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.

Two general tendencies can be detected in theological enquiries on nature, ecology and the environment. The first tendency stresses the inadequacy of ‘traditional’ or mainstream Christianity to engage with the crisis in human relations with non-human nature. The positions under this tendency draw on other resources—process thought, the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, the ‘common creation story’ of the natural sciences—to construct anew the Christian contribution to the healing of our relations with damaged nature. For this tendency, standard Christian responses such as reinterpretations of dominion as stewardship presuppose the distinction of humanity from non-human nature. Such unrevised constructs thereby remain part of the problem rather than part of the resolution.

The heresy of Donatism has often been associated with the fourteenth-century theologian John Wyclif. This study focuses on whether or not Wyclif's eucharistic theology had in fact lapsed into this heresy. For if Wyclif was guilty of Donatism it is certainly no small matter. Donatism violates one of the most fundamental tenets of Catholic Christianity, viz. that the validity of the sacraments is not dependent upon the personal sanctity of the human beings who administer them. Medieval canon law dealt at some length with the issue of sacramental administration, upholding the Augustinian position that the determining factor in the proper administration of the sacraments is not the merit of the celebrant, but rather the power of God operating through him. Indeed, such a principle would have to be maintained if the foundation of the Church's sacramental system, and the ecclesiastical structure as a whole, was to be preserved from the prospect of disintegration.

To speak of Jewish-Christian relations at the present time requires one to immediately recognise how different these relations are in this more secular period of the history of Western Civilisation than they were in earlier, more religious periods of that history. Jewish-Christian relations today are certainly different in character from the way they were during much of the past two millennia, when ‘Western Civilisation’ was very much a ‘Christian’ civilisation. Throughout this very long, earlier period of history, Jews related to Christians as the masters of the world in which we were continually struggling to survive and maintain our communal life.

In his Massey lectures, Charles Taylor offers an efficient critique of modernity's overarching concern with individual freedom: ‘In a flattened world, where the horizons of meaning become fainter, the ideal of self-determining freedom comes to exercise a more powerful attraction. It seems that significance can be conferred by choice, by making life an exercise in freedom, even when all other sources fail. Self-determining freedom is, in part, the default solution of the culture of authenticity, while at the same time it is its bane since it further intensifies anthropocentrism. But this… deeply subverts both the ideal of authenticity and the associated ethic of recognizing difference.’2 Similarly, for Karl Barth, the failure of liberalism is not simply its conceptual failure to represent God in aseity, but also its failure to provide a framework in which truly authentic human action could be imagined. As John Webster puts it: ‘Even at the furthest reaches of his protest against anthropocentric deduction of God to a function of human piety, consciousness or moral objects, Barth is attempting to safeguard not only the axiomatic divinity of God, but also the authenticity of the creature.’3 Liberal belief in the ostensive freedom of self-determining choice, unhampered by heteronomous authority, fails also to recognise the deep power of the implicit heteronomies of liberal culture. What is required, according to Barth, is a thoroughly theological exploration of human freedom: it is only within humanity's true horizon, which is the reconciling work of God through Jesus Christ, that true liberation can be experienced and pursued.

As the Millennium approaches, there is considerable interest in the Old Testament idea of Jubilee, but the New Testament application is unexplored. The Jubilee is a key element in understanding both the ministry of Jesus and Palestine in the first century CE.

Enlightenment optimism concerning man's ‘natural goodness’ is out of fashion. The many instances of monstrous evil on a mass scale (Nazi extermination camps; Gulags; Cambodia; Kosovo, etc.), the widespread reporting of the activities of sadistic torturers and killers, the great increase in violent crime and drug addiction in the most affluent and welleducated societies, expose to ridicule Condorcet's prediction that 'the time will come when the sun will shine only on free men who know no other master but their reason … the human race, emancipated from its shackles [will] advance with a firm and sure step along the path of truth, virtue, and happiness. Yet there have been few recent philosophical or theological attempts to consider afresh the nature of human evil, and most of them still tend, if mutedly, to cling to the notion of mankind's essential moral goodness. Thus the hesitant conclusion of Ricoeur's reconsideration of human moral responsibility is that ‘however radical evil may be, it cannot be as primordial as goodness’, and that we should think of an ‘existential superimposition of radical evil on primordial good’.2 In 1963, Hannah Arendt declared that ‘evil is never “radical”, that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension … Only the good has depth and can be radical.‘ Instead she wrote of the ‘banality of evil’, generalising from the case of Eichmann.

The three most common criticisms of Stanley Hauerwas' work are that he is a sectarian, that he is a fideist, and that he lacks a doctrine of creation. My intention in this essay is to show that how greater attention to the eschatological implications of his theological ethics would enable Hauerwas successfully to respond to his critics.

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.

To many, Alasdair Maclntyre seems to epitomize the sort of dangerous confusion they fear from ‘postmodernity.’ Consider two separate passages from Maclntyre's recent writing.

In his wonderful book, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience, Michael Ignatieff observes that the process of healing the wounds of the past is the most mysterious process of all. Yugoslavia, Rwanda, South Africa are names that remind us that the past continues to torment us because it is not the past. ‘These places are not living in a serial order of time but in a simultaneous one, in which the past and the present are continuous, an agglutinated mass of fantasies, distortions, myths, and lies.’

