Gregory Nazianzen spoke of a suffering Christ ‘who became weak for us’ in the context of an oration, On Love of the Poor, which dealt at length with the extreme suffering the lepers had endured. The outcasts of the ancient world, lepers figured prominently in Jesus’ ministry as recorded in the Gospels. By juxtaposing their human suffering with divine weakness, Gregory implied that Christ had suffered with the lepers. The comparison not only gave meaning to the human experience of suffering, it also explored the extent of Christ's suffering in the divine economy. There was no affliction too grotesque for Christ to have assumed.

Throughout his life, Gregory developed a notion of collective suffering which is relevant to understanding the magnitude of the suffering of Christ. It made the limitless suffering of humanity seem manageable and contained. It normalised the overwhelming sense of misery by expanding individual suffering into the suffering of the group, the suffering of the group into the suffering of neighbours and finally the suffering of neighbours into the collective suffering of the body of Christ. Christ then experienced the fullness of the human condition as the head of this body.

The lepers served a purpose in this vision of collective suffering. By making the lepers a synecdoche for all human suffering, Gregory allowed Christ to assume their misery without his listeners having to imagine Christ suffering every aspect of their physical and emotional distress. This transference of collective suffering to the body of Christ worked in the following way: the individual suffering of the leper flowed into the collective suffering of the group, which connected with, and was incorporated into, the collective suffering of the Christian body. The result was a relationship of mutual imitation between Christ and humanity. It implied that human beings suffered with Christ, and that Christ suffered with human beings.

By integrating literary techniques and contexts into theological analysis, this article examines the various ways in which Gregory construed the suffering of Christ.

The present article examines John Calvin's trinitarian and christological interpretation of Old Testament theophanies in his Praelectiones on Ezekiel 1. The first section of the article treats Calvin's exegetical principles. It is noted that Calvin defends a strict set of rules for how to interpret Old Testament theophanies: in short, Calvin argues that if a passage presents the divine nature in the form of a human person, that given theophany must be interpreted as a representation of the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God (i.e. Jesus Christ). In defending this position, Calvin examines in great detail various rules for how to interpret Old Testament passages which indicate a plurality within the divine nature (i.e. the Trinity). He defends his exegetical approach to these texts with numerous passages from the New Testament.

This examination of Calvin's exegesis is contextualised in two ways. First, it is noted that Calvin's exegesis of these passages is uncharacteristically more ‘strict’ in its trinitarian and christological reading than one finds in earlier thinkers such as Augustine and Jerome. For example, Augustine argued that Old Testament theophanies which present God in the form of a human being could be understood as the Father, the Son or the Holy Spirit. Augustine, in short, does not think one can definitively determine which member of the Trinity is ‘present’ in a theophany. Second, it is noted that this surprising development in Calvin's final work is the result of the rising threat of anti-trinitarianism in Transylvania. Thus, the article argues that the rise of Polish anti-trinitarianism not only contributed to Calvin's renewed interest in trinitarian and christological interpretations of the Old Testament, but it also pushed him to develop a more strict set of exegetical rules which govern how such passages are interpreted.

Therefore, the article presents a reading of Calvin which strongly suggests that any complete analysis of Calvin's alleged ‘Judaising’ must develop a historically nuanced methodology. While it is often argued that Calvin hesitates from interpreting Old Testament passages in a strictly trinitarian or christological way, it must be acknowledged that towards the end of his career he radically began to alter his exegetical rules/method given the renewed threat of the anti-trinitarians.

Theologians seeking to respond to the ecological crisis seldom turn to the theology of Karl Barth as a resource. In fact, some suggest that his doctrine of God is too monarchical and leads to unnecessary hierarchies between God and humans, or between humans and the rest of nature. This article counters this trend and begins a dialogue with Barth, especially on the place of non-human nature in his thought. While agreeing with the substance of Barth's theology, it is argued a number of critical additions and revisions are appropriate, especially concerning his doctrine of election. The article first briefly outlines Barth's doctrine of election and then, second, examines various New Testament passages on election and non-human nature. This second section will examine the prologue of John's Gospel, Colossians 1:15–20 and Romans 8:18–23. As key texts in Barth's exposition, it will be noted how he passes over important connections between election and nature found in them. Guided by the green exegesis of Richard Bauckham, it will be argued that nature is not merely the stage for the drama between God and humanity but that it is also an object of God's election and thereby participates in reconciliation and redemption. The third part of the article suggests various points of commensurability, correction and addition to Barth's theology arising from the biblical material examined. This includes points concerning theological epistemology, the atonement, anthropology and the theology of nature. For example, Romans 8 suggests that creation groans in anticipation of redemption. Barth's view of the cross, especially the Son's taking up of human suffering, is extended to suggest that the cross is God's way of identifying with the suffering of nature and its anticipation of redemption, and not just human sin and salvation. The most important revision, however, is to be made to Barth's doctrine of election. It may be summarised as follows: in Jesus Christ, God elects the Christian community and individuals for salvation within the community of creation. The article concludes by suggesting areas of dialogue with other types of ecotheology, especially ecofeminist forms.

