Contrary to periodic challenges from a viewpoint of historical scepticism or relativism, Jerome's late fourth-century description of Simon Peter may be said to represent a critical and consensual account of the Apostle's demise in Rome as this was reflected in early Christian memory of the first two centuries, both in the East and in the West. Three centuries earlier, the much-debated passage in 1 Clement 5 represents (for all its ambiguities) an integral strand of such living memory – citing the founding apostles' death for their faith according to local Roman tradition while discreetly airbrushing the specific circumstances of their demise. It is significant, finally, that local memory of Peter's martyrdom remained confined to Rome and was never subject to competing claims elsewhere.

It is widely known that early on in his teaching career Karl Barth advanced a concept of the ‘orders of creation’, but that he retracted that concept in his later work in reaction to the tragic use that had been made of it by the National Socialist movement in Germany. However, two aspects of this movement remain relatively unexplored: first, the underlying material continuity between Barth's early ethics and his later ethics that this movement occludes; and second, the significant methodological shift in Barth's theology which this movement attests. This article explores both these aspects of Barth's theological development through his treatment of the ‘orders of creation’.

There are several ways whereby medieval theories of vision may have contributed to the rise of practices some saw as idolatrous. A feature of much medieval art is the rise of naturalistic representation. This process was facilitated by the use of linear perspective, based ultimately on Euclid's visual cone. We are told its application led viewers to confuse a representation with its object. The theory of extramission influenced medieval piety profoundly. First, by suggesting that the eye emits a ray and ‘touches’ its object, it led worshippers to believe that seeing the Eucharistic host had a salvific effect. This may have led them to think that seeing images of saints or God had a similar effect. Second, by implying that the subject was active in the process of seeing, it underpinned Augustine's theory of vision, whereby one trained the eye to access the invisible through the visible. However, as he was aware, the untrained eye could linger on physical objects and want to possess them. Finally, there was much debate about how visual information was mediated. Some argued that it was transmitted by intermediate bodies. The parallels between their language and that used by iconophobes to describe the images they rejected are striking and merit further investigation. Others argued that the viewer had direct access to the object. This understanding, when combined with the idea that seeing equates to knowing, may have led worshippers to believe that seeing an image of God meant they might in some sense know him.

Central to Barth's doctrine of election is the notion that Jesus Christ is the subject of election. This implies that Jesus Christ existed from all eternity. I discuss four possible interpretations of this proposition. I analyse these interpretations both in terms of their internal consistency and in terms of their consistency with Barth's overall proposal. Three of the four interpretations, defended by Emil Brunner, Cornelius Berkouwer, John Colwell and Bruce McCormack, I find wanting. With the fourth interpretation I lay my own cards on the table and argue that part of the problem lies in Barth's formulation itself. The context of Barth's saying that ‘Christ is the subject of election’ suggests that for Barth, Jesus Christ is not so much identical not with a subject, but with an act: the divine reaching out to that what is not God. This act establishes the act and object of election.

I would like to begin by expressing gratitude to Edwin van Driel for creating the conditions which make possible a genuine debate on the issues raised by my essay in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth. I have, of course, long been aware of Paul Molnar's (shall we say?) rather vigorous rejection of the position I took in that essay on the question of the logical relation of election to the triunity of God in Barth's ‘mature’ theology – i.e. subsequent to publishing his revised doctrine of election in CD II/2. If I have kept silence this long, it has not been without good reason. I was unwilling to respond to Molnar for two reasons. First, in his criticisms of my views, Molnar failed to engage the one point which would have been decisive for launching a serious ‘debate’, i.e. he made no attempt to explain the meaning of Barth's thesis that Jesus Christ is the subject of election or to show how his own reading of Barth is not called into question by that thesis. He simply set it aside as (apparently) unworthy of discussion and chose instead to merely insist on his own reading. It should go without saying that no real ‘debate’ can take place when the evidence brought forth to support a new proposal is passed over in silence. Less important was the second reason.

I dissent from Hart's project of a theological aesthetics by a hair's breadth: but that hair's breadth is tragedy. The Beauty of the Infinite is an excellent book, but it would be still better without its misinterpretations of tragedy. Nietzsche told us that ‘we must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus which ever anew discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images’: that is, Attic tragedy arises from the clash of Dionysian music with Apollonian thought. Hart regards postmodernism as a story involving the clash of two ‘violences’ – the ‘chthonic and indiscriminate’ violence of Dionysus versus the ‘discriminating’ violence of Apollo. Nietzsche's sympathies lay with Dionysus: ‘Dionysus versus the “Crucified”: there you have the antithesis.’ Nietzsche once confessed that The Birth of Tragedy ‘smells offensively Hegelian’. Both Hegel and Nietzsche read tragedy differently from Aristotle, and from the anterior Western tradition. Nietzsche could equally have confided that his first book imposes a nineteenth-century taste for melodrama on the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The argument of this article is that Hart likewise misconstrues tragedy as melodrama. If, as Hart says, ‘Nietzsche had atrocious taste’, it is self-defeating for him to assume that Nietzsche had the last word on Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. Hart takes the modern theologians at their word when they speak of ‘tragedy’. He spontaneously deprecates the use of what he calls tragedy and what most people can recognize as melodrama in the writings of theologians such as Robert Jenson, Donald MacKinnon and Nicholas Lash. He tells us that, ‘None of what I say … is intended as a rejection of tragedy as such … but only as a critique … of the sacrificial logic from which Attic tragedy … sprang and according to which … tragedy is still read’. But his misinterpretation and rejection of tragedy has a wider reference than the writings of Sophocles and Aeschylus and rebounds on his own theology.

Publishers' blurbs for new books are often de trop. Those accompanying David Bentley Hart's opus, however, are surprising in the array of notable names that have acclaimed him, even in the pre-production phase. One of the famed maintains that with this first book Bentley Hart has emerged as the ‘best living American systematic theologian’, and another of the great and good hails him as: ‘one of his generation's leading theologians’. No small potatoes this, considering the first book in question is the revision of a doctoral thesis of a young man who has yet to start a university career. It seems, moreover, to have been two theses rolled into one. Having read the book, one understands why the accolades were so heart-felt. It is indeed a most learned, profound and immensely rich volume. It is undoubtedly one of the most important and timely works of theology written for many decades past, and will prove itself to be so, I suspect, despite its (many) eccentricities and idiosyncratic judgements, and despite its failure to say many things one might have wanted it to: but then at 448 pages, one needs to draw a line somewhere.

I should first of all thank John McGuckin and Francesca Murphy for their remarks; both are scholars I very much respect, and it is flattering that they think my work worthy of their scrutiny and of – occasionally – their animadversions. I much prefer praise to censure, of course, but only the latter affords any scope for a meaningful reply. One dare not respond to a compliment by agreeing with it, or amplifying upon it; but to demur from it is to squander a gift that may not come again. So it is probably for the best that, even if I have apparently succeeded on the whole in pleasing both readers, I have nevertheless failed to please either of them in every particular. And I hope I may be excused for confining my replies almost entirely to their more critical remarks.