In a short but pithy article entitled ‘Christ's uniqueness’, which appeared recently in an issue of the publication ‘Reform’, Professor John Hick outlines very compactly one of his latest presentations against the traditional Christian acceptance of Jesus' theological pre-eminence. My paper is not intended to present a full-blown argument either in defence or criticism of ‘the uniqueness of Christ’ (Except where another sense is clear, I use ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’ throughout as they are commonly used, viz. as proper names referring to one and the same person). More directly, its aim is to point out what appear to be serious objections to a view that is gaining increasing support from thinkers who study the inter-relations between the world religions at various levels; and which for the committed Christian raises fundamental issues any seraiousminded believer, scholar or layman, must eventually face. Professor Hick repeats and summarises here a position he discusses at length elsewhere, and perhaps it is fitting that the stance we shall now examine will be made in the context of a presentation of one of its leading exponents.

While the Christian tradition in some of its language takes very seriously the idea that God's revelation in Jesus Christ took place on a historical stage, it too often treats the inevitable historical problems as negative, overlooking their positive value.

Humour is a serious business. The immediate aim of the comedian may be simply to entertain. But if he is successful in his art, his achievement goes far beyond this limited purpose. As much as the scientist or the novelist, the humorist holds the mirror up to man and reflects, often in sharpest focus, aspects of man's condition in and relationship to the world which otherwise might pass unnoticed. Man, after all, is the only animal which laughs, just as he is the only animal which conducts experiments or tells stories. This simple and undeniable fact surely reveals something about the kind of being man is and the kind of world he inhabits. The world is not only a realm of physical order whose regularity man-the-scientist may observe and chart; nor is it only a great theatre where the drama of human history unfolds in which man-the-actor plays and (modestly) directs his part. The world is also comical, and man-the-humorist perceives and participates in its comic structures.

From time to time controversy breaks out within Kierkegaardian scholarship as to the nature of Kierkegaard's concept of God. This controversy is invariably centred on Kierkegaard's claim that there exists ‘an infinite qualitative difference’ between God and humankind. The utter transcendence of God that this phrase expresses and the fact that Kierkegaard employs categories drawn from Greek philosophy to express the nature of God's transcendence have led such scholars as E. L. Allen, Richard Kroner, and Malcolm L. Diamond, to contend that Kierkegaard's understanding of God is not motivated by Christian principles but is merely a Christianization of an Aristotelian concept of God, a contention which would seem to be supported by Kierkegaard's frequent descriptions of God in terms of Aristotle's Unmoved Mover. On the other hand, such scholars as T. H. Croxall, Paul Sponheim, Niels Thulstrup, and Mark Taylor have rejected this argument and claim that Kierkegaard's concept of God is motivated by Christian principles. Unfortunately, none of these latter scholars has put forward a comprehensive defence of this position. In this article it is my intention to rectify this omission and to show that, far from being Aristotelian, Kierkegaard's concept of God is firmly based upon Christian principles.

Hans-Georg Gadamer and Michael Polanyi are interestingly close and yet surprisingly different. I want to illustrate their closeness and divergence at certain crucial points, and then draw from the comparison certain wider implications for understanding authorial intention and textual autonomy on the one hand, and genre and the nature of a gospel on the other.

In the theology of Karl Barth the fact of the life, death and J. resurrection of Jesus Christ is not merely the central point in our knowledge of God and His ways, a central point which might, however, be merely one, the greatest one, in a series of ways whereby we might know God and learn to speak about God. The Incarnation is for Barth the one and only revelation of God to men. In page after page he stresses that man by his unaided efforts can never know God. It is not only that man's reason is inadequate to read of God in the works of His hands, but by the fact of the Fall man has, ‘made himself quite impossible in relation to the redemptive Grace of God; and in so doing has made himself quite impossible in his created being as man, who has cut the ground from under his feet, who has lost his whole raison d'être‘ (p. 10). For such a man the knowledge of God has become quite out of the question, an utter impossibility, which can only again become possible in the quite incomprehensible ‘yet and never the less’ of the Grace of God in Jesus Christ, in Jesus Christ alone.

The aim of this article is to provide an historical description of an important piece of Victorian theology, and subsequently to suggest a new context, or rather a new content for a familiar theme. Firstly, it will consider in what sense Newman may be called a ‘natural theologian’; secondly, it will give an account of the notion of the illative sense within the developing pattern of Newman's thought; finally, it will suggest that, by a unilateral concentration on moral experience — the ‘voice of conscience’ — Newman failed to do justice to the full significance of his own argumentation. The point of the illative sense is not that it helps us to identify any one experiential content, or area of reflection, which might lead us to theistic belief, but that it provides an overall context in which a variety of experiential strata and argumentative strategies may be displayed. Newman was, perhaps, too dominated by an autobiographical sense in the realm of fundamental belief in God to identify and correct the individualism which in dogmatic theology proper he would have avoided. Our theistic materials do not lie simply within our own breasts, but in an inter-rogation, Gadamer-like, of the entire theistic tradition as that is mediated to us by the classic texts of our predecessors.

