When in the nineteen-twenties and thirties the first Agreed Syllabuses of Religious Education were being devised, the main drive behind their formulation was theology. There was of course some recognition given to the need to adapt materials for the various ages of the pupils, but the main inspiration was theological not psychological. The hesitancy created by biblical criticism was giving way to a new confidence that the idea of God's progressive revelation of himself was the key to understanding the Bible. The new syllabuses were organised around this belief; God had spoken, and the task of Religious Education was to convey to pupils the drama of the divine unfolding, in the history of Israel, in the person of Jesus Christ, and on through the history of his people, the church.

The epistle of James is one of the most Jewish of the New Testament letters, even though it is written in excellent Greek. It is traditionally ascribed to James, the brother of our Lord, and there is no adequate reason for rejecting that view. It must, therefore, have been written before James died in A.D. 62. Various authors give dates between A.D. 40 and 60, and as it was commonly dated in the forties of the first century it was claimed to be the first book of the New Testament to be written. More recently, this claim has been challenged by examination of the epistle to the Galatians.

This article contrasts the teaching on just war as presented by the 2000 document, ‘Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church’ (Moscow Patriarchate), with the insights provided by a similar social document issued in 2020 by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, ‘For the Life of the World: Towards a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church’. The article argues that whenever religion is instrumentalised to justify the political ambitions of church and secular leaders, and especially when they are used as the main driving force behind military conflicts such as the war in Ukraine, it is the prophetic role of theologians and scholars to show that religion offers resources to deconstruct the weaponisation of Christian faith for political gain.

A historic debate with great implications for theology has resurfaced in New Testament circles; however, it has not received the attention it should by theologians. It concerns how to translate and interpret approximately ten instances of the Greek phrase pistis Christou and its near equivalents in the letters of Paul. This phrase occurs within theologically crucial sections of Romans and Galatians, which have provided the foundation for the Reformation understanding of ‘justification by grace through faith’. The question is whether ‘faith’ in these phrases refers principally to the believer's ‘faith in Christ’, as traditionally understood, or should be translated and understood as ‘the faith of Christ’. In this article, I hope to introduce theologians to this debate and make a contribution to it from a theological angle, by describing the two primary ‘patterns of soteriology’ which are in play, and then examining how easily these different patterns of soteriology can be read onto what Paul writes concerning three crucial issues in his letters: salvation, the Law and the ‘righteousness of God’. I argue that the overall theological vision which includes three facets – a christologically centred understanding of the pistis Christou passages, a broader understanding of pistis, and the centring of soteriology around the concept of ‘participation in Christ’ – provides the most convincing interpretational matrix for reading Paul. I also point out implications this has for contemporary theology.

With the appearance in English of some of his most recent essays, it has become apparent that Wolfhart Pannenberg is now focusing his efforts to develop a theological program on the doctrine of God. Pannenberg has attracted considerable attention in recent years by his willingness to depart at several points from the mainstream of modern Protestant theology—especially his separation of the person and work of Jesus Christ, his argument for the historicity of Jesus' resurrection, and his overriding concern with future rather than present eschatology. Whether it is possible for Pannenberg to make these departures and still put together a coherent and viable theological program is very much an open question at this point, I believe. But the importance of a satisfactory doctrine of God in his program should be obvious enough: Can Pannenberg give us an account of a God who raised Jesus from the dead and who will bring in his Kingdom without violating the concerns which have weighed so heavily upon theology since the Enlightenment—that God must not act in ways incompatible with what man has discovered about the natural world and with what he believes about his own freedom and responsibility?

More than two decades ago T. A. Roberts wrote,

On the one hand, if Christianity is not to be cut adrift from its historical roots, the question … is the gospel true? must be answered at the first level by a rigorous application of historical criticism, with all its techniques and methods for assessing the reliability of evidence about the past. But historical criticism is essentially a secular tool, fashioned to meet secular interests, and thus by its very nature useless to evaluate the religious affirmations of Faith. Yet the very documents which we seek to examine historically were written from Faith to Faith, bearing witness to the Word which became Flesh, dwelling amongst us, and revealing the glory of the Only-begotten Son of God. How this dilemma is to be resolved is the most pressing problem in the field of Christian apologetic.

