The response of the theological world to contemporary developments in empirical and language philosophy is beginning to take on a more definite and active form. Books and articles are now appearing which deal with everything from the semantics of the Old Testament1 and the Church Fathers2 to parallels between language analysis and Karl Barth's theology.3 In addition, anthologies in the philosophy of religion are now including a section on ‘The Nature of Religious Language’.4

As the quantity and quality of this response increase there arises a need for a survey and classification of the various approaches of which it is composed. It is the purpose of this article to provide such a survey, and to make some evaluational comments and suggestions. It should be mentioned at the out-set that it is impossible completely to classify approaches; and yet there are similarities and dissimilarities among these approaches which enable one to point out ‘family resemblances’.

Obviously, such a survey cannot come close to being exhaustive, but certain tendencies can be noted. Moreover, an effort will be made to classify the various approaches according to a continuum. Those that are dealt with first tend towards maintaining the autonomy of religious language, while those that are discussed further along in the article would prefer to relate religious language to empirical experience. In between there are those who would advocate something similar to an eclectic view.

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.

‘Looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of God. Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.’ (Heb. 12.2–3.)

In two recent issues of the Scottish Journal of Theology Professor D. L. Deegan wrote papers dealing with Ritschl, the first being ‘Albrecht Ritschl on the Historical Jesus’, and the second ‘The Ritschlian School, the Essence of Christianity and Karl Barth’ Much of the second paper was devoted to a discussion of the relationship between Albrecht Ritschl and Friedrich Schleiermacher. In addition, the first paper contained much material which invites comparison of these two men. But while Dr Deegan is correct in assuming that an investigation of this relationship will contribute to an understanding of Ritschl, his remarks on the subject, it seems to me, are not completely accurate. It is the purpose of this paper, therefore, to make another investigation of that relationship.

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’.

What is meant by the finality of Jesus Christ for men? This is raised by consideration of a Study Pamphlet, ‘The Finality of Jesus Christ in the Age of Universal History’, issued by the Division of Studies, World Council of Churches. On page I of this Study Pamphlet we are told that ‘Jesus is at the end of the human journey’, and also that ‘He has revealed the ultimate truth to men, has shown in full, final and sufficient measure to them the nature of God and the truth concerning life’. The emphasis is on what we would normally call ‘the final coming’, and on what is shown of God in Jesus. ‘Because He has already appeared we know our final destination’, i.e. we know whom to expect to meet. The stress will then lie on what the Church, who knows Him, does until the end, serving men for Him. The New Testament emphasis does not lie on what we do, but on what He did. The New Testament emphasis does not lie on the end, but on an act of redemption and reconciliation effected by God in Jesus Christ, a thing done once and for all. ‘Through Him God was pleased to reconcile all things to himself, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of the cross’ (Col. 1.20). Because He has done this Christ reigns over all and the end is assured. ‘Nothing can separate us from His love‘ (Rom. 8.39).

For the Christian faith, the Old Testament is no longer revelation as it had been, and still is, for the Jews. For everyone who stands in the Church, the history is no longer a live issue … the history of Israel is not the history of revelation for us.

So Bultmann writes in an article on the significance of the Old Testament for Christian faith, and on the basis of this we might be inclined to dismiss the whole discussion of Bultmann and the Old Testament, and to add ‘Marcionism’ to the list of heresies already attributed to him. But this would be too hasty, for over against the above quotation we can cite another: For anyone who has done even a minimum of historical reflection, it is senseless to try to hold on to Christianity and at the same time to discard the Old Testament. One should realise then that the Christianity he hopes to preserve is no longer Christianity. Either–or; both, or none at all.

Discussing in the Institutes the nature of God's image in man, Calvin refers to the dream of the Manichees, which Servetus has attempted in our own day to revive. Because it is said that God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life (Gen. 2.7), they thought that the soul was a transmission of the substance of God; as if some portion of the boundless divinity had passed into man. It cannot take long time to show how many gross and foul absurdities this devilish error carries in its train.1

In our own day this view, which Calvin takes to be so fatal an error, is very much alive. Occasionally it is expressed in terms not dissimilar from those described by Calvin.2 More often, however, it appears in a more generalised form, where man's possession of a spiritual consciousness is taken to prove that the Divine is latent within him. Spirit is regarded above all as the vehicle by means of which the eternal penetrates the temporal. God himself moves in man, so that human consciousness cannot be satisfied with anything belonging to time and space, our transient world; instead, it strives continually to attain to its proper supramundane dimension.

