In the history of biblical interpretation and dogmatic speculation, Gen 1:26–28 has proved remarkably fecund as a source of exegetical and theological reflection. Literature on the passage is now boundless, but shows no sign of ceasing or abating, despite the appearance in recent decades of several exhaustive treatments of the text and the existence of substantial consensus among biblical scholars. The reason for the perpetual fascination of the passage lies in the nature and limits of the text. The verses contain a fundamental, and unique, statement of biblical anthropology and theology–presented in a terse and enigmatic formulation. A rare attempt within the OT literature to speak directly and definitively about the nature of humanity in relation to God and other creation, the statement is at once limited in its content, guarded in its expression, and complex in its structure. As a consequence, philologist and theologian are enticed and compelled in ever new contexts of questions and understandings to explore anew the meaning and implications of creation “in the divine image”–for it is this striking and unique expression, above all, that has dominated the discussion.

In 1952 there appeared a short article in Theological Studies entitled “Heraclitus' Alleged Logos Doctrine.” As one may guess from the title, the author, T. F. Glasson, reported to his largely theological audience that the conception of Heraclitus' Logos as a cosmicmetaphysical principle, far from being a possible source for the Logos of the Fourth Gospel, rests upon a gigantic mistake. The truth is, rather, that Glasson's report rests upon a gigantic mistake, as well as several lesser ones. At the very least it does not do justice to a quite different interpretation, an interpretation which, indeed, has become in the meantime the “accepted” one. Our task, also intended primarily for theologians and nonspecialists in pre-Socratic philosophy, is to provide a corrected and updated report, and to make a few observations of our own.

Reginald Pecock, D.D., thirty-second bishop of Chichester (1450–1458/59), had a meteoric career as a historic personage. He made a bright, unexpected appearance out of an obscure background. He shone brightly, first as a curiosity in his world and then as a seeming threat to it. Colliding with the power realities of his time, his career was shattered and his reputation permanently blackened by the Paul's Cross bonfire that reduced some fourteen of his books to powdery ash. This once proud figure (the obvious pun on his name was apt and widely used by his enemies) was now quite pathetic. He was required to suffer the humiliation of standing before 20,000 people to confess his errors and to assist in piling upon the fire the material expressions of his lifetime of thinking and of defending the Church. When those flames subsided, Reginald Pecock returned to the obscurity from which he had emerged, and there he died. Thus, for this the most famous lord spiritual of the Lancastrian regime; author of the most ambitious theological program of the fifteenth century in England; the first bishop of the English Church to be formally convicted of heresy–for this man we have no certain knowledge of the date of his birth or the date of his death, the place of his origin or the site of his burial.

The “judicious” Richard Hooker (1554–1600) gave classic expression to the via media position of Elizabethan Anglicanism. He attempted to steer a middle course, appropriating what he considered to be the truths and avoiding what he considered to be the errors and excesses, between Roman Catholicism and the Magisterial Reformation (Lutheranism and especially Calvinism). It has often been pointed out by scholars that Hooker sometimes inclines more in one direction than the other on certain key doctrines. For example, it has been said many times that his view of the relation of God and the world, of grace and nature, of faith and reason, is characterized by continuity rather than discontinuity, and that in this he was true to the medieval Catholic thought of Thomas Aquinas. But his view of justification has been said to be nearer to that of the Magisterial Reformation than to that of Rome.

In assessing the importance of William Ellery Channing to his generation, Ralph Waldo Emerson pronounced him “our Bishop” and put in sharp focus what was for him an intellectual problem, and what has remained for us a historical one. It is not the word “bishop” that is problematic, for almost no one disputed the leadership of Channing in the first decades of the nineteenth century, that crucially formative period for our culture. His first biographer, nephew William Henry Channing, noted that he “was everywhere recognized as the most eloquent and effective preacher in Boston,” and after his death Emerson remarked that he “left no successor in the pulpit” (JMN, 1. 470). New Englanders generally recognized him as the key spokesman for the liberal or Unitarian theology, and social reformers of all stripes looked to him with hope to support their endeavors. On the basis of a handful of literary essays and religious polemics, he became, in Sydney Ahlstrom's phrase, “the most influential American religious thinker being heard abroad,” and Robert Spiller noted that in the critical world, he was “among the first American writers to win British critical consideration.”