It is no simple matter to deal with this subject. In the first place, it is not a favourite theme of Reformed theology. In addition, there are a thousand variations of the ordination liturgy, whose comparative study is still in its infancy. Finally, a kind of mutation was produced during the eighteenth century which compromised the ‘catholic’ aspect of the Reformed Church and which made of her a Church of ‘protestant’ type (to use a term which must be precisely defined).

It is, of course, no secret that theology is a tissue of many things in interrelation. Begin at any point in it, and you will quickly be led to all the others—or at least the need for all the others. Eschatology requires one to talk about judgment and reconciliation, and they require talking about covenant, but discussion of the covenant requires finding the circumstances or context of the covenant, fallen creatures; and ‘fallen creatures’ brings one to talk about the creature, and in turn to treat his context, creation; and any elucidation of creation requires discussion of the action of God. So it may be seen that each notion demands another as an immediate context, and others as an ultimate context.

Janet Martin Soskice's book Metaphor and Religious Language may reasonably be described as ‘state of the art’ in respect of studies on metaphor and theology. Dr Soskice recognises the need for metaphor to retain its traditional designation as a figure of speech, but at the same time wants to establish its use as credible in a Christian realist perspective. To this end, she undertakes a rigorous examination of the nature and function of metaphor in order to build a solid base from which to establish its pertinence to theology. It is metaphor's ability to achieve an increment of meaning in language in general (and science in particular) which is able to provide the springboard for its role in religious language. Dr Soskice thus sees language as the framework within which to conduct her argument. The first part of this paper analyses her argument.

The names of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rudolf Bultmann have frequently and inevitably been associated in theological debate since the Second World War. On a popular level in the English-speaking world, it was perhaps J. A. T. Robinson's Honest to God (1963) which most notably placed Bonhoeffer alongside Bultmann, along with Tillich, as close allies in the search for a fresh and viable understanding of God.

What is the purpose of a doctrine of the immanent Trinity? Broadly speaking it aims to recognize, uphold and respect God's freedom. Without theoretical and practical awareness of this freedom all theological statements about the significance of created existence become ambiguous and constitute merely human attempts to give meaning to creation using theological categories.

This is a book that has achieved some notoriety. It was criticised by some rabbis and as a result Dr Sacks rewrote a few passages for a new, revised edition. These changes will be discussed below, but in the book as a whole Jonathan Sacks has again used his gifts of learning, wisdom and accessibility to illuminate a range of concerns of fundamental importance to the future of humanity.

The growing rift between biblical scholarship and the dogmatic and moral theologies of the Churches is a challenge to us all. But not only is it necessary to examine the presuppositions of the biblical scholars; it is also necessary to investigate the questions raised by their critics. Is there a uniform pattern in the questions raised? Do the critics provide any suggestions as to how the Scripture scholar should operate? Is there a common core which can be detected in the midst of the disquiet?

This article examines Karl Barth's engagement with the philosophy of religion of Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach proposes that religion is a function of human projection and that the Christian concept of God represents the crystallisation in one objectified subject of all the finite perfections of individual human beings. In Church Dogmatics, I/2, Barth seeks to respond to Feuerbach's critique of Christianity by affirming Feuerbach's critical account of the nature of religion but arguing that, since the original impetus of Christianity issues not from human projection but from God's act of self-revelation in Jesus Christ, Feuerbach's critique of religion does not apply to the Christian faith. Glasse notes that this response, whilst satisfactory to the Christian, would be ‘not intelligible’ to those who do not accept the Christian faith. Furthermore, Barth's apologetic manoeuvre, Vogel claims, entails that Barth is unable to defend the plausibility of the Christian faith on the terms set by secular culture, and that Christian theology is therefore required to abandon any attempt to participate constructively in general public discourse. Vogel recognises that this is a drastic recourse indeed, observing that it would be judicious for Christian theology to seek to elaborate a response to Feuerbach's critique which can stand without requiring the critic to assume the veracity of the Christian faith. This article argues that, by taking into account the role of Feuerbach's earlier work, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, for constituting the philosophical impetus of Feuerbach's critique of Christianity, the Christian theologian is able, using Barth's theological anthropology, to provide a response to Feuerbach's critique on Feuerbach's own terms. In Thoughts on Death and Immortality, Feuerbach argues that Protestant Christianity, as the paradigmatic expression of religion, conceives the individual as an absolute being, and that, due to the fact that everyday existence clearly counter-indicates this absolutisation of the human individual, Protestantism posits a second, eternal life, in which the limits bound up with individual existence are eradicated. Using Barth's theological anthropology in Church Dogmatics, III/2 and III/4, this article proposes that Barth concurs with Feuerbach's critique of the absolutisation of the individual, but that he is positioned to deny that this absolutised conception of the individual has anything to do with the Christian faith insofar as he accurately represents it.

