The King James Bible was widely celebrated in 2011 for its literary, religious and cultural significance over the past 400 years, yet its staunch critics are important to note as well. This article draws attention to Catholic critics of the King James Bible (KJB) during its first 300 years in print. By far the most systematic and long-lived Catholic attack on the KJB is found in the argument and afterlife of a curious counter-Reformation text, Thomas Ward's Errata of the Protestant Bible. This book is not completely unknown, yet many scholars have been puzzled over exactly what to make of it and all its successor editions in the nineteenth century – at least a dozen, often in connection with an edition of the Catholic Douai-Rheims Bible (DRB). Ward's Errata, first published in 1688, was based on a 1582 book by Catholic translator and biblical scholar Gregory Martin. The book and its accompanying argument, that all Protestant English Bibles were ‘heretical’ translations, then experienced a prosperous career in nineteenth-century Ireland, employed to battle the British and Foreign Bible Society's campaign to disseminate the Protestant King James Bible as widely as possible. On the American career of the Counter-Reformation text, the article discusses early editions in Philadelphia, when the school Bible question entered the American scene. In the mid-nineteenth century, led by Bishop John Purcell in Cincinnati, Bishop Francis Patrick Kenrick in Philadelphia and Bishop John Hughes in New York City, many Catholics began opposing the use of the KJB as a school textbook and demanding use of the Douai Rheims Bible instead. With reference to Ward's Errata, they argued that the KJB was a sectarian version, reflecting Protestant theology at the expense of Catholic teachings. These protests culminated in the then world-famous Bible-burning trial of Russian Redemptorist priest, Fr Vladimir Pecherin in Dublin, in late 1855. The Catholic criticisms of the KJB contained in Ward's Errata, which was reprinted for the last time in 1903, reminded the English-speaking public that this famous and influential Protestant version was not the most perfect of versions, and that it was not and never had been THE BIBLE for everyone.

Can a biblical text be idolatrous? Ezekiel's God has always been theologically awkward and difficult to handle. For early Jewish and Christian readers of the book the most troublesome (and indeed dangerous) parts of the text were the prophet's initial vision of the divine glory and its subsequent reappearances. Voltaire was perplexed and revolted by God's command that Ezekiel eat bread cooked with dung.1 For some twentieth-century Protestant commentators, Ezekiel's God is altogether too concerned with ritual at the expense of ethics.2 But for contemporary readers it is the unrelenting harshness, violence and especially masculinity of Ezekiel's Yhwh which proves most problematic. My aim in this article is to examine some of the theological implications of this divine awkwardness. In what follows I will attempt three things. First, I will offer a brief examination of the problems Ezekiel's God poses and a few recent Christian responses. Second, I will outline Roland Boer's proposal that Ezekiel 20 (along with 16 and 23) tends towards a kind of ‘anti-Yahwism’ or ‘protest atheism’: a vision of God so appalling as to be impossible to accept. Finally, I will explore the value for theological interpretation of taking seriously such an apparently unpromising conclusion, and suggest that the apophatic tradition may provide resources for embracing such radical negativity within scripture.

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.

Hans Urs von Balthasar claimed that Barth's Church Dogmatics demonstrates a weakening of his distinctive actualism in order to make space for ‘the concept of authentic objective form’, a point illustrated by the discourse on divine beauty in CD II/1. There Barth treats the divine being as an objective form to be contemplated, a seeming departure from Barth's privileged conceptualisation of God as personal subject whose free action humbles our theoretical gaze and graciously provides the material content for proper speech about God. Bruce McCormack has challenged von Balthasar's general thesis, arguing that no weakening has in fact taken place in the Church Dogmatics. If this is the case, what then of Barth's discourse on divine beauty? Is it consistent with his actualistic doctrine of God? Is it possible to speak of God both as a free, dynamic event and an object of beauty? Can theological aesthetics find a home within Barth's actualism? This article answers in the affirmative by demonstrating the systematic integrity between Barth's claims about divine beauty and the actualism permeating CD II/1. First, the article examines the ambiguity of Barth's specific claims about divine beauty. Barth is both enthusiastic and hesitant in speaking about divine beauty, affirming the concept yet placing careful qualifications on its use. Next, the article illustrates how the nature of these claims is anticipated by the actualism of CD II/1, specifically by (1) Barth's clear rejection of divine formlessness, (2) his argument that God's act of self-revelation in Jesus Christ implies an objective triune form for God's being and, lastly, (3) how he grounds discourse on divine beauty in the event of God's dynamic, free love. The article finally contends that the key to Barth's puzzling position on divine beauty is in understanding the precise reason why he registers beauty as a necessary but insufficient theological concept. This qualification is rooted in an important content–form, spirit–nature distinction which frames all discussion about God's being-in-act. Throughout CD II/1, objective form is a necessary condition for divine self-expression, but objectivity is always grounded in the freedom of the Spirit. Thus, the freedom-to-love at the heart of God's triune existence is the ground of our experience of God as beautiful, not any continuity with our contemplation of created forms. As such, the creative freedom animating God's triune life provides the space for, but also the limit to, theological aesthetics by imbuing divine beauty in mystery.

