Adolf von Harnack, perhaps the most influential theologian of the twentieth century, helped the Kaiser to draft his Call to the German People of 6 August 1914, and almost certainly knew that the Kaiser, the Chancellor, and the German army planned to precipitate war that month. Despite that knowledge, Harnack always maintained that Russia and France launched the war. He drew a sharp distinction between private morality and state morality, and asserted that law played no part in either. One and the same spirit rules in history and in us. The dangers of love without law.

Noting that C. S. Lewis's writings do not contain a systematic statement of his understanding of the relationship between scripture and revelation, this essay exposes the literary, theological and philosophical undergirding of his approach to scripture, which was neither fundamentalist nor modernist. It then outlines his treatment of six ‘modes’ of revelation: five general and incomplete (the numinous, the notion of Sehnsucht, conscience/the moral law, the election of Israel, pagan myths), the sixth particular and perfect – Jesus Christ. After considering Lewis's notion of ‘transposition’ and delineating the trajectory of his philosophical idealism, the essay contends that Lewis's tendency to Platonise reality leads him to articulate some unfortunate and unsatisfactory theological expressions.

Many assume that the patristic notion of deification is absent from the mainstreams of post-patristic Western theology. Recent scholarship, however, identifies deification in Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, early Anglicanism, early Methodism and Jonathan Edwards – all fountainheads of Western theology. This article contends that deification is also present in Calvin's theology. It is not a prominent theme in its own right and some of the bolder patristic terminology is not employed. Nonetheless, the concept and imagery of deification regularly appear on stage while other doctrines are explicated. For Calvin, deification is the eschatological goal and blessing greater than which nothing can be imagined.

In this essay I argue that lament, as the primary liturgical witness to divine absence in times of human need, functions in worship as a discipline of negation and disruption through which what might be termed the God of glory – the God installed by liturgical gestures of ‘praise’ – is opposed and denied, in effect forsaking God by clinging to God's promise over and against God. To spell out this argument, I turn first to Psalm 22, then to the choreography of Holy Week, contending that in proper Christian worship and life, the doxology of triumph (‘hosanna’) is transformed via lamentation into an eschatological form of praise (‘hallelujah’).

Has Reformed hymnody played a catechetical role in propagating characteristically Reformed theological emphases? While early Reformed ‘hymnody’ focused on the Psalms, the eighteenth century saw a great proliferation of Reformed hymns employing non-scriptural language. For example, the hymnody of English Congregationalist Isaac Watts shows both the traditional use of psalms and the innovative creation of hymns of praise, thanksgiving and theological narration. This paper considers how Reformed hymnody has served that tradition's catechetical purposes, taking as a test case the ways in which its hymnody may have helped inculcate the characteristically Reformed emphasis on the threefold office of Christ.

Dan Williams challenges the ‘historylessness’ of much contemporary evangelicalism and pleads for a recovery of the great Tradition as a way of ‘renewing evangelicalism’. I agree with the need to pay attention to history but am not so optimistic about its resulting in renewal and find problems in the statement of the case that require further exploration. To follow Tradition is to affirm the authority of scripture. The Rule of Faith itself was a summary of the teaching found in scripture. Theological programmes other than the ‘Bible alone’ have not been notably successful in overcoming division. The early creeds and councils may be accepted as confessions of faith but not as tests of fellowship.

American evangelicals are in the process of discovering patristics. Books, articles, large-scale projects of scripture commentary produced by evangelical publishers, growing numbers of courses offered and students who wish to take them demonstrate that serious study of the literary and intellectual life of early Christianity is slowly moving into current theological reflections of evangelicalism. By ‘serious study’ I am signaling a distinction from those contemporary readings of the early fathers which have tended to re-make them in the image of twentieth-century evangelicalism. In their own right then, the fathers are being heard as having relevant voices.