The philosopher John Macmurray's specifically theological intent, contribution, and method stand strangely neglected. In the past decade theologians have argued that his philosophic work might suggest a new natural theology. Such is the case in appreciative comments by John A. T. Robinson and Thomas A. Langford. Both focus on the primacy that Macmurray accords the ‘personal’, and the bearing that this might have on an apologetic for the ‘religious dimension of life’. That Macmurray, however, might be more adequately interpreted as theologian than as philosopher only, that his philosophy itself might legitimately be considered the development of a theological position, and that finally his work might point the way toward reorientation of the relationship between theology and other human sciences will be argued in this article.

In the nineteen-thirties, when Søren Kierkegaard was beginning to become internationally known and his ideas were being eagerly discussed, Theodor Haecker noted that of all those who had reason to take up the task of interpretation the theologians were the least active. Today, in spite of the wealth of Kierkegaardian studies available, the situation is not so very different. The great Christian writer is still more commonly thought of as the pioneer of existentialism than as a skilled exponent of Christianity, and the bearing of his teaching upon doctrinal issues is seldom mentioned. It is true that he said that Christianity was not a doctrine, and that he wrote no formal theology. Insisting that his role was that of a layman, the most he claimed was that some of his writings were specifically ‘for edification’. At the same time, he strenuously opposed the opinion that Christian belief could stand without a very definite content, pointing out that the inwardness demanded of the individual presupposed knowledge of the ‘objectively dogmatic’: in faith the how could not be separated from the what.

The Amsterdam literature has pointed out afresh the well-known fact that one of the points at issue between the Catholic and Protestant traditions is the number of the Sacraments, and it may well be that a discussion of this question would bring to light some of the other differences between these two traditions. An attempt is made in this paper to outline a Protestant view of the question. It is clear that “Catholic” is used here in a sense different from that which it bears in the historic creeds. Moreover, the contrast made between Catholic (chiefly Anglo-Catholic) and Protestant (chiefly non-Anglican) views is not intended to deny that the Church of England is in a sense Protestant, or to raise the question how far in loyalty to its formularies it can be other than Protestant.

Gazing about himself at the theological landscape in 1967, Gordon Kaufman observed,

… the historical situation has changed and with it the theological task. The great critical questions posed by liberalism and humanism …—questions which could be more or less ignored or overlooked during the crises of recent decades — have come into view once again and are demanding attention. Most notable of all in this respect is the central conception on which the whole theological program rests, the problem of ‘God’, What do we mean by ‘God’? Is this notion intelligible at all to ‘modern man’ or does it depend on outgrown mythological patterns of thought?

Kaufman was not alone in the 1960's in sensing a change in the theological situation. Schubert Ogden saw it as symptomatic of an overall, cultural change. Langdon Gilkey pointed to the rise of the radical ‘God is dead’ theologies as indicative of the truly new element in the present situation: ‘This upheaval, this radical questioning of the foundations of religious affirmation and so of the theological language reflective of it, is now taking place within and not outside of the Church.’ In other words, the meaningfulness of religious language, so long taken for granted while neo-orthodoxy held sway, was now problematic, not just outside the Church, but within as well.

At first sight the above title may suggest a gross presumption. For surely what is true is true, and there is an end of it. How can there be such a thing as an “understanding of truth,” let alone a Christian understanding of truth? And yet there have been such things as “theories of truth,” attempts to analyse the notion, ending perhaps as analysis so often does in the paradox of tautology, “truth is truth,” yet useful and illuminating as far as they go. But if we grant that truth-theory forms an admissible chapter in the philosophy of logic, can we talk of such a thing as a Christian understanding of truth? After all truth remains truth. And if we speak of an understanding of truth, and then predicate Christian of it, are we using the word understanding in such a way that theory is substitutable for it? There is a suggestion in the word understanding of a certain condescension towards what is understood, a pigeon-holing, as if we would like to say: “Yes, now we have got truth nicely docketed.” Whereas perhaps a “theory of truth” does no more than help us to dissolve some puzzle or puzzles connected with the notion.

