The second edition of John Marsh's English translation of Rudolf Bultmann's massive work The History of the Synoptic Tradition has now been issued by Basil Blackwell at 50s. This translation is based on the German edition of 1931, but it is now enhanced by an eighty-page supplement, in which Bultmann replies in detail to some of the criticisms which have been made of his book up to the year 1958. We owe John Marsh a great debt of gratitude for providing us in the first place with so excellent a translation of this important work, and also for bringing us up to date with the debate which it has aroused. The one criticism I would make of the translator's work is the totally inadequate indexes. We only have a scriptural index for references to the four Gospels, and the general index is miserably meagre. So weighty a work of scholarship deserves a better apparatus than that.

Michael Polanyi's thought has received increasing attention from theologians over the last few years. He offers both an historical and a critical analysis of the intellectual roots of contemporary Western culture. One aspect of this is his diagnosis of Locke's contribution to the emergence in Western epistemological theory of the supremacy of demonstrative knowledge over faith. This is reported, for instance, by Professor Thomas Torrance, quoting, first, this passage from Locke's Third Letter on Toleration:

For whatever is not capable of demonstration … is not, unless it be self-evident, capable to produce knowledge, how well grounded and great soever the assurance of faith may be wherewith it is received; but faith it is still, and not knowledge; persuasion, and not certainty. This is the highest the nature of the thing will permit us to go in matters of revealed religion, which are therefore called matters of faith; a persuasion of our own minds, short of knowledge, is the last result that determines us in such truths.

To many, Alasdair Maclntyre seems to epitomize the sort of dangerous confusion they fear from ‘postmodernity.’ Consider two separate passages from Maclntyre's recent writing.

This essay is written out of a sense of urgency. Christians have emerged from two centuries of vigorous battles with scientists, philosophers, and historians who attempted to reduce the Bible to their own disciplines. Under these battle conditions, Christians have fashioned the weapon of an unassailable supernaturalism which attested to the divine origins of the Sacred Scriptures and to the divine assistance necessary for infallibly interpreting them. Supernaturalism has been tried in conflict and has not been found wanting. The successes of supernaturalism, however, have so blocked our access to (and distorted our sense of) the natural origins of the Scriptures and the natural skills necessary to interpret them, that the Christian's best weapon is rapidly working for his own self-destruction. In swinging it so mightily, he has lost his balance. And, while he has saved his own life, his unbalanced position is unwittingly calculated to injure his own children—those who were to be the future generation of Christians.

Does ἐγώ in Rom. 7:14–25 refer to the Christian? This question, pivotal for understanding Paul's view of both man and the nature of the Christian life, has been debated throughout the history of the Christian Church. The Greek fathers generally answered ‘no’. Augustine, in his struggle against Pelagius, however, answered ‘yes’. The mediaeval Church, Luther, Calvin, and Calvinistic theology agreed. A swing of the pendulum back to the ‘pre-Christian’ view began with Pietism, and, at least on the continent, was made virtually complete with the publication of Werner Georg Kümmel's Römer 7 und die Bekehrung des Paulus in 1929. Thus in 1964 the Dutch scholar W. K. Grossouw could say ‘ … among modern exegetes an occasional one still takes up an exceptional position and understands Rom. 7:(14)–25 of the Christian existence …’ A notable more recent continental exception, though, has been the Swedish scholar Anders Nygren. A considerable number of British scholars, too, hold to the ‘Christian’ position. Notable examples would include C. E. B. Cranfield, John Murray, F. F. Bruce, C. K. Barrett, J. I. Packer, and J. D. G. Dunn.

Recent discussion of St Anselm's theology of reconciliation has again raised the question of freedom in respect to the relationship presupposed between God and man in this encounter. It has been asked whether in fact St Anselm's account excludes God's ability to act freely, ‘within the dynamics and development of the narrative’, and suggested that such exclusion derives from an understanding of God's ‘unchanging nature beyond the influence of persons and events within the narrative’.

In the Babylonian Captivity, 1520, Luther launched an attack on the number of ordinances which the medieval Western Church labelled ‘sacraments’. According to Luther, only three were worthy of the title sacrament: baptism, the bread, and penance. Although critical of the prevailing penitential system, Luther not only defended the sacramental status of penance, but also the practice of auricular confession:

As to the current practice of private confession, I am heartily in favor of it, even though it cannot be proved from the Scriptures. It is useful, even necessary, and I would not have it abolished.

This essay explores the overlapping territory between the phenomenon known as ‘imaginative resistance’ in literary, psychological and philosophical circles and Karl Barth's theological hermeneutic. Imaginative resistance refers to the way readers are willing to give consent to all sorts of implausible things in the context of a fiction, but become uneasy when asked to imagine that something they consider morally or ethically reprehensible is good. The essay offers an overview of the current scholarly theories regarding the origins of the phenomenon of imaginative resistance, arguing that none of them provide an adequate account of imaginative resistance in relation to a text read as ‘Word of God’. The essay suggests that Karl Barth's theological hermeneutic does not offer a ‘solution’ to imaginative resistance in relation to scripture, but rather deepens and redescribes it in meaningful ways by acknowledging the appropriateness of the interpreter's resistance while encouraging continued engagement even with the claims of challenging biblical texts.

