Is the existence of God a question of fact? Surprisingly, the answer many theologians have given in recent years is, ‘No’. Some of them actually mean that the word ‘God’ refers to nothing at all, so that sentences about God are not fact-stating utterances; but others confine themselves to the more moderate claim that, though there is something to which the word ‘God’ properly refers, this is certainly not an empirical matter of fact, and nor does it imply any empirical facts whatsoever about the world. This more moderate claim is, I think, that of Rudolf Bultmann; and the process of freeing the concept of ‘God’ from all the empirical entailments which have been customarily attributed to it is the programme of demythologising, for the advocacy of which he is well known. In this paper I wish to attack this moderate view, which implies that Christianity could be true, whatever the empirical facts about the nature and destiny of the world; that is, that questions of empirical fact are, not just undecidable, but are actually irrelevant, to the question of God's existence. And I shall refer, in particular, to Bultmann's essay, ‘New Testament and Mythology’ and to the work of the British philosopher, Bishop I. T. Ramsey, who propounds a substantially similar view, though in different philosophical garb.

It is impossible for any man to give a satisfactory answer to the question ‘What is God's purpose for the Church?’ We can only turn with expectation to Holy Scripture and to the other vehicles of divine revelation. The letter to the Ephesians declares the purpose of God as follows: ‘He destined us in love to be His sons through Jesus Christ, as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth. … To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all men see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things, that through the Church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places’ (Eph 1.5, 9; 3.8–10).

The first half of the fifth century saw the emergence of the christological controversy which led to the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The two chief protagonists were Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius, the Antiochene monk who became patriarch of Constantinople in 428. There are several different ways of regarding the conflict. On one level it involved the political and ecclesiastical rivalry between Alexandria and Constantinople. From another point of view it was a struggle between the Alexandrian and Antiochene Christologies. This essay will attempt to present some reflections upon a third aspect, the exegetical dimension of the Nestorian controversy. The two words currently used to describe patristic exegesis are ‘typology’ and ‘allegorism’. I shall argue that, although there is good reason for supposing the two methods to have been antipathetic, they do not come into direct conflict with one another in the Nestorian controversy. This judgment can be made, first, because Antiochene hostility to allegorism cannot be connected with the christological controversies and, second, because the exegetical differences which marked the Nestorian controversy cannot be described as differences of method. Such a conclusion demands redefinition of the exegetical dimension of Nestorius' struggle with Cyril, and I shall conclude by suggesting some lines upon which redefinition might proceed.

It is already possible to consider Barth's work as another turning point in the historical background of the present theological situation. But it is also still necessary for contemporary theology to come to terms with Barth. This is especially true of his treatment of the doctrine of universal salvation—apokatastasis. Modern Protestant theology has defined three basic answers to the question of the particularity of election: double predestination, Arminianism, and universalism. The question is whether Barth simply presents a strong and moving case for universalism, or whether he actually breaks out of these options and offers a new possibility for understanding the problem and therefore new possibilities for its resolution.

These two verses, though formally (since God is not directly addressed but referred to in the third person) a wish or ‘prayer-wish’, are really tantamount to a prayer. The structure of the sentence may be indicated as follows: (i) God is named (‘the God of peace’); (ii) an adjectival clause follows (as very often in collects); (iii) the first part of verse 21 expresses the substance of the petition; (iv) the whole is concluded by a doxology. A most perceptive and stimulating commentary on these verses is afforded by Philip Doddridge's paraphrase, ‘Father of peace, and God of love’, to which we shall refer from time to time.

Healing is a neglected aspect of Christian Theology, but it has an important and essential place in the gospels. The four gospels, however, differ in the proportion of space they allow to the record of healing, and in the number of healing acts they record. The difference is most marked in the case of the Gospel according to John as can be seen from the following figures.