Recent decades have witnessed a near-consensus of critical opinion (1) that the idea of God's creation of matter ‘out of nothing’ is not affirmed in scripture, but instead (2) originated in a second-century Christian reaction against Gnosticism's convictions about matter as evil and creation as the work of an inferior Demiurge. (3) Judaism's interest, by contrast, was generally deemed late and philosophically derivative or epiphenomenal upon Christian ideas. This essay re-examines all three convictions with particular reference to the biblical creation accounts in Palestinian Jewish reception. After highlighting certain interpretative features in the ancient versions of Genesis 1, this study explores the reception of such ideas in texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls and early rabbinic literature. It is clear that the typically cited proof texts from biblical or deutero-canonical books indeed do not yield clear confirmation of the doctrine they have sometimes been said to prove. Genesis was understood even in antiquity to be somewhat ambiguous on this point, and merely to say that creation gave shape to formlessness need not entail any creatio ex nihilo. This much seems uncontroversial. Nevertheless, closer examination also shows that the Scrolls and the rabbis do consistently affirm Israel's God as the creator of all things, explicitly including matter itself. Graeco-Roman antiquity axiomatically accepted that ‘nothing comes from nothing’, which also meant the pre-existence of matter. To be sure, the conceptual terminology of ‘nothingness’ came relatively late to Christians, and even later to Jews. Yet the substantive concern for God's free creation of the world without recourse to pre-existing matter is repeatedly affirmed in pre-Christian Jewish texts, and constitutes perhaps the single most important building block for the emergence of an explicit doctrine of ‘creation out of nothing’. In its Jewish and Christian origins, therefore, the idea of creatio ex nihilo affirms creation's comprehensive contingency on the Creator's sovereignty and freedom. This in fact is a point which has been rightly and repeatedly accented in both historic and modern Christian theology on this subject (e.g. by K. Barth and E. Brunner, J. Moltmann and C. Gunton). Well before its explicit articulation in dialogue with Hellenistic philosophy, the doctrine of God's creation of all matter was rooted in biblical texts and their Jewish interpretation, which in turn came to be refined and enriched through Christian–Jewish dialogue and controversy.

In their study of Augustine's De Trinitate, scholars read the fifteen books which comprise this text as a monolithically written discourse on the doctrine of the Trinity. This article is an attempt to examine if it is possible to argue on tenable bases that pneumatology, rather than any other doctrine, is the subject of Augustine's text by showing that the interpretation of the identity and consubstantiality of the Spirit occupies in De Trinitate a more foundational and central place than just being part of Augustine's discussion on the doctrine of the Trinity. It ultimately suggests that freeing Augustine's text from diachronic prejudices means also wondering if he really wanted to write an additional version of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity which he already followed, or whether he wanted to contribute something new about a relatively neglected doctrine in the faith of the church.

The four gospels rightly stand at the head of the New Testament canon. They have, however, routinely been misread or misunderstood. They tell the story of the launch of theocracy – ‘the kingdom of God’ – in terms of the story of Jesus; but they tell that story as (a) the narrative climax of the story of Israel (presupposing the continuous story envisaged by many second-temple Jews in terms of Daniel 9's prophecy of an extended exile), (b) the story of Israel's God returning in glory as always promised, and (c) as the rival to the powerful first-century narrative of Rome, as told by e.g. Livy and Virgil in terms of Rome's history reaching its climax in Augustus, the ‘son of God’, and his empire. The stories meet on the cross, and the purpose of the gospels is then to awaken the readers’ imagination: suppose, they say, that ultimate power looks like this, not like that of Alexander the Great or Augustus. Ironically, much gospel scholarship since the rise of the critical movement has appeared eager to silence this kind of reflection; this has been due to (a) a desire to avoid continuity of narrative, (b) the implicit Epicureanism of modern western culture, with its eagerness to keep God and the world at arm's length, (c) the ‘two kingdoms’ theology implicit in much Lutheranism, and hence much New Testament scholarship, and (d) the triumph in modernism of what has been described by Ian McGilchrist as ‘left-brain’ over ‘right-brain’ thinking. Microscopic analysis has replaced the world of intuition, metaphor, narrative and imagination, leading to readings entirely against the grain of the gospels themselves (though understandable in an academic world where the doctoral process rewards left-brain work). If we are to take the gospels’ narratives seriously, however, we are projected forwards into a fresh vision of what the early church understood as its ‘mission’, focused on the εὐαγγέλιον which, for the first Christians, trumped that of Caesar. Because the early church was no longer marked by the cultural symbols of ethnic Judaism, it was the freshly imagined vision of the identity of the one God that sustained them in this mission, and the ecclesial life it demanded. This was the birth of ‘Christian theology’; and today's task must include the imaginative recapturing of that vision of God's kingdom, as a key element in a refreshed and gospel-grounded missiology.

