We began by wondering what it might mean to speak of the immanent and economic threefoldness of God. Rahner's axiom provided leverage on the problem by showing that trinitarian theology is meant above all to be a truth about the mystery of salvation. That is, it is a way of both narrating and conceiving the God who saves and the God who saves.

The correspondence between these two emphases presented a hermeneutical problem at two methodological levels, and so the second step was to examine the meaning of the copula in Rahner's axiom in order to decide how we might (a) link up our narrative of God's history with us with God's inner history, and, having answered that, how we might (b) link up our speculation about God's ‘inner’ life with the divine reality. We replied in the case of (a) that the axiom legislates speaking of God by drafting an equivalence between the temporal history of God-with-us and the eternal history of God, and vice versa: the economic trinity is the immanent trinity, and vice versa. In the case of (b) and building on the answer to (a), we proposed an understanding of the trinity as a theological model. The model (trinity of relations) is related to the ‘modeled’ (God-in-relation) both heuristically and ontologically. The theological model of trinity therefore must incorporate imagistic as well as discursive, indirect as well as direct modes of discourse.

Finally, we indicated some of the theological and methodological consequences of understanding God as being the ‘God for us’, and of re-conceiving the doctrine of the trinity to be a theological model of salvation.

Despite the excessive claims sometimes made for the unity and consistency of Calvin's thought, there is no evidence to suggest that he ever varied his views on the distinctive marks of the church. From the first edition of the Institute to the last, the formula remains unchanged: ‘Wherever we see the Word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to Christ's institution, there, it is not to be doubted, a church of God exists.’ It has long been recognized that the notion of the two marks of the church is not original to Calvin, but derives from the Augsburg Confession of 1530, in which the faithful teaching of the gospel and the proper administration of the sacraments are said to designate the assembly of all believers (art. 7). Like Luther and Melanchthon, but unlike the framers of the Scots and Belgic Confessions, the French Reformer does not make discipline an explicit mark of the church. Nevertheless, so central an element is it in his ecclesiology that it is always found in the closest relationship with Word and sacraments. The Word is not only to be preached but ‘reverently heard’; it is a ‘royal sceptre’ to which all hearts and minds are to be brought in willing submission. Similarly the sacraments are, through the Spirit, manifest signs of God's work within us, ‘softening the stubbornness of our heart, and composing it to that obedience which it owes the Word of the Lord’.

This essay could have been entitled„ ‘A Methodist, A Presbyterian and a Congregationalist’; ‘An Arminian, A Calvinist and a Liberal’; or ‘A Systematiser, An Apologist and a Prophet’. For the men who concern us are William Burt Pope (1822–1903), Robert Watts (1820–95) and Andrew Martin Fairbairn (1838–1912). They were all highly respected by their denominations in their day, and each was entrusted with the task of ministerial training. Watts was Professor of Theology at the Presbyterian College, Belfast from 1866–95; Pope was Theological Tutor at Didsbury Methodist College from 1867–86, when ill-health forced his resignation; and Fairbairn, who left Scotland and the Evangelical Union in 1877 to become Principal of Airedale Independent College was in 1886 installed as the first Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford. All but forgotten by their own, an investigation of their work will nevertheless reward us with a fascinating glimpse of the influences at work upon nineteenth-century theology; it will throw into relief their diverse and temperamentally different reactions which are the more interesting because of their relative closeness as nonconformists; and it may serve to remind us that some of the philosophico-theological issues which beset contemporary theology have their roots, if not their final solutions, in the period represented by our triumvirate.

This paper has many aims. It proposes, first of all, to cover some of the research that has gone into the Eucharistic Prayer, especially its genesis in Roman Catholic circles. It has been a topic of interest for most of this century, but particularly so in the last twenty years. It aims to discuss the spirituality of the Prayer and its relationship to practical piety and to show the relationship between the Liturgy of the Word, the Gospel tradition, and the Eucharistic Prayer as our response to the Word of God. Lastly, this paper aims to uncover something of the theological richness of this Prayer and at the same time to show its roots in the human condition. In covering this research the paper also aims at pinpointing its constituent elements. Liturgically speaking, the Eucharistic Prayer is central: it represents the Christian response to his God at his most central and sacred moment. It is a topic with a long history. It was discussed particularly at the Reformation and in the Reformed circles was one of the casualties of the older tradition. It is a topic, the study of which has produced some conclusions. There has been a rather widespread reform of the Eucharistic Prayer in many churches. This is especially clear in the renewal of the Roman Catholic tradition and in the proposals of the Anglican Series Three.