IT is an interesting commentary upon the place of theology in our Western culture and society to observe how many of the phrases we normally associate with it carry overtones of conflict and argument. ‘Science and religion’, ‘faith and reason’, ‘reason and revelation’, ‘history and the Gospels’, ‘proof and belief’—not all of them antithetic to one another, but all of them areas within which there has been in the last century in all cases and much longer in some, much violent discussion. So the picture has been built up of theology as contained within a ring of frontiers, across which it seeks to parley with those on the other side, to exchange meanings, to transfer information, if only to the extent of saying what each thought of the other.On one of these frontiers theology had a long conversation with science as to the understanding of the Genesis story of Creation in the light of evolutionary theories, or of the Christology of the two natures and the one Person in the light of modern psychological views of the unity of personality; across another frontier, with the historians as to what constituted the historically credible or possible and as to whether theological presuppositions distorted historical narrative; across another frontier with the sociologists, as to whether human responsibility could still be affirmed in the midst of the vast tissue of modern economic, social and political pressures; again with the moralists, over the reconciliation of grace and freedom and the imperative of morality with the indicative of faith; while time would fail to tell of the Gideons, the Baraks and the Samsons, who have broken swords with philosophers over the veridical nature of religious knowledge, over the proofs of Divine existence and the nature of Revelation.