Christians frequently request God's forgiveness and have their Lord's assurance that if they refuse to forgive they will not be forgiven (Matt. 6:15). Forgiveness is thus integral to Christian moral existence even if life presents few opportunities to forgive those who have genuinely wronged us. This infrequency of opportunity is neither regrettable nor surprising. Sane persons after all do not wish to be routinely wronged so as to be able to forgive regularly. But perhaps the infrequency with which we forgive others helps to explain why we are mystified by the nature of forgiveness.

Twenty Five years ago the late Archbishop Ramsey went to visit Pope Paul VI in Rome. The two bishops discussed possible joint enquiries by their Churches into liturgical questions: for example, finding a common translation of the Lord's Prayer. As far as I know, they have not yet found it. That is not surprising since the Lord's Prayer presents several problems of interpretation and wording. In particular, the sixth petition ‘Lead us not into temptation’ has caused difficulty from very early times. Can it really be implied (it is said) that the Father will lead his children — deliberately lead his children — into situations where they will be enticed to do what they know to be wrong? And the usual answer is ‘Certainly not!’ Nevertheless, the petition cannot be avoided: it is present in both Matthew and Luke who offer divergent forms of the Prayer, presumably according to the traditions of their communities. It is present in the Didache which incorporates early and possibly independent material, and in the Letter of Polycarp from early in the second century. Two methods of solving the problem have been attempted.

Alasdair Maclntyre has argued that, despite its ‘rhetoric of consensus’, modern society is irreducibly pluralist since it lacks the basic condition necessary for securing agreement on the truth of competing convictions — namely, some background consensus as to the nature and procedures of rationality. Even if the possibilities of affirming truth in the public sphere may not be quite as grim as Maclntyre makes out (and it seems to me to universalize an apt description of American public society), we are nonetheless still left with disconcerting questions as to the nature of public truth. Has public discourse been relativised into competing truth-claims? Is it possible to speak now of a common public world, of society, at all? Or of rationality? Indeed, if truth cannot be made the subject of public agreement, can we really speak any more of truth at all? How, in this situation, can Christianity claim to have an absolute and universal Truth? And how might it gain a public hearing for its truth?

Janet Martin Soskice's book Metaphor and Religious Language may reasonably be described as ‘state of the art’ in respect of studies on metaphor and theology. Dr Soskice recognises the need for metaphor to retain its traditional designation as a figure of speech, but at the same time wants to establish its use as credible in a Christian realist perspective. To this end, she undertakes a rigorous examination of the nature and function of metaphor in order to build a solid base from which to establish its pertinence to theology. It is metaphor's ability to achieve an increment of meaning in language in general (and science in particular) which is able to provide the springboard for its role in religious language. Dr Soskice thus sees language as the framework within which to conduct her argument. The first part of this paper analyses her argument.

Aremarkable effort at reform is now occurring in English-speaking Christian discourse. This effort is the ongoing proposal of feminist theologians that the exclusive use of the masculine third-person pronouns to refer to God be eliminated. The traditional usage is rejected on the ground that it identifies the Godhead as male. Several alternatives to this usage have been suggested, and some of them are now being tested in various quarters of the Church. In this paper we disclose theolinguistic implications of the use of pronouns in reference to divinity and offer critique of current reformist proposals.

In contemporary Scottish culture the subject of predestination is guaranteed to evoke a variety of reactions ranging from horror and disgust on the one hand to laughter and ridicule on the other. It is viewed by some as a nightmare scenario devised by Christian theologians in their worst moments, while for odiers it is a ludicrous aberration of the medieval and Reformation mind. It is perceived frequently as the trademark of a theological mindset which is marked by harshness, legalism and a fatalistic attitude towards life. A clear example of this is Edwin Muir's biography of Knox which writes vitriolically of the oppression and tyranny of the predestinarian religion that was imported from Calvin's Geneva.

The final phase of jonathan Edwards' work centers around his defense of Calvinism against ‘Arminianism’. Along with certain tendencies in this ‘Arminianism’, which included its undermining of the unconditionality and freedom of the grace of God and its narrowing of the conception of God to those attributes acceptable to current cultural standards, it also held to the view that the human will is not determined by God or nature, or anything prior to its own acts, butis ‘self-determining’, possessing ‘a certain sovereignty over itself and its own acts’, thus determining its own volition. The notion of ‘indifference’, the mind's being ‘in equilibrio’ prior to any ‘act of volition’, was essential to the Arminian conception of liberty, as was ‘contingence’, understood as a lack of connectedness to any prior chain of causation.

There is a long tradition recognizing the evangelist as a theologian of stature. In recent times C.K. Barrett referred to him as a theologian second only to Paul and Martin Hengel described John as “a towering theologian”. In this paper it is argued that the evangelist was a profoundly theological writer and that a complex eschatology formed an essential dimension of his theology which was shaped in the dialogue and debate with the synagogue resulting in the development of distinctive christological, theological and eschatological views that have significantly influenced subsequent Christian history.

