A church which is almost exclusively adult in its make-up and style may well be seen to be lacking in catholicity, and failing in its proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Perhaps a church may be bereft of children through no fault of its members, but more likely it will have been made clear to children and teenagers, perhaps in unspoken ways, that children are an inconvenience, a disturbance, destructive of concentration and peace of mind, their unseemly noises being not unlike the shouts of those infants in the Jerusalem Temple, whose praise to God the Pharisees sought to silence. Children, by their openness, by their spontaneity, by their freshness of thought, and by their emotions being near to the surface, can, if allowed to express themselves in church, be both a sign of hope and a threat to the ‘status quo’, a challenge to tram-like thinking and spiritual rigidity. ‘Let the children come to me, do not hinder them; for to such belongs the Kingdom of God’ (Mark 10.14).

Christian theology, because of its concern with ‘all things’, is sometimes able to provide salvific insights into academic areas far removed from theological syllabuses. In this article I take one such example and show how theology can make a rich contribution to the understanding of another discipline. The example is education.

Isaac B. Singer's great short story ‘Gimpel the Fool’ is a tale of redemption. It embodies in its delightfully exaggerated characters a central notion of process thought — that a human person is a coming together of his/her past in a way that is always open to a new future. The story reminds us that human interdependence is so profound that by our actions we can not only transform the meaning of our own past and future, but we may also radically affect the meaning of the past and the possibilities for the future of those closest to us.

It has often been alleged that the liturgically-minded incline to indifference toward preaching and it must be confessed that Christian history has demonstrated that this is a plaint not wholly without foundation. The church has had its enthusiasts whose ardour for correctness in worship both in general character and in minute detail has left them somewhat short of concern for what has traditionally been deemed a high point in the Reformed cultus, the preaching of the Word. There has been a school of thought — now virtually it is to be hoped extinct — which was apt to exalt ‘worship’ above ‘mere preaching’. It developed partly no doubt in welcome reaction to another school of thought equally reprehensible in its lack of balance which relegated all of the service that preceded the sermon to the category of ‘preliminaries’. Any polarisation of worship and preaching, however, must be deprecated, for every part of the Christian cult is ‘worship’, and the sermon is an integral part of the cult. ‘The Word of God’, says the Roman Catholic scholar, Ambrosius Verheul, ‘read in the Epistle and Gospel must become a real message from God to us, men of the present, in the concrete circumstances of the world in which we live. Therefore Bible-reading demands an explanation. The Bible-reading evokes preaching, the homily, connecting with the content of what has been read.’

In a previous issue of SJT Paul Helm reviewed the work of R. T. Kendall in which Kendall ‘contends that Calvinism in general and particularly English Calvinism down to 1649 shows a marked departure from the teaching of John Calvin’. Mr Helm concluded that Kendall's thesis ‘does not stand up to serious scrutiny’. More recently, Mr Helm has underscored his rejection of Kendall's thesis with the publication of his monograph, Calvin and the Calvinists. A major point of contention concerns Kendall's assertion that Calvin teaches a doctrine of unlimited atonement. Mr Helm also takes exception to the implications for faith and assurance which Kendall draws from this view of the atonement. In his refutation of Kendall's work Mr Helm begins with a presentation of what he believes to be Calvin's own position. After a survey of quotations, primarily from the Institute, he concludes that,

in Calvin's teaching the work of Christ, from incarnation to heavenly intercession, is one work, focused on the death of Christ which expiated sin by satisfying divine justice. Christ's death brings salvation to the elect, for in dying Christ intended only the salvation of the elect (p. 22).