Shake the leaky buckets of human meditation on theodicy. Out fall problems of moral perception, of linguistic and logical subtlety, of imagination in metaphysical work and biblical interpretation, of so much more. … They are disparately connected things which can suggest a Tower of Babel at least as much as any Tree of Good and Evil. But then such a picture is what one might fairly expect from a central mystery of theology, from something one can make (in this life, at least) only limited progress towards understanding.

The first Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology was H. G. Wood. The subject of his Inaugural Lecture given in 1940 was The function of a Department of Theology in a modern University. Appropriately enough he took up the views of John Henry, Cardinal Newman, the one Birmingham theologian whose work is on the way to becoming classic. In the present climate, Newman's book The Idea of a University is worth looking at again. As he showed over a hundred years ago, purely utilitarian values cannot produce good education. Nor can a general acquaintance with a bit of everything. Specialisation and in-depth study is the only way to learn how to think rather than pick up information jackdaw-like. Scholarly grappling with the great minds of the past, the so-called ‘irrelevant’ and ‘ivory-tower’ occupation of those who inhabit an Arts Faculty, is essential for the formation of minds. ‘To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression’ – this Newman regarded as ‘an object as intelligible as the cultivation of virtue’.1 Society needs minds and not just technicians, and in an institution which is concerned with truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, theology is indispensable to the universality which a University should embrace.

The root ts-d-q found in the Old Testament has always presented its interpreters with a challenge. It is the root from which modern versions usually offer us the word ‘righteous’. Actually two problems arise over it, for from this root we have both a verb and a noun. So we must discover in the case of the noun, what the feminine form tsedaqah actually means and how it differs from its masculine counterpart, tsedeq, if at all; and, in the case of the verb, what tsedeq means in the Qal as well as in the Hiphil, as hitsdiq.

Language for God is not equivalent to the kinds of naming we use in ordinary speech. We say that what ‘we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet,’ and we recognize that ordinary names for creatures are subject to human custom, choice, and change. According to biblical religion, on the other hand, only God can name God. Distinctive Christian experiences and beliefs are expressed through distinctive language about God, and the changes in that language proposed by feminist theologians do not merely add a few unfamiliar words for God, as some would like to think, but in fact introduce beliefs about God that differ radically from those inherent in Christian faith, understanding, and Scripture. Briefly stated, that is the argument this essay will systematically expand.

The affirmation that Jesus Christ ‘was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary’ is beset by many problems and difficulties, and to deny or try to ignore their existence is bad theological scholarship. But it is also bad theological scholarship — though this is sometimes in danger of being overlooked —to refuse to consider seriously and with as open a mind as possible any evidence or any rational argument, whether historical or theological, which can be adduced as in any way supporting this affirmation of the Apostles' Creed. It seems to me that neither those who accept the historicity of the Virgin Birth nor those who reject it have a monopoly of prejudice. I cannot here attempt anything like a full or systematic discussion of this difficult and controversial subject. The best I can do is to set down briefly and as clearly as I can a few reflections as a very modest contribution to the on-going debate.

It would be dishonest not to begin with Austin Farrer, for what follows has grown out of a long-held admiration for that sadly neglected writer. Throughout his life, Farrer was concerned with the role played in our lives by imagination, inspiration and creativity. He saw that creation was shot through with the imprint of its Maker, and in the classical Christian tradition understood the shaping of all life in the material world to be the work of the Holy Spirit. At all levels of creation, inspiration, creativity and spiritual indwelling are the hallmarks of God's activity. For Farrer, natural religion and divine revelation are but two sides of the same coin. The key to all is the point at which they coincide most clearly, namely Jesus. Of Farrer's Christology I have written elsewhere. Such technical discussions are not our present business. Our task is to take the supreme Christian claim about the nature of God, namely the scandalous doctrine of the Trinity, and through the words of St John (whose influence on Farrer's understanding of Jesus was central) try to describe a practical understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit which employs the doctrine of the Trinity as the key-stone of Christian theology and experience.

