Theology, unlike other disciplines dealing with man, is faced with a fundamental methodological problem in its attempt to understand the human being. This problem is due to the Christian view of the Fall. Whatever we may wish to mean by the Fall, the fact remains that there is something which can be called ‘sin’, and which gives rise to the question: is man that which we know and experience as ‘man’? If we answer the question in the affirmative, then we are bound to imply that sin is not an anthropological problem and redemption from sin does not essentially alter our view of man; in fact if we follow up the consequence of this position, we are bound to say that unfallen man or man restored by redemption is not properly speaking ‘man’ but something of a super-man. If, on the other hand, we do not approach man from the angle of his actual sinful situation, how can we approach him? Is there another angle from which to look at man except from that of what we actually see as man?

In 1993 Frank Press, President of the United States Academy of Sciences estimated that in a typical year ie. one without a major catastrophe on the scale of the Kobe earthquake or Sahel droughts, some 250,000 people will die and losses of US$40 billion will result from natural disasters (Press 1993). In recent years much has been written about the physical causes of and human responses to natural disasters (see: Hewitt, 1983a, 1983b; Alexander, 1993; Chester 1993; Blaikie et al. 1994 and Chester et al. 1996, for extensive bibliographies), and this vast literature reflects increasing concern over disaster losses and a growing realization that most losses are preventable. Prompted by this concern the United Nations has designated the nineteen-nineties the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, or IDNDR. With the exception of a training manual for foreign mission workers published by the Evangelical Interchurch Relief and Development Alliance (Davis and Wall 1992), trenchant reflections by Austin Farrer (1966) and limited treatment in works focusing on wider ecotheological issues (eg. Russell 1994: 35–50), theologians have been conspicuous by their absence from what is now a global debate on natural disasters and their mitigation.

The Westminster Directory for the Public Worship of God, 1645, acknowledged by Presbyterian Churches throughout the English-speaking world, emerged at a time of political controversy, when an attempt was made to achieve liturgical uniformity in England and Scotland, and therefore must be understood not only in terms of the theology which it embodies, but also in terms of the social and political revolution of which it was a kind of liturgical manifesto. The immediate context was that of a national struggle for freedom, a revolt from all forms of ‘catholic’ authoritarianism (Charles I, Archbishop Laud, divine right of kings, the papacy, Erastianism, etc.) and a rising suspicion of anything that savoured of imposed form and ritual.

Confrontation with our culture has recently been put on the agenda by Lesslie Newbigin, in Beyond 1984 and Foolishness to the Greeks. Broadly speaking his position theology has sold out to Western culture, and the opposing perceptions of the Gospel need to be reclaimed and affirmed against prevailing assumptions.

Many assume that the patristic notion of deification is absent from the mainstreams of post-patristic Western theology. Recent scholarship, however, identifies deification in Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, early Anglicanism, early Methodism and Jonathan Edwards – all fountainheads of Western theology. This article contends that deification is also present in Calvin's theology. It is not a prominent theme in its own right and some of the bolder patristic terminology is not employed. Nonetheless, the concept and imagery of deification regularly appear on stage while other doctrines are explicated. For Calvin, deification is the eschatological goal and blessing greater than which nothing can be imagined.

Cabler's inaugural address De justo discrimine theologiae biblicae et dogmaticae regundisque racte utriusque finibus was written in a very complex, classically-based Latin, but the ideas he expressed were those of eighteenth-century Enlightenment theology. The responsibility for this translation was shared in that Dr Eldredge dealt with the philological and idiomatic sense of the Latin, and Dr Sandys-Wunsch filled in the theological background to Gabler's thought. Dr Sandys-Wunsch alone is responsible for the commentary and discussion.

A current emphasis in theological anthropology is that we become persons through our relations to others. Ethically valuable and pastorally illuminating insights that as persons we develop in relation to others have been used wrongly to underpin the claim that personhood is relational — a claim which is logically confused and ethically precarious. Alistair I. McFadyen, whose book The Call to Personhood has been influential in this respect, describes personhood as the ‘sedimentation’ of interpersonal relations. Elaine L. Graham places the stress on cultural interaction as a prerequisite for the development of beings into persons. In her study of gender and personhood, Making the Difference, Graham argues that her ‘relational’ account of gender is ‘suggestive of a model of human nature as profoundly relational, requiring the agency of culture to bring our personhood fully into being’. The potential ethical danger behind a view of personhood as relational is apparent from statements made by Vincent Brümmer in his volume The Model of Love, to the effect that ‘both our identity and our value as persons is constituted by our relations of fellowship with others’.

