One of the most general trends in the modern academic world has been a turning away from the static categories of the past towards new thought-forms that are more dynamic. In philosophy and theology this has involved a revulsion against the category of‘being’ (in spite of such important exceptions as Paul Tillich's emphasis on the nature of God as ‘Being Itself’), and against belief in the sufficiency of the ‘static’ traditional logic which has usually been used in conjunction with it. Thus we find today that (apart from Existentialism, the inadequacies of which I have criticised elsewhere) there are three dynamic alternatives competing for the allegiance of philosophical thinkers in the Western world.

Although it is premature to comment on what Lonergan has to say about theology because his work on theological method has not been completed, still enough material is available to suggest a basic scheme in terms of which his view of theology can be traced. As this writer sees it, there are two central ideas upon which Lonergan's thinking develops. First, the subject, and here we must consider the subject as subject and the notion of horizon; second time around we should discuss the subject as theologian and the theologian's horizon. Secondly, we should treat Lonergan's conception of science, how theology arises among the sciences, and the relation of the sciences to one another and to theology. We should also turn to the relation Lonergan sees between theology and modern culture. But Lonergan attaches great importance to the methodology used to arrive at an understanding of the subject and wants to disclose what should be going on when theologians are engaged in theology; and so we must begin by examining what the so-called ‘transcendental method’ is and conclude by suggesting what theological method is.

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.

This article attempts to take some ideas from process theology which may enlighten and help us to develop a deeper understanding of pneumatology. Pneumatology is the theological area where fresh thinking and new presentation is most justified because, as Berdyaev remarked, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is the most undeveloped part of Christian doctrine. It may be impossible to provide an exact precise formulation. We might frame ‘an open-ended’ doctrine, yet there is need to clarify our beliefs and our knowledge of the operation of the Spirit more fully. It has been remarked that even back in the New Testament St. Paul put forward ‘ideas which do not fully harmonise’. Gregory of Nazianzus, writing in the fifth century, said that people were very confused about the Spirit. He also said we live in an age of the dispensation of the Holy Spirit. Can ‘process theology’ help?

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.

When in the nineteen-twenties and thirties the first Agreed Syllabuses of Religious Education were being devised, the main drive behind their formulation was theology. There was of course some recognition given to the need to adapt materials for the various ages of the pupils, but the main inspiration was theological not psychological. The hesitancy created by biblical criticism was giving way to a new confidence that the idea of God's progressive revelation of himself was the key to understanding the Bible. The new syllabuses were organised around this belief; God had spoken, and the task of Religious Education was to convey to pupils the drama of the divine unfolding, in the history of Israel, in the person of Jesus Christ, and on through the history of his people, the church.

Torrance's book is remarkable for its aggressive, full- blooded thought and style. Such an approach is typical of this theologian, but the centrality of the issues with which he deals and the importance of the stance he assumes makes his boldness a veritable confrontation. Utilising the basic theological beginning points of the Reform tradition (and writing in a style remarkably similar to that of Karl Barth), Torrance critically appraises the present task of theology.

Contemporary scholarship in Calvin studies has generally concluded in agreement that Calvin's various religious teachings present no strictly systematic or exclusivistic pattern of presentation when his written corpus is viewed as a whole. This has been found equally true when one analyses his explication of the Lord's Supper no matter what period or portion of such thought is delimited.

In 1914 Karl Barth made a decisive break with his liberal theological past in circumstances that demonstrated the very close relationship between ethics and dogmatics that was to remain a feature of his theological work:

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.

It seems impossible to conceive of theology without some notion of progress. The Christian theologian is related to at least some of those who have preceded him, and his justification for writing at all must be a belief that he can say something better than they, whether this is conceived as saying the same things more intelligibly and authoritatively, or saying something that has not been said before. Interest must then centre not only in whether a theologian believes development to be possible, but also and chiefly in his conception of the character of that development. There may be a model of some kind in mind, or possibly a number of models, more or less successfully integrated. Whatever they are, they will be aids to a thinker's understanding of his place in history, of his relation to those events that he takes to be significant for this place, and of the reasons for the significance of those events.

