This article review considers the recent book by Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition, as a response to the work of Stanley Hauerwas and other Christian ‘new traditionalists’. The essay presents a brief overview of the book in order to ask questions of both Stout and Hauerwas. The author considers how ‘new traditionalists’ might respond to Stout with a theological concern for ‘participation’ in God's triune life as a model for citizenship, recommending that the scriptures play a more central role in public, democratic discourse.

This paper demonstrates that, despite the much discussed Hegelian influence on Pannenberg, Herder's thought plays a pivotal role in forming and shaping Pannenberg's theological work in the important areas of the image of God and human destiny. However, Pannenberg differentiates himself from Herder in a crucial respect in that Pannenberg grounds Herder's anthropology on a christological foundation in order to present a salvific rather than a providential account of the renewal of the imago Dei. This paper also offers a reflection upon other significant similarities and differences between these two major thinkers.

It is an honour and a pleasure to respond to the comments of J. Louis Martyn and Troels Engberg-Pedersen. Both of them have read my book with care, and have presented many of its central emphases with clarity and insight. The questions they raise are pertinent ones – as one would expect from the authors of two of the most interesting and innovative works of Pauline scholarship to have been published in recent years. I refer to Martyn's commentary on Galatians and Engberg-Pedersen's Paul and the Stoics – both, in their different ways, the kind of ground-breaking work that keeps the field of Pauline studies from succumbing entirely to an endless rehearsal of already familiar positions. I also note in passing that my two reviewers probably differ more sharply from each other than either of them does from me. It is not easy to harmonise Martyn's apocalyptic Paul with Engberg-Pedersen's Stoic one, and the difference tends to focus on issues of divine agency which recur in their responses to my own work.

The Dogmatic Theology of the nineteenth-century divine William Shedd has received little attention in the literature. Yet it contains a number of theologically interesting arguments. This article sets forth what Shedd has to say on the doctrine of the theanthropic person of Christ. I show that his doctrine of the person of Christ represents one important Chalcedonian stream of Christology, which, in Shedd's estimation, is intimately connected to two overarching themes in his dogmatics, namely, traducianism and Augustinian realism. His commitment to these two doctrines in his theological anthropology has important and unexpected implications for his Christology. Although the conclusion is that Shedd's doctrine of the person of Christ suffers from several serious problems, it represents an important contribution to systematic theology, which has more than historical interest.

John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) offers a highly creative seventeenth-century reconstruction of the doctrine of predestination, a reconstruction which both anticipates modern theological developments and sheds important light on the history of predestinarian thought. Moving beyond the framework of post-Reformation controversies, the poem emphasises both the freedom and the universality of electing grace, and the eternally decisive role of human freedom in salvation. The poem erases the distinction between an eternal election of some human beings and an eternal rejection of others, portraying reprobation instead as the temporal self-condemnation of those who wilfully reject their own election and so exclude themselves from salvation. While election is grounded in the gracious will of God, reprobation is thus grounded in the fluid sphere of human decision. Highlighting this sphere of human decision, the poem depicts the freedom of human beings to actualise the future as itself the object of divine predestination. While presenting its own unique vision of predestination, Paradise Lost thus moves towards the influential and distinctively modern formulations of later thinkers like Schleiermacher and Barth.

This paper responds to two article reviews of Democracy and Tradition – one by David Fergusson, the other by C. C. Pecknold. The first part of the paper seeks to clarify the author's critique of Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas, in particular MacIntyre's claim that our society is inherently incapable of sustaining rational discussion and Hauerwas's conception of what ‘being the church’ implies. The second part defends and extends the author's account of secularization. The third part considers truth, objectivity and the relationship between philosophy and political culture.

This paper will examine the relationship between Scottish common-sense philosophy and the formation of New Haven Theology. It will be illustrated that Nathaniel William Taylor's adaptations of orthodox Calvinism (particularly the doctrines of election and predestination and total depravity) relied heavily upon the principles of common-sense philosophy found in the work of Thomas Reid. Furthermore, it will be argued that Taylor's adaptation of Calvinism was a necessary accommodation to the phenomenon of mass conversion and evangelism during the Second Great Awakening.

The attraction of what Richard Cross describes as a generic view of God's trinitarian substance is undeniable. Even before the Arians professed belief in the Son of God as being of secondary divine rank vis-à-vis the Father, Origen demonstrated a tendency to envisage a derivation view of God's substance in which the Son was somewhat less divine than the Father. However, Cross's contention that Athanasius promoted this same concept is not as clear-cut as he suggests, although there are texts in the Athanasian corpus of writings lending credence to such an interpretation. While Athanasius did accept the monarchical view of the Trinity, with God the Father as the origin or source of intra-trinitarian life, he also stressed the consubstantial nature of the Son and the Father.