Pufendorf’s method comprised three distinguishable strains: a humanistic deployment of diverse sources, especially from classical antiquity; an eclectic demand to choose and fashion such materials anew; and a scientific insistence on observational evidence, systemic coherence, and procedural rigor. Each of these resisted disciplinary capture, authoritarian control, and subservience to extraneous, extra-philosophical interests – appealing instead to a rational and thus potentially universal audience. In Pufendorf the third strain became dominant and involved the others as auxiliary procedures. Like other early modern instances of “mathematical” or scientific method, it aspired – in principle, and within its characteristic domain of free, human action – to probative certitude and intellectual authority while remaining exposed to challenges and demands for articulation, thereby claiming the participatory assent of other, unbiased reasoners. Despite eschewing metaphysical foundations in favor of merely empirical supports, it claimed the peculiar force or authority animating explanatory and normative legality alike. It was, in short, rational and empirical at the same time, attempting to control the pull of these counter-tendencies toward more abstract, vacuous, and irreconcilable extremes. This aim was achieved by combining broadly prudential analyses of both human and divine intent, nourished by a realistic or pragmatic assessment of historical (actual and recorded) experience.

This chapter shows that early modern metaphysics was far more important for Pufendorf’s moral philosophy than has often been thought. In particular, it is essential to understanding Pufendorf’s theory of moral entities. This theory is often regarded as voluntarist and anti-metaphysical. Opposed to this, it has been argued, was a rationalist belief in objective and eternal moral values that was exemplified by philosophers like Leibniz. However, the main distinction for Pufendorf was not between voluntarism and rationalism, but between moral rules that were specific to a certain society because they were merely conventional, and others that were universal because they were natural, in the sense of being grounded in the physical characteristics of human nature as it had been created by God. The latter, according to Pufendorf, were necessarily true, though their necessity was hypothetical rather than absolute. Pufendorf’s intention was to turn moral philosophy into a science, which would supersede traditional Aristotelian-scholastic views that morality was concerned with the contingent circumstances of actions, and therefore incapable of ‘scientific’, that is syllogistic proof. Pufendorf’s theory of moral entities was central to this project of a moral science, which required him to provide a metaphysical foundation for these entities.

The theological movement known as Radical Orthodoxy arose in the late 1990s as a small group of University lecturers and research students who met for seminars, to discuss papers responding to various cultural and philosophico-theological circumstances. What began as a small discussion group gradually expanded into a variegated network of scholars whose views were not always aligned with one another but who shared a commitment to exploring the value of pre-modern metaphysics in problematising contemporary philosophical and theological questions. The movement is not a singular edifice comprising individuals of the same opinion in all matters but has been described as a theological idiolect or style of approach, constructive and critical at once. In what follows, I will outline the cultural and theological context in which the movement arose and then enumerate the central characteristics of a ‘radically orthodox’ approach, insofar as that may be singularly identified, before suggesting areas for future development.

This chapter explores the subject of Pentecostal theology. It makes a quick cursory look at the story of the development of Pentecostal theology in the past 120 years since the birth of the Pentecostal movement in the early years of the twentieth century. The purpose of the endeavour is to try to understand the emergence of a distinct Pentecostal theology that today caters to the theological needs of more than a quarter of the world’s Christians. It will attempt to map the evolution of Pentecostal theological discourse over the closing decades of the twentieth century when the Pentecostal movement has spread to all parts of the world and has, in the process, developed its identity and claimed its place in the global Christian landscape. Before exploring some of the key contemporary themes in Pentecostal theology, the chapter offers a short discussion of what Pentecostal theology is and what it is not. To do this well, it is necessary to also discuss, even in cursory manner, the history of Pentecostal Christianity. The essay intentionally takes a world Christianity perspective in telling both the history of the movement and the narrative of its theological development. This is to situate this discussion of Pentecostal theology in the wider and growing discourse of global theologies, which then will allow us to see the growing influence of Pentecostal thought on world Christianity and vice versa. The global nature of Pentecostal theology itself informs the second half of the chapter in which it engages some of the key Pentecostal voices in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, in addition to those in Europe and North America, to help us understand the current theological concerns of Pentecostal Christians in the world. In the end, I explore some pressing themes in Pentecostal theology, hoping to build bridges between Pentecostal theologians and those of mainline traditions.

