‘In our half century’, says Professor Gilbert Ryle, ‘philosophy land theology have not been on speaking terms.’ This is broadly true, and many philosophers and theologians seem to be quite content in the knowledge that their respective spheres are isolated from one another. Others, however, are dissatisfied with the prevailing situation, and feel that contemporary philosophy has much to offer theology by way of technique and procedure, and that philosophers display more bravado than wisdom if they rule that theology and religion are beyond the scope of philosophical investigation, and that religious statements are meaningless. Nowhere is the extent of the gulf between philosophy and theology more noticeable than in the field of morals. For example, one has only to consult the indices and bibliographies of books on Christian Ethics and on Moral Philosophy to see just how little overlapping of sources there is. This gives rises to the question whether there is, or ought to be, any common ground between them. Is it possible that representatives of the two camps could engage in profitable discussion? We shall observe certain hesitations and suspicions which the moral philosopher may entertain concerning Christian Ethics; we shall note what appear to be limitations in each discipline as currently practised; and we shall seek to draw certain conclusions. First, let us try to indicate the scope of Christian Ethics.

Ours is an age not only of discovery but also of rediscovery. By some process of reincarnation in the history of ideas, eras of the past remembered with reproach have successively come to be regarded as wellsprings offruitful thought. Medieval philosophy, once treated with deprecation as illustrating the enslavement of reason to theology, has acquired respect and been reborn in a vigorous neo-Thomism. Reformation thought, considered hopelessly obscurantist by disciples of Enlightenment, has found rebirth through powerful theological spokesmen and a hearing far beyond the confines of the organised churches. Biblical theology, reinvigorated by nineteenth-century investigation of Scripture and given impetus by Reformation doctrinal motifs, has enjoyed a renaissance in recent decades.

‘For all his abhorrence of Rome, he was after his manner as good a Churchman as any Pope’. Such, whether it be intended to express approval or the reverse, seems to be a sound judgment on Calvin's churchmanship. To a liberallike Grosclaude, it was indeed his chief fault that he could not rid himself entirely of Roman ideas: that he continued to regard the Church as depository and dispenser of the means of grace, rather than as a free association of like-minded believers. Unity and universality were lost in the general turmoil of the Reformation; but that outcome was the direct opposite of what this allegedly ‘devil-worshipping genius’ had intended; for Calvin stressed, more strongly than any other Reformer, the catholicity of the Una Sancta. And if the ideal of a Free Church in a free state has grown on Calvinist soil, Calvin himself would have repudiated such a deduction from his doctrine of the Crown Rights of the Redeemer. His entire object was to bring human life in its totality under common obedience to God in Christ.

William Hamilton has recently called our attention to the significance of the idea of the ‘essence of Christianity’ associated with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ‘… It is not at all clear’, writes Hamilton, ‘that the phrase itself does not still have some real usefulness. It is interesting that in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's final papers we have a projected outline for a little book that was to have been called The Essence of Christianity.’ Our aim in this essay is a reassessment of the significance of Ritschl, Harnack and Troeltsch as these sought to illumine from their own theological perspectives the essence of Christianity. We place Harnack and Troeltsch in the ‘Ritschlian School’ in the sense that both acknowledged Ritschl as their teacher and in spite of divergencies from him in their respective theologies nevertheless continued to note their indebtedness to him. We shall show that the effort to define the essence of Christianity is intimately associated in the work of each of these theologians with the search for right theological method.

The late Dr W. F. Howard once wrote that in Hebrews ‘we find side by side, without any apparent sense of incongruity, the Judaic conception of the two ages, and the Platonic conception of the two worlds, the real and the phenomenal’. Dr C. H. Dodd was of the opinion that the Author of Hebrews was ‘profoundly influenced by Greek thought of a Platonic type’, and Dr Vincent Taylor declared that the aim of the Author of Hebrews was ‘to present the new faith in terms which have been suggested by the Platonic philosophy’. Dr Taylor went on to express the view that the Author of Hebrews ‘may not have read the writings of Plato, but he is certainly influenced by the Platonic principle of the antithesis between the heavenly Idea, which is the real, and the earthly Copy, which is transient and temporal’. The late Bishop Rawlinson described the Author of Hebrews as ‘a Jew, perhaps, of the Alexandrian school, at once Biblical theologian and Platonist’.