In Jeffrey Archer's The Gospel According to Judas, Judas dismisses the virginal conception of Jesus as no more than another example of ‘Greek myths that tell of gods in heaven who produce offspring following a union with women of this earth’. To attribute such a view to a first-century Jew like Judas seems strange, since the earliest evidence shows Jewish critics of the Christian movement rejecting the virginal conception as a case of illegitimacy. In any case such Greek myths do not provide plausible sources for the two Gospel accounts of the virginal conception. Yet such merely historical debate is insufficient. One should press on to illustrate the religious significance and theological importance of the virginal conception within the whole story of Jesus: for instance, the role of this conception in revealing the Trinity at work for human salvation.

In Summa Theologiae III.42.4 Aquinas asks whether or not Christ should have committed his teaching to writing, and in this article I offer an in-depth analysis of his answer. I begin with a point-by-point account of III.41.4, noting that Aquinas's concerns are with salvation-history rather than with questions of the practicalities of preaching and theologizing or with problems of hermeneutics. Drawing on other parts of the Summa, I then examine the three principal reasons why, according to Aquinas, Jesus should not have committed his teaching to writing – his excellence as a teacher, the excellence of his teaching, and the requirement that his teaching should be disseminated in an orderly manner. Observing that for Aquinas ‘Christ's action is our instruction’, I show how his actio operates as both mystery and teaching to implant the New Law within human hearts. Jeremiah 31:31–33 and Hebrews 8:8,10 are key texts for Aquinas, who believes that the promise that the New Law would be written on hearts could never have been fulfilled had Christ committed his teaching to writing.

It is popular nowadays to claim not only that narrative is the most effective way to communicate religious knowledge but also that narrative provides the framework within which religious lifestyles and practices are meaningful. However, many today lack familiarity with the narratives of traditional religions. In other words, they suffer from ‘religious illiteracy’. This article considers the problem of how religion can become meaningful to such people. The view that religion can be divested of its outdated cultural accoutrements and presented in a form that resonates with postmodern secular culture is considered and found to be problematic. If acquiring a religion is like acquiring a culture, or a language, it seems unlikely that a deeper appreciation of a religious tradition will be facilitated by divesting it of its traditional cultural expressions. Moreover, the view that religious lifestyles should be emphasised rather than religious belief seems to be more a symptom of the problem of ‘religious illiteracy’ than a solution to it. The article concludes that both of these responses fail to provide a solution to the problem and that an alternative strategy is urgently required.

Reputable reports about climate change are grim. Unless radical mitigation and adaptation is implemented immediately the future of the present planetary biosystem, including humanity, is bleak. As Christians we have considerable resources in our living tradition to guide our own lives and to assist the whole earth community. Genesis, the historical books, wisdom, and the psalms all teach respect for climate as God's gift. Human hubris or idolatry results in climate nemesis. God creates the earth with its climate through his Word. In Jesus God lives in the earth community, experiencing and walking within the restraints of climate in first century Galilee. Jesus’ baptism, his lifestyle, especially his teaching and meals, his passion, death, and resurrection are all climate related. Jesus, in modern parlance lived and died sustainably. We are Jesus risen as sustainable community today.

The origin of self as subject can be sought neither in astrology, genetics nor in arbitrary divine will. These answers depend upon a realist belief in a world of objects, governed by the sufficient reason principle, as if the divine ideas were a necessary set of the possibles! The alternative is the unity of self and God, i.e. personal contingency is impossible. Otherness, rather, is in any thinkable God (any non‐abstract infinity is differentiated). The world too, as other, is inseparable from God, therefore, willing to be what he then is, though not temporally. Transcendence, as infinite, demands immanence. Why God has no real relation to creatures (Aquinas) is because they are not as God is, or as God transcends such being. Human actuality requires inversion of the common‐sense world. The idea of a privileged access to truth is arbitrary. Truth, rather, must be intrinsically human. We live in God. Only so are we, images, in ourselves. Emergent knowledge is natural to the universe. It constructs it.

