It is a curious fact that while the problem of free will has been long and widely discussed by both philosophers and theologians in the modern world, it has been largely in two separate compartments, the one set seldom conferring with the other, or even overhearing what the other has to say. Sometimes they seem almost to be talking of two different things.

In recent years Biblical criticism has been assuming a new shape, or perhaps rather an old shape encompassing new contents. The contents are the data revealed by researches undertaken according to scientific method, and the shape is formed according to a desire to regain unity in place of diversity, theological understanding in place of a disconnected series of critical facts. It is felt, and felt rightly, that while our ancestors were led through ignorance into arbitrary, and even incorrect ways of regarding the Bible as a whole, at least it must be laid to their credit that they did set out to see it as a whole; moreover that we after their example should attempt to move from analysis to synthesis, from piecemeal examination of detail to a synoptic view of that structure into which the details will be seen to fit. Such a movement is in full flow, being assisted by many an able hand.

In September 1940 an incendiary bomb set fire to the Natural History Museum in London. Two months later when the débris was being cleared it was discovered that some Albrizzia Julibrissin seeds a hundred and fifty years old had begun to sprout. Heat and hose-water had induced germination. Unsuspected life which had persisted through a century and a half was suddenly revived by the ravages of war.

The Christian understanding of time is characterised by an event which is the very centre of the Christian message, and of which it is said that it happened once and for all. This ephapax is evidently an essential part of the theology of St. Paul and of the Epistle to the Hebrews. The Christian conceives of time like everything else from this centre, i.e. from Jesus Christ, and therefore it is from this centre that our reflection upon the essence of time has to start. This must be stated explicitly because another point of departure has been suggested by traditional theology. Certainly it was an act of great intuition on the part of St. Augustine when in his Confessions he dared, for the first time in history, to put forward the idea that the world was neither timeless and eternal, nor created at a certain point in the time-series, but that the world and time were created together. Therefore if the world and time have the same beginning in creation, it becomes meaningless to ask what God did before the creation of the world. The whole schema of before and after, the framework of time, cannot be regarded as existing before creation, but as coming into being with creation, itself a temporal fact.

Here is the eleventh Kapitel of Barth' Dogmatik, and the entitles it The Creator and His creation. Its three great themes are: God's Fatherly Providence, the “Negation” (Chaos or Void) of which He rules and against whose opposition He safeguards His creatures, and the ministry of angels. Before he passes on from the first to the second article of the creed, Barth promises a further Kapitel dealing with the ethical doctrine which rests on our understanding of God as Creator. The doctrine which he has to expound and establish in this sector of the theological field is at once the most familiar and the least secure element in the Christian outlook of modern men. We all know the kind of thing we are expected to say about God's Fatherly care. Professor Farmer's book, The World and God, gave substantial help towards saying it in the modern climate of thought. But there are plenty of signs that Christians tremble in face of the obligation to relate the vast and complex range of experience to the action of God. It becomes increasingly difficult to speak as though the wealth and variety of cosmic reality can be intelligibly related to the God who reveals Himself in Jesus Christ and to the action which He takes at that focal point. And what one expected from Barth was a rethinking of the doctrine of Providence on a Christological basis. What he has to say is not excitingly novel.

The sixth volume of the Basel theologian's monumental Dogmatics (Church Dogmatics, Vol. III, Part 2) is not only, like the earlier volumes, a significant work, but like the fifth, and even more than it a work full of surprises. I have no hesitation in associating myself with the judgment of my Danish colleague Prenter,2 who calls it “the culmination so far of the whole powerful work”. Barth devotes several pages of this volume to a notable discussion of my own anthropology, published fifteen years ago (Man in Revolt). In it he puts to me the question whether we mean the same thing or not (p. 155 ff.). There arises thus for me not merely the occasion but also the necessity of abandoning our mutual practice of not reviewing one another's works. The following pages are not intended to provide a survey of the whole work but only to bring out some specially important points. Naturally, then, they will be fully understood only by those who have some knowledge of both works. I have already given a brief affirmative reply to Barth's question in the second volume of my own Dogmatics (p. 95) after a hasty glance through his Doctrine of Man which came into my hands only after the completion of my own MS., but feel myself now obliged to state more precisely the reasons for this assent and to add some qualifications.

Christianity is essentially a historical religion. It is not primarily a system of beliefs, nor is it just a perfect code of morality. Christianity is first of all a vigorous appeal to history, a witness of faith to certain particular events or facts of history. For these events were truly eventful, and these historical moments or “instants” were utterly momentous. For, by faith, we identify and acknowledge them as “mighty deeds” of God, as His intimate interventions into the course of human destiny. Already under the Old Dispensation the Living God has established His Covenant with the Chosen People, Israel, and has admitted her, the only nation of the earth, into a fellowship with Him. The God of the Old Testament did not communicate to men abstract metaphysical ideas about Himself, but He met man and challenged him in the midst of his daily existence, “amid toil and tribulation”. The Old Testament was truly a Covenant, a sacred fellowship, not primarily the Law and the doctrine. True, it was but a provisional fellowship, a shadow and a figure of the Good Things to come. It was a Covenant of hope and expectation, a Covenant of prophecy and promise. The consummation was ahead. Yet, it was a real Covenant indeed. And in due course it was fulfilled and thereby superseded; perfected and accomplished, and thereby abrogated.

