The Divine Wisdom and the Divine Economy

I am warmly grateful for the constructive comments and insightful questions of a range of people in respect of the material articulated in this paper – John Behr, Christophe Chalamet, Paul Dafydd Jones, Tom Greggs, Friedrich Lohmann, Christoph Schwöbel, Janet Soskice, and (especially) Phil Ziegler.Peer reviewedPostprin

Reflections on The Analogy of Grace by Gerald McKenny

Peer reviewedPreprin

Ethical agency and actualistic ontology in the theological ethics of Karl Barth

This dissertation investigates the way in which the actualistic ontology which underlies the Church Dogmatics of Karl Barth affects his conception of ethical agency. It analyses this effect along three paths of inquiry: noetic, ontic, and telic. The dissertation therefore explores not only the discipline of theological ethics as Barth construes it, but also the ontological import which he attributes to ethical action and its teleological purpose. Along the way, it engages fruitfully with a variety of critiques of Barth's conception of ethical agency, and finds resources within his actualistic ontology to answer some of the varied criticism

From confessing to confession : Discerning the season under heaven

Non peer reviewedPublisher PD

The eucharist in post-Reformation Scotland : a theological tale of harmony and diversity

Peer reviewedPostprin

Markus Barth on the Lord’s Supper

Open Access via the Brill Journals 2020 Bridging AgreementPeer reviewedPublisher PD

Quasideterminant solutions of a non-Abelian Hirota-Miwa equation

A non-Abelian version of the Hirota-Miwa equation is considered. In an earlier paper [Nimmo (2006) J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. \textbf{39}, 5053-5065] it was shown how solutions expressed as quasideterminants could be constructed for this system by means of Darboux transformations. In this paper we discuss these solutions from a different perspective and show that the solutions are quasi-Pl\"{u}cker coordinates and that the non-Abelian Hirota-Miwa equation may be written as a quasi-Pl\"{u}cker relation. The special case of the matrix Hirota-Miwa equation is also considered using a more traditional, bilinear approach and the techniques are compared

Resolving the decades-long transient FIRST J141918.9+394036: an orphan long gamma-ray burst or a young magnetar nebula?

Ofek (2017) identified FIRST J141918.9+394036 (hereafter FIRST J1419+3940) as a radio source sharing similar properties and host galaxy type to the compact, persistent radio source associated with the first known repeating fast radio burst, FRB 121102. Law et al. (2018) showed that FIRST J1419+3940 is a transient source decaying in brightness over the last few decades. One possible interpretation is that FIRST J1419+3940 is a nearby analogue to FRB 121102 and that the radio emission represents a young magnetar nebula (as several scenarios assume for FRB 121102). Another interpretation is that FIRST J1419+3940 is the afterglow of an `orphan' long gamma-ray burst (GRB). The environment is similar to where most such events are produced. To distinguish between these hypotheses, we conducted radio observations using the European VLBI Network at 1.6 GHz to spatially resolve the emission and to search for millisecond-duration radio bursts. We detect FIRST J1419+3940 as a compact radio source with a flux density of $620 \pm 20\ \mathrm{\mu Jy}$ (on 2018 September 18) and a source size of $3.9 \pm 0.7\ \mathrm{mas}$ (i.e. $1.6 \pm 0.3\ \mathrm{pc}$ given the angular diameter distance of $83\ \mathrm{Mpc}$). These results confirm that the radio emission is non-thermal and imply an average expansion velocity of $(0.10 \pm 0.02)c$. Contemporaneous high-time-resolution observations using the 100-m Effelsberg telescope detected no millisecond-duration bursts of astrophysical origin. The source properties and lack of short-duration bursts are consistent with a GRB jet expansion, whereas they disfavor a magnetar birth nebula.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

The theology of preaching: a Reformed perspective

Paul Nimmo’s paper explores the larger framework of the Reformed tradition’s theology of preaching by drawing on a number of the classic sources and by examining the reasons why preaching has for so long occupied a central place in the life of Reformed churches. It goes on to consider the distinct but inseparable connections of the event of preaching to the Word and to the Spirit. In the face of the challenges facing the church in Scotland today the paper concludes by making the case that the need to reflect theologically about the centrality and significance of the preaching event becomes more rather than less necessary.Publisher PD