'God reveals himself as Lord' (Karl Barth). What difficulties does this statement raise by its use of masculine language in relation to God?

The difficulty in the above statement stems from two very different issues. In regard to the first, it is whether the usage of the masculine form of 'Lord' (Kyrios) which designates that God is sexually male. This seems to be a technical and pedantic point. In this case, what is clearly evident is that any language referring to God, as Barth would have agreed, is inadequate to its task, and that analogy-metaphor-parable or symbol are means to 'accommodate' the revelation of God to human minds in speech (pp 253-258). Furthermore, only created beings have sexuality and that, by definition, God has no sex. To refer to God's sexuality is to commit a form of idolatry, making God in a created image. The counter-balance of many feminine images of God (p 320) in relationship to humanity would also lead one to conclude that the prescription of masculine identity to God is unwarranted and what is intended in such a case is a referral to the role of parent.

Careful analysis of the general usage of the word would confirm this. The term 'Lord' is also used more broadly in non-Christian sources as a term indicating ownership, including feminine deities such as Isis. In the New Testament it is used to refer to the proper name 'YHWH' of God in the Old Testament as well as to the specific individual (who is male) Jesus of Nazareth. Only in the last case does it carry the connotation of masculine sex, but this is offset by its usage as a kerygmatic proclamation of the Gospel. In this instance, God is identified not with the male sex but with this unique one Jesus called the Christ and his ministry-death-resurrection. It would be foolish to equate it in this usage with the sexual characteristic of maleness. This is certainly a usage of the term 'Lord' in Barth.

The second issue is the location of conflict, being the usage of masculine imagery as a justification for forms of patriarchy. In this case the argument with non-inclusive language is that it betrays incipient biases in cultures that maximize gender difference to the detriment of one or the other gender. Many feminist writers have noted that the only consistently feminine usage of divine imagery in the West has occurred in mystical writings such as Julian of Norwich (a woman) and that these have been largely marginalized in expressing Christian understanding. The question for these writers is why were or have feminine descriptions of God, which is both in the Bible and Tradition, been so marginalized? That question remains in dispute, but at least one strong possibility has been the usage of non-inclusive language in the West as a means to secure patriarchal hegemony.

One way around the use of gender specific language, aside from avoiding reflective pronouns such as 'himself', is to revert to the Trinitarian name of God as 'Father, Son and Holy Spirit' which stresses the functionality of identity over and against cultural norms and descriptions (pp 337-338). This use of the 'proper name of the Triune God' promises a way forward in regard to precision by stressing the univocal attributes in the Christian revelation of God as Triune, and therefore without any correlations, including gender, to created beings.

Many Christians talk about having 'a personal relationship' with God. What might they mean by this? What theological insights does this way of speaking offer?

There is a logical problem with the notion of God as a 'person' in the sense that we speak of ourselves as 'persons' and there is a theological problem as well as some gains in using the term. In referring to God as a 'person' with whom one can have a relationship, what is meant is an extension of the biblical motif found in God's election of Israel and Jesus' soteriological work. In both cases, the stress is that God has initiated a special relationship with humanity and that this relationship involves at some level the reciprocity of self-revelation. The nation of Israel and the redeemed sinner are brought into a new understanding of God and their role in creation as a result of divine initiative. Or more simply, as a result of God's action, Israel or the sinner know both God and the self better. To refer to God as a person is to invoke the analogy that just as we interact with others and begin to learn their identities through their interactions with us, so it is possible to know God through God's activity towards us. This is the core of Buber's dialogical personalism (p 270-272); and his mutuality and reciprocity of subjective interaction fits well within the biblical framing. However, there are problems with this concept as well.