In a previous paper I have argued against the assumption made by much German literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, that Luther is the religious forerunner of Kant. Even though it is the Lutheran mythology that Kant is demythologizing, Luther still cannot be considered as the religious forerunner of Kant. There are two main reasons for this. First, Kant has an entirely different conception of the religious life in terms of freewill and salvation. Kant affirms freewill, Luther denies it. Kant considers good works as a prerequisite to salvation, Luther rules outworks as playing any part in the quest for salvation, since justification is by faith alone. Secondly, Kant's view of evil and human nature in general is far removed from the Lutheran conception of human depravity. Luther claims that human beings are totally corrupt, and in need of God's grace in order to become good. Kant argues that although human beings have a disposition towards evil, their underlying nature is good.

The Göttingen New Testament Professor, Wilhelm Bousset observed that historical research was in ‘danger of placing Christianity in the flux of development’, of ‘failing to give due worth to its special character and unique meaning, and thereby neutralising and relativising everything’. ‘The halo of the supernatural which had clung around “sacred history” was destroyed,’ and history had become a ‘labyrinth for modern religious liberalism’, where it threatened ‘to betray itself’. In their attempts to avoid such a relativisation of the Christian faith, most of the members of the History of Religion School sought refuge in a primordial mystical experience expressive of non-rational feelings, of emotions, moods and fantasies.

Early in his career Edward Bouverie Pusey paid visits to Germany, as a result of which he wrote a book, revealing the influence of both Hegel and Schleiermacher, on the development of German theology. Then came some form of personal crisis, as a result of which he repudiated the book, seeking out second hand copies in order to destroy them, and in his will requiring that it never be republished. The event was tragic not merely for Pusey's personal life, but because it can be taken as symbolic of the fate of English theology since then. As one commentator remarks, it was an attempt to answer modernism by ignoring it. ‘If modernism could not be defeated by intellect, it must be defeated by piety.’ As Stephen Sykes has pointed out, for nationalistic reasons – for it is the nationalist tendency of some tractarianism which is here the point – a breach between the different European traditions was opened and has meant that English systematic theology, never very strong, has suffered injuries from which it has not yet recovered.

One of the analogies used by the Cappadocian Fathers and other early theologians to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity was the social analogy in which Father, Son and Spirit were likened to three human persons. Beginning with Augustine however, Christian Theology, particularly in the Western Church, shifted away from the social to the psychological analogy. Augustine found analogies to the Trinity in all of creation but the clearest analogy to the Trinity, in fact its unique image, was the human soul. The divine image was not found in the union of three persons but in the unity of three activities, remembering, knowing, willing in the individual human soul. The social analogy reappeared in the twelfth century in Richard of St Victor's argument for the existence of three persons in God based on the premise that supreme charity required shared interpersonal love. Though some of Richard's insights were taken up by Bonaventura, the impact of his trinitarian theology was overshadowed by the dominant influence of Thomas Aquinas with his masterful use of the psychological analogy to probe and illuminate the inner being of the divine Trinity. Following Aquinas's further development of Augustine's psychological analogy, the interpersonal approach of the social analogy all but disappeared from subsequent trinitarian theology. Even with a later shift away from the Augustinian-Thomistic model, modern theology retained its unipersonal image of the trinitarian God.

In recent articles on Karl Barth and St. Anselm, Gordon Watson has drawn attention to what he regards as a ‘characteristic systematic weakness’ or ‘systemic problem in Barth's methodology’. This has its origins in Barth's failure to ‘take into account St. Anselm's assumption of the importance of a common rational structure in thought and language existent between believer and unbeliever as the basis for speech about God’ and has consequences not only for Barth's exposition of Anselm's ‘theological scheme’ but also for the subsequent development of Barth's soteriology in that he ‘undervalues the importance of the historical humanity of Jesus in the action of the atonement’.

Not that I have already obtained this or have already been made perfect (teteleiomai); but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brethren, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature (teleioi) be thus minded; and if in anything you are otherwise minded, God will reveal that also to you.

Theologians are not generally aware of the influence of the concept of spirituality in education. Is it not remarkable, not to say amazing, for example, that the secular Parliament of Great Britain should pass a bill listing ‘spiritual development’ as the first aim of the school curriculum?1 But educationists are not generally aware of the rich heritage of thought about spirituality in Christian faith and practice. And one is also tempted to say that theologians and educationists do not read much material from philosophy about ‘spirit’ and ‘spirituality’. Yet spirituality is too important to be confined to narrow treatments in separate academic disciplines.

Hans-Georg Gadamer and Michael Polanyi are interestingly close and yet surprisingly different. I want to illustrate their closeness and divergence at certain crucial points, and then draw from the comparison certain wider implications for understanding authorial intention and textual autonomy on the one hand, and genre and the nature of a gospel on the other.

Observers of the theological scene over the past twenty years have witnessed the growth of what can only be described as a new way of doing theology. That theology, like all disciplines, should be subject to change and innovation is unsurprising; neither is it surprising that new fashions or movements should – to appropriate some words of John Clare: