The Hellenization of Christianity is a long-standing and notoriously contentious historiographical construct in early Christian studies. While it has been deployed in surprisingly fluid ways, most scholars associate the thesis with Adolf von Harnack, for whom it acquired a decidedly critical valence. The “Hellenic spirit”—a concept Harnack usually left undefined—constituted a threat to the undogmatic gospel of Jesus. Whenever this adversarial Hellenic spirit triumphed, as it inevitably did, it corroded an authentic living Christianity into an institutionalized, dogmatic religion. For many others, both before and after Harnack, the Hellenization of Christianity has signaled a similar narrative of decline. The teachings and way of life that marked an authentic Christianity often stood in a disjunctive relationship with Greco-Roman culture, especially its philosophies. The influence of the latter precipitated a debasement of Christianity, the ossification of its teachings, or more seriously, the infiltration of heresy.

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.

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,

The relationship between kabbalistic thought and ancient gnostic ideas has been debated by numerous scholars. Early on, Gershom Scholem argued that the rise of kabbalah represents the “reappearance, in the heart of Judaism, of the gnostic tradition.” In his wake, Isaiah Tishby has posited that the concept of the sĕfirot “emerge[d] and develop[ed] from a historico-literary contact with the remnants of Gnosticism, which were preserved over a period of many generations in certain Jewish circles, until they found their way to the early Kabbalists.” Joseph Dan, on the other hand, maintains that “historical connections” must not be confused with “phenomenological similarities.” There is no evidence for the existence of the former, in his opinion; all that may be claimed is a typological correspondence between gnostic ideas and medieval Jewish kabbalistic mysticism. Moshe Idel likewise claims that some early Jewish motifs penetrated gnostic texts at the same time they continued to flourish within Jewish circles until they finally found form in medieval kabbalah. Yehuda Liebes has adopted a corresponding view, although he makes fruitful exegetical use of the relationship and parallels between various gnostic and Jewish sources. The issue thus remains firmly on the academic agenda.

Since its publication, Franz Rosenzweig's magnum opus, The Star of Redemption, has remained a challenge to its readers and a source of wildly conflicting interpretations. It should be a matter of great consternation to Rosenzweig's readers that, shortly after his publication of the Star, he came to identify the work with common sense. This article traces the emergence of common sense within Rosenzweig's thought and undertakes a critical analysis of his use of the term. In contrast to other efforts to address this topic, I argue that Rosenzweig's belated appeal to common sense is a useful heuristic tool for understanding his account of God, the divine-human relationship, and the power and limits of theological language in the Star.

Amid a scholarly rediscovery of Protestant forms of theosis, questions of whether Jonathan Edwards developed a theotic account of redemption have received increased attention. Ironically, however, interest in Edwards's doctrine of theosis has emphasized the philosophical rather than the theological bases in ways that seem to set him outside the boundaries of Reformed orthodoxy. Yet if we shift our attention away from the neo-Platonic explanations of Edwardsian theosis and place it instead where Edwards himself focused—on the communicable nature of the triune God within the economy—we see that his notions of theosis rest on firmly Protestant foundations and result in recognizably Reformed conclusions. But to say that attention to Edwards's trinitarian and incarnational theology reveals an orthodox form of theosis is not to say that his theotic soteriology lacked distinctive and even innovative elements. Unlike other theologians whose accounts of theosis bifurcated God's communicable nature from the creatures’ relational participation among the divine persons, Edwards's theology made room for and insisted on both.

What did the Reformation do for sodomy? The more or less established view, developed by social and cultural historians and contributors to the history of sexuality, is that it did relatively little. The evidence of the normative discourses of theology and law suggests that definitions and understandings of sodomy after the Reformation movements of the early and middle sixteenth century differed little from what had been proffered in the legal and moral writings of the medieval period. According to these defi nitions, which varied in their particulars, sodomy was a sin of unnatural lust which included, but was often not limited to, sexual contact between persons of the same sex. It was a sin whose origins could be traced to the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, whose inhabitants' penchant for unnatural sex led directly to their destruction in a hail of sulfur and fire—a dramatic event that was to stand as a warning both to those tempted to indulge in this vice and to those innocent of that particular sin who would nonetheless tolerate it in their neighbors. This view is found reflected in a wide range of writings from homiletic, exegetical, and penitential productions of late antiquity and the early, high, and late Middle Ages. And, indeed, while Protestant reforming ideas and practices changed many things in Europe of the sixteenth century, they seem to have left untouched this conception of the sin of the Sodomites. Confessions divided on many theological issues appear to have had no quarrel over what sodomy was, where it had come from, and what ought to be done about it. Definitions, then, remained more or less the same through the course of the Reformations; what changed was the capacity of local and regional jurisdictions to enforce legal proscriptions. And so, if the Reformation movements had any impact on the public discourse on sodomy, that impact was limited to the contribution the reforms made to the development of instruments of moral discipline and their facilitation (in some instances) of harsher responses to persons accused and convicted of the crime of sodomy.