In the early Christian treatise Peri tes anastaseos ton nekron, written in the last quarter of the second century, Athenagoras of Athens drew a distinction between two kinds of theological discourse or argument (logos), ‘on behalf of the truth’ (huper tes aletheias) and ‘concerning the truth’ (peri tes aletheias), in which he clearly had in mind St Paul's missionary address to the Athenians on Mars' Hill. Owing to its nature discourse concerning the truth is of primary importance for it provides necessary knowledge of the actual subject-matter, while discourse on behalf of the truth is of secondary importance for it does not establish the truth but is useful in opening the way for it by removing the undergrowth of false and hostile opinion. It is in this light that Athenagoras' two extant works are to be appreciated, Presbeia ton Christianon which is admittedly of an apologetic nature, and Peri tes anastaseos ton nekron in which he offered a reasoned account of the truth of the resurrection.

The current discussion of the proposal from the World Council of Churches that ‘all churches should revert to the original text of the Nicene Creed as the normative formulation’ and thus excise the filioque, presents churches with a unique opportunity for extensive re-examination of fundamental theology.

There is a general malaise concerning trinitarian theology, which usually is attributed to its speculative complexity, or what we are calling in these pages, ‘the far country’. The abstractness of trinitarian theology is partly funded by an overlysharp distinction between the ‘economic’ and the ‘immanent’ trinity, or between God's activity in salvation history, and God's self-relatedness. The marginal position of trinitarian theology is also a direct result of the development of Western trinitarian doctrine apart from its proper home in liturgy and the language of praise. Despite this, there is evidence that the museum days of trinitarian theology are rapidly coming to an end.

The importance of this well-known verse has been frequently noted. It is cited as a high point in the literature of Israel, as a classic summary of the teaching of the eighth century prophets and as a statement of great lasting and theological value. In Jewish tradition it is used as one of the memorable summaries of the whole Law. It does contain, however, uncertainties of meaning and interpretation. In form it is a priestly or prophetic torah, giving an answer to the worshipper's question in vv. 6–7, What has a sinner to do to be restored to a right relationship with God, and then how is that relationship to be sustained? With a general statement like this questions of date and authorship are minor matters.

All figures in the past suffer from their interpreters, who too often see them as the embodiment or antithesis of their own position. Zwingli is no exception in this. He has in turn been welcomed as the liberal among the reformers or repudiated as the rationalist among them. He has been portrayed as the heroic Swiss patriot dying on the field of battle or dismissed as the preacher turned politician who took the sword and deservedly perished by it.

Modern ecumenical discussions and liturgical reform have given new interest to the ceremonies of Christian initiation. The Reformed churches have traditionally held the view that baptism takes the place of circumcision in the economy of salvation. The interpretations of circumcision in early Christian and patristic literature would suggest a modification, or at least a nuance, to that view.

There is a tale which Douglas Young tells of a St Andrews University divine and which may well be regarded as cautionary. Thomas Jackson was born in St Andrews in 1797, and held the Chair of Divinity, first in St Andrews and then in Glasgow. When he retired in 1874, he returned to St Andrews to write his great work, designed to settle all the controversies of the centuries and bring discordant Scots into unanimity. He had one of the big houses on the south side of South Street, with its ‘lang rigg’, at the foot of which was an elegant garden room, with table and chair. Thither, daily, the septuagenarian repaired, garbed in his ecclesiastical frock coat, took off his shiny top-hat, and grasped a quill pen to set down his great thoughts on the virgin white folio quire, daily laid on the table. white folio quire, daily laid on the table. After several hours, he would tear it all up and go back to the house. After four years, they found him dead, aged eighty-one, and the garden house yielded a single written sheet with the sum of his wisdom: ‘Theology is everything, and everything is theology’.

The year 1988 is the tercentenary of the accession of William and Mary to the throne of England at the invitation of the English Parliament. In 1689 the Estates of Scotland invited them to the Scottish throne. Their accession has been called a Revolution and it made a decisive change in the constitutional and ecclesiastical situation in both countries. Henceforth, the monarchy could not claim to rule solely by divine right. The hereditary principle still operated and the panoply of coronations retained many echoes of a divine commission, but monarchs now ruled within the law and were accountable to the parliaments of the two kingdoms and after 1707 to the parliament of the United Kingdom.

