The purpose of this article is to appraise the Christological suggestion offered by the late D. M. Baillie in God Was In Christ (1948), to the effect that the Incarnation was the supreme instance of ‘the paradox of grace’. I propose, first, to define, from the standpoint of credal orthodoxy, the central task of Christology; second, to remind the reader of the features of Baillie's thought in this field; third, to offer a criticism of his theory in the light of the desideratum noted in the first section; and fourth, by distinguishing two different aspects of the problem of the Incarnation, to suggest wherein lies the positive value of D. M. Baillie's contribution.

The renewed emphasis on the doctrine of apostolic succession which was the outcome of the Oxford Movement in the Church of England is an example of the power inherent in dogmas to recover their vitality. This is no isolated phenomenon confined exclusively to the dogmas of the Christian faith; in our own times we have witnessed the far-reaching results of the revival of the Marxian dogma of dialectical materialism in the sphere of international politics. That bishops are the successors of the Apostles was a belief held without question by the majority of Anglican Churchmen at the dawn of the nineteenth century, but it cannot be contended that they were fully alive to its implications. The awakening came through the publication of the Tracts for the Times. The challenge was sounded with unambiguous clarity in the very first of them to issue from the press. ‘Now then, ’ wrote John Henry Newman, ‘let me come at once to the subject which leads me to address you. Should the Government and the country so far forget their God as to cast off the Church, to deprive it of its temporal honours and substance, on what will you rest the claim of respect and attention which you make upon your flocks? Hitherto you have been upheld by your birth, your education, your wealth, your connexions; should these secular advantages cease, on what must Christ's ministers depend?… I fear we have neglected the real ground on which our authority is built: our Apostolic Descent.

In order to understand the NT teaching about consecration and ordination we have to examine the rites and language of the OT tradition. The rites were not carried over as such into the Christian Church, for they were fulfilled in Christ and abrogated, but the NT does use the language of the rites to speak both of Christ and His Church, and it does adapt some of the OT rites for its own use, but with entire freedom and new significance. The basic line we have to consider is the consecration of the priest, and king, and prophet in the OT, and see how they are fulfilled in Christ, and then see how in this Christ the NT thinks of the ministry as consecrated and ordained.

There have been innumerable attempts to classify and set 1 forth in order the multitudinous drives or motives which lead men to act as they do in society. Among Christians it is natural and proper to divide all human motives into those which are selfish and those which are unselfish; and further to say that all motives of the ‘natural man’ are fundamentally selfish, and only those of man under grace can really be unselfish. One thinks here of such analyses as that of Eros and Agape made by Anders Nygren in his work of that title; or of Augustine's famous distinction between earthly society (the civitas terrena) animated by love of self to the point of contempt for God, and divine society (the civitas caelestis) animated by love for God to the point of contempt for self. The danger, of course, of such vast generalisations is that they will be misunderstood by the disciples of the great men who originally made use of them—and even that they may mislead those great men themselves. It is obvious, for example, that Augustine is not here making the kind of distinction which is visible to direct empirical inspection. The two principles of which he speaks are principles of order which, he says, can be described mystically as two cities.1 Without attempting to go into the details of the interpretation of this great doctrine, it may be possible to make one point by way of introduction to our theme, a point which applies both to the distinction between Eros and Agape and to that between the two cities.

In the belief that the Church of Christ is ‘one, holy, catholic, and apostolic’, and with the prayer that God may bless the Ecumenical Movement and all who strive for the unity—not uniformity—of the Churches, this examination of the Anglican ‘Ordinal’, in so far as it throws light upon the relationship of presbyterate and episcopate, is undertaken.

When the Swedish theologian George Hammar in his study of Reinhold Niebuhr tried to formulate concisely the standpoint of this religious thinker, he did so in the very words he used in the title ‘Christian Realism’.1 He thus employed a term which is used elsewhere to characterise Niebuhr's theological thinking and which is a favourite with Niebuhr himself. This term, of course, is used so often in current theological discussions and with so many different associations, as to have become rather ambiguous and vague. The use of it here does not aspire to anything more than to indicate roughly the theology which tries to show its disagreement with ethical idealism in ‘Christian practice’ and with idealistic religious philosophy in ‘Christian theory’;. Both ethical and metaphysical idealism belong as a rule to the outfit of the modernistic, liberal philosophy of religion (where in some form or other it is proclaimed as a fitting and saving interpretation of Christianity for the modern man), but so-called Christian realism is opposed to a substantial part of the heritage of liberal theology. It is from this perspective then that the work of Reinhold Niebuhr is to be judged, as is agreed by the majority of his biographers and as follows from his own formulations of his programme.

