Blaise Pascal once pointed out in connection with mathematical demonstration that it is impossible to operate only with explicit propositions or definitions, for whenever we seek to define the meaning of something in precise terms we have to make use of other terms which for this purpose must themselves remain undefined. Michael Polanyi has shown that this applies no less to all acts of knowledge whether in everyday life or in rigorous scientific inquiry, for any formal account of what we know rests upon a base of informal undefined knowledge, from which it cannot be cut off without becoming empty and useless. This means that a complete formalisation of knowledge in explicit terms is impossible. A cognate reason for this is to be discerned in the fact that in objective knowledge the realities we seek to know inevitably break through any frame of concepts and statements which we use to describe them even though they are developed under the constraint of those realities. Concepts and statements of this kind do not have their truth in themselves but in the realities to which they refer. Hence if we are to do justice to the integrity and nature of the objects of our knowledge we must discriminate them from our knowing of them, and let them confer relativity upon our concepts and statements about them. Thus in all authentic knowledge we have to take into account an informal undefined knowledge grounded in the inherent intelligibility of what we know and must constantly find appropriate ways of letting it exercise a regulative force in all our explicit formulations of it.

The controversy sparked by Bruce McCormack's 2000 essay, entitled ‘Grace and Being: The Role of God's Gracious Election in Karl Barth's Theological Ontology’, shows little sign of waning; it seems, in fact, only to be heating up. In this article, I hope to make a modest contribution to this debate, one which will hopefully move it towards a resolution. My proposal is twofold: on the one hand, I will argue that we can do justice to McCormack's motivating concerns, without rendering ourselves liable to criticisms commonly raised against his view, if we accept two propositions: first, that God does not change in electing to be God-with-us, and second, that election is volitionally, but not ‘absolutely’, necessary to God. (By ‘absolutely necessary’ I mean something like ‘true in all possible eternities’, as will become clear.) I will try to demonstrate that this is Karl Barth's own position on the matter, which demonstration, if successful, would mean that the controversy should no longer be centred on the proper interpretation of Barth. This brings me to the second, shorter, part of my proposal, in which I argue that McCormack's position is innocent of some charges frequently brought against it. My hope is that these arguments, taken together, will advance the current discussion and contribute to its resolution.

This article develops an account of doctrine that seeks to reconceive the nature of doctrinal reference within the context of human transformation. It sets out from Augustine's advice to the preacher of the doctrine of predestination, discovering three layers of doctrinal interpretation, rooted in and geared towards transformation. Augustine's advice is applied generally to suggest that the role of doctrine is to ward off general classification in respect of God, making way for redemptive encounter with God. These insights generate a new perspective on the question of doctrinal reference that rules out both straightforward reference to God and straightforward denial of such reference. The article concludes by suggesting that one way through the resultant linguistic minefield would be to speak of ‘hyper-reference’ to God, with the intention of evoking the ‘more than’ of God.

Apophaticism has become quite fashionable, for political as well as philosophical reasons: political, because apophaticism opens up space between God and oppressive God-talk; and philosophical, because apophaticism provides theological warrant for embracing our Kantian limits. A correlate fashion has been to broaden our sense of who belongs to the ‘apophatic tradition’ – and Thomas Aquinas has been one of the favourite candidates for such reconsideration. Contrary to this trend, I argue that apophaticism is not a ‘rule’ for Thomas – far from it. Apophaticism is, ironically, one of the steps in Thomas's strategy to assemble the conceptual resources necessary for making positive statements about God. That strategy, in brief, consists of five moves: first, Thomas provisionally defines ‘God’ as the sufficient cause of certain effects ascribed to God; second, using the via negativa to rule out whatever is incompatible with a ‘God’ so specified, he argues that God-in-Godself can be identified with ‘God’; third, Thomas identifies ‘being’ as the common term between God and creatures (which is licit because, Thomas claims, being is not a genus); fourth, he argues that all beings tend toward their perfection, and that God is this perfection; and fifth, he concludes that this tendency-toward-God funds the making of meaningful, positive statements about God-in-Godself.

