This paper was originally delivered on 6th May 1977 as the Presidential Address of the Cambridge Theological Society. It has been lightly edited and prepared for publication with the author's help by Dr William Horbury and Professor J. C. O'Neill, in honour of the author and in gratitude for his teaching and inspiration on his 80th birthday, 15th April 1992.

One reason why the legitimacy of theology as an academic discipline is disputed, is the claim that theology presupposes faith. Such a presupposition, it is said, constitutes a danger for the academic nature of theology and, indirectly, its place in the university; in an academic discipline a scholar cannot proceed from a specific consideration which can not be discussed and which one can not give up without placing oneself outside that discipline, i.e., Christian theology. Therefore, while Christian theology is a valid intellectual pursuit for Christians who reflect on the content of their faith, it does not fall within the contours of an academic discipline which is universally accessible. Such is the rationale, and it involves not only Christian but Jewish and Islamic theology as well and in general all reflection on religion and philosophy of life which is undertaken in particular circles and which proceeds from unverifiable assumptions which lack universal endorsement. In this article we are concerned with the objection that theology is not properly academic (‘wissenschaftlich’) because of its unverifiable presupposition that God exists and its being connected to a particular religious community. Theology presupposes faith, it is said, and the point of dispute is whether any academic discipline may have such a presupposition. Three different things may be implied by this objection.

Karl Barth once said that we must always think three times before contradicting Hegel's system, ‘because we might find that everything we are tempted to say in contradiction to it has already been said within it’. Hegel wanted his thought to mirror the full movement of life, and to Barth (avid moviegoer no less than Mozart aficionado), this movement proceeds like the film of the cinematograph, though one so extraordinary that it depicts ‘the rhythm of life itself’, running exhaustively through the fullness of history, capturing the ‘exact recollection’ of the observed plenitude of being. When Hegel in the Phenomenology concludes the magisterial section on absolute knowledge with the statement that here ‘Spirit has wound up the process of its embodiment’, he is not, as Richard Rorty cavalierly suggests, recommending a new and improved vocabulary, but is celebrating the complete infusion of truth into the dialectic of knowing. As Barth says, ‘Truth is necessary to [Hegel] and, indeed, necessary to him in its unity, in its actuality, in the divine rigor inherent in it.’

Why is theology good for the church? One authoritative contemporary answer runs like this: theology is good for the church to the extent that it aims at a description of the linguistic and conceptual world of Christian faith normatively set forth in Holy Scripture. Theology, on this model, is ‘intratextual’ or ‘intrasemiotic’, offering a ‘thick description’, a kind of ethnography of the public, intersubjective meaning routines of Christianity, most of all as they are instantiated in Scripture which is the encoding of the ‘semiotic universe’ of Christian faith. Viewed as such, theology is a close cousin to what Clifford Geertz calls ‘interpretive explanation’: it is a discipline which ‘trains its attention on what institutions, actions, images, utterances, events, customs … mean to those whose institutions, actions, customs, and so on they are’; as such, it furnishes‘systematic unpackings of the conceptual world’ of Christian faith.

Toward the conclusion of his Theology After Wittgenstein, Fergus Kerr states that,

The rationalistic attempt to find the deeper psychological or evolutionary significance of ceremony only distracts us from the deep significance that a description of the event already communicates…

The sacrifice of the priest-king is no different in kind from religious actions that we might ourselves perform …, confessing one's sins…, baptism…

…The phenomena of the natural world, of birth, of death, and of sexual life… none of which is especially mysterious but any of which can become so to us prompt certain human reactions. …these customs are not adopted because of views that people have; they are too primitive and unreflective for that, they are reactions, in certain situations.

Today scholars still struggle to apprehend the meaning of hebel (vanity) in the Book of Ecclesiastes. It has become recognized that Old Testament theologians like Walter Eichrodt, Gerhard von Rad, and Ronald Clements did not essentially integrate the Wisdom Tradition of ancient Israel into the development of their theologies. In his Tyndale lecture on the Old Testament of 1965, David Hubbard argued for a new sensitivity to the relationship that must exist between covenant and wisdom in the community of faith. A. Graeme Auld has insisted that the alienation of wisdom from covenant traditions has caused such acute problems in understanding the Old Testament that we are in danger of not grasping at all the relation between the Word of God and the Word of Man. These problems may be linked not only to the question about why the Book of Ecclesiastes was allowed into the Canon of Israel, but also to the very hearing we claim to possess of the revelation of the Word of God in the world and the way the world has actually been made to be. All this should tell us that the significance of the concept of hebel in the Book of Ecclesiastes requires a real clarification of profound consequence for our knowledge of God in the world.

