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The path pioneered by Israel, leading to the abolition of mythology, the gods, heaven and religion came to a consummation in the man Jesus of Nazareth, so that his coming spelled the end to the world of ancient man, and the new age in human history began, as is demonstrated by our division of time into BC. and AD. But before we can see this, we must let go our hold of that traditional picture of Jesus which Christian thought and devotion has built up over the centuries and which reached its climax in the Christian mythology of the Middle Ages. The new world has been effectively destroying Christian mythology, but the mythology surrounding the person of Jesus has been the last bulwark of orthodoxy.

The traditional picture of Jesus presents Him as a supernatural person from the unseen world, who deigned to appear in human form and spend some years on the earth among men. Because he was really God, he could perform all kinds of miracles, he possessed the knowledge of all truth, and every word he spoke remains true and absolute for all time. To show God’s love and save men from damnation, he allowed himself to be put to death; but he knew that shortly afterwards, he would rise from the dead and ascend to his former home to sit at the right hand of God.

From the time the new world began to appear, men questioned this picture of Jesus more and more. But the New Testament appeared strongly to support it, particularly in the way it had been traditionally interpreted, and as long as the Bible could be regarded as an infallible source of truth, then that settled the matter. It was the new view of the Bible that finally shattered the traditional picture.

When a historian sets out to learn what a person from the past was really like, he looks first for records contemporary with the life of his subject. But for Jesus we have no relevant records written during his life, either by himself or by others. The historian then looks for records, which, though originating later, were written by men who knew the person firsthand. Here we draw our second blank. Though the memories of the disciples of Jesus are no doubt reflected in some way in the Gospels, it now seems probable that no New Testament book was actually written by one who had known Jesus in the flesh. The earliest New Testament books are the letters of Paul, and he gives no indication that he had ever met Jesus in the flesh, and he shows little interest in the earthly life of Jesus. The rest of the New Testament comes from the second and third generations of the Christian church, being written thirty-five years or more after the death of Jesus.

Last century this set many scholars busy searching the New Testament for the reliable human memories of Jesus it preserved, in order to reconstruct the historical picture of Jesus. There was a spate of books written on the life of Jesus. This inquiry received a sudden jolt when Albert Schweitzer wrote The Quest of the Historical Jesus, a book which showed, first of all, that the attempt to rediscover the historical Jesus had largely failed, and secondly, that the life of Jesus was set in a context largely foreign to us, this being marked by the expectation of the imminent end of the known world.

The search for the real historical Jesus had failed up to that date because each scholar selected and interpreted the Gospel material in a way which fitted his own presuppositions. But this is something which all Christians do in one way or another. When we read the New Testament we unconsciously construct in our imagination a picture of Jesus which is a rough and ready harmony of the four Gospels. We ignore, perhaps unknowingly, the inconvenient statements which conflict with our mental picture. The attractive figure of Jesus which each believer holds in his imagination must not be confused with the historical figure of Jesus, for it cannot even be reconciled with the New Testament, where there is not just one picture of Jesus, but several, all of which conflict at certain points.

This very thing that we find ourselves doing is exactly what the New Testament writers were already doing. What we have in the Gospels are not biographies of Jesus written by first-hand witnesses, but several portraits of the Christ of faith, written by men who had never seen Jesus in the flesh, and based on the church’s experience of the risen Christ in their midst and on the memories of the earthly Jesus that had been handed down from the original disciples by word of mouth. We may still conclude that these portraits of the Christ of faith bear a reasonable likeness to a greater or less degree to the historical Jesus, but this becomes a matter of personal conviction. We are in no position to assert as an historical fact that Jesus did ‘this’ or said ‘that’ just because we read it in the Gospels. The full and exact account of all that Jesus said and did during his earthly life is lost to us for ever.

In the New Testament we possess the early church’s testimony to the Christ of faith, and their testimony, including even the remembered stories of Jesus, reflect at many points the church’s own experience of the risen Christ they acclaimed their Lord. And after all it is not Jesus the teacher, nor Jesus the healer, who is at the heart of the Christian faith, but the Jesus Christ who is known by faith as the savior and Lord of men. To this Christ of faith the New Testament does give firsthand witness.

When we ask what gave rise to the Christ of faith in the early church, we can immediately say that it derived from a certain complex of events in human history roughly centered round the year AD. 30. Hardly anyone seriously doubts any more that there was a Galilean Jew named Jesus, who for a short time attracted local attention as a teacher who took an unusual interest in people and uttered some startling things, and who for this reason fell foul of the religious authorities, the result of it all being that the Roman governor had him crucified. This in itself is important, showing us how Israel’s concern to see the meaning of human destiny in the scene of human history itself and not the unseen world of the gods, came to a consummation in the Christian faith. For the Christian heritage points to a human figure of history, Jesus of Nazareth, as the key to human destiny and the focal point of all to which history-centered Israel was leading. It proclaims that this event was of such a nature that the world was destined never to be the same again. (Those who want to interpret the advent of Jesus in terms of supernatural intervention are inadvertently attacking the most distinctive element in Christianity, namely its concern with history and not mythology.)

Secondly, the new view of the Bible has helped us to recover the true humanity of Jesus. This is not a loss, as some have thought, but a distinct gain, and constitutes a return to the distinctive witness of the Bible. In the ancient world there were gods in plenty who competed for the attention of men, but here was a man, a true man, who called for attention, and men found themselves giving him the attention and allegiance that they had previously given only to the gods. Israel had abandoned the gods of ancient man in favor of the YHWH who addressed them in history, and now in the Israelite human scene there appeared a man who not only spoke the Word of God but who embodied it in flesh and blood. This spelled the end to the gods of ancient man. The fact that the Jesus who became the basis of the Christ of faith was a true man in every way does not need to be argued away by Christians, for in fact it is basic to the uniqueness of the Christian heritage. (This truth has traditionally been enshrined in the doctrine of the Incarnation, but so often the truth has been affirmed in one sentence and obliterated in the next by that quick flight back into mythology which has repeatedly been the church’s undoing.)

The life of Jesus must be understood within the historical context in which he lived, and which helped to shape his thoughts and actions. It was an age of expectancy in which men, out of oppression and bewilderment, were looking hopefully for the new age to be ushered in cataclysmically by the anointed servant of YHWH. We do not know exactly what Jesus said about this and what he thought about himself in connection with it, but, whatever it was, the advent of Jesus led men to see in him the key to the new age, and their hopes suddenly blossomed forth with new vitality. Here was YHWH’s man. Israel’s concern for a renewed earth had arrived at a consummating point in the coming of the man Jesus, for through him the old world was now destined to pass away. The new age had come.

We have earlier noted how Jesus, in his ministry, took the questions of life out of the temple into the fields, the lakeside, the home and the street. There is no evidence that Jesus was greatly concerned with sacrifices, ceremonial purity, or religious exercises. The evidence rather points to his being concerned with the quality of the daily or secular life of man, as shown in honesty, integrity, and the readiness to give oneself in love to others. In the man Jesus the religion of ancient man came to an end. Thus the very things which we have seen to be both the distinctive elements of Israel’s heritage and the seeds of the new world came to a sharp focal point in Jesus. That which was in Israel in the process of becoming had now actually arrived in the man Jesus. He initiated the new age.

But how did it happen? If Jesus was truly a man, why did he and not some other man give rise to the Christ of faith? There are no clear answers to these questions. But the simple fact remains that it happened. This is what the New Testament repeatedly affirms. A glorious and wonderful thing had happened. Something like a parable of this is expressed in the story of the man born blind. He could not tell how he had been healed or who the mystery healer was, but one thing he knew, "whereas I was blind, now I see".

We cannot even say at exactly what point of time the Christ of faith emerged from Jesus, that enigmatic man of history. Some have thought it originated in the ministry of Jesus, some have said it was on Easter day and some have pointed to the day of Pentecost as the birthday of Christian faith. But actually we do not know the history of that period clearly enough, as we lack contemporary records. We are not at all clear as to what happened between the death of Jesus and the conversion of Paul. Paul’s letters are our earliest firsthand witness to the Christ of faith, but when he wrote them, he had been preaching the faith for some years.

Paul’s letters, however, make it abundantly clear that for him Christian faith centered round the death of Jesus on the cross and the subsequent Resurrection. As an example of Paul’s Gospel expressed in a nutshell, we may select Galatians 1:3- 4. "Our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father." Here Paul reflects the current eschatological conviction that they were living at the end of an age -- a wicked age that could end only in disaster on a cosmic scale. But it was the will of God that men should be delivered from that doomed age to enter into the new age. The self-giving of Jesus on the cross, in some way which Paul never makes clear, was thought by him to have achieved this deliverance, and this led him to "glory in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ". The cross has always been the focal point of the Christian faith, and consequently it became the chief symbol of Christianity. Christian thinkers have been led to develop various theories of atonement which try to explain why the death of Jesus on the cross is so significant, but though these theories have a cogency in their own time, they never become permanently valid, for they are expressed in a framework of thought which belongs to the period of their origin.

When we ask how Paul came to be preaching the cross of Christ, then we find that his Gospel took its origin and shape out of his conversion experience on the road to Damascus. To appreciate the significance of that, we must remember that Paul was a Jewish scholar of no mean ability, who knew that in Israel’s past, men like Abraham, Moses, Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah had heard God speaking to them when they least expected it, and that they had been commissioned to tasks which had previously not entered their heads. Secondly, as a devout and passionately loyal Jew, Paul was intent on stamping out what appeared to be the smoldering remains of the cause begun by the now crucified Jesus.

In the short dramatic turn of events which halted him in his journey to fulfil this mission, he was temporarily blinded, and he heard a voice, which said, "I am Jesus whom you are persecuting". Paul found no way of evading the conclusion that the crucified Jesus was in some way still alive, as the Christians he was persecuting were then affirming. His own life was turned upside down, and he found himself commissioned to become an apostle of the death and Resurrection of Jesus. The new age he had awaited had burst in upon him.

Paul’s experience is perhaps no better expressed than in his own words to the Galatians, "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." Later he spoke of Christ being formed in those who heard the Gospel. Paul’s conversion is the key to his faith and the Gospel he preached. The clearest evidence he had that the crucified and risen Christ was the Lord of the new age was in himself. He had become a new man, a new creation.

But Paul was not the first to proclaim as good news the death and Resurrection of Jesus, and he himself is our chief historical link with those who were. He tells us how he conferred with Peter, and James the brother of Jesus, and some years later with other apostles. No doubt they compared experiences. Paul was satisfied that they too had seen and heard the risen Jesus in experiences similar to his own. But if we seek further details of how they came to believe, and what it was they actually saw or heard, the answers are largely hidden from us. The historical evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus is to be found primarily in the apostles themselves.

The Gospel stories of the risen Christ, which have been highly valued in traditional Christianity through the centuries, are now regarded by New Testament scholars as containing many legendary elements, reflecting the developing traditions of the last quarter century from which they come. At the same time they genuinely reflect varied ways in which the crucified man Jesus made his impact upon them as the Christ of faith. Only believers testify to having seen the risen Christ, and sometimes they did not understand whom they had encountered until faith opened their eyes.

The New Testament nowhere describes the departure of Jesus from the tomb as a witnessed event in the way the later second century Gospel of Peter does. The nearest approach is in the story of the tomb found empty, which occurs in its earliest and simplest form in Mark 16:1-8. The fact that Mark’s version contains no supernatural elements, such as the later ones do, leads some scholars to regard it as having an historical foundation. But none of the apostles figure in this story, and whatever historical element may reside in it, it was not the finding of the empty tomb that brought the apostles to faith in the risen Christ, and if Paul ever heard the story he never thought it worth a mention, even when he assembled the evidence of witnesses in I Corinthians 15.

The resurrection of a man from the dead was not nearly such an extraordinary thing in the ancient world as in ours. The Bible refers to several instances. It is only in the late legendary material in the New Testament that the risen Christ is described in terms which imply that the Resurrection was simply the resuscitation of the dead body of Jesus. By that time various legends about Jesus were growing steadily, such as that of the Virgin Birth, and the more miraculous stories of what he did during his earthly ministry.

The Resurrection of Jesus must be understood within the eschatological context of the first century. There had already been a good deal of Resurrection talk before and during the life of Jesus. For in the hopes for the coming new age, it was expected that those who died before it arrived would be resurrected to take their place in it. Some even thought that the wicked would be resurrected too in order to receive their just punishment. Thus the Christian affirmation that God had raised Jesus from the dead was much more far-reaching than simply bringing the dead body of Jesus back into the tangible world. It was the triumphant declaration that the death of Jesus on the cross was not a miserable defeat, but the very victory which ushered in the new age. Jesus was not dead, but risen, the first-fruits of the great Resurrection which would accompany the imminent arrival of the new age.

There are three affirmations of the New Testament which must always be made in conjunction if they are to be properly understood, namely, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the new age. It is only because the Crucifixion led to the new age, that we can speak of the Resurrection. It is only because the crucified one is risen that we can speak of the new age. It is only because the Resurrection demonstrates the arrival of the new age, that we discern the significance of the Crucifixion.

But what of the new age? There is no doubt that in the days of Paul and the other apostles, it was expected very soon. Paul wrote, "For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord".

But the years passed and the apostles died and the end did not come. Yet the Christian faith did not just die out. Slowly and almost imperceptibly, it adjusted itself to the new situation. It reinterpreted the New Testament conviction about the new age. What they experienced within the Christian community was evidence in plenty that there was a sense in which the new age had already come. That is why they were led to name the supposed birth year of Jesus as the point which marked the end of the old age and the beginning of the new. But they also knew that there was a sense in which the new age was not yet seen in its completeness. This formed the substance of the Christian hope and lay ahead in the unknown future. Eventually it came to be expressed almost exclusively in the mythological terms of a supernatural unseen world.

The mythological world of medieval Christendom has slowly disintegrated and out of the crumbling ruins the new world has emerged, and is still developing apace. It is only because of the medieval world that the new world has become a reality, and consequently the new world owes its being to the man Jesus just as much as the medieval world. Yet medieval Christendom had to die in order that the new world might appear.

Not everything in the new world is directly traceable to the man Jesus any more than everything in the medieval world was. The new world, however, bears unmistakable marks of the new age that he ushered in. But now, as then, the new age is both here and yet to come. The extent to which the future history of man will see the new age come more completely rather than witness a calamitous return to the old world, depends on the continuing recognition of where this new world came from. It derives from the historically based, de-divinized, world-renewing, religionless heritage of Israel, which came to a focal point in the man Jesus. By his Crucifixion and Resurrection, the old world came to an end, and he ushered in the new age, an age which is still in the process of becoming.

Religion is a difficult word to define. Christianity has been almost universally regarded as a religion, and its adherents have claimed it to be the true religion, yet notable theologians of this century have declared that Christianity is not really a religion at all. To minimize confusion we shall for this discussion define religion as a body of beliefs and practices in which man’s attention is directed towards one or more divine beings in an unseen supernatural world, upon whom he believes his true welfare to depend, and from whom he seeks the help of spiritual forces to enable him to live successfully.

In the ancient world the whole of human life was embraced by religion. It was particularly vital at those times in which man sensed the mystery of life and growth, namely birth, puberty, marriage and death, the sowing of crops, the spring lambing, the building of a new home, the going forth to battle. It came to expression in the myths in which man tried to understand his mysterious world and in the ritualistic practices by which he tried to secure divine aid. The mythological world of ancient man led of necessity to religion.

But we have seen that Israel pioneered a path which was destined to lead to the abandonment of mythology, of the gods, and of the divine unseen world in which they were believed to live. Since these are the very terms in which we have defined religion, it means that the heritage of Israel was destined to lead eventually to the eclipse of religion also.

The chief factor in this revolutionary move was the increasing attention devoted to the nature and role of man arising from Israel’s concern with history. Whereas ancient man felt himself to be at the mercy of capricious forces seated beyond his control in an unseen world, Israel came to recognize that man himself has been given power and responsibility to act decisively, and that it is on his own moral decisions that his life and destiny largely depend.

There is a very significant difference between the ancient myths and the biblical stories, in the way man’s role is described. Ancient man saw himself in a very inferior place. In the Babylonian creation myth, for example, man was created as a kind of after-thought in order to perform the menial tasks, which otherwise would have been part of the responsibilities laid as a judgment on the defeated rebel gods. But in the Old Testament man is regarded as the very crown of creation, entrusted with dominion over all other forms of life. The world was made for man, and it is his function to "be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over . . . every living thing that moves upon the earth".

It was inevitable that this much more exalted view of man would be reflected sooner or later in Israel’s attitude to traditional religion. At first the change was almost imperceptible. The chief ancient ritual of intercourse with the unseen world was sacrifice, and in her earliest traditions, sacrificial practices of some kind were assumed as a matter of course. In the very story in which YHWH delivered the promise to Abraham, we are told how Abraham responded by building an altar. In the earliest tradition of the Exodus, we learn that Moses was leading Israel out to the wilderness for the celebration of a sacrifice in a rendezvous with YHWH.

We have already seen, however, that the very same men of Israel who were responsible for developing a sense of history, were those who began to lead men’s attention away from the sanctuary. In the great prophets this attitude to traditional religious practices grew more revolutionary and iconoclastic. At first, as in the case of Elijah, it was the abolition of foreign sacrifices that was called for, but a century later this attack was taken a stage further. Amos denied any real place to sacrifice at all in the heritage of Israel, even if it were offered in the name of YHWH. He interpreted the Word of YHWH as saying to Israel:

Isaiah condemned the sacrifices of his day in even stronger terms.

It is sometimes argued that the prophets were not seeking the abolition of the sacrifices, but only their reformation, so that they should become the expression of a true spirit of worship. That is how later Israelites, and then Christians, did most commonly interpret these words. But it hardly does justice to what the prophets actually said. A century later, Jeremiah, speaking in similar vein, specifically denied that there was any divine warrant at all for the sacrifices. "For in the day that I (YHWH) brought them out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to your fathers or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices."

In their scathing denunciation of sacrifices, the prophets sought to see them replaced by a concern for the daily life of man. They believed YHWH, the God of Israel, to be concerned, not with cultic offerings and ritual, but with moral integrity, justice and goodwill. Isaiah concluded his oracle with this plea.

In the book of Micah the contrast is set out quite clearly.

As a result of the teaching of the prophets there did take place a religious reformation, in which all the village altars were abolished and their sacrifices suspended. From that time onwards sacrifices were to be offered at one place only, the temple in Jerusalem. Yet even while the reformation was in progress Jeremiah saw that it did not go far enough. It was the reformation of man’s moral and spiritual life that was required, not just a clean-up of ritualistic practices.

