Ever since the laying of the foundation stone of the present Norman building, Durham Cathedral has had an ambiguous relationship with Scotland – some good (the huge contribution of Dean William Whittingham through liturgy, metrical psalms and the Geneva Bible) and some extremely negative (the cathedral served as the prison for the Scottish prisoners after the battle of Dunbar). Amongst the more negative are the liturgical ideals and practices of the Durham House group, more commonly though inaccurately known as ‘Laudians’. The members of the group, which did include William Laud, were the protégés of the bishop of Durham, Richard Neile, and they met in his house in London. He promoted many as prebendaries at Durham Cathedral, and there they developed their liturgical ideals and practices. These ideals were ones which Neile shared with his contemporaries and close friends, Bishops Lancelot Andrewes and John Buckeridge. This article argues that the origin and precedent for these practices were the Chapels Royal with which most of the ‘players’ had affiliation in some way or other. Elizabeth I insisted on liturgical ceremonial and furnishings that supported or matched the grandeur of court ceremonial. It was a style which she hoped would also be adopted in English cathedrals. It was a style of worship which also appealed to James VI and through the Chapels Royal in Scotland he attempted to introduce a similar liturgical style. He also sought to conform the Church of Scotland to the Church of England, both in polity and liturgical text. The policy was continued by Charles I, who attempted to extend it to the Scottish cathedrals. Opponents of this court liturgical style and ‘Englishing’ of the liturgy found it convenient to blame the bishops who were given the task of implementing the liturgical changes rather than attack the source, namely the monarchy. The ultimate outcome was that, rather than the Church of Scotland adopting the 1637 Book of Common Prayer and Durham House ceremonial, it eventually even lost the liturgy which Scottish tradition had ascribed to John Knox, but the lion's share of which was more probably the work of Dean William Whittingham. Instead the Church of Scotland accepted the Directory of Public Worship, itself mainly the work of English divines. It became one of the few Reformed churches that did not have a set form for its public worship.

The result of the Arian controversy was the affirmation of the total equality of the trinitarian persons. This led to the realisation that all three persons of the Trinity are involved in every external action of God. Despite this, the role of the Holy Spirit in creation has not been clear, partly due to few specific references in the creation narratives. However, it may be suggested that the Spirit does not act in the creation of matter, which is the role of the second person, but in the provision of the underlying form and order necessary for very existence, and specifically for the dynamic interaction which is of the essence of life, as in the second account of the creation of the man (Gen 2). This reflects the fact that the action of the Spirit is also essential in salvation to link Christ's work on the cross to the believer. While separation is a feature of the Genesis creation narrative, this is balanced by the interrelating of what had been created.

So, although Christian theology has commonly seen the world as ‘spirit’-less, restricting the action of the Holy Spirit to the church, this would be understood as referring to the limitation of his direct action. His immanent presence is nevertheless essential in all for very existence. The Spirit is not in the world, but underlies it.

Creation may be seen as a theistic act, by transcendent intervention to give matter, and giving interaction in immanent presence. The nature of the world therefore reflects the theistic nature of God, involving both distinction and relating. Indeed it then reflects the trinitarian nature of the creator, in which the persons maintain their absolute distinction at the same time as their total equality through the interaction of perichōrēsis, specifically enabled by the action of the Spirit as generating and undergirding relationship. The parallel between the created and the creator is seen especially insofar as the discrete elements of matter interrelate to give form and interaction.

It is in their interaction that the elements of creation fulfil their purpose, and so specifically that humanity reflects its nature as created in imago Dei.

Theology in Greece today is the outcome of a long and complex historical process in which many different, and even contradictory, trends and theological proclivities have converged and continue to converge, thereby defining its shape and agenda. The present article tries to provide, in four sections, both a descriptive and critical account of this complex and fascinating history.

Among these trends, a decisive role is attributed in the first section of the paper to the so-called ‘generation of the 1960s’ (including among others pre-eminent Greek theologians such as Metropolitan of Pergamon John D. Zizioulas, Christos Yannaras, Nikos Nissiotis, Fr John Romanides, Panagiotis Nellas), a Greek theological movement for renewal inspired mainly by the theology of the Russian diaspora and the call to ‘return to the Fathers’, which was instrumental in shaping contemporary Orthodox theology both in Greece and outside the Greek-speaking world.

