John Henry Muirhead once said that British Idealism was from the first in essence a philosophy of religion. He saw it as an appeal to the ideas of the German Post-Kantians for the purpose of defending religious belief against the many new challenges mounted to it during the second half of the nineteenth century, challenges which had rendered untenable the less critical faith of preceding generations. Muirhead’s interpretation could be disputed, for it is not clear that it accurately describes the principal motivation of all members of the British Idealist school, but if there is truth in it, and I think that there is, nowhere is this more so than in the case of the Scottish theologian and philosopher, John Caird, for Caird’s entire oeuvre revolved around the project of reconciling Christianity and Idealism.

A celebrated preacher, then innovative professor of theology and finally much respected Principal of Glasgow University, John Caird was in his time a well-known and highly regarded figure. Today however his work is almost entirely forgotten, along with that of many others in the idealist movement; such ways of thinking having passed from favour as completely as they once held dominance of the intellectual scene. Yet we run the risk of misunderstanding our history, and thus our own present, if we insist on simply turning our faces from certain eras of thought or movements of ideas and deeming them fallow or uninteresting. For that way we simply construct a history which reflects our current prejudices but never can challenge them. In this paper I shall outline the work of John Caird in an attempt to show why it deserves to be remembered, but first let me provide just a few biographical details.

If you look in a popular atlas for the world of Las Casas—in other words, Central and South America and the West Indies—you will find it tucked away at the end. An afterthought, you might say. Our atlases very much help to shape our mental geography.

In fact the world of Las Casas covers one-sixth of the earth’s total land surface and now contains over 500 million people, the vast majority of them Catholics (they account for almost half the world’s Catholic population). However, still nearly half of the people in that world are illiterate, and nearly half of them are landless peasants; there is, in other words, still a huge gap between the rich and the poor. Las Casas would be broken-hearted to know that today at least some of the ugly consequences of the colonisation which began five centuries ago are still there for every discerning foreign tourist to see. But who was Las Casas?

Men like Dominic and Francis in varying ways powerfully articulated timeless questions in the lights of their times, and we call them men of vision. We must not claim too much for them, for they were in and out of their times. At the same time, we must keep them alive in our collective memory in a living historical conversation rooted in discernment and interpretation. They took hold of the past, immersed themselves in a living experience of their present, decoded from all that some of the timeless questions of humanity, and humbly suggested a possible and perhaps better future by word and action.

The aim of this paper is to examine the historical question as to whether mono-episcopal government existed in the local Church in Rome in the first century AD. It is not intended to engage upon the related task of theological reflection upon the role of bishops within the Church and their claim to be successors to the apostles in this role.

There has been a development in the Church’s understanding of ministry and authority, just as there has been a development in the Church’s understanding of the Trinity or the Incarnation. Leo the Great was as certain of the authority of the Petrine office, as he was of the reality of the two natures of the one person of Christ. The task of showing whether such developments were legitimate is ultimately a theological one, though it is one that will involve reflection upon history. It is not prima facie obvious that a high doctrine of the papacy does require that a single bishop exercised magisterial authority in Rome in the immediate post-apostolic age. Yet this question is only raised at this point so that it may be set aside. Here we consider the simpler historical question as to whether the evidence available requires, suggests, or excludes the supposition that Christian ministry in Rome in the latter part of the first century was mono-episcopal.

At last Søren Kierkegaard is beginning to get the attentive reading he deserves. Hegel and Marx, Nietzsche and Freud have all had their day, but Kierkegaard has always rolled along as a kind of fifth wheel. It was suspected that he was as great as the others, but no-one could quite say why. That was partly because he existed, for decades, only in the hasty and sometimes impressionistic translations of the Rev. Walter Lowrie, who began to translate him in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. These translations were indeed ‘works of love’. Lowrie’s translation of The Concept of Dread, for example, was completed ‘in a month of thirty-one days, working twelve hours a day’. In the 1980’s however, the Princeton edition called Kierkegaard’s Writings, edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong began to appear, and these are scrupulously academic translations, with a plethora of learned notes. The edition is complete now—the last of the 26 volumes appeared in 1998.

In all this, the Danes themselves played little part. For them, Spren Kierkegaard was an irritation almost too great to borne while alive, and a bore to talk about ever since. The Danes could never understand why, from the 1950’s on, there was a steady stream of scholars and philosophers, coming to Copenhagen, nosing around the second-hand bookshops in the hope of finding first editions of Spren Kierkegaard. Only in the 1990’s did the penny finally drop. A huge grant was made in 1993 by the Danish National Research Foundation, to the tune of 27,500,000 Danish kroner, and a Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre was set up at the University of Copenhagen, under the direction of a handful of Danish scholars, with the aim of setting up and publishing a critical edition of his complete works. Thus, only 138 years late, the Danes took official cognisance of their greatest literary son. The edition, in 55 volumes, with an electronic version to follow, is about to roll off the press. The first five volumes of text and commentary were available as of 10 October 1998.