The philosophical problem of whether God can create free men has a special form for Christian theologians. Among the many kinds of freedom that might be claimed for men, theologians are most interested in the kind that involves the human response to God. For Christians the important response is to God's revelation in Christ. The form of the problem of creation and freedom of chief interest to Christian theologians, therefore, is whether these two doctrines are compatible:

1. that God is the creator of everything finite and contingent, including men and their responses, and

2. that through the gospel of Jesus Christ God addresses men who may respond freely.

The concept, “act of God,” is central to the biblical understanding of God and his relation to the world. Repeatedly we are told of the great works performed by God in behalf of his people and in execution of his own purposes in history. From the “song of Moses,” which celebrates the “glorious deeds” (Ex. 15:11) through which Yahweh secured the release of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, to the letters of Paul, which proclaim God's great act delivering us “from the dominion of darkness” (Col. 1:13) and reconciling us with himself, we are confronted with a “God who acts.” The “mighty acts” (Ps. 145:4), the “wondrous deeds” (Ps. 40:5), the “wonderful works” (Ps. 107:21) of God are the fundamental subject-matter of biblical history, and the object of biblical faith is clearly the One who has acted repeatedly and with power in the past and may be expected to do so in the future.

Chronography became a discipline of its own during the Alexandrian age. Herodotus and Thucydides still reckoned the remote past by generations. But from 300 B.C. onward learned men of Alexandria attempted to assign more or less precise dates for notable events. Homeric scholars dated the fall of Troy 407 years prior to the first Olympic games in 776 B.C., i.e., 1184 B.C. Eratosthenes of Cyrene asserted that this was the first datable event of human history, giving an unmistakable demarcation line between mythology and history. For the Orientals, whose records reputedly went back to the time when gods and semi-gods held sway over man, Eratosthenes' Greek-colored view of ancient history appeared myopic. Perhaps to match the Orientals, Greek writers manufactured genealogical tables which traced the pedigrees of famous Greek cities to remote antiquity with their autochthonous progenitors. To create order among the conflicting claims, during the second century B.C., the universal chronicle made its appearance. In the universal chronicles the Greek and Oriental genealogical lists followed each other, were synchronized, or even tabulated.

To deal with the problem of the “historical” Jesus is to deal with the synoptic Gospels (with occasional appropriations of Johan-nine material).

To use the apocryphal Gospels does not seem to be advisable, since their inclusion is beset with a number of notorious difficulties. First of all, any attempt to recover historical material from the vast sea of noncanonical tradition has proved to be an arduous labor yielding only negligible results.

The evaluation of Tillich's theological system in America and Great Britain (incipient in Germany but almost nonexistent in France) inevitably takes a stand on two questions. It asks whether Tillich is a theologian or a philosopher, and it asks whether he is an existentialist, an idealist, or, perhaps, both. The second question has almost as many opinions as answers. Is Tillich solely or basically a product of the German nineteenth century? Is he an existentialist despite his system, or an idealist despite his demand for existential theology? Or is Tillich merely an existentialist in his general terminology, while the horizon and form of his thought (because of ontology and system) is of the nineteenth century?

Dr. Williams' Library in London has a copy of Bishop John Wilkins's Ecclesiastes, interleaved with pages on which the divine and hymn-writer Isaac Watts made hundreds of notes — concerning the books he studied at Thomas Rowe's Dissenting academy in London, the comments of leading figures in London's nonconformist circles, and his own maturing opinions and judgments. Dates on various notes range from 1690 to 1709. The document should be of interest to all students of English religious nonconformity in the seventeenth century; it is in effect a manuscript record of an education for the Dissenting ministry, written by one of the foremost ministers of the age, which further reveals the influence of that education on his thinking and his pastoral activities in the most active years of his public leadership. Through a combination of circumstances, Watts' copy of Wilkins has remained obscure, unidentified and virtually untouched in the Dr. Williams archives for well over a century. Now that it has come to light again,2 and has been identified as Watts's,3 perhaps it can gain the attention it merits

IT is customary to divide the second chapter of the Epistle of James into two sections, verses 1–13 and 14–26. The question whether these two sections have any connection with each other was answered negatively by Martin Dibelius. Dibelius argued his case, first of all, by denying that the parable in 2: 15, 16 — with its contrast between speaking and doing (cf. 2: 12) — represents the point of 2: 14–26. Along with other commentators, Dibelius understood this section to treat faith and works and the connection between the two in the light of the Pauline theological treatment of them. Thus, e.g., he argued that the author of James employed the Abraham example in the manner of Jewish tradition, but whereas in the Jewish tradition the faith of Abraham is itself a “work,” it is not so in James: Dibelius found his solution by assuming that this discussion presupposes Paul's treatment of πίστιϛ and ἔργα. But ἔργα for Paul means “works of the law” (e.g., circumcision), which is not the meaning for James. Therefore, James must presuppose a misunderstood Paulinism. When James 2: 14–26 is approached in this way, the parable in 2: 15, 16 appears as only an example, somewhat incidental to the main thrust of the section. Thus, the connection of 2: 14–26 with the foregoing verses cannot be affirmed, even though it appears that the parable in 2: 15, 16 is similar to 2: 12, 13.