Unless it is to resemble a voice without a speaker, Christology must pre-suppose a backing in Theism; and any talk of Revelation must assume some conviction, to be more or less rationally defended, of the existence of the God who speaks. Such a Theism, admittedly, can by no means be erected from the bricks of the discursive reason alone; for reason is often, if not always, simply the finding of reasons for what one cannot help but believe by a sort of insight, intuition–or even inspiration. Yet reason, together with the language in which it is bound up, is the common factor which we all share with each other; so that if Theism is to be given a hearing, it must be able publicly to commend itself by the displaying of some reasons, even if (as is the case) those reasons fall short of proof. Such at any rate is my excuse for what follows.

The Nicodemus story can be read as a distillation of the Gospel of John and an example of many of its key features. John 3:1–21 poses a wide range of the problems raised by this most distinctive and mysterious of the four gospels. It shows characteristic practices of John as a reader, writer and teacher. In line with John's theology of the Spirit ‘leading into all the truth’, it also shows him as a daring theologian, opening up fresh interpretations and ways of doing theology beyond the Septuagint and the Synoptic Gospels and even beyond his own Prologue (itself a remarkably daring piece of theology). That same Spirit means that John also expects his readers to be led into further truth, and to improvise on his theology as he himself did on the Septuagint and on the Synoptic traditions. His ways of reading, writing and teaching encourage such a response in the Spirit by creating a work rich in intertextuality, imagery and conceptuality which has a ‘deep plain sense’, superabundant in meaning and always inviting the reader to reread, learn more and interpret afresh. So one challenge for readers now is whether they are open not only to thinking along with John but also to thinking beyond him, in ways appropriate to different people and contexts. But this transformation in thought and imagination is not all: it is inseparable from doing the truth ‘in God’. The mutual involvement of seeing, believing/trusting, knowing and living in love is above all communicated in the drama of John's Gospel, whose backbone is a series of meetings with Jesus and the injunction to follow Jesus. More embracing and fundamental than, for example, doctrinal theology or existential decision-making, is the dramatic reality of encountering other people and following Jesus in all the complexities of life in specific contexts. In John 3:1–21 the encounter of Jesus with Nicodemus is the dramatic heart of the passage, blending into a discourse which itself culminates in the ultimate drama of ‘deeds done in God’. But to stop interpretation there would be to refuse the Johannine invitation to enter into more truth with a view to ‘doing greater things’. So the article ends with two midrashic interpretations of Nicodemus for today.

Let me begin by observing that many Pauline interpreters share with me a fundamentally participatory view of Paul's gospel, understanding salvation as a pneumatological incorporation into Christ's death and resurrection. This is arguably an irreducibly proto-trinitarian account as well, so recently Michael Gorman has rightly emphasised theosis within its description. This view holds further that the only effective ethic for a sinful humanity is generated by divine action, essentially in terms of inaugurated eschatology; humanity must be transformed in Christ in order to act well. Hence Douglas Moo clearly shares this articulation. Indeed, I do not know of an Evangelical who does not affirm everything that has just been said; but it tends to be arranged under the rubric of ‘sanctification’, and hence treated in second position in any account of Paul's gospel. And this brings us to the nub of the problem, and to the solution, that I articulate in my book The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul.

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.

John Milbank is one of the most recent and arguably most radical proponents of an understanding of nature as graced. This article critically examines Milbank's understanding of nature and grace, specifically as elaborated within his reading of Thomas Aquinas. In the first part I will outline Aquinas's most direct discussions of nature and grace in the Summa Theologica, drawing attention to several central, albeit subtle, distinctions that these contain. In the second and third parts, I will examine Milbank's reading of Aquinas in Truth in Aquinas, and examine whether it adequately reflects and negotiates Aquinas's distinctions. On this basis I will argue Milbank's reading, while drawing attention to some important and often neglected areas of Aquinas's thought, ultimately remains limited.

From the time of its publication, Barth's commentary on Romans has been regarded by many as the very paradigm of theological dualism. ‘If I have a system,’ the author announces, ‘it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the “infinite qualitative difference between time and eternity” … ’1 That distinction is succeeded by a series of others – revelation versus reason, the Gospel of God versus the ways of humankind, faith versus religion, etc. – which have the effect of ruling out of court every conceivable form of human initiative. One is left to wonder whether Barth's God serves any other function than that of a cypher for the repudiation of all that is finite or mortal.

This article attempts to show that Karl Barth and Thomas Aquinas are not as divergent as often thought. Taking Eugene Rogers's argument as a working hypothesis, I argue for two points of convergence between Barth and Aquinas, specifically on their understandings of analogy. First, both root analogy in christology. Using Christ as the great magister, Aquinas shows how Christ teaches us to see him, despite its difficulty, in his trinitarian divinity. Barth, using the imagery of the prodigal son, discusses how the incarnation places humanity in an ontological relationship within God's own dialogue within the Trinity. Second, both understand analogy as a theological practice, not a metaphysical mechanism or abstract doctrine, though metaphysics and doctrine are at play in their work. Both Aquinas and Barth attempt to train their readers in the judgement necessary to speak truthfully about God. This analogical relationship between Barth and Aquinas I call the analogia Christi.