Ressourcement Thomism refers to an emergent trend of theologians who seek to reassess the contribution of Thomas Aquinas both within his historical context and in a contemporary context. It is best explained genealogically in relation to other recent theological movements and has distinctive characteristics. In this chapter, I seek first to identify this historical context and characteristics of Ressourcement Thomism and then to illustrate its relevance by examining two typical theological claims found among those associated with the movement. The first of these is the claim that the modern focus on the “immanent and economic trinity” after Karl Rahner is conceptually problematic and that the Thomistic distinction between Trinitarian processions and Trinitarian missions serves as the more feasible one for a reasonable analysis of the way that the mystery of the Trinity is revealed in the economy of salvation. The latter model allows one to acknowledge more perfectly the New Testament revelation of the transcendence and unity of the Trinity and to avoid problematic historicizations of the divine life of God. The second claim is that key figures in modern kenotic theology such as Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar, despite their theological creativity, have failed to preserve a sufficient sense of the distinction of the divine and human natures in Christ. Aquinas’s Chalcedonian and dyotheletist Christology provides one with ways of thinking about how the crucifixion of God reveals the mystery of the Trinity in and through the sufferings of Christ without the problematic projection of human characteristics of the Lord onto the inner life of the Trinity, as constitutive of the inner life of the Trinity. In both these respects, Ressourcement Thomism as a theological movement suggests ways that historical theology that is concerned with the contribution of patristic and medieval sources can lead to a renewal of and creative engagement in modern theology.

This chapter gives an account of Pufendorf’s discussion and use of the law of nations. It first outlines his distinctive contribution to contemporary discussions of the topic, namely his rejection rejection, against Grotius, of a specific “positive” law of nations distinct from the law of nature. Secondly it explains how this position relied on Pufendorf’s voluntarist conception of law as the command of a superior and on his conception of the state of nature as devoid of such superiors. The law of nations was simply the law of nature applied to states as composite persons in the state of nature, and the treaties and alliances concluded between them could not amount to a separate and obligatory law of nations. Thirdly, against this background, the chapter shows how Pufendorf discussed the law of war, disentangling the perfect and imperfect obligations of the law of nations from custom, civil laws, and pacts and agreements. Finally, the chapter analyses Pufendorf’s own casuistic use of the law of nations in the various polemical works he published in the service of his sovereigns, especially the King of Sweden, often in line with the theoretical position he developed but also departing from it when opportune.

The church is in one sense unique among the loci of Christian doctrine: the church is both the subject of believing but also an object of belief; the church formulates and articulates doctrine while at the same time itself being an object of doctrinal reflection. It is the church universal that formulates the creeds (‘We believe’); yet part of what is believed involves certain dogmas about the church (that it is ‘one, holy, catholic, and apostolic’ and that it acknowledges ‘one baptism for the forgiveness of sins’). We call the discipline of reflecting on what we believe about the church ‘ecclesiology’. That we have beliefs about the church indicates, moreover, that while in certain ways the church shares the same forms and conditions of its empirical existence as other societies and organisations in the world (for example, it is observable and spatio-temporal), the church is also unique as an organisation by virtue of its oneness, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity. Indeed, the church is (with Israel) a community that is different from all others in that it is a community directly created by God: the church (as with Israel) is that body of people about whom we believe God speaks the words, ‘I shall be your God and you shall be My people’ (Jer. 30:22). We have faith that the church is God’s people – faith in the invisible activity of God within the visible, empirical society of people called ‘church’.

The field of disability theology is an emerging area of theological enquiry that seeks to explore the relationship between our understandings of God and human beings in the light of the experience of human disability. When it comes to disability, the tendency within the pastoral and ethical literature has been to concentrate on issues around pastoral care and ethics. Here disability is seen as a pastoral or ethical issue with little or no concentrated attention paid to the theological implications. The focus is on ethical dilemmas, such as whether or not prenatal testing for disability is appropriate, or pastoral matters around how to make sure that churches are accessible to people in wheelchairs. There is of course nothing wrong with such approaches. We all need pastoral care and all of us need the tools to deal with complex ethical challenges. Disability theology acknowledges the importance of such things but seeks to push further into a broader range of theological issues, which includes but is not defined by the pastoral and the ethical.

Pacts or “social contracts” form the basis of sovereignty in many early modern theories of political authority, and in Pufendorf’s too. Most such theories treat the pact as the means by which a pre-existing right—for example, divine right, or the natural right of individuals grounded in their strength, reason, or property—is transferred to a sovereign on the condition that the right be protected, to be rescinded if it is not. For Pufendorf, however, there is no pre-existing right since the sovereignty pact creates a new right—the right to issue unchallengeable commands for the purposes of achieving social peace—by instituting two new moral personae: the citizen who obeys the sovereign in exchange for protection, and the sovereign invested with the right of absolute command to provide social peace. Since Pufendorf’s sovereignty is constituted not by a prior moral right, but rather by the capacity to exercise unchallengeable authority for the end of social peace, there is no naturally rightful form of government. Pufendorf thus takes a neutral and pluralistic view of the three traditional forms of government—monarchical, aristocratic and democratic—insofar as each is capable of exercising the capacity for sovereign rule.

