In section I the author of this inaugural lecture (of the new Chair of World Religions for Peace at the University of Glasgow) seeks to clarify the meaning of ‘tolerance’ and argues in favour of its traditional understanding as tolerating what is disapproved. The necessity of practising tolerance in this sense is defended in section II. However – as is explained in section III – given this understanding of tolerance, the concept is no longer adequate to characterise the Christian attitude towards other religions, which has frequently started to move ‘beyond tolerance’ towards appreciation. Section IV closes with a brief discussion of those theological and christological presuppositions that are required in order to complete this move.

Charles Gore's two-volume commentary on Romans (1899, 1900) showed his heartfelt delight in the grace and love of God. Gore questions whether Luther had really understood Paul, thus in certain respects anticipating the so-called ‘new perspective’ of E. P. Sanders and others. He manages, in a way that Sanders does not, to hold together ‘justification’ and ‘being in Christ’, though he does not integrate these with Romans 9–11. When we today explore Paul more fully, we see that Romans was yet more integrated than Gore had realised, and that two of Gore's principal emphases, the vital importance of holiness and the social and political dimensions of the gospel, have a more solid exegetical basis than he realised.

Scholars discussing divine accommodation in the theology of John Calvin often assert that the incarnation is its supreme example – accommodation par excellence. But is this so? This article briefly examines Calvin's thinking on the purposes for which God accommodates and the character of these accommodating activities, to the end of showing that this position is untenable. In so doing, it suggests that contemporary views on accommodation in Calvin are not sophisticated enough and do not accurately reflect the complexity of the reformer's thinking on the subject.

The purpose of this essay is to gain some clarity on a theological understanding of adoption as a witness to Christian faith. Contrary to contemporary portrayals of adoption as a reproduction option, the principal thesis of this essay is that adoption is rooted in charity. Adoption signifies a loving act of providing familial care and belonging for a child who would otherwise have none. In developing this thesis, baptism and foster care are examined in regard to Christian claims about the nature of the parent–child relationship. It is argued that since children do not belong to their parents, but are entrusted to their care by God, parental authority is therefore limited. Consequently, the parent–child relationship is embedded within a larger community of faith in which a child is affirmed as both gift and sign of hope.

In 2001, on behalf of two Christian couples, a Christian adoption agency in the United States arranged an open embryo adoption. In addition to ethically analyzing this specific case, this paper situates the case politically and medically and distinguishes a number of general moral considerations relevant for reflection on this case. The paper concludes that while the choice to adopt embryos is morally appropriate and even praiseworthy in some circumstances, troubling features in this specific case rendered this particular adoption morally problematic.

I may have agreed to review this work under false pretenses. In a book I wrote called The Domestication of Transcendence, and elsewhere, I raised two sorts of objections to many of the contemporary discussions of the problem of evil among Anglo-American philosophers of religion. First, they often defend an abstract philosophical theism which I think has quite different implications from Christianity, or for that matter from Judaism or Islam or any other major world religion. So, as a Christian theologian, I find myself doubting that their detailed analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments they consider is really worth the trouble, given that the results may not have much to do with what religious folk actually believe.

Although my book Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Cornell University Press, 1999) takes its polemical starting point from discussions of the problem of evil by analytic philosophers from the 1950s onwards, it has an underlying theological perspective which begins with Job (and shades of 4 Ezra), continues with Christology, and stretches forward to the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. My medieval friends – Anselm, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham – reinforce and give philosophical interpretation to Job's ‘size-gap’ between God and creatures. My youthful wrestlings with existentialist philosophers and neo-orthodox theologians lead me to locate the imago dei in human nature in its alleged capacity for meaning-making rather than its putative potential for moral virtuosity. The goal of reciprocal divine–human identification, so prominent in Francis of Assisi and Julian of Norwich, combines with Matthew's Emmanuel-theme and Chalcedon to render the Christology; while the conditions of the possibility of defeating horrors constitute my rubric for interpreting credal commitments and adjusting traditional eschatologies. Throughout the book and my sequel Gifford lectures, I try to rivet attention on the category of horrendous evils because they disrupt conventional approaches to evil in philosophy and theology alike.