The subject of this paper abounds in historical problems of an extremely intricate nature—some of which arise through the theologically close association of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit with the doctrine of the Holy Trinity; but others of which are rooted in a number of more particular controversies in which the Greek Fathers were involved concerning the Holy Spirit. Among the latter are to be found such questions as the precise identification of the persons against whom many of the Greek writings were directed, for example, who the ‘Tropici’ were, with whom Athanasius deals in the Letters to Serapion, whether ‘Pneumatomachi’ was a generic term used to describe a variety of different heretics, or a proper name referring to an identifiable group existing in one particular place, whether Macedonius was a Macedonian, and so on. Included in the intricate historical problems raised in our period, there is that of accounting for the revival towards the middle of the fourth century of an interest in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit— whether it was due to the developing influence of asceticism, or simply a reaction to a latter-day Arianism working itself out belatedly in heresy concerning the Holy Spirit, or more subtly, whether it was due to a necessity felt by the Church to give substance to the Person and Work of the Holy Spirit, now that the doctrine of the Trinity had replaced the doctrine of the Logos as her central and dominant doctrine.

In this lecture I have three aims in view. First I shall review some of the main points of the theological theory of virtue in its classic medieval form, and consider how the same theme has been taken up in protestant ethics, sometimes in a constructive, sometimes in a negative tone. Second I wish to present my grounds for believing that arguments put forward in protestant ethics against any theory of virtue are insufficient, and to indicate why I hold that protestant ethics too needs an elaborated theory of virtue. Then finally I shall try, at least sketchily, to indicate the direction in which I feel such a theory could be developed.

Various critics of the New Perspective on Paul (NPP) often highlight the lack of church tradition as one deficiency of the various interpretations of Paul. To some, the lack of church history automatically renders such newer interpretations suspect. In turn critics of the NPP often turn to the reformers such as Calvin and Luther to defend the traditional reading of Paul and trace this traditional reading back to Augustine. For the critics, church tradition stands on the side of the traditional reading.

This article seeks to highlight an often neglected early church view on one aspect of the NPP, that of Paul and the Law. This article highlights one of the fiercest exchanges between two church fathers. Through a series of letters, Jerome and Augustine corresponded on Jerome's interpretation of Galatians 2 and the Antioch incident. For Augustine the pastor, nothing less than the veracity of scripture was at stake and Augustine mounts a defence of Paul's actions in Galatians 2 in response to Jerome's insistence of an agreed-upon lie between Peter and Paul. In the process of Augustine's rebuttal of Jerome, he notes that Paul followed the law without ‘pretence’ and that there was a period in early Christianity where Jewish Christians practised law observance. Augustine highlights the divine origin of the Mosaic law, which renders a positive role for the law in early Christianity, and notes that the negative critique of the law comes within the context of a Gentile audience, but did not have implications for Jewish Christians. Augustine rightly notices and raises the important context of Paul's negative statements on the law and offers a nuanced discussion of Paul's treatment of the law.

Augustine notes some of the important conclusions drawn by the NPP, namely a positive view of the law and its practice by Paul and other Jewish Christians. He also notes the various ways the law functions in Jewish and Gentile contexts. Such a positive view of Paul and the law may appear striking to many, but must be considered by those who are otherwise critical of the NPP. This article shows that there was at least one voice, among others, within the early church which advocated for a positive reading of Paul and the law. The history of interpretation of Galatians 2 offers many insights for contemporary Pauline scholars which ought to be heeded in future discussions. This article, by highlighting the exchange between Jerome and Augustine, seeks to give the NPP a historical ‘rootedness’ and placement within the history of interpretation.

In a book entitled The Christian Pastor and the Working Church, published in 1898, Washington Gladden, a leading figure in the Social Gospel movement, attempts a definition of the field of Pastoral Theology. Gladden's characterisation of pastoral theology as the pragmatic study of the work of the minister and the management of the Church is typical of many definitions, both historical and contemporary:

The purpose of this essay is to gain some clarity on a theological understanding of adoption as a witness to Christian faith. Contrary to contemporary portrayals of adoption as a reproduction option, the principal thesis of this essay is that adoption is rooted in charity. Adoption signifies a loving act of providing familial care and belonging for a child who would otherwise have none. In developing this thesis, baptism and foster care are examined in regard to Christian claims about the nature of the parent–child relationship. It is argued that since children do not belong to their parents, but are entrusted to their care by God, parental authority is therefore limited. Consequently, the parent–child relationship is embedded within a larger community of faith in which a child is affirmed as both gift and sign of hope.

The ‘philosophical theology’ of Paul Tillich is one of the most remarkable features of today's theological landscape, and obviously impressive on any estimate. Yet it has given rise to a great deal of puzzlement. This is not simply because the tightly systematised nature of Tillich's thought has led him to wrap up his ideas in a special terminology. Although the volume of his work in English is now reasonably large, so that his technical vocabulary is no longer unfamiliar, there still seems to be considerable uncertainty about just what is involved in the synthesis between philosophy and religion upon which his theology is based.