The faith of the Old Testament has its origin in the fundamental fact that God encountered Israel in the midst of history. The preamble of the decalogue mentions it: ‘I am Yahweh thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.’ From this beginning Israel knows that her God encountered her not in a reaction but in a free divine action in history. Through this action He laid hold upon Israel, called her and made her His people. At a later time this previous deed of God came to be designated by the term ‘election of Israel’. The powerful word-event of Old Testament Prophecy made plain once more this structure of God's action: Yahweh, the God who addresses Israel in and through history by the word of His messengers and who is not only reacting against Israel's sin but acting by His free grace, proves to be the God who stands by the independence of His election.

The purpose of this article is to suggest that dogmatic theology is best practised through description of the world. Its method is to marry two unlikely characters: Karl Bardi, Swiss Reformed theologian, and Michel Foucault, French atheist philosopher and historian. The thesis we propose can be presented directly. Barth is well known for insisting, in his ethics lectures in Münster and Bonn (1928/29 and 1930/31 respectively) and volume II of his Church Dogmatics, that ethics is dogmatics. Foucault famously rejected ethics which makes universal normative claims in favour of producing descriptions of historical phenomena and letting the reader make moral judgments accordingly. His method, we suggest, understands ethics as ethnography. We have taken these two ways of thinking together and excluded the middle term: ethics. This has yielded the abbreviated form: ethnography is dogmatics.

We began by wondering what it might mean to speak of the immanent and economic threefoldness of God. Rahner's axiom provided leverage on the problem by showing that trinitarian theology is meant above all to be a truth about the mystery of salvation. That is, it is a way of both narrating and conceiving the God who saves and the God who saves.

The correspondence between these two emphases presented a hermeneutical problem at two methodological levels, and so the second step was to examine the meaning of the copula in Rahner's axiom in order to decide how we might (a) link up our narrative of God's history with us with God's inner history, and, having answered that, how we might (b) link up our speculation about God's ‘inner’ life with the divine reality. We replied in the case of (a) that the axiom legislates speaking of God by drafting an equivalence between the temporal history of God-with-us and the eternal history of God, and vice versa: the economic trinity is the immanent trinity, and vice versa. In the case of (b) and building on the answer to (a), we proposed an understanding of the trinity as a theological model. The model (trinity of relations) is related to the ‘modeled’ (God-in-relation) both heuristically and ontologically. The theological model of trinity therefore must incorporate imagistic as well as discursive, indirect as well as direct modes of discourse.

Finally, we indicated some of the theological and methodological consequences of understanding God as being the ‘God for us’, and of re-conceiving the doctrine of the trinity to be a theological model of salvation.

Without creating certain illusions, to which hope could also be added as a moving beyond despair, the early Nietzsche felt one would be resigned to a paralysing, despairing life-denying, nausea. After all, some form of hope is necessary to human existence in order to open otherwise closed avenues towards the future, one that can resist the contemporary loss of certain imaginings of our futures.

One of the most significant words of the Bible is the word ‘covenant’. We read about God making a covenant with Abraham, renewing that covenant at Sinai, about David making a covenant with Jonathan, and again with the elders at Hebron when he became king. Jeremiah speaks of a day when God will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and in the New Testament, Jesus is presented to us as the Mediator of the New Covenant: ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood.’

The territory indicated by my title is impossibly vast, and some delimitations are in order at the beginning. What follows does not attempt any kind of thorough or nuanced historical analysis of the great tangle of issues to which the terms of the title refer. ‘Hermeneutics’ and ‘modern theology’ don't exist as simple entities; the terms are shorthand ways of identifying very complex traditions of thought and cultural practices, and a serious attempt to trace those traditions and the variations in their relationship would be little short of a history of Western Christian thought since the rise of nominalism. What is offered here is more restricted and precise, chiefly an essay in Christian dogmatics. At its simplest, my proposal is that the Christian activity of reading the Bible is most properly (that is, Christianly) understood as a spiritual affair, and accordingly as a matter for theological description. That is to say, a Christian description of the Christian reading of the Bible will be the kind of description which talks of God and therefore talks of all other realities sub specie divinitatis. There is certainly an historical corollary to this proposal — namely, the need for some account of why the dominant traditions of Western Protestantism (and more recently of Western Catholicism) have largely laid aside, or at least lost confidence in, this kind of dogmatic depiction of the church's reading of the Bible, replacing it with, or annexing it to, hermeneutical theory of greater or lesser degrees of sophistication and greater or lesser degrees of theological content.