‘The image of God in Adam and the restoration of man in Jesus Christ’ is a formulary title, preserving in so far as possible both the manner in which Calvin discusses the image and the progression of this paper. The contrasts of ‘image’ to ‘restoration’, ‘Adam’ to ‘man’, and the latent contrast of ‘Adam’ to ‘Christ’ are therefore purposeful ones, for they are the contrasts in which the structure and movement of Calvin's thought on the image of God can be seen most clearly. They are also the product of a patient and occasionally frustrating reduction of the hill country of Calvin's prose into a passable road. Not every facet of the image according to Calvin is brought into play. In fact, many have been weeded out as too narrowly confined to a particular context, too superfluous, or even too general or ambiguous to be of help in delineating the core of this part of his theology and the tensions within it. Thus, for example, while Calvin often speaks about a restoration of God's image in man, this phrase is meaningless in itself. Then, once we find that Calvin's understanding of this phrase is split into two opposing emphases, there is no benefit in returning to the general expression, and so it is not employed in our discussion of man's restoration. It is also true that the second half of the title indicates an abandonment of the image for a more embracing statement of all that our renewal involves.

Our discussion must start from Hegel, because Hegel set the terms of the debate and his shade has haunted the whole controversy we are to consider. His definitions of Christianity and of philosophy were at the heart of the ensuing encounter. Not that Hegel's analysis was accepted: some, like Feuerbach and Marx, modified Hegel more or less drastically while all the time assuming that in essentials, and sometimes in spite of himself, Hegel was right; others, like Kierkegaard, rejected Hegel's whole conception of what Christianity was about and yet still saw the question of what was to be done with the legacy of Hegel as a central issue of the age. And so it is impossible for us to grasp the structure of a still continuing discussion without seeing the pervasive influence of its starting-point.

In 1961 H. Wendland delivered a lecture expressing the opinion that the lack of theological discussion has meant that we have had to go without a thorough inquiry into the problems of diakonia seen as a whole. Since then, four larger contributions have been made to the debate. The first to appear was a Roman Catholic collection of essays edited by K. Rahner and H. Vorgrimmler under the title Diakonia in Christo. The thirtynine contributions cover a wide range of material in three main sections: the deacon in history and at present; the theology of the diaconate with regard to its renewal; efforts, practical possibilities and stimuli towards renewal of the diaconate. The chapter of immediate interest is that by J. Colson, Der Diakonat im Neuen Testament. He looks at the subject from four angles:

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“.

Generally speaking the Christian catholic tradition has been more uniformly well disposed than protestantism towards the idea of the imitatio Christi. In protestantism there is a perceptible nervousness about using the term at all. This has been particularly the case since the time of Luther. His final antipathy to the ideal became the orthodox protestant tradition on the matter. Luther was critical of the ideal of the imitatio Christi, partly because he was repelled by the excesses of some of the sects where it was being interpreted in a crudely liberal way (e.g. among the Anabaptists) and partly because he became convinced that the ‘imitation’ of Christ conflicted with the essence of the Christian gospel as he had come to interpret it. He found himself unable to reconcile the presuppositions of the practice of the imitation of Christ with his doctrine of justification by faith. The imitation of Christ he believed must inevitably involve a denial of grace and conceal an incipient doctrine of works.

Luther did, however, leave a more positive legacy to Christian thinking about the imitatio Christi. This was his distinction between imitatio and conformitas. Imitatio he disliked because he thought it suggested some human moral endeavour to emulate Christ undertaken apart from the work of the Spirit in grace. He preferred to speak of conformitas to Christ: the Christian life as a process of conformation to Christ through the work of the Creator Spirit.

The time of which Paul speaks in this passage which ‘had fully come’ was not the time of the culmination of some natural process of evolution and development. Rather the time was ‘full’ because it had been ordained to be so by the appointment of God.2 It was in God's good and own time that the Son was sent. This concept of a time that is God's has been analysed at length by Karl Barth, particularly in the section ‘Man in His Time’ in Church Dogmatics, III/11.3 For Barth all time is God's time, for time is not some absolute standing outside and against God. There is no god called Chronos rivalling God and imposing conditions upon him.4 Nor is the relationship between God and time merely an extrinsic one; rather there is given an essential relationship, for ‘even the eternal God does not live without time.

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’.

‘There is one note indispensable to a Positive Gospel, and indeed supreme; it is the note of Authority.’ So wrote P. T. Forsyth in 1904 (‘The Need for a Positive Gospel’, London Quarterly Review, vol. CI, p. 81). It was a theme which dominated his thought and found a place in all his writing. He insisted that the question of authority was the basic religious question, and that the church of his time lacked power for the lack of an adequate answer to it. As far as he was concerned the answer was, in principle at least, clear, and he never tired of giving it. For the Christian authority came from experience of redemption through Jesus Christ.