The subject which I have been asked to consider is the concept of Ktisis in the New Testament, with special reference to those decisively important texts, Romans 8.18ff, and Colossians 1.15ff. At the cost of repeating what others may have said, or may be going to say, here, I must preface my remarks with some observations about the attitude to creation which seems to be characteristic of the Old Testament, because to a large extent it is presupposed by the New Testament writers. The following points seem to be relevant for our purpose. First, the views of the Hebrew writers about creation are, in a sense, wholly anthropocentric. Man stands at the centre of the whole picture, and the rest of the animate and inanimate world is seen as a kind of backcloth for the drama of human history. What we ourselves would call ‘nature’ derives its significance from the activity within it of mankind and, in particular, of the chosen people of God. In this sense, what we call the ‘natural order’ revolves around man as the central point and focus which gives meaning to the whole. The creation of the world is not extra-historical. It is itself a part of history; for the creation narratives are part of a story which continues straight on to the great redemptive events which formed the basis of Israel's faith in God and the ground of her existence as his people. In the pentateuch, as in the prophets and psalms, creation and redemption are inseparably linked together.

‘Biblical theology’ has long influenced modern theological method, especially Protestant, as both boon and bane. Its role has been seen as either pivotal or problematic in the attempt to construe the Christian Bible as scripture with unified teaching for the contemporary church. The attempt to unfold biblical teaching as having organic unity, related to an internal structure of theological concepts, is frequently perceived as a failure, a has-been that leaves us only with fragmentation – between parts of the Bible, between academy and church, church and world, clergy and laity, and between various theological disciplines. Today a new movement is afoot, often labelled ‘theological interpretation of scripture’. Some of its adherents define this practice as distinct from, even opposed to, biblical theology. Others treat the two practices as virtually coterminous, while perhaps contesting what ‘biblical theology’ is typically taken to be in favour of new theological hermeneutics. Much of the difficulty in defining the relationship, then, stems from lingering debates about what biblical theology can or should be. The rest of the difficulty is perhaps rooted in the dilemma of any interdisciplinary efforts: how to breach unhelpful sections of disciplinary boundaries without redefining territory so nebulously that no one knows where they are.

This essay seeks to explore speech-act theory in its relation to biblical interpretation. Its initial focus falls on the application of N. Wolterstorff whose book Divine Discourse provided the decisive catalyst for the recent debates. Building on the different kinds of action involved when speaking (locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary) Wolterstorff draws two important hermeneutical implications. First, the theory affords a way of understanding the unity of scripture in its entirety as God's book; second, it enables the reader to acknowledge the infallibility of God's Word as divine discourse without ascribing infallibility to the human words of scripture.

The second part attempts to offer a critical assessment of Wolterstorff's application of his theory, especially in its failure to deal adequately with the function of the Christian canon which shaped the church's traditions in such a way as to provide a rule-of-faith for the theological guidance of subsequent generations of readers. By abandoning the hermeneutical understanding of scripture developed by Irenaeus and Calvin, Wolterstorff flounders in his inability to overcome the threat of scripture's becoming a ‘wax nose’ in which the noematic content of what God now says in divine discourse is not identical with the meaning of the biblical sentence itself.

The final section examines the exegesis of the well-known scholar A. Thiselton, whose work has done much in developing a speech-act theory. The conclusion reached is that Thiselton's application of the theory is far different from that of Wolterstorff's and avoids many of the problems which plague Wolterstorff's exegesis. The implication of this analysis is to argue that speech-act theory cannot be indiscriminately lumped together, because various forms of the theory often reflect different hermeneutical theories of biblical interpretation.

It was Gerald Heard who said: “Newton banished God from nature, Darwin banished Him from life, and now Freud has banished Him from His last stronghold, the soul.” The one thing I wish here to suggest about that dictum is this—that if for great numbers of our contemporaries the effect of Newton, Darwin and Freud has been to banish the divine, it has even more emphatically been to banish the demonic. St. Paul's “principalities and powers” and “spirit forces of evil” are now known, we are told, to have been mere apocalyptic imagination.

In 1892, Hastings Rashdall delivered a University Sermon at Oxford entitled ‘Abelard's Doctrine of the Atonement’. In this sermon, he outlines with increasing enthusiasm what he considered to be ‘as noble and perspicuous a statement as can even yet be found of the faith which is still the life of Christendom’. The central theme of his sermon is that in the twelfth century figure of Peter Abailard can be found a theory of the Atonement which meets the demands of an age shaped in the spirit of Darwinism and historical criticism. What Rashdall understands by the ‘Abelardian doctrine of the Atonement’ is expounded at much greater length in his 1915 Bampton Lectures, The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology.

In the background of Anselm's philosophical theology there appear a number of philosophical issues which have not received as much attention from philosophers as they deserve. Some of these issues are his view on the relation between language and reality; the way he handles the notion of being and its opposite, non-being; and his notions of necessity and eternity. Despite its title, this paper will not issue in a systematic and comprehensive reconstruction of the Anselmian metaphysics, since I doubt that that would be possible. Anselm's objectives were always ultimately theological in character, and he never purported to present a rounded metaphysical system. In his hands the basic notions mentioned were modified through their being employed by such an acute and subtle thinker to articulate and elucidate basic articles of Christian belief. But it is possible to discern a central unifying theme through which his views on metaphysical topics are connected. That theme is his interesting and quite novel account of truth. In this paper I will focus upon that theme for the light it sheds on these other issues.

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:

This article argues that Herman Bavinck's organic worldview allows him to use classical and modern thinkers in an eclectic yet theologically principled manner. To vindicate this claim, the article observes Bavinck's self-conscious comments regarding the task of Reformed catholicity, his use of Schleiermacher and Augustine to construct a theological account of self-consciousness, and his resituating of Thomistic motifs within an organic framework in his epistemology. In so doing, the article suggests that Bavinck's catholicity is broader than previously observed, thus generating a different way of interpreting Bavinck's use of thinkers who are often thought to be in tension.

The biblical narrative describes the progressive course of creation ending with man. Man appears as its culmination, as a centre on which all the planes of the world converge, a ‘microcosm’. But, ‘created in the image of God’ he is also, according to the Fathers, a ‘microtheos’. This central position of man explains the normative subjection of nature to man as to its cosmic logos, as to one of its multiple hypostases. Man ‘cultivates’ nature, gives a name to creatures and things, ‘humanises’ them. His direct relation with the Creator is constitutive of his being.

The foundation of Christian belief,' states Paul Tillich, ‘is not the historical Jesus, but the biblical picture of the Christ.’1 This statement is only now beginning to elicit the serious comment that one might expect from the statement of so great a theologian as Paul Tillich. Tillich's penetrating analysis of the meaning of Jesus as the Christ is a profound contribution to the Christian understanding of the Incarnation. Donald Baillie was surely right, too, in expressing his enthusiasm for Tillich's christological interpretation of history when he stated that there seemed to him to be ‘deep truth … in the idea that Christology stands for the Christian interpretation of history as against other interpretations’.2 Even Tillich's claim that ‘to practise Christology does not mean to turn backward to an unknown historical past or to exert oneself about the applicability of questionable mythical categories to an unknown historical persoanality’,3 contains a refreshing and valid emphasis upon Christology as living existential faith rather than arid theoretical speculation. Yet Christianity has always maintained that its foundation is Jesus of Nazareth in whom the Word of God became flesh. Tilliach's Christology must therefore stand or fall on this christological question which he regards as quite subordinate: the question of the historical basis of the biblical picture of the Christ. If the foundation of Tillich's Christology is “not the historical Jesus, but the biblical picture of the Christ”, how much importance Tillich does actually allow the historical dimension in his Christology must be carefully examined.

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was born on the 2Ist day of November 1768, and died on the 12th day of February 1834. It is altogether fitting that as we honour the birth of this great man by dedicating to his memory this number of the Scottish Journal of Theology, we should consider that aspect of his thought which has continued to influence us in the twentieth century so powerfully.

Dilthey, in his famous essay, ‘Die Enstehung der Hermeneutik’, first published in 1900, taught us that Matthias Flacius Illyricus, the mid sixteenth-century Lutheran theologian, was the author of the first significant treatise on hermeneutics. Conceding a classic Protestant opinion once articulated by Flacius, he consigned medieval interpretation to what must have seemed a justified oblivion: he simply ignored the period between Origen and John Calvin. Calvin, Flacius, and especially Friedrich Schleiermacher were the main contributors to the rediscovery of the interpretive force of history and language, which Dilthey surely felt was best appreciated by his own philosophy of culture. Hans-Georg Gadamer later tried to show that Dilthey himself was weak on language and misinformed about history, falling prey to the movement that Gadamer opprobriously called ‘historicism’. Gadamer's own view of the development of hermeneutics—with its subjection of historical knowledge to ‘our own present horizon of understanding’, its accent on language, and its debt to Martin Heidegger—shifted the chronology of hermeneutics even closer to the present According to Gadamer, the ‘hermeneutic problem’ was specifically created by the alienation of exegesis and understanding from ‘application’, the importance of which was discovered only by Romantic philosophy and best redressed with the help of a language-obsessed philosophy of being. But as was the case for Dilthey, the crucial moment in the development of hermeneutics remained the discovery of the role of language in ‘meaning’, in the broadest sense, so that texts could only be understood in the grand context of a philosophy of life or, in Gadamerian terms, in the context of a philosophy that functioned as present interpretation.

Traditional Reformation scholarship argued that conceiving faith as a habit is one of the differences between Reformed orthodoxy on the one hand, and Reformation thought on the other. Two theses have been defended in this respect. First, it has been argued that conceptualising faith as a habit was a typical example of introducing Thomistic and Aristotelian concepts into the Reformed faith. Secondly, several scholars have argued that the conceptualisation of faith as a habit overrules the role of the act of faith in salvation. The function of faith as a response to God's offer of salvation becomes secondary to the doctrine of predestination. By unravelling the transformation process which the concept of habit underwent through the history of Christian theology, the author shows that the first thesis is seriously flawed. As to the second thesis, he proposes an alternative interpretation of the sources by arguing that the nature of faith as a habit implies that it can only be known from its acts. At the end of the article, he provides some remarks about the value of the concept of habitus fidei for contemporary theology.