The name of John McLeod Campbell (1800–1872) is well-known among historians of Scottish church history. A pastor who spent most of his life in Glasgow, Campbell is remembered best for his deposition from the Church of Scotland in 1831 because of the preaching of unlimited atonement and of assurance as belonging to the essence of faith. Among historians of doctrine, Campbell's notoriety stems from his later work, The Nature of the Atonement. The book aroused controversy from the moment of its publication. Among the highly original themes set forth by Campbell, one continues to stand out as the most perplexing and controversial: Campbell's teaching on Christ as providing a ‘perfect response’, a ‘perfect repentance’, a ‘perfect sorrow’ and a ‘perfect contrition’ before the judgment of the Father on the sins of humanity.

On 6 September 1939 the ‘S.S. President Harding’ churned slowly across the North Atlantic on the last of its summer runs. Joseph Needham passed the time aboard as he had often done while awaiting the completion of a distillation or an incubation in the Cambridge Biochemical Laboratory: by preparing a book for press. Now, however, he sat forebodingly, awaiting a graver distillation from the waters, an incubus in the skies, as he put the finishing touches on the introductory essay for a new edition of a book entitled Natural Law in the Spiritual World. The author of this book was Henry Drummond, a Scottish evangelical worker who died in 1897. Needham, born three years later, was a Marxist embryologist and a practising Anglo-Catholic. Near the end of the essay Needham stressed what he took to be Drummond's belief that ‘much of the content of traditional Christian theology — “the laws of the spiritual world” — arise directly from what had preceded it in the highly organised realm of the psychological’.

The vast literature on the Reformation and the rise of science has produced what may be called strong and weak interpretations of their relation. The strong interpretation holds that specific doctrines or attitudes affirmed by the Reformers and their followers contributed directly to the growth of science. On this view, the Reformation was among the causes of the Scientific Revolution. Without the changes in thought and values wrought by the Reformation, proponents of the strong interpretation argue, modern science would not have developed as it did. The weak interpretation, on the other hand, does not claim a direct influence of Protestantism on science. It acknowledges that modern science developed as a movement independent of the Reformation and it claims only that Protestantism offered relatively few obstacles to scientific expansion. On the weak interpretation, the absence of the Reformation would have had little, if any, effect on the Scientific Revolution. After brief discussion of each of these interpretations, I will argue that the strong interpretation is too strong and that the weak one can be strengthened. I will outline an indirect approach, which falls between the above extremes, and offers advantages not offered by either of them.

In 1799 a small book called Lucinde was published in Berlin. Written by the brilliant young literary critic Friedrich Schlegel it celebrated his (adulterous) affair with Dorothea Veit, daughter of the eminent Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Though not widely read and still less widely understood the book provoked a considerable, and largely hostile, reaction among the reading public. It became to its generation what Lady Chatterley's Lover was to a more recent age: the quintessential embodiment of an obscene book. The author's mother gave utterance to the popular consensus when she wrote that ‘through his novel Fritz has shown himself to me as one who has no religion and no good principles’.

At the heart of both feminist and Christian-Marxist liberation theology is a concern for community or personal relationship. ‘In the beginning is the relation’, claims Isabel Carter Heyward in her book The Redemption of God: A Theology of Mutual Relation. God and humanity, she argues, need to be understood in radically new categories, many of which arise out of women's experience of relation, as ‘relational and co-operative, rather than as monistic (synonymous) or dualistic (antithetical) … The experience of relation is fundamental and constitutive of human being.’

The year after Hiroshima the American theologian Henry Wieman wrote, ‘The bomb that fell on Hiroshima cut history in two like a knife. Before and after are two different worlds. That cut is more abrupt, decisive and revolutionary than the cut made by the star over Bethlehem. It may not be more creative of human good than the star, but it is more swiftly transformative of human existence than anything else that has ever happened.’ One might not expect many Christian theologians to agree too readily to such a statement of the significance of Hiroshima, but it illustrates the challenge which Hiroshima and its implications constitute for Christian theology. Hiroshima revealed a radically new possibility in human history: the possibility that human beings themselves might put an end to human history. Jonathan Schell, whose brilliant book The Fate of the Earth contains the most extensive attempt so far to think through the implications of the radical novelty of the human situation since the invention of nuclear weapons, wrote that by inventing the capacity for self-extinction as a species, ‘we have caused a basic change in the circumstances in which life was given us, which is to say that we have altered the human condition’.

Moral Philosophy begins with moral intuitions and then, by arguments, either confirms or refutes them. There was a time, not so very long ago, when it was not thought to be so. For, until recently it was the orthodoxy that philosophers qua philosophers ought not to concern themselves with actual moral problems, but should instead only analyse and produce theories of the language of ethics.2 Those bad days are gone, and a mark of their passing is the frequent involvement of philosophers in the public debate of social and moral issues.