Foundations 87 (February 2025)

Issue 87 of Foundations: An International Journal of Evangelical Theology, published by Affinity, is now available from here (requiring an email address for a link to a downloadable pdf, though check here) which includes the below essays (abstracts posted where available).

Donald John MacLean

Editorial

Ian Shaw

Slavery, the Slave Trade and Christians’ Theology Part Two: Theological Themes

Stephen Steele

Garnishing the Sepulchres of the Righteous: Textual Criticism in the Free Church Fathers

The continued publication of the “Textus Receptus,” for example, a new edition by Grange Press, the publishing arm of the US Presbytery of the Free Church of Scotland (Continuing), provides the incentive to investigate the text-critical principles of the Free Church fathers. How did they view the Textus Receptus? Did they defend it in the face of new manuscript discoveries in their own century? The clear evidence is that they did not hold to a “Received Text” that was “fixed”, indeed, the leading figures among the Free Church Fathers explicitly disowned such a view. Advocates of the so-called “Textus Receptus” have a track record of claiming support from figures in church history who were far from claiming its perfection. Famously, the Anglican Dean John Burgon (1813-1888) would not be admitted to the Dean Burgon Society (founded in 1978). The society named after him exists “To Defend the Traditional Received Greek Text of the New Testament which underlies the King James Version.” Yet while believing the TR to be “quite good enough for all ordinary purposes”, Burgon was “far from pinning my faith to it”. “In not a few particulars”, he wrote “the ‘Textus receptus’ does call for Revision”.

Alison Umpleby

Review Article: She Needs

Nick Meader

Resurrection: Apologetics and Biblical Theology

Mark Roques and Steve Bishop

The ‘Christian’ Mysticism of Meister Eckhart and Terese of Ávila

In this article, we probe the so-called “Christian” mysticism of Meister Eckhart and Teresa of Ávila. We scrutinise the Orphic creation myth and Neoplatonism’s roots. We unpack how these two mystics would answer the six worldview questions. What is God like? What is the universe like? What is a person? Why do we suffer? What is the remedy? What happens after death? We conclude with a critique of “Christian” mysticism and show how it is both world-denying and auto-salvific. Neither option is Christian.

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