This article deals with the lost work of the early Christian writer Hegesippus, whose Hypomnemata is only known through quotations in Eusebius. Faulty preconceptions regarding the dating and provenance of Hegesippus’ work are criticised, and it is argued that the Hypomnemata is a loose collection of bishop traditions from the late 170s or 180s. The purpose of the work is to connect orthodoxy with correct episcopal succession.

An important contemporary approach to understanding a Pauline account of sin takes sin to be a self or personal agent who acts in the world. This article engages with such a proposal by offering theological analysis. It is argued that the exegetical arguments in favour of the proposal that sin is a personal agent are less than convincing, and it is argued further that the theory encounters serious theological problems.

This article argues that views of sin and salvation are shaped by one's view of God. Thus, whenever it is thought that God is a metaphor that theologians can change to attain a desired social or psychological result, then the true meaning of sin and salvation are lost. Relying on Karl Barth's view of Jesus as the Judge judged in our place, this article argues against ideas that sin can no longer be understood as self-will, and that salvation must be understood only as our working for a better world. Such views fail to recognise that, since only God can reveal God, the true meaning of sin is and remains most visible today in our attempts to redefine God and salvation in social and psychological rather than strictly theological terms.

Reformed accounts of infant baptism are usually covenantal and promissory in nature. They are about bringing the child into the ambit of the visible church in the hope the infant will own the faith upon reaching the age of reason. This paper sets out an alternative Reformed account of baptism, drawing on the Scottish confessional tradition. On this account, infants have a disposition to faith conveyed to them in baptism that will in due course become dispositional faith exercised in saving faith. Thus, baptism involves regeneration – or something close to it.

This essay forms the basis for the case that contemporary application of the concept of the sensus fidelium as a vehicle for transmitting accurate doctrine relies primarily on shifts in power structures in the first several centuries of the church. By investigating two documents depicting public theological dialogues in the presence of both clergy and laity, Origen's Dialogue with Heraclides from the third century and the Dialogue of Heraclian from the fourth century, I argue that the intersection of a widening gap between lay and clergy with a shrinking importance in public theological debate served actually to relocate the sensus fidelium from the efforts of powerful clergy into the lived churchly practices of the laity.