Eleven years after the third World Conference on Faith and Order at Lund, the fourth in the series (and, some have suggested, the last) was held in July 1963, at McGill University, Montreal, by invitation of the Canadian Council of Churches and with the active and welcoming participation of a Montreal Arrangements Committee. 498 persons attended the conference. 240 of these were delegates of the churches, 18 youth delegates, and 46 advisers invited by the W.C.C. There were 15 observers from non-member churches, including 5 from Roman Catholic Church, 3 from the Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod), and 1 from the Serbian Orthodox Church. There were 65 official guests, the great majority of whom had been invited through the good offices of the Canadian Council of Churches and the N.C.C.C.U.S.A. In all, 138 member and non-member churches of the W.C.C. were represented. Nor should we forget to mention in this list the 32 interpreters and translators who gave us their usual splendid service, and the 21 stewards who came at their own expense and who by their energetic work made the whole proceedings possible. It is well known that from the ranks of the youth delegates and stewards of one conference comes the chairman of the next conference but one, so that we should feel happy that the younger generation was so well represented at Montreal.

In the continuing discussion between Christian theology and linguistic philosophy there is a fundamental division of the theological responses which has weighty implications for the whole encounter between the two disciplines. This basic distinction into two types of Christian response is one of those simple categorisations which by their very obviousness are often overlooked. I refer to two kinds of Christian thinkers who deal with linguistic analysis: the ‘non-metaphysical’ and the ‘metaphysical’. In this article I have chosen to discuss certain types of the ‘non-metaphysical’ response.

Whether a Christian theologian deals with Oxford philosophy from a metaphysical or a non-metaphysical perspective is vital to the whole discussion. It is vital to the theologian because linguistic analysis is the latest in a series of philosophical movements beginning with Hume which claim to have undermined metaphysics finally and forever. If the theologian responds in a metaphysical way to the questions asked by the Oxford philosophers, he must justify his appeal to metaphysics over against the critique of metaphysics which lies behind language analysis. If, on the other hand, the theologian replies in a non-metaphysical way, he must demonstrate the epistemological significance of Christian doctrine apart from metaphysical support.

The major contemporary criticisms of theological language come not from language analysis considered independently but from a revitalised logical positivism aided by analytical methods. I call this ‘new’ positivism ‘linguistic empiricism’ or ‘analytical positivism’. Linguistic analysis is fundamentally a method, while positivism is a theory of knowledge.

‘The Uniting Church’ has been chosen as the name for the proposed united church which is to be composed of the Gongregationalist, Methodist and Presbyterian Churches in Australia, which is described in the Final Report of the Joint Commission of the three Churches which was published in Australia in April of this year.1 The Report includes a Basis of Union which is now submitted to the responsible authorities of the three Churches for full discussion and for final decision.

It is impossible in a brief article to do more than summarise what is set out carefully and in detail in the Report itself. It is however a document of great importance, since it recommends union on an episcopal basis; and this is the first time that such a proposal has been made in a Joint Commission set up by non-episcopal churches.

Some three years ago we had Part I of their Report, entitled The Faith of the Church—not, be it noted, ‘The doctrinal beliefs of the three churches concerned’, but rather ‘the faith which the Church has held from the beginning’. This is completed by the final Report now published, setting out the doctrine of the Church, the Sacraments and the Ministry, and not envisaging any mere amalgamation of the three church orders, but having in view the structure of the Church as it has been from the beginning and as it was reconsidered at the Reformation.

The Church of South India in fifteen years published separate J. forms for ten services. They are flimsy booklets, difficult for booksellers to handle and easy for owners to tear or mislay. They were used, some of them widely, in and beyond C.S.I., and were then reconsidered and revised: and now they have been made into a book, The Book of Common Worship, by Oxford University Press. It is a time to look back and to look forward.

How does the Church of South India worship ? At the sixth biennial Synod, Nagercoil, 1958, after more than ten years of union, the Moderator or presiding bishop, Bishop Sumitra, said that in six of the fourteen dioceses union so far had made no perceptible difference. That is disappointing, for any step towards the reunion of the Church ought to renew and broaden the worship of the various denominations. But is it surprising ? For many bad reasons, and for some good ones, we all cling to the familiar, hoping blindly that it will prove to be safe. We say that we know what we like, meaning that we like what we know. Indeed, it may look as if we went to church, not in order to worship God, but in order to say, hear, and sing, as nearly as possible, what we said, heard, and sang, last Sunday. There may be many mansions in the Father's house, but we are comfortable enough in the room we were born in.

When the Archbishop of Canterbury writes:

it is insufficient to pick things from the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament interpretation of his morality, without a thorough examination of the whole evidence about the morality of Jesus. We need to see the place which law had in the mission of Jesus; the way in which he did not abolish the law but fulfil it; the meaning of fulfilment, the interpretation of it in St. Paul and others; the nature of the gifts of the Holy Spirit; the significance of divine institutions within the natural order, such as marriage, the family, the state.

The apparent lack of interest of the Gospels in the last words of Jesus seems strange to us today with our almost morbid interest in ‘famous last words’. None of them records them all. The Marcan tradition records only one, the Lucan preserves another three, whilst the Johannine supplements these with a further three, making a total of seven in all. It is possible that Jesus spoke more words than these during the six hours He hung on the Cross, but these are all that have been preserved for us. Their preservation is probably due more to the presence the women at the crucifixion than to that of the men for we hear of John alone of the disciples being present at the Cross. The rest, including Peter, were still scattered and afraid.