The question of the fate of Paulinism in late antiquity, a point of controversy in early Christian studies especially since Adolf von Harnack, has benefited from fresh attention in recent research, even as, simultaneously, there is ever less agreement among New Testament scholars on the question of what Paulinism actually is. This state of affairs comes sharply into focus in Todd Still and David Wilhite's edited volume Tertullian and Paul, the first in a new series from T&T Clark on the reception of Paul in the church fathers. Reading and assessing Tertullian and Paul is a sometimes dizzying experience of intertextuality. The reader encounters, for example, Margaret MacDonald reading Elizabeth Clark reading Tertullian reading Paul. What is more, Paul himself is reading, for example, Second Isaiah, who is reading First Isaiah, who is reading parts of the Pentateuch, and so on. One thinks of Derrida's notion of différance, in which any given text refers to other texts, which refer to still other texts, which refer to still other texts, and so on, ad infinitum.

As Iain Torrance noted in the previous issue of this journal, editorials have quite deliberately not been a feature of the Scottish Journal of Theology. But in light of his and Bryan Spinks's retirement from their longstanding place at the top of the masthead, I think it appropriate not only to acknowledge – with more gratitude than I can express – Iain's generous and gracious welcoming of me into the role of editor, but also to say something about how I envision the journal going forward.

I am deeply grateful to my colleagues for their careful attention to my work, and for the invitation to respond to their comments in the pages of the Scottish Journal of Theology. It is a privilege to participate in such a conversation among friends and fellow scholars.

Scottish Journal of Theology has avoided producing editorials as we have preferred to allow our authors to speak for themselves with minimal editorial intrusion.

This article proposes looking to Kathryn Tanner and John Howard Yoder as resources for moving beyond a stalemate in recent ecclesiology which locates competing centres of gravity in either church or world. By contrast, Tanner and Yoder locate that centre outside of both church and world: in God, who ‘was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself . . . and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation’ (2 Cor 5:19). Accordingly, they articulate a vision of the church in the world whose posture is wholly, and constitutively, undefensive: a community free of the violence – actual, rhetorical or otherwise – produced by anxiety about securing its place vis-à-vis the wider society. Tanner envisages the church as a graced community of argument founded and sustained by God's cosmos-wide generosity in Christ, unconcerned with itself as such and instead intent on the world's good. In Yoder's case, his christological pacifism undergirds a church whose politics are Jesus' own, and which therefore seeks, forsaking all coercion, to embody God's eschatological peace in and for the world. These accounts share three theological moves in common. First is a Barthian priority of divine transcendence, whereby neither God, nor the gospel, nor the world is put in jeopardy by the church's fallibility (human or sinful). Second is a non-foundationalist commitment to social-historical process, to the particularities of context which constantly form (and reform) the church as a creature in time and space. Third is the generative root of all: the incarnation of God the Word. Insofar as the church is christocentric, it is by grace turned out to the world in commissioned blessing. The result is an account of the church as at once eccentric (its life hid with Christ in God) and firmly rooted in the messy realities of the here and now – realities just as present within the church as outside of it. To be sure, Tanner and Yoder are different theologians with different methods and ends; where Tanner perhaps lacks a sufficient theology of peoplehood, Yoder's ecclesiology verges at times on the heroic or ideal. Nevertheless, brought together in this way they make for productive partners in non-alarmist ecclesiology, freeing the church to fulfil its calling to serve and bless the world, even as it leaves its borders unsecured, because its faith abides not in itself but in God.

Professor Beeley has contributed a new chapter to the history of the doctrine of communicatio idiomatum. He has written a provocative book, whose argument is both revisionist and orthodox. Beeley proposes to revise the accepted christological narrative by questioning the significance and theological genius of Athanasius of Alexandria. In Beeley's judgement, Athanasius' contribution pales in comparison with such giants as Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen and Maximus the Confessor. Beeley finds especially in Nazianzen's Christology the most profound and consistent rendering of the unity of Christ, a golden standard for expressing communicatio idiomatum. According to Beeley, Gregory's achievement was only partially matched by the Christologies of Cyril of Alexandria and Leo of Rome. Gregory's Christology is the apex of the Origenist tradition, its most complete and compelling expression. A permanent contribution of Beeley's work is the restoration of Gregory the Theologian to the diptychs of contemporary Western patristic scholarship, in which Nazianzen has been overshadowed by another Cappadocian, Gregory of Nyssa.

