Using a thorough, integrated biblical theology to make sense of the 'master story' of Scripture, Allan J. McNicol explores the nature and importance of the Bible's abiding narrative of the persistence of God's promises to his people, and their hope of final triumph. Special attention is given to the often contentious claim that these early followers of Jesus presumed that they stood in full continuity with Israel, the historic people of God, and were claiming that many of God's promises were coming to fulfilment among them. McNicol presents a closer analysis of the texts as he shows how the theme of the people of God fits into the wider literary productions of these major New Testament writers.

Steven J. Duby examines the doctrine of divine simplicity. This discussion is centered around the three distinguishing features: grounding in biblical exegesis, use of Thomas Aquinas and the Reformed Orthodox; and the writings of modern systematic and philosophical theologians. Duby outlines the general history of the Christian doctrine of divine simplicity and discusses the methodological traits and essential contents of the dogmatic account. He substantiates the claims of the doctrine of divine simplicity by demonstrating that they are implied and required by the scriptural account of God. Duby considers how simplicity is inferred from God's singularity and aseity, as well as how it is inferred from God's immutability and infinity, and the Christian doctrine of creation. The discussion ends with the response to major objections to simplicity, namely that the doctrine does not pay heed to the plurality of the divine attributes, that it eradicates God's freedom in creating the world and acting toward us; and that it does not cohere with the personal distinctions to be made in the doctrine of the Trinity.

The late Bishop John A T Robinson wrote this book early on in his life but it was never published. This book is considered to be of such scholarly importance and so key to an understanding of Robinson's theology that it is now published in full. In 1960, Eric Mascall the Oxford Theologian published a book called "He Who Is", a neo-Thomist approach to the existence of God. This ran against all that Robinson believed most deeply about belief in God - influenced as he was by the new wave of German theologians. Bultmann, Buber but above all Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This book was his response to Mascall and hence the title. This book is about the notion of personality and it's relation to Christian theology, with particular reference to the contemporary "I-Thou Philosophy" of Martin Buber and it's relation to the doctrine of "The Trinity" and "The Person of Christ." This book was unquestionably the foundation of John A T Robinson theological work. Barth, Brunner, Berdayev, Kierkegaard, Heim and Mc Murray all had an influence on this book (as the reader will quickly observe). But at the heart of Robinson's thinking was Buber's small but seminal volume "I and Thou". More than anyone else, Robinson integrated the insights of Buber philosophy with the biblical doctrines of God and man. It was in this way that Robinson in this book explored both the history and implications of this tradition of thought of how one could speak of personality in God rather than God as a person. In this book Robinson began to work as a theologian as he meant to go on: questioning accepted doctrine, stripping away, getting to the heart, re-interpreting. He was in Karl Barth's great phrase taking rational trouble over the mystery.

The word 'providence' seems to have dropped out of our everyday Christian vocabulary. But questions about God's activity in our world - his 'provide-ence' for us and his creation - are as alive as ever before. Providence is the point at which theologians and the broader Christian community find their most intense conversations. Questions about God's activity in the world today, his guidance of believers, human freedom versus divine will, the place of prayer in the workings of his will, his responsibility for evil - all of these are related to his providence. How we think about these issues is deeply related to our understanding of God and of how we should serve and worship him. In the face of recent arguments that God's knowledge of the future is limited and that he therefore takes risks, Paul Helm undergirds his discussion of divine providence with an understanding of God as risk-free. The Providence of God is a clear, vigorous and thought-provoking introduction to a critical area of theology.

