Initially I briefly expound Martin Buber's Two Types of Faith so as to clarify Buber's sharp contrast between Jewish faith (Hebrew Emunah) and Christian belief (Greek Pistis). I suggest that Buber's polarisation of Emunah, a trust and existential engagement with God, over against Pistis, an intellectual acknowledgement which lacks immediacy with God, has certain resonances with Wilfred Cantwell Smith's distinguishing between ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ in his attempt to overcome the Enlightenment tendency to reduce religious faith to propositional belief. I also acknowledge that Buber's conceptually alert and religiously constructive engagement with the Bible in its own way embodies many of the concerns in the current attempts to bring Bible and theology together via ‘theological interpretation’ or ‘a canonical approach’. However, Buber's account of the Old Testament overlooks the presence of the idiom ‘to know that’ (Hebrew yada( ki), which points to the importance of cognitive content in relation to knowing Israel's God. I consider a number of narratives which feature the deuteronomic idiom ‘to know that Yhwh is God’ (or closely comparable formulations) – Elijah on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18), Rahab (Joshua 2), Naaman (2 Kings 5) and David and Goliath (1 Samuel 17) – and consider the function of ‘knowing that Yhwh is God’ in each passage. By way of conclusion I reflect on the complementarity of ‘knowing God’ and ‘knowing about God’ and the problematic nature of tendencies, represented by Buber, to set these over against each other. I also suggest that there is fruitful work to be done through a comparative and synthetic biblical and theological study of the relationship between the Old Testament concern that people should ‘know that Yhwh is God’ and the New Testament concern that people should ‘believe that Jesus Christ is Lord’.

Bede's Historia ecclesiastica makes it clear that Theodore of Tarsus, the seventh-century archbishop of Canterbury, is a figure who should command an immense amount of interest. His learning and cosmopolitan formation call upon the scholar to ask what it is that he contributed to the English church in his time and beyond. Yet interest in Theodore as a theologian has been lacking to date, most likely due to the limited amount of material attributable to him. Jane Stevenson's work on the anonymous Laterculus Malalianus in the early 1990s suggested Theodore as the most likely author. That this suggestion has proven consistent with other, cumulative evidence of Theodore's life and work makes the Laterculus an invaluable text for the student investigating his theology. This article seeks to present the theological themes of the text, especially as they relate to the person and work of Christ, and to introduce the reader to Theodore of Tarsus as a figure of interest in the study of early medieval christology.

This is a book that has achieved some notoriety. It was criticised by some rabbis and as a result Dr Sacks rewrote a few passages for a new, revised edition. These changes will be discussed below, but in the book as a whole Jonathan Sacks has again used his gifts of learning, wisdom and accessibility to illuminate a range of concerns of fundamental importance to the future of humanity.

I argue for the theological plausibility of reading contemporary environmental concern as a response to the prophetic voices of nonhuman nature, and in that sense as a movement of the Holy Spirit.

The literature on pneumatology and the environment tends to concentrate either on the Spirit's role in creation (and the continuities between creation and new creation) or on the ecclesial location of the Spirit's transformation of material reality. While these approaches are sound and necessary, neither appears fully to address the specific theological challenge of the contemporary environmental movement and of contemporary environmental stress, as a historical moment between humanity and nonhuman nature. Pneumatology needs to take account of the specific ways in which the environment becomes an issue for theology and society, and of the historical ‘discernment of spirits’ involved in Christian and theological responses to the environmental crisis.

In an attempt to address this need, I take up the now well-developed theological claim that nonhuman nature is a subject, rather than the backdrop of salvation-history, and develop it in relation to the idea that prophecy as the work of the Spirit both reveals and realises God's history with creation. I draw on Eugene Rogers’ approach to pneumatology by exploring the non-identical repetitions of pneumatology's paradigmatic narratives, but, going beyond Rogers, I trace these repetitions in nonhuman and extra-ecclesial realities – in ‘the environment’. The main paradigmatic pneumatological narratives considered in this article are those related to prophecy, and in particular to the miraculous extension of gifts of speech and hearing; rereading these narratives in the contemporary environmental crisis leads to an account of how the ‘voices’ of nonhuman nature are heard as prophetic speech that summons response. In a final section, I turn to another paradigmatic pneumatological narrative – that of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness – and propose, in dialogue with Donald MacKinnon and others, that it offers a starting-point for theological responses to the experience of despair, loss and failure in the context of environmental concern.

