A Major watershed in the interpretation of Paul is generally acknowledged as having emerged with the publication of E. P. Sanders' Paul and Palestinian Judaism (SCM, 1977). His attack on the misrepresentation of Judaism contained in much of this century's scholarship (particularly the Lutheran) has received widespread support. Scholars are now beginning to produce Pauline studies in the post-Sanders mould. H. Räisänen is one such, and the present study by Francis Watson, Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles: A Sociological Approach (CUP, 1986), follows in like vein. Sanders' thesis is essentially that Paul opposes Judaism not because of any inherent errors such as ‘self-righteousness’ or ‘legalism’, but simply because it is not Christianity. Watson's study attempts to give a historical and sociological grounding for this viewpoint (p. 67).

It is a well-known fact that many a modern eucharistic prayer shows signs of handling the relationship between Supper and Calvary with due care, even with some creative ambiguity. For some, indeed, the very concept of offering is fraught with problems which can only be faced in liturgical formulae by having recourse to paradox. The bread and wine are on the table, but they are neither ‘offered’ sacrificially, nor are they ‘held back’ from the good purposes of God. The act of memorial is neither a re-enactment of Calvary nor is it an insignificant feature of the Church's life, as if all the eucharistic community did was to bask in the sunshine of Christ's single offering, and that is that. Yet many modern prayers are the direct result of creative movements such as liturgical research, patristic theology, and the rapprochment between the Churches that has been so much part of twentieth-century history.

Recent discussion of St Anselm's theology of reconciliation has again raised the question of freedom in respect to the relationship presupposed between God and man in this encounter. It has been asked whether in fact St Anselm's account excludes God's ability to act freely, ‘within the dynamics and development of the narrative’, and suggested that such exclusion derives from an understanding of God's ‘unchanging nature beyond the influence of persons and events within the narrative’.

Liberation Theology provides a framework of principles through which we can understand God's action in the world. To say that God liberates humanity from enslavement is a way of highlighting one aspect of what it means to say that he loves and cares for us. We, for our part, have to bridge the gap between the theological framework and action. We do this through ethical and political reflection. We recognize God at work liberating humanity, and we respond to that recognition by wanting to share in the work. But, we still have to decide what this particular liberation means, and what are the best, or least evil, ways of attaining it within a particular historical set of circumstances.

In III, 2 of the Church Dogmatics, Barth develops the analogy of relations revealed in Jesus Christ to obtain between three levels or ‘planes’ of persons in relationship. These are (i) within the Triune God as the eternal relation between the Father and the Son; (ii) between God and man as the free election by God that man should be his covenant partner; (iii) between human persons as the basic form of humanity. The single factor which constitutes this analogy, the one thing which is similar in spite of all the great dissimilarity between God and man, the indestructible imago Dei, is the concept of personal relationship, the dyad, the I-Thou encounter. This theme of personal relationship is central not only in its location within the Church Dogmatics but perhaps throughout Barth's theology.