According to scripture and the historic Christian creeds, God is almighty and the creator of all things, visible and invisible. This entails that the world is neither a brute fact nor without origin, meaning, and purpose. Rather, it is the work of a divine agency that creates and provides for creatures and orders them to their proper ends. That divine agency is not part of the world but is the transcendent yet immanent and continual source of the world’s existence. These claims arise from wonder and reflection on the contingency, fragility, beauty, and rational order of the world, contemplation of scripture, and the discernment of God’s revelation in and through creation. The Christian theology of creation and providence, having its roots in the Hebrew scriptures and ancient philosophy, was developed in relation to the Trinitarian doctrine of God, the incarnation of Christ, and the hope of redemption. It has been articulated in creative and critical conversation with many other traditions of enquiry into the origin, workings, and purpose of the cosmos, from ancient pagan creation myths to the modern natural sciences.

In providing a new foundation for natural law and thence political authority, Pufendorf engaged in a major and explicit reconstruction of the discipline. Scholastic natural law derived the law of nature from a prior nature held to contain norms for moral and civil conduct; for example, from a divine nature whose will imprinted the human will, or a rational nature that was supposed to guide the will, or from humanity’s supposedly sociable nature as the source of the key norm of sociality. Pufendorf’s radical intervention into this field lay in his declaration that since it had been “imposed” or instituted as a “moral entity” by God for unaccountable reasons, human nature was not itself normative, rationally or socially. Rather, as a set of given conducts and predispositions—seen most clearly humanity’s paradoxical need for co-operation in order to survive and its ineradicable proclivity to envy, malice and mutual predation—human nature supplied only the observable basis from which it was possible to deduce the natural law: that man should cultivate sociality as a disposition needed for security and social thriving. This formed the basis for political sovereignty as the unchallengeable deployment of civil power required to obtain social peace and security.

In his theory of the family, Pufendorf treats it as a complex society composed of three simple societies or associations: those between husband and wife (matrimony), parents and children (paternal society), and master and servant, or slave (societas herilis), which are united under the domestic rule of the paterfamilias, or head of the family. Given that Pufendorf holds all human beings – women no less than men – to be naturally equal in virtue of their humanity, that is, the common moral status that they acquire through their subjection to the law of nature, the question arises as to how he justifies authority in the private realm of the family: how does his patriarchal account of marriage, and his justification of servitude, or slavery, fit with the egalitarian premise of his natural law theory? In focusing on the role of pacts and consent in the founding of the various modes of domination within the family, the chapter highlights Pufendorf’s critical attitude to traditional justifications of authority, but also indicates the limits of the egalitarian premise of his natural law theory. The chapter ends with a comparison between the rule of the head of the family and supreme sovereignty in the state.

The person and work of the Holy Spirit are central to visions of the Christian doctrine of God, the Christian gospel, and the Christian life. This judgment is not simply based on a single biblical episode (such as the Pentecost narrative in Acts 2 or the Farewell Discourses of the Gospel of John). Rather, the centrality of the Spirit is grounded in the very logic of how the God of Christian confession, YHWH-Trinity, acts in the world and how this One goes on to be known and worshipped by followers of the Risen One. Christian initiation, the availability of grace, the remembrance of Jesus, the transformation of the heart, the eucharistic life of the church, the reading of Scripture, growth in holiness, the embodied mission of the people of God with “power” and “authority,” the sustained hope of living a cruciform existence in the eschatological “last days” – in short, every feature of God’s self-manifestation and work in the economy of salvation history is not just pneumatologically related but pneumatologically constituted and driven. Gordon Fee captures this sentiment well when he remarks of Paul’s pneumatology: “‘salvation in Christ’ not only begins by the Spirit, it is the ongoing work of the Spirit in every area and avenue of the Christian life.”1 The disciples of Jesus, then, are those called to be a people of the Spirit, ones who walk according to the Spirit and those who bear the gifts and fruit of the Spirit. As Kallistos Ware has so compellingly suggested, “The whole aim of the Christian life is to be a Spirit-bearer, to live in the Spirit of God, to breathe the Spirit of God.”2