Karl Barth urged that we go through life with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, but that does not settle how we are to unite the perspectives of faith with contemporary facts. In this Reformed World we bring the two inside a single cover, but the question of integration remains.

Of our four writers, Jürgen Moltmann comes closest to tackling it directly. In an intellectual tour de force he joins together what so often we put asunder: the God of the Reformers and the God of the liberation theologians, the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New. With German understatement he writes, "It is important for Christians to see the real history of injustice and violence as sin, in order to find from the Spirit of God the power to do what is right and to find peace." Otherwise, we may add, Christianity becomes what Marx said it was - the flowers on the chain, the heart of a heartless world, its consolation and its justification.

In a lengthy survey, Walter Brueggemann shows conclusively that justice and the just community as the gift and demand of God is a central theme of the Old Testament. But there is a sting in his tail. Alongside this radical scriptural challenge, he argues, there is a second, more conservative, strand in scripture, which is more careful of the order of society and more considerate of the interests of the rich. The same tension, we may note, can be seen in the past and present of the church. In a later issue we will extend Brueggemann's analysis into the more difficult terrain of the New Testament.

Ofelia Ortega writes of the suffering of Latin America and how the churches there are challenged to respond, while Aruna Gnanadason rubs our nose in the reality of women's oppression and uplifts us with their hope. Theology may be less prominent in these two articles, but both remind us forcefully of facts which any theology of justice today must address.

Páraic Réamonn