There has been a lesiurely, or perhaps we should say a spasmodic, debate on this topic, going on for the last thirty years, to which I would like to invite St. Augustine to make a contribution. I think he can provide resources which the other participants have rather neglected.

The problems facing theology in the setting of secular. society have been widely discussed to the point, almost, of commercial exploitation, particularly by the now eclipsed radical theology of the late 1960s. The rather hollow sounding panegyrics which celebrated God's demise can hardly be said to have carried the task of theology very far forward. Indeed, they have rendered small service to Christian thought, and even less to the church of Jesus Christ, catholic and apostolic.

Irenaeus constantly spoke of the presbyters who possess the succession from the Apostles; those who, together with the succession of the Episcopate, have received the certain gift of truth. For him the importance of the presbyter was based on apostolic succession: the presbyter was a teacher, and teaching determines faith; it is the means by which the faith is preserved and transmitted. The presbyter is a link in the long line of tradition; tradition which disciplines the faithful and determines the future of the church. For this reason alone the presbyter is important for Irenaeus. And this is the basis for the distinct way in which Irenaeus treats him. The presbyter is the primary minister, yet not necessarily a bishop. He is a leader of the Christian community assigned the task of preserving the faith, teaching it and making sure to defend it against error. He holds the chief seat in the administration of the Christian community, and is always associated with the episcopos or bishop. In the writings of Irenaeus there is no clear distinction made between these two terms.

We must keep in mind that Christianity began as a movement, not as an established system or institution. The early Christians were all Jews and the authorised Jewish minister was the rabbi (presbyter). From the very beginning the apostles founded new communities and directed them. After particular communities were founded a need arose to select local leaders or administrators for each of these communities. We know from the New Testament that in the various local communities different names were given to these men: in Rome they were called presidents, in Corinth they were called governors, in Ephesus the name given to them was shepherds and in Phillipi they were known as caretakers and ministers. It is only in the Pastoral Epistles and in the Acts of the Apostles that we find these administrators called presbyters, episcopoi. Irenaeus adds further information to the development to the Christian hierarchy by expressing his views on the presbyter as servant of the community. In short the role or task of the presbyter was one of service to the Christian community.

My objectives are twofold. I want first to show (mainly following John Hick) that there is a conception of necessary existence or aseity, distinct from a conception of ‘logically necessary being’, which is at least prima facie plausible and second to show, with respect to this specific conception, that there are relevant questions about stating truth-conditions which are unsatisfied and perhaps even in principle unsatisfiable, and that these are questions which must be met before such a prima facie plausible conception can be taken to give us the basis of a satisfactory theological elucidation of what it is to speak of God. I shall argue that it is doubtful whether these questions about truth-conditions can be met.

Ten years ago it might have seemed odd to place side by side two men like Karl Barth (1886-1968) and Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), the former considered a ‘modern church father’ of the Reformation and the latter an implacable foe of that tradition in its fledgling state. What is significant however is that their essential spiritual thrust took such similar directions. It is the similarity in essentials that first drew this writer to begin comparing the thought of the two men, but more than a similarity is involved here. An examination of the attitudes of the two towards Christian proclamation and communication provides striking ecumenical possibilities, and allows Roman Catholics and Protestants to see how close their traditions are in so many cases, if only a careful effort is made to understand the other's language. Loyola himself, at the outset of his spiritual manual, offers us a pattern for sensitivity in theological discussion:

To assure better cooperation between the one who is giving the Exercises and the exercitant, and more beneficial results for both, it is necessary to suppose that every good Christian is more ready to put a good interpretation on another's statement than to condemn it as false. If an orthodox construction cannot be put on a proposition, the one who made it should be asked how he understands it. If he is in error, he should be corrected with all kindness. If this does not suffice, all appropriate means should be used to bring him to a correct interpretation, and so defend the proposition from error.

