This article builds on contemporary debates about the doctrine of justification by faith alone to revisit the old question of the “nature of Protestantism”. Traditionally a core feature of Protestant theology, the doctrine of sola fide has been under assault for the past forty years, including within Protestant theology. This essay begins by showing that the major contemporary critique that sola fide bases salvation on a “legal fiction” misses the way that early Reformers like Luther and Melanchthon understood the doctrine very substantially in terms of its pastoral power to “console” consciences. Attending to the theme of “consolation” reveals a psychological and affective realism close to the heart of the doctrine of justification by faith alone as it was originally understood. This article then shows that traditional Protestant critiques of the reliability of external mechanisms and instruments in the mediation of grace were shaped by the same orientation to psychological and affective factors that are evident in the doctrine of justification. Together, these observations suggest that “the nature of Protestantism” may be usefully understood in terms of a foundational prioritization of psychological and affective considerations over metaphysical considerations in theology.

Against the background of greatly improved ecumenical relations between the Lutheran and Roman Catholic Churches, this article discusses Catholic scholarship on Martin Luther, from the four centuries after the reformation, when Luther was subject to consistently hostile distortions of his character, to more positive twentieth century approaches by Joseph Lortz and his followers, who saw Luther as a reluctant dissenter, essentially orthodox on the contested issue of Justification, but forced by circumstances to call for the reform of a corrupt and theologically decadent Church. But more recent reformation scholarship has called into question Lortz's negative view of pre‐reformation Catholicism, while some post‐Lortzian Catholic Luther scholarship has highlighted the reformer's radical departures from Catholic orthodoxy, consequently entailing a less optimistic reading of the doctrinal divisions between Lutherans and Catholics.

This article compares and contrasts Martin Luther's and St. Ignatius of Loyola's theological anthropologies. Drawing upon the mystical sources that Luther used to develop his own account of the human person, I argue that Luther came to reject an indwelling of the divine presence in the human person and located our relation to God in the external realm of faith alone. The resulting conception of the human person is one in which we are by nature rotten by sin. Union between us and God occurs through the darkness of faith and no longer in the highest parts of the soul as it had for the German medieval mystics upon whom Luther drew. For Loyola, by contrast, whilst human nature was damaged by sin, it could be restored by God's transforming grace to actively cooperate in the process of salvation. Loyola sees the inner stirrings of grace permeating our desires and will and restoring our freedom to its natural end of giving praise, reverence, and service to God. Such an apostolic mysticism is orchestrated by Loyola through formation in the Spiritual Exercises, which provide a unique synthesis in which action becomes a form of contemplation. I conclude by sketching the reasons why these contrasting theological anthropologies of Luther and Loyola find little appeal with the dominant philosophical anthropology of exclusive humanism in the modern west.

This paper explores ways in which the identity of the secular priesthood in England and Wales has been shaped by its particular historical experience. Five themes are proposed: the creation of the concept of mission in the post‐Reformation world; the combination of isolation and independence that became characteristic of recusant priests; the emergence of new ways of relating to church structures that priests were forced to find; the distinctive fraternal identity that was nurtured in a variety of ways throughout the penal times and the period of the Catholic Revival; the revolutions in relationships with the laity. These themes are pursued through the nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐centuries when the meaning and experience of them changed as the emphasis shifted to buildings and organisations. The twentieth century experience of priesthood in a parish context created possibilities for expansion, which masked issues and problems already rising to the surface. Both the challenges and the opportunities of the recusant way of life became stifled. A fixed model of the church made change difficult to contemplate. The loss of an historically shaped sense of priestly identity is explored as part of the explanation for the contemporary loss of confidence and direction within a shrinking presbyterate.

In 2016 Pope Francis went to Lund in Sweden for a joint service with the Lutherans to begin the events marking the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Catholics have also been involved in conferences and other events that have been organized as part of this anniversary. The context and background to the Catholic Church's involvement is the Church's commitment to ecumenical dialogue made at the Second Vatican Council. The theological basis for that commitment is to be found in the Second Vatican Council's Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium and its Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio.

This paper takes the opportunity of this anniversary to take stock of the progress of the ecumenical movement and notes some of the issues and challenges that have impacted upon it. As well as social and cultural factors these include the increasing importance of interreligious dialogue and its relationship to ecumenical dialogue. Ecumenists also have to take account of the widely varying interpretations of the Reformation offered by church historians.

