Examines Albrecht Ritschl's presentation of the person and life-work of Christ as Prophet, Priest and King. As father of modern academic theology, Ritschl attempted to present his understanding of the Christian faith through a critical history of the development of doctrine, reexamination of the biblical evidence of belief and exposition of the positive development of doctrine which sought to avoid the critical errors of the past. This agenda proved so demanding that few scholars since Ritschl have been able to work competently in all areas of the discipline. In this work McCulloh identifies characteristic emphases in Ritschl's thought: a definition of religion as a positive historical phenomenon; a critique of the place of metaphysics in theology; an assertion of the importance of the Bible for understanding the Christian faith; a view of the earthly ministry of Jesus as the only meaningful foundation for the knowledge of God; and a claim for the active participation of human beings with God in justification and reconciliation. McCulloh traces the history of the Munus Triplex title into Jewish messianic ascriptions and finds it to be more deeply involved in the historical transmission of the Christian faith than was acknowledged by Ritschl.

This volume, based on recently published Old Latin material, provides fascinating information and discussion on the textual pluralism attested by the Hebrew texts and versions of the books of Kings, an intriguing page in the history of the biblical texts.

William Robertson Smith (1846-1894) was successively the embattled champion of the emergent higher criticism as applied to the Old Testament, chief editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Professor of Arabic at Cambridge University. Today he is acknowledged to have been a pioneering figure in both social anthropology and the study of comparative religion, deeply influencing the thinking of J. G. Frazer, Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud. The first full-length biography of Robertson Smith to be published for almost a hundred years, this text makes use of hitherto unknown material preserved by the Smith family and draws upon the extensive range of correspondence between Smith and such scholars as Albrecht Ritschl, Paul de Lagarde, Julius Wellhausen, Abraham Kuenen and Theodor Noldeke. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the biography locates and defines the place of this remarkable polymath within the context of Free Church Calvinism, the Scottish Enlightenment and 19th century German Protestant theology. It highlights Smith's interest in physics and philosophy, his friendship with contemporary artists, his Oriental travels, and his involvement in the social life of Edinburgh and Aberdeen. In recent years, the image of Smith as a comparative religionist has come to dominate all other perspectives and indeed tends now to overshadow his fame as an Old Testament scholar. This book seeks to redress the balance, aiming to discover the theological drive behind Smith's manifold activities.

Post-Enlightenment theology has frequently rejected the historic Christian doctrine of substitutionary atonement. For theologians standing in the tradition of the Lutheran Confessions, rejection of substitutionary atonement is particularly problematic because it endangers the unconditional nature of the justification through faith. If one rejects vicarious satisfaction, then the only alternative is to make redemption dependent on what sinners do for themselves. In this study, Jack Kilcrease argues for substitutionary atonement within the perspective of what he calls the "Confessional Lutheran Paradigm." The author also critiques a wide variety of modern Lutheran theologians' understandings of atonement: Werner Elert, Gustaf Aulen, Gustaf Wingren, Robert Jenson, Eberhard Jungel, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Gerhard Forde. As Kilcrease demonstrates, although these authors often give many fine theological insights, their distortion or misrepresentation of the doctrine of atonement carriers over to a problematic understanding of law, gospel, and justification through faith.

This important study of the published and unpublished writings of Scotland's most brilliant and controversial nineteenth-century theologian focuses on his concern to situate biblical religion within the context of the primal religions of Israel's neighbours. The book explores the implications of the relationship between the Christian faith and primal religion. Robertson Smith has still a contribution to make to contemporary discussion of the phenomenology of the Christian faith and Christian responses to religious pluralism.