The Orthodox Church within the Soviet Union has so far made no direct contribution to the ecumenical work which has been done in the World Council of Churches since its constitution in 1948 and before that in the ecumenical movement which led up to its constitution. The political situation has so far prevented this—just as the autocephalous Orthodox Churches of the Balkans, which shared in the ecumenical work before the Second World War, have found it impossible to do so since they have been in the Communist sphere of influence. There is, to be sure, a negative contribution from the Moscow Patriarchate, namely the ‘Resolution on the question of “The Ecumenical Movement and the Orthodox Church”’, passed in July 1948 in connexion with the jubilee celebrations of the Russian Orthodox Church on the occasion of the fifth centenary of its independence, and in accordance with this the refusal on 1st August 1948 of the invitation from the general secretariat of the World Council of Churches to participate in the Conference of Churches in Amsterdam. In this connexion, however, it must be borne in mind that at that time and as a result of many years of isolation it was hardly possible for the Russian Orthodox Church to take an objective view of the World Council, inasmuch as the Council's understanding of itself before the Amsterdam Conference could in fact only be discerned imperfectly from written documents alone, and in particular the important Toronto declaration clarifying this understanding was not made until 1949.

A church which is almost exclusively adult in its make-up and style may well be seen to be lacking in catholicity, and failing in its proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Perhaps a church may be bereft of children through no fault of its members, but more likely it will have been made clear to children and teenagers, perhaps in unspoken ways, that children are an inconvenience, a disturbance, destructive of concentration and peace of mind, their unseemly noises being not unlike the shouts of those infants in the Jerusalem Temple, whose praise to God the Pharisees sought to silence. Children, by their openness, by their spontaneity, by their freshness of thought, and by their emotions being near to the surface, can, if allowed to express themselves in church, be both a sign of hope and a threat to the ‘status quo’, a challenge to tram-like thinking and spiritual rigidity. ‘Let the children come to me, do not hinder them; for to such belongs the Kingdom of God’ (Mark 10.14).

One of the most stirring moments of the World Conference on Church and Society held in Geneva in 1966 was during the third plenary session on 14th July. For that evening the subject was ‘The Challenge and Relevance of Theology to the Social Revolutions of our Time’. It had been chosen with some hesitation by the preparatory Committee; for although the relevance of the subjects on the first and second evenings—the technological and social revolutions of our time—was clear to all the delegates, the importance of a ‘theological revolution’ seemed simply incommensurable in comparison with the others. However, this evening proved to be a real challenge to the Conference (and also in its repercussions on the social-theological thinking in the ecumenical movement) and its influence on the discussions afterwards was lasting and varied. The ‘theology of revolution’ presented itself as an extremely burning issue for ecumenism.

If it is the case, as John Macmurray suggests, that ‘any way of life implies a philosophy’, or further, that ‘there is a necessary relation between philosophy and social practice’, then an essential dimension of the task of the philosophical theologian must be to engage with the philosophy inherent in and underlying the social practice manifest in the society in which he or she operates. This would imply that the theologian should work in cooperation and in dialogue with the sociologist. But it is clear from theological literature that this course rarely appeals to the theologian who would rather not risk the charge of being unequally yoked with those inhabiting other domains or of deserting his academic or spiritual ‘kingdom’ in pursuit of what is often seen to be the fashionable or the popular!

This article traces the role of the Holy Spirit throughout Augustine's De Trinitate. After situating Augustine's treatise in terms of texts of Athanasius and Basil on the Holy Spirit, it treats the place of the Holy Spirit in his critique of the existing dogmatic terminology and the distinction between the economic and immanent Trinity. In contrast with the dominant Western and Eastern traditions, for Augustine the Holy Spirit comes to be thought of as God in a privileged sense, that is, as the person of the Trinity who is the most proper bearer of certain privileged names of God, most notably love. The notion of the Holy Spirit as eternal ‘gift’ proves to be especially troubling for Augustine, but also especially productive, and the present reading explicates the complex interrelationships that he is forced to develop among the concepts of love, cupiditas, gift, communio and enjoyment. The analysis of the concept of enjoyment in particular leads to the claim that the notion of property or ownership is completely foreign to God and that the Holy Spirit as communio must be thought as ‘gift’ only insofar as it is disruptive of the realm of ownership, that is, the realm of sin. The article finishes, as the De Trinitate does, with the implications of Augustine's treatment of the Holy Spirit for ethics and ecclesiology.