First, the difficulty of linguistic abstraction and limitation is acute. The term 'person' is a loaded term as seen in its etymological history. Before 1750 the term seemed to be associated with the Latin 'persona' indicating its 'hidden' function in identity until action unveils the identity (a mask). In this case there is the double meaning of 'a being that acts and speaks' but also an opaque quality wherein something of the 'essence' remains hidden. With Boethuis the term is transmuted into a definition of 'essence' equated with rationality. A person is a rational being. This seems to be dominant until the modern period when 'person' is used to refer to the autonomy of individuals in action. A person is a free being. The difficulty, apart from the fluidity of the term itself, is that none of these are particularly conclusive in regard to God and in regard to the biblical notion of 'person'. The latter definition of person seems not to have the metaphysical overture of 'essence', rather a person in the bible seems to be defined in relation to God, usually in terms of obedience. The more usual modern definitions of person as rational and free then seem to be incongruent with the biblical definition. Buber's personalism, however, seems closer with its stress on relation over 'essence'. Theologically, God as Triune, is a different kind of person than that of the human person. For example, the stress of rationality moves the Trinity to modalism (p 327-329), while the stress of autonomy leads to a form of tritheistic Monarchianism wherein the Father stands above the other members of the autonomous Trinity (p 329-330). In each case, the dominant form of definition of person breaks down analogically when strictly applied to the revealed truth that God is triune. Finally, weaker in implication is the denial that the term 'person' is analogical. Paul Tillich's claim that to speak of God as a person is to place God into a restrictive historical contingency or location such as 'there' or 'here' is, frankly, simple. No one would deny the analogical use of the term in use for both humans and God (i.e., 'D Marks as a person' is not defined merely or exclusively by my location in time). To speak of personhood is to invoke a range of meanings, strong and weak, which help to identify another being with whom one has a direct or indirect encounter.

The meaning of a 'personal relationship' with God is an affirmation of the presence and activity of God in the experience of the believer based on God's prevenient grace towards that believer. It is an attempt to describe the variety of means through which God moves to the person and in which God self-reveals, now opaquely, the nature of true deity and humanity.

'God can do anything.' How would you respond to this definition of divine omnipotence?

Omnipotence is a loaded term, begging its own definition and needing to be corrected by revelation if it is to be applied to the Christian notion of God. While there is a Christological context in kenotic theology (pp 283-284) for a sub-discussion on omnipotence in light of the incarnation, usually the term is problematic in its employment in discussions of the relation of God to the contingent world. It is this aspect that we consider. Clearly the most obvious definition of omnipotence as the ability to do anything must be ruled out. Both Anselm and Aquinas alert us that this definition would mean that God could do things - lie, pervert justice and sin - that would be in contradiction to the claims of revelation in regard to God's Holiness.

Ockham's introduction of potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata attempts to answer another apparent problem with the definition by distinguishing between God's power before creation and God's power after creation. In the first case, omnipotence is extended to include all possibilities (except imperfection itself) while the second case, 'ordained power of God', omnipotence is constricted to structures established, and thereby self-limited, by God. In this instance, for example, God's all-powerful nature is circumscribed by human decision - our free will limits God's acting on us in that we are not pre-determined in our actions. Underscoring this concept is the idea that once God has chosen an act, even God is bound to see it through; or once God has done one thing it cannot necessarily be undone. Whereas before acting God had all possibilities open, on acting God now has limited possibilities. Omnipotence, strictly applied here, refers to the lack of compulsion in the first instance from an outside influence while God self-limits after acting in accordance with that first willing. Omnipotence has shifted in Ockham from a definition of all-powerful being in all things to a definition whereby no being outside of God can interfere with the act of divine willing wherein God has absolute power. Once God has done some things, those acts in themselves limit God's subsequent power, but significantly, it is God's self-limiting in that instance. In this sense, divine self-limitation is not incongruent to the notion of omnipotence.

Why do so many Christians believe that God suffers? What difference does it make?

Underscoring this question is another question before moving to answer the question of patripassianism or theopaschitism. This is the priority of Hellenistic philosophy (metaphysics) over the biblical understanding of God. The issue of whether God can suffer opens this question to scrutiny. Adolf von Harnack's Dogmengeschichte theorized that many central Christian doctrines were influenced by non-biblical worldviews and that one could uncover the 'fossilized' doctrines through a method of redaction. One such issue is the imposition of the dualistic Greek notion of an 'impassible' understanding of deity which is removed from human passions (equated with materialism). Thus, cuing more from Plato's perfect and unchanging (as passions were changeable) 'deity' of the Forms, Christianity came to understand God as unchangeable and thereby perfect. God, in short, could not change nor be moved from perfection lest in doing so God becomes less perfect and thereby, by definition, no longer divine. To suffer would be to 'feel' change, and immutability of substance or will becomes confused with immutability of experience. In Philo through to Aquinas, the thought that God could suffer would mean nothing less than the fact that God could be altered, by compassion or love, by the experience. The prime mover and un-moveable is moved or changed by human predicament or experience of that predicament. God's compassion, a biblical motif, is naught but figurative and not an attribute or predication of deity itself. Harnack felt that this type of dogma was due to the imposition of alien metaphysics rather than the exposition of the Hebrew and Christian bible. Many believe, at some level, him to be correct.