Finally the paper argues that in the Catholic Church perceptions of ecumenism often fail to take account of the many ways in which the Second Vatican Council significantly changed the global role and profile of the Catholic Church (and the pope in particular) as a source and agent of peace and reconciliation on many different levels. Ecumenical engagement is an integral part of that continuing development which is increasingly acknowledged by political and religious leaders throughout the world.

This article aims at exploring some recent developments in Catholic Church's recent relationship with religious others. It does so by exploring the theological‐anthropological sources behind Vatican II and some subsequent Papal teachings concerning the Church's mission of dialogue. Specifically, it discusses the notion of common origin, destiny and common humanity as sources for praxis‐oriented and faith‐based initiatives in a Christian‐Muslim dialogue. This article is divided into three sub‐sections. First, it considers the Catholic Church's renewed dialogue with non‐Christian believers, with particular focus on the theological‐anthropological turn in recent Church teaching. Second, it examines the prospects and challenges of Christian‐Muslim dialogue based on belief in God the creator and divine revelation, and human beings' response to divine manifestations in history. Finally, it considers some faith‐based humanistic and dialogic initiatives that emerge from the Christian‐Muslim confession of one creator God. The paper suggests that a theology of dialogue that understands the world and human beings as the realm of encounter, uncovering and necessitating the divine and the Church's (salvific) activity in human history, can foster faith‐based humanistic and dialogic initiatives between Christians and Muslims.

Pope Francis wants a reform of the church and he sees Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador as a model bishop, one who smells like his sheep and who was fully committed to a poor church for the poor. Pope Francis and Archbishop Romero agree that the basis for church reform must be the gospel. As Jesus did not preach himself but the kingdom of God, the church must be at the service of the kingdom, she is the sacrament of the kingdom. The first addressees of the good news of the kingdom of God were the poor, so there is an intrinsic relationship between the church and the poor. Church reform means that the church becomes more like Jesus Christ serving the poor, the needy and the marginalized.

There is an intrinsic relationship between church reform and the signs of the times. The Second Vatican Council established a new relationship between the church and the world. Of key importance for this are the signs of the times as signs of the presence and the plans of God in history.

Archbishop Romero's deepest and most creative spiritual and theological insight is his association of the passion of the Salvadoran people with the suffering servant of God and the crucified Christ. He spoke of a crucified people.

Anglicanism's relationship with its Reformation heritage represents a tension. It looks to the Reformation as the movement from which an English Church, independent of papal authority, was inaugurated. At the same time, it refuses to be labelled as a “church of the Reformation”, pointing to its continuity with a much longer history of Christian practice in Britain. The growth of the Anglican Communion and current controversies over church order, the interpretation of scripture and the exercise of authority make Anglican identity difficult to define. Identity would once have been sought in liturgy, but the view that liturgy completely enshrines Anglican doctrine has been convincingly put to rest by scholarship since the 1970s. This paper argues that the liturgical legacy of the Reformation (especially use of the vernacular, concern for the orderly reading and interpretation of scripture, and attention given to the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist) offers categories that can help to form possible approaches to the current crisis of Anglican identity.

In the last 500 years our modern world has oscillated between the belief in “disenchanted” strategies of bureaucratic control and surveillance, and the celebration of iconoclastic ruptures that are supposed to preserve our sense of freedom and dignity. Yet, the equilibrium between these poles has fallen out of balance after the turn of the millennium. While the obsession with control has released concerted efforts to replace our supposedly irrational intelligence by the “artificial intelligence” of digital technologies, the implementation of ICT technologies in our everyday life has undermined the iconoclastic conviction that artefacts are merely tools. Our smartphones have a “magic life” of their own – be it that they afford a life that we appreciate, or that they nudge us into a life that we abhor. This challenge requires us to recover our ability to distinguish between idolatrous attachments and the prudent use of “magic objects” that is consistent with our natural desire to transform our life for the better. The following essay will discuss the question to what extent the basic assumptions of the confessionalized religions of the post‐Reformation era distract us from the task of engaging with this challenge. Moreover it will question the modern inclination to replace the engagement with sacramental objects with an engagement with pious “master signifiers”: authoritative substitutes for the “body of Christ”, like the Eucharistic host, the Bible or secular party books that reduce the attachment to religious traditions to a matter of formal belief and submission to an authoritative system of clerical, bureaucratic, or (today) robotic surveillance.