In this article, I provide a detailed analysis of the poems on the Lord's Supper by the Dutch statesman and man of letters, Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687). Between 1642 and 1684, he wrote eighteen poems on this subject, sixteen in Dutch and two in Latin. The type of poem varies from pithy epigrams to sonnets, through to longer poems over fifty lines in length, replete with well-conceived poetic tropes. To date, these poems have received little scholarly attention. Huygens was a lifelong member of the Reformed church and his poetry considers themes which are central to Reformed theology, such as human sin, divine grace and human gratitude. In his poetry, he recognises that he is a sinner and that it is not sufficient merely to ask for divine forgiveness, and then sin again. He acknowledges the need to intend to change his ways, but also recognises that he can only do this with divine assistance. Huygens published most of these poems and although such a public acknowledgement of sin may seem strange to us, there is a sense in which he was performing a public act of confession, to make common cause with his fellow believers, and also perhaps to encourage them to do the same. Much of the poetry considers the ontology and efficacy of the Lord's Supper. As well as exploring familiar tropes such as the sacrament as a feast and a pledge for God's promises, Huygens also asks about the very nature of the bread and wine of the sacrament. We might expect him to ascribe little or no value to the elements themselves, beyond, to use Brian Gerrish's phrase, ‘presenting what they represent’. poetry. However, at some points, the language Huygens uses to refer to the elements, such as ‘holy bread’ and ‘healing dew’, suggests something more is at stake. Some may dismiss such phrases as mere lyrical flourish, but I argue that they point to a central tension inherent within Reformed eucharistic theology between sign and signified and, furthermore, that this poetry offers us the opportunity to explore that tension. Huygens’ poems bear comparison with the best English-language religious poetry of the seventeenth century, and remind us that poetry as well as prose can offer us valuable theological insight.

There are two different hermeneutical principles between the views of the fallen and unfallen humanity of Christ. Scholars who deny Christ's assumption of corrupted human nature emphasise that, due to a fallen humanity, Christ would have inevitably committed sin in the context of the original sin. However, theologians who are in favour of Christ's fallen humanity explain the issue in the person and work of Christ himself. Here, I present John Calvin's biblical views on the body of Christ as the vicarious humanity for all of us. With regard to the biblical truth that the Word became flesh without ceasing to be the eternal of God, Calvin describes the paradoxical character of the event in scripture. Although Calvin never supports the fallen nature of Christ at a literal level, he is inclined to accept the view of Christ's fallen nature at the level of interpretation, because Calvin has no hesitation in saying that Christ assumed a mortal body like us. Calvin is in line with the views of Christ's fallen human nature, for he uses the biblical concept of Christ's mortal body and the principle of sanctification in his own body through the Holy Spirit, except in that Calvin denies Christ's assumption of the sinful nature of Adam after the Fall. Calvin's opinions not only provide us with the common biblical ground with which the two theological camps would agree, but also demonstrate that Christ assumed fallen humanity for us. In this article, I will explain how the view of Christ's unfallen humanity has logical errors and how it distorts the integrity of the Gospel. Next, in order to demonstrate how Christ's assumption of fallen humanity accords with the orthodox faith in Reformed theology, I examine Calvin's biblical arguments of Christ's assumption of our true humanity. Then, I explain that without assumption of our mortal body by Christ there is no vicarious humanity of Christ in Calvin's christology. Particularly, in order to understand the original and biblical arguments for the humanity of Christ, I will use a dialectical approach to both the Institutes of Christian Religion (1559) and Calvin's commentaries, as the best way to grasp the essence of Calvin's theology.

