It is good in this centenary year of his death to remember that the Chair of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology in the University of Edinburgh is successor to the Chair of Evangelistic Theology first occupied by Alexander Duff. Duff was a missionary strategist and statesman who saw the Christian mission in world-wide terms, yet found in his Scottish Reformed heritage treasures of immense value and relevance to the India of his day. Within a few short months of his arrival in Calcutta in 1830, Duff produced an assessment of the situation in Bengal of quite extraordinary shrewdness and insight, discerning the signs of the times and pinpointing the opportunities and dangers to the Christian witness. He looked, as any good practical theologian must, for the working of God in the context in which he found himself; he embraced not just the immediate opportunity but the long-term process, imbuing his converts—remarkable men that they were—with a vision of India as she might be, and of their own role as reformers, renewers and leaders of Indian society and culture in their ministerial and educational work. Duff saw himself not as handing on a closed and unexamined package of accumulated wisdom and orthodoxy, but as equipping a new generation to think for themselves and live creatively always looking, like the heroes of faith of Hebrews xi, to the future, to the city whose builder and maker is God.

The relationship between biblical exegesis and modern theology is complex. The two are rarely, if ever, independent of one another. No Christian theology is done in a vacuum, and all Christian theologising is, in a sense, an interpretation of the Christian tradition.1 Any new theological synthesis is formulated in part as a dialogue with past theologies. In this dialogue, one may be critical of the past; one may wish to preserve the past to a greater or lesser degree. What is determinative is the theologian's current apprehension of what Christianity is, but this in turn will have been created and shaped by the interplay between the theologian and the tradition in the past.2 Christian theologising thus involves a continuous dialogue between the theologian and the tradition.

Martin Marty and Dean Peerman in their New Theology series attempt to present the most significant recent theological trends. Volume 5, published in 1968, was devoted to the theology of hope. In the period from about 1967 to 1973 the word ‘hope’ appeared in the titles of numerous books to be found in theological bookstores and hope was the subject of various conferences at seminaries and universities. These books and symposia addressed themselves to an array of themes including a concern for the future, a call to political activism, a dialogue with Marxism inspired by the work on hope by the Marxist Ernst Bloch, exegetical studies of eschatology, Old and New Testament theological studies emphasising eschatology, and hope as the cognitive basis and starting-point for doing theology. The work that came closest to encompassing all these divergent strands and did much to stimulate thinking on these issues was Jürgen Moltmann's Theology of Hope published in 1967, in which he attempts ‘to show how theology can set out from hope’.

For the larger part of their history, the Christian Churches have taught the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity as central and essential to their faith. Their creeds, councils, and confessions, whatever their differences and whatever range of different interpretations they have permitted, have agreed in affirming that the central figure of the Gospels is to be understood, not only as the revealer of God, but as himself the content of that revelation, God the Son made man for our salvation, and that the doctrine of God implied by that revelation is to be expressed in trinitarian terms. These are still, to a very large extent, the characteristic and peculiar beliefs of Christianity, in its Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant forms. Nevertheless, since the Enlightenment and the rise of modern critical approaches both to scripture and to tradition, the propriety of these doctrines has been questioned. This questioning has been overwhelmingly a Protestant phenomenon, though there have been and are some indications of similar questioning in Roman Catholic theology at the turn of the century and today. Disregarding external critics of Christianity, we can point within the Christian Churches themselves, to rationalist versions of the faith, in which the eternal truths of reason (metaphysical or moral) have been held to constitute the essence of Christianity, deistic versions, which have sought to eliminate the notions of special revelation and divine action in the world, idealist versions, in which the concept of Incarnation has been held to symbolise some universal identity of God and man, liberal Protestant versions, which have singled out either the God-consciousness of Jesus or his teaching as the crucial element in Christianity, and modernist versions, in which the life of the Church itself has been embraced as experientially self-authenticating, irrespective of its origins.

Definition.—I define Epistemological Primitivism as the view that a given text exists in a state of nature or a condition of primordial meaning. It is the literary equivalent to the version of empiricism which stresses the passivity of the mind and the purity of the data in the knowing process. The impossibility of holding consistently to epistemological primitivism is seen when (1) the interpreter recognises that a text gains cognitive meaning only if it is interwoven with other texts and (2) the interpreter actively brings to the text a selective factor by designating which texts will interlace more predominantly and directly with one another.