Both the bible and Christian tradition are used as witnesses to the misnomer of an impassible God. The bible seems to indicate that Jesus Christ, as human and God, suffered and died. Luther's 'theology of the cross' took for its central theme the fact that God is revealed in the suffering and humiliation of the cross juxtaposed against human efforts to create a God in its own image. Such a 'God of glory' was, for Luther, the sort of idolatry the 'crucified God' destroyed by inverting human understanding of deity for revelation. J. Moltmann's 1972 work on The Crucified God reintroduced the Lutheran notion of the theologia crucis into the contemporary scene (p 277-278).

Running parallel to Moltmann's work but deriving from a different origin in the resurgence of the Hegelian-influenced A N Whitehead is Process Theology (p 287-289). In contrast to the Lutheran crucifixion theology revival of Moltmann (and perhaps earlier in Bonhoeffer), Whitehead's vision of God as suffering is derived from philosophical concepts, which understand reality as an organized happening towards a goal of perfection. God, although different from creation, having the attribute of divine imperishability, is similar to creation in the attribute of being influenced or in process by other things in creation. Just as all entities are both affected and affecting other entities in the movement of development (which is teleological), so must 'God' also if in the world, be affected by and affecting other entities. Both God and all of reality are in the process of being organized to a final, if not undescript, goal. In this case, God can and does suffer but for metaphysical reasons (moving to the perfection of creation) not theological ones as in the case of Luther and Moltmann.

One final consideration must be made before turning to the yield or advantage of the concept of a suffering God. This consideration is the conflation of the notion of God's suffering with the 'death of God' movement that Moltmann's work seems to have revived in the 1960s. While Moltmann's work returned the notion to theological currency, it is not a direct analog to the usual locus of the term in nineteenth-century German philosophy, even as borrowed by Bonhoeffer. In this instance, the slogan 'God is dead' as coined by F Nietzsche meant that western European civilization had grown to a point in which it may recognize the notion of 'God' for what it truly was - Feuerbach's projectionism. 'God's death' was the emancipation of humanity from Christian (and unfortunately Jewish) superstition and an acceptance of human destiny to self 'will-to-power' in constituting new forms of morality and political structures reflected in this awareness of intrinsic human greatness. D Bonhoeffer borrowed the grammar of Nietzsche but presented it in terms that the church must function as though 'God were dead' in the Nietzschian definition of confusing with cultural-values in order to refound its core relevance. For Bonhoeffer, the 'death of God' or 'religionless Christianity' was a recommitment to the Christian understanding of its own uniqueness due to its founder and His cross. This dichotomy of 'relevance through irrelevance' is picked up in Moltmann's work and shadows Luther's hidden and revealed God theology of the cross. Anglo-American theologians such as Paul van Buren and J Robinson took this a step further in their theological programmes by stressing that the notion 'God' had become abstracted from 'Jesus Christ' in theology itself and that by recovering the radical ethic of Jesus - his lifestyle and teachings over theological meanings - one could rediscover the relevancy of Christianity. What is common in Nietzsche, Bonhoeffer, van Buren and the 'suffering God' movement of Luther-Moltmann is the belief that somehow cultural values, whether Hellenistic or nineteenth-century Germanic, wrapped up in the notion of 'God,' occlude the truth of the human condition. Of course, in the case of Nietzsche this truth is a truth independent of revelation whereas for the others it is somehow related in differing degrees to revelation. Nonetheless, the point is that the term 'death of God' is not directly equated to the notion of God's suffering.

There are two historical factors usually associated with the rise of a theology of a suffering God. The first and perhaps most probing is the above problem of the 'history of dogma' movement that enabled theologians to engage more critically with traditions and doctrines. The other historical factor is more woven into popular consciousness, being the rise of 'protest atheism' or more generally the problem (and solutions) of an impassible God in a world which has seen unprecedented human suffering (pp 292-295). Hand-in-glove with this is the painful admission that all too often the church has been a silent voice in the midst of human misery, and, perhaps, even contributing to it. The critique of oppressive ideology becomes a critique of the church. The theological resources of Luther's 'theology of the cross' promises a way forward to answer this potent critique raised by 'protest atheism' with its postulate that God does indeed suffer in the suffering of humanity. It is this that we now turn to.

