Theology

Study of Paul’s use of Scripture has searched for ‘allusions’ and ‘echoes’, generating a reaction which claims that Paul could not have intended such detailed reference because his hearers would not have understood it. This article develops the former quest, and answers the latter objection, with the suggestion that Paul saw the larger story of Israel coming to fruition in the gospel: his allusions and echoes are to earlier moments in the single narrative in which Jesus’ death and resurrection were decisive moments and which Paul believes himself to be carrying forward in its new phase.

This essay is a personal reflection on my experience as a translator in the translation project Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English (DBWE). The purpose of these reflections is to make intelligible my experience of translating Bonhoeffer as a distinctly hermeneutic engagement on three distinct but interrelated levels. First, the translation of words; second, the translation of ideas, concepts, paragraphs, sections and so on; and third, the translation of the author as a person, in this case, the attempt to understand Bonhoeffer’s thought and life.

In the first half of the nineteenth century the relationship between the Church of England and the state shifted dramatically. This influenced, and was in turn influenced by, heated debates about Anglican history in general and about the Reformation in particular. Some of the bitterest debates revolved around differing understandings of the Church’s foundational literature – the Articles, Homilies and Prayer Book – and what they stood for. These debates drove scholarly understanding of the Reformation, but they also sharpened developing party boundaries. This article examines how these supposedly unchanging texts were reinterpreted as first Evangelicals and ‘Orthodox’ churchmen then Tractarians too sought to demonstrate that they, and not their adversaries, were the ‘true churchmen’.

In commemoration of its three-hundred-and-fiftieth year, this article draws on the rich resource of Evening Prayer as it appears in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer to argue that the liturgy leads the participant through a transformative movement of prayer. The curious doubling of the Lord’s Prayer provides a framework in order to discuss this transformation.