Example.—The famous or infamous passage of Romans 9.11–24 serves as a vivid example of a network of interwoven texts whose overall impact forces the conclusion that Paul is advancing a doctrine of strict predestination. In this passage, each verse seems to prepare the way for the following verse in elaborating the theme of predestination of human choice itself. In his book The Debate About the Bible evangelical Christian Stephen Davis, recognizing the force of the Romans 9 passage, writes, ‘I do not claim to know how to reconcile Paul's teachings on election with the Bible's apparent commitment to the notion that people are free and morally responsible agents.’ Davis' point is that within the Bible are texts other than Romans 9 which seem to force the conclusion that some human choices are neither caused by God nor predestined.

The growing rift between biblical scholarship and the dogmatic and moral theologies of the Churches is a challenge to us all. But not only is it necessary to examine the presuppositions of the biblical scholars; it is also necessary to investigate the questions raised by their critics. Is there a uniform pattern in the questions raised? Do the critics provide any suggestions as to how the Scripture scholar should operate? Is there a common core which can be detected in the midst of the disquiet?

In some unpublished lectures on communication written in 1847, Kierkegaard contends that Christian communication requires some direct discourse. This did not mean that he had abandoned his long-standing insistence that Christianity is a project for existence. The information conveyed in that discourse is not intended to assuage intellectual curiosity and to supplement our general desire for knowledge. Rather, it intends a change in people's lives. Thus, he further asserts that this direct discourse is preliminary and must be followed by indirect discourse. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard is saying that some truth claims about matters of fact are indispensable; some propositions that convey information, which might from a logical standpoint be either objectively true or false, are necessary in genuine Christian communication.

It would appear that one is an apostle of the obvious when speaking of Karl Barth's ‘christological basis’ for the state. According to G. C. Berkouwer, amongst others, to say Karl Barth is to mean simultaneously ‘christocentricism’, especially when speaking of Barth after his deliberate reversal in his dogmatics published in 1932—the date Barth published his Kirchliche Dogmatik after he discontinued writing his Christliche Dogmatik begun in 1927, which he later described as ‘my well-known false start’. But even Berkouwer, who criticises Barth for underplaying the demonic effects and influences of evil through his emphasis on grace, admits that Barth's ‘christocentricism’ has epistemological emphases not found in other theologians:

… Barth underscores with increasing emphasis that all knowledge of God is exclusively determined by and is dependent upon the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and that this is not simply a matter of our epistemology, but that it is directly related to the nature of God in Jesus Christ who is the dominant and all-controlling central factor in the doctrines of election, creation, and reconciliation. Only in Jesus Christ do we meet the true and decisive revelation of God.

Kant, it has been said, brought a ‘Copernican Revolution’ to religion and theology no less so than he did to physics. According to Karl Barth, for example, Kant's theology diverges radically from tradition. While rejecting the traditional proofs as foundation for a knowledge of God (his existence, etc.) as wholly inadequate, he, nevertheless, remained a theist. Unwilling to believe in God in the absence of good reasons for doing so, however, he offered an alternative justification for such belief. Religious belief, he insists, is based on practical considerations rather than on theoretical ones. Kant, therefore, did not consider it as necessarily irrational to hold a thing as true even though it be a theoretically insufficient holding to be true. According to him it is simply that in such a case the belief that ‘something’ is true does not constitute knowledge. And it is this displacement of knowledge in the religious sphere by faith that essentially constitutes the revolutionary change in theology.

Contrary to this generally accepted view of Kant's thought, I shall in this paper argue the essentially unrevolutionary character of his understanding of theology. There is, I shall maintain, a basic continuity in Kant's thoughts on religion with the theologies of the past. The faith of which Kant speaks, I shall attempt to show, is a cognitive faith—a source of beliefs that can quite legitimately, even if only in a weak sense, be referred to as religious knowledge. His theology, therefore, is, like the theology of his predecessors, ultimately an inferential knowledge of the divine.

In the background of Anselm's philosophical theology there appear a number of philosophical issues which have not received as much attention from philosophers as they deserve. Some of these issues are his view on the relation between language and reality; the way he handles the notion of being and its opposite, non-being; and his notions of necessity and eternity. Despite its title, this paper will not issue in a systematic and comprehensive reconstruction of the Anselmian metaphysics, since I doubt that that would be possible. Anselm's objectives were always ultimately theological in character, and he never purported to present a rounded metaphysical system. In his hands the basic notions mentioned were modified through their being employed by such an acute and subtle thinker to articulate and elucidate basic articles of Christian belief. But it is possible to discern a central unifying theme through which his views on metaphysical topics are connected. That theme is his interesting and quite novel account of truth. In this paper I will focus upon that theme for the light it sheds on these other issues.

