This article reflects on Rowan Williams' postmodern approach to sacramentalism and ecclesiology, tracing it through various books and articles. Partly under the influence of the Roman Catholic reception of Wittgenstein, he expounds the centrality of the Eucharist in cultural-linguistic and semiotic terms. Through this central ritual the church signifies the Kingdom of God in a uniquely strong sense of ‘signifies’. He foregrounds a dramatic model: the worshipping community performs the new humanity, it is remade through this unique form of ‘community theatre’. Its guardianship of the ultimate form of Christian sign-making is what authorises the church, Williams teaches, and necessitates hierarchical control. The postmodern idiom therefore serves a very conservative ecclesiology. Williams balances this high ecclesiology with a recurrent apophatic theme: the church must remember that its performance of the Kingdom of God is provisional, ironic. Yet the article questions whether this is sufficient: Williams does not fully confront the danger of such an ecclesiology becoming the ideological justification of a form of social power. This danger is raised with especial pertinence by the issue of homosexuality: it shows that the ecclesial policing of sacramentalism is potentially erroneous. This issue therefore threatens to unravel his ecclesiology, or at least to expose its innate violence. The article concludes that Williams is only half-willing to confront the negative dimension to his sacramental ecclesiology: its ideological character, its potentially violent policing of all Christian culture.

A key feature of Jürgen Moltmann's doctrine of God is his dismissal of divine impassibility as a heretical importation of Hellenistic metaphysics. This argument is a broader one assumed among many detractors of this theological tenet that is illegitimate given its rushed historical judgements. By dismissing the important features divine impassibility provided by past articulations, Moltmann offers a doctrine of God that in many ways repeats or avoids problems within the (im)passibility debates. Rather than dismissing divine impassibility from the onset, Moltmann would have benefited from a more careful appraisal of this axiom, one that would have chastened and enlivened his project within the ongoing conversation of God's relationship to suffering.

In recent scholarship the spiritual reading of the New Testament resurrection stories has come under pressure from new studies of the relevant data. In this article, two of the most conspicuous of these studies are compared and evaluated. First, Richard Swinburne's monograph opens our eyes to the fact that, in interpreting the resurrection stories, much more is at stake than is usually recognised in so-called ‘undogmatic’ exegesis. However, the rather crude way in which Swinburne deals with these stories, suggesting that they represent Jesus' resurrection as a bare fact not qualitatively different from other historical facts, neglects their peculiarity and displays insufficient hermeneutical sensitivity for their unique theological meaning. Second, Tom Wright's monumental volume is sometimes criticised for a similar single-minded focus on historical questions and a concomitant lack of attention to the eschatological character of Jesus' resurrection. As a result, George Hunsinger has argued, it becomes unclear why the resurrection reports embody life-transforming good news now. Close scrutiny of Wright's book, however, does not vindicate this criticism. Wright neither isolates the question of the resurrection's historicity from its theological meanings nor overlooks the fact that a plausible historical case for the resurrection does not in itself elicit faith. Still, he rightly argues that what people believe about what actually has happened often plays a vital role in their personal transformation. Moreover, the eschatological nature of the resurrection does not rule out the fact that it can be seen and discussed with integrity as a historical issue.

There was a time when the interpretation of the Bible was a seamless integrated theological activity. Today, the separation of biblical studies from theologically interested exegesis amongst theologians encourages a sceptical arms-length relationship between Old and New Testament scholars and theologians. Theologians criticise biblical studies' so-called objective and disinterested approach to interpreting the Bible for requiring scholars of both testaments to suspend their theological convictions. Biblical scholars condemn theologians for misusing biblical texts in support of their own preconceived theological agendas. The article suggests a way to bring these divergent exegetical approaches into conversation in a charitable, yet critical fashion, by comparing Karl Barth and N. T. Wright's exegesis of Romans 3:21–4:25. It concludes that the biblical scholar's and theologian's respective sensitivity to the historical and theological sense of the biblical text can, when brought together, benefit each other's reading of the Bible.

This article examines Karl Barth's conception of the interpersonal relation of male and female and demonstrates that, although Barth superimposes the concept of order within the Trinity onto the specific interpersonal relation of male and female, there is provision within his anthropology concerning interpersonal relations in general (i.e. interpersonal relations which are irrespective of sexual distinctions) to correct this error. I focus on Barth's exegesis of the creation narratives in Church Dogmatics III/1 and his discussion of the interpersonal relation of male and female in Church Dogmatics III/4. Then, because of Barth's principle of analogia relationis, I will briefly examine his doctrine of the Trinity in Church Dogmatics I/1. Whereas the role of christology in Barth's anthropology is frequently highlighted, there is often little regard for the trinitarian grounding of Barth's anthropology, especially with regard to the interpersonal relation of male and female. Finally, I will look at Barth's discussion of interpersonal relations in general in Church Dogmatics III/2 where he delineates a principle of the ‘priority of the other’, which serves to redeem his anthropological statements on the humanity of male and female. I contend that the recognition of the imago Dei in the interpersonal relation of male and female, sustained by the priority of the other, is a better way to achieve the personhood of both sexes than Barth's proposed static relational order.

What has ‘emerged’ in the ‘emerging church’ movement, through writers such as Brian McLaren, is merely a new form of correlational theology – or what I will term ‘neo-correlational theology’. This ‘emergent’ movement aligns itself with Paul Tillich's systematic presentation of what he termed a ‘theology of culture’ addressed in his 1919 lecture ‘Über die Idee einer Theologie der Kultur’ and is deeply rooted in theological essentialisms aligned with Friedrich Schleiermacher and Don Browning. While many adherents of the Emergent movement have recently attempted to catalogue its theological legacy, this article will address three key emphases which haunt the corners of its discourse yet remain largely unacknowledged. First, the heritage of Schleiermacher's notion of ‘feeling’ as an authentic categorical form of knowledge forged through radical reflexivity which is the proper domain for authenticity in the Emergent movement. Second, as underscored in Tillich's Theology of Culture, the church as ‘emergent’ is profoundly imminent and therefore necessarily social, positivistic and historical. Third, theological anthropology is understood primarily through our freedom over and (at times) against the necessity of redemption. The question this article will address is whether or not such an approach reimagined as ‘neo-correlational theology’ and actualised through the ‘emerging church’ movement tacitly relies upon a more traditional theology which it explicitly rejects.

I argue that Lindbeck's notion of religion as a cultural-linguistic system may be profitably considered in the light of contemporary socio-linguistic concerns orientated towards the critical analysis of real-world language usage. Examples drawn from observation are used to show how, by combining Lindbeck's approach with Critical Discourse Analysis (Critical Postliberalism), extrasystemic features of religion and religious language can be perceived which link with a basic (R1–R2) dialectic. The latter can be correlated not only with the observable product of socio-theological grammars in believing communities today, but also with salient features of the gospels. Regional and other culturally related variations appear within limits to be accommodated by the model.