Hans Urs von Balthasar claimed that Barth's Church Dogmatics demonstrates a weakening of his distinctive actualism in order to make space for ‘the concept of authentic objective form’, a point illustrated by the discourse on divine beauty in CD II/1. There Barth treats the divine being as an objective form to be contemplated, a seeming departure from Barth's privileged conceptualisation of God as personal subject whose free action humbles our theoretical gaze and graciously provides the material content for proper speech about God. Bruce McCormack has challenged von Balthasar's general thesis, arguing that no weakening has in fact taken place in the Church Dogmatics. If this is the case, what then of Barth's discourse on divine beauty? Is it consistent with his actualistic doctrine of God? Is it possible to speak of God both as a free, dynamic event and an object of beauty? Can theological aesthetics find a home within Barth's actualism? This article answers in the affirmative by demonstrating the systematic integrity between Barth's claims about divine beauty and the actualism permeating CD II/1. First, the article examines the ambiguity of Barth's specific claims about divine beauty. Barth is both enthusiastic and hesitant in speaking about divine beauty, affirming the concept yet placing careful qualifications on its use. Next, the article illustrates how the nature of these claims is anticipated by the actualism of CD II/1, specifically by (1) Barth's clear rejection of divine formlessness, (2) his argument that God's act of self-revelation in Jesus Christ implies an objective triune form for God's being and, lastly, (3) how he grounds discourse on divine beauty in the event of God's dynamic, free love. The article finally contends that the key to Barth's puzzling position on divine beauty is in understanding the precise reason why he registers beauty as a necessary but insufficient theological concept. This qualification is rooted in an important content–form, spirit–nature distinction which frames all discussion about God's being-in-act. Throughout CD II/1, objective form is a necessary condition for divine self-expression, but objectivity is always grounded in the freedom of the Spirit. Thus, the freedom-to-love at the heart of God's triune existence is the ground of our experience of God as beautiful, not any continuity with our contemplation of created forms. As such, the creative freedom animating God's triune life provides the space for, but also the limit to, theological aesthetics by imbuing divine beauty in mystery.

Colin Gunton advanced the radical claim that Christians have univocal knowledge of God. Just this, he said in Act and Being, was the fruit of Christ's ministry and passion. Now, was Gunton right to find this teaching in Karl Barth – or at least, as an implication of Barth's celebrated rejection of ‘hellenist metaphysics’? This article aims to answer this question by examining Gunton's own claim in Act and Being, followed by a closer inspection of Barth's analysis of the doctrine of analogy in a long excursus in Church Dogmatics II/1.

Contrary to some readings of Barth, I find Barth to be remarkably well-informed about the sophisticated terms of contemporary Roman Catholic debate about analogy, including the work of G. Sohngen and E. Pryzwara. Barth's central objection to the doctrine of analogy in this section appears to be the doctrine's reckless division (in Barth's eyes) of the Being of God into a ‘bare’ God, the subject of natural knowledge, and the God of the Gospel, known in Jesus Christ. But such reckless abstraction cannot be laid at the feet of Roman theologians alone! Barth extensively examines, and finds wanting, J. A. Quenstedt's doctrine of analogy, and the knowledge of God it affords, all stripped, Barth charges, of the justifying grace of Jesus Christ. From these pieces, Barth builds his own ‘doctrine of similarity’, a complex and near-baroque account, which seeks to ground knowledge of God in the living act of his revelation and redemption of sinners. All this makes one tempted to say that Gunton must be wrong in his assessment either of univocal predication or of its roots in the theology of Karl Barth.

But passages from the same volume of the Church Dogmatics make one second-guess that first conclusion. When Barth turns from his methodological sections in volume II/1 to the material depiction of the divine perfections, he appears to lay aside every hesitation and speak as directly, as plainly and, it seems, as ‘univocally’ as Gunton could ever desire. Some examples from the perfection of divine righteousness point to Barth's startling use of frank and direct human terms for God's own reality and his unembarrassed use of such terms to set out the very ‘heart of God’.

Yet things are never quite what they seem in Barth. A brief comparison between Gunton's univocal predication and Barth's own use of christological predication reveals some fault-lines between the two, and an explanation, based on Barth's own doctrine of justification, is offered in its place.

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.

Précis: Here is a call for an investigation of the linguistic formulation of the term ‘Trinity’. Can it be that the phrase ‘kingdom of God/heaven’ is a functional equivalent in the New Testament of the later term ‘Trinity’? As a political term, kingdom (or monarchy) provides a framework for collegiality in the exercise of an undivided power. As a philosophical term, however, monarchy (or monotheism) entails subordinationism. Recent theological works recall that time is an essential category in theology. The description of time is compared to the description of light in physics, and the principle of complementarity is used to hold together spatialized time (Parmenides) and dynamized space (Heraclitus). The first use of the term ‘Trinity’ (by Theophilus of Antioch, ca. 170 C.E.) referred to the first three days of creation, which are called types of the Trinity. Thus, God was not described as beyond time and history, as Origen assumed, but rather we are summoned to a quest for the historical God, who takes our individual stories up into the total story of God and the world.

Doctrines of the atonement in Christian theology, as Marlin E. Miller has pointed out, ‘usually limit their concern to reconciliation with God and, at most, consider reconciliation with others a secondary consequence of reconciliation with God’. Too often, in other words, the vertical aspect of reconciliation is allowed to overshadow its horizontal aspect. The vertical aspect of the atonement as it pertains directly to God is often treated in isolation as if its ethical implications were of no great importance. The reverse defect, however, would also appear to be widespread. Christian ethics as we know it today often seems to proceed as if the atoning work of Christ were of little or no relevance to its deliberations on human affairs. The social or horizontal aspect of reconciliation thereby eclipses its vertical aspect. Yet if the cross of Christ is indeed the very center of the center of the Christian gospel, as the church has historically believed, then how can it fail to determine the substance of Christian ethics as well as that of Christian theology? Moreover, how can the centrality of the cross fail to orient them both in any attempt to specify their inner unity, order and differentiation?