This essay considers Gregory of Nazianzus’ allusion to ‘divine deceit’, a motif related to the so-called ‘Christus Victor’ theory of atonement. This allusion is curious when we recall that for Gregory, the devil, not God, is the master of deception. When we treat On the Lights (Or. 39) as a literary unit – which commentators have yet to do – we see that Gregory makes several doctrinal affirmations before alluding to what is known as ‘divine deceit’. In this doctrinal discussion, Gregory draws upon the Platonic distinction between the orders of being and becoming as described in the Timaeus. He then alludes to ‘divine deceit’ with respect to the order of ‘becoming’, which bears the possibility of being misapprehended because it is ‘grasped by opinion’. The devil's ‘opinion’ of himself and of Christ, therefore, is suspect. Death – or rather, Christ's vanquishment of it – is the moment of reckoning. Since God alone can defeat death, Christ's putting death to death is the only certain way for the devil to recognise that the ‘Son of Man’ is, after all, the ‘Son of God’. The ‘devil's delusion’, then – not ‘divine deceit’ – best summarises Gregory's understanding of this moment in the history of salvation.

Karl Barth's Theology of the Reformed Confessions characterised those catechetical texts as more ethical in orientation and more horizontal in focus than the corresponding Lutheran symbols. By examining both primary and secondary sources, this paper shows that while Barth legitimately illumines a key element of the Reformed witness regarding a connection between faith and life, his polemical eye may also distort his perspective on its distinctiveness, likely owing to contextual factors related to his self-fashioning a Reformed identity in his early academic service at the predominantly Lutheran University of Göttingen and alongside his colleague, Emanuel Hirsch.

In 1257, the election of Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (c. 1217–1274) as leader of the Franciscan Order thrust him from the regulated world of academia into the polarised world of the Order. In his Breviloquium, completed just after his transition from a scholastic to an administrative and pastoral role, exegesis was mainly a form of intellectual contemplation mediated by Scripture. In his Itinerarium mentis in Deum, completed in 1259, exegesis became a form of contemplative encounter with the textual origin, Christ. This transformation of exegetical method in response to changing contexts and audiences manifests a different way of relating to Scripture.

The connection between ecological responsibility and differing conceptions of Christian eschatology is widely observed. It is often assumed that the necessary response to Christian environmental inaction is affirmation of a strongly this-worldly vision of new creation (so, influentially, N. T. Wright). However, recent systematic theology has seen retrieval of elements of eschatology that foreground discontinuity and transcendence (e.g. Hans Boersma). Moreover, there are exegetical challenges to continuationist claims (e.g. Markus Bockmuehl and Edward Adams) and doctrinal reactions to ‘eschatological naturalism’ (Katherine Sonderegger and Michael Allen). Where does this leave the connection between ecological witness and the content of Christian hope? Doubtless, continuationist accounts have some salutary emphases, but on exegetical, doctrinal and moral grounds I seek to disentangle the assumed compact of particular construals of this-worldly continuity and ethical commitment. Finally, drawing on James Cone's meditations upon black spiritual traditions, I explore how discontinuous interpretations of the life to come themselves need not undermine responsible action.

The Christian mystical tradition approaches the apocalyptic as praxis – a way of living that renounces the world as it is, lives proleptically into a counter-world of God's reign and practices indifferent freedom in the meantime to love God and neighbour. Although concerns about the ethical viability of such a disposition have merit, this essay demonstrates its constructive possibility through recourse to two archives: the writings of Evagrius of Pontus and the witness of Francis of Assisi. By recovering a scriptural distinction between world and creation, and by emphasising the posture of holy indifference, apocalyptic praxis offers a resource and guide.

This study of Paradise Lost, interpreted through the lens of John Milton's treatise De doctrina Christiana, argues that the poet seeks to breathe new life into the tropes of orthodox Christian theodicy by radicalising concepts chosen eclectically from both Reformed and Arminian schools of thought, integrating them within the patchwork of his own idiosyncratic heterodoxies and thus catalysing a fundamentally new theology propelled by his narrative priorities. This approach makes the drama that Milton intuits itself the driver of dogma, which drama allows him to bring God and reader into the same story, under the spell of his own theodical narration.