It is individuals and their particular characteristics that form the pattern of any country's theology; but it is neither the qualifications nor the scholarship of these individuals alone by which the distinctive theological outlook of the country is determined. A great deal too depends on the way in which the Universities are organised, the extent of ground covered by the professorships, the nature of theological examinations, and things of that kind. It is factors such as these which determine the course of study to be followed by theological scholars before they reach a chair in the University, and for those of them who are appointed as lecturers it is the organisation of the study which prescribes, for example, what they are required to teach. A few words, then, may be appropriate at this point on the composition of the Swedish theological faculties.

The problem of Scripture and tradition is again causing much discussion both among Catholic and among Protestant theologians. It is certainly no exaggeration to say that since the Reformation this question has never been so much to the fore as it is today. And the outstanding characteristic of this discussion is the fact that both sides realise the problem can no longer be posed in the same way as it was during the Reformation period, and especially during the period of great religious controversies after the Reformation. That is a good sign, for it is the first condition for progress in interconfessional discussion. The development of the Roman Catholic and Reformation Churches, and especially the new theological situation, compel us to re-examine the teaching of Scripture and of tradition, and the relation between them. This research is now being carried out very thoroughly by both confessions—but the situation is still by no means clear; it remains very complex. From both confessions we are waiting to hear what the outcome will be.

It has been for many years a hope of mine that I might find the time to formulate, in a systematic fashion, the ethical teaching of the New Testament, and particularly of the Gospels. This would be a major undertaking, and what I write now falls far short of this. But it is not unrelated to it; for it arises from repeated, if unsystematic, reflection upon the conditions of fulfilling such a project. Certain problems have presented themselves for solution which I cannot solve. Certain possible conclusions, between which a choice must be made, compete with one another for acceptance. Certain valuations which seem to differentiate the teaching of the Gospels from other ethical attitudes have focused themselves in my attention, without achieving systematic relation to one another. It is something of all this that I have in mind to express; no firm conclusion, certainly, but rather certain prolegomena to any conclusion which may eventually become possible.

The invitation to pay a tribute to my friend, Principal John Baillie, on the occasion of his attaining the biblical three score years and ten, and his consequent retirement from duty in New College, Edinburgh, stirs memories that go back half a century and more.

It may sound a bit presumptuous to speak of the architecture of a dogmatics which is not yet complete, but the size and scope of Professor Barth's Church Dogmatics to date would seem to justify our attempt to examine its outer structure in order to discover the basic dynamic principles involved in this Protestant ‘Summa’. In following this procedure, however, we should be aware that we are working backwards, for, unlike the many dogmatics in which the Christian Faith has been forced into a pre-established mould, Professor Barth has been willing to cast the mould in accordance with the demands of the Faith itself. This is not to deny in any way the obvious human element involving meticulous planning and unusually sensitive organisational skill, but is to state clearly that the Church Dogmatics is not a system conforming to the dictates of human reason, but is a bold yet humble attempt to write a systematic theology which conforms to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. As such, the architectural plans must necessarily result from obedient and faithful listening to the Word of God spoken to the Church, and all future designs must remain fluid and prepared for unexpected changes.

This article was written originally as a draft for private study, consequently all my indebtedness to other scholars, such as Dr J. L. Ainslie, Dr T. W. Manson, Dr T. F. Torrance, etc., is not noted as it ought to be. That it owes much to such men is freely admitted, so I hope that this acknowledgment will be accepted as adequate. Further, it was prepared for a group of theologians, with the result that a considerable background-knowledge is taken for granted. Its purpose was simply to form a brief historical survey as a basis for further study.

The Primacy of the Church. Christianity is often called the religion of the Book: this is because it is based on things that happened in history. Jesus did not leave behind Him, so far as we know, a single written word. We hear of His writing only once, and then it was on the dust of the floor of the temple (John 8.6). What He did leave was a community—the eleven faithful Apostles, the ministering women, His mother and brothers—about 120 persons in all (Acts 1.15), who met daily for worship because they loved Jesus and believed that God had raised Him from among the dead. When they had to fill the place of the traitor Judas, Peter said: ‘Of the men therefore which have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John, unto the day that he was received up from us, of these must one become a witness with us of his resurrection’ (Acts 1.2 if). And Matthias was chosen, with all possible care. Six weeks later the company was wonderfully strengthened and increased by the outpouring of the Spirit, and the Church began to spread from Jerusalem to ‘all Judaea and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth’ (Acts 1.8).

I am not here concerned with the harmony of faith and reason, but rather with the inner meaning of faith as an acceptance of truth on the Word of God. The second half of the article will indicate a difference of emphasis among Protestants and Catholics as to the connotations of the word ‘faith’. It will attempt to justify the Catholic tradition, while suggesting that the difference of emphasis need not necessarily imply lack of common ground for mutual understanding.