The prophetic distrust of religion was not confined to sacrifices. In most mythological cultures religious practices centered upon a holy building, which was either the house of the god, or else the appointed meeting-place between the gods and men. Israel inherited from her ancestors the tradition of a desert tabernacle or ‘tent of meeting’, which served this purpose m the nomadic setting. In the reign of Solomon this dwelling-place of God was given more permanent form in the erection of a relatively large and magnificent temple.

The prophets became as distrustful of the temple as they were of the sacrifices. Micah was the first to prophesy its destruction at the hands of YHWH himself, declaring that Jerusalem would be leveled to the ground, and the very hill on which the temple stood would become a forest slope. The clear implication is that YHWH was not concerned with holy buildings in the same way as were the gods of ancient man. At the very time when the temple was becoming an exclusive focal point of Israel’s religion, Jeremiah saw that it was inducing in men a false sense of security. So he pointed to the well-known ruins of the earlier sanctuary of Shiloh as a sign that the Jerusalem temple too was destined for destruction, for the religious practices in it were leading Israel into a false faith, dishonesty and immorality.

Thus, in the very things most characteristic of the religion of ancient man, namely altars, sacrifices and temples, the prophets of Israel took the first steps in the direction of their abolition, for YHWH, being wholly different from the ancient gods, neither required the old cultic offerings, nor did He dwell in a house made by hands. The prophets turned Israel’s attention away from the sanctuary to the daily life of man in society. Whereas ancient man attempted to bring some influence to bear upon the unseen world by taking his offerings to the holy place where he believed the gods to dwell, the prophets proclaimed that YHWH had come to man where he was. Whereas ancient man yearned for an immortal existence among the gods, the prophets declared that YHWH had chosen to dwell among men. Human affairs assumed a new dignity and eternal significance.

Both the sacrifices and the temple did come to a sudden end when Judah was overwhelmed by the Babylonians and the city of Jerusalem sacked in 586 BC. The proclamation of the prophets was dramatically fulfilled. Even though some seventy years later the temple was rebuilt and sacrifices reinstated, this step proved retrogressive, leading to a period of stagnation. It came to an end when the final destruction of the temple by the Romans in AD. 70 brought to fulfillment those words of an even greater prophet, "There will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down".

But in the meantime the non-religious concerns of the earlier prophets had found new forms of expression in the emerging institution of the synagogue, which pioneered quite a new phase m man’s spiritual pilgrimage. Here there was no altar, no sacrifices, no priest, and the building itself was not originally thought of as a holy dwelling-place of God. It took its name not from God, but from the people who gathered in it. (‘Synagogue’ is a Greek word which simply means ‘coming together’.) In those days the synagogue would have appeared to a contemporary outsider, not as a religious place at all, but as a secular building, such as a school or a reading room. Some scholars have described it as a laymen s institute. It was primarily a place for those who had inherited the faith of Israel to gather for the study of the Holy Scripture which enshrined that faith. The written word of YHWH had now replaced the altar as the focal point of the community, and it was natural that their study of the Word should be in a context of the praise of YHWH and prayerful meditation. In our day the Jewish synagogue looks to us much like any other religious building, but in its original setting it must have looked decidedly secular.

It was because of the rise of the institution of the synagogue, that Jewish faith and culture not only survived the final destruction of the temple and the cessation of sacrifices, but even flourished. The Jews lamented the loss of the temple, but found, perhaps to their surprise, that they could get on without it. Yet even before it happened, Judaism gave birth to the new movement of Christianity, which owed more to the synagogue than it did to the temple.

In Jesus of Nazareth we find the true successor to the prophets of Israel, whose concern for the common man, and whose unconcern for the forms of ancient religion, He not only shared, but took to their logical conclusion. He was neither a priest nor a rabbi. He spent most of His life as a village carpenter. His actions and words are mainly recorded as taking shape by the seashore, on the open road, or in a friend’s house.

Although a new religion eventually formed round His person, there is little historical foundation for the assertion that He set out to found such a thing. The impression we receive from the gospels, particularly the earlier ones, is that the practices commonly regarded as religious by the ancient world are never more than incidental to what He had to say. The sayings gathered in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the parables of the Kingdom, show that like the earlier prophets He was chiefly concerned with the quality of a man’s daily life. In contrast with the priest from the temple, and the scribe from the synagogue, Jesus was listened to gladly by the common people, and finally it was not the irreligious, but the religious authorities who had Jesus put to death, for He constituted too severe a threat to the vested interests of religion.

The early Christian movement spread first of all in the synagogue and derived its earliest forms and practices from it before being eventually cast out to live an independent existence. It was thrust more deeply into the common life of man, and further away from commonly accepted forms of religion. It had good news to proclaim about man’s new freedom, and about the new world which would shortly replace the old one. It called men to a life of faith and obedience which transcended the religion of both Jew and Gentile, though it claimed to be the genuine consummation of the heritage of Israel.

For two centuries or more the Christians had no need of special buildings. It was not buildings that mattered but people. Those who professed the new faith became themselves the very dwelling-place of God through the indwelling risen Christ. The early church was the community of the faithful, and Paul transferred the word ‘temple’ to the human body as ‘the temple of the holy spirit’. The Christians had neither sacrifices, nor holy temples nor priests. They gathered in one another’s homes for fellowship meals, for the hearing of the Gospel, for the prayers and joyful songs in which they expressed their praise and gratitude to God for the newly received faith and hope. In contrast with ancient religion, the Christian Way (as it was called) was something new in human history.

It is roughly from the end of the first century, when the earliest Christian proclamations were already requiring some reinterpretation, that some aspects of the ancient character of religion began slowly to return. We see the climax of this process in the Middle Ages by which time Christianity had become a fully-fledged religion in the ancient meaning of the term. It focussed attention on holy places. It had developed a priesthood, and the original fellowship meal had been transformed into a sacrifice on an altar. It had become engrossed with an unseen supernatural world, where, by means of religious exercises, man was encouraged to secure a place for himself. It was a far cry from the concern of the prophets of Israel, of Jesus, and of the early church to see this world transformed by the coming of the new age.

The Renaissance and the Reformation reversed this long process which had led to the resurgence of ancient religion in a Christian dress, and they made way for the emergence of the new world with its renewed emphasis on the human scene. It is unfortunate that both Protestant and Catholic became so obsessed with the matters which divided them, that it was left more and more to laymen, as scientists, philosophers and historians, to take the adventurous steps in developing the new world. Catholic and Protestant ecclesiastics fell more and more into a conservative rear-guard role.

This has given the impression that the emergence of the new world, and the advent of the secular, have been initiated by those who had broken with the Christian tradition, and who have achieved success in the teeth of ecclesiastical opposition. There is some truth in this, but then, to men of their own time, the prophets of Israel and Jesus himself gave a similar impression. As we look back we can see that the Judeo-Christian heritage was making its significant advances through these men of old. We must learn to discern more clearly who the prophets of God really are in the new world. The fact that they may be holding up religion to judgment is no criterion for dismissing them, for at the heart of the biblical heritage we find a consistent movement away from the traditional forms of ancient religion to a concern with the daily life of man.

Much of what has appeared in the new secular world, and much of what has been said by the modern secular prophets finds its roots in the Judeo-Christian heritage. The new way pioneered by Israel and consummated by Jesus of Nazareth was not a new religion. It is essentially a way of faith, by which man, in whatever generation he lives, is summoned by the Word of God to concern himself with the human scene, for this is God’s concern. Here he is called to grow to full manhood and contribute to the full potential of the new society. The Christian way transcends religion and spells the end of religion. It is not for nothing that we have been hearing in our day of religionless Christianity.

Israel’s concern with human history caused her to fasten her attention more and more on the tangible world, the earth, and less and less on the unseen world called heaven. The abolition of the gods was destined to entail the abolition of the unseen world in which ancient man supposed them to live. The myths of ancient man were predominantly concerned with descriptive narratives of what went on in that divine world hidden from human sight. The Old Testament almost completely lacks this mythological interest, one of the few examples being the prologue of the book of Job, and this is very likely an ancient myth which a post-exilic writer adapted to provide the setting for his magnificent poem on the riddle of human destiny.

When the Old Testament begins its main theme, which is the story of Israel, we find that God’s promise is expressed in quite worldly or materialistic terms. God promised to Abraham a numerous posterity, and the possession of the land of Canaan. "I will make of you a great nation . . . To your descendants I will give this land". This theme continues through the stories of the patriarchs and forms the prologue for the much more important and rather more historically based tradition, of the deliverance from Egyptian slavery and the entry into the land of promise.

As the story of Israel proceeds thereafter the material becomes more and more historical. But though this story of Israel is set in the real world of human history, and becomes what we today would call both political and secular, it is for Israel the very ground of her theology. The story of how Israelite tribes established firm possession of Canaan, drove out enemy raiders, and met the very severe crisis of the Philistine invasion by the institution of kingship, is narrated in the context of Israel’s encounter with YHWH. Political leadership, military defense, the establishment of dynastic rule, become the chief concerns of Israel’s traditions, and are expressed as the chief concern of YHWH her God.

At the point where Israel recognized that YHWH must also be the creator of the tangible world, the Old Testament expressed this in a positive, world-affirming attitude. "God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good." The psalmists proclaim that in the night-sky one can behold the very handiwork of God, and it makes manifest His glory. It is He, who has provided the mountains with strength, and who can still the roaring of the sea. It is He, who provides for the watering of the earth, that it may bring forth grain and food for the creatures He has placed upon it. The earth in fact, along with all that it contains, is YHWH’s magnum opus, and it is His chief delight to be concerned with what goes on in it. What a contrast this is with the comparative lack of interest which the gods of ancient man were believed to show in the tangible world.

Israel’s concern to affirm the essential goodness of the human world that God had made, did not prevent her from seeing the wickedness, evil, crime and tragedy that it also contained. On the contrary it led her to be caught up in the process of rooting out those evils, for it became clear to her that YHWH was not abandoning the world He had made, but was determined to achieve its renewal. Israel pioneered the movement for social reform and the renewal of human culture. Wherever the people of God in subsequent centuries have neglected this, they have deviated from the biblical tradition which Israel founded, in obedience to Him who has the earth as His chief concern. The prophets of Israel, if transported to the twentieth century, might have found themselves more at home in a political meeting than in an ecclesiastical council.

The prophets of Israel were the forerunners of the political reformers in the new world. They saw that their world was under judgment, not because people had neglected their tithes, their sacrifices and their temple worship, but because they had trampled on the poor, traded dishonestly, and showed neither mercy nor justice to the weaker members of society. One of their chief concerns therefore was with the widow, the orphan and the resident alien, the very individuals who had been deprived of their natural protectors.

The prophets never for one moment suggested any attempt to escape from the wicked world. They did not proclaim any comforting message that all would be well in the sweet by-and-by in a spiritual heaven beyond death. But they did hold out the promise that the earth itself would be renewed, and they looked forward to the time when a transformed human society would live in harmony. Among their poetic prophecies we read:

Israel testifies to us in the Old Testament that the promises she heard from YHIWH were earth-centered, and the blessings received from YHWH were to be found in the length and quality of human life. Since the study of the Bible was revived at the Reformation, the sheer earthliness of the Israelite hope has often been a puzzle to the Christian reader. Modern Christians have been inclined to dismiss the Old Testament as primitive, limited and unsatisfying. This is because we have inherited from the Middle Ages a Christianity that was world-denying and which insisted on directing men’s attention away from this temporal world to an eternal home in a supernatural heaven above. But this medieval Christian emphasis constituted a resurgence of the very same mythological unseen world which Israel had earlier abandoned.

Christians have often searched the Old Testament for evidence of the orthodox other-worldly Christian hope. They usually conclude that the Old Testament contains no clear doctrine of a life after death, but they interpret this as meaning that Israel in her earthly-centered life had only reached the stage of beginning to feel after that eternal world above, the door of which Jesus is said to have opened to all believers. But this is to ignore the fact that in at least some of the ancient mythologies, the human search for immortality in the unseen world of the gods was one of the favorite themes. It was not because ancient man had never entertained any such hopes of immortality that Israel focussed her attention upon the earth, but because Israel deliberately turned her back on such hopes, as she cast off the mythological outlook to which they properly belong. This might be how ancient man saw his eternal destiny, but this was not how YHWH had spoken His Word to Israel.

The story of the Garden of Eden illustrates this emancipation from the immortality theme in a rather interesting way. Close study of this material suggests that the prototype of this story was originally a myth derived from Israel’s ancestors. Indeed it appears to have been a story of how to obtain immortality by eating from the tree of life which enabled one to live for ever. But in Genesis 3 this tree of life is referred to only in two verses (22 and 24) which can be shown to be an intrusion into the present text, partly because they break the continuity, and partly because one of these verses breaks off in the middle of a sentence. If, as seems likely, these two verses have found their way back into the story from an earlier version that had been discarded, it illustrates how man, even when emancipated from the mythological, is always being tempted to restore it.

Now let us see what the Israelite thinker has done with this myth. He has deliberately turned round the story to be firstly a magnificent study of disobedience and guilt in the human scene, and secondly, though more subtly, to warn his readers against the search for immortality. He removed all mention of the tree of life, and made the tree of knowing good and evil the forbidden tree. The idea that it is within man’s grasp to become like the gods (and so attain immortality) is now set in the mouth of the wily serpent as the very temptation most likely to lead the woman astray. The fruit that can do this is too good to be missed and the woman and her husband succumb. One of the several morals conveyed in this version of the story is that man is not intended to share the immortality of the gods, and the attempt by man to grasp it for himself lies at the root of his fallen nature.

In contrast with many others of the ancient world, Israel recognized the full implications of man’s mortal nature. Man is made from the dust of the earth, and to the dust his body returns. Israel understood the destiny of man as something to be expressed within the context of the tangible world of earth, and within the limits which mortal existence places upon it. YHWH was the One who spoke to her within the historical context, who sustained Israel as a people from generation to generation, and who walked with the individual Israelite from the cradle to the grave. Such a faith led the psalmist to say:

There were many times when the Israelite was deeply conscious of the moral problems, the frustrations, and the anguish in which his human mortal lot involved him. But for the most part he learned, in obedience to the Word of YHWH, to accept himself as a creature, who was earthly and earth-bound, and yet the recipient of more blessings from God than he deserved. So out of the context of his mortal historical existence he could pour out his praises to God with joy and gladness.

Israel’s almost exclusive concern with the earth meant that, for her, the mythological heaven of ancient man was all but eliminated. There are many places in the Old Testament where ‘heaven is used to describe the dwelling-place of God e.g. "Hear thou from heaven thy dwelling place; and when thou hearest forgive". This is an understandable survival of the earlier mythology in which the sky above, with its fascinating heavenly bodies, to some extent visible yet always beyond the reach of man, was regarded as the domain of the gods. Yet though Israel accepted the usage of speaking of heaven as the dwelling-place of God, she could not tolerate the idea of confining God to such an area. The very prayer we have just quoted, also says, "Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have built".

But that was the limit of Israel’s interest with heaven. The idea that it is a realm where the faithful departed live in immortal bliss is quite foreign to the Old Testament. The only two humans of whom the Old Testament speaks as being in heaven are Enoch and Elijah, and according to the tradition neither of these men had ever died. Enoch is a mythical character from Israel’s prehistoric traditions, and of him the Old Testament simply says, "Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him."

Elijah, on the other hand, was an historical character, but the stories of him preserved in the Old Testament are strongly legendary. He was so full of vitality, and seems to have been so much of a mystery man, who appeared on the scene like lightning and disappeared again as quickly, that it was hard to think of such a man as ever succumbing to death. So we are told that he was taken up to heaven in a whirlwind on a chariot of fire, drawn by horses of fire. Israel retained her interest in Elijah, not because he had attained immortality on the other side of death, but because she believed him, having never died, to be living in heaven with God for an indefinite period, whence at any time he might return.

It was in the post-exilic period, after most of the Old Testament was written, that we see the rise of certain themes and hopes which were destined to come to the fore in the New Testament. The Jewish remnant of Israel had achieved only a partial restoration of their former community life in the Holy Land. They were still scattered round the Eastern Mediterranean in what is called the Diaspora, and the holy city of Jerusalem was subjected to one foreign conqueror after another. This brought them under the influence of the mythological interests which had continued among other ancient peoples. And the increasing imperial oppression they experienced led them to a certain degree of despair concerning this world.

Yet this despair was directed not against the tangible world as such, but against the present age of the tangible world that they were then passing through. They began to set their hopes on the coming of a new age, and here they turned to the words of the earlier prophets who had looked forward to a renewed society. Out of the traditions associated with the earlier office of the kingship in Jerusalem, and stemming from the covenant establishing the dynasty of David, there began to emerge various messianic hopes that the new age would be ushered in by someone especially anointed for the purpose by YHWH the Lord of history.

It is important to note that their hopes did not involve the abandonment of the tangible world, but the abandonment of the present age, and its projected replacement by a new age or era, just as the antedeluvian era was thought to have been succeeded by the era after the Flood. The new age was described in more extravagant terms than those the earlier prophets had used, partly because the evil of the present generation, it was thought, could be rooted out only by a more cataclysmic change, and partly because of the influence of mythological terms drawn from the other cultures. By the time of the birth of Jesus, there was in Judaism a general air of expectancy. They looked forward to the new age. A messiah of some kind was awaited.

The early church believed that Jesus Christ had inaugurated the new age, and that it would very shortly be consummated in its fullness. They preserved the same terms as had been current in Judaism, namely, ‘this age’ and ‘the age to come’. We have earlier seen that the same Greek word can be translated as either ‘age’ or ‘world’, and that is why this very term appears in the Nicene Creed as ‘the life of the world to come’. The later Christian interpretation of this as an unseen supernatural world existing contemporaneously with the tangible world is quite a distortion of the New Testament hope, where ‘the world to come’ is definitely that which comes when the present age of the world has passed away. (Compare Matt. 12:32 in both A.V. and RSV.).

All this needs to be made clear, for the word ‘heaven’ appears a good deal more in the New Testament than in the Old Testament, and there is a strong tendency for readers to assume that it means there what later Christian orthodoxy meant by the term, namely, an eternal spiritual sphere above this world where the faithful departed live with God. It may come as a surprise to learn that in not one of the approximately 275 instances of the use of the words ‘heaven’ or ‘heavenly’ in the New Testament, does it mean the eternal home of the faithful departed. Often it just means the ‘sky’, sometimes it is a synonym for God, and in all the other cases it is used in one way or another to describe the dwelling-place of God, just as in the Old Testament. As such, it is the present storehouse for such future blessings as God may later bestow upon the faithful, and that is why we often hear of a reward or inheritance preserved in heaven until the time when it is to be granted.

