Hans Urs von Balthasar's kenotic trinitarianism and theodramatic Christology is designed to dramatise the triune God's kenotic engagement with the world without introducing a change in God. It continues to be disputed whether Balthasar ends up divinising suffering and making God into a tragic deity or succeeds in redefining and complexifying divine immutability. To engage with this question, this article critically examines Balthasar's theological use of the image of ‘the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world’, which plays a pivotal role in his kenotic and theodramatic soteriology. I will argue that his kenosis-driven understanding of John's Gospel is untenable, and his rich theological use of Revelation's image of the Lamb slain, intensified by his questionable exegesis of the Fourth Gospel, renders super-temporal suffering and death real in the life of God.

While scholars have traditionally taken Revelation’s “letters to the seven churches” (Rev 2–3) as documentation for the experiences of the Christ-movement in those cities, this article argues that the letters amount to a fictional device—that the Apocalypse appropriates epistolary forms in response to the increasing authority of early Pauline collections among the late first-century Asia Minor Christ-movements. With its divine epistolary authority and heavenly sevenfold “collection,” the Apocalypse attempts to exceed and denigrate Pauline authority in the Christ-movement, and it elevates a Jewish Christ-devotion based in priestly apocalyptic traditions. In the end, we can see John of Patmos both as a competitor to the Pauline tradition and as a witness to the earliest circulation of Pauline collections.

The meaning of χλωρός in Rev 6.8 has been given a variety of interpretations (green, yellow, pale, vigorous etc.) due to its polysemic character; that is, it possesses a chromatic as well as an achromatic meaning and, in addition, if it denotes colour, can express a wide spectrum of hues. From this arises the need for a methodology that offers not merely a gloss, but rather a ‘meaning’. This methodology is based on: an analysis of the text; the use of the term; the concept of colour that existed in antiquity and the entity in which the colour was embodied; and the use of various lexicographical tools provided by the field of cognitive linguistics.

The article argues that philosophers of religion and theologians should pay less attention to the so-called ‘classical attributes’ of God and more attention to the neglected, but venerable, tradition of the divine names. Grounded in Scripture, these reflections are predicated on the doctrine of Creation, and what it is for human beings as creatures to speak of their Creator. The article demonstrates that, even the so-called ‘classical attributes’, when placed in the divine names tradition, are far from being mere ‘natural theology’ but Christological to the core and lead us, through intellect, into the mysteries of awe and prayer.

The Letters to the Seven Churches in the Book of Revelation follow a fixed sevenfold literary pattern. The single form elements are developed in view of the special situation of each of the seven churches but, at the same time, aim to create linkages with the main body of the book. In addition, referencing between form elements within one and the same letter often help to construe ambiguous metaphors. While the seven letters all together build a unit, this unit falls into two groups: the letter to Thyatira closes the first section, the letter to Laodicea closes the second one, with the letter to Sardis serving as a hinge between the two groups. The literary and the text-pragmatic purpose of the seven letters are well combined. In the second group, the linkages serving as a connection with the rest of the book make an increasing use of motives that describe the final victory at the end of the Book of Revelation. In this way, the author tries to focus the reader's attention on this eagerly awaited future.

This paper considers the centrality of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo to both Augustine and Aquinas, especially as these pertain to knowing and naming God. It argues that too much has been ceded to Augustine's purported debt to neo-Platonism, and too little to the doctrine of creation as found in the Christian (and Jewish) middle-Platonists. In these thinkers God's self-disclosure from the burning bush was of signal importance, the ‘I AM WHO I AM’ glossed in terms of God's creative and redemptive power. The theme is traced through Augustine and Aquinas before returning the Christology of the Book of Revelation.