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.

Because it is manifest that ‘the world’, traditionally said to be God’s good creation, is shot through with profound ‘wrongs’, the question arises about the sense in which the physical creation is good in and of itself, for its own sake. This essay first briefly argues that theological strategies attempting to ground creation’s goodness in either God’s relating to reconcile sinful humankind or in God’s relating in eschatological blessing are inadequate, and then urges that it can be adequately grounded in a doctrine of creation that shifts focus from offering a causal explanation of the existence of ‘the world’ to description of what it is to be ‘creature’, backed by an exegetical shift in how the text that traditionally warrants doctrines of creation, Genesis 1:1-2:25, is read. That shift entails acknowledgement of two theological aporias, one of which it is important to stress is theologically insoluble, while the other is soluble.

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.

This article considers John Owen’s introduction of the word ‘atonement’ as a term of art for Christ’s satisfaction in response to Socinian attacks on that doctrine. Owen’s innovation complicates the use of atonement theories in the dogmatic history of atonement by F. C. Baur and his successors, because Owen’s account of Christ’s work extends beyond satisfaction, and he uses ‘atonement’ to emphasise not the mechanism of that work but its relational necessity. Even as the framework of atonement theories obscures these aspects of Owen’s work, his novel use of ‘atonement’ lays the foundation for satisfaction to become an atonement theory in Baur’s sense.

This paper broaches ‘natural theology’ in terms of the conceptual systems through which revelation is understood, as opposed to questions regarding the sources of revelation. I do so by analysing Barth’s rejection of natural theology in terms of what it can mean to treat a logic of prior possibility as determining what revelation’s conditions of possibility must be. I begin by reading Emil Brunner’s ‘Nature and Grace’ alongside Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections on mathematical necessity in order to show that Brunner’s thinking of possibility subordinates the necessities of revelation to what Wittgenstein calls ‘the logical machine’. I then argue that Barth’s rejection of natural theology involves rejecting the workings of this machine and so rejecting the axiomatic force of prior possibility for theology. I conclude by tracing two consequences of this rejection, one related to creativity, the other to political crisis.

Contrary to longstanding opinion, it was Luther, not Calvin, who first interpreted Christ’s descent into hell as an event of suffering and feeling forsaken by God. Though Lutheran tradition afterward emphasised a victorious interpretation taken from Luther’s famous ‘Torgau sermon’, a more ambivalent legacy exists in his own writings. Sufficient attention is therefore warranted to view Luther as a forerunner to Calvin’s use of the cry of dereliction to interpret the descensus. Understanding this nuance can smooth the edges of a myopic age-old debate between the two traditions, since the two Reformers have more in common than not on the doctrine.