This paper has been the result of teaching and comparing two very different Old Testament texts, both of which are concerned with the relationship between God and the created order. One is Genesis 1, with its priestly concerns for harmony within the created order; the other is the book of Amos, where one encounters a profoundly pessimistic view of the coming disorder throughout the natural world. In making associations between these two texts, one cannot help but ask why the earlier reflections in Amos offer such aradical and developed understandingof God's relationship with creation — quite distinct from the view of God evidenced in the first chapter of Genesis.

Abiblical scholar is sometimes asked, “What effect has the Bible had?” To my embarrassment, I have not been able to draw on solid results of research to answer this very reasonable question. It has been all but ignored by the exegetical guild.

The late medieval synthesis reflected in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) generally and in the doctrine of transubstantiation in particular established an understanding of the nature of the church and authority that was to be varied and wide in its effects. Transubstantiation as doctrine and as coalescor of Church worship laid the groundwork for a particularly formative understanding of the ekklesia of Christ. It issued in a view of immanental, divine authority and grace that would come to manifest itself in the indulgences, the treasury of merits, invocation of saints, relics, etc. To be critical of the Mass was to bring into question the entire hierarchy of the Church and its authority on earth. In this context of strong ecclesiological authority, God was reckoned primarily as immanent and immediate through the papal head. In the face of this development, John Calvin asserted that Christ, as center of all true Christian reality, is the necessary focus and the preeminent authority in and to the Church through the Word of God, the Scriptures.

John McLeod Campbell was deposed from the ministry of the Church of Scotland in 1831, at the age of thirtyone, following an infamous heresy trial focusing primarily on his preaching the universal extent of the atonement. After twenty-five long years of obscurity, he published The Nature of the Atonement and Its Relation to Remission of Sins and Eternal Life, in 1856, an extensive and eventually well received treatment of the doctrine and one which brought him into some prominence as a theologian. These are the two moments in his life for which Campbell is most remembered. This essay brings attention to a later work, Reminiscences and Reflections, Referring to His Early Ministry in the Parish of Row, 1825–31, begun in 1871 and left unfinished at his death the following year. Though it ostensibly has to do with the time and events leading up to his trial, important connections can be made with his later major writing on the atonement. In particular, Campbell's reflections on the value of the memory of the past are shown in this essay to offer an expanded, explanatory account of what it means for the work of Jesus Christ in the atonement to be reproduced in the Christian believer. According to Campbell, in this way even the past can be redeemed.

Kierkegaard scholarship has, in the past twenty years, gone a long way toward clearing up issues both historical and interpretive that earlier interpreters had somehow overlooked. This essay is neither an attempt at historical reconstruction or a direct engagement with the Kierkegaard guild. This essay is a reflection on the spirituality of Soren Kierkegaard, a theme he would probably find somewhat inappropriate. He would rather want to challenge us, his readers, to consider the primary subject of theology itself, namely God. But if a consideration of his spirituality should lead the reader in such a pursuit, then it seems one is indirectly led to the ultimate goal ol the Kierkegaardiana.

The canonical books of Judaism, to which we turn for the definition of theological categories and doctrines, rarely set forth ideas in the form of abstractions and generalizations, with the result that understanding any generative theological categories requires the philological exegesis of texts. In the case of the Judaic canon, the pertinent texts are those of the Torah, written and oral. When we turn to the written Torah, which the West knows as the Old Testament, and to the Oral Torah, which Judaism assembles out of the Mishnah, the two Talmuds, the Midrash-compilations of the formative age, our work only begins. For we have also to determine for ourselves what words, in the canonical writings, stand for, or refer us to, the counterpart category that our Christian and Greek philosophical heritage has conferred upon us. When, as we shall see, we ask ourselves about how the classical theology of Judaism conceives of ‘eternity’, we therefore engage in a prior inquiry into what we mean by ‘eternity’ and how in the Judaic canon's substrate of theology we may locate the counterpart-language for that meaning. Not only so, but we have further to find out in what context thought takes place on the category, ‘eternity’: when and why is discourse on eternity precipitated in the canonical theology of Judaism? And when not?

The problem of the Beloved Disciple (BD) has come to seem virtually insoluble. It cannot be John bar-Zebedee: there would be no reason to suppress the name of so high an authority; striking events which he attended (Jairus' daughter, the Transfiguration) are passed over in silence; and anyhow the whole Gospel is antipathetic to the Jerusalem leadership (see below). It cannot be an anonymous jerusalem disciple: none such is mentioned in the Jerusalem events of 2–12; these latter seem to consist of elements also found in the synoptic tradition, given a Johannine slant; and why should his name be suppressed, if he were Jesus' favourite, and the Gospel community's hero? It cannot be a totally fictitious ‘symbolic’ figure: no proposed symbolism is clear or adequate; and it was rumoured in the Church that he would not die. No one believes that he was Lazarus or John Mark: so what are we left with? It is time to approach the question from a different angle.

