The Middle Platonic concept of ‘participation’ in the Forms is important for understanding the connection that Athanasius finds between Christians and Christ. Yet, Athanasius adapts this concept to his Johannine view of the Word of God incarnate in Christ. He turns to the language of bodily creation and kinship rather than contemplation to express the relationship between Christ and Christians. For Athanasius, evil makes it impossible for humans to contemplate the divine Word by which they were created. Therefore, the Word embodied a new humanity in Christ. The Holy Spirit enables Christians to participate in Christ, becoming thereby part of a new humanity and children of God.

Recent work on Calvin's theology has focused on the integral relationship between his Institutes and his biblical commentaries. Particularly significant have been the claims that we can understand the development of the structure of the Institutes only in relationship to Calvin's work on his commentaries and that we can understand the content of the Institutes best through a recognition of the traces of the commentaries that are found therein. This article will extend this work, arguing that we best understand the final form of the 1559 Institutes through its relationship to Calvin's recently completed commentaries on the historical books of the Old Testament and the gospels. These commentaries, with their focus on the history of God's covenant with God's people, fulfilled in Christ's history, provide this covenant history as a framing device by which the first two books of the 1559 Institutes are shaped. This framing is evident in the new ordering of material in the text, in Calvin's provision of new chapters to fill out this narratively structured order, and in the traces of his scriptural work within the text. Once the structural role of the covenant history is recognised within Books I and II, then Calvin's exposition of Christ's redeeming work through his exegesis of Christ's gospel history II.xvi is seen as the culmination of the theological developments of the first half of the Institutes, completing Calvin's depiction of the broader covenant history as a thoroughly christological reality.

This essay puts the issue of spiritual fatigue – those times when emotional despondency prohibits our wholehearted participation in worship – in conversation with Jonathan Edwards's public and private writings. Following an outline of the parameters for the discussion, Part I examines Edwards's Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. Although this was a treatise intended to trouble individuals who were overly confident in their religious affections, I suggest that when read through an alternative lens, Edwards's work offers comfort to those who struggle with their inability to ‘be present’ in worship. Edwards reminds us that religious affections have as much to do with constancy and disciplined habit as with fervour and immediacy of feeling.

Part II takes a biographical turn, with particular interest in Edwards's Diary, Resolution, and Personal Narrative. Whereas Religious Affections stressed the necessity of self-discipline in religious practice, the twenty-year trajectory of Edwards's private writings reveals a subtle parallel emphasis: the need for patience and relinquishment in times of discouragement. Using insights from the public and private writings of Edwards, I conclude that times of spiritual fatigue call not only for constancy of practice but also for self-care and relaxation of heart.

It is often said that α, β, χ, δ, Δ, ε, ε, η:, γ, Γ, ϝ, Ϝ, ι, κ, ϰ, λ, Λ, μ, ν, ω, Ω, ϕ, Φ, φ, π, Π, ϖ, ψ, Ψ, ρ, ϱ, σ, Σ, ς, τ, θ, Θ, ϑ, υ, ϒ, ξ, Ξ, ζ, biblical exegesis by or on behalf of the Church is understandable – since the Church is concerned with Scripture and its interpretation – but suffers from a problem of ‘dual loyalty’:

Samuel Rutherford (1600–61) has long been assumed to be an advocate of a harsh supralapsarian predestinarianism. Such an assumption, however, cannot be substantiated by the claims that he makes in his writings. New evidence from his writings suggests that while Rutherford was supralapsarian, he expressed his supralapsarianism only in the most moderate of terms. In fact, he consistently employed infralapsarian language to express his thinking in regard to predestination. This essay will seek to demonstrate this in Rutherford and then to explore whether such an expression of supralapsarian predestinarianism can help us in determining the lapsarian position of the Westminster Confession of Faith. While some scholars have claimed that the Confession is an infralapsarian document, this essay will show that, by using Rutherford's supralapsarianism as a hermeneutic, it is perhaps better understood as a supralapsarian document that is phrased in such a way so as to facilitate consensus on the lapsarian issue.

This paper demonstrates that, despite the much discussed Hegelian influence on Pannenberg, Herder's thought plays a pivotal role in forming and shaping Pannenberg's theological work in the important areas of the image of God and human destiny. However, Pannenberg differentiates himself from Herder in a crucial respect in that Pannenberg grounds Herder's anthropology on a christological foundation in order to present a salvific rather than a providential account of the renewal of the imago Dei. This paper also offers a reflection upon other significant similarities and differences between these two major thinkers.

John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) offers a highly creative seventeenth-century reconstruction of the doctrine of predestination, a reconstruction which both anticipates modern theological developments and sheds important light on the history of predestinarian thought. Moving beyond the framework of post-Reformation controversies, the poem emphasises both the freedom and the universality of electing grace, and the eternally decisive role of human freedom in salvation. The poem erases the distinction between an eternal election of some human beings and an eternal rejection of others, portraying reprobation instead as the temporal self-condemnation of those who wilfully reject their own election and so exclude themselves from salvation. While election is grounded in the gracious will of God, reprobation is thus grounded in the fluid sphere of human decision. Highlighting this sphere of human decision, the poem depicts the freedom of human beings to actualise the future as itself the object of divine predestination. While presenting its own unique vision of predestination, Paradise Lost thus moves towards the influential and distinctively modern formulations of later thinkers like Schleiermacher and Barth.

This paper will examine the relationship between Scottish common-sense philosophy and the formation of New Haven Theology. It will be illustrated that Nathaniel William Taylor's adaptations of orthodox Calvinism (particularly the doctrines of election and predestination and total depravity) relied heavily upon the principles of common-sense philosophy found in the work of Thomas Reid. Furthermore, it will be argued that Taylor's adaptation of Calvinism was a necessary accommodation to the phenomenon of mass conversion and evangelism during the Second Great Awakening.

The attraction of what Richard Cross describes as a generic view of God's trinitarian substance is undeniable. Even before the Arians professed belief in the Son of God as being of secondary divine rank vis-à-vis the Father, Origen demonstrated a tendency to envisage a derivation view of God's substance in which the Son was somewhat less divine than the Father. However, Cross's contention that Athanasius promoted this same concept is not as clear-cut as he suggests, although there are texts in the Athanasian corpus of writings lending credence to such an interpretation. While Athanasius did accept the monarchical view of the Trinity, with God the Father as the origin or source of intra-trinitarian life, he also stressed the consubstantial nature of the Son and the Father.