After many years of dormancy, the concept of kenosis has recently received widespread and lively attention from contemporary theologians. Yet, in the midst of this revival, there has emerged a steady stream of critique of the concept because of its apparently adverse doctrinal and ethical implications. Less remarked upon, but equally important, is an analogous and long-standing debate about the nature and pervasiveness that we should assign to humility in Christian teaching. Indeed, the interweaving of humility and kenosis in Philippians 2 arguably requires that the two rise or fall together; even if the concepts are not semantically equal, their meanings and their theological implications overlap in manifold and important ways. This article surveys the current state of the question, and argues that the works of Augustine yield valuable insights regarding the most knotty problems emerging from contemporary disputes about kenosis and humility. In the first part, I outline several recent perspectives on kenosis, aiming to bring clarity to the discussion. Along the way, I note the similarities between kenosis and humility as they function theologically, and I offer a summary of the qualities that a theologically sound account of those concepts would need to exhibit in order to address the valid concerns which have so far been raised. In the second part, I propose that closer attention to the theme of humility (both human and divine) may shed new and important light on kenosis debates, suggesting that Augustine is the ideal theologian on whom to test this theory. To this end, I explore Augustine's explanations of christology and language, suggesting that these are the loci through which Augustine's perspective on humility – both divine and human – is best expressed. In both cases, Augustinian humility strikes a noteworthy balance between restraint and empowerment and offers an instructive vantage point from which to address the complex and lively discussions about kenosis. While the African bishop may not offer a decisive resolution of these matters, his approach to them does hold significant promise for a depiction of humility and kenosis which incorporates the valid concerns of critics while simultaneously preserving an unavoidable and central aspect of Christian doctrine.

Victor Preller's Divine Science and the Science of God makes an unjustly neglected contribution to understanding the apophaticism of Thomas Aquinas and, by extension, the possibilities and constraints of theological discourse. Preller contends that, according to Thomas, God-talk can be meaningful though not intelligible. That is, by faith one can know that one's propositions refer to God; one cannot, however, know how they do so. The first part of the article explains the main inferences leading up to these conclusions. The second part attends to some key passages in Thomas' Summa Theologiae in order to substantiate Preller's interpretation. Spelling out these passages requires coming to grips with Aquinas’ distinction between the ‘thing signified’ (res significata) and ‘mode of signification’ (modus significandi). Armed with this second stock of concepts, the argument doubles back on the conclusions already set out: building on Preller, I argue that Thomas distinguishes between meaning and intelligibility for semantic reasons, judgements about the practice of language which are bound up with certain other ontological judgements. Throughout the article, the virtues of this line of interpretation are compared and contrasted with the position laid out in Kevin Hector's article, ‘Apophaticism in Thomas Aquinas: A Reformulation and Recommendation’, Scottish Journal of Theology 60/4 (2007), pp. 377–93.

Initially I briefly expound Martin Buber's Two Types of Faith so as to clarify Buber's sharp contrast between Jewish faith (Hebrew Emunah) and Christian belief (Greek Pistis). I suggest that Buber's polarisation of Emunah, a trust and existential engagement with God, over against Pistis, an intellectual acknowledgement which lacks immediacy with God, has certain resonances with Wilfred Cantwell Smith's distinguishing between ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ in his attempt to overcome the Enlightenment tendency to reduce religious faith to propositional belief. I also acknowledge that Buber's conceptually alert and religiously constructive engagement with the Bible in its own way embodies many of the concerns in the current attempts to bring Bible and theology together via ‘theological interpretation’ or ‘a canonical approach’. However, Buber's account of the Old Testament overlooks the presence of the idiom ‘to know that’ (Hebrew yada( ki), which points to the importance of cognitive content in relation to knowing Israel's God. I consider a number of narratives which feature the deuteronomic idiom ‘to know that Yhwh is God’ (or closely comparable formulations) – Elijah on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18), Rahab (Joshua 2), Naaman (2 Kings 5) and David and Goliath (1 Samuel 17) – and consider the function of ‘knowing that Yhwh is God’ in each passage. By way of conclusion I reflect on the complementarity of ‘knowing God’ and ‘knowing about God’ and the problematic nature of tendencies, represented by Buber, to set these over against each other. I also suggest that there is fruitful work to be done through a comparative and synthetic biblical and theological study of the relationship between the Old Testament concern that people should ‘know that Yhwh is God’ and the New Testament concern that people should ‘believe that Jesus Christ is Lord’.

