The Gospel of Mark includes a series of passages that depict direct interaction between Jesus and God. When viewed in their full literary, historical and canonical contexts, these passages can be seen to address an embryonic trinitarian question concerning the relationship between trusting and worshipping Jesus and trusting and worshipping the one God of Israel. They provide grounds for affirming that mutual love, knowledge and communication have a place in the immanent life of the Trinity, and that these elements bear a meaningful analogical relationship to the love, knowledge and communication that ideally characterise human father–son relations.

In the thirtieth disputation of the Leiden Synopsis (1622), Johannes Polyander elucidates what he considers to be the Reformed doctrine of vocatio. In his explanation of this doctrine, Polyander makes surprising statements concerning the internal call. He teaches that not only the external call, but also the internal call can come to the reprobate. It does not do so all the time, but it does so sometimes, especially in the sphere of the covenant. Yet, when it does, that internal call is ineffectual. This doctrine of an ineffectual internal call is not found in the Canons of Dordt (1618–19), nor in disputations held before the cycle of disputations that became the Leiden Synopsis. Was Polyander's view a compromise with Arminianism? Or was Polyander actually defending Dordt's doctrine? This article builds on Henk van Den Belt's cursory conclusion to this question by providing proof that Polyander was in fact defending Dordt.

I argue that Teresa of Cartagena's Grove of the Infirm offers a recalibration of the wisdom emergent from suffering by moving from a cruciform spirituality to an intellectual ‘scientia,’ which benefits specific marginalized groups (prolonged sufferers) by establishing new paths of agency (through distinctive cooperative virtues) for those who suffer. I show that by disengaging suffering's spiritual meaning from the Franciscan focus on the cross, Teresa is able to amplify the relationship of virtue to wisdom while maintaining the validity of the painful experience endured. I argue that Teresa's focus on wisdom challenges the diminution of sufferers' experiences and elevates their spiritual wisdom as applicable to the church writ large. Teresa's work opens new spaces of agency for the most sidelined and secures the lasting significance of the wisdom of suffering.

In this article I propose an erotic theosis as a fruitful possibility for conceptualising our final participation in union with God in the beatific vision and for imaging said participation on earth. Particularly, I propose a synthesis of recent work from Oliver Crisp on theosis with that of Sarah Coakley on sexual desire as an especially helpful way in which to conceive of our ever-deepening participation in God's love. Further, this synthesis uses contributions from Erin Dufault-Hunter on the intersections of sexual desire and ethics as a catalyst for its recommendations.

Although the Christology of the Ebionites in general, and the so-called Gospel of the Ebionites cited by Epiphanius of Salamis in particular, has been commonly classified as adoptionist, the utility of the term ‘adoptionism’ has been recently called into question. This article will focus on the fragment about Jesus’ baptism in Panarion, 30.13.7–8 to determine whether it depicts Jesus’ adoption to divine sonship. Although the text does not use adoptionist terminology and imagery, Jesus does acquire a new christological identity in the pericope when he is possessed by the spirit and metaphorically begotten by the deity. This should be relabelled as a possessionist Christology. However, Epiphanius wrongly interpreted the text through the lens of Cerinthus’ Christology, in which Jesus is only temporarily inhabited by the Christ aeon between his baptism and his crucifixion.

The nature and extent of Karl Barth's significance in John Webster's theological formation is widely recognised but remains to be explored in detail. Addressing this lacuna, this essay considers how Barth's doctrine of the triune God animates Webster's teaching on the same. In approaching the topic, I show how Webster carries forward Barth's deep sense of God's aseity in relation to the world and follows Barth in his commitment to the singularity of God's triune being. God's particularity and aseity converge in ‘God's self-correspondence’ (namely, that God ‘in Godself’ corresponds to God ‘for us’), which represents the core of Barth's influence on Webster's theology proper. The final section responds to Katherine Sonderegger's recent criticism of Webster's ‘relationalism’, which counts God's relation to creatures as an integral aspect of God's eternal life. I reframe the issue in terms of Webster's late-career retractions of the language of inclusion and divine self-determination, arguing that the difficulties that Sonderegger identifies in earlier writings are overcome in the final decade of Webster's corpus.