Some classics of pre-war British theology appeared in Nisbet's Library of Constructive Theology. The aim of writers in that series was, in the words of editors W. R. Matthews and H. Wheeler Robinson, ‘to lay stress on the value and validity of religious experience and to develop their theology on the basis of the religious consciousness’. Such an empirical approach ensures for the theological product a high content of the kind of material fundamental to modern Phenomenology of Religion; that is, the description and interpretation of experiences, behaviour, and other phenomena of life taken by the religious believer as manifestations of divine reality and activity. A re-reading from a phenomenological point of view, then, can discover new significance in those writings which, though less than a generation old, are all too easily felt to be obsolescent in the light of more recent theological fashions.

Bonhoeffer gave surprisingly little systematic attention to questions of providence and history despite the fact that his lifelong theological concern was to explore the way in which revelation was given form in his world. It was only in the experiences in the Second World War when working in the Abwehr with members of the resistance and subsequently in prison, when he had to face the possibility of a major shift in human consciousness, that he looked at the problem of history and the development of culture and had to relate it to an understanding of providence. Even so circumstances did not allow him to work this out in detail; both the Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison are evidence of a direction in his thinking, though the way seems to be fairly clearly delineated.

How far can we claim to know anything for what it actually is? Or, to put the question another way, how far is our so-called knowledge relative to the specifically human perspective? The problem was succinctly put by Fr Paul Verghese in an essay he contributed to the symposium on Technology and Social Justice:

Our present universe is constituted by our sense-equipment, and by the ancillary equipment which we have been able to make for ourselves by technology. Change our sense-equipment and brain-structure, and we will have a different universe. Look at the paranoid or the psychedelic. Is the universe of his experience the same as ours? And which is the true one? For our equipment ours is true, for his, his is true. And if all were paranoid or psychedelic, we would have a totally different universe. … The bee has its world, the spider and the bat have each its own, depending upon die particular perception system of each. Change our sense-equipment—this world disappears and another one takes its place.

Of the various attempts to turn theology into a systematic science, that of Bernard Lonergan seems to me by far the most impressive. But it is not yet as well known as it deserves. In what follows I shall try to describe Lonergan's method, and to indicate why I think that it is of importance.

After having listened to the scientists telling us about the phenomenon of biological evolution, the philosophers shared with us their views on evolution on the human level. Then the theologians have given their interpretation of the canonical scriptures of the Old and New Testaments on the basis of exegetical knowledge. Now, by way of conclusion, I have to attempt to give you a synthetic view of man's eschatological condition on the basis of the facts of science and Christian revelation.

Thirteen years ago Will Herberg described the work and influence of Karl Barth in the following way:

Karl Barth is, beyond all doubt, the master theologian of our age. Wherever, in the past generation, men have reflected deeply on the ultimate problems of life and faith, they have done so in a way that bears the unmistakable mark of the intellectual revolution let loose by this Swiss thinker in the years immediately following the first world war…. If any man has ever put his sign on the thinking of his time, it is Karl Barth, the father of the ‘dialectical theology’.

Athanasius of Alexandria (298?–373) was a key figure in the in the life and theology of the fourth-century Church. In most of the contemporary controversies and events his force of personality made an indelible mark on developments and influenced their direction and movement to a remarkable degree. Although known most widely for his defense of the communion of being of the Son incarnate in Jesus with the Father, he was no less important in the incipient controversies concerning the divinity of the Holy Spirit. At a decisive hour of the Church's life, Athanasius not only secured her faith in the one Godhead of Father and Son; he delineated the lines upon which her pneumatological doctrine was to develop. With his characteristic single-mindedness, and by constant reiteration of certain propositions, Athanasius laid down the general lines of the future development of the doctrine, thus making the question of the divinity of the Holy Spirit as fundamental a part of the Church's consciousness as the doctrine of the Son's full divinity had become through his disputes with the Arians.

As reported in the synoptic gospels, one of the most characteristic features of Jesus' activity was his campaign against the household of Satan, the demons. And yet Jesus' work as demon-exorcist has generally received little attention. Perhaps this is because for some time now the idea of demon-possession has been alien to the viewpoints of both liberal and conservative interpreters of his ministry. We do not believe in Satan and demons; surely Jesus could not have done so either!

