“A Reform manifesto”: Thus did Professor James Mackinnon characterise Luther's Commentary on Romans. This twofold collection of interlinear and marginal glosses (glossae) and continuous expositions (scholia), discovered only at the birth of the present century and first published in 1908 under the editorship of Johannes Ficker, represents the doctrinal core of the Protestant Reformation. The Wittenberg Theses only marked the practical outcome of a theological revolution which had already been announced in Luther's Lectures on Romans, delivered in the years 1515 and 1516. This declaration of theological independence merits close attention. It is indeed a work of genius “of very great span, of remarkable clarity and vigour,” as Henri Strohl affirmed. Karl Holl went even further. He regarded this as Luther's greatest achievement, along with his Galatians, and thought it still unsurpassed.

The Reformed Minister in the contemporary Church is concerned about his Ministry because he realises that without a doctrine of the Church's ministry, there can't be a true doctrine of the Church. The revived interest in the theology of the Church, has therefore led to a renewed interest in the Reformed doctrine of the Ministry. Among many excellent ministers in Canada and in the United States and among seriously-minded Divinity students in a Southern Presbyterian Seminary, I have frequently noticed uncertainty with regard to the doctrinal basis of the pastoral calling. The Scottish minister has a traditional regard for his vocation which is still shared by the vast majority of the Church people. But he too might sometimes wonder where the Minister really stands, not only in the tradition and practice but in the doctrine of the Church.

How do a generous orthodoxy and contemporary feminist theology relate and work together, if at all? Can feminist theology have something to say to a generous orthodoxy other than blatant critique? Orthodoxy is seen as that view expressed in the rule of faith as early as Irenaeus and Tertullian, and is a constellation of beliefs which link Creator with Christ, OT with NT, and which employs the interpretation of scripture ‘according to itself’. A definition of generous orthodoxy means a Christ-like submission to the Other, and reasoning about God, three in one, through meditation on the scriptures and tradition of the church such that one's soul is turned to praise. A simple definition of feminist theology is ‘the radical notion that women are people too’ (so Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Sharing Her Word: Feminist Biblical Interpretation in Context, 1998). Can these two ways of envisioning the theological task work together, and if so, to what extent? With key doctrines and concepts of feminist theology such as patriarchy, women's experience, feminist consciousness, one questions the fit between orthodoxy and feminist theology, but of course this is purposefully so on the basis of feminist principles and dogmas. We will examine and compare the construction of sin, Christology and the trinity in feminist theologies and generously orthodox theologies to clarify the discussion.

In examining the similarities and differences between God and humanity in his analogia relalionis, Karl Barth correlates three I-Thou relations: God to Godself in similarity and difference (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit); humans to humans in similarity and difference (male and female); God to humanity and humanity to God in similarity and difference. For all three, Jesus Christ is the master analogue. Christ relates to God in a God-God ‘I-Thou’ relationship, to humanity in a human-human ‘I-Thou’ relationship, and God to humanity and humanity to God in a God-human ‘I-Thou’ relationship.

Calvin is one with the other Christian communities in teaching a presence of Christ's body and blood in the Lord's Supper. To arrive at a conclusion other than this is to misread him, to misunderstand and misinterpret him. Certainly, the reformer cannot be numbered among the sacramentarians, as if he had taught that the partaking of Christ's flesh and the drinking of his blood were nothing more than merely believing in Christ. The sacraments are signs, it is true, but they are not merely signs, they are signs of a present reality.

The second letter of Peter follows the usual sequence of proclamation and exhortation. But it is also typical when it betrays a melancholy realisation of the gap between hope and reality. First, there comes the proclamation of salvation. ‘He has bestowed on us the great and precious things he promised, so that through these you who have fled a world corrupted by lust, might become sharers of the divine nature.’ (1.4) Yet, evidently this initial conversion by no means gives irreversible thrust and momentum. Thus an exhortation to keep working must be added. ‘Be solicitous to make your call and election permanent.’ (1.10) Finally, beyond the exhortation, there is need to confront the discouraging reality reflected in the mockery of the sceptics. ‘They will ask: Where is that promised coming of his? Our forefathers have been laid to rest, but everything stays just as it was when the world was created.’(3.4)

