Uniformly positive response to the first issue of the Global Journal of Classical Theology has confirmed our conviction that such a publication is just what the doctor (of theology) ordered: biblical truth on the highest intellectual plane, available online for the approaching new millennium.
In this, our second issue, we offer a previously unpublished essay on Milton’s Paradise Lost – heavily dependent upon C. S. Lewis – by the late Arthur Henry Robertson. When “Bill” Robertson, archetypical expatriate Englishman, barrister-at-law with an earned higher doctorate in law from Harvard, and Director of Human Rights for the Council of Europe, was Secretary-General of the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, he chose me to serve under him as Director of Studies. He also recommended me to Middle Temple in London, his Inn of Court, for my own training as a barrister. After Bill’s untimely death I dedicated my Human Rights and Human Dignity to him and secured, not without difficulty, his personal papers and library for the Simon Greenleaf School of Law (now Trinity International University School of Law). With his several standard works on international human rights published by Manchester University Press, Bill exemplified the highest scholarly standards combined with firm Christian conviction. You will discover from his essay how cultured a fine Christian lawyer can be – not a common phenomenon these days, one notes sadly.
Physicist John Bloom, one of the contributors to my Evidence for Faith, the Cornell Symposium on Evidential Apologetics (Probe Books) offers a fine essay on a subject dear to his heart and vital in the defence of biblical truth: The value of fulfilled prophecy. He focuses, quite properly, neither on subjective charismatic prophecy nor on speculative end-time prophecy, but on the Old Testament predictions which have already come to verifiable fulfilment. In the Patristic age, fulfilled prophecy in this sense was a bulwark of the church’s apologetic: it should be more used today than it is. Bloom’s essay is an important step in that direction.
Homosexuality vis-a-vis biblical teaching and the question of the toleration of homosexual practices by laymen and the clergy looms large among the controversial ecclesiastical issues of the moment. It would be difficult to find a better treatment of this timely moral issue than that provided here by Geunther Haas of Redeemer College, Ontario, Canada.
Finally, the Revd Kenneth Harper, my student assistant in the antediluvian days when I held a professorship at the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois, and a frequent contributor of trenchant essays at the national Annual Meetings of the Evangelical Theological Society, regales us with the implications of psychological and educational “generational theory” for the work of the local church and indeed, of the church at large.
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A feast of theological reading indeed!
John Warwick Montgomery
