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The primary purpose of this study is to investigate and systematically explicate the doctrine of God found in the writings of John Wesley.  This thesis consists of seven chapters:  the incomprehensible God, the revelation of God, the Trinity, the attributes of God, creation, the providence of God, and conclusion. Wesley was biblical and practical in explaining God.  He also defended a holistic view of God:  that the omnipotent and omniscient God is at the same time personal, just, and holy.  However, in the historical background of the eighteenth century when the traditional doctrine of God was challenged, Wesley emphasised that God is a personal, holy, triune God. Wesley’s doctrine of God is the doctrine of “the old religion”, which wants to return to the root of the original Christianity of the Bible and “the primitive Church”.  Thus, the root of this doctrine is in the Bible and “the primitive Church”.  In this sense, this doctrine is orthodox and ecumenical. A characteristic feature of this doctrine is its emphasise on the harmony of God’s attributes and on the balanced activity of the three Persons of the triune God in the process of salvation.  Thus, for example, while he stressed the moral attributes of God, he did not limit any natural attribute of God.  Further, seeing salvation as a whole work of the triune God, Wesley did not fall into an unbalanced view of salvation that lays emphasis on one Person of the triune God in the process of salvation. Wesley characteristically understood God as personal.  For him, the personal God means that he is relational and social interacting with intelligent beings.  Thus he rejects God’s pantheistic and panentheistic relation to the world.  This personal God enjoys having fellowship with human beings and working together with them.  This determines how salvation is worked out and how the kingdom of grace on earth is established.  In a word, the personal God desires synergism in salvation and his kingdom of grace. The dynamic of Wesley’s doctrine of God was in his spirituality and his vision for establishing ‘the kingdom of holiness and happiness on earth’.  In sharing this spirituality and vision, his doctrine of God can be a new challenge today and can radically transform the world.

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Stephen Charnock (1628-1680) is arguably remembered for his importance, at the zenith of Puritan or English Reformed scholastic divinity, in terms of the doctrine of God’s existence and attributes. He also contributed to Reformed orthodox or Puritan theology through his writings on the knowledge of God, the doctrine of regeneration, Christology, and the atonement. He wrote all these work in the midst of the theological turbulence of the later seventeenth century, with the underlying purpose of defending the inseparability of theological system and piety. His work, with its eclectic acceptance of medieval scholastic intellectual tradition as a tool, plays a significant role in the development of an historical phase of trinitarian and federal theology. However, The Existence and Attributes of God as Charnock’s magnum opus has been unexplored in terms of its view of the full doctrine of God in its trinitarian and covenantal dimensions. This is despite the fact that the Puritan concept of the divine attributes is the very doctrinal area in which the theological loci are concentrated into “a system” associated with the pursuit of piety in the period of high orthodoxy. This lack of a comprehensive overview concerning the Reformed orthodox system has brought about a misunderstanding of his theology. Charnock’s work has been regarded, even in recent scholarship, as the product of a mere scholastic rationalism. William Perkins (1558-1602) is undoubtedly the “father” of the doctrine of God in the early Puritan or Reformed orthodox period. Although misunderstandings concerning his scholastic Puritan theology and its trinitarian system and piety have been successfully rectified by other previous researchers, a confirmation of it through an investigation of his idea of God’s attributes is necessary in our study. This is in order to prove the identity of Charnock’s doctrine of God with the Puritan Reformed orthodox theological system allowing, of course, for the development of the historical and theological context between these two periods. In particular, Charnock’s understanding of the theological prolegomena, Scriptural foundations, and God’s existence and attributes is dealt with in this current study in comparison with Perkins’ work. Charnock’s work has been viewed in terms of a continuity between the early and high orthodox doctrine of God within the flow of English Puritan thought. During this examination, giving particular attention to Charnock’s treatise The Existence and Attributes of God, we have attempted to resolve the question of whether the past interpretation of Charnock’s theology or doctrine of God as a rigid speculative doctrinal formulation of Protestant scholasticism beyond Scripture is reasonable or not.