In the second section are given the reactions to and criticism of the ‘theology of 1960s’. There were strong disputes and rejection on the one hand by conservative Greek academic and ecclesiastical circles, and on the other hand from the opposite progressive side (mainly the professors of the Theology School of Thessaloniki University during the 1990s), which accused this theological movement of conservatism and anti-Westernism.

The emergence of the agenda initiated by the new theological generation (of 2000) is discussed in the main and longer (third) section. This new theological agenda and its principal characteristics come from points of disagreement with the theologians of the generation of the 1960s, and from a renewed and more inclusive understanding of Orthodox theology which goes beyond the problématique, the language and the agenda of the 1960s. Among the topics raised and discussed by the new trends of Greek theology are: the rediscovery of eschatology and its dynamic interpretation, ecclesiological issues, such as the centrality of the episcopal office, and the critique of the dominant place of monasticism in the life of the church, the movement of liturgical renewal, the revalorisation of mission, the rediscovery of ethics and the dilemma of ethics versus ontology, the renewed interest in political theology, the overcoming of anti-Westernism and of the West–East divide as a central interpretative key, a more constructive relationship between Orthodoxy and modernity, the critical approach of the ‘return to the Fathers’ movement, the reconsideration of the devaluation of biblical studies, the emergence of an Orthodox feminist theology and the debate on women's ordination, the radical critique of religious nationalism, and the devolution into Byzantinism and ecclesiastical culturalism.

In the fourth section the article names the settings and institutions that are hosting the new theological trends in Greek Orthodoxy, mainly mentioning the leading Greek Orthodox theological quarterly Synaxi, the official scholarly journal of the Church of Greece, Theologia, the Biblical Foundation of Artos Zoes and its Bulletin of Biblical Studies and, finally, the Volos Academy for Theological Studies. An overall group vision and esprit de corps which could integrate the individual efforts and provide an identity, clearly missing from the above-mentioned picture, are demanded from the two theological schools of Athens and Thessaloniki.

The article concludes by briefly reviewing the conservative and fundamentalist reactions towards this new theological agenda, and by highlighting the urgent need for contemporary Greek theology to face the new, dynamic and particularly challenging global context, and to continue to reflect and to act towards Christian unity, as well as move to reconciliation between Christian East and West, Eastern and Western Europe.

John 3:13 presents a grammatical and theological problem for Augustine. If the only one who ascends to heaven is the one who descended, namely Christ, then what becomes of the Christian life of ascent? To unpack Augustine's solution to this problem, this article explores his use of John 3:13 in his anti-Donatist sermons of 406–7. Here Augustine uses the grammatical method of prosopological exegesis both to identify and to solve the problem of Christ's solo ascent. Prosopology asks of a text, ‘Who is speaking? To whom is he speaking? And about whom is he speaking?’ in order to parse the sometimes ambiguous personae within a dramatic scene. Through this method, Augustine affirms that Christ is indeed speaking about himself alone, but the reflexive subject of Christ includes the church who is his body. The Christian life of ascent to God requires that we become participants in the subject of Christ's ‘I’. Building on the work of ‘New Canon’ Augustine scholarship, I argue that this use of John 3:13 to espouse the unity of the church in the body of Christ is founded upon a pro-Nicene understanding of the revelatory and epistemological role of the Son. The ability of Christ fully to reveal the Father is a central tenet of Latin pro-Nicene refutations of homoian christologies, and this revelation of the Father's Word through Christ's incarnation is accomplished in our union with that Word through his body. Based on this pro-Nicene affirmation of epistemological salvation through Christ, Augustine then uses John 3:13 to condemn the Donatists for damning themselves by separating from the body of Christ. The oneness of the ecclesial body of Christ is predicated upon the oneness of Christ himself because it is into his complex subject that we are incorporated. Separation from that unity is separation from the singular grammatical subject who ascends as Christ to the Father. Thus, Augustine's grammatical practice of prosopological exegesis to solve the problem of John 3:13 connects the pro-Nicene affirmation of Christ's revelation of the Father to an anti-Donatist defence of the necessary unity of the church. This should encourage us to consider further the ways in which pro-Nicene principles help to shape Augustine's vision of the church.