It is no accident that when Socrates, Critias, Hermocrates, and Timaeus came to discuss the historicity of the Ancient Athens in correlation to Socrates' idea of the ideal city, they were led to the problem of the metaphysical reality of time. In Timaeus, time becomes the hinge of correlation between historical reality and eternity. And so it is with Augustine. In his Confessions, after a lengthy discussion of his personal history he sets out to construct an ontological structure for the interpretation of history as a whole. Right there, he encounters the problem of time. ‘What, then, is time? If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.’ Lament as Augustine may, he plunges right into the puzzle.

The problem of time is more than a pastime interest for metaphysical speculation. It is at the root of our understanding of the structure both of physical and of human existence. Einstein's relational concept of time affects our understanding of the structure of physical reality, just as the former Newtonian habit of looking at time as an independently flowing stream governed our former way of seeing things. With the suggestion in the Newtonian model that one moment of time flows into the one immediately next in sequence, we unconsciously look at events as flowing one into the other, and so we perceive events in terms of causal connexions. The relational model breaks the necessity of causal connexions and replaces it with a concept of functional dependence.

IN the early nineteenth century visits by German philosophers and theologians to Britain were rare, rarer still when the visitor was of Friedrich Schleiermacher's distinction. However, Schleiermacher spent three weeks in London in September 1828, and the occasion provides a fascinating sidelight on this period of English Church history. It was his first and last visit: though Schleiermacher had learned English early in life, and translated two volumes of sermons and written various articles for the Athenaeum, he had felt no urge to cross the Channel before. The reasons now were political rather than religious. He lodged in London with his wife's cousin, Ludwig von Miihlenfels, a writer and critic who had been arrested for ‘demagogic’ activities in Germany and had subsequently escaped and settled in England. From this point of view the visit was a success; Schleiermacher appears to have reinstated von Mühlenfels in the eyes of the Prussian authorities since he was allowed to return home in 1830.

Cabler's inaugural address De justo discrimine theologiae biblicae et dogmaticae regundisque racte utriusque finibus was written in a very complex, classically-based Latin, but the ideas he expressed were those of eighteenth-century Enlightenment theology. The responsibility for this translation was shared in that Dr Eldredge dealt with the philological and idiomatic sense of the Latin, and Dr Sandys-Wunsch filled in the theological background to Gabler's thought. Dr Sandys-Wunsch alone is responsible for the commentary and discussion.

Humour is a serious business. The immediate aim of the comedian may be simply to entertain. But if he is successful in his art, his achievement goes far beyond this limited purpose. As much as the scientist or the novelist, the humorist holds the mirror up to man and reflects, often in sharpest focus, aspects of man's condition in and relationship to the world which otherwise might pass unnoticed. Man, after all, is the only animal which laughs, just as he is the only animal which conducts experiments or tells stories. This simple and undeniable fact surely reveals something about the kind of being man is and the kind of world he inhabits. The world is not only a realm of physical order whose regularity man-the-scientist may observe and chart; nor is it only a great theatre where the drama of human history unfolds in which man-the-actor plays and (modestly) directs his part. The world is also comical, and man-the-humorist perceives and participates in its comic structures.

Bored congregations, discouraged ministers, and many attempts to discover new forms of communicating the gospel signal a crisis of preaching. This crisis is not explained by the fact that preaching is difficult and often frustrating. We could live with that. Difficulties and frustrations can be utilised, if the preacher is convinced that his task is necessary and worth while. As long as we can see meaning in preaching; as long as we can hope that the words of men may become the word of God, no difficulties would deter the preacher from pursuing the privilege of preaching. The crisis is therefore a theological one. We have become uncertain as to who God is. We are not sure—deep down—whether our preaching corresponds to his will. This then creates our modern situation where responsible and effective preaching is declining and is also discouraged in our churches.

Even the most casual observer of the contemporary theological scene knows that Wolfhart Pannenberg's theology relies heavily on the resurrection of Jesus as a genuinely historical event. The peculiarity of this is that a theologian who has accurately been called a ‘rationalist’ should so forthrightly embrace a claim that the entire thrust of post-Enlightenment theology has seemingly undermined. But Pannenberg himself contends that his reliance on the resurrection is not legitimated by the subterfuge of an existential ‘moment’ or ‘leap of faith’; instead, he argues for the acceptance of the resurrection on purely historical grounds. This argument implicitly rests on Pannenberg's conviction that ‘the truth is one’ and that the theologian's worst mistake is to cut the ties between theology and secular disciplines and modes of inquiry, a conviction that has recently received its most forceful statement in Pannenberg's Theology and the Philosophy of Science. This means that, insofar as belief in the resurrection of Jesus entails a claim about a past event, the standard methods by which we normally adjudicate claims about the past must be brought into play. Accordingly, the resurrection of Jesus is for Pannenberg not a ‘faith claim’, for ‘faith cannot ascertain anything certain about events of the past that would perhaps be inaccessible to the historian’. Instead, the resurrection of Jesus must be understood as the best historical explanation accounting for the New Testament witness and the rise of Christianity.

