There has recently been a number of books on the Christian understanding of atonement. What has been fascinating for me is the extent to which these books do, or more often do not, use the Old Testament material on atonement as the basis for what they have to say. The New Testament speaks in a variety of ways about atonement and this has become the centre of Christian dogmatics; but this ‘atonement’ is only loosely related to its Old Testament roots. Did the first Christians, then, radically alter what was understood by atonement, or was this radical alteration made by subsequent expositors of their ideas? The latter is more likely; in other words, the original ‘model’ for New Testament theology has been lost.

It has long been recognised that there are significant parallels between the folk tale and the parable. The folk tale presents a single perspective. Only the necessary persons appear; only two persons speak or act at any one time. Contrasts are developed; inessentials avoided. Even feelings or motives are not mentioned unless they shed light on the plot. Repetition is part of the technique — for example, three characters come down the same road and meet the same woman begging by the roadside. Structuralists such as Propp and Lévi-Strauss look for the deep structures underlying all such stories and evident in the function of actants or characters and the resolution of oppositions.

Argula von Grumbach, a contemporary of Luther, was the first woman Protestant author to be published, some 30,000 copies of her eight writings circulating between 1523–4. She leapt into the public eye by challenging the Ingolstadt theologians to debate with her, a mere woman, their actions in forcing a young student, Arsacius Seehofer, to retract publicly his reforming views. The Bavarian noblewoman, who defended her right to speak out by a lively new reading of Scripture, and who broadened her appeal by a comprehensive call for the reformation of church and society, had to cope with vicious attacks on her personal life and with death threats. Her incomprehensible neglect by Reformation historians is only now beginning to be remedied. This paper addresses her understanding of sin and grace.

According to recent literature, the crisis of modernity owes much to an uncritical acceptance of the ‘Enlightenment metanarrative’. The Enlightenment, with its sanctification of reason, privileged technological progress and personal advancement and created the illusion that human potential and happiness was unlimited. All one had to do was to free oneself from superstition (for example, religion) and the world would be a better place. Modernity has, correspondingly, emphasized individual rights, personal power, and wealth. In spite of the promise of modernity, however, the wars, famines, poverty, and inequality of the modern world have made it all too obvious that the end result of the Enlightenment's goal to alleviate the miseries of the human condition applies only to a small portion of the population. In this respect, the contradiction between the universality of the Enlightenment project and its application to a minority of the population lies at the heart of many of the critiques of modernity.

The theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar can be described as an attempt to provide an exposition of a verse in one of Gerard Manley Hopkin's most memorable poems in which the Jesuit poet declared that ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’. This verse, and indeed the poem as a whole, affirms the Christian's cosmic experience of God. Just as the mythological view of the relationship between god and the world is that the world is a sacred theophany, the world is, for the Christian, the theophany of God's glory and beauty.