2014 is the quincentenary of the birth of John Knox and the article is part of an attempt to contextualise him and assess his impact. In the autumn of 1552 Knox preached a ferocious sermon at Windsor in the presence of the young King Edward VI. The sermon threatened to derail the careful compromise of the Second Prayer Book of Edward VI and provoked a sharp reply from Archbishop Thomas Cranmer to the Privy Council. The so-called Black Rubric (arguably produced by Cranmer) which clarified the intention of the posture of the recipient at communion was added to the Second Prayer Book. Though Cranmer's withering response might have been taken to have demolished Knox's peculiar insistence that the Reformed communion should mirror the posture of the disciples at the Last Supper, the issue reappeared a generation later when James VI and I attempted to require recipients to kneel to receive communion in the Articles of Perth of 1618. The Knox–Cranmer dispute had a rerun in the conflicting pamphlets of David Calderwood and John Forbes of Corse. In theological terms, John Forbes has the better arguments, but by that stage aspects of a style and tone of Scottish worship had become customary and prevail to this day. It is those aspects of table fellowship which form Knox's continuing legacy.

Although many Barth scholars have begun to argue for the necessity of evaluating Barth's theology as an interpretation of scripture, so far these efforts have focused more on hermeneutical questions and less on the specifics of Barth's exegesis, the specific ways his conclusions derive from that exegesis, and the interplay between his exegetical work and his theology. Accordingly, this article seeks to contribute to Barth studies by tracing the development of Barth's christology through his exegesis of Romans 5:12–21 in the first edition of the Romans commentary and Barth's later essay Christ and Adam – specifically how he understands the function of Christ's particularity in relation to his universal soteriological significance. These works have been selected not only because they give extended treatments of the text but also because there is a wide timespan between them. Furthermore, in contrast to the second edition of Romans and the Church Dogmatics, these texts remain relatively untapped, and will consequently provide a unique entry-point into Barth's exegetical work. By looking at Barth's theological development through his exegesis of Paul's text, we have a benchmark by which both to trace Barth's development and to critique it: does Barth do justice to both the particular and universal aspects of the christology of Romans 5:12–21? In this way, I intend to take seriously Barth's recurring assertion that his project succeeded or failed by how well it functioned as biblical interpretation. It will be demonstrated that the early Barth was unable to allow Christ's particularity to have much of a soteriological function in his interpretation of Romans 5:12–21, and was thus compelled to downplay the particularity of Christ which is emphasised in the text and instead emphasise his universality as the only aspect of soteriological value. By contrast, the later Barth grounded Christ's universality precisely in his particularity; that is, the Christ-event only had universal soteriological consequence because it was the action of a particular, historical Jesus. Yet, despite any problems we might find with Barth's interpretations, both works display Barth as an interpreter seeking to grapple with the nuances of scripture and with one of the central issues of the biblical text, and of soteriology in general: the relation of the one to the many.

The cult of the Virgin Mary had a complicated history in Scotland during the sixteenth century, with historical, devotional and literary evidence indicating both widespread acceptance of the church's traditional practices and growing dissatisfaction with them, particularly in elite culture. Anti-Marian polemics entered Scottish Christianity through various sources, including the Lollards around Kyle, the prominent witness of Patrick Hamilton, the preaching of Thomas Guillaume and George Wishart, the theological climate at St Leonard's college in St Andrews, as well as a number of popular works.

John Knox (1514–72) incorporated many of his contemporaries’ concerns in his own treatment of the question, being trained at St Andrews University and heavily influenced by Guillaume and Wishart. Knox considered the cult of Mary using the same tool that he used to analyse the cult of the saints in general, the mass, and liturgical ritual, contending that they could not be reconciled with his stringent doctrine of sola scriptura, in particular as read through the lens of Deuteronomy 12:32.

Yet for all that Mary and her place in Christian life and devotion formed a major aspect of sixteenth-century Scottish religious praxis, Knox gave little attention to her, preferring to indicate her proper place in Christian theology by presenting a vision of Christianity which omitted her almost entirely. Knox does indirectly indicate what he considers to be the proper Christian attitude towards the Virgin, however, through his explication of sola scriptura and its implications for genuine religious practice as opposed to idolatry, and his understanding of 1 Timothy 2:5 and the unique mediation of Christ. Where Knox does directly address the Marian question, he expresses his rejection of her cult in far more restrained terms than readers of his polemics against the mass may expect; while he is firm and unequivocal in denying Mary's intercessory role and in uprooting Marian devotional practice, his rhetorical restraint points to the irreducible dignity of Mary in the scriptural texts.

