The result of the Arian controversy was the affirmation of the total equality of the trinitarian persons. This led to the realisation that all three persons of the Trinity are involved in every external action of God. Despite this, the role of the Holy Spirit in creation has not been clear, partly due to few specific references in the creation narratives. However, it may be suggested that the Spirit does not act in the creation of matter, which is the role of the second person, but in the provision of the underlying form and order necessary for very existence, and specifically for the dynamic interaction which is of the essence of life, as in the second account of the creation of the man (Gen 2). This reflects the fact that the action of the Spirit is also essential in salvation to link Christ's work on the cross to the believer. While separation is a feature of the Genesis creation narrative, this is balanced by the interrelating of what had been created.

So, although Christian theology has commonly seen the world as ‘spirit’-less, restricting the action of the Holy Spirit to the church, this would be understood as referring to the limitation of his direct action. His immanent presence is nevertheless essential in all for very existence. The Spirit is not in the world, but underlies it.

Creation may be seen as a theistic act, by transcendent intervention to give matter, and giving interaction in immanent presence. The nature of the world therefore reflects the theistic nature of God, involving both distinction and relating. Indeed it then reflects the trinitarian nature of the creator, in which the persons maintain their absolute distinction at the same time as their total equality through the interaction of perichōrēsis, specifically enabled by the action of the Spirit as generating and undergirding relationship. The parallel between the created and the creator is seen especially insofar as the discrete elements of matter interrelate to give form and interaction.

It is in their interaction that the elements of creation fulfil their purpose, and so specifically that humanity reflects its nature as created in imago Dei.

It is a familiar refrain in various theological conversations that pneumatology has been woefully underdeveloped in Western theology since the time of Augustine. However, some theologians are working to correct this situation and to develop new ways of understanding the person of the Holy Spirit in ways which are faithful to traditional theological sources. Wolfhart Pannenberg is one such theologian. One way in which he seeks to revitalise contemporary pneumatology is by appealing to field theory as it has been developed in modern physics. Pannenberg justifies such a move by investigating the etymological and philosophical roots of both field theory and pneumatology in the Stoic understanding of the doctrine of the πνεῦμα as the field of all material existence. While the Stoic notion of field was rejected by the apologists as a way of understanding, because of its inherent materialism, this possibility has been reopened by modern physicists who have developed field theories as a way of understanding the animating and binding qualities of nature which are devoid of materialism. Pannenberg takes up this language in a distinctive way to describe the unity of the Godhead in order to avoid modalism and to undo emphasis on rationality which has been the central feature of much of modern Western pneumatology. He also draws upon field theory to understand the activity of the Spirit in creation as its animating and unitive property, while preserving the freedom and individuality of creaturely existence. The author argues that this distinctive feature of Pannenberg's use of field theory in pneumatology has laid the ground work for a renewed understanding of the role of the Spirit in creation and a new avenue of conversation between theology and the natural sciences. In particular, field theory should be seen as an important way of understanding the loving relations between persons which is grounded in a mutual self-giving which respects the individual, in contrast to those who ground love primarily in compassionate suffering.

A number of New Testament scholars, including John O'Neill and Larry Hurtado, have drawn attention to the prospects which worship texts in the writings of the New Testament offer in revealing the way in which the first Christians thought of Jesus. Whilst the impossibility of separating the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith has contributed to this development and has also been a central impulse in the so-called Third Quest, the ancient principle of lex orandi, lex credendi, coined by Prosper of Aquitaine, gives a further theological foundation for such explorations. However, its later distortion, particularly in the aftermath of the Reformation, has privileged doctrine (credendi) over experience (orandi), and diminished the reciprocity between the two demanded by the classical formulation.

Revelation 4–5 are explored as two texts which are rooted in experience, both of Christian liturgy and the merkavah traditions which drew on the heavenly visions of prophets like Ezekiel and Isaiah. Viewed from this perspective, the visions make claims about the divinity of the Lamb and the propriety of its worship on the basis of religious experience, embodied in authoritative claims for both ‘altered states of consciousness’ and literary tropes. They give pictorial descriptions and visions which should stand as authoritative theological claims in their own right.

However, modern New Testament scholarship, following post-Reformation patterns, attempts to explain these visions in more technical and abstract theological terms such as binitarian or trinitarian. This, it is suggested, is undesirable because of the danger of importing anachronisms, with their attendant theological bag and baggage, of making overly bold claims for our knowledge of the individuals, communities and/or circumstances which produced these texts (given both the oscillation of New Testament writers between binitarian and trinitarian tendencies, and a degree of confusion caused by the role of the Spirit in related discourse), and of shifting the locus of meaning from the texts themselves to secondary explications (a phenomenon which appears peculiarly attractive to modern scholarship).

Drawing on Wittgenstein's reflections on the study and analysis of religious experience, it is suggested that it may be wiser to leave the texts to stand in their own right, rather than to be interpreted via theological categories which may ultimately say more about the concerns of modern scholars than the producers of the texts.