From the moment Jesus was hung on the cross, Christians have been compelled to address the fact of evil within God's creation. For the most part we have made the mistake of addressing this reality by logical means. It is not that there are no logical solutions to the apparent contradiction between the fact of evil and an omnipotent and benevolent God. The difficulty is far more fundamental. Logical solutions or answers do not address the fact of sin, evil and suffering in the world. At best, they are innocuous. At worst, they are destructive. For example, a pastor presiding at a funeral may well have an answer or two to the inevitable question raised by the grieving, 'Why did Jack have to die so young?' She might say that the wages of sin are death, and she might even speculate thatjack died young because he was such an accomplished sinner. Moreover, it is at least conceivable that our pastor could be correct in herjudgment!!! Nevertheless, those gathered would be right to be angry if the pastor said such a thing because her answer did not address the issue. Indeed, no answer can. The people gathered do not need answers. They already have biological, psychological and even theological answers. The people longfor presence instead. To be sure, they long for the presence of their departed loved one, but they require the presence of friends, relatives and God. The theodicy issue is addressed by such presence. The theodicy issue does not simply pose a question to be answered. It creates a context in which ministry may happen.

Central to the whole of Thomas Forsyth Torrance's theology is the μοοΣιον between the incarnate Logos and the eternal God, or the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father. The immense significance of this Nicene μοοΣιον is best understood against the background of the axiomatic χωριΣμΣ which lies at the heart of Hellenism, Gnosticism and Arianism. Once such a radical separation between τ νοητ and τ αἰΣθητ is posited, there arise the inevitable questions: (a) How do we regard the biblical statements of the eternal God within the history of the Jewish people in the realm of τ αἰΣθητ (b) On which side of the demarcation does the Logos of the eternal God belong? For the dualist thinkers, the dilemma is — How can the eternal God who is impassible and changeless be thought of as actually entering the spatiotemporal history of this changing and decaying world, and alas, even living within our creaturely and contingent order? To be sure, the biblical notion of a Creator who actively and creatively interacts with his creation is incompatible with the prevailing Hellenic thought-form and secular culture of the early Church. It was as unthinkable and unintelligible to them as it is to Bultmann and the myth-of-God-incarnate theologians of our day.

The moral pluralism that characterises contemporary living can largely be attributed to the education that differentiates modern life from previous generations. During the industrial revolution in Britain in the nineteenth century John Henry Newman (1801–1890) was very sensitive to the importance of a more educated society, especially with regard to the development of religious faith and morals in an increasingly secular and sceptical age. Although his dedication to the advancement of knowledge remained throughout his life, his career commitment to formal learning began as an Anglican when he became a tutor at Oriel College, Oxford in 1826. In a sense his academic calling reached its zenith in 1852 as rector of the Catholic university at Dublin when he had the opportunity to express his view of liberal education by writing his university discourses.

The publication of The Politics of Jesus in 1972 established John Howard Voder as the most intellectually compelling, critical, and constructive Mennonite theologian of this generation. In that volume, Voder articulated an interpretive method and a substantive doctrinal position that affirmed his sectarian and ‘restoration’ theological vision but at the same time gained him a serious hearing in several corners of the North American Christian community. His recent tenure as President of the Society of Christian Ethics and appointment in the Department of Theology at Notre Dame University are only two examples of his standing among ecumenically-minded Christians.

Judeo-Christian theology has always been concerned with the order and rationality of the created universe, believing that this rational order was somehow bestowed upon it by the Creator. However, in the last two decades traditional conceptions of order have been challenged by the scientific discovery that ‘chaos’ permeates the behaviour of natural systems in our cosmos. What is the theologian to make of this ‘discovery’? If theology is to speak to the contemporary mind with its postmodern frame of reference, it must carry out its own inquiry vis-à-vis the work of natural science as it explores the intrinsic intelligibility of the created universe.

Karl Barth exacts a heavy punishment on his critics. Reading his many volumes is toil as well as pleasure, as Barth himself observed, in the special irony he reserved for his own work. But it is not the length of the Church Dogmatics, the scripture commentaries, the sermons or the letters, however great, that weighs on the critic. Critics are bothered — for lack of a better term — by his style.