This article analyses the theology of Mary which Knox reveals in occasional comments scattered through his writings and attempts to place his ideas in their historical and theological context. By explicating the precise nature of Knox's objection to the cult of Mary, the article attempts to open the door for future Reformed–Catholic dialogue on the person of Mary and her place in the church of Christ.

It is a familiar refrain in various theological conversations that pneumatology has been woefully underdeveloped in Western theology since the time of Augustine. However, some theologians are working to correct this situation and to develop new ways of understanding the person of the Holy Spirit in ways which are faithful to traditional theological sources. Wolfhart Pannenberg is one such theologian. One way in which he seeks to revitalise contemporary pneumatology is by appealing to field theory as it has been developed in modern physics. Pannenberg justifies such a move by investigating the etymological and philosophical roots of both field theory and pneumatology in the Stoic understanding of the doctrine of the πνεῦμα as the field of all material existence. While the Stoic notion of field was rejected by the apologists as a way of understanding, because of its inherent materialism, this possibility has been reopened by modern physicists who have developed field theories as a way of understanding the animating and binding qualities of nature which are devoid of materialism. Pannenberg takes up this language in a distinctive way to describe the unity of the Godhead in order to avoid modalism and to undo emphasis on rationality which has been the central feature of much of modern Western pneumatology. He also draws upon field theory to understand the activity of the Spirit in creation as its animating and unitive property, while preserving the freedom and individuality of creaturely existence. The author argues that this distinctive feature of Pannenberg's use of field theory in pneumatology has laid the ground work for a renewed understanding of the role of the Spirit in creation and a new avenue of conversation between theology and the natural sciences. In particular, field theory should be seen as an important way of understanding the loving relations between persons which is grounded in a mutual self-giving which respects the individual, in contrast to those who ground love primarily in compassionate suffering.

A number of New Testament scholars, including John O'Neill and Larry Hurtado, have drawn attention to the prospects which worship texts in the writings of the New Testament offer in revealing the way in which the first Christians thought of Jesus. Whilst the impossibility of separating the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith has contributed to this development and has also been a central impulse in the so-called Third Quest, the ancient principle of lex orandi, lex credendi, coined by Prosper of Aquitaine, gives a further theological foundation for such explorations. However, its later distortion, particularly in the aftermath of the Reformation, has privileged doctrine (credendi) over experience (orandi), and diminished the reciprocity between the two demanded by the classical formulation.

Revelation 4–5 are explored as two texts which are rooted in experience, both of Christian liturgy and the merkavah traditions which drew on the heavenly visions of prophets like Ezekiel and Isaiah. Viewed from this perspective, the visions make claims about the divinity of the Lamb and the propriety of its worship on the basis of religious experience, embodied in authoritative claims for both ‘altered states of consciousness’ and literary tropes. They give pictorial descriptions and visions which should stand as authoritative theological claims in their own right.

However, modern New Testament scholarship, following post-Reformation patterns, attempts to explain these visions in more technical and abstract theological terms such as binitarian or trinitarian. This, it is suggested, is undesirable because of the danger of importing anachronisms, with their attendant theological bag and baggage, of making overly bold claims for our knowledge of the individuals, communities and/or circumstances which produced these texts (given both the oscillation of New Testament writers between binitarian and trinitarian tendencies, and a degree of confusion caused by the role of the Spirit in related discourse), and of shifting the locus of meaning from the texts themselves to secondary explications (a phenomenon which appears peculiarly attractive to modern scholarship).

Drawing on Wittgenstein's reflections on the study and analysis of religious experience, it is suggested that it may be wiser to leave the texts to stand in their own right, rather than to be interpreted via theological categories which may ultimately say more about the concerns of modern scholars than the producers of the texts.

