The year 1958 marked the two-hundredth anniversary of the death of the celebrated Puritan divine, Jonathan Edwards. Edwards stands out as the one figure of real greatness in the intellectual life of colonial America. He was born, bred, and passed his whole life on the verge of civilisation; yet he has made his voice heard wherever men have concerned themselves with that great topic—God's sovereignty and the human will. We shall consider, in spite of twentieth-century philosophical prejudice, his most important piece of scholarship—Freedom of the Will.

The Christological approach to the doctrine of the Church. which is now seen as the most hopeful way forward fot the work of Faith and Order, could mislead us if it were to direct our attention away from the dependence of the Church on the historical Jesus, and to lead us to think instead only in the dogmatic terms of a Chalcedonian analogy. While there is much to be learned about the right way to formulate our doctrines from such theological machine-tools, our first business in thinking about the nature of the Church is to learn to bear witness to the acts of Christ Himself in founding the Church as the new People of God, and in keeping it throughout its history as the instrument of His present work. If the purpose of this paper is to think especially of the dependence of the Church, as a continuous society in history, on its origins in the historical actions of Jesus, in the Incarnation and Passion of Christ as concrete facts in space and time, there is no intention thereby to deny the equal importance of the corresponding dependence of the Church on the present action of its living and ascended Lord.

One of the greatest needs of our day and generation is for an approach to the question of the inspiration and authority of the Bible which will be sufficiently clear and embracing in its statement of the truth to be a means, both of assurance to all who seek to find God's Word for their daily spiritual food in the Bible, and of reconciliation to those who have approached the problem from varying angles in their search for a satisfying solution, and who, instead of welcoming one another's insights, treat one another with hostility and contempt. Fifty years ago Fundamentalists and Liberals looked at one another across a vast chasm of bitterness and difference: that chasm has persisted to the present day, but in many ways it is not so wide or so deep as it was—and neo-Calvinism has interposed a third approach. Is it too much to hope that the time should now have come when each of these groups will be ready to confess the defectiveness of its own understanding, and the extremes to which it has at times gone in overemphasising one side of the truth; and that each will seek that fuller understanding which an appreciation of the contributions of the others can bring? The barriers between the theologians of these three schools are in some ways more difficult to overcome than those between Christian denominations.

In 1 Cor. 15, his fullest doctrinal statement on the resurrection of the dead, Paul teaches that Christians will receive their spiritual body at the Parousia, those who are dead by resurrection and those who are still alive by transformation. The term applied to the dead, , suggests provisional and intermediate state from which they will ‘awake’ at the Lord's coming. Paul does not, however, discuss the nature of this state.