The language of Christian prayer reflects two central components of christology. One is the exclusive importance attached to a brief portion of history centring upon the death of Jesus, while the other is the assertion of his continuing presence to the believer. The ways in which these twin themes are articulated is nowhere more apparent than in the theology of the resurrection. In this respect the resurrection provides the most important case-study in Christian interpretation. The sense in which the history of Jesus is theologically significant and the sense in which he can be spoken of as present — these are partly illustrated and partly constituted by the interpretation of the resurrection.

That the early church was intensely and passionately evangelistic is clear to every reader of the documents that make up the New Testament. Equally clear, or so it would seem, is the scholarly consensus that when Christian evangelists took the step of reaching beyond the borders of the Jewish people, they did so without requiring observance of the Jewish law. The work of these evangelists, in turn, is said to have sparked a reaction on the part of firmly observant Jewish Christians, who, seeing the growth of the Gentile mission, sought to require observance of the Law by its converts. Struggles ensued, and the outcome, to put the matter briefly, was victory for the mission to the Gentiles, for the Law-free theology characteristic of that mission, and for the churches produced by it.

Most of the standard treatments of Martin Luther's biblical exegesis move deductively: general propositions are enunciated (e.g., Holy Scripture as its own interpreter; all correct interpretation standing under the rule of the analogy of faith, construed Christocentrically) and are then supported with extracts from the Weimar Ausgabe or Luther's Works. Genuinely instructive as such a procedure can be, its total effect is often a rather ‘flat’ or undifferentiated presentation of Luther's biblical interpretation throughout his career. Perhaps some of the dimensions of the subject — the unity and diversity, the constancy and development — would become clearer were we to adopt a more inductive procedure: to examine, compare, and contrast three different specimens of Luther's exegesis of a single text.

The aim of this article is to provide an historical description of an important piece of Victorian theology, and subsequently to suggest a new context, or rather a new content for a familiar theme. Firstly, it will consider in what sense Newman may be called a ‘natural theologian’; secondly, it will give an account of the notion of the illative sense within the developing pattern of Newman's thought; finally, it will suggest that, by a unilateral concentration on moral experience — the ‘voice of conscience’ — Newman failed to do justice to the full significance of his own argumentation. The point of the illative sense is not that it helps us to identify any one experiential content, or area of reflection, which might lead us to theistic belief, but that it provides an overall context in which a variety of experiential strata and argumentative strategies may be displayed. Newman was, perhaps, too dominated by an autobiographical sense in the realm of fundamental belief in God to identify and correct the individualism which in dogmatic theology proper he would have avoided. Our theistic materials do not lie simply within our own breasts, but in an inter-rogation, Gadamer-like, of the entire theistic tradition as that is mediated to us by the classic texts of our predecessors.

Not all people deal with the crucial existential questions of modernity in a religious manner. Yet, contrary to enlightenment predictions, religion continues to be a prominent reality in the latter part of twentieth-century western society. It is the purpose of this essay to identify the distinctive nature of the contemporary Protestant brand of this religiosity.

On 6 September 1939 the ‘S.S. President Harding’ churned slowly across the North Atlantic on the last of its summer runs. Joseph Needham passed the time aboard as he had often done while awaiting the completion of a distillation or an incubation in the Cambridge Biochemical Laboratory: by preparing a book for press. Now, however, he sat forebodingly, awaiting a graver distillation from the waters, an incubus in the skies, as he put the finishing touches on the introductory essay for a new edition of a book entitled Natural Law in the Spiritual World. The author of this book was Henry Drummond, a Scottish evangelical worker who died in 1897. Needham, born three years later, was a Marxist embryologist and a practising Anglo-Catholic. Near the end of the essay Needham stressed what he took to be Drummond's belief that ‘much of the content of traditional Christian theology — “the laws of the spiritual world” — arise directly from what had preceded it in the highly organised realm of the psychological’.