A major pursuit of biblical studies, especially since the dawn of the Enlightenment, has been to discover the one, intended, objective meaning of the various biblical texts. Over the last several hundred years, a plethora of methodological paradigms, biblical language and reference tools, historical studies, sociological analyses, comparative linguistic investigations, and anthropological and cultural examinations have all been published through many outlets by a host of people for the purpose of finding THE meaning the biblical authors wished to convey to their respective audiences. Although the results of all these works have positively contributed to our knowledge of scripture in profound ways, the problem is this: none can claim that they have actually discovered this one objective meaning. This is not to say, however, that there are not better understandings of scripture which point more adequately to the originally intended meaning, but simply that the best anyone can do is interpret scripture. The consequence of interpretation, though, is the relativity of meaning. In other words, there are several interpretations of scripture which can validly point to the intended meaning of the biblical authors and texts. One purpose of this article, then, will be to explore why it is not possible to find the one intended meaning of scripture, by defining some key concepts (e.g. tradition and presupposition) in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who is one of the most influential names in the history of philosophical hermeneutics of the twentieth century, as interpreted by Merold Westphal.

Some scriptural interpreters, especially evangelicals, are frightened by the idea that biblical meaning is relative because such a pluralistic approach can lead quickly to the demise of biblical infallibility and authority. A second major purpose of this article will be to help ease such fear by offering a biblically grounded theological justification for the interpretative plurality of scripture by looking at the relativity of meaning through the lens of the doctrine of the Trinity. This justification will suggest that the more we rely upon the Holy Spirit and act out our faith in God through Jesus Christ in and outside of the church, the better our interpretation of scripture will become.

This article analyses the Catholic view of religions by examining its beginnings as a theology of salvation for non-believers summarised by the aphorism extra ecclesiam nulla salus. It notes that Catholic attempts to examine the capacity of religions per se in attaining salvation for their followers took place in the period before and during Vatican II when the church began assessing the non-Christian person not just as an isolated individual but also by taking into account her wider affiliations to a religious community. This analysis has revealed there were hermeneutical tensions within the church about whether the Council signified greater continuity or discontinuity with tradition, and consequently, similarly contrasting views about the extent to which it was willing to see other religions as holding salvific function to any extent. The survey has concluded that ultimately the Council chose to leave this question of the salvific function of other faiths open for further investigation, even though it displayed an unprecedented positive appreciation of them, contra some observers who have argued the church recognised the possibility of salvation for non-Christians through their own faiths. Nevertheless, the Second Vatican Council did affirm the significance of other religions as a preparation for the Gospel, as well as showed a movement beyond the pre-Conciliar notion of extra ecclesiam by granting the possibility of salvation for non-Christians, particularly those who are invincibly ignorant and who had striven to live an upright life by observing natural law. This implies that the next theological question on the agenda could be on the role and functions of these religions; i.e. are those people who are reckoned to be saved, saved through or despite their religions, and how is this salvation related to the church or to the work of Christ or both? Thus, the analysis provided in this theological-historical survey will serve to provide the backdrop for further discussions on post Conciliar developments within the Catholic theology of religions. Finally, an understanding of Catholic views towards other religions will also be illuminative for Protestantism as it seeks to advance its own theological understanding of world religions.

Recent scholarship has done much to uncover a continuous tradition of distinctively Reformed natural law reflection, according to which knowledge of the natural moral law, though not saving knowledge, is universally available to humanity in its fallen state and makes a stable secular order possible. A close look at Calvin's understanding of natural law, and in particular of conscience and natural human instincts, shows that Calvin himself did not expect the natural law to serve as a source of substantive action-guiding moral norms. First, Calvin held that conscience delivers information concerning the moral quality even of individual actions. But he also thought that we often blind ourselves to the deliverances of conscience. Second, he argued that our natural instincts predispose us to civic order and fair dealing insofar as these are necessary for the natural well-being or advantage of creatures such as ourselves. But he also carefully distinguished the good of advantage from the good of justice or virtue. The modern natural lawyers eroded Calvin's careful distinction between conscience as revealing our duty as duty, and instinct as guiding us towards natural advantage. They also turned away from Calvin's insistence on the moral incapacity of unredeemed humanity. The modern natural lawyers saw their task as one of developing an empirical science of human nature to guide legislation and shape international law, bracketing questions of whether this nature was fallen and in need of redemption. When Scottish Presbyterian Reformed thinkers, such as Gershom Carmichael and John Witherspoon, tried in diverse ways to restore eroded Reformed commitments to the science of human nature, about which they were otherwise so enthusiastic, they were not particularly successful. A science which could derive moral norms from an examination of human instincts, and a conscience which could deliver universal moral knowledge, proved too attractive to decline simply because of the transcendence of God or the fallenness of humankind. Those who wished to preserve an account of natural law which remained faithful to a fully robust set of Reformed theological commitments could do so only by refusing to regard the natural law as a positive source of moral knowledge.