This essay examines Herman Bavinck's Stone Lectures (1908), published as Philosophy of Revelation, for indications of a noteworthy conception of the relation between ontology and revelation. One discovers in the lectures that in responding constructively to various challenges to the Christian faith, Bavinck pushes in a direction documented in recent studies of his work: toward doctrinal organicism. What emerges in terms of ontology and revelation is Bavinck's belief that Christianity is distinguished primarily by confession of a real divine relational initiative, understood in terms of the incarnation, which serves as the ontological precondition of divine revelation and thus as vindication of creaturely naming of God.

In a previous paper I have argued against the assumption made by much German literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, that Luther is the religious forerunner of Kant. Even though it is the Lutheran mythology that Kant is demythologizing, Luther still cannot be considered as the religious forerunner of Kant. There are two main reasons for this. First, Kant has an entirely different conception of the religious life in terms of freewill and salvation. Kant affirms freewill, Luther denies it. Kant considers good works as a prerequisite to salvation, Luther rules outworks as playing any part in the quest for salvation, since justification is by faith alone. Secondly, Kant's view of evil and human nature in general is far removed from the Lutheran conception of human depravity. Luther claims that human beings are totally corrupt, and in need of God's grace in order to become good. Kant argues that although human beings have a disposition towards evil, their underlying nature is good.

It is individuals and their particular characteristics that form the pattern of any country's theology; but it is neither the qualifications nor the scholarship of these individuals alone by which the distinctive theological outlook of the country is determined. A great deal too depends on the way in which the Universities are organised, the extent of ground covered by the professorships, the nature of theological examinations, and things of that kind. It is factors such as these which determine the course of study to be followed by theological scholars before they reach a chair in the University, and for those of them who are appointed as lecturers it is the organisation of the study which prescribes, for example, what they are required to teach. A few words, then, may be appropriate at this point on the composition of the Swedish theological faculties.

The theme of this article is the reconstruction of the doctrine of God offered by the German theologian and historian of doctrine Isaak August Dorner (1809–84), in his treatise ‘On the Proper Conception of the Doctrine of God's Immutability, with Special Reference to the Reciprocal Relation between God's Suprahistorical and Historical Life.’ Although the theme of God's immutability has received wide attention in the last years, Dorner's essay has gone largely unnoticed, and its contribution to the current debate still awaits appreciation. The following argument shall provide some building-blocks for this goal. It presupposes that Dorner's theology was shaped in dialogue with the thought of Schelling, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, but it will extend this perspective and ask for the particular systematic-theological link between Schleiermacher and Karl Barth that Dorner's essay represents.

Bishop Stephen Neill, in his Survey of the Training of the Ministry in Africa, writes as follows: ‘I could not but feel profound sympathy with the African student who remarked: “It seems to me that missionaries are much too hard in their judgments on the African Churches. Did you never have a period of struggle in your own Churches? ” Indeed we did. In that moment I suddenly saw that, for the African Churches in their contemporary struggle, the most important period is the one that ordinarily we never teach them in detail, the Dark Ages.… They wrestle with precisely the same difficulties and are called to find anew the way out of the twilight of the coexistence of the old and new into a more genuinely Christian life and social order. ’

In the nineteen-thirties, when Søren Kierkegaard was beginning to become internationally known and his ideas were being eagerly discussed, Theodor Haecker noted that of all those who had reason to take up the task of interpretation the theologians were the least active. Today, in spite of the wealth of Kierkegaardian studies available, the situation is not so very different. The great Christian writer is still more commonly thought of as the pioneer of existentialism than as a skilled exponent of Christianity, and the bearing of his teaching upon doctrinal issues is seldom mentioned. It is true that he said that Christianity was not a doctrine, and that he wrote no formal theology. Insisting that his role was that of a layman, the most he claimed was that some of his writings were specifically ‘for edification’. At the same time, he strenuously opposed the opinion that Christian belief could stand without a very definite content, pointing out that the inwardness demanded of the individual presupposed knowledge of the ‘objectively dogmatic’: in faith the how could not be separated from the what.