One of the most pressing tasks for the Christian theologian at the present time is the construction of a theology of the religions which can adequately account for the continuing diversity of religious belief and practice, and which offers a distinctively Christian approach to religious pluralism. In the last few decades this topic has increasingly commanded the attention of prominent writers (e.g. P. Tillich, W. Pannenberg, J. Moltmann). Not only has it become the subject of numerous monographs and articles, but it seems to have established itself as an indispensable theme within any comprehensive (systematic) presentation of the Christian Faith.

As reported in the synoptic gospels, one of the most characteristic features of Jesus' activity was his campaign against the household of Satan, the demons. And yet Jesus' work as demon-exorcist has generally received little attention. Perhaps this is because for some time now the idea of demon-possession has been alien to the viewpoints of both liberal and conservative interpreters of his ministry. We do not believe in Satan and demons; surely Jesus could not have done so either!

The description of the doctrine of universal salvation by Brunner in his recent Dogmatik (1, 363) as a “ menacing heresy, endangering the Biblical faith ”, raises acutely a problem that has divided theologians since the days of Origen. Though formally condemned as heresy by the fifth ecumenical council, the doctrine has frequently found advocates of disconcerting eminence in the ranks of theology. It is impossible to ignore, for instance, a concensus of contemporary names such as Nicolas Berdyaev, William Temple, John Baillie, C. H. Dodd, Charles Raven and Herbert Farmer, all of whom have come out more or less openly in its favour. Nor can they all be labelled, and dismissed, as liberals. Is Brunner right, therefore, in saying that a doctrine of universal restoration is wholly incompatible with a truly Biblical theology?

One hot day a eunuch of great authority under Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians, was riding home in his chariot. He had just been to the temple in Jerusalem, yet he was not content to have his faith nourished by the priestly exposition of Scripture alone, but was also studiously reading Scripture for himself, specifically the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. He found enough clarity in the prophet to strengthen his faith; but then he came across a passage that seemed to block his access to the meaning of the prophet, for it spoke of one who in a contradictory way was humiliated beyond all others, and yet exalted above the earth. As he was puzzling over the meaning of this passage, a man appeared and asked him, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ The eunuch could have dismissed this question with proud disdain. Instead, he responded with modesty and humility, ‘How can I, unless someone guide me?’ Philip answered the eunuch's most pressing question, ‘Of whom does the prophet speak?’ by pointing him to Jesus Christ. The eunuch responded to Philip's help in interpreting Scripture with such faith that he asked to be baptized then and there, and then returned home with much joy, for he now knew the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.

Kant, it has been said, brought a ‘Copernican Revolution’ to religion and theology no less so than he did to physics. According to Karl Barth, for example, Kant's theology diverges radically from tradition. While rejecting the traditional proofs as foundation for a knowledge of God (his existence, etc.) as wholly inadequate, he, nevertheless, remained a theist. Unwilling to believe in God in the absence of good reasons for doing so, however, he offered an alternative justification for such belief. Religious belief, he insists, is based on practical considerations rather than on theoretical ones. Kant, therefore, did not consider it as necessarily irrational to hold a thing as true even though it be a theoretically insufficient holding to be true. According to him it is simply that in such a case the belief that ‘something’ is true does not constitute knowledge. And it is this displacement of knowledge in the religious sphere by faith that essentially constitutes the revolutionary change in theology.

Contrary to this generally accepted view of Kant's thought, I shall in this paper argue the essentially unrevolutionary character of his understanding of theology. There is, I shall maintain, a basic continuity in Kant's thoughts on religion with the theologies of the past. The faith of which Kant speaks, I shall attempt to show, is a cognitive faith—a source of beliefs that can quite legitimately, even if only in a weak sense, be referred to as religious knowledge. His theology, therefore, is, like the theology of his predecessors, ultimately an inferential knowledge of the divine.

The 318 Fathers at the First Council of Nicaea (325) began their profession of faith in the second article of the creed as follows:

Confessing that: We believe in one God … And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father as only begotten, that is, from the essence of the Father, [ek tes ousias tou patros].

For Paul, where is Jesus now? The Apostle's Christ-mysticism provides one important clue to his sense of continued personal presence, but this coexists with an important eschatological dialectic that involves absence as much as presence. Moreoever, straightforward sublimation in terms of the Holy Spirit in no way exhausts the register of Jesus’ personal presence for Paul, which also finds specific application in repeated visionary experiences, as well as in the church gathered for worship, baptism, and eucharist. The dialectic of absence and presence appears on the one hand personally attuned in the assurance of Paul's Jesus that ‘My grace is sufficient for you’ (2 Cor 12:7), but it is also eschatologically and spatially articulated in the promise that ‘the Lord is near’ (Phil 4:5).

