The Christian understanding of time is characterised by an event which is the very centre of the Christian message, and of which it is said that it happened once and for all. This ephapax is evidently an essential part of the theology of St. Paul and of the Epistle to the Hebrews. The Christian conceives of time like everything else from this centre, i.e. from Jesus Christ, and therefore it is from this centre that our reflection upon the essence of time has to start. This must be stated explicitly because another point of departure has been suggested by traditional theology. Certainly it was an act of great intuition on the part of St. Augustine when in his Confessions he dared, for the first time in history, to put forward the idea that the world was neither timeless and eternal, nor created at a certain point in the time-series, but that the world and time were created together. Therefore if the world and time have the same beginning in creation, it becomes meaningless to ask what God did before the creation of the world. The whole schema of before and after, the framework of time, cannot be regarded as existing before creation, but as coming into being with creation, itself a temporal fact.

It is often claimed that the problem of communicating the Gospel is the major practical problem facing the Church to-day, as it may also be the major theological problem. This concern is a very healthy sign, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that we are apt to be so concerned with devising new methods of evangelism as to forget the one factor of supreme importance: the burden of the Gospel itself, that is, to forget that the Gospel is not simply the message of divine love, but the actual way in which God communicates Himself to us in history. No technique that forgets that the Gospel has already been made supremely relevant to sinful humanity in the Incarnation and death of Jesus Christ will ever avail for the communication of the Gospel. This is therefore an attempt to probe into what the New Testament has to say to us about this, and into the way in which, as a matter of fact, the New Testament actually communicates the Gospel to us.

This paper gives an account of the religious epistemology and theological working methods used in Anne Conway's Principia Philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae (1690). It is argued that the epistemic foundations of Conway's philosophical theology are rooted in a personal revelation of the existence and nature of God, which forms a framework through which the natural world can be approached and studied as creation. In this way, we can clarify both the place of Conway's work in the intellectual currents of the seventeenth century and various aspects of her metaphysical system, such as her account of creation.

Paul quoted extensively from scripture, especially in Romans. Many of these citations are from the Psalms, using the Septuagint. Paul could have found all his vocabulary and concepts for ‘justification by faith’ in the Psalms. The Psalms contain a doctrine of ‘righteousness through faithfulness’: God is righteous by forming a covenant with Israel, and proves his righteousness by remaining faithful to that covenant despite Israel's failings. He will remain faithful to the end by vindicating his righteous ones when they are oppressed by the ungodly. Israelites are righteous by having been elected to the covenant and will remain righteous through faithfulness to God, the marks of which are the avoidance of idolatry and keeping the law. Far from rejecting this Old Testament inheritance, Paul takes over this doctrine of ‘righteousness through faithfulness’ as it stands in the Psalms (Romans 1:18–3:20) and then christologises it (from 3:21). The mark of faithfulness to God now is no longer the law, however, but faithfulness to Christ, who is himself the model of faithfulness and what it is to be righteous. This understanding of how one becomes righteous is located by Paul himself within his fivefold scheme of salvation at Romans 8:30: foreknown, predestined, called, made righteous and glorified.

The word ‘theology’ can be and is used in a number of different ways. It has developed a variety of meanings, such that the use of this same word to allude to different concepts sometimes leads to confusion. In this paper I intend to look at the development of the word ‘theology’ without necessarily resolving the question of what theology is by reference to any one of the past meanings as a determining norm for a new quest. However, in the course of this analysis, certain suggestions will be made that may help to indicate directions for theology in our time.

The attraction of what Richard Cross describes as a generic view of God's trinitarian substance is undeniable. Even before the Arians professed belief in the Son of God as being of secondary divine rank vis-à-vis the Father, Origen demonstrated a tendency to envisage a derivation view of God's substance in which the Son was somewhat less divine than the Father. However, Cross's contention that Athanasius promoted this same concept is not as clear-cut as he suggests, although there are texts in the Athanasian corpus of writings lending credence to such an interpretation. While Athanasius did accept the monarchical view of the Trinity, with God the Father as the origin or source of intra-trinitarian life, he also stressed the consubstantial nature of the Son and the Father.

