It would seem that the trend in modern theological works on Christology is to place a positive emphasis primarily on the humanity of Jesus Christ; if, it seems, Christ's divinity can also somehow be worked into the overall picture of the figure he represents in the historical Church, then, so much the better; if not, well, we still are left with an historical religious prophet par excellence. And certainly, such an advocate might argue, this is better than placing one's entire faith in an irresolvable antinomy such as this issue otherwise presents. After all, he might say, if, for example, ‘God, the Father’ is really nothing more than a religious metaphor, then there is no need to consider ‘Jesus, the Son’ as more than this either.

Does a church in the Reformed tradition ever express its own essence and self-understanding more clearly than when, in the liturgy, with the subtlest blend of invitation and command, the minister bids the congregation: ‘Hear the Word of God!’? Here, in dramatic, personal (but corporate) encounter between the people and God's Word — delivered first as Scripture and then expounded as proclamation — the church becomes anew what it already and always is: a community of the Word. A people are summoned into being by living, creative, divine Speech, and from their own side come into being — or better, move toward their true being — through the only appropriate response to divine Speech, namely that faith which comes by hearing (Rom. 10: 17). Our concern here is not to offer a systematic account of this Reformed understanding of the church in all its major aspects, but simply to raise a few of the hermeneutical questions involved: what does it mean for a church tradition to understand itself in these predominantly verbal and auditory categories, indeed to think of the whole encounter between God and man as occurring primarily in the mode of speech and hearing?

It is my impression that in Britain there is more awareness of the importance of John Calvin as a biblical expositor and theorist on the doctrine of Scripture than there is of the parallel significance of Martin Luther; but perhaps I am generalising from my own experience of realising the creativeness of Luther's work much later than I did that of Calvin's. Admittedly Calvin's doctrine of Scripture is more clearly formulated and his exegesis is tighter. But often the issues that are raised and not entirely solved in Luther are the ones that continue to trouble and fascinate biblical scholars and theologians. His new hermeneutic foreshadows many aspects of the problem of the status and interpretation of the Bible as these have since unfolded; indeed, he was a decisive stimulus to this development.

Christians are not the only people with reservations about ethical hedonism. But the leading of a Christian life—along the broad lines traced out in the New Testament, say—has often seemed to be particularly disprobative of the theory that the moral end consists in pleasure. And it is not just a theoretical matter: among Christians, pleasure has been ignored, suspected, feared; and only sometimes welcomed. What I shall try to do in this article is examine what substance there is behind this hesitancy, and what significance pleasure should still have in the Christian life. To do this successfully we shall have to clarify the concept of pleasure. This is a task that needs to be done as much for the sake of our moral philosophy as for the sake of our Christianity, and the way in which I shall proceed will be to develop the meaning and the importance of pleasure in close connection with another (and perhaps slightly less controversial) feature of the Christian life: spontaneity. I can anticipate the general drift of the paper here by saying that pleasure, roughly speaking, is felt spontaneity. This has important implications, as does the fact that, for all their doubts about hedonism, Christians have traditionally made use of a number of words not unrelated to ‘pleasure’: words like ‘joy’, ‘contentment’, ‘blessedness’ and ‘happiness’.