Contemporary debates on God's emotionality are divided between two extremes. Impassibilists deny God's emotionality on the basis of God's omniscience, omnipotence and incorporeality. Passibilists seem to break with tradition by affirming divine emotionality, often focusing on the idea that God suffers with us.Contemporary philosophy of emotion reflects this divide. Some philosophers argue that emotions are voluntary and intelligent mental events, making them potentially compatible with omniscience and omnipotence. Others claim that emotions are involuntary and basically physiological, rendering them inconsistent with traditional divine attributes. Thinking Through Feeling: God, Emotion and Passibility creates a three-way conversation between the debate in theology, contemporary philosophy of emotion, and pre-modern (particularly Augustinian and Thomist) conceptions of human affective experience. It also provides an exploration of the intelligence and value of the emotions of compassion, anger and jealousy.

Apophasis has become a major topic in the humanities, particularly in philosophy, religion, and literature. This two-volume anthology gathers together most of the important historical works on apophaticism and illustrates the diverse trajectories of apophatic discourse in ancient, modern, and postmodern times. William Franke provides a major introductory essay on apophaticism at the beginning of each volume, and shorter introductions to each anthology selection. Franke is an excellent guide. In the introductions to both volumes, he traces ways in which the selections are linked by common concerns and conceptions, rhetorical strategies, and spiritual or characteristic affinities. The selections in both volumes explore, in one way or another, a fundamental challenge: how can human beings talk about a God who defies language, and more generally, how can they use their limited language to express the unlimited, open nature of their existence and relations to others? In the first volume, "Classic Formulations", Franke offers excerpts from Plato, Plotinus, Damascius, the Bible, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides, Rumi, Thomas Aquinas, Marguerite Porete, Dante, Teresa of Avila, and John of the Cross, among others. The second volume, "Modern and Contemporary Transformations" contains texts by Holderlin, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Dickinson, Rilke, Kafka, Rosenzweig, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Weil, Schoenberg, Adorno, Beckett, Celan, Levinas, Derrida, Marion, and more. Both volumes of "On What Cannot be Said" underscore the significance of the apophatic tradition. Scholars and students in all branches of the humanities will find these volumes instructive and useful.

Debates about the existence of God persist but remain at an impasse between opposing answers. God at the Crossroads of Worldviews reframes the debate from a new perspective, characterizing the way these positions have been defined and defended not as wrong, per se, but rather as odd or awkward. Paul Chung begins with a general survey of the philosophical debate regarding the existence of God, particularly as the first cause, and how this involves a bewildering array of often-incommensurable positions that differ on the meaning of key concepts, criteria of justification, and even on where to start the discussion. According to Chung, these positions are in fact arguments both from and against larger, more comprehensive intellectual positions, which in turn comprise a set of rival "worldviews." Moreover, there is no neutral rationality completely independent of these worldviews and capable of resolving complex intellectual questions, such as that of the existence of God. Building from Alasdair MacIntyre's writings on rival intellectual traditions, Chung proposes that to argue about God, we must first stand at the "crossroads" of the different intellectual journeys of the particular rival worldviews in the debate, and that the "discovery" of such a crossroad itself constitutes an argument about the existence of God. Chung argues that this is what Thomas Aquinas accomplished in his Five Ways, which are often misunderstood as simple "proofs." From such crossroads, the debate may proceed toward a more fruitful exploration of the question of God's existence. Chung sketches out one such crossroad by suggesting ways in which Christianity and scientific naturalism can begin a mutual dialogue from a different direction. God at the Crossroads of Worldviews will be read by philosophers of religion, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and theologians and general readers interested in the new atheism debates.

This powerful collection of essays focuses on the representation of God in the Book of Ezekiel. With topics spanning across projections of God, through to the implications of these creations, the question of the divine presence in Ezekiel is explored. Madhavi Nevader analyses Divine Sovereignty and its relation to creation, while Dexter E. Callender Jnr and Ellen van Wolde route their studies in the image of God, as generated by the character of Ezekiel. The assumption of the title is then inverted, as Stephen L. Cook writes on 'The God that the Temple Blueprint Creates', which is taken to its other extreme by Marvin A. Sweeney in his chapter on 'The Ezekiel that God Creates', and finds a nice reconciliation in Daniel I. Block's chapter, 'The God Ezekiel Wants Us to Meet.' Finally, two essays from Christian biblical scholar Nathan MacDonald and Jewish biblical scholar, Rimon Kasher, offer a reflection on the essays about Ezekiel and his God.