Both Thomas F. Torrance and Karl Barth speak of the obedience of the Son as a condescension of the Son to become incarnate for our sakes. Thus there is wide agreement between them with regard to both the doctrines of atonement and the Trinity. Yet, despite the fact that Barth never wavered in his rejection of subordinationism and modalism and always affirmed the freedom of God's love, he also claimed that there ‘is in God Himself an above and a below, a prius and a posterius, a superiority and a subordination’,1 while Torrance unequivocally refused to read elements of the economy, such as the ideas of super and subordination and a before or after, back into the immanent Trinity. By comparing the thinking of Barth and Torrance on this issue, I hope to show why I think Barth illegitimately read back elements of the economy into the immanent Trinity, thus creating confusion where clarity would help us see that what God does for us in the economy is and remains an act of free grace which becomes obscured when any sort of hierarchy is introduced into the Trinity.

Both theologians thoroughly agree that what God is towards us in the economy, he is eternally in himself and what he is eternally in himself, he is towards us in the economy. But, there is a difference between them over how to interpret this insight, since Barth thinks super and subordination should be ascribed to the immanent Trinity. While Torrance, like Barth, will argue that the incarnation and Christ's mediatorial activity fall ‘within the life of God’, he also insists that the incarnation cannot in any way be confused with the generation of the Son from the Father in eternity. Barth would agree; yet this important distinction becomes fuzzy when he ascribes subordination and obedience to the eternal Son as a basis for his actions ad extra.

This article will develop in four sections. First, I will discuss the obedience of the Son as condescension for Torrance and Barth. Second, I will consider the implications of the Extra Calvinisticum for each theologian's view of the obedience of the Son and of the Trinity. Third, I will explore how each theologian attempts to avoid subordinationism and modalism indicating the problems which arise in Barth's thinking in connection with these views. Fourth, I will compare Torrance and Barth, showing that Torrance more consistently maintains God's freedom and love by not reading back elements of the economy into the life of the immanent Trinity.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer's liberal use of spatial concepts in constructing an ecclesiology served his theological purpose in the articulation of a concrete ecclesiology. In particular, Bonhoeffer uses the themes of taking-up-space and the visibility of the church. The visibility of the church is depicted as a proclamatory space, a liturgical space and an ordered space, all encapsulated in the concept of Lebensraum. Within this space, witness is given to the foundation of all reality in Jesus Christ. The church is the place where this reality is proclaimed; a space no bigger than that required to serve the world in witness to Christ. As opposed to any idea of a ‘privatised’ or individual space, Bonhoeffer insisted on the public and territorial nature of this space as essential to the church's witness, for it was in this very visibility that the church gains space for Christ.

Lebensraum, an idea popularised by Adolf Hitler and incorporated into the foreign policy of the Third Reich, was a highly charged political concept taken over by Bonhoeffer to represent a living space diametrically opposed in form to that proposed by the Reich. A useful way of thinking about the Christian form of Lebensraum as proposed by Bonhoeffer is to regard it as the space in which the ‘social acts that constitute the community of love and that disclose in more detail the structure and nature of the Christian church’1 are to be demonstrated and observed. These ‘social acts’ are built upon the foundational concepts, first found in Sanctorum Communio, of Stellvertretung or vicarious representative action, Miteinander or church members being with-each-other, and Füreinander or church members actively being for-each-other. Bonhoeffer proposes that, as its life is lived out in this way, the church will take the form of its suffering servant Lord. It is in this particular space and no other, grounded and upright in Christ, that Christians are to live their lives in witness to Christ.

Ernst Troeltsch and Heikki Räisänen have raised significant challenges to the way New Testament theology handles the relation of history and theology. Troeltsch pushed Christian scholars to apply the historical method's three principles of criticism, analogy and correlation consistently to their work and thus embrace empiricism. Räisänen continues this trajectory by splitting New Testament theology into its descriptive and reflective tasks, resulting in a programme which questions the unity of the canon, the appropriateness of prescription and the role of church authority in New Testament theology. With these challenges in mind, this article examines four recent New Testament theologies to see how they use the historical method. It finds that these works exhibit different ad hoc ways of using the historical method, picking it up and setting it down at will. Peter Balla accepts New Testament theology as descriptive and historical while claiming it can also be theological by studying the content in the New Testament. Despite this embrace of the historical method, Balla remains uncomfortable with bare empiricism and pushes back on its naturalism. Georg Strecker splits the world into two: one part which can be investigated by the historical method and another part which lies outside its normal subject matter. The result is that he uses the historical method everywhere except where his main theological concern lies – Jesus’ resurrection. I. Howard Marshall similarly holds the historical method to be necessary for New Testament theology but largely ignores it in light of narrative-theological concerns. Frank Matera takes a purposefully literary approach to New Testament theology and generally ignores the historical method. He does invoke it, however, when the text becomes difficult and alternative readings must be found. The methodological inconsistency demonstrated by these New Testament theologies leads the article to conclude that this type of historical New Testament theology is a failed enterprise. A theological understanding of history based on work by Murray Rae is then proposed as an alternative which allows for methodological consistency in synthetic work on the New Testament.