Karl Barth and Georges Florovsky interacted in several contexts, beginning in 1931 and then later within the ecumenical movement. Although some have noted a ‘Barthian’ accent in Florovsky's Christocentric theology, in fact both theologians remained critical of the other. Making use of extensive historical sources, this article attempts to reconstruct the meeting between Barth and Florovsky, and to pinpoint the areas of fundamental reservation and disagreement between the two. As will be shown, at the heart of their disagreement lay the role of eschatology in its impact on ecclesiology, a difference finally Christological in foundation. This fundamental disagreement shows itself likewise in relation to the two theologians' ideas concerning history, the relationship of philosophy to theology and the place of Hellenism in Church tradition. The role of Florovsky's opposition to the sophiology of Bulgakov in his interpretation of Barth, and Florovsky's stance vis-à-vis the debate between Barth and Brunner on natural theology, will also be considered. Uniquely, Florovsky anticipated the contemporary debate concerning Barth's doctrine of election, and drew crucial connections between Barth and Bulgakov on this point – an issue which for him was related to the question of the role of German Idealism in modern theology. Notwithstanding these disagreements, this article concludes by highlighting crucial areas of convergence between Barth and Florovsky concerning Christocentrism, revelation and theology as an enterprise in fides quaerens intellectum. Florovsky's ideas on analogy, naming and realism in theology will also be illumined, in relation to Barth and with reference to Bulgakov and Torrance.

This article focuses on Karl Barth's mature doctrine of baptism, as it is developed in the final part-volume of the Church Dogmatics. Published in 1967 (English translation in 1969) as a fragment of the ethics of the doctrine of reconciliation, Barth's theology of baptism is not without its controversy. Among the critiques that the baptism fragment has generated, one of the most significant concerns is over its presentation of the relation between divine agency and human agency. The formal division in the baptism fragment (and its sharp distinction between ‘Spirit baptism’ and ‘water baptism’) is taken to imply an uncharacteristic separation of divine agency and human agency, which renders his doctrine of baptism inconsistent with other areas of his thought. The argument proposed in this article, however, is that better clarity as to what Barth is theologically up to in the baptism fragment can be gained by reading his mature theology of baptism in connection with his theology of prayer. Barth's theology of prayer is rich and extensive. Although very present across all of his writings, his thinking on prayer (and indeed the Church Dogmatics itself) culminates in an intriguing set of meditations on the petitions of the Lord's Prayer. Although unfinished, these lectures on prayer were published posthumously as The Christian Life in 1976 (English translation 1981). Together with his doctrine of baptism and his unwritten doctrine of the Lord's Supper, the finished lectures on prayer would have formed the ethics of reconciliation. Importantly, Barth insists that baptism and the Lord's Supper were to be understood not only in the context of prayer but actually as prayer, as ‘invocation’. Rooted in the motif of ‘correspondence’, which is deployed at a number of key points throughout the Church Dogmatics, Barth's theology of invocation is based on a highly participative account of the divine–human relation: divine agency and human agency ‘correspond’ in the crucible of prayer. From the perspective provided by his writings on prayer, invocation and the motif of the ‘correspondence’ of divine and human agency, this article revisits the critique that Barth unduly separates divine and human agency in the baptism fragment.

It is always exciting to read the retelling of a familiar narrative, whether it is of the early life of Shakespeare, the political careers of Washington and Jefferson, or the story of the development of the classic Christian understanding of the person of Jesus Christ during the first seven or eight centuries of Christianity. In this last case, the reader feels liberated from the weight of inherited pieties, invited to look again at the existing documentation with fresh eyes, urged to reconceive what he imagines to be the implied agenda of the main actors, and their significance for the later history of Christian faith. Christopher Beeley's new book from Yale certainly has this effect on those trained by earlier tellings of the story of early Christology, from Newman to Harnack and Loofs, to Sellers and Grillmeier and Kelly. The heroes and villains, characteristic phrases and defining moments of heresy and orthodoxy, all take on a slightly new form in Christopher's reconstruction – a form centred on the question of how the personal and ontological unity of the Saviour is conceived and emphasised by key Christian authors and principal church synods from the third to the eighth centuries.