For the first two centuries of its existence Christianity was, even in the West, a Greek thing. Domitian might find Christian victims among members of the reigning family, but Tacitus could still regard the Christians of Rome as the off scourings of the eastern provinces. The language of the Roman Church was Greek throughout the second century A.D., the language of Bible, Creed and Worship. However Roman in feeling Clement might be his letter to the Corinthians was in Greek; and Hermas' Shepherd was meant for home consumption. During the century nearly all the leading Christians from the East appear to have visited Rome bringing their ideas as to a sort of clearing house; and towards the end of it Bishop Victor of Rome, a genuine Roman, had still to struggle with Theodotus the Tanner from Byzantium, and Blastus and Florinus from Asia. Under his successors Zephyrinus and Callistus theological controversy was still carried on in Greek, but their opponent Hippolytus seems to have been the last Greek-speaking Father of the Roman Church. Similarly in Gaul the Christians of Lyons and Vienne were Greek migrants from Asia, and their bishop, 180–200, Irenaeus, was a product of Asia, the authentic voice of Christian Ephesus.

Writers belonging to various Christian denominations have recently had much to say about the Laity and their privileges and responsibilities within the Church. It is plain that the Church is unthinkable apart from membership, and this membership consists largely of laymen. We are, however, painfully conscious that for the majority connexion with the Church is vague, and it seems natural to speculate whether deeper sympathy might not be roused if membership more clearly carried with it a real share in a life of obvious activity. The Calvinistic Reformers made serious efforts in this direction, with reference both to Worship and to Government, and corresponding strategy is everywhere needed today, for nothing will occupy a prominent place in a man's heart that does not make an appreciable demand upon his attention and supply him with agreeable outlets for his energy. Experience teaches the observant minister that he must offer church-people something definite to do, something that will bring out their capabilities and promote the exercise of their gifts, stir their pride and stimulate loyal sentiments and render fellowship interesting and action rewarding. Being busy about a church is not being religious; but religion will have a better chance with the ordinary person as the Church forces itself to a higher place on the list of his priorities. Both rights and obligations ought to be underlined.

The name of Rudolph Bultmann has recently become specially associated with the proposal to demythologise the New Testament and reinterpret it in terms of a Christian existentialism. The discussion of this proposal will be further stimulated by the recent publication in English of Kerygma and Myth, which contains Bultmann's original essay on the subject and a selection of the contributions made by German scholars in the ensuing controversy. It appears to the present writer that insufficient attention has been given in discussion to the connexion between Bultmann's opinions on the historical Jesus and the proposal now so prominently before us. It may be that in Bultmann's teaching there is an underlying interplay between his criticism of the history and his hermeneutic proposal; such that on the one hand his estimate of the historical Jesus is influenced if not controlled by his general philosophical and theological assumptions, while on the other hand his radical conclusions regarding the history have tended to lead him to his extreme position as an interpreter.

The survey of recent trends in Old Testament Scholarship, entitled The Old Testament and Modern Study, has indicated the changes of approach which have taken place in the present generation. The consensus of opinion amongst the acknowledged authorities who have contributed to this volume seems to be that, while the older methods of study have by no means been driven from the field and the opinions of scholars who ignore them should be treated with caution, the new approach, associated in particular with the names of Swedish scholars, which seeks to trace the growth of Hebrew literature through the oral tradition of cultic circles has, in spite of doubts and opposition, now gained a place as an approved method of study beside the methods evolved in a previous generation. The result has been a profound change in the pattern of the Old Testament which critical scholarship presents to us. It is not without significance that a similar method began to be applied at an earlier date to the analysis of the oral tradition behind the New Testament. There too, this method has gained its place as one of the approved methods of study, though by no means the only one. There too our concept of the way in which the Gospels, in particular, came to be compiled has undergone a transformation.

The subject of this paper abounds in historical problems of an extremely intricate nature—some of which arise through the theologically close association of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit with the doctrine of the Holy Trinity; but others of which are rooted in a number of more particular controversies in which the Greek Fathers were involved concerning the Holy Spirit. Among the latter are to be found such questions as the precise identification of the persons against whom many of the Greek writings were directed, for example, who the ‘Tropici’ were, with whom Athanasius deals in the Letters to Serapion, whether ‘Pneumatomachi’ was a generic term used to describe a variety of different heretics, or a proper name referring to an identifiable group existing in one particular place, whether Macedonius was a Macedonian, and so on. Included in the intricate historical problems raised in our period, there is that of accounting for the revival towards the middle of the fourth century of an interest in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit— whether it was due to the developing influence of asceticism, or simply a reaction to a latter-day Arianism working itself out belatedly in heresy concerning the Holy Spirit, or more subtly, whether it was due to a necessity felt by the Church to give substance to the Person and Work of the Holy Spirit, now that the doctrine of the Trinity had replaced the doctrine of the Logos as her central and dominant doctrine.

