In His birth, life, death and resurrection Jesus Christ finished the work the Father gave Him to do. He the eternal Son and Word of God, by whom all things were made and in whom all things cohere, became flesh, a Man among men, incorporating Himself into the humanity He had made but which had alienated itself from God through sin. It was our corrupt human nature that He took upon Him, but in taking it and in living out His holy life in it, He condemned sin in the flesh and saved what He had assumed, healing and sanctifying the mother through whom He was born, the sinners with whom He identified Himself and to whom He communicated His grace, the company of men and women which He built around Him as His own body, loving them and giving Himself for them, and in them for all mankind. In this oneness with us, wrought out in birth, in life and in death, He offered in Himself to the Father a sacrifice of obedience, bearing our judgment and offering us in Himself to the judgment of the Father, that through His life of obedience in our place where we are disobedient, and through His judgment in our place where we have no justification, He might destroy sin in our body of sin, death in our body of death, and raise us up in Himself to righteousness and new life, presenting us before God as those whom He had brothered and redeemed, and therefore as sons and daughters of the Father in Him.

One of the most striking and significant features of the present climate of opinion is to be found in the resumption, often tentative, questioning but real, of the age-old conversation between philosophy and theology. It is not to the present purpose to trace in detail the reasons which led to the lapse of this conversation in the first instance; but it would probably not be misleading to lay very considerable weight in this connexion upon two developments in modern thought, one in the sphere of philosophy and the other in that of theology.

The former of these consists in the rise of the school of radical empiricism or logical positivism, and especially in the enunciation of the principle of empirical verifiability according to which the test which determines whether an alleged statement purporting to be informative and not just tautologous or analytic is really meaningful or not is that it should be in principle empirically verifiable or falsifiable, in other words, that there should be the possibility of certain observations in sense-experience relevant to its truth or falsity. It is now some thirty years since Professor A. J. Ayer announced the elimination of metaphysics on the ground that ‘no statement which refers to a “reality” transcending the limits of all possible sense-experience can possibly have any literal significance’, so that ‘the labours of those who have striven to describe such a reality have all been devoted to the production of nonsense’ and Professor Ayer was no less emphatic, when he turned his attention to theology, that ‘the possibility of religious knowledge’ had ‘already been ruled out by our treatment of metaphysics’.

With the publication in 1961 of Offenbarung als Geschichte, the first supplementary volume of the German periodical Kerygma und Dogma, it has become evident that a new theological movement is gaining momentum amongst some of the younger theologians of Germany. Each of those writing for this booklet supports, from the vantage point of his own particular specialty, the thesis that revelation is mediated only through historical events: Wolfhart Pannenberg as a systematic theologian, Rolf Rendtorff as an Old Testament exegete, Ulrich Wilckens as a New Testament scholar, and Trutz Rendtorff as a Church historian. Since 1951 these and others who were then doctoral students at Heidelberg have been meeting regularly to formulate the basic ideology found in this booklet. Wolfhart Pannenberg has become the chief spokesman for this new movement, not because he was originally responsible for the basic approach to revelation as history, but because as one whose specialty is dogmatics, he provides the over-all synthesis for the historical and exegetical work of the others.

Origen's Commentary on John provides us with a fruitful acquaintance with his christological thinking. The Commentary as a text is not well presented, and for this reason the work is not as well known as it might be, although Origen is the first great commentator of Scripture whose exegetical works have come down to us. It seems important to know what he has to say in those works which he was able to write according to his inclination, and not for the purposes of an argumentum ad hominem. The Commentary on John itself provides the reason why it should be studied as an important revelation of Origen's thought, since he describes the Fourth Gospel as the greatest of the Gospel writings because it contains , and plainly ‘declared ’ in a way the Synoptics did not, although no one can understand the meaning of the Gospel unless, like John, he has been shown ‘by Jesus Himself, Jesus as He is’ (Book I, 6). The writing of this Commentary was not a work taken up lightly or without a great deal of hardship on the part of the author. It is a carefully—indeed painfully—wrought out work, agonised over to the last logical detail according to his exegetical method, and must be considered as one of the most serious attempts at a systematic construction of a christological position in the history of Christian thought.

Wilhelm Herrmann remains of importance in present theological debates, particularly those between Bultmann and Barth, two of his most distinguished pupils. Barth's own break with liberal theology was to an extent a break with his teacher Herrmann, a rejection of revelation as essentially the mode of inward appropriation within the religious subject and a rejection of the psychological pragmatism which determines the soteriological significance of Jesus in terms of the moral need of the individual. Barth sees Bultmann as setting forth in existentialist categories the transformation of the inner life of the believer and reminds us of all that Bultmann learned from Herrmann long before he had ever heard of Heidegger. When we consider the distinction drawn by Herrmann between historico-critical research and the certitude of faith, his conception of revelation as event in the life of the individual, his sharp rejection of dogmatics as a normative discipline, we discern motifs which continue to be determinants of Bultmann's theology.

We must first set this verse in its context. Paul has given in chapters 5, 6 and 7 of the Epistle to the Romans three definitions of that life which, according to 1.17, is promised for the man who is righteous by faith. In chapter 8 he goes on to define it further and finally as life in the Spirit, that is, life in obedience to God's law established in its true character by God's gift to us of His Spirit. The basic statement of this definition is contained in verses 1–11. In verses 12–16 the meaning of obedience is clarified. Its substance is summed up in verse 15. Obedience to God's law is to call God ‘Father’ in all seriousness and sincerity, in gratitude and joy. This, as Barth has pointed out, is in principle the whole of our obedience; for it naturally involves seeking wholeheartedly to please Him in thought, word and deed, and to avoid displeasing Him. Verse 17 by its movement of thought from sonship to heirship effects the transition to the subject of Christian hope, with which verses 17–27 are concerned. Life in the Spirit, life under God's law as established by His Spirit, life in obedience to God, is life characterised by hope. The content of the hope is indicated by verses 18, 19 and 21, its present painful context by verse 20.

Ch. Dodd in According to the Scriptures argues that the early Church had a distinctive method of biblical study. Quotations and citations of the OT were employed in oral tradition, and by some NT writers, as pointers indicating larger contexts or whole sections of scripture. That such sections of the OT were in common use is demonstrated by two or more NT authors independently referring to the same passage, although perhaps to different verses. Furthermore Dodd holds that the early Church used these longer passages to provide witness to ‘the determinate counsel of God which was fulfilled in the gospel facts’. This body of OT reference material, and its application to the NT events, underlies the theological expositions of the Church, especially that of Paul, the fourth evangelist, and the author of Hebrews.