Let me begin by thanking Jeff Hensley for taking the time and expending the effort to respond to my book on the Trinity. Naturally I appreciate his positive assessments offered in the opening pages of his paper. As any reader might expect, I was less enthusiastic about his Rahnerian proposals, together with his other two critical questions. As Hensley mentioned, it might very well be helpful to discuss these issues in greater depth so that we might come to a deeper appreciation of how and why a properly conceived doctrine of the immanent Trinity might help us recognise more clearly both divine and human freedom at a time when God's freedom for us so frequently takes the form of a purely economic trinitarianism which leaves no room for God really to act for us within history in his own distinctive way. And it is worth noting, of course, that the purpose of my book was not to discuss any and every possible implication of a properly conceived doctrine of the immanent Trinity; my purpose, rather, was to clear the ground of misconceptions of divine freedom, in order that any theology claiming to be based on sound trinitarian doctrine could be seen to be grounded in God rather than being the product of human projection. My book, then, was not a book about social justice, which certainly is a worthy topic of discussion in its own right, even though it seems Hensley would have preferred such a work.

When Jürgen Moltmann's Theology of Hope first appeared in 1965, it was seen as ushering in a new era of theological thinking. Karl Barth, however, sharply criticised the work as too heavily dominated by a ‘principle of hope’ that he believed Moltmann had inherited from the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. This interpretation has largely been taken as fact among interpreters of Moltmann's theology of hope. This has caused most interpreters to see his turn to panentheism and ecotheology in God in Creation (1983) as being less of a shift of emphasis than a total change of trajectory or even break. There is evidence, however, that a different source contributed to the overall orientation of Moltmann's theology – an orientation that has remained throughout his life. This other source is the life and thought of the radical Schwäbean Pietists, Johann Christoph Blumhardt (1805–80) and his son Christoph Blumhardt (1842–1919). In this article the authors flesh out the thesis that the Blumhardts are the prior, deeper and more long-lasting influence on Moltmann by focusing on three key theological motifs that permeate his theology: 1) Christianity as eschatology; 2) the ‘theology of the earth’; and 3) the ethics of hope. Furthermore, they argue that when the ‘hidden’ influence of the Blumhardts is acknowledged, Moltmann's later ‘shift’ can be understood as essentially in continuity, rather than discontinuity, with his earlier thought.

The Protestant church, for Reinhard Hütter, relinquished its ecclesial public character when it turned from ‘binding doctrine’ as the means for establishing and maintaining its concrete ‘time-space’. Christendom disguised this basic theological flaw, but with its collapse the public basis of the Protestant church fell away. This reduced the church's witness and destroyed its communal structure. His positive proposal re-establishes the church as a public by reference to the communion nature of God, and to church practices as mediate forms of the Spirit's acting. Hütter's account shadows an argument made fifty years before by Johannes C. Hoekendijk, observing an intensified focus on word and sacrament and the promotion of a culture as a solution to the problem of the church's witness. Yet, for Hoekendijk, this logic exemplifies the problem. The institutions of the church come to bear the full evangelistic load. Mission replicates the basic structures of a particular way of life as a necessary precursor to the gospel. The act of witness becomes propaganda because of an insufficient doctrine of the church. This insufficiency is a failing in the doctrine of the Trinity: God's own life is defined without sufficient attention to his act of reconciliation and redemption as itself material to understanding the nature of his in se life.

Contrary to much of the recent literature on the trinitarian theology of John Owen, which often ascribes radical personal distinction to his account of triune relations and actions, this paper argues that Owen's account of distinct divine persons and trinitarian actions ought not to be contrasted with his theological forebears: Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Calvin. Instead, his account of trinitarian ontology and operation is thoroughly consistent with (and dependent upon) the Augustinian principles that these interpreters suspect Owen is rejecting. The argument unfolds by presenting four putative points of strong personal distinction in John Owen's trinitarian theology and then reinterpreting each of the themes and passages that these four points are supposedly rooted in, evidencing his Augustinian account of trinitarian unity and distinction.

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.

Although it was never completed and has had only slight impact, T. F. Torrance's work on the nature and interpretation of scripture is a primary element in his theology, though largely unstudied. For Torrance, a theology of scripture and its interpretation derive from a theology of revelation; revelation takes creaturely form in the incarnate Word, out of which is generated the apostolic community and its witness, which in turn generates scripture, the human word which ministers the divine Word. Scripture is the divine Word accommodated to human form, and so a sacrament or sign which refers to revelation; its social location is the life of the apostolic community. Interpretation of scripture is properly ‘depth-interpretation’, following the semantics of scripture by which reference to divine reality is made, rather than terminating on scripture's syntactical surface. Fitting interpretative practice follows the text's reference, penetrates to the thing signified, indwells its subject matters and listens to the divine Word. The interpreter is summoned to mortification of prejudice and constantly renewed attentiveness. Torrance's most impressive contribution to bibliology and hermeneutics was his insistence that both are ingredients within a theology of God's economic presence. There are some historical limitations to his work, along with a lack of interest in the Christian literary culture and lack of extended exegesis. However, his writings in the field constitute one of the most impressive Protestant accounts of the field in the last half-century.

