In December 1977, Israeli politicians and journalists were allowed once again, after so long, to visit the Egyptian pyramids. It was during this visit that a saying of their Prime Minister Menachem Begin went around: ‘Just think! Your forefathers built these marvellous works!’ What memories does this reminder call forth? Does it express Israel's unyielding self-assurance, which not only runs across the traces of its own history all over the Near Middle East, but also calls them to the attention of others? Should the representatives of Modern Egypt perhaps be told that they stand in a different sort of continuity with the great dynasties on the Nile from the Jews? Or does Begin's reminder also revive the ineradicable knowledge of Israel's helplessness, which in the grey dawn of its history drove its fathers to the granaries of Egypt and made them there dependent upon their providers, until the time came when Yahweh led them ‘out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage’ (Exod. 20:2)?

‘It would be quite wrong to take the individual human being as in any way providing a satisfactory analogue’ (sc. of God the Holy Trinity) — J. Macquarrie. To anyone in the Augustinian tradition this is a hard saying. The search for the analogy of God in the human soul (what it is proposed to call ‘the psychological analogy’) dominated the theology of Augustine of Hippo. Though he failed to find a developed analogy which fully satisfied either himself or his successors, he never abandoned the quest, attributing his comparative failure to the limitations of the human mind.

The first assembly of the World Council of Churches recognised that the aspect of the Roman Catholic-Protestant division which constituted ‘our deepest difference’ was the question of justification. The appearance in 1957 of a work by a then unknown Roman Catholic scholar, claiming that ‘it is undeniable that there is a fundamental agreement between Karl Barth's position and that of the Catholic Church seen in its totality' was therefore the occasion as much for surprise as for pleasure. ‘How one would like to believe it!’ remarked Barth. Küng's study marks a major step toward ecumenical discussion on the issue of justification; however, that discussion must be continued. The present study is a small contribution toward that discussion.

The names of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rudolf Bultmann have frequently and inevitably been associated in theological debate since the Second World War. On a popular level in the English-speaking world, it was perhaps J. A. T. Robinson's Honest to God (1963) which most notably placed Bonhoeffer alongside Bultmann, along with Tillich, as close allies in the search for a fresh and viable understanding of God.