This article questions the value of the categories ‘the school of Antioch’ and ‘Antiochene christology’ on the basis of the significant theological differences between the two central figures in the school: John Chrysostom and Theodore of Mopsuestia, both of whom studied together at the school of Diodore of Tarsus in the late fourth century. Drawing on scholarship which has pointed to the coherence of Theodore's exegesis and christology, I show that Chrysostom's exegesis and christology are also coherent, but in a way which is at odds with those of Theodore. As opposed to Theodore's distinctions between the two testaments and between the human and the divine in Christ, Chrysostom has a strongly unitive reading of scripture's two testaments and of the person of Christ. In my argument I especially employ Theodore's and Chrysostom's respective exegetical works on the Gospel of John.

It is no small consolation to one rash enough to agree to lecture on this subject that the title of the lecture is a question rather than an assertion. The title is a question to which the lecturer must address himself rather than a summary of the information contained in the lecture.

The group of imperatives usually known as the Mission Charge to the Twelve Disciples deserves consideration for its own sake since it marks an important climax in our Lord's life and ministry, as well as in the experience of those whom he called to be his disciples. It deserves consideration also because in the process of time it became the justification for the medical missionary movement which arose within the Protestant Church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today this movement as part of the great worldwide expansion of the Christian Church appears to be coming to an end. It is appropriate, therefore, to look again at what was claimed to be its biblical basis. This article proposes to do this, and to consider medical missions in relation to the Mission Charge to the Twelve Disciples, and in relation to the modern healing ministry of the Church.

Torrance's book is remarkable for its aggressive, full- blooded thought and style. Such an approach is typical of this theologian, but the centrality of the issues with which he deals and the importance of the stance he assumes makes his boldness a veritable confrontation. Utilising the basic theological beginning points of the Reform tradition (and writing in a style remarkably similar to that of Karl Barth), Torrance critically appraises the present task of theology.

Without doubt, David Kelsey's Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology (henceforth, EE) is one of the most significant and important contributions to the field of theology from this generation of theologians. The two-volume work of over a thousand pages (really one volume bound into two books because of its size) is Kelsey's magnum opus, and arises from more than three decades of study and thought. It addresses directly and (properly) theologically central issues relating to humanity in relation to God and to creation (‘all that is not God’). This book has arisen within a theological setting of conversations with other members of the ‘Yale school’ (Hans Frei and George Lindbeck). Yet, there is a sense in which this book surpasses what that school of thought has offered thus far, not by beginning on an altogether different theological path, but by journeying further, and bringing what that theological approach has to offer to bear on one doctrinal locus in a way which the other key proponents of post-liberal theology have not yet done: Kelsey moves from discussing a theological method to using that theological method more fully and directly than has previously been the case in relation to the theological content of a single theological issue.

The Protestant church, for Reinhard Hütter, relinquished its ecclesial public character when it turned from ‘binding doctrine’ as the means for establishing and maintaining its concrete ‘time-space’. Christendom disguised this basic theological flaw, but with its collapse the public basis of the Protestant church fell away. This reduced the church's witness and destroyed its communal structure. His positive proposal re-establishes the church as a public by reference to the communion nature of God, and to church practices as mediate forms of the Spirit's acting. Hütter's account shadows an argument made fifty years before by Johannes C. Hoekendijk, observing an intensified focus on word and sacrament and the promotion of a culture as a solution to the problem of the church's witness. Yet, for Hoekendijk, this logic exemplifies the problem. The institutions of the church come to bear the full evangelistic load. Mission replicates the basic structures of a particular way of life as a necessary precursor to the gospel. The act of witness becomes propaganda because of an insufficient doctrine of the church. This insufficiency is a failing in the doctrine of the Trinity: God's own life is defined without sufficient attention to his act of reconciliation and redemption as itself material to understanding the nature of his in se life.

Contemporary scholarship in Calvin studies has generally concluded in agreement that Calvin's various religious teachings present no strictly systematic or exclusivistic pattern of presentation when his written corpus is viewed as a whole. This has been found equally true when one analyses his explication of the Lord's Supper no matter what period or portion of such thought is delimited.

Modern scholarship has accustomed us to recognise the profundity of thought and the breadth of meditation that lie crystallised in even the briefest words of our Lord's and the beauty with which he presents the sublimest Gospel in the simplest way, so that even the barest saying yields fruit an hundredfold. Indeed it seems probable that He deliberately framed His teaching in this way, to be received at different levels of understanding. It may be the parables that have prepared the way for the recognition of this fact since there remain in the recorded words at least two authentic explanations of these and there may be yet a third preserved for us by tradition.

While Karl Barth balances the reliability of revelation with divine counterfactual freedom through the analogia temporalis, Robert Jenson rejects this form of analogy, arguing that it posits an unknowable reality of God behind revelation. He instead transposes metaphysics into narratological terms, arguing that this secures the reliability of revelation and divine freedom, since it means God is future to (and so undetermined by) events in time. This metric for divine freedom cannot, however, replace counterfactual possibility; hence, the analogia temporalis (presupposed in counterfactuals) re-emerges in Jenson's theology. This form of analogy is essential in balancing the reliability of revelation with divine freedom.