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In spite of his denials Barth’s secular parables of truth were an example of natural theology. This thesis exploits them to provide a way of connecting theology from revelation to Darwinian science. Chapter one argues that natural science cannot provide truths about things in themselves. It does offer corrigible working hypotheses about the phenomena of the physical world. The chapter expands and illustrates David Fergusson’s five fold typology of natural theology. It argues that claims about humanity, ontological ones from revelation, phenomenological ones from science, can interact constructively provided we respect boundaries between the two. Chapter two recounts how Darwin and successors into the twenty-first century offer working hypotheses of life as a physical phenomenon of which Homo sapiens is one among several million examples. It argues, however, that humanity cannot be biologically or culturally defined. Chapter three summarizes Barth’s doctrine defining humanity as elect in Christ. It defends the doctrine against Clough’s extension to cover “all flesh”. The Spirit’s action constitutes the person as “the soul of his body”. Chapter four explains Barth’s understanding that natural science concerns phenomena, not things in themselves. It argues that problems in physics and cognitive science indicate that there is no guarantee of the world’s intelligibility. That reinforces Barth’s dismissal of grand narratives. But Barth wrongly parallels theological and scientific activity. However his theology can engage with a science that makes only empirical claims. Chapter five situates Barth in a twenty-first century context. It argues that the empirical truth claims of science and the ontological ones of theology from revelation can relate to each other using secular parables of the truth. It exemplifies such parables from Darwinian science. They point to truths that theology could know but neglects. Chapter six summarizes the argument, contextualizing a theology of revelation for late modernity. Life on earth and human life within it exhibit a unity of the whole and a distinctiveness of the individual. They form a complex of relationships that are finite in time and bounded by grace. The Darwinian narrative understands the human person as a thoroughly physical entity. Natural science cannot rewrite revelation. But empirical biology points to features of human ontology that theology must not ignore.

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The primary objective of this thesis is to demonstrate that while the author of the Pastoral Epistles is faithful and committed to the apostolic gospel as well as strict in enforcing continuity with the primitive kerygmatic tradition, he is not, however, a mere mechanical transmitter or a lifeless purveyor of disparate christological traditions. Rather, he is a creative interpreter-theologian who has the ability to apply and to contemporize the existing traditional material by re-casting it within the distinctive framework of a coherent christology, that is, an 'Epiphany Christology'. Although this christology is couched in contemporary Hellenistic epiphany language, its predominant background is best seen in connection with the OT (Jewish-Hellenistic/LXX) idea of theophany, and its nature corresponds to the Pauline pre-existent and incarnational (Son of God) christology. With this epiphany christology the author intends to present a consistent understanding of the person and work of Christ in order to eludicate its christological significance and its present relevance to the particular historical context of his readers, that is the impending threat of heresy and apostasy in the church. He therefore shows a definite correlation between christology, ethics, and Christian existence.

The distinction is often made or assumed in New Testament studies that while Jesus is God in John, he is human in the synoptics. To a large degree, the primary thrust of the present dissertation is to call such a view into question, particularly with regard to the Gospels of Matthew and John. The proposal in the present dissertation is that Matthew and John are christologically comparable in three ways. First, they both present Jesus as closely resembling God's great agents from the Jewish literature by the first century AD: Wisdom, Moses and exalted angel-like figures. These great agents were indeed exalted figures of ancient times. Nevertheless, they were not understood by Judaism in the main as divine agents, i.e., independent beings with a divine nature. Second, both gospels portray Jesus as having a divine nature. This is seen through Jesus being the person Wisdom; having the ultimate authority which surpasses the Law; and being identified as 'I Am' and [Special characters omitted]. Third, the first and second comparisons are inter-locked contextually or thematically, with the result that Jesus is portrayed as a divine agent. In conclusion, the presentation of Jesus in Matthew and John is substantially the same with regard to these three comparisons. Both gospels reveal Jesus to be a divine agent. What John reveals explicitly, Matthew does more implicitly.

"Believe me, my young friend," said Water Bat. in The Wind in the willows, there is nothing-absolutely nothing-half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. "It may be a matter of literary taste as to whether that somewhat infelicitous expression can be applied to theology as well. But this much is certain, that no number of words, be they 'warmth' or 'devotion', can begin to describe what actually goes on in the scholar's mind when he pours over the documents of Life Eternal. Perhaps 'messing about' is more suggestive of those who appear to approach the New Testament somewhat lightheartedly and even at times disdainfully, clipping here and cutting there, all to fit some preconceived pattern brought to it from without. It is distressing to think that the noble New Testament teaching of the Kingdom of God has suffered so lamentably down the years from those who should have been the bearers and protectors of its message to the world. First it was literalized and futurized into a weird program of millennial glory; next it was betrothed to an heirarchical organization; then the humanists veiled its divine character and misinterpreted it in terms of human brotherhood realizable on earth. Finally in revolt, the Kingdom was called 'wholly other', 'wholly realized' or 'wholly future': suggestions not without their individual merits, to be sure, but used alone they have missed the grandeur of the Kingdom as a divine Rule and a Christian community, intimately one yet separately identifiable. And, too, they have failed to capture the utter simplicity of the Kingdom of God which is entered by faith in Christ the King and proceeds progressively and inevitably from the realized events of Christ's ministry, into our present experience, and onward to its consummation at the Parousia. The Kingdom of God is a divinely-directed 'progressive eschatology' which has a word of hope for our civilization and calls upon men to decide for or against membership in it. "For all the efforts of modern biblical scholars, "writes J.R. Nelson, it is far from evident that theologians have been able to interpret the Kingdom in such a way as to make it again the vital element of Christian faith That is certainly a telling criticism of all our efforts to date. In the past, liberal scholars ran roughshod over the divine character of the Kingdom with their 'by man alone' approach; and they along with many of the orthodox so individualized the concept of salvation that the doctrines of the Kingdom and the Church were all but lost along the way. The road back has been hard, almost Sisyphus-like; but now in this golden decade of biblical study we may hope that the stone will roll over the knoll to the other side and not back again to where we were forty or fifty years ago. Let us hope, anyway, that we shall not lose what Thurneysen and others discovered in the Bible out of the terrible experience of the first great War. "we read it, "he says, "with the eyes of shipwrecked men, for whom everything has gone overboard. And we did so, as it has turned out, not wholly in vain. The Bible gained a new meaning for us. Beyond all interpretations, its real word again began to speak; The word of forgiveness of sins, the proclamation of the, not humanly, but divinely coming kingdom. H2 Visser 't Hooft give us his impressions of the same experience on the part of the persecuted European Christians during the last War.3 This study of the Kingdom and the Church is presented as an attempt to bring together the doctrines which should be uniting the Church in inward fellowship and outward proclamation in our day I have tried to avoid any lop-sided interpretations, no matter how enticing, and to achieve that balance. which I am convinced lies intrinsically within the pages of the New Testament. Nor have I avoided the 'big' problems which inevitably confront one who writes on such a comprehensive subject as the Kingdom of God and the Church; but I have tried to meet each of them head-on. The theme of this study is what I have deign to call 'progressive aschatology'; its heart is the fellowship of believers in Christ.