The Letter of the Synod of Antioch contained in a Syriac MS. of the eighth or ninth century (Codex Parisinus Syriacus 62), to which Edward Schwartz first drew attention in 1905, has thrown light on the period immediately preceding the Council of Nicaea and on the proceedings of the Council itself. After much initial controversy, mainly between Schwartz and von Harnack, this document is now generally accepted as authentic.

The Synod of Antioch, of which nothing was hitherto known, appears to have assembled in order to settle the difficulties which had arisen in the Church at Antioch after the death of Bishop Philogonius (ca. A.D. 322), one of three Bishops whom Arius described as ‘unlearned heretics’; Eustathius, Bishop of Beroea, was appointed to fill the vacancy. The Synod was attended by at least fifty-nine bishops from Syria and Palestine, forty-nine of whom also attended the Council of Nicaea a few months later.

It is, of course, no secret that theology is a tissue of many things in interrelation. Begin at any point in it, and you will quickly be led to all the others—or at least the need for all the others. Eschatology requires one to talk about judgment and reconciliation, and they require talking about covenant, but discussion of the covenant requires finding the circumstances or context of the covenant, fallen creatures; and ‘fallen creatures’ brings one to talk about the creature, and in turn to treat his context, creation; and any elucidation of creation requires discussion of the action of God. So it may be seen that each notion demands another as an immediate context, and others as an ultimate context.

Some years ago, the editor of the Scottish Journal of Theology asked me to review what was, to me, an interesting and important book which amounted to a systematic attack on the existence of God, at any rate on the validity of the traditional theistic proofs of classical and modern systematic theology. In addition, such other bases of belief in God as authority revelation, historical event, and religious experience were treated, with the aim of showing that they cannot substitute for a failed philosophical theism. However, some mental block prevented me from completing the review proper. The root of the matter was that, in my Bachelor of Arts degree at Sydney University, my philosophical course had involved a system of atheism which I have recognised ever since to be more rigorous and cogent than any others, and I am not alone in this feeling. In particular, I felt that Professor Flew was in a stronger position than most philosophers of the prevailing modern British schools, but that this was because he approximated more than most to what I had learnt at Sydney, and that a still further approximation would tighten his case still more. The professor in question, the late John Anderson, was a Clydesider whose family background was the familiar Leftwing agnosticism and whose training was Absolute Idealism; in his later development, he reacted against both these elements, but his agnosticism hardened into a positive atheism.

This paper is concerned with how we should understand the distinctive contribution of music to Christian worship. It considers two contrasting views that have powerfully influenced contemporary church music – the pursuit of musical excellence by highly competent performers on the one hand, and the adoption of simpler, popular and more inclusive musical forms on the other. This contrast is explored against the background of a biblical understanding of prayer and sacrifice, and in the light of some philosophical issues surrounding both the idea of divine service and the nature of music.

It is no simple matter to deal with this subject. In the first place, it is not a favourite theme of Reformed theology. In addition, there are a thousand variations of the ordination liturgy, whose comparative study is still in its infancy. Finally, a kind of mutation was produced during the eighteenth century which compromised the ‘catholic’ aspect of the Reformed Church and which made of her a Church of ‘protestant’ type (to use a term which must be precisely defined).

Students of Karl Barth will recognize my title immediately: it is a paraphrase of Barth's own effort to understand Rudolf Bultmann. Like Barth, I seek really to understand, not to evade or repudiate; and really to seek, not to grasp insight as the better tool to punish the opponent. But like Barth again, I may find understanding an elusive goal. For I am one of those Christians Kaufman believes at odds with her own age.

Judeo-Christian theology has always been concerned with the order and rationality of the created universe, believing that this rational order was somehow bestowed upon it by the Creator. However, in the last two decades traditional conceptions of order have been challenged by the scientific discovery that ‘chaos’ permeates the behaviour of natural systems in our cosmos. What is the theologian to make of this ‘discovery’? If theology is to speak to the contemporary mind with its postmodern frame of reference, it must carry out its own inquiry vis-à-vis the work of natural science as it explores the intrinsic intelligibility of the created universe.

Soteriological participation in God, variously termed theosis, divinisation or deification commands widespread interest across the spectrum of Christian theology. A key difficulty is how to maintain the creator–creature distinction, while bridging it to gain intimacy. Jonathan Edwards provides a Reformed perspective on this conversation, by way of his distinction between the incommunicable divine essence and the communicable divine fullness. This article clarifies this distinction by evaluating its coherence and exploring whether it divorces God's immanent and economic life. It argues that distinguishing two forms of participation – methexis verses koinonia – clarifies coherence and shows that it does not divide God's being from act.

A christological treatment of sin is, for Karl Barth, the only possibility for those who wish to know something of that which opposes life in Christ. Such a treatment must be christologically ordered in so far as Christ remains the arche, teloas, and nomos of theological thought. It is not coincidental, then, that his treatment of sin is proper to the doctrine of reconciliation and ordered by the christological assertion that Jesus Christ is truly God, truly human, and the unity of these as the ‘guarantor and witness of our atonement.’ Indeed, the knowledge of sin is only possible in the light of the revelation of God and humanity in the God-man Jesus Christ. Consequently, the doctrine of reconciliation is the proper place for the knowledge of sin in so far as Jesus, the one who knew no sin, was made to be sin ‘so that we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Cor. 5:21). To know sin one must face the one who became sin for our sakes.