Cardinal Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) considered Buddhism to be, after Christianity, the greatest spiritual fact of history. His groundbreaking studies of it have nevertheless received little previous scholarly attention. De Lubac focuses on Amidism, also known as Pure Land Buddhism, because he regards this as the form of Buddhism possessing greatest affinity with Christian faith, particularly in its conceptions of charity and divine personality. Religion cannot be considered in isolation from culture, however. De Lubac argues that Christian-Buddhist encounter is, wherever it occurs, necessarily also an encounter between Western culture and Buddhism, in the course of which boundaries between religions and cultures are continually defined, dissolved and redefined, especially in the understanding of human personhood. He nevertheless defends the universality of faith in Christ, the Word made flesh, in whom the desire of nature for God characteristic of the whole of humanity is fully expressed and realized.

The experience of human suffering presents an ongoing challenge to believers who seek to sustain their relationship with God in the face of the tragedies of human history. Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P. is a seminal Christian thinker who has made a conscious attempt to take into account the harsh reality of suffering in his systematic theology. Rejecting theoretical attempts to reconcile belief in a good, all‐powerful God with the reality of evil and suffering, Schillebeeckx employs the categories of narrative and memory in his articulation of a Christian response to evil and suffering. He tells the story of Jesus as the story of God. The God who is disclosed in the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus is the God who is “pure positivity”– the source of life and the opponent of evil and suffering. God's action in and through Jesus provides clues to the way in which God is present and active in the lives of suffering human beings. This revelation summons Christians to become people of memory and of praxis.

Contra Swinburne I argue that God cannot exist within time. There is a sufficient condition for its being now now. Because the conception of God existing within time cannot account for this condition, it has to be rejected. Based on Priest I argue that God's creative act is this: to cause the actuality of the universe within the soul.

In his published Gifford Lectures, Professor Michael Dummett asks ‘what would it be for there to be a universe devoid of sentient beings? What would be the difference between God's creating a material universe, in the whole of which there never was any creature able to experience it [‘a unidead’, in Moonan's shorthand], and His creating nothing at all? … What difference would its existing make?’ He answers: ‘there would surely be no difference…’ and ‘unless there are sentient and rational observers, it would not be possible for either observation or inference to occur’. (Thought and Reality, 97.)

Some theists might find this a disconcerting restriction on divine power; and if in addition realist, might put it down to a refusal of realism for the range of language in question. In this article, however, I presuppose a coherent realism for the range, and argue that Dummett's contentions can hold for realisms too, and ought not to disconcert serious theists. What is crucial is not (just) whether you are prepared to understand your assertions in an ‘anti-realist’ rather than a realist manner, but whether or not you are prepared to use ‘God’ to stand for something not finite in any way, if there is any, and for nothing else in extra-mental reality. Dummett's Giffords are metaphysically serious: where it would matter if there were no God.

Why should Catholics enter into dialogue with representatives of non-Christian religious traditions? Although the last decades have witnessed an impressive involvement of Catholic theologians in these contacts, a positive dogmatic framework of interreligious dialogue is still waiting in the wings. On one hand, one can no longer be satisfied with trying to make non-Christians realize that Christianity is their beliefs ultimate truth (what about a dialogue with non-Christians then?). On the other hand, one cannot admit of expecting to get some additional knowledge about God that would not already be contained in Tradition and Scriptures, believed to convey the fullness of Gods Revelation to mankind. Putting forward the Traditions legitimate development, the present paper argues that new insights into the fullness of Gods Revelation can be gained from types of religious thinking born beyond the historical limits of Gods Revelation. According to its essence, this Revelation appeals to the contribution of those who have never heard of it.

The exemplum is a short edifying tale that uses a historical person's positive or negative character traits to make a moral point. Its homiletic suitability ensured the genre's widespread use throughout premodern Europe. Not only were exempla effective preaching instruments on which a travelling friar could rely, but they also were extremely elastic in their application. A closer look at two late thirteenth-century English texts, Ralph Bocking's Latin Life of St Richard of Chichester (Vita sancti Ricardi) and the Life of St Dominic in the anonymous South English Legendary, a Middle English cycle of saints' lives, will explore two original ways in which mendicant hagiographers attempt to conceal and yet betray their intentions through their choice of hagiographic exempla. The first, I argue, petitions the patron, Isabella of Arundel, for a gift to the Order of Preachers, whereas the second text shows evidence of having been composed by a Dominican friar.