Twenty Five years ago the late Archbishop Ramsey went to visit Pope Paul VI in Rome. The two bishops discussed possible joint enquiries by their Churches into liturgical questions: for example, finding a common translation of the Lord's Prayer. As far as I know, they have not yet found it. That is not surprising since the Lord's Prayer presents several problems of interpretation and wording. In particular, the sixth petition ‘Lead us not into temptation’ has caused difficulty from very early times. Can it really be implied (it is said) that the Father will lead his children — deliberately lead his children — into situations where they will be enticed to do what they know to be wrong? And the usual answer is ‘Certainly not!’ Nevertheless, the petition cannot be avoided: it is present in both Matthew and Luke who offer divergent forms of the Prayer, presumably according to the traditions of their communities. It is present in the Didache which incorporates early and possibly independent material, and in the Letter of Polycarp from early in the second century. Two methods of solving the problem have been attempted.

Aremarkable effort at reform is now occurring in English-speaking Christian discourse. This effort is the ongoing proposal of feminist theologians that the exclusive use of the masculine third-person pronouns to refer to God be eliminated. The traditional usage is rejected on the ground that it identifies the Godhead as male. Several alternatives to this usage have been suggested, and some of them are now being tested in various quarters of the Church. In this paper we disclose theolinguistic implications of the use of pronouns in reference to divinity and offer critique of current reformist proposals.

One of the analogies used by the Cappadocian Fathers and other early theologians to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity was the social analogy in which Father, Son and Spirit were likened to three human persons. Beginning with Augustine however, Christian Theology, particularly in the Western Church, shifted away from the social to the psychological analogy. Augustine found analogies to the Trinity in all of creation but the clearest analogy to the Trinity, in fact its unique image, was the human soul. The divine image was not found in the union of three persons but in the unity of three activities, remembering, knowing, willing in the individual human soul. The social analogy reappeared in the twelfth century in Richard of St Victor's argument for the existence of three persons in God based on the premise that supreme charity required shared interpersonal love. Though some of Richard's insights were taken up by Bonaventura, the impact of his trinitarian theology was overshadowed by the dominant influence of Thomas Aquinas with his masterful use of the psychological analogy to probe and illuminate the inner being of the divine Trinity. Following Aquinas's further development of Augustine's psychological analogy, the interpersonal approach of the social analogy all but disappeared from subsequent trinitarian theology. Even with a later shift away from the Augustinian-Thomistic model, modern theology retained its unipersonal image of the trinitarian God.

Not that I have already obtained this or have already been made perfect (teteleiomai); but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brethren, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature (teleioi) be thus minded; and if in anything you are otherwise minded, God will reveal that also to you.