In what follows I offer a dyptich on the assurance of salvation and its relation to good works in three Christian traditions, Reformed, Lutheran, and Catholic. The Orthodox Reformed (or the Reformed scholastics in the generations after Calvin) consider the assurance of salvation in terms of the practical syllogism: crudely put, my salvation depends on God's election, but I can tell whether I am among the elect by examining my good works. The Orthodox Lutherans (Lutheran scholastics in the generations after Luther) consider die assurance of salvation in terms of fides praevisa, or (crudely) faith that God foresees, in abstraction from the further question of whether or not God also causes it. Thomas Aquinas, comparable in method and influence, considers the sort of knowledge that observation of one's merits bestows: not certainty but conjecture.y

Since at least the time of Albert Schweitzer's attempt to move justification from die Mitte to the margins, the question of the centre of Paul's theology has included a criticism of the Reformation's classification of justification as ‘the lord, ruler, and judge’ of theology. For the reformers, however, this designation is not so much a claim about the centrality of the vocabulary of justification as it is a claim about the grammar of the gospel: justification, because it is articulated as an antithesis, says both what the gospel is not and what the gospel is. With this understanding of the theological function of justification in view, the role of justification in Paul's letter to the Galatians can be reconsidered: the antithetical grammar of justification is a critical and hermeneutical criterion in Galatians, both identifying and negating the ‘other gospel’ even as it picks out and proclaims ‘the gospel of Christ’.

… the reliability of the kerygmatic tradition must not be questioned, for otherwise the eschatological event to which the kerygma testifies would be implicated in the relativity of all historical knowledge.

This paper elucidates the connections in Gregory of Nyssa's thought between the rite of baptism, the doctrine of God as Trinity, and practices of ecclesial pedagogy. These components formed a dynamic and differentiated whole for Gregory. To consider one element in isolation from the others runs the risk of interpretive distortion of Gregory's work. This means that the current tendency to harvest Gregory's trinitarian ideas abstracted or disembodied from the rite of baptism and practices of ecclesial pedagogy perpetuates the false notion that the doctrine of the Trinity can be adequately treated apart from liturgical and pedagogical concerns.

Presumably it is not necessary here to offer a potted history of discussions of ‘cultural relativity’ and supposed ‘culture gaps’ … we can press the story back through Professor Dennis Nineham, (and other contributors to The Myth of God Incarnate,) to T. S. Kuhn and to suggestions from Alasdair Maclntyre, and others such as Peter Winch claiming the support of Ludwig Wittgenstein. We can go. back beyond them to Rudolph Bultmann, as does Professor Joseph Runzo in his ‘Relativism and Absolutism in Bultmann's demythologising Hermeneutic’ recently in this journal. We can go back even further to Albert Schweitzer (‘Jesus as a concrete historical personality remains a stranger to our time’) and then behind him to the Enlightenment — or at least to its immediate heirs' assessment of it.

I am grateful to John Perry for his deft and illuminating review, which nudges in productive ways at the unity and shape of the story I have told in Putting on Virtue. In brief, Perry reads my book as a defence of Christian eudaimonism against charges of hypocrisy. He judges the defence to be a success, but suggests that I am conflating two distinct issues, only one of which is helpfully construed as hypocrisy. As a result of this conflation, I end up including topics and thinkers which don't properly belong under the same umbrella, and failing to do justice to those that do. I overlook the significance of the journey metaphor for Augustine's construal of pagan virtue, and so miss some of his most valuable resources for coming to terms with the character of all virtue in via. Furthermore, while Luther might appear to be the villain of my narrative, Perry argues that in fact he hardly deserves a place in it. Luther's rejection of eudaimonism is so complete that he doesn't really contribute at all to an ongoing conversation about it; his real concern is justification, with an unfortunate spillover into the foreign territory of ethics. It is Hume, Perry proposes, who is the proper villain, undermining the eudaemonist tradition by unashamedly setting aside the task of differentiating objective goods from subjective goods.