In the following discussion I wish to demonstrate the basic homogeneity of Barth's thinking on the relationship between Divine self-disclosure and Religion. In order to restrict the discussion, reference will be made to the second edition of the commentary on Romans, the first volume of the Church Dogmatics, the essays: ‘The Humanity of God’and ‘The Christian Understanding of Revelation’, and volume four of the Dogmatics— for if there has been a significant change in the structure of Barth's thinking, one must expect to find such evidence in these basic sources. While the primary aim is to explore the relationship between Revelation and Religion, the discussion must necessarily take into consideration a number of secondary relationships which impinge upon the central theme at certain places. These secondary relationships as it happens, vary in accordance with the dialogical situation in which Barth formulates his argument. In Romans for example, the resurrection of Jesus occupies a pivotal position, but in the first volume of the Dogmatics he has shifted his attention to the significance of the Incarnation. Again, however, at the closing stages of volume four attention has swung back to the importance and relevance of the resurrection for Christian faith.

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)

Studies of the Rahab story in Joshua illustrate how, as interpreters, we can read our interests and convictions into a text, allow it no room to protest that it did not have these interests or convictions, and give it no opportunity conversely to question the interests and convictions that we bring to it as interpreters. This raises the question whether we actually want to discover things from texts or whether we simply want to provide illustrations of and support for what we think already.

This article demonstrates that an economic context is essential to the metaphor that Anselm of Canterbury and Peter Abelard used in their arguments against a ransom theory of atonement. Contrary to typical analyses, which suggest their metaphor makes a point about obedience or honour that slaves or servants owe to a master or king, this metaphor in fact suggests relations between the lord of a manor and his servi – serfs bound to the land, perpetually indebted to the lord and effectively considered his property. Should servi attempt to desert their lord, he had the right simply to reclaim them wherever they went. Insofar as this right voided the servus’ choice to leave their lord, the metaphorical framework of manorial economy ruled out the ‘rights of the devil’ in a way previous debt-slavery and military frameworks for ransom theory (in themselves) did not.

The broad contours of Augustine's critique of Stoic virtue theory in De civitate dei 19.4 finds a fascinating analogue in Theodor Adorno's theory of immanent critique: Augustine ‘enters’ into Stoic virtue theory and criticises it from its own postulates, illustrating the striking implausibility of Stoic orthodoxy when lived out in concreto and the absurd, but logical, conclusions to which one is necessarily carried by Stoic ethics. Through this deconstruction, Augustine clears a space to propose his own virtue ethic. Augustine maintains that a Stoic virtue ethic fails to deliver on its promised eudaimonistic ends because it lacks a robust eschatological vision. For Augustine, the Christian faith offers a more viable virtue ethic.

Throughout his life, Augustine faced the charge that, despite his apparent conversion to the orthodox Christian faith of the Catholic Church, his thought nonetheless retained vestiges of his roughly ten-year sojourn with the Manichees. No one was more relentless in this accusation than Augustine's Pelagian nemesis of his twilight years, Julian of Eclanum. Throughout most of church history, Augustine's reputation was little troubled by these allegations of crypto-Manichaeism. However, over the last century or so, the charge has once again taken on life. This article begins with a brief orientation to some of the main philosophical and theological tenets of Manichaeism, with an emphasis on those elements that will be important for assessing the Augustine question. Next, the history of the accusation that the Christian Augustine remained, in important if unconscious ways, a crypto-Manichaean will be traced from the time of Augustine to the present. Finally, one methodological direction in which an eventual resolution to this long-standing question may lie will be considered.

John Owen was the main exponent of the classic Independency of the mid-seventeenth century. He was no mere sectary, the very antithesis of the fanatic; a highly intelligent and highly educated man; and a voluntary, not a compulsory, Nonconformist. From a writer as systematic and as magisterial as Owen it should be possible to gain some light on the meaning of the Lord's Supper for his generation of Dissenters.

