One hot day a eunuch of great authority under Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians, was riding home in his chariot. He had just been to the temple in Jerusalem, yet he was not content to have his faith nourished by the priestly exposition of Scripture alone, but was also studiously reading Scripture for himself, specifically the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. He found enough clarity in the prophet to strengthen his faith; but then he came across a passage that seemed to block his access to the meaning of the prophet, for it spoke of one who in a contradictory way was humiliated beyond all others, and yet exalted above the earth. As he was puzzling over the meaning of this passage, a man appeared and asked him, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ The eunuch could have dismissed this question with proud disdain. Instead, he responded with modesty and humility, ‘How can I, unless someone guide me?’ Philip answered the eunuch's most pressing question, ‘Of whom does the prophet speak?’ by pointing him to Jesus Christ. The eunuch responded to Philip's help in interpreting Scripture with such faith that he asked to be baptized then and there, and then returned home with much joy, for he now knew the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.

In his review of the historical tradition, James McClendon concludes that ‘the doctrine of election or predestination in Scripture viewed as a whole seems fully to warrant none of the paths ecclesiastical doctrine has so far taken’. He finds some hopeful signs, particularly in his own Radical Reformation tradition. Yet his redrawn contours of the doctrine rarely appeal to the tradition so far. ‘The old associations of the doctrine die so hard that (in my judgment) this part of Christian teaching is of litde present service. We do well to emphasize the rule of God in every effective way, while exercising great reserve with regard to this Augustinian deposit’.

‘All the gifts of God set forth in baptism,’ wrote John Calvin, ‘are found in Christ alone’ (Inst. IV.15.6). The baptismal gifts, for Calvin, were essentially three: forgiveness of sins, dying and rising with Christ, and communion with Christ himself (FV.15.1, 5, 6). They were ordered, however, in a particular way. Communion with Christ, Calvin considered, was in effect the one inestimable gift that included within itself the other two benefits of forgiveness and rising with Christ from the dead. Forgiveness and eternal life were thus inseparable from Christ's person and so from participatio Christi through our communion with him. Only by participating in Christ through communion could the divine gifts set forth in baptism be truly received. Any severing of these gifts from Christ himself would result only in empty abstractions. No spiritual gift—neither forgiveness nor eternal life nor any other divine benefit—was ever to be found alongside Christ or apart from him. Christ's saving benefits were inherent in his living person. Only in and with his person were they set forth and available to the church. Communion with Christ was thus bound up with Christ's person in his saving uniqueness. He himself and he alone, for Calvin and for the whole Reformation, was our wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption (1 Cor. 1:30).

A christological treatment of sin is, for Karl Barth, the only possibility for those who wish to know something of that which opposes life in Christ. Such a treatment must be christologically ordered in so far as Christ remains the arche, teloas, and nomos of theological thought. It is not coincidental, then, that his treatment of sin is proper to the doctrine of reconciliation and ordered by the christological assertion that Jesus Christ is truly God, truly human, and the unity of these as the ‘guarantor and witness of our atonement.’ Indeed, the knowledge of sin is only possible in the light of the revelation of God and humanity in the God-man Jesus Christ. Consequently, the doctrine of reconciliation is the proper place for the knowledge of sin in so far as Jesus, the one who knew no sin, was made to be sin ‘so that we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Cor. 5:21). To know sin one must face the one who became sin for our sakes.

Søren Kierkegaard delivered a scathing critique of certain German philosophies that arose in the wake of the Aufklärung. In this respect he is most well known for focusing most of his attacks against Hegelian idealism, although it is important to remember that he also found the time to attack aspects of the theological Rationalism and Romanticism that he had encountered during his university studies. Unfortunately for us he chose a rather eccentric way in which to do this. Inspired by the literary techniques of German Romantic ironists such as Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, Kierkegaard chose largely to mask his thoughts beneath levels of irony and pseudonyms. Each one of these pseudonyms personified specific traits of his chosen opponents.

The concept of the covenant is crucial to understanding the development of Reformed theology in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The origin of this aspect of theology during the initial decades of the Reformation, however, has received little attention. Kenneth Hagen's groundbreaking article on the advent of covenant theology and its distinctiveness from testamental theology was a pioneering outline, yet was not built upon by the succeeding generation of scholars. Attempts to explain the Reformed covenant as an outgrowth of late Medieval theology, in particular the Nominalist pactum concept, remain tentative and inconclusive. Efforts in the field of Anglo-American Puritanism have likewise yielded little in the way of detailed analysis.

