The last number of this Journal was already in print when news came of the death on 19th February of Dr Alan Lewis, who served for many years as one of our editors. The following tribute by President Stotts of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary speaks for all who knew and valued Alan Lewis as a colleague and friend.

In memory of Alan Lewis, student, colleague and above all friend, at whose ordination as a minister of the Church of Scotland the author was privileged to preach, Kirkliston Parish Church, Midlothian, 4th December, 1977.

Of the many problems which trouble interpreters of Romans 9–11, none rises more massively from its pages or casts a more impenetrable shadow than the relationship between Paul's argument in 9:6–13 and his argument in 11:25–31. The issue in both passages is whether God's biblical promises to save Israel have failed (9:6, 11:29), exposing the God of Paul's gospel as untruthful (15:8) and unrighteous (3:5, 10:3). In 9:6–13 Paul denies the charge by defining Israel on the basis of God's choice rather than on the basis of national affiliation. In 11:25–32, however, he denies the charge by pointing forward to a time in which God will fulfill his promises and secure the salvation of all Israel. The problem is that these two defenses of God's faithfulness seem to contradict one another, and the defense in chapter eleven seems not only to contradict the one in chapter nine but to oppose Paul's frequent and emphatic denial in several letters, and especially in Romans, that national Israel has any soteriological advantage over the Gentiles.

In much contemporary theology, pastoral/practical theology, and much of the more popular ‘Christian’ literature there is a concern for exploring and discovering various aspects of right relationship. These relationships might be political, marital, familial, sexual, economic, those within the church, or between the church and the greater society. What seems to be lacking in many of these discussions is an adequate theological foundation upon which to carry out the exploration. There are assumptions made about the nature of human relationships which seem to have no connection to theological underpinnings or are only loosely, or thematically related.

‘Whatever became of sin?’ – the title of American psychiatrist Kark Menninger's book – encapsulates the problem with which I begin. That there is appalling suffering today, organized crime on a scale which almost defies analysis – and certainly detection! – moral evil in a variety of repugnant forms and so-called ‘natural’ catastrophes which threaten the very continuation of human life on our planet, is beyond dispute. But ‘sin’? Is sinfulness still an accepted category in our society for eidier religious believer or nonbeliever? It is hard to accept that when Professor Kerkhofs (from the University of Leuven, Belgium), surveyed the attitudes on sin and guilt of European Christians in 1985, 40% of those interviewed admitted that they had never experienced any feelings of regret about their actions! There is a double tendency prevailing with regard to responsibility for acknowledged wrongdoing: increasing sense of diminished responsibility for crime seeks either to scapegoat a certain sector of the populace as blameworthy, or attempts are made to cope with criminal damage – for example, injuries sustained by drink-driving – by assessing it in exclusively (reductive) monetary terms.

There was a widespread assumption in the 1980s that liberation theology had come of age. The early passionate manifestos of those such as Hugo Assmann had been replaced by a deluge of substantial theological works which entered the theological debate bearing the wounds of oppression and injustice in Latin America, and also the clear marks of the European academy. Liberation theology remained highly controversial, but it had to be taken seriously. It suggested a new way of doing theology which was at one and the same time a recovery of older understandings of the nature of theology and rooted in Latin American reality. It plundered and turned on their original possessors the weapons of post-Enlightenment and post-Vatican II theologising, and it was viewed with deep suspicion by most of the authorities in church and state. The movement found resonances and allies in many countries of the Third World, and spread from systematics into biblical studies, ethics and pastoral theology.