How exactly could God achieve infallible foreknowledge of every future event, including the free actions of human persons? How could God exercise careful providence over these same events? Byerly offers a novel response to these important questions by contending that God exercises providence and achieves foreknowledge by ordering the times. The first part of the book defends the importance of the above questions. After characterizing the contemporary freedom-foreknowledge debate, Byerly argues that this debate has focused too narrowly on a certain argument for theological fatalism. This argument attempts to show that the existence of infallible divine foreknowledge poses a unique threat to the existence of creaturely libertarian freedom. The author argues, however, that bare existence of infallible divine foreknowledge cannot threaten freedom in this way; at most, the mechanics whereby this foreknowledge is achieved might so threaten human freedom. In the second part of the book, Byerly develops a model for understanding the mechanics whereby infallible foreknowledge is achieved which would not threaten creaturely libertarian freedom.According to the model, God infallibly foreknows every future event because God has placed the times which constitute the history of the world in primitive earlier-than relations to one another. After defending the consistency of this model of the mechanics of divine foreknowledge with creaturely libertarian freedom, the author applies the model to divine providence more generally. A novel defense of concurrentism is the result.

‘In the beginning was the Word,’ says the Gospel of John. This sentence – and the words of all four gospels – is central to the teachings of the Christian church and has shaped Western art, literature and language, and the Western mind. Yet in the years after the death of Christ there was not merely one word, nor any consensus as to who Jesus was or why he had mattered. There were many different Jesuses, among them the aggressive Jesus who scorned his parents and crippled those who opposed him, the Jesus who sold his twin into slavery and the Jesus who had someone crucified in his stead. Moreover, in the early years of the first millennium there were many other saviours, many sons of gods who healed the sick and cured the lame. But as Christianity spread, they were pronounced unacceptable – even heretical – and they faded from view. Now, in Heretic, Catherine Nixey tells their extraordinary story, one of contingency, chance and plurality. It is a story about what might have been.

Does God's existence make a difference to how we explain morality? Mark C. Murphy critiques the two dominant theistic accounts of morality--natural law theory and divine command theory--and presents a novel third view. He argues that we can value natural facts about humans and their good, while keeping God at the centre of our moral explanations.
The characteristic methodology of theistic ethics is to proceed by asking whether there are features of moral norms that can be adequately explained only if we hold that such norms have some sort of theistic foundation. But this methodology, fruitful as it has been, is one-sided. God and Moral Law proceeds not from the side of the moral norms, so to speak, but from the God side of things: what sort of explanatory relationship should we expect between God and moral norms given the existence of the God of orthodox theism? Mark C. Murphy asks whether the conception of God in orthodox theism as an absolutely perfect being militates in favor of a particular view of the explanation of morality by appeal to theistic facts. He puts this methodology to work and shows that, surprisingly, natural law theory and divine command theory fail to offer the sort of explanation of morality that we would expect given the existence of the God of orthodox theism. Drawing on the discussion of a structurally similar problem--that of the relationship between God and the laws of nature--Murphy articulates his new account of the relationship between God and morality, one in which facts about God and facts about nature cooperate in the explanation of moral law.