So any attempt to defend the concept of a Christian understanding of truth must begin by some account of the sort of jobs truth-theories have tried to do, and then explain the kind of connection that obtains between such theories and what we call an “ understanding of truth.”

In recent years feminists and others have taken issue with traditional understandings of the atonement. Part of their criticism has been the assertion that to glorify Christ's suffering entails glorifying all suffering, a connection that potentially leads to abusive behaviour. Suffering, they claim, is not redemptive – ever. In this article I argue that, based on the biblical text, at least one instance of suffering, the suffering of Christ, is redemptive. In addition, I argue that redemptive suffering is unique to Christ. Human suffering is not redemptive and should not be spoken of in those terms.

The first assembly of the World Council of Churches recognised that the aspect of the Roman Catholic-Protestant division which constituted ‘our deepest difference’ was the question of justification. The appearance in 1957 of a work by a then unknown Roman Catholic scholar, claiming that ‘it is undeniable that there is a fundamental agreement between Karl Barth's position and that of the Catholic Church seen in its totality' was therefore the occasion as much for surprise as for pleasure. ‘How one would like to believe it!’ remarked Barth. Küng's study marks a major step toward ecumenical discussion on the issue of justification; however, that discussion must be continued. The present study is a small contribution toward that discussion.

In 1960 a unique encounter between East and West took place. Paul Tillich visited Japan for a lecture visit of three months. In a recent article appearing in The Christian Century in the series ‘How My Mind Has Changed’, Tillich declares that this encounter was perhaps the most significant experience of the past ten years of his life. His discussions with Japanese religious leaders, especially those of Buddhism, ‘served to bring to full awareness elements of thought which had been present for a long time’ (‘On the Boundary Line’, Christian Century, 6th Dec. 1960, p. 1435). While not becoming a convert to Zen Buddhism (as he puts it), he was impressed with the ultimate concern he found in forms of religious life uninfluenced by Christianity. He declares that his observations strengthened his theological conviction that the concept of religion in its larger sense ‘transcends the concrete existence of any religion, as God transcends each of his manifestations’ (ibid.).

It is frequently alleged that Martin Luther's doctrine of justification by grace through faith posits absolute human passivity vis-à-vis God and, on account of the past completion of Christ's sacrifice, disconnects Christians from the cross. This article takes issue with this view. Specifically, it disputes the claim that, through his doctrine of justification, Luther became an unwitting advocate of the conceptual juxtaposition of gift and exchange and thus also an ideologue of the shift from an organic to a contractual view of society. Instead, I argue, Luther's eucharistic theology anticipates the concerns of Radical Orthodoxy's critique of gift and sacrifice. It does so, however, in a more forceful manner, in that for Luther gift and exchange are so bound together in his doctrine of justification that the eucharist, instead of being a mere paradigm for social relationships (as Radical Orthodoxy would have it), radically restructures those relationships in the all-embracing unfolding of its participatory gratuity. An additional merit of Luther's vision lies in its systematic description of the eucharist's gift-character in terms of socially and vocationally construed delay and non-identical repetition, actively involving both God and humans – a description not afforded by Radical Orthodoxy's critique.

William Robertson Smith and the heresy trial that secured his place in history apparently have lost none of their many-sided interest or dramatic appeal. It might even be argued that Smith today is as famous — or infamous — as he ever was. The most recent fulllength survey of the Church in nineteenth-century Scotland, for instance, devotes nearly forty pages to a blow by blow account and evaluation of the Smith case, and Professor A. C. Cheyne, in his excellent study of Victorian Scotland's religious revolution, contends that Smith is ‘a man with very strong claims to be regarded as his country's most influential modern churchman — claims only contestable, it may be supposed, by Thomas Chalmers or David Livingstone’.