The doctrine of the incarnation suggests that Christ is necessarily like us in some respects, and also unlike us in others. One long-standing debate in modern christology concerns whether Jesus’ human nature ought to be regarded as ‘fallen’ – as conditioned by the effects of the Fall – despite the fact that he himself remained without sin (Heb 4:15). Is fallenness a condition which is necessary in order for Christ to sympathise with human beings, to represent them, and so to reconcile them to God? Is fallenness logically separable from sinfulness? Recent literature has suggested an increasing intractability on both sides of this debate. This article seeks to bring clarity to the question of the fallenness of Christ's human nature by identifying areas of common ground between advocates and opponents of this position. It engages the work of representatives from both sides – Oliver Crisp in opposition and Karl Barth in support – in order to determine the different ways in which they approach the matter of Jesus’ fallenness and impeccability, and to locate points of potential consensus. Crisp argues that fallenness cannot be detached from sin and guilt – i.e. Augustine's notion of both original sin and original corruption, in which sin is an inevitability. Barth, on the other hand, is critical of the Augustinian view and takes as his point of departure Jesus’ unity and sympathy with fallen creatures. Yet the fallenness of Jesus’ humanity does not mean that sin was a real possibility for him.

In this article the christological doctrine of anhypostasis – a way of speaking exclusively of human nature apart from its hypostatic union with God the Son – is suggested as the primary way forward. Advocates of the fallenness position seem to have this qualifier in mind when describing Jesus’ human nature as ‘fallen’: it is true of the assumed nature only when considered in itself, apart from the hypostatic union. There are logical and historical grounds for opponents to accept fallenness strictly on these terms, as well. Beyond this, I argue that anhypostatic fallenness should be acceptable to both sides because it is never without a corresponding sanctification of Jesus’ human nature by its encounter with God. Though Jesus’ humanity was conditioned by the fall, by virtue of the communicatio gratiarum it was not left in a state of peccability.

Vladimir Lossky (1903–58) and Sergii Bulgakov (1871–1944) are normally taken as polar opposites in modern Orthodox theology. Lossky's theology is portrayed as being based on a close exegesis of the Greek Fathers with an emphasis on theosis, the Trinity and the apophatic way of mystical union with God. Bulgakov's ‘sophiology’, in contrast, if it is remembered at all, is said to be a theology which wished to ‘go beyond the Fathers’, was based on German Idealism and the quasi-pantheist and gnostic idea of ‘sophia’ which is a form of the ‘Eternal Feminine’ of Romanticism. In short, Lossky's theological approach is what people normally think of when they speak of Orthodox theology: a form of ‘neo-patristic synthesis’ (Georges Florovsky). Bulgakov's theological approach is said to be typical of the exotic dead end of the inter-war émigré ‘Paris School’ (Alexander Schmemann) or ‘Russian Religious Renaissance’ (Nicolas Zernov). Lossky, we are reminded, was instrumental in the 1935 condemnation, by Metropolitan Sergii Stragorodskii of the Moscow Patriarchate, of Bulgakov's theology as ‘alien’ to the Orthodox Christian faith. Counter to this widely held ‘standard narrative’ of contemporary Orthodox theology, the article argues that the origins of Vladimir Lossky's apophaticism, which he characterised as ‘antinomic theology’, are found within the theological methodology of the sophiology of Sergii Bulgakov: ‘antinomism’. By antinomism is understood that with any theological truth one has two equally necessary affirmations (thesis and antithesis) which are nevertheless logically contradictory. In the face of their conflict, we are forced to hold both thesis and antithesis together through faith. A detailed discussion of Lossky's apophaticism is followed by its comparison to Bulgakov's ‘sophiological antinomism’. Lossky at first appears to be masking the influence of Bulgakov and even goes so far as to read his own form of theological antinomism into the Fathers. Nevertheless, he may well have been consciously appropriating the ‘positive intuitions’ of Bulgakov's thought in order to ‘Orthodoxise’ a thinker he believed was in error but still regarded as the greatest Orthodox theologian of the twentieth century. Despite major differences between the two thinkers (e.g. differing understandings of reason, the use of philosophy and the uncreated/created distinction), it is suggested that Lossky and Bulgakov have more in common than normally is believed to be the case. A critical knowledge of Bulgakov's sophiology is said to be the ‘skeleton key’ for modern Orthodox theology which can help unlock its past, present and future.