It is appropriate to begin this presentation with an extended citation from Luther, where this founder of ‘Protestant thought’ develops what he means by ‘justification by faith’. We read in the Large Commentary to the Galatians:

Faith lays hold upon Christ and has Him present, enclosing Him as the ring encloses the precious stone which is set in it. And he who is found to have laid hold upon Christ with such a faith and have Him in his heart, God counts for righteous. This is the reason or the merit through which we receive the forgiveness of sins and righteousness. Because you believe in Me, says God, and because your faith lays hold upon Christ, whom I have given to you to be your Justifier and Saviour, therefore be thou righteous… And it is altogether necessary that God accepts us or counts us as righteous, first because we are not yet in this life wholly righteous, rather in this life sin always remains in the flesh. This sin remaining in the flesh God purges from us. Further we are also sometimes abandoned by the Holy Spirit and fall into sin, like Peter, David and other saints. But then we may always fall back upon this doctrine, that our sins are covered and that God will not impute them unto us (Rom. 4.7f).

The nineteenth-century revolution in historical method and its application to the study of the Bible rendered necessary a complete re-statement of the doctrine of revelation. No longer was it possible to hold a doctrine of revelation as given in propositional form at the dictation of the Holy Spirit. The object of this paper is to ask what is the biblical conception of revelation and how it can best be expressed and understood in the light of modern thought. We will begin with a very brief and necessarily inadequate summary of what the Bible means by ‘revelation’.

The Church Militant, living and working in history as an organic and visible society, must have a structure and organs which express its nature and enable it to be what it is and to fulfil its function or mission. Whatever might be argued a priori about this structure and these organs, and whatever might be learned from the experiences of history through the centuries, it is plain from the New Testament that the apostolic church possessed institutions which were part of its structure and which existed in order to further its mission. Among these was a ministry of men distinguishable qua ministers from the other members of the body, a special organ of, and therefore within, the one body.

Perhaps an astrologer would claim that due to some remarkable astral influence the year 1955–6 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on 27th January 1956; the centenary of the death of Sören Kierkegaard on 11th November 1955, and the seventieth birthday of Karl Barth on 10th May 1956. The three dates are being suitably observed by music-lovers and scholars the world over. But something more than a disposition of the stars links their names together. For if, as we believe, Kierkegaard and Barth, like Luther and Calvin in the sixteenth century, represent the end of an epoch and the dawn of a new era, then according to both men, Mozart is the herald of a new age. Though Mozart lived in the eighteenth century, he actually represented the end of the Age of Absolutism in which he lived and which lingered on in idealism and contemporary existentialism. At the same time he marked the beginning of a new day in which men would begin, not with expressions of their own consciousness, but with grateful praise to the Creator who has revealed Himself totheir consciousness. In Mozart's music Kierkegaard believed he had heard a No to the past: to man who is the measure of all things. Barth, on the other hand, believes he has heard a Yes to the goodness of God's creatures. Not that Mozart himself was a sort of Hegelian synthesis.

The object of this essay is to offer for consideration a new way of translating the fragment of Papias' Preface quoted by Eusebius, in the belief that it may show that Papias was indeed ‘a man of the primitive age’ (⋯ρχαîos), who flourished about A.D. 80, and whose ‘Interpretation’ did not deal with Matthew's Gospel, still less with Luke's, because the First and Third Evangelists had not published their works when he wrote.

It is important for the historian that he should exercise a salutary scepticism towards his materials and his sources, but even more important that he should adopt this detachment towards himself, and when confronted by apparent confusion and contradiction in some great figure of the past, to ask whether perhaps he himself as historian may be asking the wrong questions, and evaluating another century in the themes and categories of a later age. This is particularly true about Luther's doctrines of the Church. For while there is no doctrine of the Church which does not somewhere blur its edges (by reason of the eternal and eschatological dimension intersecting the empirical and historical plane) and Luther's is no exception, there is I think a demonstrably consistent core to his teaching, from the beginning to the end of his career.

Justice, according to Aristotle, is giving to every man his own. But what is a man's own, and how is it to be determined relative to what belongs to other men? We call fair distribution between persons by the name of justice, and in doing so we acknowledge that justice stands over and between men as something prior to and outside a man's will or even the State's will. The moment we invoke ‘justice’, we in fact appeal to a supreme Being as the source of justice. Either God disposes of the world, determines the order of His creatures, and endows them with the qualities necessary to that order, or justice is based on power, and the expression of justice is the edict of the State. Either there is a Supreme Lawgiver who is the source of Jus or right and therefore of law, or there is no objective right but only the will of the powerful. Hugo Grotius agrees with the Stoics in deriving Jus from Jove.