The Suffering of the Impassible God provides a major reconsideration of the notion of divine impassibility in patristic thought. The question whether, in what sense, and under what circumstances suffering may be ascribed to God runs as a golden thread through such major controversies as Docetism, Patripassianism, Arianism, and Nestorianism. It is commonly claimed that in these debates patristic theology fell prey to the assumption of Hellenistic philosophy about the impassibility of God and departed from the allegedly biblical view, according to which God is passible. As a result, patristic theology is presented as claiming that only the human nature of Christ suffered, while the divine nature remained unaffected. Paul L. Gavrilyuk argues that this standard view misrepresents the tradition. In contrast, he construes the development of patristic thought as a series of dialectical turning points taken to safeguard the paradox of God's voluntary suffering in the flesh. For the Fathers the attribute of divine impassibility functioned in a restricted sense as an apophatic qualifier of all divine emotions and as an indicator of God's full and undiminished divinity. The Fathers at the same time admitted qualified divine passibility of the Son of God within the framework of the Incarnation. Gavrilyuk shows that the Docetic, Arian, and Nestorian alternatives represent different attempts at dissolving the paradox of the Incarnation. These three alternatives are alike in that they start with the presupposition of God's unrestricted impassibility: the Docetic view proposes to give up the reality of Christ's human experiences; the Arian position sacrifices Christ's undiminished divinity; while the Nestorian alternative isolates the experiences and sufferings of Christ's humanity from his Godhead. In contrast to these alternatives, the mind of the Church succeeded in keeping God's transcendence and undiminished divinity in tension with God's intimate involvement in human suffering. It is precisely because God's divinity and transcendence are never lost in suffering that the Incarnation becomes a genuine act of divine compassion, capable of transforming and healing the human condition.

This volume brings together articles on the cult of the mother-goddess Cybele and her consort Attis, from the emergence of the religion in Anatolia through its expansion into Greece and Italy to the latest times of the Roman Empire and its farthest extent west, the Iberian Peninsula.
It combines the work of established scholars with that of young researchers in the field, and represents a truly international perspective.
The reader will find treatment "inter alia of Cybele's emasculated priests, the Galli; the dissemination of Cybele-cult through the harbour city, Miletus; the cult of Cybele in Ephesus; the rock-cut sanctuary of Cybele at Akrai in Sicily; the competition between the Cybele-cult and Christianity; and the role of Attis in Neo-Platonic philosophy.

The general goal of this book is to add one more voice to the growing chorus of opinion that the theologies of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Barth may have far more in common that the many insistent assertions of the latter, or the partisans of either, would lead one to believe. While there can be no easy reconciliation of the differences which do in fact exist between these two figures, the book will argue that these differences do not always stem from irreconcilable starting points. This book will investigate one aspect of their theologies--the doctrine of Creation.
The thesis of the book asserts that both Barth and Schleiermacher take a Christological orientation to the doctrine of Creation. Approaching their theologies in this fashion allows them to solve the problem of maintaining dogmatic coherence and continuity with the Church's historic confessions while also meeting certain modern, external intellectual demands confronting those systems. To put it more sharply, this study claims that each uses Christ as the hermeneutical key for interpreting Creation, and that each does so in an effort to remain true to the faith handed down from the past while maintaining intellectual integrity in the present. This underlying connection perceptible in both Barth's and Schleiermacher's work forges one continuity between them and suggests that there may be certain fundamental similarities in their respective theologies in spite of other well-known differences.

The doctrine of the Trinity has been central to Christian faith since the fourth century, but it is often the cause of more confusion than understanding. The author here overcomes this by looking at it from the point of view of one who vehemently rejected it. Eunomius of Cyzicus was condemned as a heretic during his lifetime in the fourth century and after. Richard Paul Vaggione uses Eunomius' life to examine how the whole Christian community, including ordinary men and women, helped determine how this often abused doctrine was - and is - understood.

