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.… ’

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.

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’.

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.

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.

In an article published some time ago Dr Vincent Taylor drew attention to the fact that the question raised fifty years ago by Wrede in Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien had not been satisfactorily answered in all respects, and went on to suggest that the ‘Messianic secret’ is not, as Wrede supposed, merely a clumsy editorial explanation of a difficult problem, but is derived from and reflects beliefs about the nature and methods of His own Messiahship held by Jesus Himself. The views expressed in this article may be found summarised in the Introduction to Dr Taylor's Commentary on St. Mark where he writes:

Jesus imposed silence because of the nature of Messiahship as he conceived it to be. To him it was not primarily a matter of status but of action. In his own estimation Jesus is Messiah in his works of healing, his exorcisms, his victory over Satanic powers, his suffering, dying, rising, and coming with the clouds of heaven. Messiahship is a destiny; it is that which he does, that which the Father is pleased to accomplish in him and which he fulfils in filial love. It is for this reason that he silences the demoniacs and commands the disciples to tell no man his secret till after the resurrection.