The Hebrews had an ineradicably “whole” view of life and the universe. We Westerners, whose educational system rests upon the assumption of the “Greeks” that matter and spirit are separate entities, find it hard to think as the Old Testament thinks. Plato was not the first of the philosophers to dissociate the realm of ideas from the realm of things, since some of the Ionian philosophers before him had already conceived that truth is the truth of propositions. One result of such a dichotomy was the conception that matter or things are not so important or even so real as are ideas; it is the study of the world of ideas, or of the world of spiritual values, which primarily leads mankind to a knowledge of God.

When we encounter a discussion concerning Christ and the forces of destruction, our thoughts go immediately to Luther and to his explanation of the second article of the Apostle's Creed in his catechism: “I believe that Jesus Christ is my Lord, who has released, redeemed and won me from all sin, from death and the power of the devil.” Sin, death and the devil—these are the powers, which have subjected human life to their control and lead it to destruction. But now Christ has come and redeemed me and the whole human family to which I belong. He has deprived these other masters of their power and Himself become “My Lord”, so that I am no longer a slave unto death, but may live under His dominion: “So that I shall be His own, remain and live with Him in His Kingdom and serve Him.”

That the Judgment of God is a Biblical notion of profound significance cannot be denied. But it has never been popular with man, and in some ages of the Church's history—apart from the Liturgy—it has been entirely dormant. In a recent article in The Congregational Quarterly Dr Lovell Cocks describes the Edwardian Nonconformist minister as one “who endeared himself to his congregation as a big, brotherly fellow by having ‘no use for theology’”—a very true description of more than Nonconformist ministers in that age of prosperity—and then says that the same man to-day would “merely write himself down as a charlatan or an ass”. I wonder how true this is! Have we really so completely left behind that Edwardian optimism? I doubt it. The heritage of the second half of the nineteenth century, the age of progress and expansion, is perhaps not so easily got rid of as that. Whilst it is true that amongst theologians in the past thirty years there has been a revival of the notions of the Holiness of God, the Judgment of God, and of eschatological matters in general; and whilst Barth and Brunner and Niebuhr are names to conjure with, I am inclined to think that the general run of men and women, including many preachers, are still prone to cling to the comfortable and somewhat sentimental doctrines of the Love of God which were fashionable amongst theologians a generation ago.

In introducing this subject I recognise that some degree of objectivity and dispassionateness is prescribed by regard for the inter-Church membership of the society which I address. This limitation is not, however, to the disadvantage of the discussion any more than it is separable from the historical situation which lies behind the problem, and therefore I make no apology for soliciting the privilege of the occasion for the observations which I have to make on “Church and Intercommunion”. The subject is one which needs for its setting a really ecumenical atmosphere. What has become regular and normal on the platform of the Faith and Order Conference should not be out of place in the more intimate arena of the present or similar fellowships. The representatives of the Churches must think together the nature of the ecumenical problem. They must seek together the lines of a practicable solution. The theologians and philosophers of the Churches should take responsibility for the straightening out of our ideas in the very tangled situation which history has produced and which it presents for our unravelling. The World Ecumenical Conference has signalled for an advance in this direction, and a theology divorced from interest in the Unity of the Church is not any longer justifiable.

It is commonly accepted as a basic principle of Presbyterianism that the conduct of public worship belongs exclusively to the Minister under authority of the Presbytery. Strictly speaking the position is that matters entering into the actual performance of public worship or the administering of ordinances are the business of the Presbytery and the Minister is recognised as the executive officer of the Presbytery. What this amounts to in all ordinary cases is that there is vested in the Minister the entire responsibility for the ordering of the Service—a very grave responsibility indeed.

In the discussion concerning the doctrine of baptism two fairly clear and steady datum-points are provided by the views of the Roman Catholic and Baptist Churches respectively.

Modern exponents of the doctrine of creation skate as lightly as possible over the thesis that God is Maker of heaven as well as of earth. And St. Matthew's habit of referring to the Kingdom of Heaven does not commend itself as important to most scholars in their elucidation of the Kingdom of God. For Barth, whose doctrine of Providence was outlined in the last issue of this Journal, “God's Kingdom which comes to us on earth is the Kingdom of Heaven; and when God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven, that is not only a divine event, i.e. one established, governed, and consummated by God, but also a heavenly event, i.e. one worked out in the presence, power, co-operation, and co-revelation of heaven on earth” (p. 558). Though this is a secondary aspect of the event, a theology which ignores it is gravely impoverished. And a proper recognition of this aspect entails a further recognition that man's encounter with God in His saving act is also an encounter with the angels of God, the creatures who inhabit heaven. Schleiermacher wrote a notable appendix Of the Angels (§§42–43 in the Second Edition of The Christian Faith) which dismissed the topic from Protestant theology for 150 years, but now it has come back in a treatise which will surely rank with the other two great monuments of angelology, the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius, and the Summa Theologica of Aquinas (1.50–64, 106–114), both of which are sympathetically evaluated.