Daniel Lamont, I think it was, once remarked that theologians should read more poetry. This insight into the nature of theological language has profound relevance for our contemporary concern with the problem of communicating the Gospel to modern man. Theology, as language about God, may be regarded in one sense as faced with an impossible task: ‘The maker and father of this Universe it is difficult to discover; nor, if he were discovered, could he be declared to all men.’ This hiddenness of the divine being is reflected even in the historical beginnings of the biblical revelation, in the cryptic tautology, ‘I am that I am’ (Exod. 3.14). Yet the fact of revelation was taken to mean, within Israel at least, not that the divine aseity was now compromised, but that this very self-sufficiency was revealed in terms of a purpose of love towards this people. The revelation was instrumental to the fulfilment of that purpose: the divine condescension used creaturely forms to communicate its truth and life to men. Therefore the theological language which sets forth this communicative revelation will be proportionately indirect or analogical.

The article by Dr Farrer on ‘Revelation’ in the Faith and Logic collection is of special importance, for here we have a theologian attempting to steer between the Scylla of irrationalism and the Charybdis of apriorism. That is, by trying to point out the criteria for determining the truth of revelation he is able to avoid the extreme irrationalism that has characterised much Protestant theology in recent decades; while on the other hand, in concentrating attention upon these checks on religious truth he escapes that metaphysical assimilation of religious to deductive arguments which mars Thomism and (the more immediate cause of the irrationalist revolt) Hegelianism. Whereas the word ‘reason’ is a chameleon, which changes its colour in accordance with its environment, so that mathematical reasoning has a different style and rigour from reasoning in morals, and this in turn differs from scientific reasoning, etc., philosophers and theologians have tended to overlook such matters. A crude version of a common attitude can be expressed something as follows: ‘In religion there either is or is not a proper place for reasoning (and this will be deductive reasoning); if there is, we can divide theological assertions into two kinds, those which are provable by reason and those which are not; and if there is not, we must take religious assertions on faith.’ This attitude has two main evil effects.

Article VII of the Augsburg Confession of 1530 contains a definition of the Church the substance of which was adopted by most of the Protestant Confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including the Articles of the Church of England and the Confessions of the Free Churches: ‘The Church is the congregation of the saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments rightly administered. And for the true unity of the Church it is sufficient to agree about the teaching of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments, nor is it necessary to have everywhere like human traditions, whether rites or ceremonies instituted by man.’

While the antithesis between theology and philosophy has never perhaps been as sharply pointed as it is today, in one direction at least it may be considered that research in both disciplines is running along parallel lines. In the study of time there is a common ground of interest. This is observable in such essays as The Fulness of Time, In the end God, Christus und die Zeit and in the current interest in eschatology. In philosophy, particularly in twentieth century France from Bergson to Berdyaev, there is a growing ‘respect’ for time—and an increasing awareness of its moral significance. In the belief that this subject affords a common vocabulary we make the following suggestion as a new topic in apologetic conversation. We shall first describe the new conception of time which is emerging, then note its relevance to one aspect of theology, the Fall, and finally suggest the apologetic significance.

For over a generation now (in Protestant circles) natural theology has fallen on evil days. Barth has stamped ruthlessly on every attempt to ground the Christian faith in any form of general knowledge. ‘Back to the biblical faith’ became his watchword. Bultmann likewise scorned Weltanschauung as the importation of Stoicism into the non-philosophical Christian faith. Between Barth's biblical theology and Bultmann's existentialism there was such a strong bond of common hostility to general revelation that natural theology was rejected outright—for natural theology is most properly defined as any knowledge of God, His will and His ways, based on man's general experience, knowledge, and reason.

Lately, however, for good or ill, there are some signs of return. The thrust of Kierkegaard's anti-rational and antiempirical polemic is being broken both as its newness wears off and as its negativity stands naked before us. The anti-theological as well as the an ti-metaphysical drive of linguistic philosophy is slowing down, and there is even evident most recently a somewhat more constructive mood and method within this philosophical position. The power of Tillich's position, in sharp contrast, has been partly due to a bold system holding that, while recognising the truths inherent in both Barth's anti-liberal stand and Bultmann's existential interpretation of the Christian faith, nevertheless dares to base itself on the fulness of the facts of experience and of human history. Tillich's positive and inclusive approach is commending itself to a fast expanding circle of thinkers.

It was naturally very much interested by Professor Hick's generous appreciation and lucidly, argued criticism, in the March number, of my brother's views; but since I have been inclined to accept these latter very fully, I am most anxious to understand the exact point of their divergence from those now advanced by Professor Hick.

Although it is evident to every student of the New Testament that Matthew has a special interest in the Church, the use of the term ‘body of Christ’ to describe the Church has been peculiarly associated with Paul. For this reason it seems well to begin by discussing briefly what Paul meant by the concept of body in order to have a working definition of it. We will then endeavour to ascertain whether this idea is also present in Matthew.