Edward Schillebeeckx in The Understanding of Faith (1974, 154) defined or described theology as ‘the critical self-consciousness of Christian praxis in the world and the church’. Others may prefer another definition, but it can be agreed that Christian theology is not revelation and it is not church doctrine; both of these while inevitably formulated within time yet lay claim to, and acquire, a certain degree of timelessness which is neither possible nor desirable for ‘theology’. Theology rather requires a continuous contemporaneity. It is a ‘critical self consciousness’ — an extended intelligent response of men of faith both to the word of God and to their own world. At times it may appear to concentrate more upon that word, as found in the Scriptures, while interpreting and applying it aptly and acutely in the light of contemporary culture; at other times theology will appear to concentrate more upon the contemporary world, or upon some part of it decisively significant for this theologian or the group of christians of which he or she forms part, interpreting it and judging it in the light of scripture. Behind appearances theology, to be true to itself, has always to do both.

Of the many difficult formulations in Karl Barth's ‘Special Ethics’, none seems less amenable to acceptable interpretation than his conception of the relation of male and female. I do not refer to Barth's insistence that Man, created as male and female, maintain both the unity and distinction required for true co-humanity. I refer, rather, to his puzzling (even if textually supported) assertion that this co-humanity is ordered by God in such a way that the woman is ‘sub-ordinate’ to the man without inferiority or disadvantage. Putting aside the exegetical issues involved, I will try to show that Barth's redefinition of the concept of sub-ordination gains coherence when understood as an ‘ordering’ of human life by a revealed order of creation, which in turn is an expression of the divine life itself. I will argue that the analogy Barth draws between the order of the Trinity and sexual relationship is authorized by his doctrine of creation, by his view of Christ as the analogia relationis, and by what I believe to be his application of the doctrine of perichoresis to anthropology. And finally, I want to suggest that, while some of Barth's language may have to be set aside, the arguments described here inform the presuppositions and method of an ethic more relevant for moral discrimination than has commonly been supposed.

Is there a sense in which ‘myth’ is an appropriate category of understanding of material within the Old Testament? In attempting to clear the way towards answering this question it may be useful to present some representative expressions of views about the propriety, or impropriety, of the use of the term ‘myth’ with regard to the Old Testament. There are some interpreters who hold that myth, properly so called, does not, even cannot, appear within the Old Testament; others, however, consider that there are significant features preserved and sufficient functions operative for the term ‘myth’ to be applied.

Certain myths are often perpetuated in a discipline, myths which upon later reflection are seen to be what they in fact are: unhelpful, deceptive or simply wrong. Often these myths are perpetuated in spite of good evidence to the contrary. This tendency is not unique to Biblical studies but is a pattern that is found in a range of disciplines. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, addresses this tendency in the so-called hard sciences. He does not use the term myth but rather speaks of the presuppositions of normal science, the scientific paradigm which controls the scientific community of a given time. But as is so often the case, growing evidence mounts that the model is unsatisfactory, that it fails in significant ways to explain evidence which is increasingly seen to be important. The evidence mounts, until a paradigm shift occurs, when the significant or major practitioners of a discipline realise that a new model must be invoked to explain the data at hand.

One purpose of this article is to explicate what Karl Barth means by the man-to-man relationship, or, in his terms, ‘humanity’, and to discuss the variety of forms involved in this basic dynamic-form. Another purpose is to make the reader aware of the way dialectical-dialogical thought functions in describing the relationship between God and man, and man and man.

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.

Despite the strong interest of Eastern Orthodox theologians in the area of anthropology, their reflection has almost never included intellectual disability. The article aims to take the discussion further by providing the contours of an inclusive anthropological ethics. In this sense, it will develop constructively the three main principles of Dumitru Stăniloae's dialogical anthropology: (1) that each human being is a person because she is called to dialogue with God from the womb of her mother; (2) that this dialogue with God is mediated by one's neighbour; (3) that the materiality of creation is meant to be transformed into a gift of communion with other humans and God.