Usually one does not include Karl Barth in contemporary Jewish-Christian dialogue. Unlike his Protestant theological contemporaries, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, there in no evidence that during his long theological career Barth had any real contact with Jewish thinkers. The only contemporary Jewish thinker whom he engages, to my knowledge, is Martin Buber, but in his magnum opus, Church Dogmatics, Buber is discussed almost en passent and with a rather hurried dismissal. Barth's relations with Judaism are seriously complicated, but one gets the impression from reading what he says about Judaism that he is doing typology, engaging a type already created in his mind largely by Paul and those who followed in his path. He does not seem to be dealing with Judaism as a living tradition, indeed a current rival religious option to Christianity. After all, how can one engage Judaism as a living tradition, let alone as a current rival, if one has no serious contact with living Jews during the most productive years of one's thought? For that reason it would seem an engagement of Barth's thought by a contemporary Jewish theologian could only be, at most, an arcane academic exercise having no real Jewish significance.

One of the more noticeable features of the landscape of theological studies, broadly conceived, is the trouble-some relationship between biblical studies and systematic or constructive theology. Following the programmatic comments of Colin Gunton, by ‘systematic theology’, I refer to that theology which is concerned (1) to elucidate in coherent fashion the internal relations of one aspect of belief to other potentially related beliefs; (2) to demonstrate an understanding of the relation between the content of theology and ‘the sources specific to the faith’; and (3) to evince an awareness of the relation between the content of theology and general claims for truth in human culture, not least those of philosophy and science. It is with this enterprise, the doing of systematic theology, that biblical studies has come in the last two centuries to have increasingly poor relations.

Nowhere in the literary remains of antiquity is there another document quite comparable to Gregory of Nyssa's fourth homily on the book of Ecclesiastes: certainly no other ancient text still known to us—Christian, Jewish, or Pagan—contains so fierce, unequivocal, and indignant a condemnation of the institution of slavery. Not that it constitutes a particularly lengthy treatise: it is only a part of the sermon itself, a brief exegedeal excursus on Ecclesiastes 2:7 (‘I got me male and female slaves, and had my home-born slaves as well’), but it is a passage of remarkable rhetorical intensity. In it Gregory treats slavery not as a luxury that should be indulged in only temperately (as might an Epicurean), nor as a necessary domestic economy too often abused by arrogant or brutal slave-owners (as might a Stoic like Seneca or a Christian like John Chrysostom), but as intrinsically sinful, opposed to God's actions in creation, salvation, and the church, and essentially incompatible with the Gospel. Of course, in an age when an economy sustained otherwise than by chattel slavery was all but unimaginable, the question of abolition was simply never raised, and so the apparent uniqueness of Gregory's sermon is, in one sense, entirely unsurprising. Gregory lived at a time, after all, when the response of Christian theologians to slavery ranged from—at best—resigned acceptance to—at worst—vigorous advocacy. But, then, this makes all the more perplexing the question of how one is to account for Gregory's eccentricity. Various influences on his thinking could of course be cited— most notably, perhaps, that of his revered teacher and sister Macrina, who had prevailed upon Gregory's mother to live a common life with her servants—but this could at best help to explain only Gregory's general distaste for the institution; it would still not account for the sheer uncompromising vehemence of his denunciations.

While the Christian tradition in some of its language takes very seriously the idea that God's revelation in Jesus Christ took place on a historical stage, it too often treats the inevitable historical problems as negative, overlooking their positive value.

Why did Jesus die on the cross? Ask this question of a theologian, and the answer will likely be something to the effect that Jesus died so that our sins might be forgiven and the world might be saved from sin, death and evil eternally. Ask this question of a historian, however, and the answer will be quite different: Jesus died because his activity created conflict with the authorities of his time, and therefore they had him crucified.

St Anselm of Canterbury is famous on two counts: he is the originator of the ontological argument for the existence of God and he is the source of the satisfaction theory of the atonement. These positions do not exhaust his theological contribution; he also wrote works defending and defining Western Trinitarian doctrine, against Sabellianism and tritheism, and arguing for the filioque; he wrote on the Incarnation; and was influential in modifying Augustine's account of the transmission of original sin. There is also a collection of meditations and prayers, traditionally attributed to St Anselm, which at their best rank alongside almost any devotional literature of the medieval period. His memory, however, is firmly attached today to just the two points with which I began. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that on both he has been fundamentally misunderstood by the popular accounts of his thought given in theological and philosophical introductions and histories; these misreadings have been pointed out often enough, but are still regularly repeated.

The 318 Fathers at the First Council of Nicaea (325) began their profession of faith in the second article of the creed as follows:

Confessing that: We believe in one God … And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father as only begotten, that is, from the essence of the Father, [ek tes ousias tou patros].