Several years before the mode of Christ's eucharistic presence became a controverted issue which would presently provoke a lasting schism among the Churches of the Reformation, Luther could unaffectedly propound the traditional dogma of the bodily presence of Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar as a necessary consequence of the evangelical quest for the sensus grammaticus of the words of institution. The same exegetical method which led to his reappropriation of the doctrine of the justification of the sinner ‘by grace, for Christ's sake, through faith’ obliged him to confess that ‘the bread is the body of Christ’. Already here, in the mordantly anti-Roman treatise On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther has laid his finger on the model in terms of which he will understand the real presence to the end of his days: the consecrated host is the body of Christ, just as the assumed humanity of jesus Christ is the Son of God. The displacement of the scholastic theory of transubstantiation by the model of the incarnate person illustrates the Reformer's allegiance to the Chalcedonian Definition: ‘Luther is really replacing Aristotelian categories by those derived from Chalcedonian christology, to which he remained faithful: “unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably”.’ While the doctrine of the real presence moved from the periphery to the centre of Luther's theology and piety as the 1520s wore on, his conception of the modality of the eucharistic presence remained constant throughout.

In Exodus 3, 14 a concept of the God of Israel is hinted at, and the hint is taken up by Moses Maimonides in his Guide of the Perplexed and developed in a way that should hold our metaphysical gaze. In particular, on the basis of the Great Tautology Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh contained in that verse, he presents an account of God in terms of a distinctive application of the categories of agent and act, and I shall follow Maimonides through the crucial moves he makes in his application of those categories to God. Yet the Maimonidean system presents us with reasons for being suspicious of the application of any categories at all to God, and my approach to Maimonides' discussion of the Great Tautology will be by way of a consideration of those reasons, all of which relate to the most famous feature of the Guide of the Perplexed, the unremitting application of the via negativa. There are large problems concerning the correct way to understand Maimonides' use of that via. But we cannot afford here to be deterred from attending to that aspect of his system, for he uses it in his discussion of the Great Tautology. Indeed he has barely started his journey along the Via Negativa when he is confronted by the concept of divine existence and has to decide on an appropriate response. Hence in our investigation of Maimonides' concept of divine existence, we must take into account the way in which his apophatic route determines his perspective.

The growing rift between biblical scholarship and the dogmatic and moral theologies of the Churches is a challenge to us all. But not only is it necessary to examine the presuppositions of the biblical scholars; it is also necessary to investigate the questions raised by their critics. Is there a uniform pattern in the questions raised? Do the critics provide any suggestions as to how the Scripture scholar should operate? Is there a common core which can be detected in the midst of the disquiet?

The names of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rudolf Bultmann have frequently and inevitably been associated in theological debate since the Second World War. On a popular level in the English-speaking world, it was perhaps J. A. T. Robinson's Honest to God (1963) which most notably placed Bonhoeffer alongside Bultmann, along with Tillich, as close allies in the search for a fresh and viable understanding of God.

The late Professor H. R. Mackintosh wrote: ‘All religious knowledge of God, wherever existing, comes by revelation; otherwise we should be committed to the incredible position that man can know God without His willing to be known.’1 This statement brings to light the obvious point that revelation and knowledge of God are of the same piece. Revelation and knowledge of God necessarily belong to one another. It would be as ‘incredible’ for a work on ‘knowledge of God’ to fail to discuss revelation at some point or in some way as it would be for a work on ‘atonement’ to fail to discuss reconciliation. It is not incredible, however, to find an absence of a discussion of atonement or reconciliation, soteriology or union with Christ in works on ‘knowledge of God’. Revelation and ‘knowledge of God’ are for the most part separated from works on atonement and reconciliation. The outstanding characteristic of Professor T. F. Torrance's doctrine of the knowledge of God is that it does not separate revelation and reconciliation. These two are held together in God's work in Israel and in the Person and work of Christ and consequently in our knowing God. As a result, soteriology and epistemology, salvation and knowledge of God are inseparable in Torrance's theology. As our Lord himself said,‘… this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.’2 Among other things this means that Torrance's doctrine of the knowledge of God does not stand as an isolated doctrine at the beginning of his thought cut off from the rest of his theology.