The Platonic inspiration of such a view is evident when it is advanced as a distinctive argument: for example, in Rufus M. Jones' West Lectures, Spirit in Man.3

Accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.

It is a tribute to the perspicacity of Lessing and Kierkegaard that their way of investigating the problem of the role of historical investigation in the task of theological construction has set the tone of subsequent discussion. The centrality of their problem in our time is shown up by the way Diem depicts Lessing's question and Kierkegaard's answer as the starting-point of the contemporary theological debate.1 Diem's analysis here is penetrating, even if it only shows up the need for that starting-point to be critically examined.

In this article, after an examination of Kierkegaard's general position, what I wish to suggest is (1) that the problem as Lessing has posed it is insoluble, and thus Kierkegaard's paradoxical solution is no solution; (2) that nevertheless, despite his clear dependence on Lessing, Kierkegaard has restated the problem in the only way which shows any promise for a Christian theology; and (3) that the pursuit of this solution requires that faith be not sealed off from ‘natural inquiry’, and consequently, a serious grappling with ordinary historical problems is unavoidable in Christian theology—which is the opposite conclusion to that which Kierkegaard himself drew (and which is widely accepted at the present time).

There does seem some truth in saying that any large-scale endeavour to work through a comprehensive programme of thought produces the radical critic who proclaims, after the manner of a prophet, that the programme is wrong-headed and misconceived, and who himself works through the programme for just one reason—to show, once and for all, that the only thing to do is to abandon an impossible investigation. Søren Kierkegaard was such a critic.

The notion of doctrinal development has become increasingly popular with Roman Catholic theologians in recent years, and has received official recognition in the decree of the second Vatican Council on Revelation. ‘There is’, the document maintains, a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down. … As the centuries succeed one another, the Church constantly moves forward toward the fulness of divine truth until the words of God reach their complete fulfilment in her. But, if dogma develops, how can revelation be constant? This, starkly put, is the dilemma to which many Roman Catholic theologians have directed their attention in recent years. If there has been a growth in dogma, must we not say that the contemporary Church is in a better position than the early Church? How can we deny that the Church today, in which dogmas have been better understood and more fully expressed, has an advantage over the primitive Christian community? As one nineteenth-century theologian observed, If there be a difference of any sort between Augustine and Liguori (and if there be not, what becomes of Mr Newman's theory?) it must manifestly be incalculably to the advantage of the latter … to compare the catachetical schools of Alexandria, Antioch, Gaesarea, with our Irish Maynooth, would palpably be an insult to the latter, too gross even for the licensed bitterness of religious controversy.

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.

‘In general, theological ethics has handled this command of God [the fourth Mosaic commandment] … with a casualness and feebleness which certainly do not match its importance in Holy Scripture or its decisive material significance’ (Church Dogmatics, 111.4, P. 50). Thus Karl Barth in the English translation of his Kirchliche Dogmatik (hereafter referred to as CD.). His own treatment is neither fragmentary nor perfunctory. There are references to ‘Sabbath’ in the indexes of six of twelve volumes of the Dogmatics so far published. The particular discussion of the Fourth Commandment occurs in his treatment of Special Ethics in CD. 111.4, where ‘the one command of God’ the Creator is set forth ‘in this particular application’ of ‘The Holy Day’ (p. 50). But for Barth the scriptural references to Sabbath rest have relevance to the doctrines of God, and Revelation; to the relation of God's Eternity to man's temporal being; to the biblical conception of Creation as the setting for the Covenant history of the Old Testament and the New Testament fulfilment of the divine purpose in redemption in Christ, to be completed and perfected in the ‘rest that remaineth to the people of God’ (Heb. 4.9). The treatment of the topic throughout the Dogmatics constitutes a corpus of exegesis and doctrine of which even a summary statement such as is here attempted might well be a useful contribution towards modern efforts at rethinking the Christian use of the Lord's Day.

The question of the Sabbath is still a living issue. Unfortunately it is also one that all too often becomes bogged down either in a legalism which prescribes a list of do's and don't's (mainly don't's), or in a humanism which leaves us to please ourselves. In between, there are many who are frankly puzzled. On the one hand they are not enthusiastic about the Scottish Sabbath of the past (though in actual fact our forefathers do not seem to have found it as grim and irksome in practice as we feel it must have been), while on the other hand they are apprehensive of what is commonly known as the ‘continental Sunday’. But there seems to be equally little promise in the nondescript hybrid which is fast emerging among us, and which has no definite character at all but is merely a part of the ‘weekend’. Obviously new thinking is urgently needed here. This article attempts a few steps in that direction. It takes its cue not from the fourth commandment, but from a Gospel passage (Mark 2.2–28) which in a sense points behind and before it and sets the whole question of the Christian Sabbath in a new light.

