As in modernity appropriation has become more important than dedication and communication, the modern Narcissus, captured in self-relation, sees only his own projections. A change of the polarity of our attention is therefore necessary: from the human who appropriates to the God who communicates, who is himself a hermeneut. This means that neither Schleiermacher's nor Bultmann's hermeneutic of regression should be followed; both are shy of talking about the God who is not only already in us, but who comes to us – and this advent is mediated through creaturely means. God the creator is – in accordance with the Nicene Creed – the ‘Poet’, the one who does what he says, and says what he does. This communication needs a space of hearing and reading; its text vindicates the relative autonomy over the author as well as over the reader. The human being in its modern subjectivity ignores this and either transcends the text (Hegel and Barth) or goes behind the text (Schleiermacher and Bultmann). Instead, the aim should be to have a relationship, an engagement with the text, to have, quite frankly, ‘intercourse’ with it, as Luther translates ‘meditatio’. The crucial question is therefore not: ‘How do I understand the given biblical text?’, but ‘How does the given biblical text give itself to me to understand it – so that I am understood?’

A concept of the church current in post-Enlightenment modernity, of a religious society founded for the voluntary association of like-minded individuals, continues to dominate among many Christians today, especially in North American and western European contexts. This idea of church is particularly threatened by difference and conflict. Differences in matters of faith and values in such an ecclesiology mean that someone must be wrong in their private religious opinions. And, even if these opinions are privately held, they may undo the weak bonds of association among members of a Christian fellowship. Conflict, thus, is to be dreaded, and avoided. Unity for many in such an ecclesiology is synonymous with uniformity. Tolerance is theoretically valued, but toleration may mean little more than enlightened forbearance with the errors (i.e. differences) of others. The irony is that the church that can be undone by difference is a church more closely related to the polis of antiquity and the religious society of John Locke than to the diverse, vibrant, lively, and often messy communities of faith that spring to life on the pages of the NT. This essay seeks to advance an alternative ecclesiology conversant with classical trinitarian theology, grounded in the historical experience of the church, and open to certain streams of cultural pluralism.

Traditional Reformation scholarship argued that conceiving faith as a habit is one of the differences between Reformed orthodoxy on the one hand, and Reformation thought on the other. Two theses have been defended in this respect. First, it has been argued that conceptualising faith as a habit was a typical example of introducing Thomistic and Aristotelian concepts into the Reformed faith. Secondly, several scholars have argued that the conceptualisation of faith as a habit overrules the role of the act of faith in salvation. The function of faith as a response to God's offer of salvation becomes secondary to the doctrine of predestination. By unravelling the transformation process which the concept of habit underwent through the history of Christian theology, the author shows that the first thesis is seriously flawed. As to the second thesis, he proposes an alternative interpretation of the sources by arguing that the nature of faith as a habit implies that it can only be known from its acts. At the end of the article, he provides some remarks about the value of the concept of habitus fidei for contemporary theology.

Was Cyril of Alexandria a theopaschite? In order to resolve this controversial issue, this paper will look at Cyril's Christology with Nestorius's eyes. The charge of theopatheia appears from the very beginning in Nestorius's correspondence with Cyril and retains its central place in Nestorius's work Liber Heraclidis. The paper discusses Nestorian arguments against Cyril's position and Cyril's counter-charges. The conclusion is reached that Nestorius asserted unqualified divine impassibility. Cyril, in contrast, held a qualified view of the divine impassibility and maintained that neither divinity suffered alone, apart from humanity (in which case the assumption of humanity would be superfluous), nor humanity suffered alone, apart from and in sharp contrast to the impassible divinity (in which case the reality of divine involvement in the incarnation would be put at risk).

The sixteenth-century English Reformer John Hooper's views on the biblical idea of magisterial office and the application of God's law to the whole of the Christian community had a profound influence in England and Scotland. It is also clear that Hooper assimilated much of the German Reformer Heinrich Bullinger's theologico-political federalism, and played an important role in the reception of Bullinger's thought in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain. Bullinger, via Hooper, also influenced English and Scottish theories of political resistance in diverse ways.

Though renowned for restoring the dogma of the trinity to a place of honor in Protestant dogmatics, Karl Barth has faced widespread criticism for allegedly introducing an ancient heresy into that very doctrine: the heresy of modalism. In this paper, we analyze: (a) Barth's doctrine of the trinity as presented in his Church Dogmatics I/1; (b) the arguments Barth himself employs against modalism; and (c) those aspects of Barth's doctrine of the trinity which, is his critics' view, commit him to some form of modalism. On this basis, we argue that Barth, in spite of infelicities and even errors in his doctrine of the trinity, does not in any way endorse the heresy of modalism.