The question of the unity of the Bible's message is one that will never be satisfactorily solved, though it is one which every generation of Christians must seek to solve. We are continually impelled to search for the answer because the unity of the Church's message to the world is at stake.

The extensive use of typology and allegory by the early Church is usually and rightly regarded as the Church's effective answer to Marcion's rejection of the Old Testament. It was also a part of her answer to the Jewish acceptance of the Old Testament. Controversy has a stimulating effect upon the development of new ideas, but it has in most cases also the disadvantage of fostering special pleading and unbalanced exaggerations. It seems worth trying to discover in what ways anti-Jewish controversy and the mere fact of the Jews' use and possession of the Old Testament affected the Church's understanding of it in the formative ante-Nicene period.

It was not until the fifth Christian century that the Church reached at the council of Chalcedon a definitive statement of its belief concerning the nature of Jesus Christ. This decision was preceded by a long era of controversy, first that in which against the Arians it was affirmed that the Son of God is not a created being but is of the essential nature of God Himself, and secondly that in which there was hammered out the relation between this divine, uncreated nature of the Son of God on one hand and the human nature of the Man Jesus on the other. To this latter question the Chalcedonian formula gave what was for the main body of the Church the nearest approach to an adequate answer, and it reads as follows:

‘One and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, inconvertibly, indivisibly, inseparably.… ’

I have chosen a subject both common and extremely difficult. Where is God leading us, in the matter of Church union? What is our next task, in the Church of Scotland? We older members remember two Church unions. I do not expect to see a third—unless it be with some of our own separated fragments in the Highlands, or with the United Free Church. May God grant these in His time. For the moment these hardly appear to be tasks. What can we do but pray for the Spirit of God to move both these Churches and ourselves, and live as ‘visible Christians’ alongside them?

There are more perplexing problems. We know that our unions of 1900 and 1929 have been part of something greater, a ‘movement’, a ‘vision’ (we say) of our era. But the next steps for ourselves, what are they to be? Our unions of 1900 and 1929 were ‘cheek by jowl’ re-unions. Those towards which we are now being drawn, are mostly strange to our people. I imagine everyone who has tried to prepare our people, in any way, for whatever ‘drawing closer’ may be God's will, has found that. The difficulty of ‘ecumenism’ is not just the name. It means other churches that are strangers to the vast majority of our folk. Societies aiming at Church union not infrequently find, that eager members of a few years back have left them, feeling that they were ‘getting nowhere’.

Bishop Stephen Neill, in his Survey of the Training of the Ministry in Africa, writes as follows: ‘I could not but feel profound sympathy with the African student who remarked: “It seems to me that missionaries are much too hard in their judgments on the African Churches. Did you never have a period of struggle in your own Churches? ” Indeed we did. In that moment I suddenly saw that, for the African Churches in their contemporary struggle, the most important period is the one that ordinarily we never teach them in detail, the Dark Ages.… They wrestle with precisely the same difficulties and are called to find anew the way out of the twilight of the coexistence of the old and new into a more genuinely Christian life and social order. ’

‘It becomes theologians to be cautious in accepting the gifts of the Greeks.’ It is the conviction of the present writer that Christian theology as a whole, and the doctrine of God in particular, have suffered because of the lack of caution which theologians in every age have shown in their too ready acceptance of the gifts which the Greeks have brought. Of no age is this more true than of that which witnessed the formalisation and systematisation of the Christian doctrine of the Godhead, namely, the second, third and fourth Christian centuries, during which ‘theologizing’ was for the most part in the hands of men who had been trained in the philosophical schools of the Hellenistic world, and who refused to do intellectually what Justin Martyr had refused to do literally, refused, that is, to doff the academic dress of the philosopher. But it is still true that philosophical theologians today, in their desire to interpret the Christian faith in modern philosophical terms, tend to be too ready to accept as gifts the presuppositions of some modern philosophical school, and in doing so to give away much that is vital to the faith which they are seeking to interpret.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Scottish Episcopacy in the period 1560 to 1689 with a view to discovering how it was regarded by those chiefly concerned and how near or far apart the Churches of Scotland and England were at that time. In estimating these matters reference will have to be made to the doctrine of apostolic succession, by which we shall mean the doctrine that bishops who have received their office by succession from the Apostles are the necessary ministers of ordination and that the apostolic, succession so understood is essential for the authority of the ministry, the visible unity of the Church and the validity of the Sacraments.

When was there episcopacy in post-Reformation Scotland? The answer depends on whether the frame of reference is ecclesiastical or constitutional.

