In his study of the development of Anglican theology in the years 1889–1939 Archbishop Ramsey observes that R. C. Moberly's Atonement and Personality ‘stands apart with a certain loneliness alike in achievement and in failure. To read it is still a searching experience. It belongs to the literature of spirituality no less than to the literature of dogmatics.’ So interesting a judgment suggests that Moberly's study is one of those books which deserve periodic re-assessment and it is the purpose of this article to attempt such a re-assessment, albeit in a brief and modest manner.

Paul Tillich's rejection of any attempt to substantiate faith and christological doctrine by extracting from the gospels a biographical picture of Jesus is well known. The reasons he gives in the second volume of Systematic Theology are by no means unusual and certainly not intended to be original. So, for example, we find a basic agreement with Bultmann that, in view of the kerygmatic nature of the gospels, it is illicit to make the liberal Protestant distinction between the man Jesus and Jesus the Christ, in order to confine attention to the allegedly recoverable ‘Jesus of history’. Tillich develops this argument in terms of the inseparability of the ‘fact’ of Jesus and his ‘reception’ as the Christ within the event ‘Jesus as the Christ’, and maintains accordingly that biblical criticism cannot effectually undermine Christology because the empirical truth of Jesus cannot be distinguished apart from the faithful appropriation of that fact, in which the recipient is quite as important as the fact itself.

Various disciplines, despite their intrinsic differences, have in common the use of models to provide understanding. A model is a verbal or physical example upon which there can be general agreement whereby people can be led to understand something which before was unclear or perplexing. Lord Kelvin regarded the mechanical-replica model, as a scale model of a ship, as the sine qua non for understanding in the physical sciences.

Must Christians today choose between the risen Jesus and electricity? Must we make a painful choice between modernity and miracles? Ernst Troeltsch, Rudolf Bultmann and Paul van Buren, to name only a few, all believe that the influence of modern science forces such a choice. Van Buren, for instance, simply assumes that ‘the idea of the empirical intervention of a supernatural “God” in the world of men has been ruled out by the influence of modern science on our thinking“.

The death of Karl Barth on the 10th December 1968 removed from the theological scene one of the greatest thinkers of the Church. Professor T. F. Torrance in an appreciation of him says that he was ‘God's greatest gift to theological science in the whole of the modern era’.

The over-arching unity which characterises that section of the OT from Deuteronomy to 2 Kings has long been recognised as the work of a mind (or minds) permeated by the Dc outlook. The result of this from the historiographical point of view has been that ancient records and traditions of Israel's past are controlled and presented theologically to produce a specific historical scheme, a Heilsgeschichte. Two main procedures are selection and evaluation, both subordinated to the leitmotif of the Dc ideal. Here I want to suggest that within the overall selective process which has produced the Dc History we can discern another principle of selectivity, an inner line within the broad band of narrative.