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George Smeaton (1814-89) was the Professor of Exegesis at New College, Edinburgh, for the last 32 years of his life. His three works still in print on the atonement and the Holy Spirit are recognised to represent a statement of the orthodox Scottish Reformed thought of the Free Church at its inception. Smeaton is thus recognised to be one of the last of the ‘old school’ lecturers of New College. His theology, therefore, falls into the traditional Reformed category of federal theology. This thesis studies Smeaton’s pneumatology and demonstrates that, while it is entirely orthodox in line with its Reformed heritage, it advances in four small but significant points to represent a more thoroughly federal pneumatology. The first feature that Smeaton incorporates into his pneumatology is that the Holy Spirit indwelt Adam at his creation, only to deprive Adam of his fellowship at the fall. This anthropology, in light of the prominence that Smeaton gives to the federal analogy of the two Adams, obviously draws attention to the role of the Spirit in the incarnation. It is, therefore, no surprise to find the role of the Spirit central in Smeaton’s Christology. The second feature is that it is the Spirit who is the executive of the communication between the two natures of the incarnate Christ, thus, thirdly, allowing him to experience the life of the true Spirit-filled person. Finally, the closeness between the Spirit’s work and Christ’s mission prompts Smeaton to call it a conjoined mission. This thesis explores the historical and exegetical foundations of these features of Smeaton, concluding that he does not introduce any radically innovative ideas to federal theology, but brings existing yet underplayed ideas to the fore. In the final chapter the consequences of Smeaton’s federal pneumatology are highlighted.

Contentious unresolved philosophical and anthropological questions beset contemporary gift theories. What is the gift? Does it expect, or even preclude, some counter-gift? Should the gift ever be anticipated, celebrated or remembered? Can giver, gift and recipient appear concurrently? Must the gift involve some tangible ‘thing’, or is the best gift objectless? Is actual gift-giving so tainted that the pure gift vaporises into nothing more than a remote ontology, causing unbridgeable separation between the gift-as-practised and the gift-as-it-ought-to-be? In short, is the gift even possible? Such issues pervade scholarly treatments across a wide intellectual landscape, often generating fertile inter-disciplinary crossovers whilst remaining philosophically aporetic. Arguing largely against philosophers Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion and partially against the empirical gift observations of anthropologist Marcel Mauss, I contend in this thesis that only a theological – specifically trinitarian – reading liberates the gift from the stubborn impasses which non-theological approaches impose. That much has been argued eloquently by theologians already, most eminently John Milbank, yet largely with a philosophical slant. I develop the field by demonstrating that the Scriptures, in dialogue with the wider Christian dogmatic tradition, enrich discussions of the gift, showing how creation, which emerges ex nihilo in Christ, finds its completion in him as creatures observe and receive his own perfect, communicable gift alignment. In the ‘gift-object’ of human flesh, believers rejoicingly discern Christ receiving-in-order-to-give and giving-in-order-to-receive, the very reciprocal giftedness that Adamic humanity spurned. Moreover, the depths of Christ’s crucified self-giving and the heights of resurrectional glory, culminating in the Spirit’s eternal communion, convey sin-bound creatures into the new creation, towards their deified end, through liturgical mediation which reveals true giftedness. The gift is thus no aporetic embarrassment but the means of entry into and – more significantly – the very texture of the new, eucharistic creation.

On the basis of my experience as a U.S. national living as a missionary in Brazil from 2003-2010, this thesis explores cultural, political, and ethical questions related to Christian mission, by reappropriating the life and thought of Ivan Illich. This thesis is an exercise in doing theology with and after Illich. One of the aims of my thesis is to respond to a ‘research gap’ in relation to Illich in the field of theology. In reappropriating Illich for contemporary theology, my thesis is two-fold. First, I bring his explicitly theological commentary (focused on the Incarnation) together with his earlier social criticism (focused on conviviality)" arguing that they operate in tandem as expressions of “Incarnational Christianity.” Second, I show that he offers a compelling contribution to contemporary accounts of Christian mission, with practical implications for incarnational mission. Illich’s three-fold contribution, I argue, relates to: his understanding of the incarnational basis of mission; his diagnosis of the social conditions which undermine and corrupt this incarnational movement; his insights regarding the cultivation of conviviality as a response to wider social concerns, such as economic and ecological crises, as a means for reclaiming the freedom of living in hope and of “prolonging the Incarnation.