Based on the theology of Emil Brunner, this article seeks to demonstrate the relevance, even the imperative nature, of personal encounter both for the work of dogmatics and for theological existence. In particular it assesses what impact the personalness of God's self-revelation should have, not just on one's doctrinal conclusions, but also on one's self as a theologian. A range of Brunner's writings forms the backdrop for this focused study of a paradigm which shapes his theology and methodology: personal encounter. I start by introducing the broader context of Brunner's presuppositions about the theological task, including his regard for divine self-communication. With this in mind, attention will be paid to the relationship between revelation and scripture, and in particular to the Christocentric, personal and enduring character of God's unveiling. Brunner's regard for the apostolic witness as the authoritative testimony to God's full disclosure in Christ is high and determines the position that he affords the Bible throughout his work. A summary of Brunner's treatment of the divine-human encounter will follow, with a view to understanding him on this subject in his own terms. His small publication by the same name, The Divine-Human Encounter, serves as the focus of this examination. The term ‘personal correspondence’ requires special consideration for the central position it enjoys in Brunner's conception of divine revelation and its relationship to dogmatics. Further expressions related to this theme will come to light in the process of answering two questions regarding the connection between personal encounter in scripture and the work of theology. First, how true is our doctrine when its expression becomes distanced from the language of divine-human encounter which characterises revelation? Second, what is the relationship between scripture as theology's primary source and the ongoing revelation of God to the believer in personal encounter? The suggestion that theology cannot be restricted to intellectual pursuit will not be universally applauded, but the proposal that God's self-unveiling obliges a change in existence and not just an adjustment in knowledge is one that Brunner deems unavoidable. In this light I conclude by suggesting that the personal encounter of revelation issues an imperative for both individual and communal existence which must be considered by all who undertake the theological task.

Formation constitutes the key link between reception theory, Jauss and scripture. The Bible shapes readers by showing them what lies beyond the self. Hans Robert Jauss (1921–97) remains the effective founder of reception theory or reception history. He was a literary theorist, who specialised in romance literature. Following Hans-Georg Gadamer, he insisted that texts carry ‘a still unfinished meaning’, and focused on their historical influence. The exposition of how communities or thinkers have received texts includes de-familiarisation; sometimes the ‘completion’ of meaning, as in much reader-response theory; and instances of when a text ‘satisfies, surpasses, disappoints, or refutes the expectations’ of readers. Reception theory can often trace continuity in the reception of texts, as well as disjunctions, reversals and surprises. It offers a more disciplined approach to scripture than most reader-response theories. Clearly horizons of expectation play a major role in the interpretation of biblical texts. I suggest six direct parallels with biblical interpretation. (1) Like Francis Watson and others, Jauss rejects any value-neutral objectivism in interpretation. (2) The readers’ horizon of expectation derives partly from earlier readings of the text. (3) Horizons can move and change, and thus transform readers as these change. (4) Biblical genres display all of Jauss’ accounts of the responses of readers. For example, parables of reversal may surpass what the Christian believer expects, or disappoint the unbeliever. (5) Like Gadamer, Jauss emphasises the importance of formulating constructive questions in approaching texts. (6) Jauss’ ‘levels of reading’ correspond closely with Bakhtin's notion of polyphony. I compare Ormond Rush's work on reception and otherness, and Luther's insistence that the Bible often confronts us as our adversary to judge and to transform us. Finally, we illustrate the history of reception from Ulrich Luz on Matthew, from Childs on Exodus, and from my commentaries on 1 Corinthians and 1 and 2 Thessalonians.

Contemporary theology exhibits a lively interest in using the traditional doctrine of the munus triplex (the threefold mediatorial office of Christ as prophet, priest and king) to unify our understanding of the person and work of Jesus Christ and ground it in the Old Testament witness. This article explores Karl Barth's contribution to this trend and draws from it a set of reflections for the church today. Scholarly consensus suggests that Barth offers an exceptionally robust development of the munus triplex in shaping the formal structure and material content of his doctrine of reconciliation. In this article I contend that his use of this concept is actually quite superficial in nature. As scholars are wont to point out, Barth incorporates the munus triplex into eye-catching summary statements throughout CD IV – but these statements are more ambiguous than they might at first seem. A closer examination of the details of his account of the work of Christ, and particularly his hamartiology, demonstrates that the munus triplex does not substantially inform his treatment of these subjects, and that his own unique christological concerns provide the determining influence. While Barth was eager to align his position with that of Reformed orthodoxy, focusing on the munus triplex ultimately distracts the reader from his primary concerns. Much the same is true for the church today – when used as a sufficient interpretative device for offering an account of the person and work of Jesus Christ, the munus triplex suffers the fate of many an artificial schema for biblical interpretation, distracting us from the breadth and depth of the biblical witness by offering an overly tidy, artificially organised account of the material. Nevertheless, when modestly employed, it remains a significant though limited conceptual device for understanding Christ's person and work, which the church should employ in several ways so as to integrate the Old and New Testaments in its proclamation of the Gospel.

