt to interpret the theme of the Bible and was also in strong reaction against the prevailing theology of the nineteenth century, liberal and, to some extent, orthodox as well. Among the many commentators on the early period Barth himself is the best interpreter of the necessity and meaning of this emphasis as well as of its limitations. He writes ‘What began forcibly to press itself upon us about forty years ago was not so much the humanity of God as his deity—a God absolutely unique in his relation to man and his world, over-poweringly lofty and distant, strange, yes even wholly other.’