In this paper I shall be applying a modern-day issue to ancient texts. My intention is to illuminate understanding of the ancient texts and to try to stimulate dialogue between the Bible and a major concern of today. I do not intend to suggest that the authors of these texts had any environmental awareness in the terms we might use nowadays. However I find outlooks and presuppositions in their thought that can be illuminating for our own concerns and even guide us in attitudes we might adopt towards our environment.

The last number of this Journal was already in print when news came of the death on 19th February of Dr Alan Lewis, who served for many years as one of our editors. The following tribute by President Stotts of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary speaks for all who knew and valued Alan Lewis as a colleague and friend.

Today the whole of Europe, East and West, is caught up in the search for new political and economic structures, sadly, along violent and atavistic as well as peaceful and constructive paths. In the West the fulcrum of change is the halting movement of countries toward economic and political ‘integration’ within the European Community. The issue of what form, or forms, the Community should take (whether federal, confederal, or more loosely associative) is understandably divisive, for its resolution will determine the political shape, not only of the member states, but also of those western European countries (should there be any eventually) that remain either outside the Community or only partially integrated in it. Moreover, it will decisively influence the political and economic aspirations and possibilities of the Community's eastern European neighbours, and even of their Soviet or ex-Soviet neighbours. Thus are we justified in viewing the fate of the European Community as the fate of Europe. Consequendy, it is a task of theoretical and practical moment to attempt to grasp the civilisational meaning of the projected European union with the help of some points of reference from western Europe's past and present.

Orthodox Christians, Rahner declares, are ‘almost mere monotheists’, isolating the dogma of the Trinity from any personal relevance to their lives. The doctrine of the Trinity appears in the Church's creeds, prayers, rites, and hymns, but the faithful must often wait till Trinity Sunday to hear the significance of the Trinity for their identity as Christians. Likely, they will hear imperatives without indicatives, moral mandates devoid of ontological grounding in God's grace. No wonder that the laity often ignore the triune God whom they confess and praise in Church amid their life and work in society.

Michael Heyd has described the late seventeenth and early eighteen centuries as an era of gradual development from Orthodoxy to the Enlightenment at the Academy of Geneva. One of the most important facets of this change was the eventual triumph of reason over revelation and the inevitable elimination by the mid-eighteenth century of many of the essential doctrines of the faith such as the Trinity and the Incarnation. Deism and atheism, which were becoming more and more feared at the Academy, posed the greatest threats to Reformed thought. Those theologians who considered themselves to be orthodox Protestants and yet enlightened to the use of reason to defend Christianity, attempted to protect the faith against the unique challenges of the times. Their extensive use of reason was a marked departure from the traditional Reformed approach to Apologetics and radically transformed the very nature of Reformed Protestantism. It is the purpose of this paper to show that the specific challenges of this era provided the theological faculty at the Academy of Geneva, and especially Jean-Alphonse Turrettini, the leader of the so-called enlightened orthodox party, with the predisposition to employ a rationalistic approach to natural theology.

In memory of Alan Lewis, student, colleague and above all friend, at whose ordination as a minister of the Church of Scotland the author was privileged to preach, Kirkliston Parish Church, Midlothian, 4th December, 1977.

If we are frank, we have no idea whether there was a pre-Marcan Gospel, in the sense of a continuous written account of Jesus. It is widely believed that there was a continuous Passion narrative before Mark, and it is often thought that there were some collections of pericopae, like the controversy stories in 2.1–3.6; but denials that there was a continuous story, in some sense like our Mark, are as weakly supported as assertions of the same. It could be that Friedrich Schleiermacher was right, and that certain διηγ⋯σεις existed before Mark, to which Luke had access. We might think it rather singular that so elaborate a work as Mark should appear de novo, like Athena from the head of Zeus. But we have no evidence to take us beyond conjecture.

Federalism or centralism – this is a decisive question in the political structuring of Europe today. The socialist centralism of the command economy and the ideological surveillance of the people has collapsed. The federal republic with decentralized forms of communication and a diversity of regional, local and personal initiatives proved stronger.

Of the many problems which trouble interpreters of Romans 9–11, none rises more massively from its pages or casts a more impenetrable shadow than the relationship between Paul's argument in 9:6–13 and his argument in 11:25–31. The issue in both passages is whether God's biblical promises to save Israel have failed (9:6, 11:29), exposing the God of Paul's gospel as untruthful (15:8) and unrighteous (3:5, 10:3). In 9:6–13 Paul denies the charge by defining Israel on the basis of God's choice rather than on the basis of national affiliation. In 11:25–32, however, he denies the charge by pointing forward to a time in which God will fulfill his promises and secure the salvation of all Israel. The problem is that these two defenses of God's faithfulness seem to contradict one another, and the defense in chapter eleven seems not only to contradict the one in chapter nine but to oppose Paul's frequent and emphatic denial in several letters, and especially in Romans, that national Israel has any soteriological advantage over the Gentiles.

Since Perry Millerpos;'s biography of Jonathan Edwards began a new cycle of study some forty years ago, research into Edwards' life and thought has advanced considerably. No longer is the intellectual giant of colonial America surrounded by the obscurity to which early generations had consigned him. Yale is republishing his works. New secondary studies on Edwards appear regularly. Academics from a range of disciplines - history, American studies, theology, philosophy, and literary criticism - have all made Edwards a focus for serious scholarly attention. As an index to the quickening tempo of research, the total number of dissertations on Edwards increased in geometrical proportion during the last half century, doubling during each of the successive decades since 1940.

In examining the similarities and differences between God and humanity in his analogia relalionis, Karl Barth correlates three I-Thou relations: God to Godself in similarity and difference (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit); humans to humans in similarity and difference (male and female); God to humanity and humanity to God in similarity and difference. For all three, Jesus Christ is the master analogue. Christ relates to God in a God-God ‘I-Thou’ relationship, to humanity in a human-human ‘I-Thou’ relationship, and God to humanity and humanity to God in a God-human ‘I-Thou’ relationship.

In Exodus 3, 14 a concept of the God of Israel is hinted at, and the hint is taken up by Moses Maimonides in his Guide of the Perplexed and developed in a way that should hold our metaphysical gaze. In particular, on the basis of the Great Tautology Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh contained in that verse, he presents an account of God in terms of a distinctive application of the categories of agent and act, and I shall follow Maimonides through the crucial moves he makes in his application of those categories to God. Yet the Maimonidean system presents us with reasons for being suspicious of the application of any categories at all to God, and my approach to Maimonides' discussion of the Great Tautology will be by way of a consideration of those reasons, all of which relate to the most famous feature of the Guide of the Perplexed, the unremitting application of the via negativa. There are large problems concerning the correct way to understand Maimonides' use of that via. But we cannot afford here to be deterred from attending to that aspect of his system, for he uses it in his discussion of the Great Tautology. Indeed he has barely started his journey along the Via Negativa when he is confronted by the concept of divine existence and has to decide on an appropriate response. Hence in our investigation of Maimonides' concept of divine existence, we must take into account the way in which his apophatic route determines his perspective.

In much contemporary theology, pastoral/practical theology, and much of the more popular ‘Christian’ literature there is a concern for exploring and discovering various aspects of right relationship. These relationships might be political, marital, familial, sexual, economic, those within the church, or between the church and the greater society. What seems to be lacking in many of these discussions is an adequate theological foundation upon which to carry out the exploration. There are assumptions made about the nature of human relationships which seem to have no connection to theological underpinnings or are only loosely, or thematically related.

‘The Bible is not concerned with transmitting general truths about God, but is the Word of God calling forth a response.’ This declaration, which sounds as if it might be found in the first volume of the Church Dogmatics in one of the other early writings of Karl Barth, is actually a quotation from an early article by Brevard Childs entitled, ‘Jonah: A Study in Old Testament Hermeneutics’.

Few aspects of Paul's teaching have proved more controversial in recent times than his injunction that women should neither speak (lalein) nor teach (didaskein) in church assemblies (1 Cor. 14.34–35; 1 Tim. 2.11–12). To those seeking to promote the ministry of women in the church, the apostle's words appear as a personal expression of opinion founded on patriarchal prejudice, on rabbinic conservatism or on purely local considerations of strategy, motives which are of little more than documentary interest in the current debate. To proponents of the principle of male leadership, on the other hand, Paul's instruction forms part of a normative, enduring evangelical tradition which is often assumed to bear not only on the order of the church but on the order of creation itself. In these circumstances it is instructive to examine Calvin's treatment of the subject as found not only in his major dogmatic work, The Institute of the Christian Religion, but at various places in his sermons and commentaries. Our purpose here is not to make Calvin the arbiter of what, in his own day, was a highly marginal question – outside of court and literary circles, equality of the sexes was not a serious Renaissance concern – but rather to understand how he interpreted Paul's teaching in the context of a creation which God was already renewing and of a church where all were already made one in Christ.

I have found myself very much drawn to the epistemological realism which T.F. Torrance puts forward in his 1985 book, Reality and Scientific Theology. Torrance's claim, that true knowledge represents a genuine disclosure to the mind of that which is objectively real, seems to me an indispensable presupposition for the church's proclamation of the Gospel. If the knowledge, ‘That I belong, body and soul, in life and in death, not to myself but to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ’, is to be capable of offering concrete assurance about the eternal destiny of ordinary believers, such knowledge must of necessity be grounded in a reality (Jesus Christ) which transcends the particularities of the believer's own body, soul, and historical circumstances. A realism like Torrance's would seem to be essential if the church's witness is to be taken seriously.

In 1918, on the very day the First World War ended, Karl Barth (1886–1968) wrote of doing theology with the Bible in one hand and the newspapers in the other. The scriptures and the daily papers converge in presenting one real, if highly unpleasant, feature of our human existence: hatred.

‘Whatever became of sin?’ – the title of American psychiatrist Kark Menninger's book – encapsulates the problem with which I begin. That there is appalling suffering today, organized crime on a scale which almost defies analysis – and certainly detection! – moral evil in a variety of repugnant forms and so-called ‘natural’ catastrophes which threaten the very continuation of human life on our planet, is beyond dispute. But ‘sin’? Is sinfulness still an accepted category in our society for eidier religious believer or nonbeliever? It is hard to accept that when Professor Kerkhofs (from the University of Leuven, Belgium), surveyed the attitudes on sin and guilt of European Christians in 1985, 40% of those interviewed admitted that they had never experienced any feelings of regret about their actions! There is a double tendency prevailing with regard to responsibility for acknowledged wrongdoing: increasing sense of diminished responsibility for crime seeks either to scapegoat a certain sector of the populace as blameworthy, or attempts are made to cope with criminal damage – for example, injuries sustained by drink-driving – by assessing it in exclusively (reductive) monetary terms.