This paper proposes to give some account and critique of Peter Berger's thought as contained in a selection of his books. No note will be taken of his witty and mordant critique of the Protestant Churches in the United States, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies (1961), nor yet of The Social Construction of Reality (1966), which is a more technical book than the others which will be dealt with here. These are The Precarious Vision (1961), Invitation to Sociology (1963), The Social Reality of Religion (1967) (more entertainingly entitled in its original American edition, The Sacred Canopy), and A Rumour of Angels (1968).

There has to be a pressing reason to add to the mountain of material which has grown up around the work of Paul Tillich. Has not the ground been exhausted, the sponge wrung dry? While it would be presumptuous to claim that the present article deals with some hitherto unturned stone, our contention is that by asking a relatively simple question, a strange defect in Tillich's system becomes evident which seems to have been largely ignored. If this contention succeeds, then perhaps the presence of yet another article on Tillich may be justified.

In recent years, the phrase ‘political theology’ has become fairly common in theological discourse. Political theology has been used to describe not only the work of theologians who admit to having or seeking to develop a political theology but also to describe the work of some theologians who have not explicitly stated that they are engaged in doing political theology. It is in this context that descriptions of Karl Barth as a political theologian or one who does political theology are becoming common place. The purpose of this article is to test the appropriateness of ascribing a political theology to Karl Barth.

Few sociologists can afford to ignore Peter Berger, and theologians only do so at their cost. Berger's contributions to both the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of religion are important and widely influential. However, I think he would be the first to admit that his specifically theological contributions are more tentative and exploratory. Professor Cairns ably shows that in fact Berger's theological ideas have shifted considerably over the last decade. From a highly Barthian position, distinguishing rigidly between ‘religion’ and Christianity, he has now almost become a natural theologian, appealing to ‘signals of transcendence’ within the experience of everyone, whether Christian or not.

It is comforting to one embroiled in the tantalising, and not infrequently exasperating prolegomena to Christian philosophy, to be able to make an assertion which is unlikely to be controverted by anyone familiar with recent theological writing. The assertion is to the effect that two concepts which have been much to the fore of late are ‘communication’ and ‘relevance’. Christians are urged from all sides to find ways of communicating with present-day, secularised, ‘post-Christian’ man, in such a way that he will see the relevance of their gospel. Indeed, the challenge has been put so often that one can readily see the point of Professor J. McIntyre's suspicion that relevance seems to be replacing truth as a criterion of permissible discourse; and one can echo his sigh, ‘Sometimes I think that I would appreciate an address that claimed unashamedly to be “irrelevant”.’ What concerns us is the possibility that certain efforts in the direction of communication and relevance merit the charge of reductionism, that is, the charge that in some way the distinctives of the Christian message are being watered down or undermined. No doubt reductionism may take many forms, but it is that variety of the phenomenon which might be termed ‘logical reductionism’, which more immediately concerns us.

The Scriptures have served the believing community as guide for faith and conduct. Long after the prominent personalities such as Abraham, Moses, and David of the Old Testament and Jesus, Paul, and John of the New Testament had lived, spoken, and written, many people of later times and of different cultures have embraced these Scriptures with deep devotion and gratitude.

The group of imperatives usually known as the Mission Charge to the Twelve Disciples deserves consideration for its own sake since it marks an important climax in our Lord's life and ministry, as well as in the experience of those whom he called to be his disciples. It deserves consideration also because in the process of time it became the justification for the medical missionary movement which arose within the Protestant Church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today this movement as part of the great worldwide expansion of the Christian Church appears to be coming to an end. It is appropriate, therefore, to look again at what was claimed to be its biblical basis. This article proposes to do this, and to consider medical missions in relation to the Mission Charge to the Twelve Disciples, and in relation to the modern healing ministry of the Church.