Study of Barth's doctrine of angels has languished, and the time is ripe for a thorough reassessment. While any full account will centre on the magisterial theology of angels in the Church Dogmatics, much can be gained from a close, contextually informed reading of the earlier treatment of angels in the Göttingen dogmatics lectures. These lectures are shaped by a twofold procedural commitment: Barth's presentation is ordered, on one hand, to a recognisably modern conception of the logical content of Christian preaching; and it conforms, on the other hand, to a doctrinal sequence recommended by the dogmatic textbooks of the classical Reformed tradition. A tension between these two aspects becomes visible in Barth's handling of the doctrine of angels – a tract of teaching by which he is visibly unsettled. Barth accordingly attends with particular care to two fundamental modern objections to the doctrine – namely that it involves a superfluous reduplication of anthropological themes and that it has no independent doctrinal standing. The first objection exploits the observation that the doctrine of angels traditionally stands in close proximity to the doctrine of the human creature; the second follows from the claim that Christian preaching, and the dogmatic theology which serves it, attends strictly to the relationship between God and humanity, realised and revealed in the gospel. Barth's attempts to respond to these criticisms, and so to draw out the necessity and the proper dogmatic status of the doctrine of angels, are traced in detail. Angels and demons, conceived as real spiritual forces, are ineluctable features of the situation within which human moral agency is exercised. And angels are ingredients in, though not central to, the scriptural depiction of the relationship between God and humanity. Barth's elaboration of the positive features of Protestant scholastic angelology is summarised, and the motivating impulses and constructive potential of his theology of angels are briefly noted: Barth's exposition may be read as a complex exercise in theological self-differentiation; a recommendation of a distinctive style of biblical reasoning; and a creative contribution to the revitalisation of a culture of Christian witness.

In an age where the church needs to foster moral concern for the environment, some are suggesting that Christian theology itself must be changed to produce this result. This article argues that such emendations are unnecessary because Dietrich Bonhoeffer, working a couple of decades before ecological concern was even seen as necessary, manages to craft a theological and ethical approach which is sensitive to ecological concern while retaining large portions of the Christian tradition. Bonhoeffer's anthropology robustly affirms humanity's connection with the natural environment and does not separate humans from the natural order. In fact, his novel approach to the image of God emphasises the necessity of human physicality and the ethical responsibility for the other, which seems to be extendable to the natural order as well. In addition, Bonhoeffer's interpretation of the command to have dominion sees the injunction as a call to be ‘bound’ to nature as a servant, not as a lord free to exploit the earth for wanton pleasure. Consequently, Bonhoeffer interprets the industrial revolution as the failure of humans to rule and serve creation well. Finally, his anthropology, unlike many in the tradition, does not extradite humans from the world, but rather situates them entirely within the matrix of interlocking relationships in the natural world. While Christian soteriology has been criticised for shifting Christian concern away from the environment and life in this world, Bonhoeffer's soteriology overcomes this criticism. Bonhoeffer vociferously repudiates two kingdoms theology in favour of a single unified reality of Christ, which unites God's work of creation and redemption into a unified whole. Furthermore, he interprets the incarnation as a robust affirmation of God's creation and thereby life in this present world. Finally, Bonhoeffer posits redemption encompassing the entire world order, rather than seeing humans as its unique constituents. Bonhoeffer's ethics of responsible action shows that humans need to evaluate not just their immediate actions, but also the long-term consequences of their actions, especially when it comes to use of the environment, both for the sake of other humans and for the sake of following Christ. Since disciples of Christ are supposed to be working towards the reality of Christ, one can conclude that Bonhoeffer's thought encourages humans to work towards the harmony that is to typify creation in the eschaton. Thus, Bonhoeffer's ethics encourages a moral concern for the environment both as a means of neighbourly love and as a means of following Christ.