This paper and the two responses to it were presented as part of “Evangelical Perspectives on Biblical Authority,” a conference held at Harvard Divinity School on 9 and 10 March 2001. The conference was sponsored by the School under the auspices of the Alonzo L. McDonald Family Visiting Professorship of Evangelical Theological Studies.

Professor Abraham has given us a stimulating paper on the central and prophetic nature of revelation. I thank him for it. Several years ago at a meeting of a theological society Professor Gabriel Fackre gently chided David Tracy and myself by asking: “Why do Roman Catholic theologians neglect the work of Evangelical theologians?” This neglect was regrettable, he suggested, for Evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics have much in common theologically. Moreover, although they are numerically very large denominations in society, they both share a certain minority status in the academic community. They should, therefore, pay attention to one another's writings. His admonition has weighed heavily upon me.

Let me thank Professor Abraham for such an interesting and engaging presentation on the status and character of the epistemology and logic of divine revelation. The humility he calls for, and the spirit animating his desire for critical, open, conversation, is, I think, to be emulated and strongly admired.

A prominent feature of post-Reformation English theology is a strong tradition of plebeian heresy. English people, men and women, without knowledge of learned languages or the theological canon, derived original religious ideas from their own experiences or personal study of the Bible, as well as from an eclectic miscellany of other texts.England did not, of course, have a monopoly on plebeian heresy. The most celebrated early modern plebeian heretic known to us today is probably the Italian miller Menocchio, the subject of Carlo Ginzburg's study: The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Trans. John and Ann Tedeschi; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Plebeian heretics often emerged from the artisan classes, possessing literacy and access to at least a small collection of books, always including the Bible. They elaborated their individual theologies outside both the dominant orthodoxy of the Anglican church and that of the major dissenting bodies.

A recurring issue in analyzing the work of the critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno (d. 1969) is how to understand his professed adherence to the biblical commandment that prohibits the manufacture of images of the divine—referred to as the “image ban” or Bilderverbot (Exod 20:4–5). Adorno writes, “I see no other possibility than that of extreme asceticism toward any faith in revelation, and extreme allegiance to the Bilderverbot.”Theodor W. Adorno, “Vernunft und Offenbarung,” Gesammelte Schriften (20 vols.; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–1993) 10:616. See also Gesammelte Schriften 6:207, 293–94; idem, Negative Dialectics (trans. E. B. Ashton; New York: Continuum, 1994) 207, 298–99. Gesammelte Schriften 3:40; idem and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (trans. John Cumming; New York: Continuum, 1994). Adorno also prohibits pronunciation of the divine name; see Gesammelte Schriften 6:394; Negative Dialectics, 402. Some readers' interest in the significance of Adorno's allegiance to the Bilderverbot is primarily theological. Others' interest, particularly that of his successors in critical theory, is primarily political. In their estimation, Adorno's allegiance to the Bilderverbot undermines any contribution he might make to contemporary formulations of an emancipatory praxis.

It is one of the ironies of American religious history that the most thoroughly anti-Catholic work to appear after the Civil War was published in the unlikely decade after the Second World War, when the last good war had been fought and won, and what Gibson Winter termed “the suburban captivity of the churches” was well underway, a “captivity” in which questions of crabgrass ostensibly replaced theology as the major topic of conversation. A series of articles that had begun to appear in the Nation, a staunchly libertarian journal, in November 1947, was published by Beacon Press in 1949 as American Freedom and Catholic Power—a work that would set the stage for increasingly neuralgic exchanges between Catholics and Protestants during a decade in which sociologist Will Herberg announced that the “American Way of Life” was now acceptably packaged in Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish forms. The author of that book, Paul Blanshard, understood himself to be issuing a timely call to protect the First Amendment of the Constitution against the encroachments of a Catholic hierarchy living within the very fortress of the free world, but hostile to American democratic and political values.

David Ralph Bains [Ph.D.2000]: The Liturgical Impulse in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Mainline Protestantism

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Susanne Mrozik [Ph.D. 1999]: The Relationship Between Morality and the Body in Monastic Training According to the Shikshasamuccaya

Laura S. Nasrallah [Th.D. 2002]: Rhetorical Strategies in Early Christian debates over Prophecy

Nancy Eileen Nienhuis [Th.D. 2002]: Neighbors and Other Strangers: Poor Women, Critical Feminist Liberation Theology, and Welfare-Reform Rhetoric

Yuko Taniguchi [Th.D. 2002]: To Lead Quiet and Peaceable Lives: Rhetorical Analysis of the First Letter to Timothy