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.

Jonathan Edwards had some strange ideas. He was an idealist like Berkeley. He denied that the world persists through time, claiming that it is continuously created out of nothing by God moment-by-moment. He also denied creaturely causal action in his doctrine of occasionalism. Moreover, he thought that the world is the necessary output of the essential creativity of the deity, embracing the idea that this is the best possible world. Often these views are not reported in popular accounts of his work, though they are widely known in the scholarly community. But is his position theologically orthodox? This article argues that he is faced with an Edwardsian Dilemma: Either he must admit that his theology proper implies that God is not metaphysically simple, or he must embrace pantheism. Neither horn seems particularly attractive. Of the two, the second seems less appealing than the first. Nevertheless, it looks as if the logic of his position presses in this direction. His idealism and Neoplatonic conception of God's necessary emanation of the world imply panentheism. When coupled with his doctrine of divine simplicity, it looks as if his position could be pressed in a pantheist direction. However, if he opts for the first horn, he must deny the doctrine of divine simplicity, which he endorses in a range of works. If God is simple, then it looks as if all his ideas imply one another and the divine essence. Yet the world is an emanation of divine ideas, which Edwards believes God constantly ‘communicates’. Suppose with Edwards that the world is an ordered series of divine ideas. Then it looks as if they must imply each other and the divine nature as well, given divine simplicity. Clearly this is intolerable, as far as orthodoxy goes. One option is for the Edwardsian to revise divine simplicity, so that God is merely a metaphysical simple like a soul. Then he may have distinct states and properties. However, in addition to this revision one would need to amend Edwards’ occasionalism because it provides an apparently insuperable problem of evil for his metaphysics. Thus, revising the first horn involves more than a little tinkering with the deep structures of Edwards’ thought. However, I argue that this is what the Edwardsian must do if she wants to hold onto a broadly orthodox Edwardsian view on these matters.

For two hundred years after 1687, Newton's notion of absolute time dominated the world of physics. However, Newtonian metaphysical absolute time is so ideal that it may only be realised and actualised by God. In the early twentieth century, Einstein breaks this dominant understanding of time fundamentally by his Special Theory of Relativity and General Theory of Relativity. In the Einsteinian paradigm, we are forced to think no longer of space and time but rather to look at a four-dimensional space-time continuum, in which time appears to be more space-like than temporal. The Newtonian theory implies that there is an absolute, dominant point from which the universe can be observed, whereas Einstein argues for the opposite: there can be no vantage perspective and no universal present by which God can divide past and future.

Barth takes a trinitarian approach to interpret the concept of time. For Barth, the Father is coeternal with the Son and the Holy Spirit. The eternal immanent Trinity acts concretely as the temporal economic Trinity, thus the triune God is pre-, supra- and post- to us. In actual temporality, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit transcend time concretely in our history and penetrate time absolutely from divine eternity. God's eternity is both transcendent and immanent to human time.

Such a trinitarian temporality might serve as a ‘dynamic privileged perspective’ since time, energy and movement are all created by God from eternity. On the one hand, the triune Creator transcends his creature and its creaturely form – time absolutely; on the other hand, even when God enters time and moves together with the time ‘uniformly’ in the Son and the Holy Spirit, he becomes concretely simultaneous with all time. Also the Barthian perspective might provide something which is lacking in Einstein's relative time, i.e. the direction of time from the past to the future. Since every historical event in Einsteinian four-dimensional continuum is posited as a static space-time slice and Einstein equations are time-reversible, there is no ontological difference between time dimensions at all. However, in Barth's trinitarian opinion, such extraordinary events as the creation, resurrection and Pentecost are ontologically superior to other events in human history because they do change our temporality in an absolute way. Penetrated by the trinitarian eternity, those discrete space-time slices also become communicable and hence take genuine temporal characteristics, i.e. the past, present and future.

