This article seeks to summarise and critically analyse Colin Gunton's trinitarian theology in regard to the claim that the doctrine of the Trinity is a doctrine with radical consequences for human life. To this end it engages, first, in an examination of Gunton's trinitarian project following his thought from a cultural critical starting point finally leading to the establishment of three open transcendentals and, second, in a critical analysis of this approach, highlighting some essential inconsistencies in regard to Cappadocian theology, the concepts of relationality and personhood and practical consequences for human life. In conclusion, the article suggests that Gunton's strong emphasis on relationality and his search for open transcendentals could be understood as the result of his passionate aspiration to heal the wounds of an egocentric, individualistic and alienating modern culture through an ontology of communion.

Many studies criticise John Duns Scotus (c. 1265–1308) for reducing the atoning sacrifice of Christ to a merit of finite worth and making its atoning power completely dependent on the accepting will of God, such that if it pleased God, even a purely creaturely sacrifice of an angel or a saint would have sufficed to redeem the elect. This article discredits this sort of criticism by demonstrating that Scotus situates his argument for a finite worth of Christ's merit within the framework of his larger argument for the infinite sufficiency of Christ's merit. A cogent examination of the ways in which Scotus posits a merit of finite intrinsic worth and arrives at its infinitely sufficient atoning power reveals that only the merit of a God-man can achieve this sort of sufficiency and that the nature of Scotus' voluntarism that underlies his concept of divine acceptation is nowhere as radical as it is usually portrayed.

With a long and venerable history in both Catholic and Protestant traditions the doctrine represented by the term extra Calvinisticum has fallen out of favour within contemporary theologies of the cross. Through an examination of the history of the doctrine and its constituent features the present article advocates the reclamation of the doctrine as a necessary component for a contemporary theology of the atonement, with special emphasis on the trinitarian dimensions of the death of God on the cross. The extra Calvinisticum is then adopted to refute contemporary theologies of a suffering God.

The Protestant church, for Reinhard Hütter, relinquished its ecclesial public character when it turned from ‘binding doctrine’ as the means for establishing and maintaining its concrete ‘time-space’. Christendom disguised this basic theological flaw, but with its collapse the public basis of the Protestant church fell away. This reduced the church's witness and destroyed its communal structure. His positive proposal re-establishes the church as a public by reference to the communion nature of God, and to church practices as mediate forms of the Spirit's acting. Hütter's account shadows an argument made fifty years before by Johannes C. Hoekendijk, observing an intensified focus on word and sacrament and the promotion of a culture as a solution to the problem of the church's witness. Yet, for Hoekendijk, this logic exemplifies the problem. The institutions of the church come to bear the full evangelistic load. Mission replicates the basic structures of a particular way of life as a necessary precursor to the gospel. The act of witness becomes propaganda because of an insufficient doctrine of the church. This insufficiency is a failing in the doctrine of the Trinity: God's own life is defined without sufficient attention to his act of reconciliation and redemption as itself material to understanding the nature of his in se life.

Blaise Pascal once said, ‘Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance [for theology] because he shows us both God and our wretchedness’. Indeed, the majesty of Christ is that in him the despair of wretchedness and the hope of God are held together. Theology often does not reflect this balance, leading towards either anthropocentrism or nihilism. The ubuntu theology of Desmond Tutu does, however, by proclaiming the inherent interconnectedness of humankind. Tested by the context of South African apartheid, this notion called ‘ubuntu’ counters segregation and violence with reconciliation and justice. It refuses to execute retribution upon transgressors, instead committing itself to re-membering the disinherited of Christ's inclusive body. Forgiveness is the only future for this body and, though it remains an aporia in the context of radical evils such as apartheid, it is the only way to achieve justice without economising balance. That is, only forgiveness can realise ubuntu because it progresses forward toward justice not backward toward vengeance. Ubuntu is the prophetic balance of a divine gift that transforms the wretchedness of human atrocities. It represents Tutu's attempt to realise the way of God in his context, an attempt from which all theologising can benefit.

I was hoping that this book might end one of my most enduring classroom group research activities. At the beginning of my introductory module in black theology, I send the class to the library to search for all the books written by British theologians on ‘race’, since the First World War. Students return an hour later and acknowledge that there are none. Then I send the group back again but this time to search for books on the subject of ‘animal theology’ (by the same intellectual demographic). On their return each group announces, sometimes in triumph, that there were at least a dozen! I then respond by asking them to reflect on what we are to make of a theological community that appears to be more interested in the souls of animals than British Christianity's sojourn with racialised oppression?

I am grateful to Robert Beckford for the care he has taken to present the argument of my book and for his incisive comments and criticisms. My book has been reviewed by other black theologians, in the UK and the USA, who have avoided the argument of the book, preferring to play the race card: any criticism of black theology can only be an expression of white racism. I am grateful to the editors of SJT in affording me the opportunity to respond. It would be tedious to become involved in a detailed exchange of he-said–I-said. I have chosen to respond to two issues raised in Beckford's review.