The question of what it means to be a person is hardly new in theology, but it has arguably been posed with renewed urgency over the past generation. On the one hand, traditional answers have been challenged by those whose personhood had long been viewed inside and outside the church as somehow inferior or deficient (especially men of colour, and women of all backgrounds). On the other, reflection on the situation of people suffering from severe mental retardation, psychosis and dementia (not to mention the debates over abortion and euthanasia) has cast doubt on ancient and modern attempts to understand personhood in terms of self-consciousness or some other mental capacity.

The reception of Jacques Derrida in the academic community has frequently been a source of controversy. Whilst America has often been hospitable to his thought, the situation in British and even French universities has occasionally been openly hostile. Derrida arouses an intensity of emotion illustrated by the two hundred and four academics at Cambridge University who attempted to block the award of an honorary degree in 1992. Like the reaction within other disciplines, the theological response was, and remains, fissured. Leading the critics, Brian Hebblethwaite lent vocal support to Derrida's detractors. Nevertheless, Hebblethwaite's published criticisms of Derrida at the time lack either theological or philosophical arguments. Instead, his assessment reveals a knowledge of Derrida gleaned almost exclusively from secondary sources, with the exception of a lone reference to Derrida's debate with John Searle in Limited Inc.

One of the axioms of modern church history in Britain is that whereas Anglo-Saxon thought was on the whole impervious to the appeal and achievement of Karl Barth, it was among the Scots alone that the Swiss theologian's theories found any real resonance and creative response. Stephen Sykes in a 1979 volume of studies in Barth's theological method, mentions the somewhat bewildered response to his publications in Britain and the United States between 1925 and the mid-1980s and goes on to say that ‘from now onwards it is in Scotland that Barth is taken with the greatest seriousness in the English speaking world’. In a later volume of centenary essays, R. H. Roberts traced the reception of the theology of Karl Barth ‘in the Anglo-Saxon world’ by quoting the evidence of such late 1920s and early 1930s figures as J. H. Morrison, John McConnachie, H. R. Mackintosh, Norman Porteous and A. J. MacDonald to claim that ‘it is clear from an early stage that enthusiasm for Barth's work … was primarily a Scottish attribute’. In another essay in the same volume, Colin Gunton contrasted the usual English attitude to Barth with that of theologians from other lands: ‘For the most part and despite exceptions’, he claimed, ‘the English find it difficult to come to terms with the theology of Karl Barth’, while in a companion volume Geoffrey Bromiley noted that this was hardly the case for theologians and pastors ‘in such diverse lands as Switzerland, Germany, France, Holland, Hungary, and Scotland’. Again and again, it is Scotland which is emphasised as being the place within the British Isles where Barth's ideals took root.

Modern people make horrible contemplators of icons. This is not only because we have excised icons from the venues in which they were originally deployed, hanging them on the walls of this-or-that National-Gallery-of- Art. It has also to do with the way we see things. We trust sight in a way pre-modern people never could. Consider the contact lens: Small convex pieces of silicon we place over our pupils to refract light more precisely onto our retinas. We put them in and we forget about them—until our eyes begin to burn. But even then we rarely think of contacts as mediators that decisively affect our capacity to trust in sight. Or consider the television. With a tap of a button it comes on, bringing us images from … where? New York, Hollywood, London—one, two, three thousand miles away. This is mediation, and we trust it so much that we have forgotten to experience it as such. The relevant question is, Why?

Perichoresis (perichoresis, circumincessio) is a theological term which describes the ‘necessary being-in-one-another or circumincession of the three divine Persons of the Trinity because of the single divine essence, the eternal procession of the Son from the Father and of the Spirit from the Father and (through) the Son, and the fact that the three Persons are distinguished solely by the relations of opposition between them.’ This term was popularized in the eighth century by John of Damascus who, in his De fide orthodoxa, said the three Persons of the Trinity ‘are made one not so as to commingle, but so as to cleave to each other, and they have their being in each other [kai ten en allelais perichoresin] without any coalescence or commingling.’ This important theological term, which Karl Barth rightly regarded 'as the one important form of the dialectic required to complete the concept of ‘three-in-oneness’ ‘from the side of the unity of the divine essence’ and ‘from the side of the original relations,’ has suffered in some recent theology from its appropriation to describe relationality apart from mutually shared being. For example, in his influential social doctrine of the Trinity, Jürgen Moltmann emphasizes the ‘relational, perichoretically consummated life processes’ of the three Persons who ‘cannot and must not be reduced to three modes of being of one and the same divine subject,’ whose unity ‘cannot and must not be seen in a general concept of divine substance.’