The debate regarding the meaning of πίστις Χριστοῦ in the Pauline epistles continues and is important because of its implications for theology. In the phrase there is a double ambiguity, which touches not only the significance of the genitive, but also the meaning of πίστις. A brief look at some key texts in Romans suggests that the phrase refers primarily to the faith/faithfulness of Christ, but that this is also something shared by those who are ‘in Christ’. Through Christ God has done what the law could not do, enabling men and women to become his children, and so share not only in Christ's faith but in what he is. The phrase thus represents the ‘delicate balance between human behaviour and divine grace’ that characterises Paul's soteriology.

Although the death of Jesus has been much written about by biblical scholars and theologians, most discussions have focused on its redemptive efficacy. In this essay, however, the focus is on NT references to Jesus' death as inspiring, exemplary, and descriptive of, and criterion for, Christian life. The basic thesis advanced is that the NT refers to Jesus' death as ‘paradigmatic’ impressively widely and with far-reaching applications. Insofar as Christian theological reflection involves taking seriously the scriptural testimony, this widely shared emphasis on Jesus' death as paradigmatic should be reckoned with in the content and perhaps also the practice of theology.

Of what are we speaking when we speak of the Holy Spirit? This most fundamental of all the questions asked in the field of Pneumatology has not received an answer widely accepted in the theology of the twentieth century. Karl Barth could write that the ‘Holy Spirit is nothing else than a certain relation of the Word to man’; while to Rudolph Bultmann, the Spirit was ‘the power of futurity,’ and was to be counted among the mythological forms of New Testament speech. Heribert Mühlen, on the other hand, interpreting the Latin pneumatological tradition in terms of the personalism of Ebner and Bubner, calls the Spirit ‘we,’ the unity of T and ‘thou.’ And David Gelpi reflects current feminist concerns when he designates God's Spirit as ‘The Divine Mother,’ the feminine in God. Finally, most recendy, Michael Welker has adopted the language of the natural sciences mediated through process thought and calls the Holy Spirit a ‘force field,’ while Jürgen Moltmann terms God's Spirit ‘the Spirit of Life’; a notion echoed in Mark Wallace's thesis that the Spirit is ‘the power of life-giving breath (r¨ah) within the cosmos who continually works to transform and renew all forms of life—both human and nonhuman.‘

Ours is an age not only of discovery but also of rediscovery. By some process of reincarnation in the history of ideas, eras of the past remembered with reproach have successively come to be regarded as wellsprings offruitful thought. Medieval philosophy, once treated with deprecation as illustrating the enslavement of reason to theology, has acquired respect and been reborn in a vigorous neo-Thomism. Reformation thought, considered hopelessly obscurantist by disciples of Enlightenment, has found rebirth through powerful theological spokesmen and a hearing far beyond the confines of the organised churches. Biblical theology, reinvigorated by nineteenth-century investigation of Scripture and given impetus by Reformation doctrinal motifs, has enjoyed a renaissance in recent decades.

Despite the risible misnomer of his book of miscellaneous essays, which, claiming to speak of ‘Jewish law to the Mishnah,’ discuss mere anecdotes and episodes in Jewish law in the first century with special reference to the Gospels, Professor Edward P. Sanders’ current account of his views should not be dismissed as the merely random thoughts of one who wanders beyond the boundaries of his field of first-hand knowledge. Holding Sanders to his claim that he knows something about what he calls ‘Jewish law,’ let us take seriously his conception of the Pharisees of the first century. Since, intending to persuade colleagues that his picture of, and apologia for, the Pharisees, not mine, accurately portray how things really were in the first century, Sanders devotes two of his five chapters to that subject, we turn forthwith to the contrasting results contained in his current book.

Nicodemus is the hero of many a Trinity Sunday sermon.2 The leader of the Jews, the master of Israel, comes humbly to Jesus, by night to the Light of the World. He does not believe much (like the preacher perhaps), but he has the heart of the matter, ‘We know that thou art a teacher come from God’. Jesus teaches him the profound truth of man's need for rebirth, and he is converted. He stands up for his faith pluckily against the hostility of his peers — ‘Does our Lawjudge a man…?’; and in the end it is he who buries Jesus, with a royal anointment of a hundred litres of myrrh.

