The theology of the Holy Spirit waited through the early Christian centuries until the main doctrines regarding the Trinity and the person of Christ had been forged. Even then pneumatology was introduced ‘by the back door’, in Theodore Campbell's phrase, that of how the Son was placed in the Father, Son and Spirit confession. While prayers to the Spirit were not lacking in the earliest liturgies, still, at Nicea the doctrine ‘had been disposed of in lapidary brevity’, as Jaroslav Pelikan has described the credal line, ‘and we believe in the Holy Spirit’. ‘Nor does there seem to have been a single treatise dealing specifically with the person of the Spirit composed before the second half of the fourth century’. After Nicea, however, controversy concerning the Spirit erupted ‘with a vengeance’, producing the same kind of energy that had accompanied the Christological debates. Pneumatomachi, Tropici, and Macedonians, though losers in the fight for orthodox doctrine on the Spirit's nature, had mounted formidable campaigns, as Arians had done over the relationship of Christ to the Father. But disagreement over the Spirit had an even greater impact than Arian opposition in that the filioque remains a principal difference between the Catholic and Orthodox, and now Catholic and Anglican, creeds.

It is impossible to read the first fifteen chapters of Exodus alongside the royal psalms and Zion hymns in the Psalter without noticing that very different perceptions of Israel's beginnings co-existed in the pre-exilic period. The Moses-Egypt tradition is about a wandering people, deprived of land and status, living under the promise of the protection offered by a nomadic clan-god; whilst the David-Zion tradition, fundamental to so many psalmists, concerns an established nation, a royal state cult which ratifies claims to land and status through its deity ‘housed’ in a Temple. And yet the Exodus tradition is used in a handful of psalms: the question thus arises — what purpose does it serve? Furthermore, why should the psalmists use such an anomalous tradition in this way?

Before the General Assembly of the United Nations Pope John Paul II declared that the quest for freedom points to the existence of ‘natural rights’ that reflect the objective and inviolable demands of a universal moral law. While this assertion was well received by those in attendance, an important question remains: how are we to reconcile this universal vision of human rights with the current plethora of disputable legislated rights? Ernest Fortin claims the problem is rooted in the fact that modern ‘rights talk’ emphasizes individual subjective rights over the objective reality of human nature, and Alasdair Maclntyre even questions the moral value of human rights because they are all too easily manipulated by those who view them as self-evident truths. When you add to these observations the appearance of such controversial individual entitlements as ‘reproductive rights’, ‘sex rights’, ‘the right to same-sex marriage’ and the ‘right to die’, it is not surprising to hear people calling for a silencing of ‘rights talk’.

Stanley Hauerwas likes to be regarded as a theologian. He writes about ethics, and ethics is commonly thought to be about decisions. But he believes that the fundamental decision is God's decision to be in relationship with his creation and his people. He believes that out of the Christian narrative come particular habits and practices that shape the lives of Christians in a distinctive way. He believes that Christians proclaim the sovereignty of God and the imitation of Christ by the practice of peaceable engagement with the world. These convictions earn his ethics the epithets of theological, narrative, and nonviolent.

A distinction was proposed in old Protestantism, by Johannes Musaeus among others, but not then generally adopted: that the authority of Scripture is a ‘double capacity: one to judge other writings and teachings…, another to bring about the assent of faith…’. Recognition of this distinction and separate discussion of these capacities is, in my judgement, necessary to resolve many modern perplexities about Scripture. The present essay is concerned for the second sort of scriptural authority, precisely in its difference from the first. We will begin with the simple fact that the church reads Scripture, in expectation of faith.

What follows is a set of reflections on the nature of Christian morality. Having been reared on and given allegiance to a morality which claimed to be rigorous, comprehensive and distinctively Christian, I have spent at least the last thirty years unlearning this in the light of experience and observation. The morality of my youth now appears as an ethics of boundaries rather than of transformation.