Augustine's understanding of the church as part of the totus Christus – the ‘whole Christ’ – has become an important resource in contemporary theology, offering a robust vision of the church's union with God. Yet a key critique maintains that it threatens to elide the distinction between the perfected Christ and the created church. This article addresses this issue by asking how the totus Christus doctrine relates to the doctrine of participation. For Augustine, participation is a metaphysical category that expresses the creature's dependent, non-divine status, its essential being out of nothing. The totus Christus doctrine is most explicitly an exegetical, not metaphysical doctrine. Nevertheless, by putting these two facets of Augustine's thought together, we can see the way in which they mutually reinforce the view that the astonishing claims of unity in the totus Christus are structured by a larger theological grammar that distinguishes God and creature.

Donald Macleod (1940–) has been called one of the two most important Scottish Reformed theologians of the twentieth century. This article shows that by the 1990s Macleod in his public theology consistently used language and concepts which were also trademarks of Latin American liberation theology. By comparing his work to the three mediations of liberation theology, I show it is possible to speak of Macleod as exhibiting a distinctive Scottish Reformed theology of liberation. I propose this connection should be understood through Macleod's constructive engagement with his own Scottish (and specifically Highland) Reformed tradition, whose interest in liberation carries surprising parallels with Latin American liberation theology.

This article contrasts the teaching on just war as presented by the 2000 document, ‘Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church’ (Moscow Patriarchate), with the insights provided by a similar social document issued in 2020 by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, ‘For the Life of the World: Towards a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church’. The article argues that whenever religion is instrumentalised to justify the political ambitions of church and secular leaders, and especially when they are used as the main driving force behind military conflicts such as the war in Ukraine, it is the prophetic role of theologians and scholars to show that religion offers resources to deconstruct the weaponisation of Christian faith for political gain.

This essay adapts Dietrich Bonhoeffer's ‘orders of preservation’ to address the sharp rise in species extinctions due to human causes. I argue that Bonhoeffer's creative use of preservation orders to build an international alliance provides the scope required to meet the present biodiversity crisis while pre-empting Karl Barth's criticism of static regionalism and avoiding problematic elements in Carl Schmitt's concept of the ‘restraining force’. Drawing on Bonhoeffer's 1932 address, ‘On the Theological Foundation of the Work of the World Alliance’, I present three convictions to guide the task of preservation today, which include the formation of alliances between ecclesial and scientific communities in order to properly specify God's commandment.

This article traces convergences and differences within the classical philosophical tradition of musica and its later Christianisation, exploring Martin Luther's engagement with such metaphysical accounts of music's significance. Recent scholarship on Luther's agreement with a reformulated Boethian account of music is critiqued, distancing Luther from the main currents of this tradition. The article goes on to explore the way Luther subverts Platonic emphases in his theological understanding of music, drawing on a longer tradition of criticism for musical cosmologies. The article concludes with an extended reading of Luther's most substantial hymnal preface, to articulate his alternative, dynamic account of music in creation, which grounds musical realities in the gifted contingencies of human musicianship.

The phrase blood of Christ has traditionally been interpreted as and used interchangeably with Christ's sacrificial death. As such, Jesus’ death is seen to be more crucial to salvation than his incarnation and resurrection. The blood of Christ language in the New Testament books of Hebrews and Romans echoes Old Testament cultic atonement language. Given recent and ample exegetical biblical scholarship that suggests blood of Christ language might refer to Christ's incarnational, resurrected life, we should explore the resulting soteriological implications. What salvific significance is there to the cross if Jesus Christ entered the Most Holy Place with his lifeblood flowing in his veins as David Moffitt asserts? I propose that the cross reveals God's legal and moral authority to forgive sin without minimising the law.