Divine simplicity is plausibly seen as a biblical doctrine, given a standard account of the way doctrine is derived from Scripture. The polemic of Jeremiah 10 against ancient Near Eastern mis pî or ‘mouth opening’ rituals involves a commitment to a radical account of divine aseity. In dialogue with Thomas Aquinas and a number of contemporary figures, I suggest this view of divine aseity might plausibly be thought to lead to the inference to divine simplicity.

This essay considers whether eschatological speculation is appropriate in light of the mystery of human suffering. I argue that a pneumatological construal of the beatific vision offers important resources for this question. In the beatific vision, the Spirit perfects the human person by bringing them to participatory attention to the whole of their life, so that the person participates in the final event of making meaning out of the life lived. There is no general, all-encompassing description of how this heals a history of suffering, because the redemption happens in the attention shared between each particular individual and God.

The present essay considers what, if any, metaphysical perspective can be discerned in the thought of René Girard. Aware of the fact that Girard has little to say about metaphysics and that what he does say harbours the same reservations and misgivings as his postmodern confreres, I argue that the rudiments of a metaphysics can nevertheless be identified. This metaphysics is not one of violence that Girard, following Martin Heidegger, associates with the violence of Heraclitean logos. Rather, it is one predicated upon the dynamic interplay between identity and difference realised concretely within the incarnate Christ. My claim is that ‘metaphysics’, much like what occurred to the notion of ‘sacrifice’ in Girard’s thinking, requires further development and even redemption. This essay takes an initial step in that direction.

After reviewing several stances in modern theology on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus, this article argues that a common feature of the worldviews of Baroque Catholicism, classical Reformation theology, and the Enlightenment, namely, their separation of the supernatural and natural realms into ‘two orders’, explains the attractiveness of the apologetical strategy of affirming the reality of the resurrection as a non-historical, supernatural event. Drawing on the temporal and spatial imaginary of Henri de Lubac’s theology of grace, it concludes by pressing the case for a theological understanding of the resurrection of Jesus as a historical event that valorises the eschatological resonance of time.

This article examines Paul’s view of the law with attention to the figure of the pedagogue. It suggests that the law stands in a redemptive-historical role to the coming of Christ. It accomplishes this through a comparison between Seneca’s Moral Epistles and Paul. Seneca’s discussion is a helpful heuristic to elucidate Paul’s teaching on Jewish law. Paul highly values the Jewish law and explains that it leads humans to Christ as a pedagogue, although the law itself does not have the power to make righteous. Scholars offer arguments in support of positive or negative attitudes toward the pedagogue, but the pedagogue’s basic role was to bring a child to the age of maturity and rationality. Paul’s thesis is to argue that the Jewish law functions, historically and ethically, to lead one to Christ. This interpretation suggests that the law plays a positive redemptive-historical role in Galatians 3:19–4:11.

That God could have not created the world is a commonplace of Christian theology, often invoked to articulate the meaning of divine freedom. This essay argues that this counterfactual predication cannot be made consistent with the classical doctrine of God and so cannot be an adequate way of characterising God’s freedom. Drawing on a critical realist account of coherent counterfactual predications, it is shown that every cogent counterfactual attribution implies that the subject of the attribution is located in time, possessed of potential, and knowable in its essence. These entailments of counterfactual predications render them formally incompatible with a classical theist doctrine of God, in which God is not temporally located, purely actual and unknowable in essence by humans in the status viatoris. If the counterfactual on divine predicating compromises the divine simplicity, divine perfection and divine pure actuality, it should be understood to be a metaphorical, not substantial divine predication.