The task of understanding the uniqueness of human being which underlies the obligations obtaining among men in distinction from all other creatures, is a perennial task of Christian theology. The one complete and final revelation of God in Jesus Christ has planted this task firmly and unalterably at the centre of theological reflection rather than at its periphery. In our generation the search for theological clarity on this matter receives heightened urgency from the pervasive assault on dignity of human being coming from recent developments in the modern sciences and technologies. This assault is conducted simultaneously in the theoretical and practical realms, armed by the increasing coalescence of the two realms in advanced scientific method.1 Today the most consequential knowledge of human life is produced by the most exact, intricate, and complex forms of manipulation and control. In the enthralling feats of biochemical technology the coming–into–being of individual human life is now the object of experimental making.2 Whetheror not our mastery of the reproductive process will ever lay bare the mystery of human generation, it certainly throws open to an unprecedented degree the question of what human being is, and by what its uniqueness is constituted.

It was a fundamental principle of the great Athanasius that to approach God through the on and call him Father is amore devout and accurate way of knowing him than to approach him only through his works by tracing them back to him as their uncreated Source. To know the Father through his Incarnate Son who is of one and the same being as God is to know him strictly in accordance with what he is in his own being and nature as Father and Son, and as Holy Spirit, which is the godly and the theologically precise way. On the other hand, to seek knowledge of God from what he has created out of nothing would be to operate only from the infinite distance of thecreature to the Creator, where we can think and speak of God only in vague, imprecise and negative terms, for what God has created out of nothing does not tell us anything about who God is or what he is like in his own being. It is through God alone that we may know God in accordance Cross with his nature. We may know God in truth only as we are given access to him as Father through Jesus Christ his Incarnate Son and in his one Spirit, an access opened to us as we are brought near to God and are reconciled to him through the Cross (Ephesians 2.14–18).

Traditionally, Calvinists (those in the Reformed tradition) have placed a great deal of emphasis on their belief that

(1)God has total control over all earthly affairs.

In a discussion in this journal of Kant's ‘moral proof’ of the existence of God Peter Byrne describes what he takes to be the ‘fundamental incoherence’ of Kant's position. Kant, it is well known, wishes to hold together two claims concerning our epistemological relationship to God: the claim that we can have no ‘theoretical knowledge’ of God's existence; and the claim that we nonetheless have ‘moral certainty’ of God's existence. The first claim arises out of the Kantian criticism of the pretensions of speculative metaphysics, a criticism developed most rigorously in the Critique of Pure Reason. The second claim, in turn, arises out of Kant's so-called ‘moral proof which appears in skeletal form in the firstCritique and acquires more detail edelaboration in the Critique of Practical Reason.

E. L. Allen, writing in a little noticed article in 1953, claimed that just as the early Christian Apostles were the representative of Jesus in accordance with the shaliach conception of Rabbinic Judaism, Jesus himself was portrayed as the representative or shaliach of God in a number of New Testament works from the writings of Paul to the Gospel of John. Some fifteen years later, apparently without knowledge of Allen's essay, Peder Borgen examined the representative idea, or the agency idea as he more aptly called it, in Jewish halakhic writings and argued that the long recognized sending motif in John showed close affinities with this material. He went on to argue that the portrayal of Jesus as a ‘heavenly agent who has come down among men’ needed to be understood in terms of Jewish Merkabah mysticism. Merkabah mysticism combined among other things,halakah, heavenly figure and the heavenly world just as the concept of agency does in the Gospel of John. He was also able to show the same phenomena in Philo and suggested that this too must be seen as part of the background for the agency concept in John.

One Of the many challenges of the theology of liberation of Latin America (TL or LT) has been to rethink the relation between theory (theology) and praxis. A debate, which has been going on for over a century among philosophers and social thinkers since Hegel and Marx has finally hit the serene shores of Christian theology. Are theory and praxis two co-equal dimensions of human existence, or is the one derivative from the other? Is Christian faith primarily a matter of theory, belief and truth, or is it primarily a matter of praxis, action and justice? Is theology only a reflection on faith or a reflection in faith as well? What is the relation between theology and contemporary historical praxis? Does theology have to remain ‘external’ to that praxis in order to preserve its critical objectivity, or is participation of theology in that praxis the very condition of its objectivity? Is the prior commitment of theology— so much insisted on by TL — to the praxis of liberation detrimental or necessary to the integrity of theology? In this essay I propose to deal with these issues in the context of recent debates between Schubert Ogden and the Vatican on the one hand and TL on the other. I shall first review Ogden's and the Vatican's critique of TL, then present the position of TL, and finally evaluate both TL and its critics and reconstruct a theory of the relation between theology and praxis in light of the preceding discussion.

Eberhard jüngel'S reputation as a severely professional systematic and philosophical theologian is beginning to drift across to the English speaking world. His Gott ah Geheimnis der Welt, which first appeared in 1976 and whose third edition is here translated by Darrell L. Guder, is a curious book. It is perhaps best read not so much as a single argument but as a series of studies which at important points overlap or converge. It is a remarkably wide-ranging book: indeed, so wideranging that the argument becomes frustratingly difficult to get hold of in its entirety. Jü ngel writes illuminatingly about a variety of philosophical and theological traditions, and does so in order to advance some large-scale proposals about how a contemporary Christian doctrine of God ought to be pursued. And yet at the end of the book, even the reader who has put in the demanding work of mastering Jüngel's complex argument is left with an odd feeling of dissatisfaction, as if the book somehow lacks a recognisable, sustained treatment of its central theme.