Karl Barth's formidable attack on all forms of natural theology is one of the major events in twentieth-century religious thought. He anathematized every effort by unaided reason to conceive adequately of the nature of God or to demonstrate God's existence. To him all are disguised attempts to ‘domesticate’ God in the circumscribed and self-serving world of human interests. Those theologians who are dissatisfied with this dimension of Barth's thought sometimes criticize it, but more often find it easier just to ignore him and go their own ways. Those philosophers who are interested in provoking a confrontation with Barth find it difficult to penetrate the confessional circle and establish a point of contact which the defenders of Barth's prohibition of natural theology would themselves be constrained to acknowledge.

My contention is that there is such a point of contact open to theological and philosophical critique, one which previous critics have overlooked. The argument is organized around five theses. They are:

1. The foundation of Barth's position on God's knowability lies in Church Dogmatics II, 1. Here he declares that God's noetic absoluteness derives from his ontic absoluteness (pp. 310f). To the critical eye this spurious derivation appears to be a non sequitur rather than an acceptable statement of logical entailment or of metaphysical or theological necessity.

2. Barth fails to support the derivation with convincing exegetical arguments of the sort required to override its conceptual weakness. This is a rather surprising circumstance for one who strives to rest his entire theology on revelation.

Can God suffer? Can God feel real pain, anguish, or disappointment regarding the human situation? The answer of most classical Christian theists has been negative. Early in Christian history theologians began to develop the notion of divine impassibility, i.e. that God cannot suffer. This position was crystallised in the third century debates over patripassianism, a view proposed by Praxeas and Noetus that God the Father suffered and died in the crucifixion of Christ. Mainstream Christianity rejected this view because of its failure to maintain a clear distinction among the members of the trinity. In later Christological controversies, theopaschitism was also condemned for arguing that God suffered. In the twentieth century, however, numerous philosophers of religion, Biblical scholars, and theologians have criticised the doctrine of divine impassibility. Now it is not surprising to find a theologian arguing this way: ‘The concept of divine suffering is not only the core of our faith but the uniqueness of Christianity.’

One reason for the frequent debate over the impassibility of God is the kind of language used in the Bible to describe God. Many passages affirm the radical difference between divine and human natures (e.g. Isaiah 40.18, 25; Hosea 11.9). Other passages freely use anthropomorphic language to describe God, i.e. human form is attributed to God. God walks, talks, smells, hears, writes, and has a back side that Moses can see. Especially important for the impassibility discussion are the passages that use anthropopathic language for God, i.e. they attribute human moods, feelings, or emotions to God.

My primary concern in this article is with the Christian nurture of children. In particular, I would contend that one of the present deficiencies in the nurture of children within the Reformed tradition lies in the fact that we regard Holy Communion more as the goal of than the means to such nurture. There is, in my view, a clear case for admitting baptised children to Holy Communion, and it rests both upon the Reformed understanding of the Lord's Supper as a means of grace, and upon the growing realisation that the Christian nurture of children is no mere didactic matter but must be conducted within the whole life and worship of the church. Plainly though, the question of Christian nurture cannot be considered without reference to Christian initiation, debate about which in recent years has been much concerned with the doctrine of confirmation. I should make it clear, right at the start, that I do not intend to discuss the issue of infant versus believers' baptism, or to consider the place of the unbaptised child within the church. My question is simply: if a church practises infant baptism, is there any justification for excluding baptised children from the sacrament of Holy Communion?

Initiation practices vary from denomination to denomination. On the one hand there is the Baptist tradition of believers' baptism. But in those churches where infant baptism is not only practised, but is the norm, questions of subsequent initiation procedures are answered in differing ways.

One of the established conjuring tricks of a discussion of this sort is to flatter your audience by pretending that they fully understand the meaning of your central concepts. This way, you exonerate yourself from explaining them, and perhaps thereby conduct the rest of the inquiry in a dark cloud of unknowing. Therefore, to change the figure, in order not to be pulling mythical rabbits from hitherto concealed hats, I propose to put my rabbits on the table ab initio and to reveal my sleeves as empty of all but my arms, by setting before you in a fit of generosity, if not also of madness, a definition. It is a definition of religious education, one from which I shall endeavour to extract what I have to say on the theme. Here it is: