What might be learned, for theology, from recent interest in the complex love triangle of Nelly Barth, Charlotte von Kirschbaum and Karl Barth? I explore some aspects of how the story has been told, in and since Christiane Tietz's 2016 presentation and article, and argue that they expose deep-seated issues in and for the discipline of systematic theology. In particular, I draw attention to the focus on preserving the authority of the individual (male/masculine) author as the exemplar of theological practice; and to the reluctance to recognise the social, political and economic dimensions of sexuality and ‘domestic’ life. I argue that a properly ‘systematic theological’ approach to the Barth-von Kirschbaum story would involve critical and constructive theological reflection on theology's conditions of production: using historical contexts to help us recognise and respond to contemporary issues, without reducing such reflection to stories about individual authors.

Thinking with and beyond Alexander Schmemann, this essay constructs a theological anthropology that conceives of humans as standing as priests at the centre of the cosmos. Within the exitus et reditus framework of neoplatonic thinking, the cosmos proceeds from and returns to the one God. Recent biblical theology has interpreted the imago Dei in a royal-functional sense. However, this essay argues for a priestly-functional interpretation of the imago Dei that comports better with the conceptual schema of Genesis 1–2 when read through an exitus et reditus lens. Ramifications for worship and work follow the constructive portion of the essay.

This article examines how Thomas Aquinas used reduplicative propositions (e.g. ‘Christ suffers insofar as he is a human being’) to explicate Christ's saving mysteries, or events that Christ did and suffered that produced states of affairs only God can do. Following scripture's focus on Christ as one acting subject, Aquinas argued that we should use the adverbial modifiers ‘authoritatively as God and instrumentally as a human being’ to speak well of Christ's saving mysteries as actions of a single subject. This approach is theologically beneficial because it avoids the pitfalls of thinking of Christ's natures as agents.

The late John Webster advocated both for a theological theology and a robust recovery of God's intrinsic perfection. This article examines how both occupations are related in Webster's thought by setting forth six statements summarising his doctrine of God and his theological approach to it. According to Webster, the doctrine of God is theological to the extent it upholds the principle of solus Deus in theology's formal and material consideration of God's perfection. Only thus does theology articulate the crucial distinction between and yet correspondence of God's antecedent perfection and God's intimate presence with us.

In dialogue with John Webster and Karl Barth, this essay considers the intersection of divine aseity and holy scripture. I argue that the doctrine of holy scripture is constituted by a backward reference, namely, the plentiful life of the triune God. The doctrine of divine aseity denotes God's self-existent triune life, which anchors God's bestowal of life. Construed negatively, aseity establishes the incommensurability of God and creatures by distinguishing, without sundering, scripture and God's self-communicative presence. Construed positively, aseity constitutes scripture as ‘a field of divine activity’, the sphere of the life-giving missions of the Word and Spirit. The triune God who lives a se, elects the texts of scripture to serve as intermediaries of God's vivifying address.

This essay examines Herman Bavinck's Stone Lectures (1908), published as Philosophy of Revelation, for indications of a noteworthy conception of the relation between ontology and revelation. One discovers in the lectures that in responding constructively to various challenges to the Christian faith, Bavinck pushes in a direction documented in recent studies of his work: toward doctrinal organicism. What emerges in terms of ontology and revelation is Bavinck's belief that Christianity is distinguished primarily by confession of a real divine relational initiative, understood in terms of the incarnation, which serves as the ontological precondition of divine revelation and thus as vindication of creaturely naming of God.

This essay argues that Barth's christological ecclesiology is worthy of consideration as a resource to fund a more robust and distinctly theological evangelical free church ecclesiology. Specifically, Barth's articulation of the church as witness, combined with his emphases on the gathering, upbuilding and sending of the church, all resonate with a distinctly free church vantage point. Additionally, I argue that Barth's theological interpretation of Matthew 18:20 (a verse of great significance for the free church tradition) further reveals his compatibility with free church ecclesiology. I conclude that while the traditional problems associated with evangelical reception of Barth need to be addressed and his doctrine of the church as grounded in Christ (and thus election) critically assessed, Barth does end up offering a resource that can inform the development of a theologically robust evangelical free church ecclesiology.

Exodus 3:14 had traditionally been taken as God's self-identification as ‘being-itself’, and hence as a source for the doctrine of divine simplicity. I begin this essay by arguing that the appropriateness of this interpretation of Exodus 3:14 should be evaluated by attention to the judgements about God made within scripture rather than merely the semantic range of a few words. There are three questions elicited by Exodus 3:1–14, concerning God's incomparability, intimacy and ineffability, that are relevant to the significance of verse 14 for divine simplicity. Consideration of the kind of judgements these questions elicit about God allows a case to be made for the aptness of divine simplicity to hold the judgements together, thereby allowing for a more sympathetic retrieval of premodern uses of Exodus 3:14.

The Epistle of James is one of the most overlooked texts in the New Testament. This is partially due to Luther's judgement of the epistle as anti-Pauline. This article suggests that James should rather be seen as an early reception of Paul that brings new insight into the Pauline legacy of the late first century. James also helps us understand more about the theological issues of its day.

Gregory illustrates the complex reception of Chalcedon in the West in the way he dealt with the Istrian Schism caused by the Fifth Ecumenical Council of 553. At issue was whether Chalcedon's decisions in their entirety or its doctrinal statements alone were inviolable. Gregory strongly urged the latter, influenced by initial papal support for the Fifth Council, his conviction that only those within the church would be saved and pastoral anxiety about the imminence of the eschaton. However, his literary legacy also demonstrates his commitment to the soteriological significance of the Chalcedonian definition of the two natures of Christ.

Psalm 78 is a lengthy psalm with puzzling phrasing, which presents a peculiar historiography and enigmatic entities. The article begins by highlighting the omission of Moses in the psalm's chronological review, a feature that enables a strong focus on the role of God in the people's history. From concern with the absent Moses, the article moves to examine the role of David in the psalm as a way to access the psalmist's motivations and historical-political context. By examining literary, historical and theological features of the psalm, the article explores the use of collective memory and rewritten narratives for consolidating the people's religious and political ideals.

This paper considers two twentieth-century heresiological critiques of G. W. F. Hegel. That Henri de Lubac and Sergius Bulgakov should both worry at Hegel's ‘heresy’ is hardly surprising. More surprising, however, is how and that each charges Hegel with a different heresy. Though de Lubac's heresiological critique has proven more influential, I commend Bulgakov's. The paper concludes by querying the very strategy of assaying philosophers like Hegel heresiologically.

In the writings of Isaac of Nineveh, a seventh-century East Syriac solitary, one finds a profound compassion for every created being, including wild animals, heretics and demons. This article shows that this compassionate attitude towards external negative entities is rooted in the creature's relationship with its own condition of vulnerability. This vulnerability is distinctive of the human condition. Isaac conceives of the passions as attempts to remove this ontological condition, proposing that one can instead learn to deal with it and to ‘take it on’. This occurs through a demanding exercise of relationship with one's suffering self, and only once this relationship has been discovered does grace reveal itself to the creature. Grace, therefore, emerges from Isaac's writings as something that never removes one's creaturely poverty, but reveals itself only to the person who has the courage to experience, ‘bear’ and ‘take on’ this poverty.

Within the recently published volumes, Knowing Creation and Christ and the Created Order, several authors argue that the theological category of creation can help contemporary society overcome the modern, and ecologically harmful, bifurcation between nature and culture. This paper supplements this important argument by showing how theological panpsychism, an ontology inspired by current debates within analytic philosophy of mind, can help theologians articulate a metaphysically robust and trinitarian doctrine of creation.

Augustine famously believed fallen human sex to be inescapably bound up with sinful lust. In every sexual act, lust embodies both the sin of the fall (prideful idolatry) and that sin's consequences. John C. Cavadini has extended Augustine's conception of lust to include domination, and even violence. This leaves us with a disturbing question: is sex without violence possible? Building upon Jean-Luc Marion's distinction between idol and icon, this paper locates a solution to the problem of lust in Augustine's conception of friendship. Identifying the beloved as an icon of God entails relating to the beloved without lustful domination.

In recent work on the doctrine of atonement there has been little positive said about the view that Christ's work is principally a moral example. This article addresses that lacuna. It sets out two versions of the moral example doctrine, which are often conflated in the literature. According to the first, Christ is merely a moral example. Such a view does not amount to a doctrine of atonement. According to the second, Christ's moral example brings about reconciliation with God through a transformative experience. This does amount to a doctrine of atonement. I raise some traditional objections to the moral example view and show that it has resources with which to withstand them. However, moral exemplarism still has difficulties dealing with a cluster of biblical motifs about atonement. In the final analysis, it is a partial but not complete account of the saving work of Christ.

Despite the theological controversy surrounding ‘Russian sophiology' amongst Orthodox theologians, John Milbank has claimed that it has proven to be one of the most daring theological breakthroughs within twentieth-century theology. He further considers it to be a fecund avenue of theological and philosophical reflection that has the potential to effectively communicate his central theological arguments in a new idiom. However, many of the positions which Milbank adopts within his sophiology prove to be controversial. This article offers a critical appraisal of Milbank's sophiology, drawing particular attention to several theological aporias it appears to generate and leave unresolved.

This essay situates two embodied practices of palliative care, namely, the act of sitting with another in silence, and the act of gentle touch, within the broader conceptual framework of creatio ex nihilo. Centring on themes of particularity, creatureliness, and relationality, I argue that these practices, understood theologically, can be reframed as active participations in the self-giving love of God – thus setting forth a mode of loving relation with the dying person, rooted in a deep, attentive presence.

This article investigates action of grace in Titus 2:11 and argues for a congeniality in this epistle with Pauline thought on grace as interpreted by John Barclay in Paul and the Gift. Barclay's disentanglement of the concept, including his newfound taxonomy for χάρις, advances Pauline studies significantly, yet it has not informed studies of the Pastoral Epistles. The article examines the juxtaposition of soteriology and ethics found in Titus 2:11–14 and 3:4–7, proposing that the subsequent passage is an elaboration of the first, which sheds light on the idiosyncratic notion of God's grace performing ethical training.

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.