Although it was never completed and has had only slight impact, T. F. Torrance's work on the nature and interpretation of scripture is a primary element in his theology, though largely unstudied. For Torrance, a theology of scripture and its interpretation derive from a theology of revelation; revelation takes creaturely form in the incarnate Word, out of which is generated the apostolic community and its witness, which in turn generates scripture, the human word which ministers the divine Word. Scripture is the divine Word accommodated to human form, and so a sacrament or sign which refers to revelation; its social location is the life of the apostolic community. Interpretation of scripture is properly ‘depth-interpretation’, following the semantics of scripture by which reference to divine reality is made, rather than terminating on scripture's syntactical surface. Fitting interpretative practice follows the text's reference, penetrates to the thing signified, indwells its subject matters and listens to the divine Word. The interpreter is summoned to mortification of prejudice and constantly renewed attentiveness. Torrance's most impressive contribution to bibliology and hermeneutics was his insistence that both are ingredients within a theology of God's economic presence. There are some historical limitations to his work, along with a lack of interest in the Christian literary culture and lack of extended exegesis. However, his writings in the field constitute one of the most impressive Protestant accounts of the field in the last half-century.

The important, but unexplored, John Maclaurin of Glasgow (1693–1754) represents the branch of enlightened evangelicals in the Church of Scotland who defended aspects of supernaturalism as compatible with reason. Evangelicals like Maclaurin endorsed the transatlantic evangelical revivals while still maintaining that such pervasive and multifarious spiritual awakenings were not a chaotic display of enthusiasm. Maclaurin supposed that God had created humanity with the ability to reason and could influence one's thinking to adopt epistemological assumptions about religion which some saw as irrational and superstitious. In order to prove this point, Maclaurin turned the tables on the opponents of the revivals by arguing that in order to be truly natural, in the sense of being a complete human, one must embrace the inner workings of the Holy Spirit. The corruption of our nature which occurred as a result of the sin of Adam and Eve left mankind in an incomplete state. Therefore, the purpose of God's supernatural grace is to restore mankind to its authentic natural state. Without such divine aid to form knowledge, he argued, one would never be able to gain a full understanding of spiritual truth. Similar to Thomas Aquinas, Maclaurin assumed that humans can know many things about God and his work in the world using reason. Sin has not corrupted our intellect to the extent that we cannot ascertain any truth about God from observing the world around us. Nevertheless, in order to have a thorough understanding of God, divine grace is needed. Following Aquinas, Maclaurin claimed that God uses secondary causes like preaching to motivate people to seek grace. Such secondary causes cannot produce any real change in a person unless accompanied by the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit. As opposed to many of the more liberal ministers of the day, Maclaurin, although not entirely comfortable with the fainting and weeping which sometimes appeared at the revivals, was willing to admit that emotional displays could be a natural response by a person whose heart had been moved by the spirit of God. While defending extreme emotions, Maclaurin's main point in his sermons was that evangelicalism was entirely reasonable.

The controversy sparked by Bruce McCormack's 2000 essay, entitled ‘Grace and Being: The Role of God's Gracious Election in Karl Barth's Theological Ontology’, shows little sign of waning; it seems, in fact, only to be heating up. In this article, I hope to make a modest contribution to this debate, one which will hopefully move it towards a resolution. My proposal is twofold: on the one hand, I will argue that we can do justice to McCormack's motivating concerns, without rendering ourselves liable to criticisms commonly raised against his view, if we accept two propositions: first, that God does not change in electing to be God-with-us, and second, that election is volitionally, but not ‘absolutely’, necessary to God. (By ‘absolutely necessary’ I mean something like ‘true in all possible eternities’, as will become clear.) I will try to demonstrate that this is Karl Barth's own position on the matter, which demonstration, if successful, would mean that the controversy should no longer be centred on the proper interpretation of Barth. This brings me to the second, shorter, part of my proposal, in which I argue that McCormack's position is innocent of some charges frequently brought against it. My hope is that these arguments, taken together, will advance the current discussion and contribute to its resolution.

