A Central theme in J. Moltmann's The Crucified God is that since Jesus was God and Jesus was crucified, God may be called the crucified God. In other words God himself may be said to have suffered and died on calvary. The purpose of this article is to discuss the philosophical problems raised by Moltmann's striking assertion. The difficulties it raises will be considered and Moltmann's solution will be criticised as unsatisfactory. We shall then suggest a possible solution via the notions of a double-role christology and a particular view of divine infinity.

All intellectual activity implies some presuppositions. Thoughts can only be formulated in words and these words have been formed by the previous thought of the community whose language they are. Even the most radical scepticism can only be formulated in terms of presuppositions which are-for the moment—unquestioned. (See Michael Polanyi: Personal Knowledge, chap. 9, ‘The Critique of Doubt’, pp. 269–98.)

J. C. O'Neill is already well known for his strikingly original studies of various books of the New Testament, and his latest work, a commentary on Romans, is no exception. It is immediately obvious that this is a commentary with a difference, a commentary which argues a thesis, viz., ‘that the words of the epistle handed down to us were not written by one man, were not written at one time, were not written to one audience’. On the contrary, he suggests, Paul's original letter has been subjected to two sorts of corruption, each of which has added new material to the text. First, glosses have been copied into the text by mistake in later years. Second, interpolations have been added by later editors, usually from old traditions, in order to supplement the epistle and make it more suitable for general use (p. 14). Some of the interpolations which O'Neill claims to identify are of considerable length. For example, 10.16–11.32 is attributed in its entirety to a theologian of the second century. Indeed, out of chapters 9–14, containing 148 verses in the form of the letter that we know, O'Neill assigns only twenty-one verses to Paul.

For the Christian ‘Pentecost’ is a shorthand way of referring to the initial outpouring of the Spirit on the disciples of Jesus described in Acts 2, although of course the events of that historic day included a public address by Peter and the conversion and baptism of a substantial number of his hearers. The event is scarcely mentioned elsewhere in the NT. The narrative in Acts interprets it as the fulfilment of the prophecy of the baptism with the Spirit made by John the Baptist (Acts i.4f.), and there is one clear reference back to it in Peter's account of the conversion of Cornelius (Acts 11.15–17; cf. 10.47). Otherwise there is no specific reference to it anywhere in the NT, and there is an account of what appears to be a different bestowal of the Spirit by Jesus on ten of His disciples in Jn. 20.22. Luke's narrative is filled with problems of interpretation, and the lack of comparative material makes assessment of its historicity and significance all the more difficult. What we may be able to discuss with some hope of success is Luke's own understanding of the event, since we have the rest of his narrative in the Gospel and Acts as a context to aid us in discovering his interpretation.

It is not my intention in this paper to attempt a fresh exegesis or interpretation of a passage which in recent years has been much studied by New Testament scholars, but rather to draw attention to two unavoidable limitations in human thinking, shared by Paul and ourselves, which, I believe, go some way to explain the commentators' difficulties in dealing with ‘the unmanageable dimensions of the Christian verities’ found here. Paul makes some attempt to overcome these limitations by the use of a series of metaphors, apparently not always consistent with one another in strict logic, and we shall consider these individually in the third part of our study.