On 8 December 1854, Pius IX issued Ineffabilis Deus, in which he dogmatized the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The bull reads,

Despite decades of research, it remains surprisingly difficult to identify the origins of the works preserved in the hoard of Coptic manuscripts discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945. Even as unearthed “Gnostic” gospels continue to make headlines, many academics repent intoning these old, fiery heretics, and some have even called for an all-out dispensation of the term “Gnosticism.”2 Yet a felicitous piece of external evidence seems to offer a more stable foundation for identifying the date and sectarian provenance of several of the most difficult works discovered at Nag Hammadi, the so-called “Platonizing” treatises of the “Sethian school” of Gnosticism.3 Porphyry, the top pupil of the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus (third century C.E.), remarks that,

The engagement with Egypt and the Egyptian gods that transpired in the Hebrew Bible continued into the texts produced by rabbinic Judaism. Rabbinic texts of late antiquity and the early medieval period frequently presented images of Egypt and its religion. One of the critical objectives of these portrayals of Egypt was to set boundaries of Jewish identity by presenting rabbinic Judaism in opposition to Egyptian culture. The Egyptian cultural icons in rabbinic texts also demonstrate that the rabbis were aware of cultures other than their own.1 The presence of Egyptian elements in midrash had previously been noted to a very limited extent by scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (the science of Judaism), and it has not escaped the attention of more recent scholarship.

In this essay I take up cudgels against a central construct in the confessional historiography of the Protestant Reformation: The notion that there existed a clear, well-defined doctrine of justification shared by all the major reformers from the earliest stages of the conflagration and that this “Reformation doctrine of justification” served as the “material principle” in the formation of the emerging Protestant self-identity.1 In contrast with this traditional view, I argue that the first-generation reformers, galvanized by Luther's protest against the indulgence trade, adopted a common “rhetoric of dissent” aimed at critiquing the regnant Catholic orthopraxy of salvation in the interest of a common set of primarily existential-religious concerns. During the course of the next several decades following the initia Lutheri, however, an “orthodox” doctrine of justification quickly emerged'several of them, in fact. The Roman Catholic church and the emerging Protestant confessions, Lutheran and Reformed, quickly found it necessary to formulate their teachings in increasingly precise terms, so as both to integrate their central soteriological affirmations within a wider body of contested doctrines and practices and to demarcate clearly the boundaries of confessional identity in opposition to competing confessions. As with earlier periods of intense theological controversy within the Christian tradition, this conflict represented not a sudden breakthrough, but rather “a search for orthodoxy, a search conducted by the method of trial and error.”2 Unlike earlier debates, however, what emerged in the aftermath of the Reformation was not a single, dominant orthodoxy which carried the field, but rather multiple, competing orthodoxies, each one with its own Gospel.

I continue to be preoccupied with the task of delineating the features of a distinctive tradition in American religious thought that I refer to as theosemiotic.1 It can be traced back through Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jonathan Edwards as an early exemplar. It achieves full flower in the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce and then bears fruit in the work of the later Josiah Royce and in some of H. Richard Niebuhr's writings. This essay focuses on Peirce and on the later Royce. Peirce's theosemiotic is most clearly discernible in his 1908 article “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” especially when one reads that article in the context of Peirce's developed theory of signs. I do not intend to engage here in any sort of detailed exegesis of the Neglected Argument.2 Instead, I wish to focus on the continuity between Peirce and Royce visible in the latter's book on The Problem of Christianity,3 with most of my attention being directed to the discussion in the second part of that work.

In reflecting upon the fact that religious language survives long after the practices and the devotion that gave rise to it have departed, Alasdair MacIntyre once observed that what “we” are left with is “a religious language which survives even though we do not know what to say in it.”1 Some writers and thinkers who acknowledge that religious language is, for them, effectively either foreign or dead, continue to employ it because of its beauty, or because they wish to speak to people for whom such language is still living for political, moral, or literary reasons. But why a writer for whom religious language holds no personal meaning would go to near absurd lengths to construct a narrative saturated with biblical typology (and even numerology) is difficult to imagine. The question of how such a writer would seem to know almost exactly what to say in the religious language of a tradition that she never practiced is even more difficult to understand. How could someone who couldn't say that she was among those for whom religious language was a source of binding claims to truth (as opposed to a culturally important animated corpse) speak as if things were otherwise?