The Ascension of the risen Jesus to heaven is a story parallel to that of the ascension of Elijah. The story was meant to explain why Jesus no longer appeared to the believers. Like Elijah of old, He has ascended to heaven for an indefinite period, but before long, so the early Christians believed, He would descend from heaven in the same manner as the apostles had seen Him go. Then there would be ushered in in its fullness that new age of which only a foretaste had been experienced to date.

The Revelation of John is quite unique in the New Testament in the emphasis given to the unseen heaven above, yet even here, what John was invited to see through the open door of heaven was a preview of the future events which were yet to take place on the earth. ("Come up hither, and I will show you what must take place after this.") John tells that he saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven (dwelling-place of God) and the first earth (the present dwelling-place of man) had passed away and the sea was no more. Then he saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. It would replace the old Jerusalem recently sacked by the Romans. Thus, in spite of the visionary nature of these descriptions, it is still the tangible world that is being talked about, but renewed and transformed by the power of God. We must not miss the final and dramatic point. It is not a case of the faithful being saved from a lost world to spend eternity with God in a heaven above. It is a case of a lost world being transformed by God to such a degree that He himself abandons His heaven and comes to dwell among men.

It was only when the expected imminent end of the present age did not eventuate that the first century Christian hope found in the New Testament entered on the long path of transformation which was to reach its peak in the other-worldly unseen heaven of traditional Christian thought. There were many factors in this transformation, one of them being the influence of Persian religion to which we earlier referred. It had already influenced Judaism, and it further influenced Christianity with its clear-cut doctrine of the survival of man beyond death, to face a divine judgment which led directly to either heaven or hell. Once Christianity became permanently divorced from its Semitic origins in Judaism, and was proclaiming its Gospel in a pagan context where the ancient mythology was still very much of a reality, it was natural that the idea of the unseen divine world above should steadily become more dominant in Christian thought.

The emergence of the new world has brought about the dissolution of the mythological framework in which Christian faith had come traditionally to be expressed. Christians need have no alarm about this, for the other-worldly concern with a supernatural unseen heaven, which has dominated traditional Christianity, is really foreign to the witness of both the Old Testament and the New Testament. The way in which the new world has focussed man’s attention on the tangible historical world of here and now is, in fact, a return to the very road on which our spiritual forebears of ancient Israel took the pioneering steps. It is He who was the YHWH of Israel and the God and Father of Jesus Christ, who has opened up this new world to men. It is He, who calls men to abandon the traditional concept of heaven and to concern themselves with the tangible historical world as the sphere of human destiny.

One of the universal characteristics of ancient mythology was its multiplicity of gods, goddesses and spirits. In sharp contrast with this polytheism, the Bible affirms that God is one. It was the lot of Israel to play the pioneering role which led to a convincing monotheism. There are only three great monotheistic religions in the world, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and their monotheism is to be traced directly to that of ancient Israel.

Monotheism, like the sense of history, is something we too readily take for granted today, just because we ourselves are the product of a culture which has been based on it for so long. When, in a Western setting, a Christian believer and an atheist enter into discussion about the existence of God, it is common for them both to assume the unity of God. In doing so, they are both indebted to Israel, for whom the oneness of God was a consistent and unique declaration. It received classic expression in Deuteronomy 6:4, "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD". These are the opening words of what the Jew refers to as the Shema, and even by the time of Jesus, the Shema had become the nearest equivalent to a formal creed that the Jew attained.

In her earliest period, Israel was not yet ready to deny the reality of gods which other nations worshipped, but for her there was one God only. Gradually this belief, that God is one, led her to abandon the remnants of mythology she had inherited from her cultural ancestors. So the Psalmists spoke of the gods of the nations as idols, and unambiguously proclaimed that the LORD their God was quite unlike the gods of other peoples. This means that He was to be sharply distinguished from the gods of ancient man.

In some respects Isaiah 40-55, chapters which are commonly attributed to an unknown Israelite prophet of the Babylonian Exile, may be regarded as the highest peak of Israelite thought about God. This prophet poked fun at the gods of the nations with fearless scorn, on the grounds that they were helpless and unsubstantial. In fact there was just nothing to them at all. In his chapters we find no reference to angels or any other supernatural power. On the contrary, this prophet was so intent on attributing all power to the LORD, that he put these words into His mouth:

But how did this faith in the one God arise? Was this divine LORD of Israel simply one of the ancient gods, who was now raised to such supremacy in the minds of the Israelites that all other rival gods gradually lost their effective reality? While there is some element of truth in this, it is only so because Israel herself necessarily reflected in her earliest period the traits of the mythological origins from which she emerged. The LORD was in the early stages described as if He were the storm-god, or even the war-god, but these are but the remnants of ancient mythology. It is important to discern the unique elements in Israel’s faith which came steadily to the fore.

The first sign of uniqueness is in the proper name by which the God of Israel was known. This holy name has been preserved only in its consonants, YHWH, but modern Old Testament scholars believe that it was originally pronounced Yahweh. (The name ‘Jehovah’ is an incorrect version of the same name. It was first used in the sixteenth century, and derives from a misunderstanding of the Hebrew text.) By the time of Jesus the word was no longer pronounced for fear of breaking the third commandment, and God was referred to as ‘the LORD’.

We do not know where this name YHWH originated. There are even two conflicting traditions in the Old Testament itself, one of which says that as far back as the time of Adam’s grandson "men began to call upon the name of YHWH". The other, and more dominant tradition, however, asserts that the name YHWH was known only from the Exodus, and that it was revealed to Moses by YHWH Himself. It is not possible to separate history from legend in the Exodus tradition, and so we cannot say just what actually happened.

But the important emphasis of the tradition is that YHWH was associated for Israel, not with mythology, as were the gods of ancient man, but with the events of her own history. The ancient gods derived their meaning and role from the phenomena of nature, but Israel explained their introduction to the name YHWH, and the import that this holy name had for them, in terms of the historical context in which she originated as a people. This is clearly seen in the introduction to the Decalogue, "I am YHWH your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage". For Israel, YHWH was the ‘out-of-Egypt bringing God’. When the Old Testament speaks about God, it is not referring to one of the many gods which derived from the imagination of ancient man, but to the one and only YHWH, who not only brought them into being, but also continued to be the Lord of history.

The Israelite affirmation that YHWH is the one and only God has important implications. Since YHWH is one, and since He is God, then everything in human experience and understanding stands in relationship to Him. He is not only the Lord of history, but also Creator of the universe. He is the source of truth, and for this Israel used a word which came from the Hebrew root Amen. This word describes that which gives firm support, that which is the pillar or ground of whatever has some degree of permanence. No wonder Israel called YHWH the God of Amen. This basic word supplies a whole family of words so essential for Israel’s faith, which we translate as ‘truth’, ‘faithfulness’, ‘faith’, ‘believe’, ‘trust’.

All truth, all sound learning, all reliable knowledge stem ultimately from God. Everything that happens in the world of nature, everything to be observed in human experience finds in Him its unity. If God is one, and is not at cross-purposes with Himself, then the inconsistencies in life are only apparent and are due to man’s limited understanding. Forces and phenomena which appear to be quite unrelated are in fact related, for they emanate from God in whom there is neither division nor conflict.

These implications of the unity of God were destined eventually to supply the seedbed for modem science. It is being acknowledged more and more these days by historians, scientists and theologians that modern science not only in fact did take its rise within Christian culture, but could not have developed without the presuppositions which it supplied. C. F. von Weizsäcker (1912- ), an eminent physicist and philosopher, said in his Gifford Lectures; "the concept of exact mathematical laws of nature which was only dimly present in Greek thought gained far greater convincing power by means of the Christian concept of creation. Thus I think it is a gift of Christianity to the modern mind." It is out of the vigorous affirmation of the unity of God the Creator that men were led to postulate and seek basic laws to which all natural phenomena conform.

A further implication of the unity of God is seen in the absoluteness of moral values. In a polytheistic setting it is possible to play one divine spirit off against another, and thus escape the demands made by moral issues. In the medieval Christian mythology, for example, the saints, the Virgin Mary, and even Christ were appealed to by the believer as a way of escaping the demands of justice associated with God. But when the oneness of God is paramount this is impossible, for it is God alone with whom one has to deal. Before the one God there can be no evasion of our human responsibility. His Word is absolute and final.

Moreover, the faith that YHWH was the Lord of history meant that in contrast with the mythological cultures, where the gods were little interested in human affairs, the spotlight of divine concern was pointed directly to the human scene. Nowhere else in the ancient world were moral demands brought so vigorously to the fore as in Israel. The prophets were the mouthpiece of YHWH in the concern for social justice and humanitarianism, and pioneered the way for all subsequent social reform. This all flowed from their concern with YHWH the one God and Lord of history.

But now we must ask in what ways Israel conceived of YHWH, if on the one hand He was acclaimed as their God and, on the other hand, He was clearly distinguished from all the mythological beings who had been referred to as gods hitherto. When we put the Old Testament material in its chronological order and make a comparative study of the way in which YHWH was understood and talked about, we get a fairly clear impression that Israel was steadily shedding the mythological elements from her thinking. In the earliest material God was pictured in human form, and described as if he made personal appearances in the human scene from time to time. The material from the next stage avoided these theophanies, as we now call them, and spoke of an angel or messenger (the one Hebrew word has both meanings) as the means by which YHWH communicated with men. Later again, even angel-talk was avoided, and it was thought sufficient for YHWH to speak His word, and man heard it through the voice of a prophet, or in his own inner ear.

Israel became increasingly reluctant to offer any descriptions of YHWH, except in such elusive terms as the ‘glory’, ‘light’ and ‘brightness’ of His presence. Nowhere is this clearer than in the second commandment, "You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in the heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." The reason for this is that whatever these forms portrayed, it would not be a likeness of YHWH, and any adoration of it would therefore be idolatry. The implication is that there is nothing known in the whole universe, not even in the spiritual realm of heaven above, which can be taken to be a true likeness of YHWH.

The implications of Israel’s understanding of YHWH, as expressed in the first two commandments, are completely at variance with the way ancient man thought of the gods, and explain the iconoclasm which has been prominent from time to time in both Judaism and Christianity. Indeed both Jews and Christians have, on occasions, been labeled atheists, since they rejected all other gods and refrained from portraying their own God YHWH in any of the forms that ancient man associated with the gods.

It is but a logical step further to conclude that if the God of Israel cannot be likened to anything that is known or seen by man, then neither can He be adequately portrayed in the forms of language. Neither a mental image, nor a verbal image are any more successful in portraying the God of Israel than a graven image or painted picture. This means that the God of the Israelite heritage defies definition. Israel and her Jewish successors refrained from allowing any form of words about God Himself to harden into an absolute doctrine. They were concerned with that action which was obedience to YHWH, rather than with right understanding of the being of YHWH. They were ready to recognize that the God whose word they heard in their history, must forever remain beyond man’s comprehension. He is the God of faith and not the God of knowledge.

This is a most important difference. When ancient man expressed his gods in visible form and gave them names, he was taking the first steps towards gaining the mastery of them. The possession of expert knowledge of the gods meant that the human worshipper knew just how to approach them in supplication and ritual and win their favor in order to achieve his own ends. Knowledge of the gods meant that man had the gods just where he wanted them. Man is always seeking this kind of absolute control over his world. But Israel recognized that YHWH can never be known in this way, for He does not come within the scope of those certainties which man can master with his mind and so manipulate for his own ends.

Christians, for the most part, continued the Israelite ban on the portrayal of God in visible form, though it did become one of the differences which finally caused the Eastern and Western churches to break from each other in 1054. But because the early church inherited from Hellenistic culture the love of penetrating into the truth by intellectual enquiry, the Christian thinkers of the West have too commonly concluded that they could define and delineate the being of God in the forms of human language with some confidence. Both Catholic and Protestant have often attributed to formal doctrines about God a finality they cannot bear.

For Christians, admittedly, the question was made more difficult by the claim that God had chosen to reveal Himself in Jesus Christ. But it must be remembered that the Christ of faith is no more visible to the Christian believer than God is. The New Testament writings can in no sense capture or limit the Christ, who is the risen Head of the Church, for He can be apprehended by faith alone.

John, the New Testament writer who most clearly claims that when one sees Jesus one sees the Father, is also the one who twice declares that ‘no man has ever seen God’. This reflects the penetrating Old Testament story in which Moses asked to see the glory of God. He was placed in a cleft in the rock, and the hand of God covered the eyes of Moses so that he saw only the back of God. In other words, Israel recognized that one can see only where God has been; no man can see the face of God and live.

In the new world, much of what orthodox Christianity has assumed to be the sure knowledge of God seems to have dissolved away leaving the Christian with a certain sense of loss. He need not be bewildered. There are good biblical reasons why this should have happened. The YHWH of Israel, who was also the God and Father of Jesus Christ, does not belong to the ancient order of supernatural beings who can be neatly described by man’s carefully chosen words. It is a mistake to think that Israel was slowly groping after the true God, who then finally answered them by coming down and showing Himself. This is the very kind of mythology from which Israel was being delivered by the word of YHWH. Israel testifies that YHWH is completely other than such gods. He defies description and definition, and is known only through His actions in human history. In Israel’s experience He became more and more hidden from the human eye rather than less. It is at the peak of Old Testament thought that the prophet declares, "Truly, thou art a God who hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Savior."

But while Israel increasingly acknowledged that their God YHWH could be neither seen, described, nor intellectually mastered by men, she was on the other hand adamant in affirming that God was not silent. YHWH was known through His word. God spoke through the prophets, making them His human mouthpiece, so that the oracles they uttered were in the first person, as if God had taken temporary possession of their mind and body. God spoke to Moses from a burning bush and called him to lead Israel out of slavery. God spoke to Abraham and said, "Go from your country . . ." God spoke to the first man and said to him in his hiding-place, "Where are you ?" Indeed, it was by the Word of God that the world was created, for God had only to say, "Let there be light!" and there was light. Such was the unmistakable testimony of Israel.

The theme continued in the New Testament, where an unknown writer says, "In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son". John, in his Gospel, takes up the theme, interpreting the whole testimony of Israel concerning God in terms of the Word, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God". And then he strikingly interprets the significance of Jesus of Nazareth by saying, "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth".

In turning men away from the mythological concepts of the gods, to the YHWH who was known through His Word, Israel seized upon the most important phenomenon in the human scene to become the metaphor for faith. The evolution of man and the development of language went hand in hand. Our very humanness is dependent upon the language by which we communicate and grow to some degree of human maturity. With the development of each individual, language is drawn out of him by his elders who speak to him. So the very deepest insights about human existence that came to her, Israel described as the Word of YHWH. It was addressed to her from without, even though it was heard from within. As Israel learned, in obedience to the Word of YHWH, to shed one by one the mythological concepts of the ancient gods, it was the Word that remained. There was much she could not understand and never would be able to understand, but of one thing she was sure. She had heard the Word of YHWH, speaking now in promise, and now in judgment, but always summoning to decision and action, and she had no choice but to obey.

The fact that Christian thought has sometimes been tempted to revert to a doctrine of God more mythological in character than that of Israel, should not hide from us the direction in which the testimony of Israel was heading. YHWH was Israel’s name for the one reality with whom all men have to do, and this one reality can never be mastered by man like the gods of the nations. In fact YHWH spells the end of all the gods and mental images which men Create to bring themselves comfort and security. YHWH the God of Israel is always beyond man’s grasp, and can be contained neither in temples, nor in pictures, nor in words. He can be spoken of, referred to and obeyed, only because in the events of daily life and history men have found themselves addressed by Him. It was the greatest prophet of Israel who wrote, "the word of our God will stand for ever".

When we turn from the mythological world of ancient man to the Old Testament we find ourselves in a different world. It is a great pity that the casual Bible reader almost inevitably reads the Old Testament against the background of a sophisticated modern world, for then the first things to strike him are characteristics which are strange to him just because they reflect the ancient period. What he ought to find striking are some things which he usually never notices to be there, for the simple reason that they have become part and parcel of the modern world, and he does not realize, as he ought, that he has in fact inherited them from ancient Israel.

The mythological world of ancient man forms the real background for the appreciation of the Old Testament, and the first thing which strikes one is that the Old Testament contains so much writing of history. This historical concern in the Christian Bible still makes it unique among the holy books of the world. In the Holy Scriptures of Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism or Islam, one finds no real interest in history at all, but in both the Old Testament and the New Testament the thread of history provides the framework and focal points.

Today we take a sense of history for granted. We know that the past has gone for ever and that the present moment can never be recaptured. We know that history brings change. All our thinking and our human endeavors, whether individual or collective, religious or secular, are pursued within a context of history, in which we are ever moving away from an original beginning, and nearer to some future goal.

But in the mythological world ancient man had not developed a sense of history. He saw himself as a creature of nature, and almost the plaything of the gods who controlled nature. The world moved in cycles of various frequencies, returning to the points it had passed before. So man’s true welfare was chiefly to be attained by reconciling his life to the cycles of nature, such as day and night, summer and winter, death and rebirth. The really significant things were all executed by the unseen forces. The actions of men were of no great moment and indeed had little meaning.

How did the sense of history begin? It is generally agreed that it is of comparatively recent origin, and the beginnings of the writing of history are commonly traced back to the Greek historians Herodotus (c. 484-24 BC.) and Thucydides (c. 460-400 BC.). Herodotus is often called the ‘Father of History’ because he wrote a history of the Persian invasion of Greece after travelling extensively through the Middle East.

But Israel’s concern with history takes us back at least five centuries earlier. Paul Schubert, in a symposium devoted to the The Idea of History in the Ancient Near East writes: "When it comes to the idea of history, it must be said that Israel, through its sacred scripture . . . has proved to be the strongest and most influential single force observable by the historian in shaping the idea of history throughout two millennia of Western history." The Cambridge historian, H. Butterfield, has said of the Old Testament "Altogether we have here the greatest and most deliberate attempts ever made to wrestle with destiny and interpret history and discover meaning in the human drama; above all to grapple with the moral difficulties that history presents to the religious mind."

We can hardly expect the Old Testament to tell us explicitly how Israel came to have a sense of history, for she was not given to think in abstract terms and did not have a language suited for it. Indeed Israel had no word even for ‘history’, the nearest Hebrew expression meaning simply ‘the things of the days’. It is only by indirect means that we can learn how it all began. In the early stages, it was not at all easy to distinguish clearly the sense of history from the mythological context out of which it was emerging. Indeed, there was a strong tussle between the historical and the mythological concerns and this has continued in some degree down to the present day.

