Review of Emil Brunner, Christianity and Civilisation. First Part: Foundations, Gifford Lectures, delivered at the University of St. Andrews, 1947 (London: John Nisbet and Company, 1948), and Evgenii Lampert, The Apocalypse of History: Problems of Provide

Abstract Wight wrote that the “break” between Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, then leading Protestant theologians, “came on an issue that repeatedly forms parties in the history of the Church, how to interpret the balance between reason and revelation. Can there be a natural theology? Is revelation prepared for and supplemented by reason? Barth pugnaciously asserts the transcendence and Divine arbitrariness of the Christian Revelation. Brunner emphasises its congruity with and fulfilment of history. . . . There is all his serene lucidity in the first series of Brunner’s Gifford Lectures. He writes an extraordinarily smooth and readable English, and the book makes a masterly philosophical survey of the problems of ontology and truth, time and meaning, justice and freedom, simple and compact enough to be an introduction. . . . Dr. Lampert’s essay in the philosophy of history has more meat in it. Dr. Lampert is a young Russian theologian at Oxford. He writes in the Orthodox tradition, grounded in patristic learning, enriched by the Russian theologians from Dostoevsky to Berdyaev, detached from but deeply read in Western thought from Aquinas to Nietzsche. Two last chapters on ‘Night and Day’ and ‘East and West’ as symbols of the rhythm of history resemble the cosmic fantasies of that near-great novelist Merezhkovsky, intuitive and undisciplined but perhaps not therefore uncreative. But they are only colouring to a scholarly and perceptive discussion of the eschatological interpretation of history, as clamantly relevant as Henry Moore’s Three Standing Figures.”