Definition.—I define Epistemological Primitivism as the view that a given text exists in a state of nature or a condition of primordial meaning. It is the literary equivalent to the version of empiricism which stresses the passivity of the mind and the purity of the data in the knowing process. The impossibility of holding consistently to epistemological primitivism is seen when (1) the interpreter recognises that a text gains cognitive meaning only if it is interwoven with other texts and (2) the interpreter actively brings to the text a selective factor by designating which texts will interlace more predominantly and directly with one another.

Example.—The famous or infamous passage of Romans 9.11–24 serves as a vivid example of a network of interwoven texts whose overall impact forces the conclusion that Paul is advancing a doctrine of strict predestination. In this passage, each verse seems to prepare the way for the following verse in elaborating the theme of predestination of human choice itself. In his book The Debate About the Bible evangelical Christian Stephen Davis, recognizing the force of the Romans 9 passage, writes, ‘I do not claim to know how to reconcile Paul's teachings on election with the Bible's apparent commitment to the notion that people are free and morally responsible agents.’ Davis' point is that within the Bible are texts other than Romans 9 which seem to force the conclusion that some human choices are neither caused by God nor predestined.

Kant, it has been said, brought a ‘Copernican Revolution’ to religion and theology no less so than he did to physics. According to Karl Barth, for example, Kant's theology diverges radically from tradition. While rejecting the traditional proofs as foundation for a knowledge of God (his existence, etc.) as wholly inadequate, he, nevertheless, remained a theist. Unwilling to believe in God in the absence of good reasons for doing so, however, he offered an alternative justification for such belief. Religious belief, he insists, is based on practical considerations rather than on theoretical ones. Kant, therefore, did not consider it as necessarily irrational to hold a thing as true even though it be a theoretically insufficient holding to be true. According to him it is simply that in such a case the belief that ‘something’ is true does not constitute knowledge. And it is this displacement of knowledge in the religious sphere by faith that essentially constitutes the revolutionary change in theology.

Contrary to this generally accepted view of Kant's thought, I shall in this paper argue the essentially unrevolutionary character of his understanding of theology. There is, I shall maintain, a basic continuity in Kant's thoughts on religion with the theologies of the past. The faith of which Kant speaks, I shall attempt to show, is a cognitive faith—a source of beliefs that can quite legitimately, even if only in a weak sense, be referred to as religious knowledge. His theology, therefore, is, like the theology of his predecessors, ultimately an inferential knowledge of the divine.

Karl Barth's formidable attack on all forms of natural theology is one of the major events in twentieth-century religious thought. He anathematized every effort by unaided reason to conceive adequately of the nature of God or to demonstrate God's existence. To him all are disguised attempts to ‘domesticate’ God in the circumscribed and self-serving world of human interests. Those theologians who are dissatisfied with this dimension of Barth's thought sometimes criticize it, but more often find it easier just to ignore him and go their own ways. Those philosophers who are interested in provoking a confrontation with Barth find it difficult to penetrate the confessional circle and establish a point of contact which the defenders of Barth's prohibition of natural theology would themselves be constrained to acknowledge.

My contention is that there is such a point of contact open to theological and philosophical critique, one which previous critics have overlooked. The argument is organized around five theses. They are:

1. The foundation of Barth's position on God's knowability lies in Church Dogmatics II, 1. Here he declares that God's noetic absoluteness derives from his ontic absoluteness (pp. 310f). To the critical eye this spurious derivation appears to be a non sequitur rather than an acceptable statement of logical entailment or of metaphysical or theological necessity.

2. Barth fails to support the derivation with convincing exegetical arguments of the sort required to override its conceptual weakness. This is a rather surprising circumstance for one who strives to rest his entire theology on revelation.

My primary concern in this article is with the Christian nurture of children. In particular, I would contend that one of the present deficiencies in the nurture of children within the Reformed tradition lies in the fact that we regard Holy Communion more as the goal of than the means to such nurture. There is, in my view, a clear case for admitting baptised children to Holy Communion, and it rests both upon the Reformed understanding of the Lord's Supper as a means of grace, and upon the growing realisation that the Christian nurture of children is no mere didactic matter but must be conducted within the whole life and worship of the church. Plainly though, the question of Christian nurture cannot be considered without reference to Christian initiation, debate about which in recent years has been much concerned with the doctrine of confirmation. I should make it clear, right at the start, that I do not intend to discuss the issue of infant versus believers' baptism, or to consider the place of the unbaptised child within the church. My question is simply: if a church practises infant baptism, is there any justification for excluding baptised children from the sacrament of Holy Communion?

Initiation practices vary from denomination to denomination. On the one hand there is the Baptist tradition of believers' baptism. But in those churches where infant baptism is not only practised, but is the norm, questions of subsequent initiation procedures are answered in differing ways.

There is seldom a lack of new studies of Isaiah. In this article I want to mention some aspects of a few recently published studies which direct our attention in different ways to the book of Isaiah, rather than to Isaiah of Jerusalem (or the so-called ‘second Isaiah’) as an individual with an historical role. Not that I am not concerned with the historical Isaiah of Jerusalem: in fact the concern is greater than the following reviews might suggest. Positively I am insisting that our quest for him must start from the book of Isaiah in all its variety and complexity, and not from its few familiar and congenially informative prose sections. Then the more negative suggestion that Isaiah may not have been a ‘prophet’ (at least in the sense that tradition came to regard him) is an attempt to clear the ground for a better point of view.