In the Old Testament there are two main complexes of historical material. The first is the Pentateuch, which sets out to sketch the history of the world from the day of creation to the point where Israel was about to enter the promised land. We now know that we cannot treat this material as if it had been written under the conditions that a modern historian would impose, namely, access to reliable contemporary records. But the remarkable thing is that these books betray a marked sense of history. They are expressed in terms of linear history and not in nature cycles. It was a pioneering feat of simply outstanding quality, testimony for which is seen in the fact that it served as the basic text-book of early human history for more than two and a half thousand years.

Modern scholarship has analyzed the Pentateuch into at least four different strata, which were once independent, but which were at later stages blended together to form the present unity. The earliest of these may have come from about the time of Solomon. The unknown writer responsible for it (often referred to as the Yahwist) appears to have sifted through the myths, legends and stories that had been transmitted orally by his forefathers, and to have molded them into a continuous story reaching from the first man down to the Exodus from Egypt, and possibly as far as his own time, Of course this is not wholly history by our standards, but within the limits of the material available to the Yahwist, it still reflects a remarkable sense of history. Here and there we can discern the words of the Yahwist himself, which are intended to interpret to us the material he has selected, and to enable us to follow the thread which formed for him the meaning of his narrative.

Now the quite distinctive feature of this pioneering venture into history writing is the way in which the Yahwist led his readers’ attention away from the ancient practice of turning to the priests and cultic practices for discerning the will of the gods. The Yahwist turned the spotlight not on the sanctuary, but on the human scene of historical event, as the sphere in which the will of the God of Israel became manifest. This change in focal-point cannot be over-emphasized, for it is the key to much which happened later in the faith of Israel, and which is again happening in the new world to which Christendom has given birth.

This receives further emphasis when we turn to the second main corpus of historical material in the Old Testament. This consists of the books called Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, which together form a consecutive history of Israel covering the period of the occupation of the Promised Land from the time of Joshua’s entry until the Fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC. Here, too, there are included many earlier blocks of material which have been pieced together, and these include the finest piece of historical narrative in the Old Testament. It is to be found in 2 Samuel 9-20 and I Kings 1-2. It is often referred to as the ‘Succession Story’ for it deals with the historical problem of who was to succeed David as king. It is judged by many scholars to have been written by one who had lived as an eye-witness through that critical period, and who gathered the necessary information together to write this account of that important crisis.

The historical problem with which this writer was dealing may be briefly described as follows. Before King David all of Israel’s leaders had been of a charismatic kind, and were believed to have been raised up by God to meet particular crises. The personal prowess of the young David had led all the Israelite tribes finally to accept his rule and from that point he went on to establish a kingdom, and indeed a minor empire, such as Israel had not previously experienced. There had as yet been no dynastic rule. The approaching death of David therefore raised vital questions on which Israel’s future existence depended. Was the day of charismatic leadership over? Would the kingdom of David disintegrate on his death? Could the stability of the kingdom be sustained by the establishment of dynastic rule? If so, which of the many sons by various wives should succeed him?

Thus the last years of David’s rule witnessed the working out of these problems, and the consequent clash among several of David’s sons for the throne soon to be vacant. Our unknown historian not only shows a penetrating knowledge of human nature in the way he sketches the characters of the piece, particularly David himself, but he soon makes the reader aware that his story is not a succession of meaningless events. The historian keeps his own sympathies out of the story, and makes no attempt to hold his characters up to praise or blame. Yet his narrative shows that each of the characters contributes to the complexity of the situation, in which ambition, guile, and secret plotting end in various acts of judgment. When, at last, Solomon is king and all rivals are vanquished, the history is brought to an end with the words, "So the Kingdom was established in the hand of Solomon."

Here we have no piece of theocratic history or myth, but a straightforward, and so far as we can judge, faithful account of a very human situation on which so much hung for the future of Israel. Eduard Meyer, a distinguished German historian of the turn of this century, described this historical writing as purely secular, and of it he said, "Thus the golden age of the Hebrew monarchy produced genuinely historical writing. No other civilization of the ancient East was able to do so. Even the Greeks achieved it only at the height of their development in the fifth century, and then as quickly fell away again . . ."

In this otherwise secular historical writing there are only three hints of a theological character. After the shameful incident between David and Bathsheba is concluded, there comes the comment, "But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord". When Solomon, the future successor to David, is born we read, "And the Lord loved him". At the crucial point in Absalom’s rebellion against his father David, we are told that "the Lord had ordained to defeat the counsel of Ahithophel, so that the Lord might bring evil upon Absalom". Imperceptible though these hints may appear, the reader should remember them when he gets to the end of the story and recognize that the historian sees a purpose being worked out in the history he relates.

Gerhard von Rad, a renowned Old Testament scholar of our day, has shown how revolutionary was this view of history when it was first put forward. Up until this time the activities of the gods were expected primarily in natural events, particularly the miraculous and the extraordinary, such as earthquakes, storms and famine. But this historian believed that to the eye of faith the works of God were to be seen in everyday life, in events both public and private, and in secular affairs rather than in religious activities. "With this work," writes von Rad, "there begins a wholly new conception of the nature of God’s activity in history."

We have looked at only two examples which illustrate how the Old Testament writers were concerned with history. They were two of the earliest but they were followed by many others. Israel was always trying to evaluate the present in the light of the past. To do this she was not afraid to reinterpret the past in the light of new events in her own day. Consequently the Old Testament contains not just one interpretation of history, but several, and each is related to the circumstances of the period which brought it to light. Among Israel’s interpreters of history we must number the great prophets, for though, so far as we know, they did not themselves write any historical narratives, the divine oracles they proclaimed as coming from the mouth of God were all steeped in the historical sense of which we have been speaking. The prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries BC. were the prophets of crisis, who interpreted to Israel the catastrophes in which first one, and then the other Israelite kingdom was swallowed up in the imperialist expansion of Assyria and Babylon respectively.

Thus in contrast with the ancient mythological cultures and with holy scripture outside the Judeo-Christian stream, most of the Old Testament either consists of historical material, or is expressed with due regard to the historical nature of human life. This led Israel to pay particular attention to what was going on in the world in her own day. National affairs and international affairs constituted the raw material for theological thought about the questions of human destiny. For Israel, God was to be sought both in nature and in history, but chiefly in the latter. He was for her the Lord of history. Modern Old Testament scholarship is continually emphasizing that Israel’s theology, as expressed in the Old Testament, is essentially a theology of history.

This concern with history is continued in the New Testament, which records a further set of historical events of quite outstanding importance. The ministry of Jesus started with the proclamation, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand". An air of expectancy and of imminent cosmic change pervades the New Testament, even as the apostles go out to proclaim the events of the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The early church believed that God had spoken and acted in history in their own day in a way which lit up all that had gone before.

So far, we have been at pains to describe how a concern with history came to the fore in Israel earlier than anywhere else, and found expression in the Bible. But this does not mean that there is a complete absence of mythology in the Bible. Indeed this should hardly be expected, for it was only by degrees that the concern with history developed. It is not the actual presence of mythological material in the Bible that is surprising, but the very small amount of it relative to the whole.

Almost the only element of pure mythology in the Old Testament is found in a few verses in Genesis 6, where it is reported that divine beings fell in love with human beings, married them, and gave rise to a hybrid race, presumably half-divine and half-human. There are several places where myths of the ancient world are clearly reflected, such as the story of the Garden of Eden, but these myths have been remolded by the Yahwist and other writers to serve another purpose. They have been largely stripped of their original mythological elements, and have become rather like parables.

Generally speaking, the more the sense of history developed and turned Israel’s attention to the human scene, the more the elements of ancient mythology were discarded. Yet there was always a cultural battle going on between the two, and the prophets may be regarded as the chief champions of the view that God is the Lord of history. It is probable that popular religion in Israel was much more mythological than the Old Testament, for the simple reason that the latter records the vanguard of Israel’s thinking. Because each generation has, in a sense, to pass through all the stages of human evolution, both biologically and culturally, there is always a tendency for men to revert to mythology.

We are not surprised therefore to find that when, from the Exile onwards, the Jewish remnant of Israel was dispersed among foreign cultures which were still predominantly mythological, there was a resurgence of the mythological elements in Judaism. The Persian religion of Zoroastrianism was the strongest influence in this direction. It revived interest in angels, which now became a hierarchy of named heavenly beings, each with particular tasks to perform. It stimulated an interest in an after-life by contributing a doctrine of rewards and punishments in another life beyond the grave. The very term ‘Paradise’ is of Persian origin.

It is because of the resurgence of mythology in Judaism in the two or three centuries before Christ, and the continuing influence of Persian and other Eastern religions, that we find more elements of mythology in the New Testament than in the Old Testament. This is chiefly to be seen in the frequent reference to angels, the personification of the cosmic power of evil in Satan, the story of the Ascension, and the birth stories of Jesus, both of which are expressed in terms of traffic between heaven and earth. The earliest affirmations of the Resurrection of Christ are already tinged with mythology, but were quite restrained when compared with the Resurrection stories soon to develop, and by the second century the trends already present in the Biblical material had led to pure mythology, as in the Gospel of Peter.

The concern with history pioneered by Israel did not put an immediate end to mythology. On the contrary, when Christianity spread into the Gentile world of Greece and Rome, and later into the Teutonic world of Europe, there was a strong tendency for mythology to be baptized into the faith along with the new converts and to flourish under a Christian guise. It is open to debate whether popular Christianity in the Middle Ages was very greatly different in character from the popular religion of ancient Persia, except that the name of the Savior was different. By that stage the scene of human history was no longer the focal point for Christian faith, for it had now been superseded by the heavenly scene, where all that was really vital for men was decided. One’s destiny was in the hands of a whole heavenly company of angels and interceding saints.

The emergence of the new world, with its increasing secularization, has brought about the dissolution of the medieval Christian mythology. Orthodox Christians have often regarded this increasing worldly interest and this human emphasis on the here and now as a deplorable departure from the true spiritual path. But in actual fact this is the very direction in which Israel was stepping out in faith three thousand years ago. The abandonment of the other-worldly interests and the increasing concern with the historical processes in the world of here and now, far from being a sign of Christian apostasy, represent the recovery of some of the essentials of the Judeo-Christian heritage.

With the modern return of interest in the meaning of history, it has been common for some biblical scholars to recognize the important role that history plays in the Bible, but to limit the Christian’s concern with history to those events to which the Bible witnesses. These events have been referred to as ‘Salvation’s history’, as if the hand of God is to be seen only in a selected number of events of the distant past. But this does not go far enough. The witness of the Old Testament is that Israel was always concerned with her contemporary history, and was prepared to reinterpret her past heritage in the light of what she witnessed in her own day.

The Bible, therefore, leads us to pay proper attention, not only to the significant events in the period of origins to which it gives first-hand witness, but also to the human scene of our own day. Concern with an other-worldly mythology can form a tranquilizing escape from the moral decisions and duties which involvement in the historical world forces upon us. The Bible leads us to see the problems of peace and war, of politics and economics, of race relations and poverty as the very areas where the God of the Christian heritage is speaking His word in history today. In the events in which we are caught up, in the problems that confront us, in the crises which hang over us, we are confronted by the God of our fathers. The decisions we make in our human situation is our response to God. In these decisions we are making history, and in this history we are encountering the Lord of history, and working out our own eternal destiny.

To understand and meet the challenge of the new world we must turn back to examine the roots of the Christian heritage. This leads us to the Bible, the definitive witness to the faith of our fathers during its long formative period. But the Bible we have seen, must be studied against the background of its own original context in the ancient world. Until this century little was known of the ancient world before 500 BC. except that which is contained in the Bible. We must now take time to sketch the outlines of the world of man in the ancient Middle East since this formed the immediate background for the people of Israel who gave us the Old Testament.

As ancient man surveyed his world, he found himself surrounded on all sides with movement and change, not only in fellow-humans, animals and birds, but in running water, scudding clouds, heavenly bodies traveling across the sky, rising dust-storms, the occasionally quaking earth and the vegetation which sprang up, flowered, fruited and died. Wherever there was movement there was life. Wherever there was life, there was evidently something corresponding to what he knew in himself, such as his own consciousness, his will and his emotions. He saw personality or personal life everywhere. The world to him was not an ‘It’, but a vast, powerful and complicated ‘Thou’.

This means that when he tried to understand what he saw, and give some kind of explanation for the life and movement he witnessed, it did not occur to him to look for an abstract principle or a natural law. He was not interested in asking how a thing happened. That did not even appear to him to be a problem. He saw with his own eyes how a thing happened. What he wanted to know was who was behind the action. Everything that happened was thought to be willed by someone or other, and because this was the cause of the action, he would have thought it foolish and naïve to look for a simple explanation which would hold good on all such occasions. The person who had caused the action might well will one thing at one time and something different the next, just as he himself could vary his action to suit his mood.

But who were the persons whose actions he believed he was witnessing? Here, of course, no one ancient individual ever had to start off from scratch and puzzle it out for himself. Once human language had developed, ancient man was always the recipient of the heritage of oral tradition. He received this from his fathers and passed it on to his children with perhaps only very little change. But there was always room for a little change and that is how the heritage of ancient ideas of the world was gradually built up.

The oral tradition he received (and this all helped to make him the civilized man he was becoming) had already created names for the large number and varied kinds of personal forces who made his world such a live place. The names varied from one culture to another, as did also the kind of person or being that they represented. Fundamentally they were all ‘spirits’. In most languages the word ‘spirit’ was derived from, or was still identical with the word for ‘wind’ or ‘breath’. Since the wind can be seen by what it does and yet remains unseen, and since continued breathing is the best way of testing between the living person and the dead body, these words were the obvious ones for ancient man to use to describe the unseen personal forces at work.

But there are many diverse movements and forms of life in the world, and this naturally became reflected in the types of beings man came to recognize. There were major ones whom he called gods and goddesses, some with quite wide dominion, and others with clearly defined roles. There were also local spirits, good and bad, some of them puckish but harmless, some to be feared, some to be welcomed for their kindly aid.

Ancient man thus recognized himself to be in a very complex world, only one portion of which was visible to the naked eye. There was a whole intercourse of personal dealings going on in the world around him, just as real, even though unseen, as what was going on in the neighboring village of the next valley hidden for the moment by the intervening hills. These personal spiritual forces placed man at a disadvantage just because they were unseen. Ancient man was at their mercy, and it was in his own interests to win and retain their favor. He inherited from the past the knowledge of the best methods of achieving this end. Any new methods he picked up in the course of his own experience were stumbled upon by accident, rather than discovered by venturesome experiment, for it did not pay to wander far from the known way.

In his encounter with this complex world, ancient man attributed equal reality to all his experiences. For him there was no absolute distinction to be made between dreams, hallucinations, and the impressions he received during the hours of wakefulness. The voices he heard and the people he saw were all equally real whether they were in dreams or daily life. In his dreams no doubt, as in ours, the strangest things happened, but then the whole world was to him a mysterious place where wonders abounded, and where nothing was impossible.

Now we must take his understanding of the spirits of the unseen world a stage further. They formed a whole community on their own, and this divine society he pictured in his imagination after the pattern of his own human society. Some of the social affairs of this spiritual society impinged upon his own visible part of the world, and some of them went on wholly in the unseen. Since these spiritual powers were personal, with wills and passions like our own, they loved, quarreled, fought and entered into intrigue. All these doings he expressed in the form of stories which today we call myths. (‘Myth’ was simply the Greek word for any story told by word of mouth.)

What we nowadays know about dreams and the subconscious can help us understand in part how these myths came to be created. We know that dreams result from the various emotional conflicts which arise in us as a result of our daily experiences. Although in sleep we have temporarily lost consciousness, our mind goes on wrestling with these conflicts at lower or subconscious levels of mental activity. These lower levels do not deal with abstract concepts as readily as does the more highly developed stream of consciousness, and so the various factors of the conflict are translated into more objective symbols. The dream may take the form of a drama where people known to the dreamer play the parts of the ideas and concepts included in the particular conflict.

Perhaps in this process we have some hint as to the way in which the mind of ancient man, less adept in handling abstract concepts, was led to express the conflicts he felt among the unseen forces about him in the form of stories of the gods and spirits. In many ways these stories were a projection of the conflicts aroused in his own mind by his confrontation with the world he experienced. It is unlikely that any of the stories in the form in which they have come down to us were created by one man. Instead, they were a gradual development as an original theme was filled out and extended by successive generations. The comparative study of the myths of the ancient Middle East shows that the myths were in a continuous process of development and adaptation.

It is important to realize that, unlike our situation today, the mind of ancient man enjoyed almost unlimited freedom in developing the story. He lived in a world in which almost anything seemed possible. Once again we have a parallel in our dream experiences, where the subconscious mental processes are freed from the monitoring influence of an informed sophisticated consciousness, ever ready to bring a halt to any idea too outlandish by saying, "Don’t be ridiculous. That’s impossible." But when we wake we may recall the most outlandish dreams we have had. So it was with ancient man. In his case there was no body of accepted knowledge of the seen world to confine and actually hamper the processes of his imagination by impressing upon him what was really possible. Many of the ancient myths, like our dreams, are marked by the complexity of the plot and sub-plots, the lack of consistency in the characters and their actions, and the introduction, without warning, of further players in the cosmic drama.

In such an intellectual climate as that, some of the mythical interpretations of observable phenomena given by ancient man would have seemed to him much more obvious and common sense than our modern explanations, should it ever have been possible to present the latter to him for the purpose of choosing between them. For example, he experienced the same physical sense impressions as we do when witnessing the breaking of a drought by means of a violent storm. But our meteorological explanation in terms of barometric pressure, temperature and wind movements would have struck him as too abstract and remote to explain anything. Was it not clear that the hot wind that had been scorching the crops was the hot breath of the angry Heavenly Bull, which had now met its match with the arrival of the gigantic bird whose immense widespread wings were already darkening the sky and blotting out the light of the sun?

The process of myth-making has been called "the intellectual adventure of ancient man". But it was not simply an intellectual exercise, far less a form of entertainment, for ancient man knew himself to be involved in the processes of life and divine encounter which he saw all around him. Most of the myths which have come down to us in written form were not just stories or explanations of phenomena. They were part of a cultic activity and were associated with ritualistic acts, religious ceremonials, sacred dancing, and drama. It was in these media that ancient man played his part in the world scene, and responded in that way which he believed to be most appropriate to the occasion, and which would further promote his welfare.