Some writers express extreme confidence about the meaning of 1 Cor. 5.5: . Ernst Käsemann, for example, asserts that it ‘obviously entails the death of the guilty’, and he is not alone in using such words as ‘obviously’ or ‘only’ in putting forward this interpretation. Probably the majority of modern writers, with a little more caution, regard an allusion to death as the most likely explanation of a notoriously difficult verse. Almost all the remainder believe that Paul is referring, if not to death, then to suffering which is necessarily physical.

The Old Testament is rich in animal imagery. There has been a considerable amount of work done on the imagery connected with animal sacrifice and on the theological significance of this, but little work done on the wider use of animal imagery in the Old Testament. To attempt to document and review this for the whole Old Testament is beyond the scope of this article, but what I wish to do is to focus on a particularly neglected area—the use of animal imagery in the psalms and wisdom literature of ancient Israel. I have divided the material mentioning animals in the books of Psalms, Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes into seven categories, which I believe are helpful for defining the material but necessarily involve some overlap. The first three categories are concerned with animals as seen from a human viewpoint. They involve humans looking at the world and attempting to illuminate and prescribe human behaviour on the basis of what is observed of animal behaviour. The last three categories involve God and his relationship with the created world, with humanity and with animals. Again this is expressed from a human standpoint, but very often the limitations of the human quest for understanding is stressed. The middle and bridging category is the simple observation of animal behaviour which seems to me to go some way towards counterbalancing the others which are inevitably humanocentric and theocentric respectively.

I would like to begin by expressing gratitude to Edwin van Driel for creating the conditions which make possible a genuine debate on the issues raised by my essay in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth. I have, of course, long been aware of Paul Molnar's (shall we say?) rather vigorous rejection of the position I took in that essay on the question of the logical relation of election to the triunity of God in Barth's ‘mature’ theology – i.e. subsequent to publishing his revised doctrine of election in CD II/2. If I have kept silence this long, it has not been without good reason. I was unwilling to respond to Molnar for two reasons. First, in his criticisms of my views, Molnar failed to engage the one point which would have been decisive for launching a serious ‘debate’, i.e. he made no attempt to explain the meaning of Barth's thesis that Jesus Christ is the subject of election or to show how his own reading of Barth is not called into question by that thesis. He simply set it aside as (apparently) unworthy of discussion and chose instead to merely insist on his own reading. It should go without saying that no real ‘debate’ can take place when the evidence brought forth to support a new proposal is passed over in silence. Less important was the second reason.

For the Christian faith, the Old Testament is no longer revelation as it had been, and still is, for the Jews. For everyone who stands in the Church, the history is no longer a live issue … the history of Israel is not the history of revelation for us.

So Bultmann writes in an article on the significance of the Old Testament for Christian faith, and on the basis of this we might be inclined to dismiss the whole discussion of Bultmann and the Old Testament, and to add ‘Marcionism’ to the list of heresies already attributed to him. But this would be too hasty, for over against the above quotation we can cite another: For anyone who has done even a minimum of historical reflection, it is senseless to try to hold on to Christianity and at the same time to discard the Old Testament. One should realise then that the Christianity he hopes to preserve is no longer Christianity. Either–or; both, or none at all.

When the nineteenth-century historian R. W. Dixon called Peter Martyr Vermigli ‘a learned stranger’ he was reflecting what Martyr's own contemporaries had said. For example, Edmund Grindal, Bishop of London wrote to Sir William Cecil about Martyr's role at the Colloquy of Poissy:

The church's Christological confession of the uniqueness of J. Christ's relation to God has always been understood to include the historical Jesus. In theory, at least, this is a point at which faith must be vulnerable to historical investigation. To what extent can Jesus' unique relation to God be affirmed on historical grounds? While the church is not limited to believing about Jesus only what he explicitly believed about himself, a certain correspondence is necessary for the credibility of Christology. If there were no evidence that Jesus understood his relation to God to be in any way distinctive it would be difficult to maintain that he was in fact uniquely related to God. Both doctrine and history suggest that the most profitable line of enquiry into this question will concern Jesus' consciousness of sonship. It is a line of enquiry which may in its turn elucidate some of the problems of Christology.