It is by no means an easy matter to trace the precise origins of the rite of Christian Baptism, both because there is a vast amount of material relevant to it, and because the New Testament does not seem to offer any one clear line for consideration. It takes all this for granted and speaks of Baptism quite naturally and without any difficulty of communication, and without any need for explanation. The derivation of the rite and the actions involved are everywhere presumed as familiar. That makes it all the more difficult for us, for we have to examine minutely the many allusions, hints and images employed in the New Testament writings, and in particular the references and citations (often very incomplete) from the Old Testament, in order to place ourselves as completely as possible in the position of the New Testament writers, and then from their Sitz im Denken as well as Sitz im Leben, seek to unravel their presuppositions and interpret their meaning.

The proposals contained in the Report entitled ‘Relations Between Anglican and Presbyterian Churches’ are sufficiently far-reaching to command wide attention. And this is what, in some quarters, they have attracted—though one suspects that the attention given them has not always been born of knowledge, or of an interest quite devoid of mercenary considerations. In essence, the proposals call for a modification of Church polities to provide for ‘Bishops’ in Presbyterian Churches and for ‘Elders’ in Anglican Churches; and it is the effect of such a modification, as it relates to Presbyterian Churches, and to the Presbyterian Church of Australia in particular, that is the subject of these comments.

The twelfth century witnessed a memorable conflict between rationalism and authority, in the persons of Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux. It is, of course, erroneous to exaggerate these two extremes; by the one, reason was ultimately accepted as the servant of personal faith, and by the other, authority was founded on a basis of mystical devotion. None the less it remains true that both, in different directions, were guilty of the same dangerous tendency, that of abstracting one element from the wholeness of human personality, and of confining religion to the sphere of that one element; Abelard was too exclusively concerned with matters of the intellect, while Bernard directed an almost equally exclusive attention to the will; and the factor neglected and suppressed by both, which breaks through in Bernard's Sermons on the Song of Songs, and overwhelms Abelard in his affair with Heloise—the factor of emotion, of personal experience, of the deep springs of affection in the human heart—it was this forgotten factor which another school of theologians had the distinction of restoring to its proper place. The great Victorines took a saner and more balanced view of human nature. They studied man in his totality, and were willing to derive or at least expound their doctrine on the level of practical experience. They occupied a mediating position from which, with exaggerating either, they could give due weight to the claims of both reason and faith.

Is there a conflict between the principles of pastoral counselling and traditional Christian theology?

In discussing this question, I shall consider Carroll A. Wise' Pastoral Counselling as a representative statement of counselling principles. What I mean by ‘traditional’ theology will, I hope, become reasonably clear in the course of the essay.

The last fifty years have seen revolutionary progress in the work of the interpretation of the parables of Jesus. This progress has been made possible primarily by the final discarding of the allegorical method and the repudiation of ‘the centuries of distortion and ill-usage that the parables have suffered through allegorical interpretation’.1 Exegesis of the parables in centuries before the present might seem therefore to be of purely antiquarian interest. Nevertheless it seems worth while attempting to discover whether there may not be some light to be gained from the way in which the parables were understood by those who stood nearest to them in point of history. This study is therefore devoted to the interpretation of parables in the ante-Nicene fathers.

The way in which anybody interprets the parables will largely be controlled by the answer which he gives to two prior questions—namely: What constitutes a parable? and Why did Jesus use the parabolic method? There is not much direct discussion of these issues. Origen defines a parable as ‘an account of an event which did not literally take place, but which, could have done so. It is a figurative representation of certain things by virtue of their correspondence to the things spoken of in the parable.’ He distinguishes it from a fable (αἴνιγμα) where the event spoken of is something which could not conceivably have happened in real life.2

In the history of exegesis there have been few books within the Old Testament which have roused more vigorous controversy than the interpretation of the Book of Jonah. There was a time when one's orthodoxy could be quickly determined simply on the basis of opinions held regarding its historicity. Yet in spite of the stormy past it is a surprising fact that in modern times there has been a great unanimity of interpretation reached among Old Testament scholars. On the one hand, the attempt of the older expositors, such as Pusey and Orelli, to defend the book as literal history has been almost universally rejected as untenable. On the other hand, the allegorical interpretation of G. A. Smith has found few followers. Rather, the great majority of modern scholars have reached the conclusion that the book of Jonah is simply a narrative which the author used as a means of conveying a general truth in an interesting and effective manner. R. H. Pheiffer is typical when he calls it ‘a short story with a moral’. The spiritual message of the book is the lesson that God's love is not exclusively confined to Israel, but that Israel carries a responsibility of sharing it with others.

Biblical theology is difficult, if not impossible, to define. In broadest terms, however, we may say that it is the conviction that the central concern of the Church is with the Word of God in the Bible.