Let us take, for example, his response to the changing seasons. He could not help but notice that the spring brought new life both in the fields and among the flocks. The cereals and fruit-trees quickly grew until they flowered and reached maturity in grain and fruit. But then the signs of life began to depart, and, as autumn fell, it was just as if the whole world was coming to a standstill in the state of death. How could he be sure that the annual cycle would start up all over again? There had been handed down to him a pattern of ritual which was believed to ensure that it would. In any case he knew that some seasons were better than others, and it was clear to him that this meant that at some times the gods were more pleased with his response than at others. So to ensure the return of the spring and to promote a successful and plentiful season he sought to win the favor of the gods concerned, by playing his traditional part in the cultic ritual.

This varied from one ancient culture to another but was performed in the late autumn, the winter solstice, or the early spring. In the Babylonian New Year Festival their creation myth was recited and partly acted out. This was a long involved story of how Marduk was elected King of the gods in order to attack and defeat Tiamat the goddess of the watery deep, who was spreading chaos by spawning all sorts of evil creatures. After the victory Marduk brought order out of chaos, cut the dead body of Tiamat in two to make heaven and earth, and so created a fit place for the gods to dwell in. The creation myth was deemed appropriate at the New Year because it was thought that before the return of spring life was possible, the basic creative act had to be performed afresh.

A common theme of the myths of the ancient cultures was the death and resurrection of the god of fertility. In Babylonia it was Tammuz, in Syria Adonis, in Egypt Osiris, in Canaan Baal, in Greece Persephone, whose death was marked by the falling leaves of autumn, whose imprisonment in the underworld of death explained the winter, and whose release by the gods of the underworld for one reason or another made possible the spring revival.

Now that we have briefly sketched the role of myth and ritual in the ancient world we can see why it is convenient to use the label ‘mythological’ to describe the world of ancient man. It is used in this book to refer generally to ancient man’s distinctive way of looking at and responding to his world. For this reason it is important to see that we shall be using the word ‘myth’ in a somewhat different sense. They are related in that the mythological world view of ancient man was expressed in the form of stories or myths, but it shall be argued later that there is something more permanently valid in ‘myth’ than in what has been here called the ‘mythological’.

The reason for this is that there is a strong link between myth and poetry in that they both derive from the fertility of the human imagination as man makes his response to his environment at the deepest level. But whereas ancient man drew no clear dividing line between objective knowledge and the insights to be expressed in poetry, this is something we are forced to do. In the new world the mythological world view of ancient man is obsolete, but poetry is not obsolete. While it is true that myth is no longer appropriate for the objective understanding of natural phenomena, it may still have a valid role to play for the expression of man’s sense of mystery and wonder in the world in which he finds himself. In both myth and poetry there is a freer and more fruitful use of words and concepts than prose, logic, or scientific description would allow.

We shall now summarize the chief characteristics of the mythological world of ancient man. Firstly, the whole cosmos was subject to a cyclic rhythm. The natural alternation of day and night, the waxing and waning of the moon, the yearly round of the seasons, the succession of one generation by the next, all led ancient man to a cyclic view of time. In cycles of different length he saw himself returning to an earlier point. This meant there could be no such thing as permanent progress and development; there could be only successive periods of growth and decay. The gods and men were all involved in this cyclic rhythm. We are used to the cyclic rhythm in the daily, monthly and annual routine, but we have become so conditioned to the sense of history in terms of a continuous line in which the past recedes ever further away, that we find it difficult to appreciate the time-world of ancient man.

Secondly, the mythological world was inevitably polytheistic. It was the meeting place and often the battle ground of a whole host of divine forces. Sometimes one major god might be thought of as having won the ascendancy, and then he became a king of the gods, but often there was no clear unity or system. The unseen world of the divine mirrored in many ways the human world, and the gods displayed all the same emotions and craftiness. It may be said that man was in effect working out the problems and conflicts he saw in his visible environment by projecting them into the divine figures which symbolized them.

Thirdly, the mythological world was divided into two parts, the unseen world of the gods, often associated with the sky above, and the visible tangible world to which men were confined. The gods could move freely about both parts and frequently did. They could break into men’s affairs when they wished, and they could keep to themselves when they desired privacy from the inquisitive eye of man. The gods were thought for the most part to be very jealous of the advantages which their divine immortality gave them over the limitations of mortal man. It was natural that men should look up with envy to the unseen world of the gods, and the search for a method to become like the gods and to win immortality became a common theme in the myths which expressed their longings. Ancient man thus showed a strong tendency to develop an other-worldly look, and to depreciate the importance and significance of the tangible world in which he lived.

Fourthly, the unseen spiritual world around him so dominated the life of ancient man that the cultic practices of sacrifice and ritual, by which he sought to win the favor of the gods, were of paramount importance. Religion and religious practices embraced everything, whether it was family affairs, agriculture, politics or war. Religious practices showed a strong tendency to become stereotyped and unchangeable, and this had the effect of imprisoning man in an intricate network or pattern of behavior, inherited from the past, from which he could not escape. That which originated in an attempt to win for him such elements of freedom as divine favor could bestow, ended by becoming a taskmaster.

Such was the way in which ancient man saw his world. The Bible presents the story of Israel from the lips of her own thinkers, prophets and witnesses, and shows how she believed herself to be called out from this ancient world to pioneer a new and distinctive way for the whole human race. In the succeeding chapters we shall examine the distinctive marks of the Judeo-Christian heritage, as they come to light when the Bible is studied against the background of the mythological world of ancient man. And we shall try to show that much that has come to a flowering in the new world has its roots in that rich heritage.

In what ways, if any, do the new views of the world and of man affect Christian theology? There are some who want to say that theology is little affected by these temporal matters, for it has to do with the timeless truths which have been revealed by God once and for all and which must therefore remain the same for ever. It is noticeable that such people are usually reluctant to admit that there is a new view of the Bible, a new view of the world or a new view of man. In other words they resolutely shut their eyes to the new world which is fast emerging around them.

On the other hand there are those who conclude, often reluctantly, that religion, theology and Christianity have come to the end of their course. Certainly, when we compare the story of the sciences with the story of theology over the last six hundred years, the latter looks rather like something from the Looking-Glass world of Alice. Six hundred years ago the sciences did not exist, two hundred years ago they were getting into their stride, today they seem to have the ball at their feet. But six hundred years ago theology seemed to have the ball at its feet, and felt that it knew a great deal about God, a hundred years ago it was ready to confess that there were some things about God it was not sure of, today theology wonders if it knows anything about God, and tomorrow, so some believe, theology will not even exist.

In between the two extremes there are those who want to be faithful to the heritage from the past, and at the same time take seriously the challenge of the new world. The attempt to reconcile these two did not start all at once, any more than the new world emerged all at once. The task has been accepted in academic theological circles for a long time, but only in the last few years has there been more popular and widespread interest in what is going on. Bishop John Robinson, as much as anyone, may be given the credit for breaking through the academic barrier and stimulating the so-called man in the street to take an interest in the contemporary theological task. The names of Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer have now become quite widely known. It has led to the popular use of the term ‘The New Theology’. This name (whether it is a good one or not is beside the point), raises a crucial question. If a theology relevant to the new World appears, and immediately is labeled ‘new theology’, how is one to judge whether it is the genuine successor to the more orthodox theology of the past? May it not be some sort of ‘pretender’, whose claim to be heir to the throne of the queen of the sciences is actually false?

Our first task is to discuss what theology is, and to distinguish it from several other things with which it is closely related, such as doctrine, Christian experience, and philosophy. The word ‘theology’ means the study or knowledge of God. But where does one start? If there were a body of fixed and permanent knowledge about God which He himself had already revealed, then theology would consist of the attempt to understand it and discuss it. Some people do think of theology in these terms. But we have seen that whatever Christians might have thought in the past, we can no longer say that we actually possess a body of knowledge which answers to this description, whether it be by revelation or by science. Not even the Bible can any longer be treated as if it were a quarry of timeless propositional truths to be mined like diamonds and then set in a gleaming diadem of Christian theology. Theology cannot therefore be defined as the study of the revealed knowledge of God, for there is none.

Neither is theology to be confused with philosophy. There have been times in the past when these two did seem very close. They are both intellectual disciplines dealing with the deepest questions of human existence, and when they were being pursued by men of Christian convictions, who were asking the same kind of questions, they were not easy to separate. But many of the questions about which men used to philosophize have now become disciplines of study in their own right. One of the earlier names for the sciences was simply ‘natural philosophy’. Nowadays philosophy mainly sees its task as one of assisting other disciplines to think clearly and meaningfully about their particular areas of study. Philosophy has aided theology a good deal within this century in helping it to examine its own language critically, and there is still an important place for philosophizing about the nature of religious experience, and the reality of religious truth. But theology is not the same as philosophy, for theology has its own distinct area of study and that is the Christian faith itself.

Now whereas any honest clear thinker can be a philosopher of some kind, no one can be a theologian (we are here confining ourselves to the Christian religion) who has not already embraced the Christian faith himself. In doing this he has professed the Christian faith as a reality in his own life and he has committed himself to some form of Christian obedience. It is at this point that we see the clear relationship between theology and Christian experience. But whereas all theologians must be Christian by profession of faith, not all professing Christians are theologians. It could be said of course that whenever a Christian is making an honest attempt to think out some problem connected with his Christian faith, then he is taking the first steps in theology. The only difference between him and the professional theologian is that the latter is pursuing the problem at that greater depth which the tools of an academic discipline make possible.

But how does the Christian go about thinking his way through his theological problem? Well, first of all he turns to the source of his faith. He became a Christian (or, alternatively, chose to be confirmed in that in which he had been nurtured from infancy) because of the influence of the Christian heritage, guarded and proclaimed by the Christian church. He is bound to study that heritage for himself. It takes him first and foremost to the Bible, which is the definitive witness to the period of origins. Then he turns to the long story of the church and the history of Christian thought. The latter has become crystallized in creeds and confessions, and in the most widely accepted writings of the theologians of the past. All this is sometimes referred to as Christian doctrine. But just as the Bible must be understood within its own historical context, as we have already seen, so all Christian creeds and writings of the past must be related to their own time. They reflect the period in which they were written, not only in the common presuppositions of men of that time, but in the kind of questions then being asked.

But we live in our own historical context, and we are concerned with our own questions and with those of our fellow-men. These are not necessarily the same as those of past ages, for history is always bringing change. While the theologian is bound to take seriously the heritage of the Christian witness and thought of the past, that is only half of his task. In the light of this heritage he must think through the meaning of Christian faith and obedience afresh from the standpoint of the contemporary context in which he finds himself. If theology merely consisted of summarizing the affirmations and thoughts of the Christians of past ages, an electronic computer could be designed to do it better. Theology must always be a fresh living expression coming from the lips of Christian believers who are keenly aware of the problems and questions of their own time.

It is thus possible to define theology quite simply as the attempt of the Christian to think about his faith and experience, to test it in the light of the past heritage, and to relate it to all the knowledge and experience of his own time. The theologian then finds himself at a point of tension, where he is trying to reconcile the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, i.e. the old heritage and the new questions and knowledge. If theology is genuine and alive, it is always new, for in each new generation it is taking as its starting point a new historical context. The more the historical context changes, the harder and more demanding becomes the theological task, and the more likely it is that the living theology that comes out of that period will be labeled the ‘New Theology’.

The theologian must try to steer his ship between the dangers of Scylla and Charybdis. If he answers the contemporary questions in a way which does not do justice to the heritage of the past, his ‘new’ theology may no longer qualify as Christian theology. If he faithfully affirms the answers given by the theologians of the past, but does not come to grips with contemporary questions, he is not expressing a Christian theology, and his words will be increasingly passed by as irrelevant. There is no theological radar or automatic pilot to which he can turn over the responsibility for steering the straight path. Whether by nature he leans to the conservative right or the liberal left, he must steer his craft by faith alone.

Let us briefly look at some of the periods of the past where this tension caused by concern for both the old and new has been most acute. First of all it is reflected in the Bible itself. The opening two chapters give us two different expressions of the beginning of things. The older one is now in chapter two and reflects the comparatively simple world view of the semi-nomad of the early second millennium BC. The later account, now in the first chapter, reflects the more sophisticated world view of the time of the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires. The Jewish scholars who put the first five books together during the fifth century BC. preserved for us both the old story and the new story and placed them side by side. This blending of the old version and the new version is to be found in many places in the Old Testament.

The problem of the old and the new came critically to the fore in the advent of Jesus of Nazareth. The Jewish community to which he belonged was by now so wedded to the written form of the old heritage, that it could not tolerate the thought of a new prophet, proclaiming something new. Jesus is reported to have countered the charge that he was abandoning the ancestral Jewish heritage by saying, "Do not suppose that I have come to abolish the Law and the prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to complete. I tell you this; so long as heaven and earth endure, not a letter, not a stroke, will disappear from the Law until all that must happen has happened." On the other hand the Gospel of Matthew in the very same chapter portrays Jesus as one who clearly recognized that there was something new in what he said, for we have the repeated words from his mouth, "You have learned that they were told . . . But what I tell you is this . . ."

The tension between the old and the new continued to mark the life of the church in her first two centuries. It was no easy task to reconcile the old with the new. It is all too easy to assume that Jesus in his teaching entrusted the content of Christian theology to his disciples, and that the task of theology thereafter was simply to ‘contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints’. This is far from the truth. It was not the teaching of Jesus which became the focal point of the Christian faith, but the person and activity of Jesus himself. The first one to hammer out anything like a theology of the Christian faith was Paul, and curiously enough he appears never to have met the flesh and blood Jesus of Nazareth, let alone to have heard his teaching on the ‘Kingdom of God’ direct from his lips.

Not all Christians of the mid-first century agreed with the way in which Paul saw the ‘old’ consummated in the ‘new’, as his letters to the Galatians and the Romans make clear. Although Paul’s theology was destined to be the dominant model for all later Christian thinking, it is fortunate that the New Testament preserves for us some other embryonic theological patterns, notably the Johannine writings which go so far as to express this theology in the form of speeches attributed to Jesus. There were other interpretations of the person of Jesus which were never caught up in the main stream of Christian development, and later died out, but the fact that this amount of diversity of thought was eventually included in the New Testament shows the willingness of the church to hold in suspension varying and sometimes conflicting viewpoints.

Even in the second century when the rift between Christianity and Judaism had become wide and permanent, the church was still wrestling with the problem of how to reconcile the new Gospel centered on Jesus Christ with the old heritage inherited from Israel. When there was a spirited move on the part of some to cut Christianity off from its Israelite origins completely, and abandon the Old Testament as Jewish scriptures, the church resolutely rejected it. On the contrary the church moved to the point where it accepted as its Bible both the Old Testament and the New Testament. Nothing could demonstrate more clearly than this, the determination of the Christian community to hold together in tension both the old and the new.

And there is a tension in the Bible. The church has never been quite sure what to make of the Old Testament. On the one hand there have been various ingenious attempts made during the centuries to resolve the tension in the Bible by trying to make it say the same thing in all its parts. On the other hand voices have been raised, as again in this century, which say that the tension should be eased by jettisoning the Old Testament.

After the first five centuries had witnessed a succession of theological controversies, the point was reached where a pattern of Christian thought was formulated which was destined to serve the church well for many centuries. But time does not stand still, and, with its passing, new experiences and new questions press themselves upon the life of the church. Such a time was the thirteenth century when there arrived at the newly emerging universities of Europe some of the teaching of the ancient Greek thinkers, Aristotle in particular. This stimulated considerable interest in academic circles and also a little alarm. It became a question whether Christian thought could assimilate the new learning. Full credit must be given to St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-74), who, building upon the work of his teacher Albertus, constructed such a magnificent synthesis of traditional Christian doctrine and of the new knowledge that it became the standard expression of Christian doctrine for the Roman Catholic Church up until the present day.

The only other period of theological ferment which we need refer to here is that of the sixteenth century Reformation. It is rather paradoxical that those who are most inclined to idolize the Reformation period seem to be among the very ones who are most suspicious of the winds of theological change which are blowing in our own day. It is true that the Reformation was chiefly concerned with a few very relevant though central issues, and that many affirmations and presuppositions of Christian orthodoxy remained undisturbed. At the same time in the eyes of the Catholic theologians of that time, reformed theology appeared to be a ‘new theology’, which deserved to be rejected just on those grounds. But there was one important principle that emerged that is particularly relevant to our discussion: that the readiness to recognize that no reformation of Christian doctrine can ever be final. The ecclesia which is genuinely reformata is semper reformanda. Reformation is a continuing process, and this applies as much to Christian thought as to Christian practice and ecclesiastical structure.

In the light of these glimpses into the fluid state of Christian theology in times past, and the tension the theologian has felt between the demands of present experience and faithfulness to the past heritage, we now turn to try and appreciate the task of theology in our own day. When one considers the magnitude and radical nature of the questions posed for the theologian by the new world, it is not surprising to find that theologians are beginning to speak about a new reformation more radical than that of the sixteenth century.

For if the theological task can be defined in terms of facing the tension between the old and the new, then it is only to be expected that both the speed and the extent of the change, in which we are at present all caught up, will inevitably bring changes in theological expression greater than at any earlier period in Christian history. It is fair to say that the world has changed more in the last hundred years than in the previous eighteen hundred. Until a little over a hundred years ago men were using the same means of travel as had been used for several millennia -- the horse by land and the sailboat by water. Education was still the privilege of the few. Today travel and communication have reached speeds and diverse forms which were unthinkable a century ago. Universal education is rapidly spreading and reaching ever higher standards. Medical practice has changed completely. It is said that something like ninety-five per cent of all scientists who have ever lived, are still alive. This is the kind of world that the theologian lives in and to which he must relate the faith by which he lives and the Christian heritage which has been entrusted to him. Is it any wonder that theology is today in a more fluid state than at any time since the period of Christian origins?

In the previous chapters we have already noted some of the specific questions which the new world is forcing us to ask with a new sense of urgency. Let us turn to what could be regarded as the most fundamental question of all theology. What reality lies behind the word ‘God’?

We start with a sketch of the mental image conveyed by the word ‘God’ in the world view which obtained in Christendom before the new world began to emerge. This can not be fully appreciated without remembering the complete supernatural world which was thought to lie beyond this visible world, and which had such an overpowering reality for the medieval mind. Heaven and hell, along with those who dwelt in them, were conceived in spatial terms. Although they were beyond the stars, or under the earth, they were thought to be places just as real, and certainly more lasting, than the earth on which men live. Besides the souls of the departed who were thought to reside in one or other of these two places, there were varieties of angels and immortal beings which were thought to have peopled heaven since the time of creation.

