It is good in this centenary year of his death to remember that the Chair of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology in the University of Edinburgh is successor to the Chair of Evangelistic Theology first occupied by Alexander Duff. Duff was a missionary strategist and statesman who saw the Christian mission in world-wide terms, yet found in his Scottish Reformed heritage treasures of immense value and relevance to the India of his day. Within a few short months of his arrival in Calcutta in 1830, Duff produced an assessment of the situation in Bengal of quite extraordinary shrewdness and insight, discerning the signs of the times and pinpointing the opportunities and dangers to the Christian witness. He looked, as any good practical theologian must, for the working of God in the context in which he found himself; he embraced not just the immediate opportunity but the long-term process, imbuing his converts—remarkable men that they were—with a vision of India as she might be, and of their own role as reformers, renewers and leaders of Indian society and culture in their ministerial and educational work. Duff saw himself not as handing on a closed and unexamined package of accumulated wisdom and orthodoxy, but as equipping a new generation to think for themselves and live creatively always looking, like the heroes of faith of Hebrews xi, to the future, to the city whose builder and maker is God.

It is no accident that when Socrates, Critias, Hermocrates, and Timaeus came to discuss the historicity of the Ancient Athens in correlation to Socrates' idea of the ideal city, they were led to the problem of the metaphysical reality of time. In Timaeus, time becomes the hinge of correlation between historical reality and eternity. And so it is with Augustine. In his Confessions, after a lengthy discussion of his personal history he sets out to construct an ontological structure for the interpretation of history as a whole. Right there, he encounters the problem of time. ‘What, then, is time? If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.’ Lament as Augustine may, he plunges right into the puzzle.

The problem of time is more than a pastime interest for metaphysical speculation. It is at the root of our understanding of the structure both of physical and of human existence. Einstein's relational concept of time affects our understanding of the structure of physical reality, just as the former Newtonian habit of looking at time as an independently flowing stream governed our former way of seeing things. With the suggestion in the Newtonian model that one moment of time flows into the one immediately next in sequence, we unconsciously look at events as flowing one into the other, and so we perceive events in terms of causal connexions. The relational model breaks the necessity of causal connexions and replaces it with a concept of functional dependence.

Can God suffer? Can God feel real pain, anguish, or disappointment regarding the human situation? The answer of most classical Christian theists has been negative. Early in Christian history theologians began to develop the notion of divine impassibility, i.e. that God cannot suffer. This position was crystallised in the third century debates over patripassianism, a view proposed by Praxeas and Noetus that God the Father suffered and died in the crucifixion of Christ. Mainstream Christianity rejected this view because of its failure to maintain a clear distinction among the members of the trinity. In later Christological controversies, theopaschitism was also condemned for arguing that God suffered. In the twentieth century, however, numerous philosophers of religion, Biblical scholars, and theologians have criticised the doctrine of divine impassibility. Now it is not surprising to find a theologian arguing this way: ‘The concept of divine suffering is not only the core of our faith but the uniqueness of Christianity.’

One reason for the frequent debate over the impassibility of God is the kind of language used in the Bible to describe God. Many passages affirm the radical difference between divine and human natures (e.g. Isaiah 40.18, 25; Hosea 11.9). Other passages freely use anthropomorphic language to describe God, i.e. human form is attributed to God. God walks, talks, smells, hears, writes, and has a back side that Moses can see. Especially important for the impassibility discussion are the passages that use anthropopathic language for God, i.e. they attribute human moods, feelings, or emotions to God.

This paper is offered as a preliminary contribution to the debate on the admission of children to Holy Communion. It attempts to examine the basis for the practice, current in many churches, of requiring some Profession of Faith or Confirmation as an essential precondition to participation in the sacrament. Accepting the need for theology to be based on responsible exegesis, the paper sets out to examine the passage 1 Cor. 11.27ff to which current practice has traditionally been traced. The paper then (section II) widens the discussion and advances the hypothesis that the communion services in the early church may not have been restricted to believers only: 1 Cor. 14.23 shows that it was possible for unbelievers to be present at worship, but without mention of the Lord's Supper. And so the hypothesis that worship normally comprised ‘word’ and ‘sacrament’ in the early church is tested on linguistic grounds from 1 Cor. 11 and 1 Cor. 14, to show the possibility of unbelievers' being present when the sacrament was celebrated. The implications of 1 Cor. 16.22 are then explored and the view advanced that it was not impossible for unbelievers to share in the sacrament—the Anathema in that verse being intended to warn participants (including unbelieving participants) in the sacrament to approach the Lord's Supper thoughtfully and carefully.