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.

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 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.

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.

This article demonstrates that Evelyn Underhill’s 1920s shift from voluntarist mysticism to christocentric participation reflects a modern Anglican retrieval of Augustine’s doctrine of grace. Drawing on her books, letters, and revisions to Mysticism, it argues that wartime disillusionment and Friedrich von Hügel’s guidance reoriented her from Neoplatonic aspiration toward divine initiative, ecclesial emphasis and christological mediation. Underhill emerges as a constructive theologian of grace whose mature outlook challenges accounts that centre religious progress in human effort, insisting instead on God’s prior action and the mediating work of Christ.

In his book The Work of the Holy Spirit, Kuyper begins (in the original Dutch version) with an extensive reference to John Owen. This raises the question of his relationship to Owen. Is his theology derived from John Owen? This study outlines Owen’s view of regeneration. We then consider how Kuyper developed his theology of regeneration. It appears that the metaphor of the ‘seed’ is central to his understanding of the new birth. The seed can retain its germinating capacity for years and only then sprout. When we compare this metaphor with Owen, it appears that Kuyper uses a concept that John Owen also uses, but he elaborates in a completely different way so that it ultimately becomes a different concept.