One of the more noticeable features of the landscape of theological studies, broadly conceived, is the trouble-some relationship between biblical studies and systematic or constructive theology. Following the programmatic comments of Colin Gunton, by ‘systematic theology’, I refer to that theology which is concerned (1) to elucidate in coherent fashion the internal relations of one aspect of belief to other potentially related beliefs; (2) to demonstrate an understanding of the relation between the content of theology and ‘the sources specific to the faith’; and (3) to evince an awareness of the relation between the content of theology and general claims for truth in human culture, not least those of philosophy and science. It is with this enterprise, the doing of systematic theology, that biblical studies has come in the last two centuries to have increasingly poor relations.

In his book A Life of Jesus Shusaku Endo talks of Jesus' compassion for those who were suffering in terms of his ‘suffering with them, carrying their burdens with them, becoming an eternal companion for them’. In several of his novels this understanding of Christ as one who suffers alongside humanity is given extraordinary dramatic power. The image of eternal companion is not explicitly discussed but it seems to underlie many of the themes which Endo employs, providing a remarkably versatile vehicle for his creative exploration of how God's power in Christ can transfigure human lives, bringing the possibility of hope and re-creation.

St Anselm of Canterbury is famous on two counts: he is the originator of the ontological argument for the existence of God and he is the source of the satisfaction theory of the atonement. These positions do not exhaust his theological contribution; he also wrote works defending and defining Western Trinitarian doctrine, against Sabellianism and tritheism, and arguing for the filioque; he wrote on the Incarnation; and was influential in modifying Augustine's account of the transmission of original sin. There is also a collection of meditations and prayers, traditionally attributed to St Anselm, which at their best rank alongside almost any devotional literature of the medieval period. His memory, however, is firmly attached today to just the two points with which I began. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that on both he has been fundamentally misunderstood by the popular accounts of his thought given in theological and philosophical introductions and histories; these misreadings have been pointed out often enough, but are still regularly repeated.

Usually one does not include Karl Barth in contemporary Jewish-Christian dialogue. Unlike his Protestant theological contemporaries, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, there in no evidence that during his long theological career Barth had any real contact with Jewish thinkers. The only contemporary Jewish thinker whom he engages, to my knowledge, is Martin Buber, but in his magnum opus, Church Dogmatics, Buber is discussed almost en passent and with a rather hurried dismissal. Barth's relations with Judaism are seriously complicated, but one gets the impression from reading what he says about Judaism that he is doing typology, engaging a type already created in his mind largely by Paul and those who followed in his path. He does not seem to be dealing with Judaism as a living tradition, indeed a current rival religious option to Christianity. After all, how can one engage Judaism as a living tradition, let alone as a current rival, if one has no serious contact with living Jews during the most productive years of one's thought? For that reason it would seem an engagement of Barth's thought by a contemporary Jewish theologian could only be, at most, an arcane academic exercise having no real Jewish significance.

The Protestant church, for Reinhard Hütter, relinquished its ecclesial public character when it turned from ‘binding doctrine’ as the means for establishing and maintaining its concrete ‘time-space’. Christendom disguised this basic theological flaw, but with its collapse the public basis of the Protestant church fell away. This reduced the church's witness and destroyed its communal structure. His positive proposal re-establishes the church as a public by reference to the communion nature of God, and to church practices as mediate forms of the Spirit's acting. Hütter's account shadows an argument made fifty years before by Johannes C. Hoekendijk, observing an intensified focus on word and sacrament and the promotion of a culture as a solution to the problem of the church's witness. Yet, for Hoekendijk, this logic exemplifies the problem. The institutions of the church come to bear the full evangelistic load. Mission replicates the basic structures of a particular way of life as a necessary precursor to the gospel. The act of witness becomes propaganda because of an insufficient doctrine of the church. This insufficiency is a failing in the doctrine of the Trinity: God's own life is defined without sufficient attention to his act of reconciliation and redemption as itself material to understanding the nature of his in se life.

The declaration that ‘Yahweh is a Man of Wars’page 1 poses a problem for the modern reader of the Old Testament. The direct connexion between God and war seems to be alien to the spirit of the New Testament. And today, when the horrors of war are so constantly in the news, this epithet for God seems to be all the more abhorrent. The epithet was quoted at the beginning of an article in an earlier volume of this Journal, A. Gelston's ‘The Wars of Israel’.page 2 The problem becomes most acute in the question of the wars of conquest, for there we can trace two aspects of Yahweh's activity. On the one hand, Yahweh uses war as a means of judgment on the sinful Canaanitespage 3; on the other hand, He uses war as a means to an end, namely the fulfilment of the patriarchal and Covenant promises.page 4 Although Gelston mentions this double aspect of the wars of conquest (p. 326), his conclusions only satisfy the former of the two aspects (p. 331). Of his five summary points, two are applicable to this particular case. The first is that ‘when Yahweh is identified with Israel's cause, the motive is usually the execution of judgment on Yahweh's enemies’, and secondly he declares that ‘Yahweh alone is ultimately sovereign in human history, and his cause is always just’.