In most Protestant denominations of the present time there is growing interest in the possibility of healing by spiritual means. Those who speak and write on this subject make it clear that it is no new thing they desire to do: their aim is to recover the lost healing ministry of the Early Church.

Section 49 of the Kirchliche Dogmatik, ‘God the Father as Lord of His Creation’, begins with this summary:

God fulfils His fatherly overlordship over his creature through sustaining, accompanying, and directing the course of its life. He does this by manifesting in creation His loving-kindness which operates mightily in it through Jesus Christ so that the splendour of His Son may be made known.

The long section of 260 pages is the development of this theme, concluding with the treatment of the place of the Christian under the world-sovereignty of God the Father. Experience, however, shows that the divine sovereignty is apparently limited; hence, Barth says at the beginning of §50:

There is found by the ordering of God a menace to the world-process and an actual corruption of it through the inimical principle of Negation (das Nichtige) which is opposed to the will of the creator and therefore to the essential goodness of His creation.

This hostile principle Barth calls das Nichtige, which, because of its frustrating opposition to the divine will, is more than the merely negative. It is a problem for theology in that it is evidence of a ‘foreign body’ within God's providential scheme, to which it is opposed at every point.

‘Ipse enim dixit, solum unum necessarium, nempe verbum Idei in quo vivit homo’ (Luke 10.42). One thing alone is essential, namely, the Word of God by which man lives. These words could be put as a motto to Luther's entire theology. For the Roman Catholic the sacrifice of the Mass is supreme and absolutely essential for salvation. In Luther the Word occupies this place, and he rejects the sacrifice of the Mass. It is not the Eucharist but the Word which stands in the centre of his theology; the Word has been given for man's salvation, and every-thing is subordinate to it.

We confess Holy Baptism as the act of grace of our Lord and Saviour fesus Christ, by which, on the command and promise of His Word, we are sealed in a second birth to eternal life as sons and heirs of His eternal Kingdom and members of His holy Church, in order that by the Holy Spirit, in His Word and faith, we may be daily baptised into His death and raised with Him.

It is exactly twenty years since I attended my first meeting of the Society for Old Testament Study here in King's College Hostel. The late Professor A. C. Welch was in the Presidential chair and I remember very clearly that at one of the sittings a very distinguished-looking man was seated at the end of the table on the President's right. There was something commanding in his appearance that at once arrested my attention and I was anxious to know who he was. Later I was introduced to him and learned his name, a name still held in honour, Claude Montefiore. It may very well have been the last occasion on which he attended a meeting of this Society. At least I never

In August 1952 the Third World Conference on Faith and Order meeting at Lund, formulated its Ecumenical objective in terms like this: Our major differences clearly concern the doctrine of the Church, but let us penetrate behind the divisions of the Church on earth to our common faith in the one Lord. Let us start from the central fact that Jesus Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for it, and by His Spirit made it His own Body. From the oneness of Christ we will try to understand the unity of the Church in Him and from the unity of Christ and His Body we will seek a means of realising that unity in the actual state of our divisions on earth. What is envisaged here is a thorough-going Christological criticism of our differences in order to open up the way for reformation and reunion of the Church in obedience to the one Lord.

The readers of this Journal have been told how the Church of South India's Order for the Lord's Supper first took shape (‘The Making of a Liturgy’, by the Rev. L. W. Brown, SJT, 4.1, March 1951). The Order has been studied in many countries; and indeed, of the English edition, more copies have been sold outside India than inside it! Some readers may like to know how it has worn. I report a full discussion of it in detail: the work was interesting to me, just because we were not handling large ideas with open minds; we had to consider details, and to decide one way or another.

I do not think that I am doing an injustice to anyone in writing that the book that Balthasar has devoted to Karl Barth constitutes the largest, most unprejudiced and most intelligent attempt that has hitherto been made to set forth clearly the thought of the master of Basel, by identifying his deep-lying connexions with modern Protestant theology, and by setting forth with precision his opposition in regard to Catholicism. One should not lose sight of the fact that Father Balthasar writes as a Roman Catholic theologian. One can easily imagine that a Roman Catholic is sensitive, more than we Protestants, to a determinate intellectual atmosphere, a certain family likeness, which is beyond doubt common to all modern Protestant theologians and which distinguishes the lot of them from the tradition of scholastic ontological thought; and it is a situation that we may enjoy when, although in the realm of Protestantism Barthians and Liberals have for a quarter of a century been exchanging fierce blows in a duel which each imagines to be to the death, a sensitive and cultured theologian can come from the other side with a smile of kindly irony and say: ‘And yet at root you are all very much alike: you are all moderns.’ Balthasar is one of a small group of Roman theologians who have taken upon themselves as their life's mission the study of the theological positions of Protestantism, in order to put the discussion between Catholicism and Protestantism on a serious footing.

