Ch. Dodd in According to the Scriptures argues that the early Church had a distinctive method of biblical study. Quotations and citations of the OT were employed in oral tradition, and by some NT writers, as pointers indicating larger contexts or whole sections of scripture. That such sections of the OT were in common use is demonstrated by two or more NT authors independently referring to the same passage, although perhaps to different verses. Furthermore Dodd holds that the early Church used these longer passages to provide witness to ‘the determinate counsel of God which was fulfilled in the gospel facts’. This body of OT reference material, and its application to the NT events, underlies the theological expositions of the Church, especially that of Paul, the fourth evangelist, and the author of Hebrews.

Of the many difficult formulations in Karl Barth's ‘Special Ethics’, none seems less amenable to acceptable interpretation than his conception of the relation of male and female. I do not refer to Barth's insistence that Man, created as male and female, maintain both the unity and distinction required for true co-humanity. I refer, rather, to his puzzling (even if textually supported) assertion that this co-humanity is ordered by God in such a way that the woman is ‘sub-ordinate’ to the man without inferiority or disadvantage. Putting aside the exegetical issues involved, I will try to show that Barth's redefinition of the concept of sub-ordination gains coherence when understood as an ‘ordering’ of human life by a revealed order of creation, which in turn is an expression of the divine life itself. I will argue that the analogy Barth draws between the order of the Trinity and sexual relationship is authorized by his doctrine of creation, by his view of Christ as the analogia relationis, and by what I believe to be his application of the doctrine of perichoresis to anthropology. And finally, I want to suggest that, while some of Barth's language may have to be set aside, the arguments described here inform the presuppositions and method of an ethic more relevant for moral discrimination than has commonly been supposed.

I have chosen this title for two reasons: first, to indicate that this essay will focus primarily on issues of religious epistemology; and, second, to acknowledge with gratitude my indebtedness to the work of that brilliant but frequently neglected Scottish theologian and churchman of the first half of this century, the late Principal John Baillie of New College, Edinburgh.

In recent articles on Karl Barth and St. Anselm, Gordon Watson has drawn attention to what he regards as a ‘characteristic systematic weakness’ or ‘systemic problem in Barth's methodology’. This has its origins in Barth's failure to ‘take into account St. Anselm's assumption of the importance of a common rational structure in thought and language existent between believer and unbeliever as the basis for speech about God’ and has consequences not only for Barth's exposition of Anselm's ‘theological scheme’ but also for the subsequent development of Barth's soteriology in that he ‘undervalues the importance of the historical humanity of Jesus in the action of the atonement’.

In discussions on the ministry those who claim to belong to the more ‘catholic’ branch of the Church, often say that their ministry is priestly whereas that of the ‘reformed’ tradition is prophetic. The representatives of the latter are usually happy to accept this as an accurate description of their own ministry, but go on to point out that the ‘catholic’ ministry is not really priestly, arguing that, since there is one priest, Jesus Christ, who has already offered the one necessary sacrifice, there is no longer need of other sacrifices, or priests to offer them. With the validity of that argument we are not at present concerned; we are concerned, though, to inquire in what sense the Reformed minister may be described as a successor to the prophets, or, to put it another way, what is prophetic preaching? Since the word ‘prophet’ occurs in Scripture and since we claim that our faith is biblical, it is incumbent on us to examine the conception of the prophetic office as found in Scripture. Since the prophets of the Old Covenant and those of the New are not necessarily the same it is necessary to divide our inquiry; we consider first the prophets of the Old Testament.

It is surely in the Book of Job that the religion of the Old Testament finds its most intense and concentrated expression. For the great theme of this book is something which lies at the root of the religious life of humanity, namely, the inescapable character of man's relation to God. Its real subject is the impossibility of eluding this numinous connexion with the ultimate religious and metaphysical ground of life. Job is like some creature caught in the toils. He comes before us as the victim of the dimension of eternity in which human life stands. He knows in his innermost soul that his suffering is ‘sent’ by the living God. He feels hunted and pursued by this mysterious divine Potentate whose character and designs are inscrutable to the petty mind of man and ever baffle ‘the foiled searching of mortality’. In the apparent impossibility of finding relief from this torture of body and spirit, or a harmonious consummation of life, he longs to cut himself adrift from the metaphysical foundations of his being and to find a momentary peace upon a lower plane. One of the key-points of Job's thought, and of the Bible as a whole, is that of the supreme significance of man in God's providential purposes, the high worth with which he becomes endowed as a result of the cherishing care of his Creator. In the stress of his suffering, Job would fain elude the burdensomeness and the costingness of this uplifting relation with the divine which redeems man from final insignificance.

