Certain myths are often perpetuated in a discipline, myths which upon later reflection are seen to be what they in fact are: unhelpful, deceptive or simply wrong. Often these myths are perpetuated in spite of good evidence to the contrary. This tendency is not unique to Biblical studies but is a pattern that is found in a range of disciplines. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, addresses this tendency in the so-called hard sciences. He does not use the term myth but rather speaks of the presuppositions of normal science, the scientific paradigm which controls the scientific community of a given time. But as is so often the case, growing evidence mounts that the model is unsatisfactory, that it fails in significant ways to explain evidence which is increasingly seen to be important. The evidence mounts, until a paradigm shift occurs, when the significant or major practitioners of a discipline realise that a new model must be invoked to explain the data at hand.

This passage has aroused much debate about the possibility that Paul is here using Greek rather than Hebrew concepts. Some, like W. L. Knox, have contended that in order to appeal to Hellenistic hearers, the apostle, after his alleged failure at Athens, realised that he must move away from Hebrew categories. (Cf the chapter ‘The Failure of Eschatology’ in St Paul and the Church of the Gentiles.) Others maintain that Paul's language and concepts in this passage can all be explained from his Hebrew background; e.g. W. D. Davies in Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, ch. 10).

An investigation of the second story of creation and the Fall in the light of their exegesis by Phyllis Trible. The strengths and weaknesses of Trible's approach are considered and an evaluation of Genesis 2–3 as a paradigm of Ancient Israel's social and religious history is offered.

The thesis of this paper is that conclusions reached in studying 2 Corinthians may profoundly affect the way Romans is read and interpreted — indeed, a number of difficulties in grasping the nub of Paul's argument may be resolved if we come to Romans with the insight into Paul's thinking that 2 Corinthians provides. The argument depends upon the findings reported in the author's joint work with David Ford, Meaning and Truth in 2 Corinthians (SPCK 1987): for convenience the most relevant of these will be outlined first.

As introduction to the topic may serve two remarks, one about the meaning and importance of the expression ‘Deuteropauline Letters’, and one about the historical and theological background of the question of the relationship between church and Israel.

In June 1272, a General Chapter of the Order of Preachers met in Florence. Among other things, it decided that a new theological study house, open to the general public (a studium generale) should be established in Italy, under the auspices of the Roman Province. That Province, accordingly, entrusted the project to brother Thomas d'Aquino. The choice of site was left, with, perhaps, a certain disregard for administrative propriety, entirely to him. For various reasons, not least among them the support of the Neapolitan crown, he selected Naples. Development was sufficiently fast for him to begin lecturing there that same September. Forty-six years old (probably), he had somewhat over a year left to live. He was ending his career as he had begun it: entrusted with the formation of young theologians. What better opportunity to finish his great unfinished work, the Summa Theologiae, described in what has been called Thomas' only recorded joke (but the remark was seriously meant) as an introduction to the subject for beginners. Having dealt already with man's sovereign Good, and with the general pattern of his return to God, as suggested by the dynamic structures of human nature, it remained for Thomas to consider how, in the concrete, this return to God might come about. As he wrote in the prologue to the Tertia Pars:

As a faithful young Puritan minister John Owen used to visit his people in the parish of Fordham teaching both adults and children the basic doctrines of Protestantism from two catechisms which he himself composed. In the larger one it is asked: Do we know God as he is? The answer is: No; his glorious being is not of us, in this life, to be comprehended. The same concern is apparent at the end of the section on the Trinity. Question: Can we conceive these things as they are in themselves? Answer: Neither we nor yet the angels of heaven are able to dive into these secrets, as they are internally in God; but in respect of the outward dispensation of themselves to us by creation, redemption, and sanctification, a knowledge may be obtained of these things, saving and heavenly.