Critics of the idea of universal salvation have frequently raised issues such as biblical evidence, human free will, and divine justice; however, somewhat less attention has been paid to the problems surrounding the concept of punishment used by some universalists. Since most universalists recognise the obvious objection that many (if not most) people appear not to be in a position in this life to be saved, there have been various suggestions as to how salvation can occur after the death of the individual. Many have taken the view that a period of post-mortem punishment will cleanse individuals of their sin. In other words, these universalists are not so much denying hell altogether, as denying an eternal hell. Whilst this idea may seem preferable to that of an eternal hell, there are various important theological and philosophical difficulties associated with it.

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.

It is an honour and a delight to be this Society's President and I am immensely grateful for the privilege. I have been coming to the Society's Annual Meetings for about twenty-five years and I owe it more than I can express. It has acted as a basic network of colleagues which I have valued more and more as our conversations have been renewed year by year. It has been my main theological community beyond my church and the institutions in which I have studied and taught: it has been so good to have this broad, ecumenical intellectual community. It has offered a rich theological life, a diversity of theological positions and arguments, and a place where I have regularly engaged with the different generations in our field.

In a recent series of essays, John Milbank has continued his impressive project of narrating a theological path beyond secular reason in both its modern and postmodern versions by attempting to develop an ‘ontology of the gift.’ In order to overcome the ontology of violence in which he claims that secular rationality is rooted, Milbank argues for the need to reclaim a specifically Christian understanding of ethics, and suggests that the best resources for doing so can be found in the logic of gift and gift-exchange. Among other things, he claims that the logic of gift involves a rejection of the notion of command, a notion whose theological significance has perhaps been expressed most forcefully by Karl Barth. It is therefore appropriate to examine Milbank's appeal to the ontology of the gift as an objection to Barth's divine command ethics. Given his construal of ethics in terms of command and obligation, it might be suggested that Barth's ethics is problematic to the extent that it retains the structure of the Kantian categorical imperative. At the same time, however, it is noteworthy that Barth develops his account of the command of God in the context of gift, and in particular the specifically theological context of the gracious gift of God in Jesus Christ. Such a combination of command and gift has led some to suggest that Barth's ethics is actually significantly anti-Kantian in structure.

It is often enough averred that Calvin developed his doctrine of predestination in order to reassure believers of their status before God; it is even more often asserted that the overall effect of his teaching was eventually to subvert that assurance, or at any rate to turn it into a form of self-absorption that has an effect contrary to that for which the gospel frees us. Self-absorption is indeed among the besetting sins of Western Christianity, from Augustine onward. In each era, it takes characteristic form. In our day, it is among the prime dangers of the post-Constantinian Church, which, deprived, apparently, of once secure social and political status and role; diminished, apparendy, in numbers and influence, flounders variously in inaction, activism and political correctness in a sometimes desperate concern not to lose the attention of the—reprobate? In this paper, I propose to bring together the related themes of election and ecclesiology, with particular reference to the beleaguered situation of the Christian Church in a world which, as Robert Jenson has observed, is unique in being the first once apparently believing culture to have abandoned the Christian gospel. That throws into the limelight the problem of the, if not everywhere minority status, at least unique situation for the Church of rejection by the main streams of intellectual and cultural life.

The theme of this article is the reconstruction of the doctrine of God offered by the German theologian and historian of doctrine Isaak August Dorner (1809–84), in his treatise ‘On the Proper Conception of the Doctrine of God's Immutability, with Special Reference to the Reciprocal Relation between God's Suprahistorical and Historical Life.’ Although the theme of God's immutability has received wide attention in the last years, Dorner's essay has gone largely unnoticed, and its contribution to the current debate still awaits appreciation. The following argument shall provide some building-blocks for this goal. It presupposes that Dorner's theology was shaped in dialogue with the thought of Schelling, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, but it will extend this perspective and ask for the particular systematic-theological link between Schleiermacher and Karl Barth that Dorner's essay represents.

There has been a growing interest in recent years in the question of meaning as it relates to liturgical performance. There is a long tradition within liturgical writing of deriving some kind of theological meaning for the liturgy from the content of the text that is used. More recently, however, this understanding of ‘meaning’ has been considered too limiting. It treats the liturgy as a literary/theological text and ignores the fact that the liturgical text is only one small part of a much wider act of worship. Bridget Nichols, for example, in her book Liturgical Hermeneutics: Interpreting Liturgical Rites in Performance suggests that the traditional theological/literary meaning is misleading. The liturgical text is designed to be performed, it comes into existence in performance, and outside of that performance, it is nothing. Kieren Flanagan also claimed to address the question of meaning and performance in his book on Sociology and Liturgy: Re-presentations of the Holy. Nichols rejected this approach, however, because of what she claims is Flanagan's particular misreading of Hans-Georg Gadamer's writing on ‘play’. This led Flanagan to suggest that there is only one single ‘unitary’ meaning in liturgy which is constantly renewed in each and every act of worship. Joyce Ann Zimmerman has written a book entitled Liturgy as Language of Faith: A Liturgical Methodology in the Mode of Paul Ricoeur's Textual Hermeneutics but this also ignores the performative aspect of liturgy and, like Flanagan, asserts a definitive meaning for the text.