In their remarkable new book, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary, Stanley Hauerwas and Rom Coles endorse a radical turn in our democratic practices and ecclesial engagements. In what follows, I say what this turn amounts to and consider what reasons might encourage churches and democracies to make it. In the end, I argue that good reasons are missing. We should forgo the radical and settle for just democracy, just church. In large measure, it is a dispute over Augustine's legacy as a social critic. Hauerwas and Coles accent the discussion of pagan virtue and temporal politics in the City of God while I prefer the remarks on idolatry and just love from book 4 of the Confessions. Hauerwas and Coles might share Augustine's anxiety about idolatry, but they resist his solution. He suspects that our idolatrous tendencies can be resolved only as we take on the just love of Christ, while they are inclined to think that democracy and church made radical will do the trick. They might also insist that their departure from Augustine on this matter is less than it seems, that they accent the radical in order to avoid unjust love, but I'm not convinced and in the end I bring in Plato's Alcibiades – garlanded, drunk and angry – to help justify my doubts.

The trinitarian theology of Gregory of Nazianzus is an important topic in patristic studies which is too often ignored by modern scholars. The aim of Beeley's book (like that of John McGuckin) is to deepen the study of this theologian who became very important for the later Orthodox tradition. Beeley wants to view Gregory not simply as one of the three Cappadocians or to make a short systematisation of the Theological Orations (or. 27–31), but rather to see his theology as a whole in its historical context. This makes the work an important contribution to historical studies in patristics, and I have learnt much from reading this book. The following remarks, even when critical, are intended to raise new topics for discussion, though controversial in some aspects.

The aspiration to find a theological perspective from which to view political life is a very old one. The converse – seeking to view theology from a political perspective – is new. It is one indication, perhaps, of an important cultural reversal of religion and politics. In what, retrospectively, has come to be known as ‘Christendom’, people subjected political philosophies to the test of faithfulness to biblical truth because, they supposed, the ways of politics are, and should be, subservient to the ways of God. In the long shadow of the French Revolution, however, democratic consensus and human rights have become the touchstones by which religious practices, and even Christian doctrines, are commonly assessed and regulated. In short, the content of anything called a ‘Christian’ political philosophy is judged acceptable or unacceptable by secular standards.

This article examines Karl Barth's engagement with the philosophy of religion of Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach proposes that religion is a function of human projection and that the Christian concept of God represents the crystallisation in one objectified subject of all the finite perfections of individual human beings. In Church Dogmatics, I/2, Barth seeks to respond to Feuerbach's critique of Christianity by affirming Feuerbach's critical account of the nature of religion but arguing that, since the original impetus of Christianity issues not from human projection but from God's act of self-revelation in Jesus Christ, Feuerbach's critique of religion does not apply to the Christian faith. Glasse notes that this response, whilst satisfactory to the Christian, would be ‘not intelligible’ to those who do not accept the Christian faith. Furthermore, Barth's apologetic manoeuvre, Vogel claims, entails that Barth is unable to defend the plausibility of the Christian faith on the terms set by secular culture, and that Christian theology is therefore required to abandon any attempt to participate constructively in general public discourse. Vogel recognises that this is a drastic recourse indeed, observing that it would be judicious for Christian theology to seek to elaborate a response to Feuerbach's critique which can stand without requiring the critic to assume the veracity of the Christian faith. This article argues that, by taking into account the role of Feuerbach's earlier work, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, for constituting the philosophical impetus of Feuerbach's critique of Christianity, the Christian theologian is able, using Barth's theological anthropology, to provide a response to Feuerbach's critique on Feuerbach's own terms. In Thoughts on Death and Immortality, Feuerbach argues that Protestant Christianity, as the paradigmatic expression of religion, conceives the individual as an absolute being, and that, due to the fact that everyday existence clearly counter-indicates this absolutisation of the human individual, Protestantism posits a second, eternal life, in which the limits bound up with individual existence are eradicated. Using Barth's theological anthropology in Church Dogmatics, III/2 and III/4, this article proposes that Barth concurs with Feuerbach's critique of the absolutisation of the individual, but that he is positioned to deny that this absolutised conception of the individual has anything to do with the Christian faith insofar as he accurately represents it.

While Karl Barth balances the reliability of revelation with divine counterfactual freedom through the analogia temporalis, Robert Jenson rejects this form of analogy, arguing that it posits an unknowable reality of God behind revelation. He instead transposes metaphysics into narratological terms, arguing that this secures the reliability of revelation and divine freedom, since it means God is future to (and so undetermined by) events in time. This metric for divine freedom cannot, however, replace counterfactual possibility; hence, the analogia temporalis (presupposed in counterfactuals) re-emerges in Jenson's theology. This form of analogy is essential in balancing the reliability of revelation with divine freedom.