In various parts of the Protestant world a re-examination of the question of Mariology has been entered upon. Now that we are in sincere dialogue with Rome, and Protestantism and Orthodoxy are united in fellowship in the World Council of Churches, it has become incumbent on Protestants to cease to be merely negative to the Mother of our Lord. Simply because our Roman Catholic brethren hold doctrines about her that Protestants do not appreciate does not mean that the Virgin Mary should have no theological significance for the Churches of the Reformation. Ten years ago an article from my pen, entitled ‘The Virgin and the Old Testament’, appeared in The Reformed Theological Review (of Australia), Vol. XII, No. 1. That article was occasioned by an uneasy reaction to a reading of the section entitled ‘Mariology’ in Ways of Worship, being the Report of a Theological Commission of Faith and Order in preparation for the Lund Conference of 1952. I acknowledge my indebtedness now to my former article, and thank the editor of the RTR for permitting me to expand it here.

The Protestant has to satisfy himself that any doctrine he holds is securely rooted in Scripture. For the early Church ‘Scripture’ meant only the Old Testament. And to it the Church undoubtedly turned as it sought to understand the place of the Virgin Mary in the Gospel it was preaching to Jews and Gentiles alike, and thus to understand her relationship to her Saviour Son.

The Church in all it forms and divisions has always had to live in the world; this is its necessary and dangerous situation; it has been placed in the world to witness to the world and to win the world; in so doing, it has often had to face the opposition of the world, but even more often the world has found it more effective to infiltrate into the Church and to percolate the Church by its own standards, and the result has been particularly corrosive, for the Church not only becomes infected by the world and its ways, but it also seeks to cast the mantle of piety and rectitude over its defections.

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.

Dr J. Jeremias has rightly observed that Jesus ‘was never tired of expressing the central ideas of his message in constantly changing images’,1 and that he ‘loved to speak of his mission in the various figures and symbols which depict his calling to be the deliverer’.2 Likewise Dr Riesenfeld in an essay on the ministry in the New Testament begins his inquiry from the premise: ‘We are … justified in beginning our investigation of the ministry with Christ Himself.’3 It remains true, however, that of the many images Jesus used to describe His mission to Israel, most are not used by the Early Church and only two metaphors receive any sustained development. These are the metaphors of the steward and shepherd. The purpose of this article is to trace the development of the former and to explore its associations, and its implications for the Early Church's understanding of its own ministry and leadership. We will, therefore, note the literal occurrences of the terms steward (oἰκoν⋯μoς) and stewardship (oἰκoνoμ⋯α) and then examine briefly their metaphorical uses and the associated ideas and terms.

These are the only occurrences of these two terms in the Synoptic Gospels and clearly they are literal though the settings call for comment.

Both Luke 12 and Matt. 24 reveal secondary features showing how the parable has been recast to suit the hortatory needs of the Church.

Every attempted statement of Christian doctrine is inevitably coloured by the circumstances in which it was drawn up, and by the motives which prompted its preparation. It is evident from the New Testament documents that even in the earliest period of Christian history, some kind of statement of belief was essential for the instruction of catechumens. ‘Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed; and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost’ (i Cor. 12.3). ‘For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures’ (ibid., 15.3).

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.

The concept of a discernment situation has assumed a key J. position in much recent philosophical theology. To take examples: Professor I. T. Ramsey's account of religious language is determined throughout by it; Professor P. van Buren's attempt to state the secular meaning of the Gospel hinges upon the claim that such a situation occurred on Easter; and Dr A. Richardson's oft-repeated asseveration that Christian theology is a matter of the interpretation of history resolves itself into the claim that there have been such situations. The basic argument is that members of our race at certain moments in the past have discerned, and we and our contemporaries at certain moments of present existence may discern, the activity or purpose of God. Connected with this discernment, it is further contended, there is—or ought to be—a response of commitment. Israel, for instance, at the Exodus discerned that they were God's chosen people and responded in the Sinai covenant. The disciples, at the Resurrection, discerned that Christ was, in some sense, victor and committed themselves to him. The important point for philosophical theology is the claim that the occurrence of discernment-commitment situations constitutes an empirical grounding for religious belief and thus provides good reason for an affirmative answer to the troublesome question: how do we know that religious language refers to objective reality? We must look more closely into this.