My objectives are twofold. I want first to show (mainly following John Hick) that there is a conception of necessary existence or aseity, distinct from a conception of ‘logically necessary being’, which is at least prima facie plausible and second to show, with respect to this specific conception, that there are relevant questions about stating truth-conditions which are unsatisfied and perhaps even in principle unsatisfiable, and that these are questions which must be met before such a prima facie plausible conception can be taken to give us the basis of a satisfactory theological elucidation of what it is to speak of God. I shall argue that it is doubtful whether these questions about truth-conditions can be met.

Bonhoeffer gave surprisingly little systematic attention to questions of providence and history despite the fact that his lifelong theological concern was to explore the way in which revelation was given form in his world. It was only in the experiences in the Second World War when working in the Abwehr with members of the resistance and subsequently in prison, when he had to face the possibility of a major shift in human consciousness, that he looked at the problem of history and the development of culture and had to relate it to an understanding of providence. Even so circumstances did not allow him to work this out in detail; both the Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison are evidence of a direction in his thinking, though the way seems to be fairly clearly delineated.

Thirteen years ago Will Herberg described the work and influence of Karl Barth in the following way:

Karl Barth is, beyond all doubt, the master theologian of our age. Wherever, in the past generation, men have reflected deeply on the ultimate problems of life and faith, they have done so in a way that bears the unmistakable mark of the intellectual revolution let loose by this Swiss thinker in the years immediately following the first world war…. If any man has ever put his sign on the thinking of his time, it is Karl Barth, the father of the ‘dialectical theology’.

There has to be a pressing reason to add to the mountain of material which has grown up around the work of Paul Tillich. Has not the ground been exhausted, the sponge wrung dry? While it would be presumptuous to claim that the present article deals with some hitherto unturned stone, our contention is that by asking a relatively simple question, a strange defect in Tillich's system becomes evident which seems to have been largely ignored. If this contention succeeds, then perhaps the presence of yet another article on Tillich may be justified.

The group of imperatives usually known as the Mission Charge to the Twelve Disciples deserves consideration for its own sake since it marks an important climax in our Lord's life and ministry, as well as in the experience of those whom he called to be his disciples. It deserves consideration also because in the process of time it became the justification for the medical missionary movement which arose within the Protestant Church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today this movement as part of the great worldwide expansion of the Christian Church appears to be coming to an end. It is appropriate, therefore, to look again at what was claimed to be its biblical basis. This article proposes to do this, and to consider medical missions in relation to the Mission Charge to the Twelve Disciples, and in relation to the modern healing ministry of the Church.

There is a certain ‘Looking glass’ quality to the title of this study—by which I mean that Lewis Carroll's White Knight, whose analysis of the relationship between names and titles is the classic one, might well have insisted that this is only what it is called, whereas in fact it is about an interpretation (namely my own) of an interpretation (namely that of the writer of 2 Kings 20 and that of the writer of the parallel but not quite identical material of Isa. 38-39), which is there offered not apparently of the Babylonian Exile but of certain incidents of importance in the reign of king Hezekiah of Judah around the end of the eighth century b.c. The introduction of the Babylonian Exile into this is not my own, since it is already inherent in one moment in the two narratives; but the understanding of the section in terms of interpretation of the Exile is something which needs to be discussed. It is here that I believe we may see the distinctive character of the narratives in their present forms.