The verb ordinare and its cognates have been used for the setting apart of church officers ever since Latin began to be an ecclesiastical language. It is significant that the names of the offices were transliterated; cheirotonia, the laying-on-of-hands, was not. This no doubt may be very simply explained. Actions with the hands were used in healing, in the reconciliation of penitents, in the ceremonies in and after baptism. A distinction of terms was needed; the choice of a term points forward to the whole history of Latin Christendom.

It is surely in the Book of Job that the religion of the Old Testament finds its most intense and concentrated expression. For the great theme of this book is something which lies at the root of the religious life of humanity, namely, the inescapable character of man's relation to God. Its real subject is the impossibility of eluding this numinous connexion with the ultimate religious and metaphysical ground of life. Job is like some creature caught in the toils. He comes before us as the victim of the dimension of eternity in which human life stands. He knows in his innermost soul that his suffering is ‘sent’ by the living God. He feels hunted and pursued by this mysterious divine Potentate whose character and designs are inscrutable to the petty mind of man and ever baffle ‘the foiled searching of mortality’. In the apparent impossibility of finding relief from this torture of body and spirit, or a harmonious consummation of life, he longs to cut himself adrift from the metaphysical foundations of his being and to find a momentary peace upon a lower plane. One of the key-points of Job's thought, and of the Bible as a whole, is that of the supreme significance of man in God's providential purposes, the high worth with which he becomes endowed as a result of the cherishing care of his Creator. In the stress of his suffering, Job would fain elude the burdensomeness and the costingness of this uplifting relation with the divine which redeems man from final insignificance.

In the Westminster Confession, the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, a section with the definition of a sacrament precedes the sections interpreting Baptism and the Lord's Supper (W.C.F., Chap. 27; L.C., Qq. 161, 162, 163; S.C., Q.q. 91, 92). In considering these it is important to remember that the authors of these statements were not interested in propounding a sacramental theory of religion for its own sake. They were confronted with an existing sacramental system and practice which appeared to them as idolatry and superstition. What we find then in our standards is not academic discussion but polemical and critical reaction to an existing situation with a view to cleansing the worship of God from error and corruption. The starting point in Scripture and the institution of Christ ensured that the essential points were brought into prominence. Nevertheless it is legitimate to inquire whether some of the elements and emphases in the teaching have not been influenced and affected by the historical situation, the general outlook and atmosphere and the modes of thought of that time.

A century of intense research on Mark has largely failed to reach generally accepted conclusions either as to the theology of Mark, or as to the degree of legitimacy and the methodology of using Mark as a source for discussing Jesus. This confusion in Marcan research is due in large measure to a failure to reach clarity as to Mark's understanding of history, a problem which should logically have been resolved before any attempt was made to use Mark as a historical source for the study of Jesus. The nineteenth century, reaching its climax in H. J. Holtzmann, assumed that since Mark was the earliest gospel it was most historical, i.e. that Mark wrote history with much the same presuppositions as did the modern historian. History consists in the interaction of human wills and actions, and is to be explained by locating the causal connexions in the intentions and actions of men. For example, Mark 6.14–29 records the beheading of John by Herod; the next paragraph records Jesus withdrawing to privacy for rest with the disciples. Mark was assumed to mean—although remarkably enough he in no word hinted it—that one event followed chronologically upon the other and was caused by the other.

The first half-volume of Barth's Church Dogmatics, in English, has been available since 1936. The corresponding half-volume, which completes the Prolegomena, is now in print. Decency demands that any fanfare which seems appropriate to an enthusiastic reviewer should be sounded on muted trumpets, and Barth himself has made it clear in this volume that no teacher of the Church should become for us an angelic power to whose weak and beggarly influence we are glad to enslave ourselves. Nevertheless the Church has been given a teacher in this generation whose stature has not been obviously exceeded by any of the great servants whom God raised up for the same task in earlier days, and it is time that his voice was properly heard in Britain. Experts on theological fashion assure us, with all the confidence of Athenian spermologoi, that the time, mercifully, has passed; other voices, more interesting and less exacting, are carrying the discussion forward to a post-Barthian stage. Only the years will show whether what these experts say is true. And each of the next five or six years will bring two part-volumes of substantial dogmatics, as distinct from prolegomena. Those are the volumes which contain the work which most obviously effects the transition from Bible to sermon. The first volume serves principally to diagnose and to heal our ‘permanent or passing, but always radical, incompetence with regard to the whole business’. It does so, of course, in the most non-arrogant and robustly human way.