There is seldom a lack of new studies of Isaiah. In this article I want to mention some aspects of a few recently published studies which direct our attention in different ways to the book of Isaiah, rather than to Isaiah of Jerusalem (or the so-called ‘second Isaiah’) as an individual with an historical role. Not that I am not concerned with the historical Isaiah of Jerusalem: in fact the concern is greater than the following reviews might suggest. Positively I am insisting that our quest for him must start from the book of Isaiah in all its variety and complexity, and not from its few familiar and congenially informative prose sections. Then the more negative suggestion that Isaiah may not have been a ‘prophet’ (at least in the sense that tradition came to regard him) is an attempt to clear the ground for a better point of view.

Although there is considerable documentation of women preachers during the English Civil War period and the Interregnum, it is clear that such activities were not encouraged among English Calvinistic Baptists, and most especially among Particular Baptists. Yet there was a tension in even the most restrictive Baptist teaching on this subject. For since Baptists had opened the door to congregational participation in the public ministry of the church, they were faced with the problem of partially closing that door in order to restrict the ministry of women to that of diakonia, and good works. Nevertheless, a small number of women have been identified as both prophets and Particular Baptists, and the nature and context of their ministry illustrates the role of women in early Baptist communities.

Gregory illustrates the complex reception of Chalcedon in the West in the way he dealt with the Istrian Schism caused by the Fifth Ecumenical Council of 553. At issue was whether Chalcedon's decisions in their entirety or its doctrinal statements alone were inviolable. Gregory strongly urged the latter, influenced by initial papal support for the Fifth Council, his conviction that only those within the church would be saved and pastoral anxiety about the imminence of the eschaton. However, his literary legacy also demonstrates his commitment to the soteriological significance of the Chalcedonian definition of the two natures of Christ.

This article addresses the so-called ‘apocalyptic reading of Paul’, taking the representative work of J. Louis Martyn and Martinus C. de Boer as its primary focus. The chief contention is that the ‘apocalyptic reading’ does not resemble the historical phenomenon of Jewish apocalyptic literature, although the scope of this article has been intentionally limited to Galatians. The present study is composed of two halves. The first half offers a critique of what it means for Paul to be an apocalyptic thinker according to Martyn and de Boer. Their emphasis is on discontinuity, duality and dichotomy, which coheres neither with first-century apocalyptic literature and its antecedents, nor with the letter to the Galatians. Their nuanced notion of apocalyptic has led to an unnecessary bifurcation between apocalyptic and covenant (not to mention Heilsgeschichte) in the interpretation of Paul. However, this article suggests that the dichotomy has been misplaced, both in relation to the discontinuity that Paul does articulate (i.e. with the law), and the dichotomy reflected in apocalyptic literature, namely, the division between the present evil age and the glorious age to come. Thus, it is argued that Martyn and de Boer's focus on discontinuity hardly constitutes apocalyptic in a first-century historical sense. Rather, their specific emphasis owes its articulation to the theology of Karl Barth. After arguing that the ‘apocalyptic reading’ lacks historical precision (and possibly theological forthrightness), the second half of the study argues that some neglected features of Galatians, such as suffering and persecution, cohere with the apocalyptic character of the letter, and are common features of apocalyptic broadly. In fact, the division between apocalyptic and covenant in scholarship on Galatians is bridged by the themes of conflict and crisis. This is because apocalyptic hope often arises in the absence of the realisation of covenantal promises and expectations; a covenantal disconnect is created and aggravated by crises and hardships of various sorts, hence the need for apocalyptic hope. Suffering therefore ties together the strands of apocalyptic and covenant in Galatians. If Martyn and de Boer's ‘apocalyptic reading’ was truly apocalyptic in a first-century historical sense, it would have integrated the imagery of suffering and persecution found in the letter.

Adolf von Harnack, perhaps the most influential theologian of the twentieth century, helped the Kaiser to draft his Call to the German People of 6 August 1914, and almost certainly knew that the Kaiser, the Chancellor, and the German army planned to precipitate war that month. Despite that knowledge, Harnack always maintained that Russia and France launched the war. He drew a sharp distinction between private morality and state morality, and asserted that law played no part in either. One and the same spirit rules in history and in us. The dangers of love without law.