Hilary of Poitiers (c300-368), Bishop and Theologian, was instrumental in shaping the development of pro-Nicene theology in the West. Carl Beckwith engages the extensive scholarship on the fourth-century Trinitarian debates and brings new light on the structure and chronology of Hilary's monumental De Trinitate.
There is a broad scholarly consensus that Hilary combined two separate theological works, a treatise on faith (De Fide) and a treatise against the 'Arians' (Adversus Arianos), to create De Trinitate. In spite of this the question of when and why Hilary performed this task has largely remained unanswered. Beckwith addresses this puzzle, situating Hilary's De Trinitate in its historical and theological context and offering a close reading of his text. He demonstrates that Hilary made significant revisions to the early books of his treatise; revisions that he attempted to conceal from his readers in order to give the impression of a unified work on the Trinity.
Beckwith argues that De Fide was written in 356 following Hilary's condemnation at the synod of Beziers and prior to receiving a decision on his exile from the Emperor. When Hilary arrived in exile, he wrote a second work, Adversus Arianos. Following the synod of Sirmium in 357 and his collaboration with Basil of Ancyra in early 358, Hilary recast his efforts and began to write De Trinitate. He decided to incorporate his two earlier works, De Fide and Adversus Arianos, into this project. Toward that end, he returned to his earlier works and drastically revised their content by adding new prefaces and new theological and exegetical material to reflect his mature pro-Nicene theology. Beckwith provides a compelling case for the nature of these radical revisions, crucial textual alterations that have never before been acknowledged in the scholarship on De Trinitate."

This volume provides new directions for thinking about the structure, organization, and "function" of the gods of the Levantine and ancient Near Eastern worlds, arguing that the structure of the pantheon worshiped in Syria-Palestine mirrored the social structure of the city-states of that region.

This book presents a fascinating, philosophical approach to the concept of divine revelation, exploring the implications this theory may have for generating a new concept of religious truth. "Obstacles to Divine Revelation" applies a philosophical approach to examining the concept of divine revelation and explores the notion that it may not be a simple matter for God, if there is a God, to give revelation to human beings.Rolfe King argues that there are obstacles to divine revelation and that exploring these leads to a significant clarification of the idea of evidence for God. These obstacles may also account for aspects of divine hiddenness which have not been adequately explored in philosophy of religion or theology. King contends that it is impossible for God to give human beings knowledge of God unless they also have some trust, or faith, in God, and that it is impossible to separate the concept of evidence of possible divine revelation from notions of divine plans.The idea of a necessary structure of revelation, should there be a God who chooses to give revelation, is explored, and it is argued that this leads to Hume's famous argument about miracles being turned on its head. A unique explanation of the narrative power of the incarnation in Christian theology is given, seeing incarnation as part of the best divine plan to overcome obstacles to revelation. King highlights a new theory of religious truth as part of a suggested wider theory of knowledge which will be of interest to philosophers in both the Anglo-American and continental traditions of philosophy.

'Content analysis'-which is a computer-assisted form of textual analysis-is used to examine divine activity in six prophetic texts, comparing God's activity to that of humans. In this methodologically innovative study, the author concludes, in the light of quantitative data, that God is harsher to non-Israelites than to Israelites in all the texts, and much kinder to Israelites in Joel than in the typical prophet. God and humans are involved in much the same kinds of physical and mental processes, but to considerably different degrees. Griffin argues persuasively that the God of the prophets is not the 'wholly other' of some theologies, but neither do his actions follow exactly the human pattern.

Richard Swinburne presents a substantially rewritten and updated edition of his most celebrated book. No other work has made a more powerful case for the probability of the existence of God. Swinburne argues compellingly that the existence of the universe, its law-governed nature and fine-tuning, human consciousness and moral awareness, and evidence of miracles and religious experience, all taken together (and despite the occurrence of pain and suffering), make it likely that there is a God.

David Coffey considers the full range of issues surrounding the Trinity, one of the central doctrines of Christian faith. He looks at these issues in historical and ecumenical context, with the goal of arriving at a balanced vision that incorporates the insights of both the Western and Eastern churches. In particular, he keeps in sight both the immanent aspect of the Trinity (the Godhead considered in itself) and the Trinity's economic aspect (its role within the economy of salvation). He also suggests a way to resolve the ecumenical problem of Filioquism vs. Monopatrism -- the issue that has divided East from West for nearly a millennium.