The general aim of an anthropology may be said to be the determination of man's characteristics in his environment. In social anthropology, however, the trend has been to emphasise the environment at the expense of man. The present article argues that a similar tendency prevails in theology's typical description of man as a ‘hearer’ of the Word of God and finds illuminating parallels in Berger and Luckmann's sociology of knowledge. The failure of these two authors to maintain a true dialectic between individual creativity and the formative influences of society appears in connection with their view of human inquiry. By developing George Kelly's model of man as an inquiring scientist, the article attempts to show that a theological anthropology is bound to take the empirical fact of the theologian's own spirit of inquiry into account and also that it must develop a theory of its own activity which overcomes conceptually the tendency to lose sight of man the inquirer in favour of divine grace or human social structures.

The rebirth of interest in the thought and life of Jonathan Edwards is fully justified, for he was truly one of the greatest philosopher-theologians that America has ever produced. One question of contemporary significance that to my knowledge has not been put to this unique thinker is the question of ‘faith and history’. In other words, the question how Edwards conceived the ground of faith as it relates to historical knowledge has not been raised in the growing body of secondary literature. I would like to put this question to Jonathan Edwards and unfold his answer as he develops it in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections.

The freedom of God is a major theme in the theology of Karl Barth. He treats of it at length in several places in the Church Dogmatics. It is a basic constituent of the being of God, and it plays a central part in the systematic connection between the being of God and his acts, as that is developed in the doctrine of election. It is the latter that will be examined in this article.

The church's Christological confession of the uniqueness of J. Christ's relation to God has always been understood to include the historical Jesus. In theory, at least, this is a point at which faith must be vulnerable to historical investigation. To what extent can Jesus' unique relation to God be affirmed on historical grounds? While the church is not limited to believing about Jesus only what he explicitly believed about himself, a certain correspondence is necessary for the credibility of Christology. If there were no evidence that Jesus understood his relation to God to be in any way distinctive it would be difficult to maintain that he was in fact uniquely related to God. Both doctrine and history suggest that the most profitable line of enquiry into this question will concern Jesus' consciousness of sonship. It is a line of enquiry which may in its turn elucidate some of the problems of Christology.

‘The kingdom of God’ is central in the proclamation of Jesus, the reality to which his preaching points and which the parables are designed to explicate; the student of the New Testament must understand this concept if he is to appreciate dominical theology and the ecclesial theology which developed from it. Since Albert Schweitzer's well-known study, it has been taken as a matter of course that Jesus' kingdom concept was ‘apocalyptic’. Yet just this assumption has necessitated crucial qualifications. To take two notable examples of this, Rudolf Bultmann asserted that Jesus rejected ‘the whole content of apocalyptic speculation’, and Norman Perrin went a step or two further by saying that ‘the difference between Jesus and ancient Jewish apocalyptic is much greater than Bultmann will allow’. At this point, the term ‘apocalyptic’, as applied to Jesus' preaching, is practically evacuated of content. On purely logical grounds, the propriety of its continued usage in this connexion is seriously to be questioned.