Ethnography ought to be a means of doing theology. Following debates over John Milbank's influential work Theology and Social Theory, the paper responds to criticism that Milbank's church is too idealised, a critique that Milbank accepts, saying that his work requires ‘supplementation by judicious narratives’. The thesis of the paper proposes that ethnography provides the most robust corrective to the problem of too formal an ecclesiology, thus offering just the sort of ‘judicious narratives’ that can make such ecclesiology more recognisably real. Drawing on the author's research, such an approach is modelled by suggesting that a sense of ‘communal identity’ stands as a complex and crucial element in practical ecclesiology.The last chapter of Theology and Social Theory requires (infinite) supplementation by judicious narratives of ecclesial happenings which would alone indicate the shape of the Church we desire.

On 6 September 1939 the ‘S.S. President Harding’ churned slowly across the North Atlantic on the last of its summer runs. Joseph Needham passed the time aboard as he had often done while awaiting the completion of a distillation or an incubation in the Cambridge Biochemical Laboratory: by preparing a book for press. Now, however, he sat forebodingly, awaiting a graver distillation from the waters, an incubus in the skies, as he put the finishing touches on the introductory essay for a new edition of a book entitled Natural Law in the Spiritual World. The author of this book was Henry Drummond, a Scottish evangelical worker who died in 1897. Needham, born three years later, was a Marxist embryologist and a practising Anglo-Catholic. Near the end of the essay Needham stressed what he took to be Drummond's belief that ‘much of the content of traditional Christian theology — “the laws of the spiritual world” — arise directly from what had preceded it in the highly organised realm of the psychological’.

Calvin scholars have disputed whether Calvin had the concept of deification. Carl Mosser was eager to find deification in Calvin's theology. On the other hand, Jonathan Slater was earnest to deny deification in Calvin's thought. Calvin distinguishes between divine essence and divine kind. According to Calvin, we will be partakers of the divine kind, but not of the divine essence. We will be like God, but we will not be God. For Calvin, righteousness and immortality are called divine righteousness and divine immortality because God is its author. They are gifts from God, not God's own essence. Calvin says that we are God's offspring, but in quality, not in essence, inasmuch as he, indeed, adorned us with divine gifts. On the other hand, although Slater argues that Calvin's position is that believers share in what is Christ's according to his human nature, in accordance with Calvin, all the actions which Christ performed to reconcile God and man refer to the whole person, and are not to be separately restricted to only one nature. In this article, I find that Calvin distinguishes between divine essence and divine kind, in other words, essential and non-essential or central and peripheral.

The most important intellectual problems facing modern Christianity stem from our awareness that Christianity is but one religion alongside many. John Hick's philosophy of world religions deserves attention because amongst English theologians he has been one of those most concerned to give a systematic answer to these problems.

Perichoresis (perichoresis, circumincessio) is a theological term which describes the ‘necessary being-in-one-another or circumincession of the three divine Persons of the Trinity because of the single divine essence, the eternal procession of the Son from the Father and of the Spirit from the Father and (through) the Son, and the fact that the three Persons are distinguished solely by the relations of opposition between them.’ This term was popularized in the eighth century by John of Damascus who, in his De fide orthodoxa, said the three Persons of the Trinity ‘are made one not so as to commingle, but so as to cleave to each other, and they have their being in each other [kai ten en allelais perichoresin] without any coalescence or commingling.’ This important theological term, which Karl Barth rightly regarded 'as the one important form of the dialectic required to complete the concept of ‘three-in-oneness’ ‘from the side of the unity of the divine essence’ and ‘from the side of the original relations,’ has suffered in some recent theology from its appropriation to describe relationality apart from mutually shared being. For example, in his influential social doctrine of the Trinity, Jürgen Moltmann emphasizes the ‘relational, perichoretically consummated life processes’ of the three Persons who ‘cannot and must not be reduced to three modes of being of one and the same divine subject,’ whose unity ‘cannot and must not be seen in a general concept of divine substance.’

One of the most significant phenomena within the Western Church over the past twenty-five years has been the emergence of feminist theology. Fuelled by the second wave of the modern women's movement, drawing upon the theoretical and critical stances of academic feminism, and inspired by Latin American Liberation Theology, feminist theologians have achieved a remarkable body of work in a relatively short time. They have sought to establish the opportunities and validate the methods by which women, long silenced as theological subjects, may articulate their perspectives and contribute towards the reconstruction of a more ‘inclusive’ theological discipline.