An investigation of the second story of creation and the Fall in the light of their exegesis by Phyllis Trible. The strengths and weaknesses of Trible's approach are considered and an evaluation of Genesis 2–3 as a paradigm of Ancient Israel's social and religious history is offered.

As introduction to the topic may serve two remarks, one about the meaning and importance of the expression ‘Deuteropauline Letters’, and one about the historical and theological background of the question of the relationship between church and Israel.

We live in a culture marked, as few others have been, by persistent and deep-seated scepticism about the existence and knowability of God. Not only is the intellectual leadership of our times for the most part atheist or agnostic, but theology itself, certainly since the time of Kant, has been in fundamental disarray about the question, as witness, for example, the recent preoccupation with the question of revelation. In this paper I want to suggest, first, that the problem does not begin with Kant, because at least one of the causes of Western atheism is a theological tradition which encourages thought in the essential unknowability of God. Here, a distinction must be drawn. In one sense, of course, the doctrine of the unknowability of God is essential to theology. But to hold it in such a way as to suggest or teach that the unknowable God can in noway make himself known — so that there can be no theological ontology at all — is to offer the kind of hostages to fortune which so much Western theology has done. Can it really be a historical accident that it is here rather than anywhere else that atheism has found so fertile a soil?

John Erskine of Dun has recently been pigeon-holed as a ‘Lutheran’; his patterns of thought sharply distinguished from those of his colleague, John Knox. The aim of this paper is to re-examine the theological contexts of this neglected yet crucial Scots reformer and laird. His was a career of particular interest, combining the spheres of lairdly politics and leadership in the reformed Kirk. Besides, an active lifespan of sixty and more years was not given to many in the sixteenth century. John Erskine, laird of the barony of Dun in Angus (between Brechin and Montrose), in addition to enjoying an unusually long life, (born c. 1509: died 1589/90) is also distinguished by his capacity for political survival. One who was never to be so closely connected with the various political factions as to fall with them in their turn, he was rarely so far from the centre of power as to be endangered by any lack of influential friends. To this intricate personal balancing-act was added the further complication of a genuine search for God that brought him to a protestant faith at a date when such beliefs were both heretical and criminal, and later to a belief in the independent jurisdiction of the church at a time when successive governments of Scotland were attempting to assert their authority in ecclesiastical matters.

Every parent is also a child. This truism of kinship is not as obvious as it might seem. A very young nephew of mine once insisted I could not be his grandmother's son because I was not a son but an uncle. He had not grasped the possibility that I could be both.