The acids of Universalism are biting deeply into our national life: and we are indebted to the Scottish Journal of Theology for this timely discussion. It was that good Scot, Alexander Whyte, who observed that “if fear slays its tens, presumption slays its thousands”. Nothing can be more natural than the hope that all may end happily in some future state of existence. But such a philosophy calls for some surer foundation than that of human opinion however ably presented. And there seems to be something alarming, to us at least who own allegiance to Christ as God, in the presumption that, to entertain this hope, we may lightly disregard His most solemn warnings as to the decisiveness of this present life. Were the ancient Greeks wrong in believing that presumption (hubris as they called it) was the prelude to disaster? Unquestionably Universalism has cost us dear in many ways. It is with its effects in the sphere of morals that this article is concerned.

Some years ago Barth fell seriously ill, and no one, least of all he himself, dared hope that he would ever again be capable of adding another volume to the twelve volumes of his opus magnum, the Church Dogmatics, which had appeared from 1932 till 1962. After his remarkable recovery in autumn 1965, however, he has paid a visit to Rome in September 1966, the fruit of which was his highly instructive report Ad Limina Apostolorum (reviewed in SJT, vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 110f), and now he has presented us with another volume of his Church Dogmatics, though, for the reasons given in the Preface to K.D. IV.4, the latter had to be confined to a fraction of what Barth had originally hoped to achieve in that volume. To understand what follows, we must call to mind that Barth, treating ethics as an integral part of dogmatics, had dealt in his doctrine of God (C.D. II.2) with the command of God as an essential element in the very Being of God (general ethics). In his doctrine of creation (C.D. III.4) he had discussed the command (special ethics) of God the Creator. In his teaching on reconciliation he had so far expounded (C.D. IV. 1–3) the three aspects of Jesus Christ's work of reconciliation, namely His priestly work as the Lord (Son of God) who became a servant to accomplish the work of reconciliation, His kingly work as the servant (Son of Man) who became Lord and by His exaltation exalted man to fellowship with God, and His prophetic work as the Godman who as the Mediator of man's reconciliation with God is the Guarantor and Witness of that reconciliation.

The problem with which we have to deal now, is whether or whether not in the initial part of Paul's epistle to the Romans (1.18–3.20) a gospel of everybody's unrighteousness explicitly precedes, prepares and finally supports that gospel of righteousness by faith which is announced in 1.16 f and which is developed in 3.21 ff. Many commentaries on Romans agree in the analysis that Paul speaks of the work of God's left hand (the opus alienwn) in 1.18–3.20 and that he describes the work of God's right hand (the opus proprium) only in 3.21 ff.

The affirmation that Jesus Christ ‘was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary’ is beset by many problems and difficulties, and to deny or try to ignore their existence is bad theological scholarship. But it is also bad theological scholarship — though this is sometimes in danger of being overlooked —to refuse to consider seriously and with as open a mind as possible any evidence or any rational argument, whether historical or theological, which can be adduced as in any way supporting this affirmation of the Apostles' Creed. It seems to me that neither those who accept the historicity of the Virgin Birth nor those who reject it have a monopoly of prejudice. I cannot here attempt anything like a full or systematic discussion of this difficult and controversial subject. The best I can do is to set down briefly and as clearly as I can a few reflections as a very modest contribution to the on-going debate.

In the first volume of The History of Israel (Oesterley and Robinson), Dr T. H. Robinson points out that at the time of the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel, Judah remained loyal to Assyria, and he goes on to suggest1: ‘It is possible that some part of the more southerly hill country was handed over to Ahaz, for we know that the Assyrian monarchs did take this means of rewarding vassals who had remained faithful when those around them were in revolt.’ Some confirmation of this, as Dr Robinson points out, may be found in the fact that some twenty years later when Judah did rebel on the death of Sargon, Sennacherib claims to have captured forty-six fortified cities of Judah, for as the narrative of Sennacherib's Third Campaign from the Taylor Cylinder says: ‘But Hezekiah of Judah, who had not bowed himself under my yoke, forty-six of his fortified towns, fortresses, and small cities in their neighbourhood innumerable, with casting down of battering-rams and assault of siege-engines, with attack of infantry, of mines … I besieged, I captured.’ (See Burney's Notes on the Hebrew Text of the Books of Kings, Appendix 5.) The biblical records refer to ‘all the fenced cities of Judah’ (cf. 2 Kings 18.13) and to ‘Sennacherib's being encamped against the fenced cities’ (see 2 Chron. 32.1).

The author's purpose in this essay is, first of all, to evaluate the recent assessments of the self given by Stanley Hauerwas and Rowan Williams. Second, in registering his reservations with these views, he claims that confessional theologians have rich resources for shaping a powerful and innovative redescription of the tradition of transcendental subjectivity that does not conclude in, or require, the self's disappearance (or the concomitant annihilation of interiority). The person willed by God into being possesses a certain formfulness that is neither pure intentionality nor interiority, a certain formful unity constitutive of its being created in the image of God. Third, the author argues that Dietrich Bonhoeffer's christological account of the self, supplemented by Eberhard Jüngel's trinitarian account, offers a promising alternative to Hauerwas and Williams. The article's general concern is to show that modern theology does itself and Christian congregations a disservice if it fails to appreciate the depth, complexity and created dignity of human personhood.

