The survey of recent trends in Old Testament Scholarship, entitled The Old Testament and Modern Study, has indicated the changes of approach which have taken place in the present generation. The consensus of opinion amongst the acknowledged authorities who have contributed to this volume seems to be that, while the older methods of study have by no means been driven from the field and the opinions of scholars who ignore them should be treated with caution, the new approach, associated in particular with the names of Swedish scholars, which seeks to trace the growth of Hebrew literature through the oral tradition of cultic circles has, in spite of doubts and opposition, now gained a place as an approved method of study beside the methods evolved in a previous generation. The result has been a profound change in the pattern of the Old Testament which critical scholarship presents to us. It is not without significance that a similar method began to be applied at an earlier date to the analysis of the oral tradition behind the New Testament. There too, this method has gained its place as one of the approved methods of study, though by no means the only one. There too our concept of the way in which the Gospels, in particular, came to be compiled has undergone a transformation.

Section 49 of the Kirchliche Dogmatik, ‘God the Father as Lord of His Creation’, begins with this summary:

God fulfils His fatherly overlordship over his creature through sustaining, accompanying, and directing the course of its life. He does this by manifesting in creation His loving-kindness which operates mightily in it through Jesus Christ so that the splendour of His Son may be made known.

The long section of 260 pages is the development of this theme, concluding with the treatment of the place of the Christian under the world-sovereignty of God the Father. Experience, however, shows that the divine sovereignty is apparently limited; hence, Barth says at the beginning of §50:

There is found by the ordering of God a menace to the world-process and an actual corruption of it through the inimical principle of Negation (das Nichtige) which is opposed to the will of the creator and therefore to the essential goodness of His creation.

This hostile principle Barth calls das Nichtige, which, because of its frustrating opposition to the divine will, is more than the merely negative. It is a problem for theology in that it is evidence of a ‘foreign body’ within God's providential scheme, to which it is opposed at every point.

In August 1952 the Third World Conference on Faith and Order meeting at Lund, formulated its Ecumenical objective in terms like this: Our major differences clearly concern the doctrine of the Church, but let us penetrate behind the divisions of the Church on earth to our common faith in the one Lord. Let us start from the central fact that Jesus Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for it, and by His Spirit made it His own Body. From the oneness of Christ we will try to understand the unity of the Church in Him and from the unity of Christ and His Body we will seek a means of realising that unity in the actual state of our divisions on earth. What is envisaged here is a thorough-going Christological criticism of our differences in order to open up the way for reformation and reunion of the Church in obedience to the one Lord.

When Holy Scripture says, ‘Serve the Lord’, it means that our whole life should be spent in continuous service of God. But we, the disciples of Jesus, cannot serve the Lord without assembling in His Name in order to hear the Word of God, to celebrate the Lord's Supper, and to offer prayer, praise and thanksgiving. The service of God which involves our whole life, has as its living centre the service of worship by the assembled congregation. The subject of this lecture is Divine Service or the worship of the congregation assembled in the Name of Jesus Christ.

To these last ten verses of the chapter we may give the general title, Watch therefore! The section falls naturally into three parts (w. 28 f, 30–32, 33–37), marked off by ‘learn’, ‘Verily I say unto you’ and ‘Take ye heed’.

The first of these contains the parable of the Fig Tree and its application. Strictly speaking, the word (‘these things’) in v. 29 should refer to the coming of the Son of Man mentioned in the previous section; but, as the sense would then be,‘When you see the Son of Man coming, know that He is at hand’, which would be pointless, we take it rather to refer to the signs of the End described in vv. 5–23 It is unnecessary, however, to conclude that vv. 28 f or vv. 24–27 are out of their original context; for such looseness of structure as is involved, if we understand ‘these things’ to refer to thesigns of vv. 5–23 in spite of vv. 24–27 being in between, is natural enough, and we actually need something like v. 26 here to provide a subject for the verb ‘is’ in v. 29. We take vv. 28 f then to mean that, when the disciples see the various things coming to pass that have been described in vv. 5–23, they are to know that the Son of Man is at hand, His Parousia imminent.