On a wet and windy evening last February over five hundred people gathered in a fine eighteenth century church in central Edinburgh to discuss the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. Given that the population of the city is about 500,000, one need not exaggerate the significance of the event. The interior of the church, modelled on St Andrew’s in the Via Quirinale in Rome, and thus neither cruciform nor circular but elliptical, provides a good arena for discussion. It is the church to which the dissenting ministers and elders went in procession when they withdrew from the General Assembly in 1843, to constitute the Free Church of Scotland.

The present controversy about the factual basis and importance of accepting the doctrine of the Virgin Birth is unlikely to split the Kirk, although the main Scottish newspapers were inundated with letters during the weeks after the Moderator of the Church of Scotland (the Right Reverend James Weatherhead) took the occasion of a Christmastide address to note that Scottish Presbyterians might believe in the doctrine of the Incarnation while being free to regard the stories in Scripture about the virginal conception of Jesus as purely ‘symbolic’.

The sermon was given in St Giles Cathedral, another site of great symbolic significance in Scottish history. Only a single scallop capital survives from the original early twelfth century building, in what is now substantially a fourteenth century structure. The central tower received its famous crown spire sometime before 1500.

As the ecological crisis, fuelled by widespread reality avoidance, deepens, so, fitfully and hesitantly, does the religious response. “Curiously, scientific analysis points toward the need for a quasireligious transformation of contemporary culture. Whether such a transformation can be achieved in time is problematic, to say the least”, writes Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. Recent Christian reflection has concentrated on the human presence, the place and responsibility, within creation, of people under God. Fruitful discussion continues about metaphors and models for human dominion, such as stewardship, sacral kingship, co-worker, and co-operative letting be.

Other distinctively Christian questions are also being asked — and convincing answers demanded — that go right to the heart of the Christian religion, questions about Christ and the whole scientifically unfolding reality of life through geological history. We now realize that the cosmos is more immense than our ancestors in the faith imagined; and that our own species, redeemed in Christ and the conscious edge of evolution, is both more fragile and more vulnerable and, simultaneously, more damaging a presence within global and local ecosystems than we like to acknowledge. We are aware that there have been mass extinction events taking out whole ecosystems; in particular we are aware of the dinosaurs. Extinction events take their toll, especially through climate change and habitat loss, over millenia, even millions of years. We may be in such an extinction event in this our time, particularly in the decimation of flora and fauna including numerous insect species in the rainforests of the humid tropics.

‘Law’ says Plato in his dialogue The Statesman, ‘can never embrace in one prescription what is best and most right for everyone. The dissimilarities between men and between their actions and the fact that human affairs are pretty well always changing make it impossible for any skill whatever to lay down anything simple in connection with anything that will hold for all cases and at all times.’ Aristotle agrees. ‘It is the mark of an educated mind to aim at just so much precision of detail as the nature of the subject matter admits.’ In mathematics we expect exactitude; but in matters of conduct and what is advantageous, ‘nothing is fixed any more than in medicine’, and ‘the agents themselves must decide each case as it comes, just as must doctors and steersmen.’ The best thinkers of ancient Greece thought it obvious that we cannot achieve what is best for ourselves, cannot achieve the good for human beings, by following general rules.

Today it is sometimes said that there are certain general moral rules that bind without exception, rules that it is always wrong to break, whatever the circumstances. Is there a conflict between this and the ancient view?

In his Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas discusses the biblical account of Creation and deals at length with the production of the body and soul of the First Man and the First Woman. The soul of each, being immaterial, was created by God. But whereas the human body is normally produced by parents from the substance of their own bodies, God himself produced both the body of Adam and the body of Eve. He produced the body of Adam from earth, the body of Eve from the body of Adam. The matter used may have been different, but Adam and Eve were equally God’s own handiwork and Eve was not a child of (and hence not a dependent of) Adam.

He asks himself why God followed this (asexual) method of production and replies that it was to show that reproduction is a relatively peripheral activity in the life of the human being. The specific goal of human existence is to understand. He uses the word homo: the activities of mind are the central work of the human being qua human being, of woman therefore as of man.

In accordance with medieval practice, he states objections to his own position and seeks to refute them. Perhaps God should not have made woman at the beginning of the world? The suggestion by a theologian that God should not have done something he actually did is obviously academic. But Aquinas was an academic, and academics of all centuries find that the discussion of highly theoretical issues assists them to clarify their understanding of the real world.

This festchrift honours the notable theological career of Dr. Maurice Wiles, Regius Professor emeritus of Divinity at Oxford University. In their Preface Drs. Coakley and Pailin state: “Throughout his distinguished career he has been a staunch supporter of a liberal approach to Christian theological understanding” (p. v). The essays in this volume take up a major, if not the major, preoccupation of Professor Wiles’ “liberal approach”, that of the making of Christian doctrine in the early Church and the remaking of it today.

The majority of the authors endorse, and so champion, in some fashion, Wiles’ initiative that Christian doctrine be remade in light of the demands of historical criticism, contemporary philosophy, and cultural experience. Thus J. Barr, J. Hick, M. Hooker, G. Kaufman, R. Lyman, S. McFague, J. Macquarrie, S. Ogden, and D. Pailin argue, in a variety of ways, that the traditional understanding of Christian doctrine, based on an often unscriptural (Hooker, p. 74), supernaturalist (Macquarrie, p. 168), interventionist (Barr, p. 9), and dualistic (Kaufman, pp. 99-100) understanding of God’s relationship to the world, must be fundamentally reconceived and replaced by an understanding of doctrine where God’s activity is restricted within the enclosed process of history and human activity, and interpreted through human experience and philosophical insight. As Ogden states: “I hold that one of the lasting achievements of revisionary theology right from the beginning is to have shown that the credibility of Christian witness can be validated, finally, only by appeal to what anyone is capable of experiencing simply as a human being” (p. 196).