Presbyterianism has always tended to be a misleading name for the Reformed Church-order. It suggests the absence of any office superior to that which in Anglican and Roman terminology is called the priesthood; and as neither Roman nor Anglican priests possess power of ordination, it further suggests that Presbyterian clergy have never been able to ordain. Their orders are taken to be invalid from the start, and thus its mere name kills a Church. But the usual assumption, that the Scottish parish minister is equivalent (however imperfectly) to the English parish priest, is a distortion of both doctrine and practice in Scotland; and it is the chief purpose of this paper to maintain that when the ecclesiastical idioms of the two countries are translated, the minister must be called, not a parish priest, but a parish bishop.

In the Bible we find Baptism suddenly appearing for the first time in that action of John the Baptist which, according to one way of reading Mark I.I, was ‘the beginning of the Gospel’. The Evangelists speak of Baptism not as a strange rite invented by John, but as something so familiar that it requires neither detailed description nor careful explanation.

To readers of the present day, however, the sudden appearance of Baptism at the beginning of the New Testament is a source of bewilderment which can easily lead to the kind of false interpretation of Scripture that underlies the Baptist movement et hoc genus omne.

It is therefore necessary to try to discover all we can as to the origin and significance of this strange rite.

The New Testament uses two cognate nouns: βάπτισμα and βαπτισμóς. βάπτισμα is found only in the New Testament and in Christian writers, and in the New Testament is used only of Baptism, whether it be John's Baptism or Christian Baptism. βαπτισμóς is used in the New Testament meaning a special form of ‘washing’. It occurs only at Mark 7.4, Heb. 6.2 and 9.10. In all these cases the reference is to ritual washings either of persons or of things. It is never used of Baptism in the New Testament, though Josephus, the only profane author to use the word, applies it to John's Baptism (Ant. xvii.v.2).

The question of sacrifice in the Eucharist has been called by the Ways of Worship Commission of Faith and Order a ‘live issue’, that is to say a question over which agreement is not right out of sight though considerable and even vehement controversy continues. At Lund, the section considering Ways of Worship reported that they had held a lively and rewarding discussion on the subject, and had been surprised by the degree of agreement revealed; on the other hand it must be admitted that neither the discussion nor the resulting agreement are very apparent from the relevant chapter of the Conference report. This article is an attempt to examine the present state of the question against a background of ecumenical discussion, and to suggest ways of conceiving the Eucharistic Sacrifice which might be more widely acceptable than those commonly put forward by ‘catholics’ in the past. Its sources, besides a necessarily incomplete study of some of the more influential modern contributions to the discussion, consist mainly in discussions amongst younger theologians and theological students in the ecumenical movement. Whilst this group is not so learned as its elders, and its discussions are seldom recorded in print, its contribution can be a valuable one, because it is most sensitive to the issues which are now live ones, and also because it frequently seems to clear away misunderstandings more effectively and reach greater agreement than more senior groups.

The doctrine of predestination is commonly regarded as the normative dogma of Reformed or Calvinistic theology —but the contemporary demand for Christocentric theology is held to prove that this norm is not fully Christian. The impressive critical analysis of Karl Barth, for example, shows the Reformed doctrine of predestination, especially as it is worked out in the centuries following the Reformation, to be reduced to ‘double predestination’. This unscriptural teaching, Barth argues, derives from the misplacement of the doctrine in Reformed theology, since its proper position (Stellung) in dogmatics is in the context of Christology, and ‘not directly following the doctrine of God’.

‘I swear by Apollo the healer, by Aesculapius, by Health 1 and all the powers of healing, and call to witness all the gods and goddesses that I may keep this Oath and Promise to the best of my ability and judgment.’ These words form the opening sentence of the Hippocratic Oath and they bear eloquent testimony to the theological basis of medicine in Ancient Greece. This close association of theology and medicine characterised the thought and practice of all peoples until the Renaissance, and it still appears most natural to the inhabitants of Africa and Asia who have not been influenced by Western thought. But with Western thought the Renaissance marked the dividing point between theology and medicine so that today medicine is suspicious of theology and jealously resists any approach from the side of theology. The result is that medicine has come more and more to deal with concrete situations and particular problems, and the doctor by his training is unfitted to discuss general principles for he is given no guidance during his training since, in most cases, his teachers have little guidance to give.

Dr Cullmann, in his recent discussion of NT origins has again drawn attention to the hypothesis that the Lordship of Christ is the key to the understanding of the primitive Gospel. The task of this paper is to examine the meaning of the word κύριος in Acts. We must first discover whether or not the very use of the word ‘lord’ tells us about its origin, date and meaning.