Various critics of the New Perspective on Paul (NPP) often highlight the lack of church tradition as one deficiency of the various interpretations of Paul. To some, the lack of church history automatically renders such newer interpretations suspect. In turn critics of the NPP often turn to the reformers such as Calvin and Luther to defend the traditional reading of Paul and trace this traditional reading back to Augustine. For the critics, church tradition stands on the side of the traditional reading.

This article seeks to highlight an often neglected early church view on one aspect of the NPP, that of Paul and the Law. This article highlights one of the fiercest exchanges between two church fathers. Through a series of letters, Jerome and Augustine corresponded on Jerome's interpretation of Galatians 2 and the Antioch incident. For Augustine the pastor, nothing less than the veracity of scripture was at stake and Augustine mounts a defence of Paul's actions in Galatians 2 in response to Jerome's insistence of an agreed-upon lie between Peter and Paul. In the process of Augustine's rebuttal of Jerome, he notes that Paul followed the law without ‘pretence’ and that there was a period in early Christianity where Jewish Christians practised law observance. Augustine highlights the divine origin of the Mosaic law, which renders a positive role for the law in early Christianity, and notes that the negative critique of the law comes within the context of a Gentile audience, but did not have implications for Jewish Christians. Augustine rightly notices and raises the important context of Paul's negative statements on the law and offers a nuanced discussion of Paul's treatment of the law.

Augustine notes some of the important conclusions drawn by the NPP, namely a positive view of the law and its practice by Paul and other Jewish Christians. He also notes the various ways the law functions in Jewish and Gentile contexts. Such a positive view of Paul and the law may appear striking to many, but must be considered by those who are otherwise critical of the NPP. This article shows that there was at least one voice, among others, within the early church which advocated for a positive reading of Paul and the law. The history of interpretation of Galatians 2 offers many insights for contemporary Pauline scholars which ought to be heeded in future discussions. This article, by highlighting the exchange between Jerome and Augustine, seeks to give the NPP a historical ‘rootedness’ and placement within the history of interpretation.

Jorgen Moltmann has remarked that Reading the Bible with the eyes of the poor is a different thing from reading it with a full belly. If it is read in the light of the experience and hopes of the oppressed, the Bible's revolutionary themes — promise, exodus, resurrection and spirit — come alive.

These words go to the very heart of the matter of our concern in this essay — the hermeneutics of Liberation Theology. It is a subject of vital importance for the Church today. For Liberation Theology is developing creative and challenging insights, principles and procedures in the field of Biblical interpretation. There are several reasons for this.

This essay seeks to explore speech-act theory in its relation to biblical interpretation. Its initial focus falls on the application of N. Wolterstorff whose book Divine Discourse provided the decisive catalyst for the recent debates. Building on the different kinds of action involved when speaking (locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary) Wolterstorff draws two important hermeneutical implications. First, the theory affords a way of understanding the unity of scripture in its entirety as God's book; second, it enables the reader to acknowledge the infallibility of God's Word as divine discourse without ascribing infallibility to the human words of scripture.

The second part attempts to offer a critical assessment of Wolterstorff's application of his theory, especially in its failure to deal adequately with the function of the Christian canon which shaped the church's traditions in such a way as to provide a rule-of-faith for the theological guidance of subsequent generations of readers. By abandoning the hermeneutical understanding of scripture developed by Irenaeus and Calvin, Wolterstorff flounders in his inability to overcome the threat of scripture's becoming a ‘wax nose’ in which the noematic content of what God now says in divine discourse is not identical with the meaning of the biblical sentence itself.

The final section examines the exegesis of the well-known scholar A. Thiselton, whose work has done much in developing a speech-act theory. The conclusion reached is that Thiselton's application of the theory is far different from that of Wolterstorff's and avoids many of the problems which plague Wolterstorff's exegesis. The implication of this analysis is to argue that speech-act theory cannot be indiscriminately lumped together, because various forms of the theory often reflect different hermeneutical theories of biblical interpretation.