When Holy Scripture says, ‘Serve the Lord’, it means that our whole life should be spent in continuous service of God. But we, the disciples of Jesus, cannot serve the Lord without assembling in His Name in order to hear the Word of God, to celebrate the Lord's Supper, and to offer prayer, praise and thanksgiving. The service of God which involves our whole life, has as its living centre the service of worship by the assembled congregation. The subject of this lecture is Divine Service or the worship of the congregation assembled in the Name of Jesus Christ.

There is probably no activity of man at once so congenial to his instincts and baffling to his intelligence as the worship of God. Worship may be described as congenial to man's instincts since it exists, and has existed, in some form or other in every human society, and is a recognisable impulse in even the most secularised product of a modern sceptical world. It may be described as baffling to his intelligence since it escapes the definitions of our scientific culture, and is, in fact, so unaccountable on any merely rational view of human nature that rationalism has handed the problem over to the psychologist to explain in terms of repressions, mother-fixations, infantile-regressions and the like. This modern rejection of worship with the surface of the mind, coupled with the persistence of the instinct in powerful and often perverted forms is worth examining in the light of the enduring summons of the Christian Church to the worship of Almighty God.

In his recent important book, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, Professor W. D. Davies, discussing St. Paul's doctrine of the Second Adam, writes: ‘Probably … this conception played a far more important part in his thought than the scanty references to the Second Adam in I Corinthians and Romans would lead us to suppose.’2 A similar importance has been attached to the idea by Dr A. J. Rawlinson in his New Testament Doctrine of the Christ; it has provided Paul with some of his most characteristic Christology. It has also been claimed more than once that the Second Adam is St. Paul's substitute for the Gospel Son of Man, while both have been traced to a widely spread myth of the Urmensch, or primeval Man, the origins of which are obscure, but which was revived in the Gnostic Anthropos.

To these last ten verses of the chapter we may give the general title, Watch therefore! The section falls naturally into three parts (w. 28 f, 30–32, 33–37), marked off by ‘learn’, ‘Verily I say unto you’ and ‘Take ye heed’.

The first of these contains the parable of the Fig Tree and its application. Strictly speaking, the word (‘these things’) in v. 29 should refer to the coming of the Son of Man mentioned in the previous section; but, as the sense would then be,‘When you see the Son of Man coming, know that He is at hand’, which would be pointless, we take it rather to refer to the signs of the End described in vv. 5–23 It is unnecessary, however, to conclude that vv. 28 f or vv. 24–27 are out of their original context; for such looseness of structure as is involved, if we understand ‘these things’ to refer to thesigns of vv. 5–23 in spite of vv. 24–27 being in between, is natural enough, and we actually need something like v. 26 here to provide a subject for the verb ‘is’ in v. 29. We take vv. 28 f then to mean that, when the disciples see the various things coming to pass that have been described in vv. 5–23, they are to know that the Son of Man is at hand, His Parousia imminent.

The word with which we are concerned is variously trans-lated in the E.VV. as ‘Parable’ (e.g. Ezek. 17.2), ‘Proverb’ (e.g. Ezek. 12.22, 23), ‘By-word’ (e.g. Ps. 44.15; so Ezek. 14.8 should be more appropriately translated). The last two groups are obviously related and it would be reasonable to suppose that ‘By-word’ would be a particularised meaning of ‘Proverb’, i.e. the use of a person (individual or group) in a proverbial way, as an example of disaster. The relation of this kind of meaning to that of ‘Parable’ is not so obvious, except in so far as there is a common idea of likeness. But this is less obvious when some of the instances of Māšāl—‘Parable’ are noted. Thus the term is used for Taunt song: Isa. 14.4; Hab. 2.6; Mic. 2.4; its use in the Balaam story seems at first to mean little more than an oracle and its use in Job 27.1, 29.1 appears to mean ‘Theme’.

The great German scholar Martin Dibelius is said to have expressed his admiration for the Scottish Church during a visit to Scotland some years ago by declaring: ‘You have not yet lost the masses.’ The attitude of the masses towards the Church largely depends on the attitude of the Church towards the masses. This applies to the modern Church as much as it applied to the Church in which the Gospel was first proclaimed. Martin Dibelius himself stated in his work on Form-criticism (Die Formengeschichte des Evangeliums, 1933, pp. 50, 54, 64) that in the Gospels the multitude forms an impersonal choir whose main function it is to express amazement and admiration.

‘Wherefore the apostles, following the rule, doctrine, and commandment of our Saviour Christ, their master, ordained in his kingdom and congregation two officers: one called, after the Greek word, bishop, in English an overseer: which same was called priest after the Greek, elder in English, because of his age, discretion, and sadness… Another officer they chose, and called him deacon after the Greek, a minister in English, to minister the alms of the people unto the poor and needy.’ This is rather a different doctrine of the apostolic succession from that which we normally associate nowadays with Anglican teaching. Its exponent was of course condemned by the traditionalist hierarchy of his day and finally came to a heretic's death. But a generation later the doctrine of Tyndale had become the commonly accepted teaching of the leaders of his Church, and it could be held without any sense of disloyalty to the newly reformed articles and liturgy.