Much research in biblical studies today concerns itself with hermeneutics, in which biblical scholars attempt to establish principles of interpretation which will do justice to the meaning of the Bible. The need for hermeneutics is apparent for the understanding of any literature and especially of the Scripture since an understanding of the Bible involves the interpreter's subjective element of faith. The Bible in contrast to much literature asks the reader for his interest, his faith, and his commitment to God. Consequently subjective notions and arbitrary fancies frequently play a part in determining what the interpretation should be. Before the reader has been properly disciplined in understanding the language of other peoples living in ancient times, he has set up his own rules of interpretation which satisfy his own predilections but hardly the message of the inspired writer.

One might say that, by and large, the French are interested in John Calvin as a Christian humanist, the Germans in Calvin as a Christian theologian, and the Dutch in Calvin as a Christian philosopher. Of course, in some sense, Calvin is all these; therefore the precise relation in Calvin between scriptural theology and Platonic humanism will continue to be discussed. Concerning the doctrine of soul, Roy W. Battenhouse in an influential article entitled ‘The Doctrine of Man in Calvin and in Renaissance Platonism’ suggests that there are important resemblances between Calvin and Renaissance Platonism in the treatment of human nature. He claims that ‘both the Neoplatonists and Calvin base their thinking about man on the premise of a dualism between soul and body’, which reveals ‘Calvin's fundamental Platonism’. Although Battenhouse calls his study ‘frankly exploratory and tentative’ and uses such phrases as ‘may have been’ and ‘seems to have’ and ‘it can be argued’, the evidence demonstrates to him ‘that Calvin's socalled biblical theology is not quite so biblical as its nuggets of quotation would like to impress upon us’. Jean Boisset, while insisting that Calvin's thought is basically biblical, also finds similarities between Calvin and Plato in the doctrine of soul, and Heinrich Quistorp thinks that the question remains whether in fact Calvin does not develop a doctrine of soul which is more philosophical than theological. Quistorp thinks that Luther was more aware of the contrast between biblical anthropology and philosophical dualism than Calvin was.

The second edition of John Marsh's English translation of Rudolf Bultmann's massive work The History of the Synoptic Tradition has now been issued by Basil Blackwell at 50s. This translation is based on the German edition of 1931, but it is now enhanced by an eighty-page supplement, in which Bultmann replies in detail to some of the criticisms which have been made of his book up to the year 1958. We owe John Marsh a great debt of gratitude for providing us in the first place with so excellent a translation of this important work, and also for bringing us up to date with the debate which it has aroused. The one criticism I would make of the translator's work is the totally inadequate indexes. We only have a scriptural index for references to the four Gospels, and the general index is miserably meagre. So weighty a work of scholarship deserves a better apparatus than that.

The Reformed churches have frequently regarded the Reformation in ways that are contradictory but without seeing the contradictions. On the one hand the Reformation is assumed to be the common and binding heritage of Fundamentalists, the various Presbyterian churches throughout the world, the Southern Baptists, the Taizé Community, even the avant garde of the Second Vatican Council and BonhoefFer's ‘Protestants without a Reformation’. ‘Justification by faith’, ‘the priesthood of all believers’, ‘the Bible alone’ and often ‘no Bishops’ are catchwords, said to be common to all, and somehow entailing each other.

The first problem which confronts us is that of the relation of this verse and of the whole section 5.12–21 to what has preceded.

We welcome this book by Robert Voelkel on Herrmann, who in his own day wrestled with theological problems which have continued to be debated at great length. Other works have far more extensively pointed out lines of continuity between nineteenth and twentieth-century theological thought. This is not the primary aim of the author, who provides us rather with an excursus on Herrmann's thought with an interest in furthering our own.