The success of reductionism as a method in the natural sciences has heavily influenced modern theology, much of which attempts to reduce theology to other disciplines. However, the past few decades in science have shown the limitations of reductionism and the importance of emergence. The properties of complex systems with many constituents cannot be understood solely in terms of the constituent components and their interactions. I illustrate emergent properties and concepts with specific examples from geometry, condensed matter physics, chemistry and molecular biology. Emergence leads to a stratification of reality which affirms that ontology determines epistemology. To show the significance of emergence for the dialogue between theology and the natural sciences parallels are drawn with the theology of Karl Barth. The approach here is distinctly different from most writing on emergence and theology which embraces ‘strong’ emergence (which most scientists consider speculative), an immanent God and does not engage with orthodox Christian theology. Aspects of Barth's theology which are particularly relevant include his view that theology is an autonomous discipline which is not reducible to anthropology or history, the irreducible character of revelation, and the emphasis that ontology determines epistemology.

In choosing the title for these reflections, I have attempted to note not only a transition in the occupant of the Chair of New Testament Language, Literature & Theology in the University of Edinburgh, but also the historic period in which this transition takes place, in the closing years of one millennium, approaching the threshold of a new one. In an effort to engage the interests of a wide circle of readers in various scholarly specialities, I have also chosen to discuss (though only in very limited depth) several major questions, each of which could occupy us for much longer than space here permits. I hope at least to underline their importance, and to sketch a rationale for the positions I shall advocate. I cannot hope that this sketch will persuade anyone not already inclined to my views, but I can perhaps indicate that they are not without reason. If a thorough treatment is not possible here, I shall at least endeavour to be clear, and this may better stimulate the reflections of others.

Robert Jenson's two-volume Systematic Theology is a highly creative and individual synthesis of a number of often divergent strands of contemporary theology. An ecumenical and trinitarian theology, it is also a theology of narrative, hope, and of the word. The main body of this article attempts a sympathetic paraphrase of the argument of this work section by section. In a more critical ‘postscript’, it is argued that ‘word of God’ language is appropriate to the bible's twofold canonical structure, and that the appropriation of the beginning, middle and end of the biblical narrative to the first, second and third persons of the trinity respectively results in an undue bias towards eschatology.

Ever since the 1920s, Rudolf Bultmann has been charged with confining theology to philosophy, owing to his naïve adoption of Martin Heidegger's existentialist ontology. Bultmann's personal friendship with Heidegger is well-known, and the presence of Heideggerian concepts throughout his work is impossible to miss. But there is a great deal of confusion over the details of this relationship, and scholars differ widely over what conclusions we ought to draw regarding the nature of Bultmann's work. This article reassesses the Bultmann–Heidegger relationship from three angles. First, I show that the essential elements of Bultmann's theology were already in place before he met or learnt from Heidegger. Second, I argue that Bultmann circumscribes Heidegger's philosophy within a theology of revelation. Third, I demonstrate that his theological programme is, in principle, open to other conceptualities. Since nothing material rests on the appropriation of Heidegger, one cannot accurately call Bultmann a Heideggerian theologian.

This paper highlights two aspects of Stanley Hauerwas's thought: philosophical ethics, which consists of second-order methodological claims; and moral theology, which consists of first-order, local, unsystematic moral descriptions. I show how the philosophical ethics relates to the moral theology by proposing a set of rules that constitute a ‘grammar’ of Hauerwas's thought. These rules are asymmetrical in that later rules presuppose earlier rules but earlier rules do not presuppose later rules. Each rule corresponds to texts that Hauerwas recommends and relies upon. The first rule prioritizes MacIntyre's concept of non-foundational ‘practical wisdom’. The second rule, which draws on Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Anscombe and Kovesi to stress the impossibility of separating agent from act, influences the third rule that ethics is moral description. The fourth rule uses ‘postliberal’ theologians and draws on the liturgy alongside Barth and Yoder, in order to redescribe the shape of Christian life in liberal modernity.

This article seeks to offer a theological account of gratitude from a Protestant perspective by arguing that the Christian life is one marked by a covenant of grace and gratitude in which the creature's response of gratitude to divine grace is a participating in that grace, and, as such, is a full recognition of the ways of grace which flow from the divine life to creation. The first section of this article examines this theme in relation to creation from nothing. The second establishes God's electing will as the foundation of God's willing to be for another in creation. The third section examines justification by grace as the soteriological form of God's gracious turning towards the creature in divine mercy. The fourth section sketches the forms of gratitude that one might find in the Christian life as these are brought together in the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist.