Assertions of John the Baptist's identity as the returned Elijah are commonplace in New Testament scholarship. Attention has then tended to focus on whether the returned Elijah was regarded as the forerunner of the Messiah or of God himself. Surprisingly, the logically prior question of how someone could be regarded as Elijah returned has received scant investigation. This article explores what it might mean to describe John the Baptist as the returned Elijah, suggesting that we need clearly to distinguish this concept from Elijah typology. If, as is argued here, the expectation of Elijah's return in Mark's Gospel points to John the Baptist's angelic identity, this has interesting ramifications for other NT issues such as Christology and eschatology.

At first sight the above title may suggest a gross presumption. For surely what is true is true, and there is an end of it. How can there be such a thing as an “understanding of truth,” let alone a Christian understanding of truth? And yet there have been such things as “theories of truth,” attempts to analyse the notion, ending perhaps as analysis so often does in the paradox of tautology, “truth is truth,” yet useful and illuminating as far as they go. But if we grant that truth-theory forms an admissible chapter in the philosophy of logic, can we talk of such a thing as a Christian understanding of truth? After all truth remains truth. And if we speak of an understanding of truth, and then predicate Christian of it, are we using the word understanding in such a way that theory is substitutable for it? There is a suggestion in the word understanding of a certain condescension towards what is understood, a pigeon-holing, as if we would like to say: “Yes, now we have got truth nicely docketed.” Whereas perhaps a “theory of truth” does no more than help us to dissolve some puzzle or puzzles connected with the notion.

So any attempt to defend the concept of a Christian understanding of truth must begin by some account of the sort of jobs truth-theories have tried to do, and then explain the kind of connection that obtains between such theories and what we call an “ understanding of truth.”

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.

Gazing about himself at the theological landscape in 1967, Gordon Kaufman observed,

… the historical situation has changed and with it the theological task. The great critical questions posed by liberalism and humanism …—questions which could be more or less ignored or overlooked during the crises of recent decades — have come into view once again and are demanding attention. Most notable of all in this respect is the central conception on which the whole theological program rests, the problem of ‘God’, What do we mean by ‘God’? Is this notion intelligible at all to ‘modern man’ or does it depend on outgrown mythological patterns of thought?

Kaufman was not alone in the 1960's in sensing a change in the theological situation. Schubert Ogden saw it as symptomatic of an overall, cultural change. Langdon Gilkey pointed to the rise of the radical ‘God is dead’ theologies as indicative of the truly new element in the present situation: ‘This upheaval, this radical questioning of the foundations of religious affirmation and so of the theological language reflective of it, is now taking place within and not outside of the Church.’ In other words, the meaningfulness of religious language, so long taken for granted while neo-orthodoxy held sway, was now problematic, not just outside the Church, but within as well.

Is there a sense in which ‘myth’ is an appropriate category of understanding of material within the Old Testament? In attempting to clear the way towards answering this question it may be useful to present some representative expressions of views about the propriety, or impropriety, of the use of the term ‘myth’ with regard to the Old Testament. There are some interpreters who hold that myth, properly so called, does not, even cannot, appear within the Old Testament; others, however, consider that there are significant features preserved and sufficient functions operative for the term ‘myth’ to be applied.

In recent years feminists and others have taken issue with traditional understandings of the atonement. Part of their criticism has been the assertion that to glorify Christ's suffering entails glorifying all suffering, a connection that potentially leads to abusive behaviour. Suffering, they claim, is not redemptive – ever. In this article I argue that, based on the biblical text, at least one instance of suffering, the suffering of Christ, is redemptive. In addition, I argue that redemptive suffering is unique to Christ. Human suffering is not redemptive and should not be spoken of in those terms.

Recent scholarly interest in the Fathers as exegetes of Scripture has tended to examine the reasons why a patristic author takes a particular exegetical position. Rowan Greer's fine study of the Greek patristic exegesis of Hebrews best exemplifies this current tendency. Greer refuses to judge the ‘correctness’ of the Fathers' exegesis, for they have as much right to their interpretations as sixteenth-century or modern exegetes. Rather, he attempts to see how their theological concerns determined the questions which they asked of the Scriptures. These questions, in turn, shaped the answers that were given. This dialectic does not necessarily mean that these Fathers consciously forced the Scriptures into pre-formed theological moulds. The Fathers were honest in their desire to remain faithful to the Scriptures. Nevertheless, the theological principles which they either inherited from traditional views of Scriptural texts or formed in response to what they considered heretical opinions definitely shaped the questions which they asked of the Scriptural text and consequently, the answers which they received from it. This is no less true today.