This is a book that has achieved some notoriety. It was criticised by some rabbis and as a result Dr Sacks rewrote a few passages for a new, revised edition. These changes will be discussed below, but in the book as a whole Jonathan Sacks has again used his gifts of learning, wisdom and accessibility to illuminate a range of concerns of fundamental importance to the future of humanity.

The question concerning conflicting truth claims so often at the center of theological discussions of religious pluralism has not shown signs of resolution insofar as the debates have proceeded from within the framework of propositional discourses. Among other reasons, this is in part due to the inadequacies of language to capture and communicate transcendental realities, in part due to the variety of interpretative systems associated with the religions, and in part due to religious truths claims as inviting inhabitation and practical embodiment rather than just describing objective realities. The thesis proposed here is that a pneumatological approach to the diversity of religions provides hitherto untapped resources for the theological understanding of religious truth. Building on the narrative of Pentecost in Acts 2, it is suggested that the Spirit's being poured out upon all flesh enables us not only to register the values of particular and distinct claims to truth, but also to engage such truths in some ways ‘from the inside’. This preserves the otherness of the religious other even while enabling interreligious dialogue.

Presbyterianism has always tended to be a misleading name for the Reformed Church-order. It suggests the absence of any office superior to that which in Anglican and Roman terminology is called the priesthood; and as neither Roman nor Anglican priests possess power of ordination, it further suggests that Presbyterian clergy have never been able to ordain. Their orders are taken to be invalid from the start, and thus its mere name kills a Church. But the usual assumption, that the Scottish parish minister is equivalent (however imperfectly) to the English parish priest, is a distortion of both doctrine and practice in Scotland; and it is the chief purpose of this paper to maintain that when the ecclesiastical idioms of the two countries are translated, the minister must be called, not a parish priest, but a parish bishop.

Modern scholarship has accustomed us to recognise the profundity of thought and the breadth of meditation that lie crystallised in even the briefest words of our Lord's and the beauty with which he presents the sublimest Gospel in the simplest way, so that even the barest saying yields fruit an hundredfold. Indeed it seems probable that He deliberately framed His teaching in this way, to be received at different levels of understanding. It may be the parables that have prepared the way for the recognition of this fact since there remain in the recorded words at least two authentic explanations of these and there may be yet a third preserved for us by tradition.

This article reflects on Rowan Williams' postmodern approach to sacramentalism and ecclesiology, tracing it through various books and articles. Partly under the influence of the Roman Catholic reception of Wittgenstein, he expounds the centrality of the Eucharist in cultural-linguistic and semiotic terms. Through this central ritual the church signifies the Kingdom of God in a uniquely strong sense of ‘signifies’. He foregrounds a dramatic model: the worshipping community performs the new humanity, it is remade through this unique form of ‘community theatre’. Its guardianship of the ultimate form of Christian sign-making is what authorises the church, Williams teaches, and necessitates hierarchical control. The postmodern idiom therefore serves a very conservative ecclesiology. Williams balances this high ecclesiology with a recurrent apophatic theme: the church must remember that its performance of the Kingdom of God is provisional, ironic. Yet the article questions whether this is sufficient: Williams does not fully confront the danger of such an ecclesiology becoming the ideological justification of a form of social power. This danger is raised with especial pertinence by the issue of homosexuality: it shows that the ecclesial policing of sacramentalism is potentially erroneous. This issue therefore threatens to unravel his ecclesiology, or at least to expose its innate violence. The article concludes that Williams is only half-willing to confront the negative dimension to his sacramental ecclesiology: its ideological character, its potentially violent policing of all Christian culture.

The invitation to pay a tribute to my friend, Principal John Baillie, on the occasion of his attaining the biblical three score years and ten, and his consequent retirement from duty in New College, Edinburgh, stirs memories that go back half a century and more.