Two dogmas continue to die hard, despite attempts to destroy them, and it may be that they have good reason for refusing to go away. The first is that what has come to be known as ‘christology from above’ tends to produce a docetic conception of the person of Christ, or at least one in which the humanity of Jesus receives so little emphasis that it becomes little better than a cipher. If an eternal being or hypostasis – to put the matter in the almost tritheistic language that is sometimes used – takes to himself a body, can the resulting being be truly human? Does not the eternal origin inevitably call the tune, undermining the genuineness of the human actions?

This passage must surely be unique in the variety and contrasts of the interpretations proposed by commentators and theologians. Not only are there at least three main lines of exegesis distinguishable, but within and across these general lines scholars disagree radically as to the source of St. Paul's teaching, its relation to 1 Cor. 15, its value as evidence of the Apostle's thought, and even its basic subject matter. Thus while Windisch (Commentary on II Corinthians, in loc), W. L. Knox (St. Paul and the Church of the Gentiles, pp. 128–43) and Rudolf Bultmann (Theology of the Mew Testament, I, pp. 201–2) regard the passage as evidence that St. Paul had modified traditional Jewish eschatology by introducing Hellenistic themes, Walter Grundmann (articles on εκδημεω,ενδημεω in Kittel's T.W.N.T. II, pp. 62–4), W. D. Davies (Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, pp. 308–14) and Schweitzer (The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, p. 134) maintain that the language can be explained without recourse to direct Hellenistic influence. Whereas Davies (op. cit., pp. 310–11) and Bultmann (op. cit., p. 201) believe that between 1 Cor. 15 and 2 Cor. 5 the Apostle's thought had undergone a significant development, G. B. Stevens (The Pauline Theology, p. 343 note 1), H. A. A. Kennedy (St. Paul's Conception of the Last Things, pp. 264–72), Alfred Plummer (II Corinthians, pp. 160–4), L. S. Thornton (The-Common Life in the Body of Christ, pp. 284–6) and H. L. Goudge (The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, pp. 45–55) deny any such development.

In his 1923–4 lectures on the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Karl Barth offered a strikingly negative verdict on Schleiermacher's doctrine of justification, lamenting that it was radically discontinuous with the theology of the Reformation. The core purpose of this article is to assess this verdict in detail. The introduction presents in outline Barth's criticism of Schleiermacher's doctrine of justification from these lectures. The first section of the article provides a summary of the doctrine of justification as it is found in Schleiermacher's mature work, The Christian Faith, together with a brief consideration of the related doctrines of conversion and sanctification, and an exposition of the dogmatic location and inter-relation of the three loci. In the second section, the article proceeds to investigate closely whether three of the central criticisms of Barth pertaining to Schleiermacher's doctrine of justification reflect an accurate reading and adjudication of the underlying material. The criticisms explored are: that for Schleiermacher there is no justification as a free act of God but only a justification which takes place according to the law of nature; that in the event of justification Schleiermacher considers both God and the human being to be active; and that the doctrine of Schleiermacher repeats the heresy of essential righteousness after the fashion of Andreas Osiander. The common theme underlying each charge is that Schleiermacher has departed significantly (and lamentably) from the tradition of the Reformation. The third section of the article proceeds to explore these charges carefully in light of a close reading of Schleiermacher's dogmatic work on justification and related doctrines. In the case of each of the criticisms directed at his doctrine of justification, it is argued that there are strong grounds for asserting that Barth's concerns may be rather misplaced and that – true to his word – Schleiermacher indeed remains in broad dogmatic continuity with the Reformation tradition. In the conclusion, two further theological possibilities are noted. First, it is suggested that, far from leaving the Reformation tradition behind, Schleiermacher's work on justification resonates strongly with one particular reading of Calvin's work which has much currency in contemporary theology. And second, it is suggested that, far from Schleiermacher being the one to depart from the Reformation tradition on justification, it might actually – ironically – be Barth who is more guilty of that charge in view of his own doctrine of justification in the Church Dogmatics.