Both Thomas F. Torrance and Karl Barth speak of the obedience of the Son as a condescension of the Son to become incarnate for our sakes. Thus there is wide agreement between them with regard to both the doctrines of atonement and the Trinity. Yet, despite the fact that Barth never wavered in his rejection of subordinationism and modalism and always affirmed the freedom of God's love, he also claimed that there ‘is in God Himself an above and a below, a prius and a posterius, a superiority and a subordination’,1 while Torrance unequivocally refused to read elements of the economy, such as the ideas of super and subordination and a before or after, back into the immanent Trinity. By comparing the thinking of Barth and Torrance on this issue, I hope to show why I think Barth illegitimately read back elements of the economy into the immanent Trinity, thus creating confusion where clarity would help us see that what God does for us in the economy is and remains an act of free grace which becomes obscured when any sort of hierarchy is introduced into the Trinity.

Both theologians thoroughly agree that what God is towards us in the economy, he is eternally in himself and what he is eternally in himself, he is towards us in the economy. But, there is a difference between them over how to interpret this insight, since Barth thinks super and subordination should be ascribed to the immanent Trinity. While Torrance, like Barth, will argue that the incarnation and Christ's mediatorial activity fall ‘within the life of God’, he also insists that the incarnation cannot in any way be confused with the generation of the Son from the Father in eternity. Barth would agree; yet this important distinction becomes fuzzy when he ascribes subordination and obedience to the eternal Son as a basis for his actions ad extra.

This article will develop in four sections. First, I will discuss the obedience of the Son as condescension for Torrance and Barth. Second, I will consider the implications of the Extra Calvinisticum for each theologian's view of the obedience of the Son and of the Trinity. Third, I will explore how each theologian attempts to avoid subordinationism and modalism indicating the problems which arise in Barth's thinking in connection with these views. Fourth, I will compare Torrance and Barth, showing that Torrance more consistently maintains God's freedom and love by not reading back elements of the economy into the life of the immanent Trinity.

Colin Gunton advanced the radical claim that Christians have univocal knowledge of God. Just this, he said in Act and Being, was the fruit of Christ's ministry and passion. Now, was Gunton right to find this teaching in Karl Barth – or at least, as an implication of Barth's celebrated rejection of ‘hellenist metaphysics’? This article aims to answer this question by examining Gunton's own claim in Act and Being, followed by a closer inspection of Barth's analysis of the doctrine of analogy in a long excursus in Church Dogmatics II/1.

Contrary to some readings of Barth, I find Barth to be remarkably well-informed about the sophisticated terms of contemporary Roman Catholic debate about analogy, including the work of G. Sohngen and E. Pryzwara. Barth's central objection to the doctrine of analogy in this section appears to be the doctrine's reckless division (in Barth's eyes) of the Being of God into a ‘bare’ God, the subject of natural knowledge, and the God of the Gospel, known in Jesus Christ. But such reckless abstraction cannot be laid at the feet of Roman theologians alone! Barth extensively examines, and finds wanting, J. A. Quenstedt's doctrine of analogy, and the knowledge of God it affords, all stripped, Barth charges, of the justifying grace of Jesus Christ. From these pieces, Barth builds his own ‘doctrine of similarity’, a complex and near-baroque account, which seeks to ground knowledge of God in the living act of his revelation and redemption of sinners. All this makes one tempted to say that Gunton must be wrong in his assessment either of univocal predication or of its roots in the theology of Karl Barth.

But passages from the same volume of the Church Dogmatics make one second-guess that first conclusion. When Barth turns from his methodological sections in volume II/1 to the material depiction of the divine perfections, he appears to lay aside every hesitation and speak as directly, as plainly and, it seems, as ‘univocally’ as Gunton could ever desire. Some examples from the perfection of divine righteousness point to Barth's startling use of frank and direct human terms for God's own reality and his unembarrassed use of such terms to set out the very ‘heart of God’.

Yet things are never quite what they seem in Barth. A brief comparison between Gunton's univocal predication and Barth's own use of christological predication reveals some fault-lines between the two, and an explanation, based on Barth's own doctrine of justification, is offered in its place.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's liberal use of spatial concepts in constructing an ecclesiology served his theological purpose in the articulation of a concrete ecclesiology. In particular, Bonhoeffer uses the themes of taking-up-space and the visibility of the church. The visibility of the church is depicted as a proclamatory space, a liturgical space and an ordered space, all encapsulated in the concept of Lebensraum. Within this space, witness is given to the foundation of all reality in Jesus Christ. The church is the place where this reality is proclaimed; a space no bigger than that required to serve the world in witness to Christ. As opposed to any idea of a ‘privatised’ or individual space, Bonhoeffer insisted on the public and territorial nature of this space as essential to the church's witness, for it was in this very visibility that the church gains space for Christ.