The idea of God's suffering has been thought of as heretical in that it recalls two older heterodox positions in patripassianism and theopaschitism. In the former, derived from Sabellius, the doctrine held that both Father and Son suffered on the cross, understood through a modalistic theology of the Trinity (p 328). The important theme is that the suffering of the cross was the same suffering, not a suffering of the Father for the suffering of the Son. In this case there is no difference between Father and Son, both undergoing the same suffering in different modes. Theopaschitism is not necessarily heterodox as it maintains that only one member of the Trinity, Christ, was crucified. However, the doctrine is easily misinterpreted and was marginalized as a result. In the modern period it is a rehabilitation of theopaschitism that is the dominant approach to a theology of the suffering God. In this case, the keynote is that while both Father and Son suffer, their involvement with the experience of suffering is not identical. The Son experiences the death and pain of the cross while the Father suffers the loss of the Son. This, however, must be tied to an eschatological vision wherein all things are renewed and 'death has no sting'. What this allows is not merely that God knows suffering (little comfort really) but rather that God transforms suffering into hope (see, for example, Barth p 294). Nonetheless, the strength of the position is the stress that God through Jesus Christ is not alien to the suffering of an Auschwitz (nor the pain of a single person) but has entered into death and transforms that pain with the hope of resurrection, renewal and life.

Summarize and evaluate the main ways of thinking of God as the creator of the world.

The first series of parameters in thinking of God as creator are derived from the context of the ancient near Eastern world and its cosmology. The Hebraic conception of God as creator affirmed two important points in contradistinction to the beliefs of other ancient cultures. First, the notion of YHWH as creator stressed the absolute uniqueness of the revealed God of Israel over and against the deities associated with the moon, stars and sun. The God of Israel was creator of all things. Creation was different from the creator. Second, and related, was the concept that creation was not merely an ordering out of chaos or a formless void but that creation was ex nihilo. The freedom of the act of creation was the freedom of the goodness of the Creator. This cut across what would be later labeled as Platonic notions that creation was limited by the instability of materials available to the creator, or that matter itself was a co-factor in the creation. This led to a dualism in the ancient world, a disparaging of the physical world in favour of the ephemeral spiritual. Christian creation stresses not only the distinctiveness of both Creator and creation but also affirms that creation is God's creation not to be disparaged but to be enjoyed and that those who believe in YHWH are to be responsible for that creation as stewards. In this latter notion, the doctrine of stewardship (pp 303- 304) derives from a foundation that while creation properly belongs to God, humans are in a joined enterprise with God of stewardship due to their unique relationship to the Creator (pp 440-443). However, as created, humanity is also dependent on God and therefore must be responsible to the Creator. All of this runs in contradistinction to the mythology of the ancient near Eastern world setting the Hebrew conception of God as creator and sustainer in a framework that was adopted and expanded with the notion of God as redeemer of fallen creation in Christ. In the New Testament the notion of creation is expanded and supplemented by the consideration that the Creator is not distant to the creation but active in redeeming and renewing it through the work of the Son and Spirit.

Three models of God as creator are given as picturing the doctrine of creation. All three highlight one aspect of the above. The model of emanation, often influenced by neo-Platonic philosophy, stresses that the creation is an overflow or manifestation of divine creativity or being (being equated in the definition). In this instance, the analogy between God and creation is that of an organic or natural (namely in substance or essence) connection of the Spiritual and the material. Creation is the not only a reflection or refraction of God but is a replication of God in some form. The difficulty here is the collapse of God as a person, able to interact and to create or sustain, into the idea that God is a non-descript energy or process within creation (p 287-291). It is no surprise that Hegelian-influenced theologies and later Process Theology share this form of creation. Secondly, creation is understood from the paradigm of being constructed or purposed by God. The stress here is a return to the Hebrew idea that creation is a shaping of order from disorder or chaos. The major difficulty in this model is that it seems to imply a Platonic scheme in matter, namely that it tends towards chaos without the direct continued intercession of the Creator. This can be understood in dualistic terms, which runs contrary to Christian affirmations of both creatio ex nihilo and creation's goodness. The impersonal character of intervention, towards an abstract perfection, is also another limitation of this model. One strength in this position, however, is that it does deal with the 'fallen' aspect of creation due to sin by positing God's gracious intervention to remedy the intrinsic demonic-human sin induced corruption of creation. To fully explore this 'ordering' additional doctrines need to supplement the location of the argument in creation by using Christology as a means by which God redeems (and hastens) not only humanity but also the entire world. The rehabilitation of the medieval vision of 'participation', in work such as John Milbank's, is just such an enterprise. Finally, the artistic expression of creation is another way to articulate the doctrine. This analogy stresses the continuity between the 'hand' of the Creator and the 'art' of creation arguing that God is personally involved and invested in the creation. This model has been particularly useful in developing forms of natural theology or theologies of nature.