I offer three reasons for revising what was, until recently, a fairly widespread assumption about a limitation on Protestant ethical theory. First, I identify a broad and diverse array of contemporary Protestants who are rehabilitating natural law theories or facets thereof. Second, I consider and attempt to rebut two principal objections to the theological coherence of a distinctively Protestant theory of the natural law. With special reference to the theology of John Calvin, I argue that a Protestant account of the natural law need not deny that either (1) sin has dramatically hindered the cognitive faculties of humans or (2) God is somehow subjected to the natural law. Third, I illustrate the ecumenical implications that may result from Protestants’ explicit affirmation of the natural law. I conclude that the Protestant tradition affords both historical examples and conceptual space to accommodate some form of natural law theory.

More scholarly lances have been broken, with apparently less conclusiveness over Isa. 40–55, the so-called Second Isaiah, than over any comparable section of the Old Testament. Ever since B. Duhm1 published towards the end of last century his epoch-making commentary, two interrelated problems have been at the centre of scholarly discussion.

The first problem which confronts us is that of the relation of this verse and of the whole section 5.12–21 to what has preceded.

Many Christians in the Western tradition would find the idea of salvation as the deification of man alien because the concept of justification by faith has played such a central and influential role in Western soteriologies. There is, however, a renaissance of the concept of deification or theosis in contemporary theology even outside its traditional home in Eastern Orthodoxy. Many Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians have discovered that although the two metaphors, justification and deification, emphasise different aspects of salvation, they are not incompatible with each other. In addition, theologians in the Western tradition are arguing that although the forensic and declarative aspect of justification is important, justification also has a transformative aspect. An exploration of the transformative aspect of justification has resulted in the discovery of interesting ways in which this concept can be brought closer to that of theosis in the Eastern tradition.

At the present time a considerable amount of attention is being paid to the eschatology of St. Luke's Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, largely as a result of the publication in 1954 of Professor Hans Conzelmann's Die Mitte der zeit,1 which has recently been made available in English under the title, The Theology of St. Luke.2 In addition to this work, Professor C. K. Barrett's Luke the Historian in Recent Research3 must now be mentioned.

After a short preliminary consideration, we shall discuss some presuppositions of our theme in parts A and B and then only in part C, as a summary, present the whole theme. This method will necessitate some minor repetitions, but it should serve to cast some light on the contemporary situation.

This article argues that the Christian West's indebtedness to contractual logic in regard to marriage, as canonically depicted in 1 Corinthians 7, has resulted in a corresponding theological and pastoral myopia. The weakness of this reliance, as seen paradigmatically in Augustine's theology of marriage, consists in its articulation of marriage's constitution apart from any meaningful reference to the particular dynamics of any given marital common life. ‘Marriage’, in this sense, remains extrinsic to the living of marriage. Augustine doubly solidifies this separation by construing marriage as a contractually negotiated site for the sinful, though forgivable, expression of sexual desire, which he then roots in a christological account of sacrament whereby the sacramental bond of marriage can never be broken regardless of the lived particularities of marital life. A promising corrective can be found by way of a theological retrieval of a minor set of images suggestively employed in passages such as Ephesians 5:21–33 and Revelation 19:7–9 rooted in cultic themes such as sacrifice and consecration, which Augustine employs in describing marriage's preferred ecclesial alternative: the consecration of virginity. The constructive result is a theology of marriage in which every moment of marital life is marked by the ambivalence of vulnerably and ‘deathly’ surrendering to one another, which is pre-eminently embodied in the surrender of Christ himself upon the cross to the one he called Father. This ambivalence is characterised by the dual possibility, inherent in the posture of surrender itself, in which the result can either bear the healing fruits of love and reciprocal embrace or the tragic inhumanity of abuse, rejection and manipulation. Finally, the sacrificial and contractual elements of marriage might be ultimately reconciled in a refigured notion of ‘covenant’, which too often has been understood simply as a synonym for ‘contract’. Instead, a proper covenantal understanding of marriage emerges as a participatory analogy to the entire, complicated and contingent history of God, with God's people marked by seemingly endless cycles of sin, repentance, forgiveness and restoration. Intriguingly, this history was also founded within a temporal space outlined by a mix of contractual elements and cultic regulations. Likewise, the covenantal founding of a marriage mirrors a similar dynamic: the initial ‘contractual’ vows speak into existence a temporalised space within which a daily, mundane life of love might come to pass and bear its fruits, in due time, by God's grace and the daily improvisations of love and sacrifice.