In this article we will argue this thesis: even with classical theism and meticulous providence, one can properly say God exercises creativity. This is not merely to say that God is creative – which is perhaps tautologous given that God is the Creator – but further, it is to say that God's activity in relation to the cosmos displays creativity. We will examine open theism, which resides at the other end of the spectrum, in order to provide contrast with the position defended in this article. There are three aspects we intend to affirm in saying God exercises creativity. First, the product (the cosmos which God made) exhibits creativity. This should not be particularly contentious and we will not pursue this aspect here. Second, the agent (God) exhibits creativity. Third, the process exhibits creativity. Both of these latter aspects will be defended. In this article we argue that God's freedom, creation's contingency, creation's reality and actuality, and considerations from the incarnation all enable meaningful ways in which one can speak of divine creativity while still affirming classical theism and meticulous providence. First, in support of our thesis we will use possible world talk as a heuristic device. Possible world talk involves modal claims, modal logic and counterfactuals. We use this conceptual device, operating within a theistic framework, to approach with clarity theological issues such as the divine decree, creation ex nihilo and providence. Second, we will utilise a two-nature christology to speak meaningfully about divine creativity. Against those who describe God's creativity in terms of divine attributes, we suggest that it is possible to understand God's creativity in terms of the incarnation. Drawing upon the work of Thomas Weinandy, we suggest that it is possible to speak about God experiencing something genuinely new in the person of Christ. As such, one can hold to a classical doctrine of divine creation and use language associated with human creativity, such as ‘risk’, ‘process’ and ‘discovery’, to speak about God. We hope to demonstrate that the affirmation of divine creativity need not be exclusive to positions such as open theism.

Recent moral justifications of military intervention in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq have drawn upon just war concepts set out by Augustine of Hippo in the early fifth century. Augustine, writing as the political hegemony of the Roman Empire was ebbing away, provides a valuable touchstone for anyone engaged in analysing the complex interplay of power, war, morality and religious faith. Like most of the problems Augustine addressed in his writings, his attitude to just war was rooted in a potent mix of imperial politics, concern for individual souls and establishing and defending church orthodoxy. Though his personal telos was to be found in the Heavenly City, Augustine did not try to avoid the difficulties of dealing with the contradictions involved in the Christian's encounter with the decidedly ungodly Earthly City. Though he never ruled out the need for political power to be wielded through the medium of martial force, Augustine would only accede to such action with great reluctance. This article investigates aspects of the use and misuse of Augustine and his ideas in both the political and academic arenas in the justification of recent military interventions. Analysis of statements made by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the book Just War Against Terror by American political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain will show how Augustinian concepts have been used selectively to serve broader political agendas. Blair and Elshtain have been chosen for this study because they were both, in their respective fields, influential figures who advocated the 2003 invasion of Iraq; they are both declared Christians; Elshtain has explicitly associated herself with Blair's approach; and they both rejected any notion of religious crusade in the aforementioned interventions. By considering casus belli which included self-defence, opposing evil and liberating the oppressed, this article will demonstrate that the selective use of Augustine would eventually weaken the very case it was meant to strengthen. In the process, commonalities and discontinuities between Augustine's ideas in their original context and their application in the present will be highlighted. The article concludes that, in the process of using Augustinian concepts to justify recent military action, his renowned reticence regarding the use of force was undermined.