It was from within this spatial heaven, far above and yet real, not of the temporal quality of earth and yet within space, that God ruled both heaven and earth from a golden throne. There is little doubt that in the human imagination he was pictured in the form of a man, and thus the painters often portrayed him. While some may have wondered what was the most adequate way of attempting to portray the Holy Trinity, the risen Lord Jesus is described by the two most ancient creeds as sitting on the right hand of God the Father, and so it naturally led to a mental picture in which the three ‘persons’ of the Trinity were pictured as individual forms though acting in unison. This whole picture of the Lord God in His heaven all hangs together very well, and readily wins a response from the mind of the believing Christian.

But what happens when this heavenly world is caused bit by bit to disintegrate and lose its reality? For that is exactly what has happened over the last four hundred years, as all the aspects of the new world have been slowly impressing themselves upon man. The new world view of space made it steadily clearer that this supernatural world could not be located any more in some distant space area of the universe. By last century men were preparing to eliminate a personal devil, and were inclining to the view that a hell of eternal punishment was hardly consistent with the goodness of God. Then the ministering spirits and angels began to recede into the background and lose their former reality. This left a very indistinct picture of the disembodied souls of the departed, conceived as being in the presence of God, in some rather vague existence still called heaven.

But since the new view of man has virtually deprived the concept of a disembodied soul of any meaningful reality, it means that the medieval picture becomes further simplified to the plain affirmation that God is in His heaven. (This, incidentally, is much closer than the medieval picture to the Biblical understanding of heaven.) But now we must ask to what extent the common conception of God itself derives from the same kind of projection of the human consciousness out into the unknown, as that which initiated animism, Platonism and the doctrine of immortality. Plato did in fact speak of God as the great soul. But if we can no longer accept the reality of a disembodied human soul, then what does it mean to attribute consciousness, thinking powers, will and emotions to a non-physical bodiless being, however greatly exalted? When Bishop Robinson startled the world in 1963 with the headlines of an article "Our image of God must go!" he was simply putting into plain words something that theologians had been recognizing for some time.

The fact is that while the medieval picture is still held with conviction by some, for many others the image of God as a supernatural being has already gone. On the assumption that God must be defined as ‘a supernatural being’, it has led some to atheism as the only alternative. Increasing numbers have become agnostic, in that they do not profess to know what the basic realities of man’s world are, and are unprepared either to affirm or to deny that one called God is a reality.

Here we must hasten to point out that among Christian thinkers over the centuries the conception of God has varied considerably more in expression than is often popularly supposed, and theologians have always wanted to guard themselves against the implications of such crude and concrete images of God as may have been prevalent in the popular imagination. Here for example is how John Scorns Erigena (c. 810 - 877), a deeply original thinker and a great scholar, long before our time expressed his concept of God in the words of a prayer:

Theologians have always recognized, to some degree, that one can never talk about God with the preciseness that is possible with tangible objects. For this reason it has been acknowledged that human language, evolved for communication in and about the finite world, will always be inadequate for discussion of the infinite God. In particular it has been realized that when terms drawn from human experience and personality are applied to God, they must inevitably be metaphorical and symbolic in character.

But while this has always been so, it is fair to say that today theologians are more aware than ever before of the tentative and symbolic nature of all talk about God. In the new view of the Bible we see one of the main reasons for this. Now that the Bible must be regarded as the witness of ancient men to what they believed God was saying and doing in their own day, and not the verbatim revelation spoken by God Himself, then even the biblical language is relative to its age and cannot be appealed to as if it were God’s very own words about Himself. Nor is it sufficient just to say that religious language is symbolic. How is one to show that there is some unseen and intangible reality to which the God-talk refers by means of symbols?

In the past there has been no real need to show that God-talk is meaningful, for belief in some kind of supernatural reality was then a common premise that could be taken for granted. This is no longer the case. T. S. Eliot has put it clearly:

It is important to appreciate this new situation. It is not just a question of an isolated rebellious individual proclaiming defiantly, "There is no God". In earlier days he could be written off as a fool. But today, for reasons discussed in earlier chapters, it is simply a widespread cultural phenomenon that for increasing numbers the God-talk and religious language in which the church proclaims her message possesses little or no reality. It is ceasing to be part of the common language and cultural presuppositions. Before the emergence of the new world the church proclaimed her message in what was already a religious context, no matter where she turned. The advent of secularization has meant that the traditional religious language of the church has now become a specialist language which to many in the secular world is not meaningful, and indeed even non-sense.

What is the church to do in this new cultural situation? By and large the church has been reluctant to venture far away from its traditional language because of the conviction that certain fundamental terms and concepts are indispensable to the Christian faith, and if the world does not want to try to understand them, then it is so much the worse for the world. It wants to affirm that God has revealed Himself in such and such terms in the Bible and in the life of the church, and men have the choice of responding to or rejecting the Gospel in this form, for there is no other. Karl Barth (1886- ) is the most outstanding contemporary exponent of this ‘revelational’ theology. For him the revelation of God as attested by Scripture stands over against contemporary human culture, whether religious or secular, with the divine Word of promise and judgment.

There are other Christian thinkers who believe that the new cultural situation must be taken a lot more seriously. Paul Tillich (1886-1965), for example, has tried to break out of the traditional language and discuss God and the Christian faith in terms that are still common to all men whether secular or religious. He has interpreted the meaning of the word ‘God’ in terms of man’s ultimate concern. "This does not mean that first there is a being called God and then the demand that man should be ultimately concerned about him. It means that whatever concerns a man ultimately becomes god for him, and, conversely that a man can be concerned ultimately only about that which is god for him."

A few have startled the Christian world by going even further. They believe we are in the process of entering a post-theistic age, in which the word ‘God’ by reason of all its past associations is becoming increasingly irrelevant and there is no possibility of, nor even any point in attempting to salvage it. In this present decade they have been called the "Death of God" theologians. Some of them speak of the death of God as if it were an event that has taken place in our time; others simply avoid the word ‘God’. Paul van Buren, in his book The Secular Meaning of the Gospel has given us an interpretation of the Christian faith which does not depend upon the use of the word ‘God’ at all.

Naturally many Christians regard this extreme form of the contemporization of the Christian faith as such a radical departure from Christian orthodoxy as to be something quite different, and perhaps they are right. But on the other hand, if the church insists on speaking to the secular world in its own traditional ‘religious’ language, it is possible that the Christian faith will be written off as irrelevant to the new world, and will fade away as a cultural force. Such are the issues of theology today.

So far we have been concerned to try to state and appreciate the nature and the gravity of the questions which the new world poses for the Christian faith. We have as yet made no attempt to meet these challenges. To this task we shall presently turn. But at this point there is one final thing to be said. Whether we are Christians, agnostics or atheists, we are all involved in the present cultural crisis. For two reasons at least, the present ferment in Christian thought is, at the same time, of widespread significance for the total human situation.

Firstly, it is true that the new world has challenged at many points the validity of the traditional Christian answers to such basic questions as: What is man? Where did he come from? What is he here for? Where is he going? But no scientist, philosopher, or secular prophet has supplied alternative answers. Here and there the quest of man for the ultimate answers has given rise to a certain resurgence of religion, both Christian and non-Christian, both orthodox, and more often, unorthodox. In some areas the communist ideology has, temporarily at least, given men something to live for. But secular man for the most part is left with his questions unanswered, sometimes still hopeful, as with the humanist, sometimes despairing as in some forms of art. Sometimes he does not know what is causing his unease, and sometimes he is aware of the God-shaped vacuum in his life.

Secondly, it must be acknowledged that it was out of Christendom that the new world emerged. To understand the new world we must go back to the seeds and roots from which it sprang. Perhaps we shall find that just as the continued vitality and fruitfulness of the tree depends on the nourishment it receives from its roots, so the new world depends more than is realized on the nourishment it receives from its cultural roots. If the new world turns its back on the past heritage it may find itself to be like an uprooted tree, which will wither and die, and cultural thorns and thistles will spring up where once it proudly stood. And over the withering tree will be heard those puzzling words:

How has the life of our world today already reacted to, and to a large extent been moulded by, the new views of man and his world that we have just been considering? The word which best describes the dominant trend in our world today is secularization. By this word it is commonly implied that more and more of man’s life is being emancipated from the concern of religion, and hence from the power of church authorities. One area after another, such as healing, education and politics, has been secularized. In view of this it is not surprising that Christians have most commonly been led to regard secularization as an enemy to be fought. In their eyes it is the modern manifestation of the earlier foes of Christianity, such as paganism and apostasy. The church often sees itself as an army engaged in an orderly retreat to defensive positions from which, when the time is ripe, it will sally forth to win back to true religious faith those areas of human life, which for the moment are in the hands of the secularist forces.

Although most of the present activity of the church seems to rest on such a view as this, we do well to ask whether this is not altogether too superficial a diagnosis of our present situation. We must not hide our eyes from the fact that what we have called secularization is an entirely new phenomenon in human history, that it has been brought about by a number of new factors in human knowledge, the more important of which we have looked at, and that for these reasons a secularized culture has come to stay, at least in some form. Certainly there will be changes in the future which we cannot now foresee, but it is unreasonable to suppose it at all likely that there will be a return to the pre-secular world. To appreciate this contention, we must examine secularization a little more closely.

We can learn something first of all from the very curious history of the word ‘secular’. It is derived from the Latin word saeculum which meant a long period of time, and in particular the age or period of world history to which the present belongs. One age or saeculum when it comes to an end was thought to be followed by another, which could, of course, be very different in character. Endless time was described in the phrase in saecula saeculorum, translated ‘for ever and ever’. It is worthwhile mentioning that the equivalent Greek word aeon, along with its derivatives, occurs quite often in the New Testament and is translated as ‘eternity’, and ‘eternal’.

Now the word saeculum came to mean ‘the world of this present age’, i.e. the present world. In Christian usage in the course of time we find the word ‘secular’ being used to describe this visible tangible world in contrast with another world, the unseen supernatural world, which is the world of eternity. Any activity directed mainly to the natural world is described as secular, while any activity directed to the supernatural world is ‘religious’. The distinction was found in the Christian priesthood. Those who withdrew from the world to live the life of Christian devotion in the monastic cloister were the ‘religious’, while those who ministered in the everyday world were the ‘secular’ priests.

Medieval Christendom was subject to a dualistic tension between the secular and the religious, the temporal and the eternal, which made itself evident at many points. Society itself closely reflected the commonly accepted Christian view of the individual man as a combination of a visible body and an invisible soul. The state or kingdom was the ‘body’ of society and was ruled by the secular prince or king; the church was the ‘soul’ of society and was ruled by the prince of the church. As practically all Europeans were Christians, the powers of church and state were geographically co-terminous. The interests of the two powers penetrated each other at all points, and this led to conflict, of a kind that a man may feel in his own experience when the flesh and the spirit are at war. Now the curious thing is that these two distinct worlds of interests, the secular and the eternal, were known by names derived from words which were once synonymous. This may help, to illustrate if not exactly to prove, one of the contentions in this book, namely that the dichotomy of the two worlds recognized by medieval Christendom and by much of traditional Christianity, has been in fact a false one, just as the traditional view of the dichotomy of man is invalid.

During the Middle Ages the two worlds of interests were theoretically in a happy state of complementary co-operation and mutual respect for each other’s rightful authority. In practice, this was rather a state of truce, which from time to time broke down as either one or the other became dominant. But from the Renaissance onwards, the interests of the secular world have step by step been winning increasing emancipation from the interests of the eternal world, and at the same time secular pursuits have been growing in number and diversity. The reverse side of this picture is that the interests of the eternal world, in so far as they are identifiable with ecclesiastical practice and rule, have been steadily retreating. This process is secularization, i.e. the apparent victory of the secular world.

Let us take the example of education. In Europe it was the monasteries which kept alive what learning there was in the Dark Ages, and as the Middle Ages emerged, there grew out of these the first of the great European universities. They were founded for the study of theology, as the Divinity Hall still standing in Oxford so clearly illustrates to this day. Theology was seen, as the core of all sound learning. In the oldest universities the Faculty of theology still holds the place of honor. Wisdom began in the fear of the Lord, but reached out to all sound worthwhile human interests. The very idea of a university was that it should bring together all academic pursuits and give a man a completely balanced, an all-round, a universal education. Theology was the queen of the sciences, and these latter gradually began to emerge as individual disciplines.

From the Renaissance onwards, the young sciences struggled to get to their feet, and later, with the vigor of adolescents, they broke free from theological restraint and ecclesiastical control. Mother Church was overslow in recognizing the real worth of these rebellious young offspring which had come to birth in the very places of learning founded for the glory of God and the defense of the true faith. By the nineteenth century, universities were being founded which had no faculty of theology at all, and some had constitutions which declared that they were purely secular institutions in which no religious subjects could be pursued. The older universities began to abolish the required entrance examinations m Biblical knowledge and the necessity to give assent to Christian doctrines before matriculation was possible.

The same trend of secularization can be seen in general education. Literacy and education for all was largely pioneered by the church. From the Reformation onwards the availability of the Bible in the vernacular was in Protestant countries an added incentive to become literate. Even the Sunday School took its rise in a move to provide the elements of education for the working children of the poor on the only day they were free. Until this century primary education was mainly a matter of mastering the three R’s, sometimes known as the four R’s because religion figured pretty largely through the study of the Bible. Primary and secondary education then became increasingly secularized as they were taken over more and more by the state. Any religious or biblical teaching that is given at all is right out on the periphery. The great heritage of knowledge made available by the sciences and the modern ‘knowledge explosion’, determines the pattern and content of education today. The average adolescent of our day is being molded by his education to take his place in secular society as a secular man.

What has been briefly described in the field of education can be paralleled in several other areas, all of which have been sometimes referred to as ‘the lost provinces of religion’. The time was when the church was the only agent in society which concerned itself with the study of the nature of man and with the promotion of his spiritual health, but now there are other agents with similar concerns. Psychology -- the study of the mind or human behavior -- is a secular science. Psychiatry -- the art of healing the psyche or mind -- is a secular pursuit. Social welfare, marriage counseling, various kinds of therapy designed to restore a person to the maximum mastery of his natural abilities, are often secular professions promoted by the state. The priest or pastor is sometimes confused today as to what constitutes his real role, for it seems so much more limited than it was in an earlier day when he was a ‘father-in-god’ to his flock in every possible way. This role seems so often today to be parceled out to a number of specialists, usually working on a secular basis.

Let us now turn from the social changes which reflect secularization to the way in which it has changed what men think about the world and the life they live. We have already referred to the dualism of the two worlds in the medieval view. The supernatural world, though normally unseen, was believed to impinge upon the natural world at many points. An unusual or otherwise unexplainable event was readily interpreted as being caused by the unseen powers of the supernatural world. In popular thinking, evil spirits, ghosties, saints and guardian angels were conceived as carrying on an unseen war around one. Many processes which we now regard as quite natural and logical were mysteries to medieval man and consequently offered a ready seedbed for all kinds of explanations which depended upon intervention by some supernatural force.

But as the sciences began to develop, they gradually brought to light quite natural explanations for some aspects of observable phenomena which had previously been regarded as of supernatural origin. Unseen forces of a natural kind came to be recognized. To the ordinary man there is no obvious connection at all between the tides, the movement of the planets across the sky, and the falling of objects to the ground. It was a brilliant leap forward when Isaac Newton recognized that they can all be explained by the one force, which we now call gravity. He proceeded to enunciate in 1687 the inverse square of universal gravitation. This confirmed Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion, which had so far been unexplained even though they correctly described how the planets moved. Knowledge of such laws as these made it much more difficult than before to contemplate the possibility even for God suddenly to cause a planet to behave in an irregular way, or to make stones fly up in the air instead of falling to the ground.

The areas of mystery, in some respects at least, seemed to be closing. There is a story told of how the famous astronomer Pierre Simon de Laplace was explaining to Napoleon his theory of the origin of the planets. When Napoleon asked him where in his theory he had left a place for God, he replied, "Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis." This is true of all the natural sciences. God is not a factor who has to be allowed for in their calculations. Now that kind of thinking about God which looks for evidence of His activity in phenomena which have no natural explanation is often referred to as a belief in the ‘God of the gaps’. At the moment admittedly there are still many gaps in our knowledge, but the closing of so many gaps in everyday experience has meant that it needs no great stretch of the imagination to see that the gaps could readily close to the point where there is no room left for any faith in that kind of God.

The image of God as a supernatural being, who from time to time intervenes in the affairs of the natural world in clearly recognizable ways, and who can suspend or reverse the usual behavior of natural phenomena, if He so wishes, in order to perform His will, is one which has become less and less tenable as the new world has emerged. As the sciences have moved from one apparent success to another, and paved the way for the rapid advance of technology, the ordinary man has felt more and more confident that he understands the natural forces and processes with some degree of certainty. And at the same time the sense of the supernatural which once weighed quite heavily with him has now receded, and plays a decreasing role in his thinking and experience.

Secularization is not simply something which divides men into two distinct classes -- the secular and the religious. Practically all contemporary men show the marks of secularity in some form or another. The new secular man is in all of us to some degree. At the extremes only do we see two distinct classes. On the one hand there is the materialist who believes he has abandoned completely the religious heritage of the past, and on the other there is the conservative Christian believer, who believes he has resisted completely the inroads of secularization. (To the extent that he is still thinking within a framework of concepts which is far more medieval than contemporary, he is correct.) In between these two extremes there are many grades of secular man. The great mass of people of western culture still play at least lip-service to past religious traditions, but the proportion of their daily life that it directly influences grows increasingly less. Let us mention three examples.

In the first place man looks more and more for natural causes in the problems which beset him. If the potato crop fails, he does not regard it as an intervention by God to demonstrate His judgment -- a judgment which must be accepted in humility and responded to with penitence and fasting. The natural causes are looked for, precautions are taken to prevent the calamity from spreading, and the most adequate remedies known are put into operation. Indeed in agriculture and in human and animal health, diseases are now forestalled wherever possible, by such methods as the application of trace elements to the soil, sterilization, a balanced diet and immunization.

This leads secondly to the fact that secular man neither expects nor believes in the miraculous intervention by God in the times of his desperate need. At this point the word ‘miracle’ needs to be more carefully analyzed. The word originally meant a marvel, something which was so extraordinary as to attract attention, wonder and even awe. In this sense the word still has a valid meaning for us, since there are many things in our experience which make us marvel. The advent of television, penicillin, nuclear fission were all marvels. When modern surgery restores sight to a blind man, when a drunkard is reformed, when what appears to be certain catastrophe is averted, then the word ‘miracle’ arises naturally to our lips in order to describe them.