In the opening chapter of his The Work of the Holy Ghost in Our Salvation Thomas Goodwin, the seventeenth-century Calvinist Independent, makes some general observations on the description of the Spirit as found in John 14–16. Among them is the following comment á propos of John 15.26 and I Cor. 2.11–12:

(1) The term ‘eschatology’ stems from Abraham Calov who entitled the twelfth and last section of his masterpiece of dogmatics, Systema locorum Theologicorum (1677), ‘EΣXATOΛOΓIA Sacra’. This final section, which concludes the Dogmatics of a leading representative of Lutheran Orthodoxy, deals with the ‘last things’ (de novissimis), specifically death and the state after death, the resurrection of the dead, the last Judgment, the consummation of the world, hell and everlasting death, and, finally, life everlasting. Calov does not define the artificial term ‘eschatologia’ which he himself had probably coined; he hardly even explains it in the course of his presentation, so that it remains a mere heading. Clearly it applies to the eschaton, namely ‘the end’, which, according to I Cor. 15.24, comes about when Christ, after subjugating all powers and authorities, delivers over the dominion to God the Father (quaestio 2). In the preceding section Calov had cited NT texts which explicitly or implicitly speak of the eschata, the last things, or of the last day/days as the conclusion of human history.

Hugh Ross Mackintosh (1870–1936) was Professor of Systematic Theology at New College, Edinburgh, for 32 years until his sudden death on 8th June 1936. Regarded as one of the foremost theologians of his day, he was awarded honorary degrees from Oxford and Marburg, and left profound impressions on the countless students from Scotland and around the world who came to hear his lectures. Mackintosh was a formidable scholar; it was said that he had read every important theological book published in Britain and Germany, and he skilfully translated Ritschl's Justification and Reconciliation and Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith. He possessed a discerning eye and a gift for lucid exposition which made him an authoritative interpreter and commentator. A keen student of philosophy, Mackintosh studied its relationship to theology closely; much of his early work dealt with the neo-Kantian epistemology of Herman Lotze that formed the philosophical basis for Ritschlian theology.

On 27th August 1952 the following lines appeared in an obituary notice in the London Times.

In the first instalment of a seven volume series, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis offers us an extraordinary tale involving four children who enter a magical land, Narnia, a myriad of talking animals, a Christ-like lion named Asian and a satanic creature known simply as the Witch (although she claims the title of Queen of Narnia and Empress of the Lone Islands). At the heart of the story is a drama of salvation, or at least saving deliverance. One of the children, Edmund, is held captive by the Witch and will be released only on the condition of Asian's taking Edmund's place. Asian is the ransom for Edmund. In rough outline, Asian's ransoming Edmund and his subsequent resurrection fits the classic ransom theory of the atonement, a theory which can hardly boast of enormous contemporary appeal. I do not think its unpopularity is altogether deserved. Versions of the theory may be found in many patristic writers including Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, St Ambrose, St Jerome, and Origen. I wish here to defend a modified ransom theory against six of the classic objections which have contributed to its neglect. As C. S. Lewis, the father of Narnia, has presented a rich story of a ransom drama which is more familiar (and sometimes more fun to read) than the Nicene and Prenicene fathers, I will use The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe to set forth a bold, unsophisticated ransom theory.

Two dogmas continue to die hard, despite attempts to destroy them, and it may be that they have good reason for refusing to go away. The first is that what has come to be known as ‘christology from above’ tends to produce a docetic conception of the person of Christ, or at least one in which the humanity of Jesus receives so little emphasis that it becomes little better than a cipher. If an eternal being or hypostasis – to put the matter in the almost tritheistic language that is sometimes used – takes to himself a body, can the resulting being be truly human? Does not the eternal origin inevitably call the tune, undermining the genuineness of the human actions?