It is clear that the story of Christ's Passion has a certain family resemblance with tragic stories: the presence of moral conflict; the death of a man; a certain inevitability. But there is another resemblance popularly recognised in tragedies which is problematic: the point to which they bring their audience as they conclude; tragedy is thought of as involving an ‘unhappy’ ending. The conclusion of the Passion comes with the resurrection which is seen as contradicting the proper ‘unhappy’ ending expected in a tragedy; yet the resurrection is surely essential to this story of faith. Is it possible to reach this end-point of tragedy while holding to an active and healthy Christian faith? To answer such a question we need to get to grips with both the nature of tragedy, and with the conditions under which Christian faith is lived. Let us consider first some writers on tragedy who have suggested a rather different idea of tragedy's conclusion.

In the past some of Wolfhart Pannenberg's interpreters have suggested that a major weakness of his revision of the doctrine of God is a neglect of the doctrine of the Trinity. In 1975 Herbert Burhenn criticised Pannenberg for exercising considerable reservation with regard to the three-in-oneness of God and for reducing the trinitarian distinctions of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to temporal distinctions. He also stated that ‘The Trinity cannot function for Pannenberg, as it does for Barth, as a structural principle of theology.’ About a decade later Elizabeth Johnson very cogently noted the need for a well-developed concept of the Trinity in Pannenberg's theology:

InThe Cost of Discipleship Bonhoeffer reflects on the nature and consequences of being called by Christ. He presents the call as bringing the individual into an immediate relationship with Christ, which effects a reconstitution of the individual. This reconstitution is not, however, a solitary and exclusive form of individuality, but a new way of being in all one's relationships, a new form of punctuation operated between oneself and others, God and reality as a whole, as all one's relations are mediated, and one's individuality therefore constituted, by Christ, (pp.84, 87, 145) The disciple is excentrically constituted. Following Christ means moving towards the reality of God, others and the world.

There is much going on in the modern religious scene, particularly in America under the name of ‘Evangelical Christianity’, that seems strange to those of us whose Church experience is shaped more emphatically by an Old-World Presbyterian, Anglican or Lutheran theological orientation. The emphasis upon the individual and the individual's personal ‘saving’ experience sounds strange to ears more attuned to social responsibility and the development of the Christian character in the nurture of the Church community. Where does this emphasis on the individual and his or her personal experience come from? And how did it come to be so much a part of American Church life? Both of these questions could introduce ponderous volumes of social, historical and theological research. But, generally speaking, this tendency to reduce the religious life to an experience of salvation can be traced to the era in the history of dogma which gave rise to Reformed Scholasticism. On the American continent, this approach to Christian faith was promoted by the early Puritan settlers in the context of their own theological concern to maintain a particular manifestation of the nature-grace dichotomy which stressed the legal duly of the individual Christian, and to gain a sense of assurance of election, however elusive that sense might be. While it is well beyond the limitations of this brief essay to trace the development of the Puritan theological orientation, this study will examine one incident in the life of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to profile the development of this Puritan inclination toward experiential individualism which, in various forms, still endures.

We live in a culture marked, as few others have been, by persistent and deep-seated scepticism about the existence and knowability of God. Not only is the intellectual leadership of our times for the most part atheist or agnostic, but theology itself, certainly since the time of Kant, has been in fundamental disarray about the question, as witness, for example, the recent preoccupation with the question of revelation. In this paper I want to suggest, first, that the problem does not begin with Kant, because at least one of the causes of Western atheism is a theological tradition which encourages thought in the essential unknowability of God. Here, a distinction must be drawn. In one sense, of course, the doctrine of the unknowability of God is essential to theology. But to hold it in such a way as to suggest or teach that the unknowable God can in noway make himself known — so that there can be no theological ontology at all — is to offer the kind of hostages to fortune which so much Western theology has done. Can it really be a historical accident that it is here rather than anywhere else that atheism has found so fertile a soil?

Paul Johannes Tillich was born a hundred years ago as is well-known. That he lived into the 1960s is equally wellknown and even what I and some others said of him in the mid and late sixties might be known. However, history moves on and we with it so that it is a different matter that is considered if one asks what his legacy is and what his significance is in the second half of this decade. That is what I want to do here and I want to highlight the legacy by asking whether he elucidates for us the concept of a world theology.