But if the word ‘miracle’ is used to describe a supernatural intervention by God, which is possible only through the temporary suspension of natural laws and forces, then we are talking about something else. It is this kind of definition which lies behind much popular talk of miracles. But it is a view of miracle which does not properly belong to the ancient world, where there was no clear understanding of permanent natural laws, and where they could distinguish only between the usual and the unusual. Certainly the Bible bears witness to the wonderful works of God, the signs and miracles of His grace, but it is anachronistic to read into these affirmations a much later understanding of miracle, one which belongs particularly to the medieval view of the interpenetration of the two worlds -- the natural and supernatural. The receding of the sense of the supernatural world, characteristic of the secularizing progress, is bringing an end to that idea of miracle which implies a temporary suspension of natural law. We know that if the world is to avoid being thrown into the holocaust of a nuclear war, we must not look for a supernatural intervention in the form, say, of a regiment of angels. Men themselves must learn to handle their own passions. It is within the framework of natural forces that the miracles of God’s grace will be recognized.

There have been periods when it has been popular to appeal to miracle as a means of proving the validity and truth of the Christian faith. Until only a hundred years ago the Gospel records of the ‘miracles’ of Jesus were regarded as one of the most telling ways of substantiating the divine powers of Jesus and hence the Christian claims about Hun. But the historicity of the ‘miracle’ stories has now been severely undermined by modern Biblical study, which has shown that we have here no infallible historical records, but the testimony of Christian traditions which had been molded by two or more generations of oral transmission. Even many of today’s Christians, who in other respects may be regarded as being very liberal in their outlook, have been inclined to rest their faith on the historical reliability of the resurrection narratives, as pointing to at least one incontestable miracle of a supernatural character, and they have been alarmed when the ‘Empty Tomb’ stories came to be regarded as legendary. Even in the Easter affirmation of the Resurrection of Jesus, so important for Christianity, we can now point to no firm historical evidence to show that there occurred there a miracle which involved suspension or reversal of natural laws -- in this case, the normal processes of decay into which the physical body enters after the point of death. The truth of the Resurrection of Jesus must be understood in terms other than these.

We shall take, as the third example of the influence of secularization, the practice and meaning of prayer. In a world where cause and effect have been shown to operate at so many more points than was earlier imagined, we are forced to ask to what extent prayers of petition and intercession which plead with God for the speedy fulfillment of certain clear objectives, really depend upon a belief in the ‘God of the gaps’. To what extent can we believe any more that "The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects"? Secular man finds it hard to be convinced that there is a chain of cause and effect which follows a channel leading from the believer to God, and from God to the physical context to which the believer directed his prayer.

Some believers claim that their prayers have been marvelously answered. But there is never any way of showing that what they regarded as an answer would not have happened anyway. And when the particular answer the believer had in mind does not eventuate, then that which actually happened is interpreted by him as the answer God chose to give. This means that the believer knows from the outset that his prayer will be answered, and nothing that happens will convince him to the contrary. But at the same time it reduces ‘answered prayer’ to something like a meaningless statement.

Petition and answer should not, of course, be regarded as the sole content of Christian prayer, but in the popular mind this has often been the case, and it is just at this point that secularization has greatly undermined the practice of prayer, and has made the Christian much more cautious about the forms of his petitions and the areas in which they may be regarded as legitimate. One of the benefits of secularization in this field has been that it has shown up the fact that much that has passed for Christian prayer was in fact a form of magic, by which the Christian was attempting to operate supernatural forces to bring about his own ends, however laudable they might have been.

Finally it is to be noted that secularization is now spreading over the whole world. In the same way as it has undermined many aspects of the medieval form of Christianity, so it is affecting those civilizations which have grown up on the foundation of other religious faiths. The new secular man is being born in the Indian, the African and the Chinese as well as in the European. In Russia and China we find a particularly militant form of secularization which sees religious faith as an enemy to be fought and vanquished.

The world is today becoming in effect a smaller and more closely interdependent society. Communication, increased opportunities of travel, interchange of knowledge and forms of education all mean that, though the old cultural characteristics will linger on for a long time yet, there is already being sown the seed of a global culture. So far as we can see at the moment the chief characteristic of such a possible global culture will be its secularity. This is the one common element which is spreading everywhere.

From the time when the Pope divided the new geographical world between Spain and Portugal until the great missionary expansion of the nineteenth century, it was the firm belief of Christian Europe that the Christian religion of the European pattern must eventually encompass the earth. At the beginning of this century some Christians were hopefully raising the slogan "The evangelization of the world in our generation". But after some encouraging beginnings, particularly in Africa and in the Pacific, the great missionary expansion of the last two centuries has now ground down to a dead slow. The churches in Europe and in those countries where European culture was planted by early colonization, now find that they face a missionary situation at home. Within the last generation secularization has made greater inroads into the framework of Christian culture than in the previous three centuries, and it is still accelerating.

Out of the missionary movement there was born the Ecumenical Movement. This was slow at first, but since the Second World War, it has grown in strength, and has now taken root in the Roman Catholic Church -- the largest and hitherto the most conservative church of the West. Many see in the Ecumenical movement the hope that the institutional Christianity of Europe will yet encircle the globe and provide the spiritual basis for the global culture. But has the Ecumenical Movement come one hundred years too late? For while ecumenical leaders strive to meet the challenge of the times by bringing together the living elements in their churches, they still find themselves weighed down as with chains by ecclesiastical machinery and dogmas of the past. By the time visible unity is restored to the church, the community of active committed Christians may have been reduced in size and influence to a quite insignificant island in a vast secular sea.

Secularization, as it is at present spreading and developing, is dividing the modern world into two. On the one hand there is an official and institutional form of Christianity seeking to be faithful to the beliefs and forms of Christendom’s past glory, and on the other there is a secular, non-religious society which tends to assume that emancipation from all religious faith is part of the goal of complete secularization. This division, if allowed to continue, could prove more disastrous than the divisions to which the Reformation gave rise.

This division is a false one, first, because it fails to recognize that secularization originated in Christian Europe and not elsewhere. Admittedly not all the products of European culture have necessarily been of Christian origin, but before the church abandons secularization as if it were a foundling child, she must look more carefully to see if this is not Christianity’s own offspring. For if it is (as later we shall try to show), then the church has the responsibility to guide the process of secularization forward and assist it to keep to its proper path, the very path whose beginning and direction are to be found in the Judeo-Christian heritage. The secularist who regards secularization as a matter of winning complete emancipation from the old heritage, is in fact turning secularism into an absolute, and without realizing it, he is in danger of becoming enslaved to a new form of idolatry. The present growing schism between the remnants of Christian orthodoxy and the secular world is a false one, which can lead both to ruin. This schism can be healed only if both are prepared to acknowledge the essential relationship between the Christian faith and secularization.

Then secondly, the church must realize that the influence of the Christian faith is not at all confined to the sphere of the organized church. It is often being said today that the church is back again in the first century situation. This is a dangerous half-truth. In the first century the church was a growing spreading minority in a completely non-Christian environment. Today the church is a diminishing minority in a cultural environment which has been largely shaped by its Christian past; and while orthodox Christianity is making only minor advances in Christian culture, the pattern of secularization to which it gave rise, is still spreading rapidly. It is rather paradoxical that while European political colonization is nowadays firmly rejected, the spread of European culture goes on apace in such forms as education, science and technology, democratic rule, and Western standards and ways of thought. Fewer and fewer people remain uninfluenced by the Christian faith, however slight it may appear on the surface, or however distorted the form of influence may be judged to be.

The old pattern of European Christendom with its complementary roles of state and church is fast disappearing. Secularization on a global scale is bringing in a new situation in which the Christian community and the secular society within which it lives, must both discover their proper mutual relationships. The Christian community in particular must be careful not to waste unnecessary energy fighting an enemy that her own misjudgment has largely created. Even the first disciples, St. Mark tells us, nearly fell into this error, and the Master said, "He that is not against us is for us."

From within this new view of the world and its origins, we must now discuss the nature of man himself, as we have been led to understand him by all those sciences most closely related to him, such as anthropology, anatomy, physiology, neurology, psychology and sociology.

It has long been recognized that man has so much in common with the animals that he must be regarded as an animal, even if of a very special kind. The Bible itself placed men and animals in the same category by describing their Creation on the same day and thus distinguishing them as a class from all other created forms of life. In 1555 an early French zoologist, called Belon, showed from the comparison of the skeletons of a bird and a man that there was such a remarkable similarity, that man carried about in his own body the proof of his connection with the animals.

But man has also drawn a clear line of distinction between himself and all other animals, and in traditional Christian teaching this was done by stating that man consisted of two parts -- a body and a soul. It was the body which linked him with the animals; it was made of similar flesh and bone, and lived only for the limited period between birth and death, at which point the body fell into decay. That which made man unique was the possession of a soul, which, being spiritual and not material, was thought to survive the death of the body and go to live in a spiritual realm. The soul, involving the consciousness, the memory and the essential self, was thought capable of existing as a complete living entity apart from the body.

At a time when men knew very little about the functioning of the human body, this view seemed to be largely a matter of commonsense. The soul was what he knew in his own inner experience of thought, feelings and acts of decision. (In his dreams, just as real to ancient man as waking impressions, his soul often seemed to leave the sleeping body and visit far places.) Without even thinking about it, he projected this same spiritual entity into the creatures round about him. For very ancient man, the whole world was alive with the kind of life he knew within himself. Rivers, trees, mountains, birds, animals all possessed their particular kind of spirit or soul. This early attempt to explain the real world is called animism and it has been almost universal at a particular stage in man’s cultural development.

It was quite a step forward when men first began to distinguish inanimate objects, such as stones, from animate or living creatures. It was a further step forward when the uniqueness of man was recognized. This was not nearly as obvious as it may appear to us. In some societies the line of division was not drawn so clearly between men and the animals, as between the nobility and the peasantry, the latter being treated with much the same attitude as the animals. Even up till modern times class and caste divisions have obscured the unity of the human species, while animal lovers have frequently projected their own human consciousness into animal experience.

It further seemed a matter of common-sense to ancient man that this inner spirit or soul, which he knew from the inside and which he witnessed in his fellows, should be immortal or deathless. On the negative side, no living person had any subjective experience of death, and on the positive side, the dead person who appeared and spoke to him in his dreams seemed just as alive as ever. Indeed it is much easier to imagine the souls of the dead living on in some new kind of existence than it is to accept as fact that they have really died. Even in our own experience today we find it hard to realize completely what death means when it occurs to someone with whom we have lived closely. It is much easier to assume they are still alive but somewhere out of our sight. Archaeology has shown that from the beginnings of civilization man has evidently believed in the continuance of the soul after death, and has buried his dead in such a way as to provide for them the things thought necessary for the next life.

The speculation which accompanied the belief in a deathless human soul took different forms in different cultures. In India, for example, it took the form of a transmigration of souls, or reincarnation. The soul was regarded as an indestructible entity, which had neither beginning nor end, but which migrated from one body to the next, without any way of escaping from the endless procession. The souls of gods, devils, men, animals and insects were all of the same order, and so the kind of creature into which one’s soul would be reborn depended on the kind of life one lived. The soul did not carry over any memory, but it did retain traits, skills etc. The various gospels of salvation provided by Hinduism and Buddhism sought to rescue the soul from its endless wandering and attendant suffering.

The belief that man possesses a soul, or some kind of spiritual entity that survives death, is itself an almost universal phenomenon in primitive human culture and it has led to different kinds of development in more mature human civilizations. It was this primitive understanding of the nature of man which was given clear and classical exposition in the writings of the Greek philosopher Plato (427-347 BC.) He saw the soul as the source of movement in every body which moved of itself, and because the soul is thus self-moving, it must be unbegotten and immortal. For Plato, God is the Supreme Soul and all living creatures have souls created by God and these are the source of everything good and bad. When the body of a man dies, then the soul is released, as from a prison, for fuller life in a spiritual realm.

It is nowadays widely recognized that what became the orthodox Christian doctrine of the soul owes more to Platonic philosophy than to any other source. This may come as a surprise to those who have assumed that Christian doctrine has always drawn its substance from the Bible. It must be remembered that the early Christian community moved almost wholly into the Gentile world within a generation or two after its origin within Judaism, and that, as Christian thought took more definite shape within the next three or four centuries, it was inevitable that it should have been strongly influenced by the prevailing philosophy of the Hellenistic culture in which the church moved. This is strikingly illustrated by the fact that when the Renaissance initiated a revival of Platonism, some Christian scholars, known as the Cambridge Platonists, urged the return of Christian theology to ‘its old loving nurse, the Platonic philosophy’.

While Christian doctrine was still passing through its formative period, Christian scholars such as Clement of Alexandria (c. AD. 150-215), Origen (c. AD. 185-254), Augustine (AD. 354-430), the last being the most influential of all in Western Christianity, were strongly influenced by Platonism in their formulation of the Catholic doctrine of the soul. For them the soul could be understood, in clear contrast to the body, as the essential spiritual man; the soul included the seat of consciousness, it was the storehouse of knowledge and hence included the human memory, it was the cause of goodness and evil, and it was deathless or immortal. Although such a doctrine of an immortal soul is usually appealed to in order to answer questions about the meaning of death, it is logical to assert that the soul, whose existence is independent of the body, may therefore originate independently from the body. Christian speculation was sometimes led to debate whether God created the particular human soul at the time of conception, or whether the soul had a pre-existence which preceded the mortal life for which it was destined. Charles Lamb gives us a moving portrayal of pre-existence in his essay "Dream Children".

It is possible to trace the popular view of man, as the temporary combination of a mortal body and an immortal soul, back through Christian orthodoxy to Platonism and from there to primitive animism. It may have been noticed that so far the Biblical view has not been mentioned. Now it is true that certain Biblical passages were used to support this view, but this was largely because the doctrine was read into them, an easy temptation to fall into at any time. Modern Biblical scholarship has been able to show that this view of man is almost wholly foreign to the Old Testament and plays very little part in the New Testament. More will be said on the Biblical view of man later, but it is sufficient to point out here, that it is just because the Bible hardly anywhere reflects a doctrine of an immortal soul, that the Christian hope took the form of the resurrection of the body.

But in the modern world several sciences have converged to press home to us the rational conclusion that each individual man is a psychosomatic unity, a living physical organism whose various organs, both physical and psychical, can only function as part of the total organism. There are certain minor parts of the body which man can lose and yet still live and be truly man, such as hair, teeth, appendix and even limbs. But there are major organs, the loss of any one of which brings death to the whole organism.

Now words like ‘mind’, ‘will’, ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ are abstractions, which we have found useful in order to describe the highest levels of human existence as they are understood by our thinking powers, and experienced in that most mysterious element of all -- our stream of consciousness. But what we are trying to describe, by each of these abstract terms, is essentially dependent for its reality upon the continuous functioning of the total organism, with all its essential physical organs and biochemical processes. Thus, just as the loss of an essential organ brings the death of the whole organism, so the death of the physical organism brings to an end those psychical or spiritual aspects of a man which are usually thought of as characterizing his uniqueness.

The whole animistic approach to man, which in both religious thought and philosophical analysis can be traced back to man’s earliest attempts to understand himself, has been destroyed by the modern sciences most closely related to the study of man. Now it must be confessed that this is a conclusion reached almost wholly on rationalistic, and, some would say, materialistic grounds. It is for this reason that it may be argued that these sciences have not exhausted all that is to be said about man, or even touched the most important questions about human existence. This we may readily concede, and many neurologists, psychologists, biochemists etc., would willingly agree; but no understanding of man can be any longer satisfactory, which is content to ignore what these sciences have taught us about the nature of man as a psychosomatic organism.

Whereas pre-scientific man had only vague notions of how the mind, spirit and consciousness of man were related to the body, we now have sufficient knowledge of the brain and the nervous system to know that man’s stream of consciousness could not function at all if it were not regularly receiving sense impressions from the eye, the ear, and touch etc. The human consciousness is dependent for its vitality, interest and development on keeping open at least some of these channels, which are the only means of contact man has with the world around him. Such controlled experiments, as it has been possible to conduct in order to learn what happens when a man is deprived of all his senses, suggest that the mind is soon subject to increasing hallucination, such as could quickly lead to the loss of the rational stream of consciousness so essential for true humanity. Thus man cannot be abstracted completely from his environment without soon ceasing to be human.

We know too that the memory, without which man could have no sense of continuity, is dependent upon the storage capacity of the unbelievably large number of brain cells, so that to the lay mind the brain is as close to an electronic computer as anything could be. We have learned how physical damage to the brain impairs the functioning of various parts of the body to which the nervous system connects it, and severe brain damage of a congenital nature can prevent the development of anything like a genuinely human personality altogether. Severe brain damage due to accident in later life, on the other hand, can make such radical changes in the personality, or destroy so much of the personality as to make it impossible to say whether it is the same person any more, even though it is fundamentally the same physical body.

In the light of this essential interdependence of mind and brain, spirit and body, we come to see that a disembodied soul is not only an unsatisfying state of existence to contemplate, but it is also bereft of any real meaning. What kind of existence can a soul have which can receive no sense impressions and make no physical response, and hence have no communication and no communion with other souls? What kind of a soul can it be that has no memory? The ancients, too, vaguely sensed these difficulties, and always imagined the spirit or soul as having some body or form, even though, of necessity, it had to be of a ghostly or ethereal ‘substance’, and pictured a spirit or soul world in which the soul found community.

Depth psychology and psychiatry have approached the understanding of man’s mind and soul (psyche) from an angle rather different from that of neurology and biochemistry. Instead of trying to penetrate to the mind and will by physical methods, they seek to understand the individual man through the channel of speech communication which constitutes one’s only means of access to what, for convenience, we call the mind. Psycho-analysis has brought to light the fact that the stream of consciousness of which each person is aware in his inner self is but the highest level of the complicated processes which are at work in the psyche. Below the conscious stream there is a great mysterious area, now called the subconscious, where, at differing levels, there move emotional forces set in operation by past experiences. It may be likened to that large part of every iceberg which lies hidden below the surface of the water. We now know that much of the emotions we feel, the thoughts we pursue, and the decisions we make, have at least been influenced, and sometimes largely directed, by those forces of which the subject himself is not consciously aware. Thus each individual is a far more complicated being than he realizes, and his own conscious assessment of himself, his motives, his emotions and his desires is only a rough over-simplification, and very likely a distorted one at that.

When the psychologist turns his attention to the study of religious behaviour, he can often give a new and quite different explanation for such experiences as dramatic conversions, visions or the sense of being impelled by a supernatural force from without. Whereas the religious believer has interpreted these as due to the influence of the Spirit of God, the psychologist is aware of the many emotional tensions at work in the human mind, only some of which are realized by the subject himself. For example, it is an observable fact that it is in those churches where dramatic conversions during adolescence are highly rated and are expected, that they actually occur in significant numbers. The psychologist interprets this as due to the fact that the adolescent is unconsciously under the pressure to do that which his particular community expects of him.

This leads us to see how sociology is bringing home to us the fact that a man must not be thought of as a self-contained unit in isolation from his social setting. Such a view is an unreal abstraction. Man is essentially a social creature, and it is due in no small measure to this, that human civilization has evolved, and man has reached the point where he is today. Each generation emerges out of the preceding one. Each man is a child of his generation, and of his immediate social setting. His family life, his school, his clubs and his whole cultural background have contributed to make him what he is. That is why we now recognize that the man with criminal tendencies is not always wholly to blame. He too reflects his upbringing, his environment and the tensions in his society. For the same reason the religious beliefs and allegiance of a man are nearly always those of his own family, or of his immediate cultural setting. In his own experience he may have consciously adopted them and made them his own, but because man is so dependent on the cultural influences around him, this was already largely predetermined.

Whereas sociology studies the nature of society and the interplay between the individual and society, education studies the learning ability of man at various stages and tries to find those teaching methods which will be most fruitful in leading the individual to full maturity within his society. As an infant, the human creature is more helpless and dependent than most other creatures. It is this initial helplessness which gives him the freedom to learn most from his social environment. The period of his greatest readiness to learn coincides with the period in which his body and physiological functions are growing to maturity. Some time thereafter the learning ability usually tapers off, though it may vary considerably from person to person. Patterns of thought and behaviour grow more rigid, and it becomes increasingly unlikely, though never impossible, that the person will abandon those patterns for new ones. This leads to two relevant observations about the nature of man. The religious beliefs and attitudes, with which a man will go through life, will be largely those which he has been led to embrace during the first twenty-five years. In later life he will not be as free as we often think him to be to make a favorable response to the claims of Christian allegiance. On the other hand, in the case of a person who has embraced certain Christian beliefs and attitudes in his formative years, his continued manifestation of these in later years may be due not simply to strength of conviction, but to the fact that they have become so much a part of him, that it would require a very strong challenge to cause him to abandon them.

All these studies bring home to us as never before the creatureliness and earthliness of man. Man himself is all a part of the natural world. As with all forms of life on this planet, man as an individual has a beginning at birth, he grows to maturity, he proceeds to a period of flowering, and then, if his life has not been terminated prematurely, he experiences a period of slowing down in both his physical and mental powers before these signs of wear and decay finally lead up to his death. While man is a many-sided and most complex creature, he is essentially a unity in whom the physical and psychical so penetrate one another as to be necessarily interdependent. When man dies, it is the whole psychosomatic organism which dies. Man, like all other forms of terrestrial life from which he has evolved, is a physical mortal creature, whose life is lived within those limits of space and time to which his creatureliness subjects him.

It is not that this view of man is wholly new. Aspects of it have forced themselves on man’s attention from time to time, at least as far back as we can trace his thoughts. But because man has risen to the spiritual level where he has become aware of his creatureliness and knows he must die (and so far as we know he is unique in this respect), he has also rebelled against this prospect and sought to escape from it. The chief avenue of escape he found was by way of that animism which led in turn to a belief in the immortality of the human soul.

It hardly needs to be said that the new view of man, to which today’s studies and sciences are leading us, constitutes a severe challenge to the doctrine of man assumed and taught by Christian orthodoxy. For one thing, man’s free-will is a good deal more limited than is often supposed, and a few people have even been led to the conclusion that it is an illusion. While there are still good reasons for believing that man does have some freedom of choice at his highest level of consciousness, it is a freedom within a context of very severe limits, which have been imposed upon him by his creatureliness. The kind of person he is, the values he acknowledges, the beliefs he holds, have been to quite a large extent determined by forces over which he has had no control. They constitute a tremendous complex of instincts and inherited traits, family and cultural background, education, and all the aspects of the individual’s own past experience which remain in his memory and in his unconscious as continuing motivating forces.

The dogmatic way in which the church has often declared itself on matters of personal salvation and judgment has rested on an inadequate understanding of the complexities of the human situation. Further, the challenge of the new view of man to the traditional form of the Christian answer to the question of his ultimate destiny is almost as devastating as it could be. It is not at all surprising that in the last two or three generations this answer has been regarded in the lands of Christian culture with rapidly diminishing conviction. Not only has there been a complete collapse of the world view of heaven, earth and hell, in which the answers concerning human destiny were expressed, but the very nature of man, as two separable parts of body and soul, which Christian orthodoxy has long taken for granted, can no longer be reconciled with our present knowledge of man.

Let it be said here and now, however, that we need not conclude that the very sciences which are forcing us more and more to abandon as invalid our traditional understanding of the nature and destiny of man, have thereby solved the riddle of life and of the mystery of man. Far from it! They have shown up that problem in stark relief. The enigma of human existence has become a greater mystery than ever. They have shown us that the form in which man’s eternal hope was expressed is no longer a satisfying one, and that any fresh expression of this hope must take fully into account all that we have learned about our creatureliness and our mortality. But because man cannot live for long in a context which has for him neither meaning nor hope, a fresh and satisfying expression of the answers to these basic questions has become a matter of extreme urgency for the future of mankind.

At the beginning of the modern era all Europeans, whether Catholic or Protestant, shared a common view of the origin of the world in general and of man in particular. This common view came from the opening chapters of the Bible. No cogent evidence had so far been produced to cause any widespread questioning of these chapters, and since they had long been regarded by the church as divinely delivered to Moses, this account of origins was accepted as sufficient and final.

The common view was that God created the whole universe out of nothing, about six thousand years ago (a notable Irish theologian, James Ussher (1581- 1656), deduced from the chronology of the Bible that the actual year was 4004 BC.) It all happened in the remarkably short period of six days, and on the sixth day God made both the animals and human beings. First of all from the dust of the ground He made one human being; He breathed His own spirit into him and called him Adam. Then from Adam’s rib He fashioned a woman called Eve. All other human beings were subsequently descended from these two by natural procreation.

It was further believed that the human race became so evil that God almost annihilated them by a great flood that covered the earth. Consequently all men who lived after the flood down to the present day have been the descendants of Noah, who became with his family the sole human survivors of the Deluge. The nations of the world were thought to have spread over the earth subsequent to that time and to have developed gradually their racial characteristics, their separate languages having resulted from a further divine judgment, following the disastrous attempt to build the Tower of Babel. All human religion, other than the Judeo-Christian faith was thought to consist of various forms of natural religion which could all be traced back to Noah. This simple outline in the opening chapters of Genesis was thought to contain all that man could ever know of the origin of the earth and of the human race. All Christians and Jews, and that meant nearly all Europeans, accepted this simple view of origins as a matter of course until about a hundred years ago, and some Christians still cling firmly to it with varying modifications.

The nineteenth century was destined to witness the complete upset of this simple picture, and this upheaval began with the emerging science of geology. In his book, Principles of Geology, 1830, Charles Lyell (1797-1875) burst through the preconceived opinions that had hindered earlier geologists, and from the evidence he had amassed he showed that the earth had been in existence for a far greater period than the Bible allowed for. Where men had thought in thousands of years, he claimed that ‘the language of nature signified millions’. He explained the present condition of the earth’s surface as the result of gradual development over a long period and due to causes which were still at work. He claimed on the evidence of fossils that life had existed on the earth for millions of years. Ardent defenders of the Bible refused to accept these conclusions, and one of them, a zoologist named P. H. Gosse (1810-1888) admitted all the evidence of geology but claimed that at the creation God had deliberately placed the fossils in the rock so that men would later find them there. In the same way he concluded that Adam and Eve had navels just as if they had been born naturally as infants. Bertrand Russell later commented that on this theory we might all have come into existence five minutes ago, with ready-made memories, holes in our socks and hair that needed cutting.

But the problem posed by the much longer history of the earth was small compared with the furore which took place soon after the publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1809-82). (We should note that this was two years prior to the famous Essays and Reviews.) Darwin originally went up to Cambridge to study for Holy Orders, but he became absorbed in natural science. After some thirty years of study, including several trips of exploration round the world, Darwin outlined a theory of biological evolution, which was destined to revolutionize the common view of the origins of life. The idea of evolution was by no means new and Darwin’s own grandfather was a zealous exponent of some form of evolution or development. It was Darwin’s achievement to supply the theory with a tenable principle, namely, that progressive changes take place by a process of natural selection.

One can readily see that the theory of biological evolution is completely at variance with what had hitherto been the common view of origins. Instead of tracing man’s ancestors back to our first two parents, Adam and Eve, it explains man’s origins as all a part of a very long and very intricate process of development, in which all known species of life had by natural selection gradually branched out from other forms; this tree of life had grown originally from the simplest possible forms of life. What had previously appeared simple and straightforward was now bristling with new problems. In the old view all the ancestors of present-day man had been true men, but in the evolutionary picture man’s original ancestors were not men at all, and it became impossible to point to a time when true men first appeared and why. The orthodox Christian teaching about the creation of man and the origin of sin in a first act of disobedience in Eden now appeared to be undermined. Such problems as these were more difficult to solve than the fact that the opening chapters of Genesis could no longer be regarded as history and needed to be reinterpreted.

In view of the difficulties raised for Christian orthodoxy by the theory of evolution it is the more remarkable to find that there were theologians who reacted favorably to Darwin’s book from the very beginning. F. I. Hort (1828-92) one of the famous trio of Cambridge Biblical scholars of last century, himself skilled in both classics and natural science, wrote in a private letter in March 1860, "Have you read Darwin? . . . In spite of difficulties I am inclined to think it unanswerable." Cardinal Newman (1801-90) wrote in a private note-book in 1863, "It is strange that monkeys should be so like men with no historical connection between them. I will go the whole hog with Darwin, or dispensing with time and history altogether, hold not only the theory of distinct species, but also of the creation of fossil-bearing rocks."

It is a pity that these initial thoughts of men like Hort and Newman were not made public till long afterwards. For in these words Newman expressed succinctly the dilemma in which the Christian was placed; he had either to shut his mind completely to the new knowledge derived from science, or he had to be prepared to accept it and surrender the security and some of the claims of traditional orthodoxy. Charles Kingsley (1819-75), a clergyman whose theological competence has been obscured by his literary fame, was ready to accept the voice of science as the voice of God, and believed that the theologian was bound to be obedient to it. He maintained that all ordinands should be required to study at least one of the sciences.

But in the decade following the publication of The Origin of Species it was mainly the voices of reaction that were heard. The book gave rise to a famous debate between Samuel Wilberforce (1805-73), Bishop of Oxford and T. H. Huxley (1825-95) the celebrated biologist. The Bishop made a vigorous, polished but superficial speech attacking Darwin’s theory and concluded by trying to win the sympathy of the audience with an appeal to Victorian sentimentality concerning women. "If anyone were to be willing to trace his descent through an ape as his grandfather", he asked, "would he be willing to trace his descent similarly on the side of his grandmother?" It is reported that Huxley excitedly murmured to his neighbor, "The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands," an odd remark to come from the first man to call himself an agnostic. Huxley then gave a straightforward account of Darwin’s views and ended by declaring that he would rather have a monkey for a grandfather than one who used his great gifts to stifle truth.

Even Wilberforce, however, was ready to recognize some cogency in evolution and this is borne out by the way he reviewed The Origin of Species later that same year. There he accepted the principle of natural selection but argued that it could not by itself account for man’s moral and spiritual condition. He defined his attitude towards scientific truth in the following striking way, "We have no sympathy with those who object to any facts in nature . . . because they believe them to contradict what it appears to them is taught in Revelation. . . To oppose facts in the natural world because they seem to oppose Revelation . . . is . . . but another form of lying for God, and trying by fraud or falsehood to do the work of the God of truth . . . The words graven on the everlasting rocks are the words of God and they are graven by His hand." He claimed that these could not ‘contradict His word written in His book’.

Only two of the famous Essays and Reviews touched upon The Origin of Species. We have already referred to the one by Benjamin Jowett; the other was written by an accomplished scientist and Professor of Geometry at Oxford, Baden Powell. (His name is familiar because of his son -- the founder of the Boy Scout Movement.) Baden Powell believed that it was within the power of science to make rapid advances in human knowledge in all directions and to unravel sooner or later those mysteries which at the moment seemed miraculous and mysterious. Such a contention was a great blow to orthodox theology for the most popular method in those days of defending the truth of the Christian faith was to appeal to prophecy and the record of the miracles. If the concept of miracle were to vanish, as a mirage, before the advance of science, what was to happen to Christian apologetics?

Baden Powell accepted biological evolution enthusiastically, writing, "a work has now appeared by a naturalist of the most acknowledged authority, Mr. Darwin’s masterly volume on the Origin of Species by the law of ‘natural selection’, which now substantiates on undeniable grounds the very principle so long denounced by the first naturalists . . . . a work which must soon bring about an entire revolution of opinion in favour of the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature." The latter was a prophecy soon to be fulfilled.

There were many, of course, who were quite unprepared for this revolution in the understanding of the origins of life. One clergyman is said to have prayed in church, "O Lord, grant this evolution be not true, but if it is, grant that it may be hushed up as far as possible." It is not surprising that the advent of Darwin’s theory of evolution should have caused such consternation in Christian circles, for it removed what appeared to many to be an indispensable pillar of the whole building of Christian orthodoxy. Among more conservative Christians that reaction has continued up until the present, and where such conservatism has been the dominant force in society, it has even been forbidden to teach biological evolution in the schools.

More than once in Christian history Christians have concluded too quickly that if a particular doctrine is proved false, then the whole Christian faith becomes null and void. Such an unthinking zeal to defend the faith can have an effect just the opposite of that desired. When Christians claim that a particular doctrine must be defended at all costs or else Christianity is doomed, those who cannot accept the particular doctrine can hardly be blamed if they assume this must be so, and, as a consequence, surrender with reluctance all allegiance to the Christian faith. T. H. Huxley and Charles Darwin themselves were by no means antagonistic to the Christian faith; it was the unwillingness of Christians to face new truth which forced men of this caliber further away from the faith than they themselves would have chosen to go. T. H. Huxley, in spite of his outspoken criticism of orthodoxy and of the church, was still at the end of his life advocating that the Bible be taught in schools in order to foster sound morality and a religious sense. The theory of evolution, and the church’s failure to appreciate it, became one of several factors, which have helped to bring about that decline in active Christian allegiance which has so marked the last hundred years.

For though Darwin’s particular theory of biological evolution was destined to undergo changes and modifications in the hands of successive biologists and zoologists (and with this we are not here concerned), there can be no going back to the simple Biblical picture of origins which was commonly held before Darwin. This picture has been shattered once and for all. Biological evolution is not only universally accepted by all scientists in some form or other, but it is part of the common knowledge of nearly everybody who has had a secondary school education. All this has taken place in the last hundred years, and the popular spread of this view in the last thirty or forty years.

The new idea of origins is much vaster and more complicated than the Biblical one it has replaced. At a conservative estimate the story of man’s origins takes us back at least half a million years and man has been civilized for only about two per cent of this period. The evidence suggests that in the long process of evolution several types of man emerged, but only our own species, Homo sapiens, has survived. The period of time which witnessed the divergence of these hominoid or human species from the various species of anthropoid apes may take us back from ten to twenty-five million years. Most of us have little real appreciation of what a vast time span this represents, and it raises many fascinating questions for which, as yet, there are no clear answers. For such knowledge as we do have, we are dependent upon anthropology.

Yet the period which has witnessed the development of men, long as it may appear to us, is short when compared with the vaster period over which other forms of life appeared. To trace the emergence of mammals we must go back two hundred million years, and for the origin of the earliest forms of life we go back three thousand million years. Much of the rapid and important achievement in the fields of zoology, botany and biochemistry, is too technical for the average layman readily to appreciate. Sufficient it is to say that the story of the earth with the various forms of life that have come to appear on it, is a million times longer than people of only a century ago used to think it to be.

But when we look out from the earth to seek to understand the universe of which our planet is such an infinitesimal part, and to ask how it all began, we find ourselves in a bewilderingly vast space which just defies our imagination. Even though we may read about it from time to time, very few of us live our lives in conscious awareness of this space universe. Mostly we are caught up with what is going on in our own little neck of the woods, and are not even aware of the diversity of the human situation scattered over the face of the globe, let alone the staggering immensity of the universe. Yet if we are going to live in the real world, we must try to understand to some degree the universe that astronomy and astrophysics have opened to us. It is so large that quite a different unit of measurement has to be used -- the lightyear. But to say that a certain star is so many hundreds of lightyears away does not really mean much to minds which are accustomed only to the inch or the mile, which can be roughly measured with the eye.

How old is the universe? Did it have a beginning at all, or has it always existed in one form or another? In any case, is there anything but a theoretical difference between a billion billion years and eternity? Did the universe begin with a ‘big bang’, as has been suggested, or is it subject to a process of continuous creation? With such questions as these we have no assured results at all as yet. Astronomy and radio-physics are amassing more and more information about the universe, and they may eventually be able to give us more definite answers. But here is the point. We once thought we had the answers and they seemed relatively simple and straightforward. Now the whole picture of the universe and the question of its origins have become tantalizingly out of reach of the minds of most of us.

In this greatly changed world of space and time, what does it mean to say that the God, who supposedly cares for us like a father, is also Creator? How can we call Him Creator, if it turns out there has never been a time when the universe did not exist in one form or another? Is man the peak of all creation, or only of those forms of life that have evolved on this one tiny planet? If man has evolved out of lower forms of life, at what point did he become man, and what is it that constituted true humanity? And if there was no point in time when man first fell into sin, what does it mean to speak of man in his fallen state, and how did sin, if this is still the proper term, come to enter the human scene? These are some of the questions which the new view of origins has raised for the Christian, and which must receive a satisfactory answer if the Christian faith is to survive as a living force in the new world. For though there is more to be learned about origins, which may do much to fill in the great gaps in our knowledge, and which may necessitate further radical revision in understanding, one thing is certain, and that is that the popular and simple view of origins which obtained among Christians until a hundred years ago has gone for ever.