The first Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology was H. G. Wood. The subject of his Inaugural Lecture given in 1940 was The function of a Department of Theology in a modern University. Appropriately enough he took up the views of John Henry, Cardinal Newman, the one Birmingham theologian whose work is on the way to becoming classic. In the present climate, Newman's book The Idea of a University is worth looking at again. As he showed over a hundred years ago, purely utilitarian values cannot produce good education. Nor can a general acquaintance with a bit of everything. Specialisation and in-depth study is the only way to learn how to think rather than pick up information jackdaw-like. Scholarly grappling with the great minds of the past, the so-called ‘irrelevant’ and ‘ivory-tower’ occupation of those who inhabit an Arts Faculty, is essential for the formation of minds. ‘To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression’ – this Newman regarded as ‘an object as intelligible as the cultivation of virtue’.1 Society needs minds and not just technicians, and in an institution which is concerned with truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, theology is indispensable to the universality which a University should embrace.

The current discussion of the proposal from the World Council of Churches that ‘all churches should revert to the original text of the Nicene Creed as the normative formulation’ and thus excise the filioque, presents churches with a unique opportunity for extensive re-examination of fundamental theology.

The importance of this well-known verse has been frequently noted. It is cited as a high point in the literature of Israel, as a classic summary of the teaching of the eighth century prophets and as a statement of great lasting and theological value. In Jewish tradition it is used as one of the memorable summaries of the whole Law. It does contain, however, uncertainties of meaning and interpretation. In form it is a priestly or prophetic torah, giving an answer to the worshipper's question in vv. 6–7, What has a sinner to do to be restored to a right relationship with God, and then how is that relationship to be sustained? With a general statement like this questions of date and authorship are minor matters.

In the opening chapter of his The Work of the Holy Ghost in Our Salvation Thomas Goodwin, the seventeenth-century Calvinist Independent, makes some general observations on the description of the Spirit as found in John 14–16. Among them is the following comment á propos of John 15.26 and I Cor. 2.11–12:

Two dogmas continue to die hard, despite attempts to destroy them, and it may be that they have good reason for refusing to go away. The first is that what has come to be known as ‘christology from above’ tends to produce a docetic conception of the person of Christ, or at least one in which the humanity of Jesus receives so little emphasis that it becomes little better than a cipher. If an eternal being or hypostasis – to put the matter in the almost tritheistic language that is sometimes used – takes to himself a body, can the resulting being be truly human? Does not the eternal origin inevitably call the tune, undermining the genuineness of the human actions?

From the time of its publication, Barth's commentary on Romans has been regarded by many as the very paradigm of theological dualism. ‘If I have a system,’ the author announces, ‘it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the “infinite qualitative difference between time and eternity” … ’1 That distinction is succeeded by a series of others – revelation versus reason, the Gospel of God versus the ways of humankind, faith versus religion, etc. – which have the effect of ruling out of court every conceivable form of human initiative. One is left to wonder whether Barth's God serves any other function than that of a cypher for the repudiation of all that is finite or mortal.