This title is deliberately ambiguous. The word ‘direction’ X covers both the trend of modern worship and its leadership or conduct. In the light of our understanding of the nature of Christian worship and of its tradition we must ask both: Where are we going? What movement, if any, is discernible in the pattern of public worship in this generation? and also: What ought we to be doing? What practical steps can be taken today by those who are responsible for the conduct of worship? The first question is a matter of observation about which we may be in general agreement; the second concerns the changes we consider desirable and it is quite certain that no two of us will be in entire agreement on that. This lecture, then, will as it descends from the realm of principle to that of practice become inevitably more controversial, and I ought to say right away that in these matters I represent no movement, organisation, or society, but simply offer you one man's ideas on the subject, with the hope that, however uninspired they may be, they may serve as a starting-point for some useful and necessary discussion in the churches.

Both the construction ('And it came to pass… that Jesus came’) and the expression ‘in those days’ have a distinctly OT flavour (cf. e.g. Exod. 2.11). As neither is frequent in Mark, we might perhaps venture the suggestion that either consciously or unconsciously he is giving to his narrative a special touch of solemnity at the point at which he introduces Jesus for the first time.

That Jesus was baptised by John1 can scarcely be doubted. The fact that the submission of Jesus to a baptism of repentance caused the early Church embarrassment, as may be seen in Matt. 3.14 f and in the Gospel of the Ebionites and the Gospel according to the Hebrews (see Huck, Synopsis, 9th edit., p. 12), makes it extremely unlikely that the Church would ever have invented the incident.2

To the question why He submitted to baptism various answers have been given. Some have suggested that it was because He was conscious of sin and felt the need to repent3; but this seems to be ruled out by what Dr Taylor has called ‘the entire absence of the consciousness of sin in His personality, as it is revealed in the Gospels’.4 Others have suggested that Jesus was simply availing Himself of John's baptism ‘as a means of expressing the will to live a pure life’5 or that He submitted to it merely in order to show His personal approval of the Baptist's movement.

Since the first Synod of the Church of South India elected a standing Liturgy Committee and assigned it as its first task the drafting of an order for the Lord's Supper, that committee has never been without work in hand. SJT has from time to time given the hospitality of its pages to reports of the committee's progress, the most recent being Doing Over a Liturgy by the Rev. J. R. Macphail, which appeared in the issue of December 1954 and gave an account of our revision of An Order for the Lord's Supper. This present essay may be regarded as continuing in the same series and reporting on our experimental production of An Order for Holy Baptism, which was the task we undertook and completed in 1954. Our intention is to revise it together with An Order for Reception into Full Membership of the Church or Confirmation after about five years of use, when we hope to have an adequate body of criticisms to guide us.

The problem with which we have to deal now, is whether or whether not in the initial part of Paul's epistle to the Romans (1.18–3.20) a gospel of everybody's unrighteousness explicitly precedes, prepares and finally supports that gospel of righteousness by faith which is announced in 1.16 f and which is developed in 3.21 ff. Many commentaries on Romans agree in the analysis that Paul speaks of the work of God's left hand (the opus alienwn) in 1.18–3.20 and that he describes the work of God's right hand (the opus proprium) only in 3.21 ff.

There are signs in nearly all the Christian communions of the Western world today of restlessness and dissatisfaction with our inherited patterns of public worship. This is indicated by the numerous experiments that are being made and by the movements for liturgical reform that are active in many denominations. A great variety of motives lies behind these movements for reform; but in general it might be said that we are conscious of living in a world that has changed more fundamentally in the last fifty years than in any remotely comparable period of the past, and feel that these changes, while not affecting the essence of Christian worship, must surely be reflected in its forms. This is felt by convinced and instructed Christians who have a vision of what worship might be as the expression of our highest and holiest activity and are disappointed at its meagre realisation in the normal practice of their church: it is felt even more by the semi-convinced who are genuinely seeking to know and experience more of what we mean by worship, and who find our services unilluminating and uninspiring. It is certainly not ill-will, and may not even be indifference, that keeps multitudes of potential worshippers from entering our churches. The blight that seems to afflict public worship in our day might be characterised in one word—irrelevance.

Now the charge of irrelevance is not to be disposed of by a series of sermons on the relevance of the Christian faith and of Christian worship.

The Reformed Minister in the contemporary Church is concerned about his Ministry because he realises that without a doctrine of the Church's ministry, there can't be a true doctrine of the Church. The revived interest in the theology of the Church, has therefore led to a renewed interest in the Reformed doctrine of the Ministry. Among many excellent ministers in Canada and in the United States and among seriously-minded Divinity students in a Southern Presbyterian Seminary, I have frequently noticed uncertainty with regard to the doctrinal basis of the pastoral calling. The Scottish minister has a traditional regard for his vocation which is still shared by the vast majority of the Church people. But he too might sometimes wonder where the Minister really stands, not only in the tradition and practice but in the doctrine of the Church.