Two questions are usually asked concerning the historical J. value of the Lazarus narrative. One question is whether or not Lazarus rose from the dead. This will be answered by arguments concerning the possibility of miracles, but John is not concerned to indulge in such arguments. The other question is about the place of this event in the course of Jesus' ministry. If the synoptic tradition is taken as the norm, the historical value of the Lazarus story seems threatened. We appear to be forced to choose between the cleansing of the Temple (Mark 11.8) and the raising of Lazarus (John 11.47–53) as the direct cause of the final plot to kill Jesus. There is, however, no certainty that one event alone caused the final decision against Jesus; both Mark and John are aware of other attempts and plots (Mark 3.6, John 7.32).

While Karl Barth and Thomas F. Torrance both believed in the possibility of universal salvation, they also rejected the idea that we could make a final determination about this possibility prior to the second coming of Jesus Christ. Hence, both theologians rejected what may be called a doctrine of universal salvation in the interest of respecting God's freedom to determine the outcome of salvation history in accordance with the love which was revealed in and through the death and resurrection of Jesus himself. This article explores Torrance's reasons for holding that ‘the voice of the Catholic Church . . . throughout all ages has consistently judged universalism a heresy for faith and a menace to the Gospel’. Torrance expressly believed in the ‘universality of Christ's saving work’ but rejected ‘universalism’ and any idea of ‘limited atonement’. He considered both of these views to be rationalistic approaches which ignore the need for eschatological reserve when thinking about what happens at the end when Christ comes again and consequently tend to read back logical necessities into the gospel of free grace. Whenever this happens, Torrance held that the true meaning of election as the basis for Christian hope is lost and some version of limited atonement or determinism invariably follows. The ultimate problem with universalism then, from Torrance's perspective, can be traced to a form of Nestorian thinking with respect to christology and to a theoretical and practical separation of the person of Christ from his atoning work for us. What I hope to show in this article is that those who advance a ‘doctrine of universalism’ as opposed to its possibility also have an inadequate understanding of the Trinity. Interestingly, Torrance objected to the thinking of John A. T. Robinson and Rudolf Bultmann because both theologians, in their own way, separated knowledge of God for us from knowledge of who God is ‘in himself’. Any such thinking transfers our knowledge of God and of salvation from the objective knowledge of God given in revelation to a type of symbolic, mythological or existential knowledge projected from one's experience of faith and this once again opens the door to both limited atonement and to universalism. Against this Torrance insisted that we cannot speak objectively about what God is doing for us unless we can speak analogically about who God is in himself.

The controversy which has this forbidding name arose as a result of Bultmann's essay «New Testament and Mythology’. The essay appears to have evoked a very loud and fierce criticism in Germany and has become the bone of contention among its theologians. This controversy has spread to America where Bultmann's friend Professor Paul Tillich has put before the theological public not only the issue involved in the debate but also his own unhesitating support of Bultmann's programme. It has also come to us in Britain through the publication of Professor Henderson's Myth in the New Testament, and the ‘documents in the case’ in the volume Kerygma and Myth. First let us see what it is that Bultmann has to say.

The philosopher John Macmurray's specifically theological intent, contribution, and method stand strangely neglected. In the past decade theologians have argued that his philosophic work might suggest a new natural theology. Such is the case in appreciative comments by John A. T. Robinson and Thomas A. Langford. Both focus on the primacy that Macmurray accords the ‘personal’, and the bearing that this might have on an apologetic for the ‘religious dimension of life’. That Macmurray, however, might be more adequately interpreted as theologian than as philosopher only, that his philosophy itself might legitimately be considered the development of a theological position, and that finally his work might point the way toward reorientation of the relationship between theology and other human sciences will be argued in this article.

Before the General Assembly of the United Nations Pope John Paul II declared that the quest for freedom points to the existence of ‘natural rights’ that reflect the objective and inviolable demands of a universal moral law. While this assertion was well received by those in attendance, an important question remains: how are we to reconcile this universal vision of human rights with the current plethora of disputable legislated rights? Ernest Fortin claims the problem is rooted in the fact that modern ‘rights talk’ emphasizes individual subjective rights over the objective reality of human nature, and Alasdair Maclntyre even questions the moral value of human rights because they are all too easily manipulated by those who view them as self-evident truths. When you add to these observations the appearance of such controversial individual entitlements as ‘reproductive rights’, ‘sex rights’, ‘the right to same-sex marriage’ and the ‘right to die’, it is not surprising to hear people calling for a silencing of ‘rights talk’.