Shake the leaky buckets of human meditation on theodicy. Out fall problems of moral perception, of linguistic and logical subtlety, of imagination in metaphysical work and biblical interpretation, of so much more. … They are disparately connected things which can suggest a Tower of Babel at least as much as any Tree of Good and Evil. But then such a picture is what one might fairly expect from a central mystery of theology, from something one can make (in this life, at least) only limited progress towards understanding.

The affirmation that Jesus Christ ‘was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary’ is beset by many problems and difficulties, and to deny or try to ignore their existence is bad theological scholarship. But it is also bad theological scholarship — though this is sometimes in danger of being overlooked —to refuse to consider seriously and with as open a mind as possible any evidence or any rational argument, whether historical or theological, which can be adduced as in any way supporting this affirmation of the Apostles' Creed. It seems to me that neither those who accept the historicity of the Virgin Birth nor those who reject it have a monopoly of prejudice. I cannot here attempt anything like a full or systematic discussion of this difficult and controversial subject. The best I can do is to set down briefly and as clearly as I can a few reflections as a very modest contribution to the on-going debate.

There is a general malaise concerning trinitarian theology, which usually is attributed to its speculative complexity, or what we are calling in these pages, ‘the far country’. The abstractness of trinitarian theology is partly funded by an overlysharp distinction between the ‘economic’ and the ‘immanent’ trinity, or between God's activity in salvation history, and God's self-relatedness. The marginal position of trinitarian theology is also a direct result of the development of Western trinitarian doctrine apart from its proper home in liturgy and the language of praise. Despite this, there is evidence that the museum days of trinitarian theology are rapidly coming to an end.

There is a tale which Douglas Young tells of a St Andrews University divine and which may well be regarded as cautionary. Thomas Jackson was born in St Andrews in 1797, and held the Chair of Divinity, first in St Andrews and then in Glasgow. When he retired in 1874, he returned to St Andrews to write his great work, designed to settle all the controversies of the centuries and bring discordant Scots into unanimity. He had one of the big houses on the south side of South Street, with its ‘lang rigg’, at the foot of which was an elegant garden room, with table and chair. Thither, daily, the septuagenarian repaired, garbed in his ecclesiastical frock coat, took off his shiny top-hat, and grasped a quill pen to set down his great thoughts on the virgin white folio quire, daily laid on the table. white folio quire, daily laid on the table. After several hours, he would tear it all up and go back to the house. After four years, they found him dead, aged eighty-one, and the garden house yielded a single written sheet with the sum of his wisdom: ‘Theology is everything, and everything is theology’.

On 27th August 1952 the following lines appeared in an obituary notice in the London Times.