Believing belongs to experience. It does not generate itself. When men today repeat the Lord's Prayer, saying Jesus' words after Jesus, “Lead us not into trial but deliver us from evil,” they are giving voice to their believing for a reason. The reason is the experience of being diminished and enlarged in the world of death, beauty, and renewal — in the great world of action that is the “circumpressure” of God. Believing (literally, holding dear) arises in times of testing in which human faithfulness takes shape and becomes tangible as an affection. How faithfulness becomes palpable is the subject matter of the following account.

Among recent proposals to give clarity and precision to theological concepts, none is more considered and provocative than that of Gordon D. Kaufman. Kaufman has correctly discerned that the question put to religious belief by the contemporary mood is one which concerns not only its truth but, even more fundamentally, the very meaning of its language. Abjuring the obscurity of much theological terminology and analysis, Kaufman accepts the challenge to clarify the meaning of crucial religious terms in the context of ordinary experience and discourse, an undertaking as refreshing as it is suggestive. While I am fully prepared to accept Kaufman's claim that he has put his finger on a, if not the, crucial issue for present theological reflection, I find myself unable to accept the results of his inquiry. In stating my disagreement with his conclusions, I hope to develop a brief but coherent response to the issues which Kaufman addresses.

At the twelfth International Congress of the Historical Sciences there were a number of papers read on the subject of religious tolerance and heresies in modern times. Among these there were two which are of particular relevance to anyone interested in the religious thought of the Reformation Era. Professors Martin Schmidt and Gerhard Schilfert, the authors, were especially concerned with English Puritanism and its relations with continental radical ferment. Schmidt analyzed the work of Hermann Weingarten, who believed that England's century of Reformation was the seventeenth rather than the sixteenth and that it was during the struggle against the Stuarts that the history of the English church became a record of new intellectual and religious movements. Hence, the chiliastic Independents of the English Interregnum were analagous to the Anabaptists of continental fame in the early sixteenth century. In fact, during the unrest of the English Puritan Revolution, German influences presumably transmitted from the Netherlands were willingly accepted. Among the writers involved in this process were Jakob Böhme and Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil. From these sources came the belief in the second coming of Christ which formed the unifying bond for all shades of English revolutionary Christian thought. Cromwell, himself, was deeply affected by chiliastic thought, but when he assumed political responsibility, he had to act in a more rational way. Finally the enthusiasm of the Fifth Monarchists and the Levellers subsided into the quiet mysticism of the Quakers and the natural rights position of the Age of Reason.

That Jonathan Edwards is an idealist is a commonly held view among historians of American philosophy. Not surprisingly, the early essays “Of Being,” “The Mind,” and the so-called “Notes on Natural Science” figure prominently in the substantiation of this judgment; for they offer not infrequent and at times unambiguous testimony to a tendency in Edwards' writings which seems to reduce all reality to the status of exclusively mental existence. Yet despite the claim which such a characterization can lay to Edwards's own words, it can be seriously misleading unless viewed within the context of his broader theological, scientific, and epistemological commitments. Because the very works which are most conspicuous in their idealistic tendencies also evidence the countervailing emphases entailed in Edwards's empiricist orientation, an examination of those early essays can itself serve to place his metaphysics in perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the usage of hwqyc in classical Hebrew with a view to proposing that hwqyc is a specialized usage in the context of covenant institutions. We shall first investigate the occurrences of hwqyc in biblical Hebrew, then discuss its etymology, and finally analyze pertinent covenantal institutions that may shed some light on the subject of this investigation.