The following speculations do not pretend to state a complete doctrine of the Trinity, though they do state decisive parts of one. The first section is an account of what is, in my view, the function of a Trinity-doctrine, and will to some extent repeat work also published elsewhere. The second section is an interpretation of the trinitarian word ‘hypostasis’, that tries to display the conceptual revolution made by the traditional trinitarian assertion of ‘three hypostases of God’. The third considers the oneness of God, by analysing a famous argument of Gregory of Nyssa. And the fourth draws some further conclusions.

Recent decades have witnessed a near-consensus of critical opinion (1) that the idea of God's creation of matter ‘out of nothing’ is not affirmed in scripture, but instead (2) originated in a second-century Christian reaction against Gnosticism's convictions about matter as evil and creation as the work of an inferior Demiurge. (3) Judaism's interest, by contrast, was generally deemed late and philosophically derivative or epiphenomenal upon Christian ideas. This essay re-examines all three convictions with particular reference to the biblical creation accounts in Palestinian Jewish reception. After highlighting certain interpretative features in the ancient versions of Genesis 1, this study explores the reception of such ideas in texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls and early rabbinic literature. It is clear that the typically cited proof texts from biblical or deutero-canonical books indeed do not yield clear confirmation of the doctrine they have sometimes been said to prove. Genesis was understood even in antiquity to be somewhat ambiguous on this point, and merely to say that creation gave shape to formlessness need not entail any creatio ex nihilo. This much seems uncontroversial. Nevertheless, closer examination also shows that the Scrolls and the rabbis do consistently affirm Israel's God as the creator of all things, explicitly including matter itself. Graeco-Roman antiquity axiomatically accepted that ‘nothing comes from nothing’, which also meant the pre-existence of matter. To be sure, the conceptual terminology of ‘nothingness’ came relatively late to Christians, and even later to Jews. Yet the substantive concern for God's free creation of the world without recourse to pre-existing matter is repeatedly affirmed in pre-Christian Jewish texts, and constitutes perhaps the single most important building block for the emergence of an explicit doctrine of ‘creation out of nothing’. In its Jewish and Christian origins, therefore, the idea of creatio ex nihilo affirms creation's comprehensive contingency on the Creator's sovereignty and freedom. This in fact is a point which has been rightly and repeatedly accented in both historic and modern Christian theology on this subject (e.g. by K. Barth and E. Brunner, J. Moltmann and C. Gunton). Well before its explicit articulation in dialogue with Hellenistic philosophy, the doctrine of God's creation of all matter was rooted in biblical texts and their Jewish interpretation, which in turn came to be refined and enriched through Christian–Jewish dialogue and controversy.

The title is suggested by Saint Paul's phrase (Ephesians 1.4) “according as he hath chosen us in him,” that is in Christ. The object of this essay is to point out the meagre use made of the phrase and of the idea it conveys by the classic doctrine of Predestination, and to show the deplorable consequences that follow.

I. Calvin

It would of course be absurd to suggest that Calvin totally neglects the thought that Predestination is in Christ. Rather this is a presupposition in all he has to say about it, at least in this sense, that, challenged whether he held Predestination to be in Christ, he would unhesitatingly have affirmed that it was. But it is the fate of many presuppositions to fall into the background, if not into forgetfulness, and to exercise less influence than they should do. It is the view of the present writer that the Calvinist theology failed to draw fully upon the implications of the presupposition that Predestination is in Christ.

Two questions are well asked at this point: What is the relation of those elected to Christ? and: What is Christ's part in their election?

(i) Here the text which has already been quoted is cited by Calvin: We are in Christo electi, and we are in Christo adoptati (Inst.3.22.1). And in 3.22.2, the elect are said to be again “chosen in Christ.”

In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard, writing as Johannes Climacus, famously distinguishes two kinds of religiousness, kind A and kind B. He claims that, even though kind A is basic to kind B, including as represented in Christian religious commitment, kind A both has God ‘in its ground’ and ‘can be present in paganism’ that is atheist or agnostic. This apparent conflict calls for a resolution, if kind A is to be coherent. This article offers a new resolution with a familiar distinction between God de re and God de dicto, even though interpreters have overlooked the importance of this distinction for understanding Kierkegaard. In addition, the article contends that this distinction is supportable from Kierkegaard's own writings, even though he himself did not draw it explicitly. The article also explains the importance of the distinction for understanding Kierkegaard on religious diversity in intellectual content. It proposes that it enables Kierkegaard to offer a compelling position on such diversity, given his understanding of God's perfectly good character and activity.