In this extended review I first describe Wright's complex account of the doctrine of justification in Paul, which combines emphases on the covenant, the lawcourt, Christ and eschatology and includes, further, important translation claims concerning ‘the righteousness of God’ as God's covenant faithfulness, ‘justification’ as vindication in a lawcourt setting, ‘works of law’ as sociological boundary markers, and ‘faith’ as speaking not infrequently of Christ's fidelity rather than the generic Christian's (although these last two things are not separate; the former grounds the latter making it a badge of Christian membership). I then suggest, second, that Wright needs to recognise more clearly a particular danger in the traditional approach to justification that he is trying to move beyond – ‘foundationalist individualism’, or ‘forward thinking’. That is, the traditional reading of justification in Paul understands him to be arguing and thinking forward, from a nasty, legalistic, and essentially Jewish, plight, to a solution which is a gospel generously grasped by faith alone. This narrative, rooted in a certain reading of Romans 1–4, creates a large number of difficulties. (It begins with natural theology. It characterises Judaism unfairly. It asks a lot of sinful individuals unenlightened by grace. And so on.) And I am not convinced that Wright's complex revisionist account of justification has avoided them all. In particular, (1) he continues to emphasise a particular notion of the lawcourt in Paul's argument and thereby unleashes an account of God's character primarily in terms of retributive justice and hence in terms of Western politics. (2) He tends to define the covenant before he has taken full account of christology. The covenant should be defined by christology, rather than the other way around. One sign that things have not been tied together here as they ought to be is the number of different definitions of Israel that Wright supplies – as many as four. Moreover (3) even his revisionist sociological account of ‘works of law’ reproduces a key difficulty in the older approach, i.e. a jaundiced description of Judaism. And (4) his account of faith in Abraham does not explicitly link Paul's controversial reification of Genesis 15:6 to a christological hermeneutic, as it needs to in order to avoid crass reductionism. But Wright's definitive account of Paul is not yet fully articulated, so suitable adjustments might well allay my concerns here, with various aspects of foundationalism presently appearing within his theological description.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) in the United States (US) went through a shift because of the introduction of open theism into theological context of conservative evangelicalism. The response by the society to this new theology was swift and decisive. Not only were the memberships of certain evangelicals (i.e. Clark H. Pinnock and John Sanders), who were responsible for bringing open theism into the ETS, in danger of being revoked, but the ETS formally denounced open theism and changed its constitutional by-laws to safeguard itself against anyone bringing significant theological innovation into the society. It is important to re-examine the cultural ethos of the ETS in the US in terms of the underlying beliefs of the society in order to determine whether or not the changes the ETS made had basis in scripture or were simply motivated by the culture at large. To determine this, this article will begin by generally describing some of the main cultural beliefs of the ETS. Next, the discussion focuses on some of the major historical influences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which impacted the ETS to conform to an ethos more in line with the Enlightenment. Third, the article will critique these Enlightenment-based cultural beliefs linguistically, culturally and theologically. This article will demonstrate that because the ETS conformed more to the standards of the Enlightenment than to scripture, it is generally much more preoccupied with knowing the truth of scripture rather than walking in the way of Jesus Christ. Finally, this article suggests the way forward for the ETS is to become a more inclusive society by aligning itself with a more historical definition of evangelicalism rather than simply being defined by the evangelicalism of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This article suggests that by making this move, the ETS will reclaim a much more grace-filled attitude towards its current members and give hope to those committed Christ-followers on the outside of the society, showing them they are welcome to be a part of such a prestigious theological group.

I have been invited to assess Douglas Campbell's door-stopper of a tome from a theological perspective. Given that this is a work in Pauline scholarship by a leading New Testament scholar, what is the justification for involving a theologian? Clearly, it is because the argumentation of this book is driven by a theological critique of certain key methodological, epistemological and, indeed, ontological suppositions which have functioned to sustain what Campbell calls ‘justification discourse’ – an approach to Pauline interpretation that Campbell argues is outmoded, confused and ultimately incoherent.

Without doubt, David Kelsey's Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology (henceforth, EE) is one of the most significant and important contributions to the field of theology from this generation of theologians. The two-volume work of over a thousand pages (really one volume bound into two books because of its size) is Kelsey's magnum opus, and arises from more than three decades of study and thought. It addresses directly and (properly) theologically central issues relating to humanity in relation to God and to creation (‘all that is not God’). This book has arisen within a theological setting of conversations with other members of the ‘Yale school’ (Hans Frei and George Lindbeck). Yet, there is a sense in which this book surpasses what that school of thought has offered thus far, not by beginning on an altogether different theological path, but by journeying further, and bringing what that theological approach has to offer to bear on one doctrinal locus in a way which the other key proponents of post-liberal theology have not yet done: Kelsey moves from discussing a theological method to using that theological method more fully and directly than has previously been the case in relation to the theological content of a single theological issue.