Christian anthropology is characterised by a tension: on the one hand, the believer hopes for life in communion with God, which implies that the believer is distinct from God in agency; on the other hand, the doctrine of creation from nothing implies that the creature cannot have any agency over against God’s. This tension has a parallel in the doctrine of the Trinity, in which the Son is over against the Father and yet has no being or agency independent of the Father. This parallel, in turn, provides a novel perspective on Christian understanding of the biblical claim that human beings have been created ‘in the image of God’, namely, that human beings are in God’s image in that, like the Son, they are fully themselves only as they do not live in any respect apart from themselves.

Using the work of contemporary female theologians, this article stretches St. Symeon’s metaphor of spiritual pregnancy to encompass a deeper understanding of the maternal body’s physicality. Though Symeon’s concept of graduated spirituality emphasises the immateriality of the afterlife, his theology is replete with imagery dependent on materiality and the senses. One of Symeon’s commonly used images is that of pregnancy, employed throughout both his discourses and hymns. While Symeon’s recognition of Mary as a model for monastics is laudable, his metaphor falls short of the physicality typically found in his other bodily images due to his particular understanding of Mary. Interjecting the voices of female theologians – including Natalie Carnes, Amy Peeler and Carrie Frost – into Symeon’s metaphor both enriches and challenges his concept of spiritual pregnancy. Finally, this essay proposes a more embodied theology of pregnancy using St. Symeon’s writings on apophaticism and incarnation.

Over the course of his career, Karl Barth changed his mind on the extra Calvinisticum, moving from a robust early affirmation to a final rejection in the later volumes of the Church Dogmatics. This article traces that theological shift, arguing that it was not incidental but necessitated by the internal logic of Barth’s doctrine of revelation. In contrast to recent trajectories that seek to retrieve the extra in defence of divine impassibility, Barth’s rejection was grounded in a conviction that God’s being is identical with God’s act – most fully revealed in Jesus Christ. This christological pressure led Barth to revise the scope and function of the extra until it became theologically untenable. The article situates this shift within the broader historical development of the doctrine and concludes by exploring its implications for reconciliation, kenosis, and divine ontology in contemporary theology.

Divine simplicity is plausibly seen as a biblical doctrine, given a standard account of the way doctrine is derived from Scripture. The polemic of Jeremiah 10 against ancient Near Eastern mis pî or ‘mouth opening’ rituals involves a commitment to a radical account of divine aseity. In dialogue with Thomas Aquinas and a number of contemporary figures, I suggest this view of divine aseity might plausibly be thought to lead to the inference to divine simplicity.

This essay considers whether eschatological speculation is appropriate in light of the mystery of human suffering. I argue that a pneumatological construal of the beatific vision offers important resources for this question. In the beatific vision, the Spirit perfects the human person by bringing them to participatory attention to the whole of their life, so that the person participates in the final event of making meaning out of the life lived. There is no general, all-encompassing description of how this heals a history of suffering, because the redemption happens in the attention shared between each particular individual and God.