Wilhelm Herrmann remains of importance in present theological debates, particularly those between Bultmann and Barth, two of his most distinguished pupils. Barth's own break with liberal theology was to an extent a break with his teacher Herrmann, a rejection of revelation as essentially the mode of inward appropriation within the religious subject and a rejection of the psychological pragmatism which determines the soteriological significance of Jesus in terms of the moral need of the individual. Barth sees Bultmann as setting forth in existentialist categories the transformation of the inner life of the believer and reminds us of all that Bultmann learned from Herrmann long before he had ever heard of Heidegger. When we consider the distinction drawn by Herrmann between historico-critical research and the certitude of faith, his conception of revelation as event in the life of the individual, his sharp rejection of dogmatics as a normative discipline, we discern motifs which continue to be determinants of Bultmann's theology.

The theological situation today demands both a restatement and a reinstatement of the Christian doctrine of reconciliation. The essential prerequisite of any attempt to interpret, reinterpret or restate that doctrine is a due appreciation of the historical origins and subsequent development of the concept. It is clearly futile to develop or defend theories of reconciliation which originally rest upon some manifestly incorrect interpretation of a Hebrew root, or which represent a comparatively recent distortion of an older and more considered doctrine, or which represent a theological response to a particular Zeitgeist which no longer pertains today. Of the several concepts employed in the Christian articulation of the reconciliation effected between God and his world through Jesus Christ, the most important is that of justification.

The language of Christian prayer reflects two central components of christology. One is the exclusive importance attached to a brief portion of history centring upon the death of Jesus, while the other is the assertion of his continuing presence to the believer. The ways in which these twin themes are articulated is nowhere more apparent than in the theology of the resurrection. In this respect the resurrection provides the most important case-study in Christian interpretation. The sense in which the history of Jesus is theologically significant and the sense in which he can be spoken of as present — these are partly illustrated and partly constituted by the interpretation of the resurrection.

To reconcile the early chapters of the book of Genesis with the findings of science has been the self-appointed task of Christian apologists for generations. Indeed in our own day the much publicized manoeuvres of a militant creationist movement reveal just how vibrant the debate remains in some quarters about how to relate the book of Nature to the book of Scripture. Over the years numerous harmonizing strategies have been advanced and, once hatched, they have, like organisms, evolved and adapted to the intellectual climate in which they have found themselves. Among these, the gap theory (postulating a lengthy period of time between Genesis 1 verse 1 and 1 verse 2 into which the whole gamut of geological history can be squeezed), the day-age theory (interpreting the creative days as geological epochs), and the ‘days of revelation’ theory (seeing the Genesis week as successive days of divine disclosure) might be specified as concordist schemes whose fortunes have changed with the passing of time. For ideas, it is clear, no less than individuals, can enjoy social legitimation or suffer from the lack of it.

Beginning from Richard Bauckham's proposal that the biblical theme of creation's praise is of considerable importance for an ecological spirituality, this article takes a close look at Luke 19:40, a text largely ignored in ecological readings of the Bible. An examination of Luke's distinctive account of the entry into Jerusalem and a consideration of the relevant Jewish parallels to the motif of the crying stone leads to a view of the stones’ cry as one of both praise and protest. The ecotheological potential of this text is then discussed and, in contrast to Bauckham's view of creation's praise as something creation always and already does simply by being itself, an eschatological view of creation's praise – and the combined expression of praise and protest – is presented as important, not least for its ecotheological and ethical potential.

The relationship between biblical exegesis and modern theology is complex. The two are rarely, if ever, independent of one another. No Christian theology is done in a vacuum, and all Christian theologising is, in a sense, an interpretation of the Christian tradition.1 Any new theological synthesis is formulated in part as a dialogue with past theologies. In this dialogue, one may be critical of the past; one may wish to preserve the past to a greater or lesser degree. What is determinative is the theologian's current apprehension of what Christianity is, but this in turn will have been created and shaped by the interplay between the theologian and the tradition in the past.2 Christian theologising thus involves a continuous dialogue between the theologian and the tradition.

Theologians are not generally aware of the influence of the concept of spirituality in education. Is it not remarkable, not to say amazing, for example, that the secular Parliament of Great Britain should pass a bill listing ‘spiritual development’ as the first aim of the school curriculum?1 But educationists are not generally aware of the rich heritage of thought about spirituality in Christian faith and practice. And one is also tempted to say that theologians and educationists do not read much material from philosophy about ‘spirit’ and ‘spirituality’. Yet spirituality is too important to be confined to narrow treatments in separate academic disciplines.