This article raises the question whether Christianity might itself, at least in part, be responsible for the modern waning of belief in God because of its New Testament teaching, unlike that of the Old Testament, that God is ‘love.’ After examining whether the Bible does in fact present two incompatible views of God, the article looks at some signs of how the traditional Western view of God might be changing, in response to modern sensibilities. It concludes by considering how it might still be possible to speak about the God of Christianity despite the new cultural conditions of today.

Maurice de la Taille's Mysterium Fidei (1921) was, as one of its reviewers remarked, a veritable ‘theological event’, both in terms of its methodology and its overturning of post-Tridentine theology on eucharistic sacrifice. De la Taille's work has been long overlooked in the history of theology in the early twentieth century. The paper demonstrates that de la Taille's work on the Eucharist proves an early example of nouvelle théologie and a catalyst for the the liturgical movement. Conciliar and pre-Conciliar documents presuppose his Mysterium Fidei. Through the retrieval of a patristic and medieval teaching about sacrificial oblation, de la Taille disperses the web of immolationist theories about the sacrifice of the Mass that had dominated baroque and early modern theology.

This article explores the role of the body in Thomas Aquinas’ ethical thought, focusing on the Summa Theologiae. Drawing on Thomas’ account of human nature, teleology and ethics, it traces Thomas’ account of human embodiment through his discussion of the relationship between human and angelic nature, the beatific vision, law and virtue, and the active and contemplative lives. Against several recent accounts which have presented versions of Thomas as a thinker who is generally positive in his assessment of the human body, it argues that there is a basic tension in Thomas’ thought between the desire to locate human distinctiveness in the conjunction of body and soul and the sense that after a certain point, embodiment is precisely that which obstructs progress towards God. This tension is inextricably connected to Thomas’ understanding of human calling and discipleship and poses serious challenges to any attempts to draw on Thomas’ work as an ethical resource.

In this essay I examine the idea that evil is to be understood as a kind of absence or a privation. I put forward two arguments against this idea. The first claims that if evil is an absence it becomes causally powerless, which seems strongly contradicted by experience and revelation. The other argument says that the idea that evil is an absence cannot do justice to the evil of depression. Depression is a set of feelings which are all too real, and so cannot be understood as literally identical with a set of absences.

Cyril of Jerusalem's proposed theology of the Trinity has been labeled generic. That is, the term “God” identifies not so much a species of being or an individual being, but a unique, sui generis genus. Within the genus of God there are three species or ways of being God, though not three discrete individual beings. The article will attempt to defend and renew Cyril's theology by an appeal to the contemporary philosopher, Saul Kripke, and his notion of rigid designators. One way to contemporize and perhaps better understand Cyril's position is to interpret the term “God” as a Kripkean natural kind rigid designator with the properties of Fatherhood, Sonship, and Spiration.

One of the problems confronting the doctrine of the Incarnation concerns Jesus’ apparent limitation in knowledge. This paper assesses various constructive proposals by modern theologians and philosophers, focusing on three of the most widely discussed solutions, namely Ontological Kenoticism, Two Consciousnesses Model, and Divine Subconscious Model. I argue that despite recent work done on the first two, the difficulties of avoiding the implication that the Logos ceased to be divine (for the first) and the implication of Nestorianism (for the second) remain. I conclude that the most promising solution is to defend Functional Kenoticism and develop the Divine Subconscious Model.