It has always been possible for members of Christian communities to find ways to avoid the force of teachings ascribed to Jesus and to his first followers, short of open repudiation. These days we have some new devices. We can stress the gulf of nineteen centuries separating us, (and our historical reconstructions are so insecure). We can point to our nuclear age as creating a gulf even between us and our parents or grandparents: the ‘godlike’ power a small number of us have to end most or all life on our planet can seem to put everything into a quite new perspective. And we can combine these arguments with enhanced versions of old ones, confining our Christian concern to an ever narrower private and religious sphere, perhaps shaping our public character, but making no specific demands on the expanding areas mapped as autonomously social, political and economic. Then we can go back to the New Testament and ‘read’ Jesus and his first followers in the light of our chosen restrictions.

John Erskine of Dun has recently been pigeon-holed as a ‘Lutheran’; his patterns of thought sharply distinguished from those of his colleague, John Knox. The aim of this paper is to re-examine the theological contexts of this neglected yet crucial Scots reformer and laird. His was a career of particular interest, combining the spheres of lairdly politics and leadership in the reformed Kirk. Besides, an active lifespan of sixty and more years was not given to many in the sixteenth century. John Erskine, laird of the barony of Dun in Angus (between Brechin and Montrose), in addition to enjoying an unusually long life, (born c. 1509: died 1589/90) is also distinguished by his capacity for political survival. One who was never to be so closely connected with the various political factions as to fall with them in their turn, he was rarely so far from the centre of power as to be endangered by any lack of influential friends. To this intricate personal balancing-act was added the further complication of a genuine search for God that brought him to a protestant faith at a date when such beliefs were both heretical and criminal, and later to a belief in the independent jurisdiction of the church at a time when successive governments of Scotland were attempting to assert their authority in ecclesiastical matters.

John Polkinghorne FRS (b.1930), the Cambridge Professor of Mathematical Physics turned Anglican parson enjoys unrivalled opportunities as an apologist for the Christian faith to those with a general scientific education. Without reading a word of his writings, many Christians will be encouraged to know that a distinguished professional scientist is so firmly persuaded of the truth of the Christian faith as to resign a prestigious professional position and embrace the far from prestigious calling of a Christian minister in the secular environment of today. Some who embark on his books may not understand all the scientific allusions, but they will be impressed by his testimony that orthodox Christian belief can exist in harmony with the scientific worldview and vocation.

Every parent is also a child. This truism of kinship is not as obvious as it might seem. A very young nephew of mine once insisted I could not be his grandmother's son because I was not a son but an uncle. He had not grasped the possibility that I could be both.

The late Professor H. R. Mackintosh wrote: ‘All religious knowledge of God, wherever existing, comes by revelation; otherwise we should be committed to the incredible position that man can know God without His willing to be known.’1 This statement brings to light the obvious point that revelation and knowledge of God are of the same piece. Revelation and knowledge of God necessarily belong to one another. It would be as ‘incredible’ for a work on ‘knowledge of God’ to fail to discuss revelation at some point or in some way as it would be for a work on ‘atonement’ to fail to discuss reconciliation. It is not incredible, however, to find an absence of a discussion of atonement or reconciliation, soteriology or union with Christ in works on ‘knowledge of God’. Revelation and ‘knowledge of God’ are for the most part separated from works on atonement and reconciliation. The outstanding characteristic of Professor T. F. Torrance's doctrine of the knowledge of God is that it does not separate revelation and reconciliation. These two are held together in God's work in Israel and in the Person and work of Christ and consequently in our knowing God. As a result, soteriology and epistemology, salvation and knowledge of God are inseparable in Torrance's theology. As our Lord himself said,‘… this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.’2 Among other things this means that Torrance's doctrine of the knowledge of God does not stand as an isolated doctrine at the beginning of his thought cut off from the rest of his theology.