For or against the Old Testament? Such was one of the main issues that divided developing orthodoxy in the primitive Church from its Gnostic and Marcionite rivals during the second century A.D. Was the Old Testament the work of an inferior god of the Jews to be read perhaps for the sake of the Decalogue and a few striking passages, and the remainder rejected, or did it unfold the gradual story of human salvation, and in the prophetic books, by foretelling the life and death of Christ, assure the Christian of his right to consider himself the Third (and chosen) Race of mankind? Behind this issue lay another equally important, namely the relationship between the Christians as the new Israel and the Old Israel represented by orthodox Judaism, whose role as the light to lighten the Gentiles it was challenging and would eventually take over. If the Old Testament did indeed contain the word of God, to whom did its promises refer, to the Christians or the Jews? Could the Christians claim with success that the prophecies in the Old Testament spoke of Christ and none other? The debate which was to span the second century was carried out in the tradition of the synagogue. At times the Church's essential message of hope and salvation threatened to founder amidst the demands of a new haggadah and halakhah evolved from the ceaseless challenge of Jewry.

Since the time of Abelard's criticism of the Cur Deus Homo? in the name of the love of God, Anselm has been the continual object of attack. To his opponents he is the symbol of legalism and a divine justice so void of mercy that it borders on vengeance. In our time, even the charge of Pelagianism has been introduced, as Gustaf Aulén has attempted to draw a line of orthodoxy from Paul through Irenaeus to Luther, thereby excluding nearly everyone else from the so-called orthodox classical theory of atonement.1 In spite of this continuous attack, many have persistently upheld Anselm's position because they see in his approach to the atonement a point of view that is essential to the Christian faith.

The caricature of John Calvin as an iron theo-logician, sans cæur et sans entrailles, is endlessly repeated. According to Will Durant, Calvin's ‘genius lay not in conceiving new ideas but in developing the thought of his predecessors to ruinously logical conclusions’. Calvin's Institutes therefore are ‘the most eloquent, fervent, lucid, logical, influential, and terrible work in all the literature of religious revolution’. Calvin did not have the tolerance of those who can conceive the possibility that they might be wrong because ‘Calvin, with lethal precosity, had been certain almost from his twentieth year’ Likewise Stefan Zweig saw in Calvin an inexorable logic, a mathematically precise nature, a monomania, and a terrific and sinister self-assurance. H. Jackson Forstmann writes that ‘one of the most impressive facts about Calvin's writings is the absolute certainty reflected by the author at every point’. Again, ‘the most striking impression which comes with reading the work of Calvin is the unfailing certainty which pervades the whole corpus”. Forstmann also quotes Doumergue to the effect that Calvin ‘was tormented by an incomparable need for certainty’. However, Doumergue was talking about something more than logical certainty. Calvin was indeed ‘logical, going to the bottom of questions, practical, completely preoccupied with piety, tormented by an incomparable need of certainty; unifying in rare mixture the reasons and sentiments; preceding Pascal, by invoking the reasons that reason does not know, and preceding also the modern theologians of Christian experience.’

At a first glance the title of this paper may seem presumpituous. For only God knows the last thoughts of anyone who has passed away. The title, however, should be understood in the more restricted sense of the last published thoughts of Karl Barth. We are greatly indebted to Eberhard Busch, Barth's faithful assistant during the last years of Barth's life, for having made available to us these last thoughts in a small volume, entitled Letzte Zeugnisse. According to the Editor they were intended for publication and had been produced after the last grave crisis in Barth's health in August 1968 and before his death on the 10th December of the same year. Hence they had been produced within the last few months of Barth's life, whereas the writings and talks of Barth collected in Fragments Grave and Gay had taken place during the years 1962 to 1967. Letzte Zeugnisse also includes a most helpful Epilogue by the Editor in which he explains the circumstances in which those last testimonies had come into existence and reflects on the latter. Eberhard Busch, described by Barth as ‘truly an ideal assistant!’, had contributed the essay ‘Der Weg der Theologie in Anfechtung und Hoffnung’ to ΠAPPHΣIA (pp. 50ff), the Festschrift edited by him together with the Professors Jürgen Fangmeier and Max Geiger on the occasion of Barth's eightieth birthday (10th May 1966), and had also compiled the Bibliography in that volume (pp. 709–23), comprising Barth's writings from 1956 till January 1966 as well as other bibliographical material and thereby continuing Charlotte von Kirschbaum's initial Bibliography which rendered nearly all of Barth's writings up to the end of 1955.

Some writers express extreme confidence about the meaning of 1 Cor. 5.5: . Ernst Käsemann, for example, asserts that it ‘obviously entails the death of the guilty’, and he is not alone in using such words as ‘obviously’ or ‘only’ in putting forward this interpretation. Probably the majority of modern writers, with a little more caution, regard an allusion to death as the most likely explanation of a notoriously difficult verse. Almost all the remainder believe that Paul is referring, if not to death, then to suffering which is necessarily physical.