Comparative theology generally begins from a study of texts, scriptural texts that have been canonized, and commentaries on these texts—as well as philosophical, theological and mystical treatises. Though this textual focus gives us access to some of the most subtle and nuanced reasonings developed in various traditions, I am concerned that this textual focus may limit our understanding of religion, and I am convinced that broadening the scope of comparative theology beyond texts will also contribute to the theological creativity of this approach. I hypothesize that, depending on the sort of source from which we theologize, different questions will come to mind relating to different theological problems. Indeed, turning to material and ritual practices, in addition to textual sources, will reveal aspects of the divine that remain invisible when one stays within the limits of textual study. I do not, in any way, want to turn this into an either/or story in which reading texts is placed over against engaging ritual and material practices. What I envision is a complementarity between textual and ritual comparison, not a privileging of one over the other.

While numerous scholars have compared the Priestly regulations in the Pentateuch to ancient Near Eastern “ritual texts,” the Priestly legal material more generally corresponds in form and style to ancient Near Eastern casuistic law collections than to descriptive or prescriptive “ritual texts.” At the same time, ancient Near Eastern law collections do not contain any ritual or religious ordinances, relating instead primarily to civil and financial affairs or social law and order. This paper examines the formal, substantive, and generic affinities between the Priestly laws and the casuistic Greek “Sacred Laws” inscribed on stone and other materials throughout the eastern Mediterranean basin from the sixth century BCE onwards. Analysis of related Northwest-Semitic and Punic texts, as well as potential precedents from the Hittite world, further contributes to our understanding of the Sitz im Leben of the casuistic Priestly law.

Much of the written evidence for Greco-Roman associations provides information about meeting frequency, group activities, venues for gathering, and membership requirements. At the same time, many inscriptions and papyri also contain short narratives that directly contribute to the common identity of the association. These narrative elements often take the form of a vision, a dream, or an oracle that a patron receives that encourages him or her to found the association or direct its practices in some way. I suggest in this article that many of Paul's audiences would have received his story about encountering the risen Christ as rather commonplace given the frequency of these similar claims among voluntary associations. In other words, the article explores how Paul's (mainly non-Judean) audiences would have slotted his claims into their cultural repertoire of ideas, especially if they considered his Christ group to be just like the many other associations with which they were already familiar. Association inscriptions offer an important collection of examples that can be analyzed alongside Paul's claim to have seen the risen Christ.

Scholarship on Phil 2:6–11 has long wrestled with the question of “interpretive staging.” While acknowledging that Jewish sapiential and apocalyptic literature as well as Roman apotheosis narratives provide important matrices for the hymn, the following study pinpoints a third backdrop against which Paul's dramatic christology would have been heard in Philippi: Euripidean tragedy. Echoes of Dionysus's opening monologue from Euripides's Bacchae in the carmen Christi suggest that Roman hearers of Paul's letter likely understood Christ's kenotic metamorphosis as a species of Dionysian revelation. This interpretive recognition accomplishes a new integration of the hymn's Jewish and imperial-cultic transcripts. Jesus's Bacchic portraiture supports a theology of Christ's pre-existence, while simultaneously establishing him as a Dionysian antithesis to the imperial Apollonian kyrios Caesar. These Dionysian echoes also elevate the status of slaves and women, and suggest that “the tragic” remains modally present within the otherwise comic fabula of the Christ myth.

Was there a “Q community”? There are many who think that any quest for a “Q community” is a fool's errand. In this paper, I revisit this vexing question by focusing on several distinctive textual coordinates with which we can map Q's author within the social, textual, and theological landscape(s) of Second Temple Judaism. Since the author of Q was capable of crafting innovative scriptural allusions and adapting inherited Jesus traditions, I suggest that Q is not an isolated “Galilean” phenomenon but a textual production that combines Galilean Jesus traditions in conversation with contemporary Jewish apocalyptic traditions and can be located alongside the wider “Essenic” networks that pre-dated and co-existed with the Palestinian Jewish Jesus movement.

Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that Kant had erected an epistemological boundary between mental representations and external reality that precipitates an anxiety in modern theologians about whether one can properly refer to God. As a way past this boundary, Wolterstorff's Reformed epistemology retrieves Thomas Reid's account of perception as an alternative to Kant, according to which knowledge of external objects is direct and immediate. Further, Wolterstorff points to the Dutch neo-Calvinist Herman Bavinck as one who bears many “reidian” elements in his epistemology, especially in the way in which Bavinck argues that the epistemic accessibility of the external world ought to be taken for granted. The thesis of this present paper, however, is that a closer investigation of Bavinck's account of perception reveals that he, unlike Reid, accepts the gap between mental representations and external objects, such that representations are those through which we know the world. Bavinck affirms that a correspondence between the two can be obtained by an appeal to the resources found in Christian revelation. In effect, what emerges in a close comparison of Bavinck and Reid is that Bavinck's account is an alternative theological response to the kantian boundary—one according to which mental representations correspond with external objects because both participate in an organically connected cosmos shaped by a Triune God.

In contemporary social and political discourse, the concept of “the West” plays a role that is both centrally important and difficult to define. It is most frequently used to designate an entire civilization, in a way that does not quite map onto what is suggested by its first dictionary meaning as a cardinal direction. Deciding what exactly is and is not included under the umbrella of the West, or whether the term usefully describes anything at all, is a daunting normative task involving a series of discrete historical and definitional judgments. For example, is the West defined more by medieval Christendom, or by the subsequent intellectual and spiritual movements that attacked it, such as the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment? Is it possible or coherent to include all these conflicting movements under the same designation? Geographically, how important is the ancient split between the Latin and Orthodox churches, and does the Cold War-era exclusion of Russia from the West still hold today? Champions of the concept see defending it and the values it stands for as the foremost ideological task of our time, while critics suspect it of being little more than a portentous tribal designation for societies whose heritage happens to be both majority-Christian and majority-white.