Lebensraum, an idea popularised by Adolf Hitler and incorporated into the foreign policy of the Third Reich, was a highly charged political concept taken over by Bonhoeffer to represent a living space diametrically opposed in form to that proposed by the Reich. A useful way of thinking about the Christian form of Lebensraum as proposed by Bonhoeffer is to regard it as the space in which the ‘social acts that constitute the community of love and that disclose in more detail the structure and nature of the Christian church’1 are to be demonstrated and observed. These ‘social acts’ are built upon the foundational concepts, first found in Sanctorum Communio, of Stellvertretung or vicarious representative action, Miteinander or church members being with-each-other, and Füreinander or church members actively being for-each-other. Bonhoeffer proposes that, as its life is lived out in this way, the church will take the form of its suffering servant Lord. It is in this particular space and no other, grounded and upright in Christ, that Christians are to live their lives in witness to Christ.

This article takes as its springboard the well-known text of Psalm 2:7, in which the Psalmist – presumably David, king of Israel – refers to himself as a ‘begotten’ son of God by virtue of his Lord's decree. The article first explores various linguistic and theological options as to the identity of the ‘son’ to whom the passage refers; and analyses the relationship between that son and the one who is stated to have begotten him. In this context, the article addresses ways in which the passage more generally sheds light on the relationship between God and Israel, including through analysis of a number of fluctuating usages of singular and plural terms in the Old Testament to describe that relationship. Second, and against that background, the article examines texts in the New Testament which quote or refer to Psalm 2:7 to see whether they provide a better understanding of the nature of the relationship between the father and the son described in the Psalm; and further to see whether any enhanced understanding of that relationship reciprocally sheds light on the relationship of God the Father to God the Son as revealed in the New Testament. The article then seeks to determine whether these passages, taken as a whole, provide explicit, implicit, or proto-Trinitarian concepts in anticipation of those given fuller expression in orthodox Church doctrine. Finally, the article explores the concept of circumincession, or coinherence, John of Damascus’ highly abstracted and nearly poetic effort at the close of the Patristic era to provide an extra-biblical explanation of the relationship between the Father and the Son as well as the relationship among the three members of the Trinity. The article concludes by finding that his attempted articulation, and quite possibly all such efforts, will ultimately fail, leaving intact the mystery of the Trinity as one escaping, or rather surpassing, conceptual analysis.

I argue for the theological plausibility of reading contemporary environmental concern as a response to the prophetic voices of nonhuman nature, and in that sense as a movement of the Holy Spirit.

The literature on pneumatology and the environment tends to concentrate either on the Spirit's role in creation (and the continuities between creation and new creation) or on the ecclesial location of the Spirit's transformation of material reality. While these approaches are sound and necessary, neither appears fully to address the specific theological challenge of the contemporary environmental movement and of contemporary environmental stress, as a historical moment between humanity and nonhuman nature. Pneumatology needs to take account of the specific ways in which the environment becomes an issue for theology and society, and of the historical ‘discernment of spirits’ involved in Christian and theological responses to the environmental crisis.

In an attempt to address this need, I take up the now well-developed theological claim that nonhuman nature is a subject, rather than the backdrop of salvation-history, and develop it in relation to the idea that prophecy as the work of the Spirit both reveals and realises God's history with creation. I draw on Eugene Rogers’ approach to pneumatology by exploring the non-identical repetitions of pneumatology's paradigmatic narratives, but, going beyond Rogers, I trace these repetitions in nonhuman and extra-ecclesial realities – in ‘the environment’. The main paradigmatic pneumatological narratives considered in this article are those related to prophecy, and in particular to the miraculous extension of gifts of speech and hearing; rereading these narratives in the contemporary environmental crisis leads to an account of how the ‘voices’ of nonhuman nature are heard as prophetic speech that summons response. In a final section, I turn to another paradigmatic pneumatological narrative – that of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness – and propose, in dialogue with Donald MacKinnon and others, that it offers a starting-point for theological responses to the experience of despair, loss and failure in the context of environmental concern.