Because the sermon on the mount (hereafter SM) has received as much attention as any text in all of world literature, informed attempts to interpret it should in some way come to terms with the history of the discussion. For this reason we shall commence by examining several traditional approaches to the SM. We fully recognise that ‘a history of the interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount throughout the past two millennia would virtually amount to an introduction to the entire development of Christian theology and ethics’ — a fact which means that our own review is of necessity brief and piecemeal. Nonetheless, the following few pages do suffice to reveal certain important tendencies in exegetical history. Among them, and of first importance for our concerns, is the unfortunate habit of viewing the SM in isolation. Interpreters have again and again failed to take seriously the broader, literary context of Mt. 5–7 and have instead interpreted the chapters as though they were complete unto themselves, as though they constituted a book instead of a portion of a book. The considerable hermeneutical consequences have, on the whole, led away from the intent of the evangelist (our primary concern herein). It is our contention that any credible interpretation of Mt. 5–7 must constantly keep an eye on Mt. 1–4 and Mt. 9–28, for the part (the SM) draws its true meaning only from the whole (Matthew's Gospel). Put otherwise, the proper interpretation of the SM must be at one with the proper interpretation of the First Gospel in its entirety.

To suggest that authentic Christianity is an insurrectionary faith, a standing provocation to the conventional values of society is, on the face of it, to invite derision. Yet the ferocity with which the first Christians were persecuted was in no small part due to their subversive teachings and practices which gave women, slaves and artisans ideas above their station. This subversive dimension may often have been forgotten. It can hardly have been very evident to the inhabitants of Wittenberg in 1515, for example, yet within a decade Germany was to be embroiled in an unprecedented crisis of authority, one which led not only to turmoil in the world of student and scholar and cleric, but to the greatest social upheaval prior to the French Revolution, to the uffrur we know as the Peasants' War.

The problem of creation, which has largely disappeared from contemporary scientific discourse, was central to the scientific revolution. What modern scientists recognise as the only relevant relation – that between the knower and the known, man and nature — was understood three centuries ago as secondary to God's relation to the created order and his relation to created minds. For most early modern natural philosophers, both the manner in which and the degree to which the universe could be understood depended on how God had acted in creating it, how he continued to act in sustaining it, and how he had made the human mind — profound theological questions indeed. Over the centuries Christian thinkers, though reaching a consensus on the reality and goodness of the creation, have differed widely on the precise nature of created minds and the created order. The spectrum of views manifests an underlying dialectic between God's unconstrained will, which utterly transcends human comprehension, and God's orderly intellect, which serves as the model for the human mind. Often this has been expressed in terms of the distinction between God's absolute power to do whateverases and God's ordinary power to uphold the creation in an orderly and faithful manner. Individual thinkers typically acknowledge that God has both will and reason, both absolute and ordinary power, but usually emphasize one over the other.

The modern scene in Christian theology is characterized by a number of very diverse movements from feminism and liberation theology to radical views on christology and the charismatic movement. For many to speak or write about the Trinity is neither realistic nor helpful. In more recent writings, however, there has been renewed interest in the doctrine of the Trinity and in its application to the spheres of the church and also of social and political concerns. Further, a variety of groups as well as individuals have been turning their attention to this central Christian doctrine which is basically attempting to say what we believe about God: Barth, Moltmann, Jungel, the Torrances, on the Protestant side and the Roman Catholics, Von Balthasar, Rahner, and Congar, as well as the Orthodox Lossky, Zraoulas and Meyendorff. Groups like C.E.C. the Conference of European Churches (The Reconciling Trinity), and the British Council of Churches B.C.C. (The Forgotten Trinity) and the Irish Theological Association (The Trinity and the Enlightenment)have all dealt in varied ways with this subject.