What does seem clear is that all the above models have inherent weakness that must be buttressed from other loci of Christian theology lest the dominant motif prescribe the Christian understanding of God. The Christian doctrine of God, in both the Old Testament and New Testament, is not merely that God is creator but also that God is redeemer. To treat one without the other is to collapse Christian specificity into theo-philosophical generality or abstraction.

What is distinctive about the Holy Spirit?

Recent theology has become reintroduced to pneumatology, especially in terms of the Irenaenean patristic Trinitarian revival associated with Colin Gunton and the King's College London group of theologians. Running alongside this academic theological renewal is the populous renewal of charismatic movements that stress the centrality of the Holy Spirit in the life-experience of Christians. At least these three factors - renewed Trinitarian theology in general, renewed patristic sources in Protestantism and popular charismatic movements - have made the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, often shabbily treated, an important doctrinal resource. In particular, the functions of the Spirit are of particular interest to theologians stemming from the Trinitarian underpinnings of Christian theology. The three functions, or tasks, of the Spirit in its role as the mediator of the relationship between the Father and Son are concerned with revelation, salvation and Christian life (sanctification).

Revelation is the making known of God to humanity. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit understands the centrality of the role of the Spirit in this movement of God to humanity. It can be understood, as in Augustine, as the nexus between the love of God and Christ to humanity (itself the mediation of that Father-Son fellowship), or as the agent bringing some measure of either epistemic or emotional certitude to the believer of the truth of God's love. In this form, the Spirit is the agent of 'truth bringing', defined as God's own self-revelation, towards the church. However, the means of the Spirit seem varied, from theologies of verbal or written inspiration to theologies of internal or subjective illumination. What is common in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in regard to revelation is that the Spirit is the agent of revelation.

In a like manner, particularly in the Eastern tradition, the Spirit is involved in salvation or justification. The Western tradition has an analogue but tends to think of the Spirit in terms of information or, to use Calvin's term, a 'seal' of what God has done. In contrast, the Eastern tradition (and some Protestants such as the Anglo-Catholic tradition of the Oxford movement) stresses the role of the Spirit in the deification (theopoiesis) of the human (and even beyond) in the transformation of grace (pp 361, 432). While not dominant in the West, although some Catholic liturgical texts have strong inclinations to theopoiesis, there has been some theological use of the term in Aquinas' work on participation. The Spirit, as in the East, is the means of bringing the human and material reality into the life of the Divine, and not merely into a right relationship with God as found in the magisterial reformers. The notable exception in Protestant theology, aside from the aforementioned Oxford movement, is in its mystical tradition such as the 'German theology' of the early Reformation and its pietistic strains.

Finally the Spirit is involved in the fulfilling or enabling the call of the Christian life at some level (sanctification).
For some this has a corporate motif, that of enabling common confession and therefore unity (Cyril of Alexandria and Roman Catholic teaching of reception) while for others, mainly Protestants, this is personal. The latter is perhaps the influence of the 'German theology' mystical tradition within Protestantism.

The growth of interest in pneumatology derives from one or a combination of the three above areas, of which Christians came to articulate in the creeds as the unique understanding of God as Triune including the Holy Spirit (pp 310-312). For example, the Trinitarian based work of Gunton works to provide in the doctrine of the Spirit as way to recovery a theology of nature (breeching the Barth-Brunner gap) while the work of Moltmann uses the Spirit as the guarantor of the coming kingdom and therefore of hope. In both cases, the centrality of the Spirit as agent and means of God's-presence-in-the-world due to the work of the Father and Son is clear. However, the doctrine has been marginalized in the West due to its very strength in often being similar to secular conceptions of 'Spirit' as emanation (p 300) as found in Plato (p 224), neo-Platonism and Hegelian philosophy. In this instance, the distinctiveness of the Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit is compromised, used as a catch-all to describe some substantial analogy between deity and materiality.