In the recent revival of interest in the teaching of Dr P. T. Forsyth as “The Theologian of the Cross”, due attention has scarcely been given to the many implications of his message among which his doctrine of Judgment occupies so prominent a place. Indeed, one can say that it is impossible to grasp his doctrine of Redemption apart from the persistent stress he lays, in practically all his works, on Judgment. It was his contention, against the Liberal Christian theology of his day, with its emphasis on the latent divinity of man and the benevolence to the neglect of the severity of God, that it tended to produce pulpiteers rather than preachers and a soft rather than a stalwart faith. He drew a hard and fast line between the orator and the preacher. “Preaching”, he declares, “is the most distinctive institution in Christianity. It is quite different from oratory. The pulpit is another place, and another kind of place, from the platform. Many succeed in the one and yet are failures in the other. The Christian preacher is not the successor of the Greek orator, but of the Hebrew prophet.rdquo; 1 The Hebrew prophet with his “Thus saith the Lord” was invariably the prophet of judgment. When God speaks He speaks as Judge, and the prophet, speaking in His name, claims the right to pronounce judgment. So with Jeremiah, Amos and Hosea. John the Baptist was the herald of judgment, and our Lord, while he cautioned people against judging one another, considering their own faults, exercised the right equally with his heavenly Father to determine the merit and demerit of men.

The Secretary has asked me, when inviting me to this meeting, to speak “of the nature of Methodism's contribution to Church Unity, or at any rate something with a definite Methodist tinge”. In trying to comply with this request, let me make it clear that I shall speak as a Methodist, but only on my own behalf and without any kind of, or even hope for, official sanction; and I shall try to be definite. The Anglo-Saxon art of understatement is not easily mastered by one who is not British-born; to say, for instance, “I don't want to hurry you”, when you are anxious to get rid of your visitor quickly, or “I shall not be a moment”, when you intend to keep him waiting for the next few hours, or “I don't want to be uncharitable”, when introducing the most devastating criticism of your opponent's view—in short, to indulge in what a recent article in Lilliput called “phrops”, is a charisma, which, alas has not been given to me. Yet I will endeavour to speak the truth in love. My thoughts go back to one who, nearly ten years ago, spoke to the Methodist Society in this room and, though not a Methodist himself, gave me my earliest and most valued introduction to the Wesley hymns; who, second to none in his determination and outspokenness as a Free Churchman, yet commanded the affection and respect of Christians in many different camps and even had a requiem mass said for him in a Roman Catholic Church: the late Bernard Manning.

The Amsterdam literature has pointed out afresh the well-known fact that one of the points at issue between the Catholic and Protestant traditions is the number of the Sacraments, and it may well be that a discussion of this question would bring to light some of the other differences between these two traditions. An attempt is made in this paper to outline a Protestant view of the question. It is clear that “Catholic” is used here in a sense different from that which it bears in the historic creeds. Moreover, the contrast made between Catholic (chiefly Anglo-Catholic) and Protestant (chiefly non-Anglican) views is not intended to deny that the Church of England is in a sense Protestant, or to raise the question how far in loyalty to its formularies it can be other than Protestant.

This article contains a brief account of the way in which the eucharistic liturgy of the Church of South India was drawn up and indicates some of the points about which opinions differed among the representatives of the different traditions sharing in this task.

In our time the Church appears constantly as a subject of theological reflection alike in the Evangelical and the Catholic world. Indeed hardly any other question has occupied the minds of theologians so much. At the turn of the century it was still possible to deliver a course of lectures on “the Nature of Christianity” without entering into serious discussion of the Church at all, for it was not considered a real problem. It is different to-day. Robert Grosche says in the Pilgernde Kirche (1938, p. 23): “The religious problem of Christianity to-day lies in the nature and reality of the Church.… He who inquires about Christianity inquires about the Church.”

In A Recent publication, Professor Wladimir Weidlé of the Russian Academy in Paris has some things to say about early Christian Art which are of intense interest to the Church historian. Unlike the Christian artist of other ages, he declares, “the early Christian painter or sculptor made no attempt, even unconsciously, to let the form of his work answer in some degree to its specific religious and Christian content… The form in these paintings and carvings simply carries their content, and makes no attempt to express or embody it… What is most remarkable is to find this indifference not to be confined to form in the ordinary sense of the word, but to extend to the inward form—the dramatic or poetic rendering of the given subject… We find no attempt made to imagine how a thing must have looked at the time when it happened. The only peculiarity here to be seen is that the inward form is, in this art, simplified and condensed to the vanishing point; something there must be, but there is as little as possible.” (The Baptism of Art, pp. 8, 9.)