Theological Action Research (TAR) is a way of doing and teaching theology and forming students that surmounts the problems associated with both formal theologies and theological ethnographies. Drawing from models of action research developed in other fields, this paper outlines an approach to teaching practical ministry grounded in a collaborative mode of inquiry capable of generating new insights into humanity's relation to God while also engendering the ethical-political powers that give shape to collective life. As a process of what anthropologist Lia Haro calls eth-o-graphy, Christian formation and knowledge production cannot be disconnected from cooperative participation in communities of practice dedicated to this kind of social, ecclesial activity. The paper goes on to describe how the author has begun to implement this TAR model at a Catholic, Jesuit institution, offering some promising preliminary findings on the potential it holds for training ministry students.

In both Theo-Drama IV and Mysterium Paschale, Balthasar suggests that the descensus existentially separates the divine hypostases of Father and Son. He also repeatedly argues that his position is faithful to the Great Tradition. While there has been much debate about Balthasar's view of the descensus, this debate has focused mostly on the issues of universalism and penal substitution, leaving the issue of trinitarian relations either to the side or without an analysis of its historical precedent. This article attempts to address this lacuna by asking whether Balthasar's view of the descensus is in fact supported by the Great Tradition, with a specific focus on second-century texts. After surveying the apostolic fathers, second-century Jewish and Christian traditions (e.g. the New Testament apocrypha), second-century apologists and Melito's Peri Pascha, the article concludes that Balthasar's position does not find historical support in the second century. His view may be in line with the Great Tradition elsewhere, but it is not grounded in this seminal century of Christian doctrinal reflection.

The criticism that the Uppsala Assembly of the World Council of Churches did not give sufficient attention to theology is justified. But this fact should be set within the perspective of the deep crisis which the theological world as a whole faces today, and which constitutes the contemporary theological situation. What are some of the factors which have contributed to this situation? One may mention three of them.

Protestant critique of the Catholic idea of inherent righteousness has, since the time of the Reformation, given rise to counter-questions about the status of faith in Protestant theology. Is faith a human condition for justification (that is, a human act or inherent property which is necessary for justification), and why should not faith in that case be counted as a kind of work? Many Protestant theologians, however, view it as very important to dissociate faith from works. This article examines a number of Protestant attempts to explain why faith is not a work. The examined explanations rely on a number of ideas, for example, that faith is not a work because faith is a gift of God, or because faith is non-voluntary, or because faith is not a condition of justification, or because faith does not merit justification, or because faith is union with Christ. The problem with many of these Protestant answers to the question of why faith is not a work is that they can equally well be used to explain why the supernatural virtue of love is not a work. The Reformers, however, strongly associated love with ‘works of the law’, and wanted to keep love out of the doctrine of justification. For Protestants who share this view of love, the present article poses a challenge. Is it possible to dissociate faith from works without at the same time dissociating love from works, thereby legitimising the Tridentine understanding of justification? The author concludes that this is indeed possible, but only if an important identity marker for much Protestant theology is given up, namely the purely forensic understanding of the doctrine of justification.

I thank the editor for the opportunity to respond to two forceful conservative critics of my position. As everyone knows, this is a controversy that threatens to split churches and divide society. Yet there is also hope for a way forward.

In Contra Arianos 3 Athanasius considers two frightened cries of a man about to be crucified:

My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me;

nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.

My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?

These he analyses in accordance with the general pattern of hisexplanation of the passions suffered by the Logos incarnate.

It is the argument of this article that Dietrich Bonhoeffer's hermeneutical approach understands creaturely existence to be truly held by the Word made flesh as the risen Christ, who is still wholly human and therefore truly present in creation. Therefore, this article argues with Dietrich Bonhoeffer that, for a viable theological hermeneutics, it is critically necessary to consider the kenotic movement of the risen Christ, not only for a proper understanding of holy scripture in its genuine humanness, but also for an understanding of the new creation as taking place in reconciled creatures through the Word.

Within the recently published volumes, Knowing Creation and Christ and the Created Order, several authors argue that the theological category of creation can help contemporary society overcome the modern, and ecologically harmful, bifurcation between nature and culture. This paper supplements this important argument by showing how theological panpsychism, an ontology inspired by current debates within analytic philosophy of mind, can help theologians articulate a metaphysically robust and trinitarian doctrine of creation.

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.