For the Christian ‘Pentecost’ is a shorthand way of referring to the initial outpouring of the Spirit on the disciples of Jesus described in Acts 2, although of course the events of that historic day included a public address by Peter and the conversion and baptism of a substantial number of his hearers. The event is scarcely mentioned elsewhere in the NT. The narrative in Acts interprets it as the fulfilment of the prophecy of the baptism with the Spirit made by John the Baptist (Acts i.4f.), and there is one clear reference back to it in Peter's account of the conversion of Cornelius (Acts 11.15–17; cf. 10.47). Otherwise there is no specific reference to it anywhere in the NT, and there is an account of what appears to be a different bestowal of the Spirit by Jesus on ten of His disciples in Jn. 20.22. Luke's narrative is filled with problems of interpretation, and the lack of comparative material makes assessment of its historicity and significance all the more difficult. What we may be able to discuss with some hope of success is Luke's own understanding of the event, since we have the rest of his narrative in the Gospel and Acts as a context to aid us in discovering his interpretation.

Karl Barth's formidable attack on all forms of natural theology is one of the major events in twentieth-century religious thought. He anathematized every effort by unaided reason to conceive adequately of the nature of God or to demonstrate God's existence. To him all are disguised attempts to ‘domesticate’ God in the circumscribed and self-serving world of human interests. Those theologians who are dissatisfied with this dimension of Barth's thought sometimes criticize it, but more often find it easier just to ignore him and go their own ways. Those philosophers who are interested in provoking a confrontation with Barth find it difficult to penetrate the confessional circle and establish a point of contact which the defenders of Barth's prohibition of natural theology would themselves be constrained to acknowledge.

My contention is that there is such a point of contact open to theological and philosophical critique, one which previous critics have overlooked. The argument is organized around five theses. They are:

1. The foundation of Barth's position on God's knowability lies in Church Dogmatics II, 1. Here he declares that God's noetic absoluteness derives from his ontic absoluteness (pp. 310f). To the critical eye this spurious derivation appears to be a non sequitur rather than an acceptable statement of logical entailment or of metaphysical or theological necessity.

2. Barth fails to support the derivation with convincing exegetical arguments of the sort required to override its conceptual weakness. This is a rather surprising circumstance for one who strives to rest his entire theology on revelation.

The New Testament interpretation of the Cross is the starting point for the doctrine of Incarnation and of Atonement. Their relationship is governed by the emergent elements, which are both central and permanent.

Professor Joachim Jeremias has raised the question of the logos problem. He calls attention to the change in the Septuagint (LXX) from the vocalisation of to and its translation with λόγος in Hab. 3:5, the personified logos in Wis. 18:14–16, and the unmistakable closeness of Rev. 19:11–16 to the latter passage. He notes that the logos title in the New Testament is limited to the Johannine writings (John 1:1, 14; 1 John1:1; Rev. 19:13). Jeremias says that in dealing with the logos problem in New Testament investigation it has become customary to begin with the prologue of John and that this is an error since the absolute use of ὁ λόγος, ‘the Word’, in John 1:1, 14 (in contrast to , ‘the word of life’, in 1 John 1:1 and , ‘The word of God’, in Rev. 19:13) warrants the assumption that the title was known to the readers and that it already had a Christian prehistory behind it when the Johannine prologue was formed. Jeremias concludes that the unmistakable closeness of Rev. 19:11–16 to Wis. 18:14–16 must be noted; that the logos title might have originated in Hellenistic Judaism and so applied to Jesus Christ as a title of the returning Lord; that, on the other hand, John 1:1, 14 and 1 John 1:1–31, where the title is extended to the pre-existent and earthly Jesus, already represent an advanced stage of the Christian usage of the logos title.