Medieval accounts of disability by and large (though not universally) defend what is now labeled the “religio-moral” construction of disability: seeing an individual's disability as a punishment for that individual's sin.1 Unsurprisingly, such models are not much in favor among contemporary disability theorists for a number of reasons, among which we might include the unacceptable thought that an individual with disabilities somehow deserves those disabilities. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) accepts some version of this theory, but one rather different from the standard one (or at least, from what is now generally understood as the religio-moral model). Aquinas sees physical impairments—things that constitute a subclass of what he labels “bodily defects”—fundamentally as punishments for original sin. He is (generally) very careful to distance his account of defects from notions of individual punishment. (When he is not, it is because of pressure from Scriptural sources—though as we shall see below he believes that by and large the Bible, too, explicitly rejects the view that disability could be a punishment for individual sin.) So whatever we think of punishment models more generally, Aquinas's certainly removes one of the least appealing aspects of such models as typically understood. And Aquinas is careful, too, to associate many features of the human condition—not just those identified as a certain subclass of defects – with corporate punishment for original sin. To this extent, his account of physical impairments tends to normalize such impairments, and to de-emphasize their distance from other features of post-lapsarian human existence. While I doubt that what Aquinas says about bodily defects would satisfy many contemporary disability theorists, it seems to me that parts of his accout—and not least this normalization strategy—may appeal to more theologically-inflected accounts of the human condition.

In Catholic social thought since the time of Leo XIII, two important developments have influenced justificatory arguments for the institution of property. First, the traditional language of the “common good” has been augmented by an emphasis in recent encyclicals upon the dignity of persons and the rights of individuals. I shall analyze the warrants for this shift in formulation to see how changes in the language of justification reveal both continuities and discontinuities with the earlier tradition. Second, in the past century of Roman Catholic social thought, understandings of natural law have been subject to significant revision. Especially since the time of John XXIII, the papal encyclicals have sought both to “historicize” and to update those elements in the traditional discussion of property that fail to reflect modern socioeconomic circumstances. In reviewing the recent encyclical literature on these themes, I will consider how, or whether, earlier discussion can be successfully modernized without undercutting the raison d'etre of natural-law terminology in the process.

A seafaring people gifted with a lively imagination will not fail to enrich its language with figures suggested by the moods of the sea and by the hardships and dangers of the sailor's calling. Hence it is a commonplace to say that the literature of Greece abounds in brilliant and memorable similes and metaphors drawn from this inexhaustible source, as also in well-worn expressions whose marine origin is only dimly felt. Because of a religious coloring that it gradually acquired, one of these figures may be appropriately discussed here; the more so because as we examine its history, it may be possible to correct a certain tendency to derive this religious tone from proximate rather than ultimate sources.

The well known passage about the “archives” and the “gospel” in Ignatius’ Letter to the Philadelphians (8.2) is one of the most intriguing glimpses given us of debate in the church early in the second century. Wide agreement about the meaning of the passage seems to have been reached, and the current view may be summarized more or less as follows: Ignatius recalls a conversation that picks up just after he had made a theological point during his visit to Philadelphia (he gives us no direct information on the subject of the discussion). His opponents had replied (according to most commentators) that if they did not find it in the “archives” (that is, the Old Testament), they did not believe it to be in the “gospel.” Ignatius had retorted that Scripture in fact supported him: “It is written” (γέγραπται). But his opponents had answered that his certainty was not well grounded: “That is just the question.” The passage concludes with a statement that may represent not so much what Ignatius said then as what he now regards as an appropriate way of ending such debates. The “archives” (he says) are Jesus Christ; or (as he rephrases it) the “inviolable archives” are Christ's cross, death, resurrection, and the faith that comes through him. If this is what the passage means, it represents a remarkable reliance on the “gospel” and the events of salvation as opposed to the formal authority of the (Old Testament) Scriptures.

The explosive emergence of the so-called “writing prophets” in the history of Israel is one of the great historical mysteries of Old Testament scholarship. The first, and in some ways one of the greatest of these figures, Amos of Tekoah, can hardly be dated much before 750 B.C., and the beginnings of the prophetic careers of Hosea ben Beeri, Isaiah of Jerusalem, and Micah of Moresheth all fall within the following decade and a half. From this time forward, with the single exception of the dark and bloody reign of Manasseh, there is a steady succession of prophetic literature, ending somewhere around the mid-fifth century B.C. Once initiated, this succession moves in what seems to the historian, operating with the full confidence of hindsight, to be an entirely logical and reasonably consistent fashion. Yet its origins are wholly obscure. Like Melchizedek, Amos seems to have been born without benefit of ancestors. (And it goes without saying that such an [apparently] “uncaused happening” in the historical sphere is as troubling to the modern historian as the thought of an ancestorless Jebusite king would be to the historian's colleague in the biology department.) But what sort of events would be deemed to constitute “sufficient historical causation” for the rise of the classical prophets of Israel?

Love as a moral norm has a very prominent place within the discussions of contemporary Christian ethics. There are three definite trends especially evident in the most popular of these discussions of love. In the first instance, there is a tendency to make love serve as the sole norm in ethics. There is a second tendency to equate love with beneficence. This means, among other things, that love tends to be put into a utilitarian type of calculus and that specific norms such as the Ten Commandments are either played down or dropped entirely. Both of these views of love, by themselves or held in concert, collapse the traditional distinction between love and justice. There is yet a third ten-1 dency to drop any distinction between love for God and love for/the neighbor. Love for God is simply to be understood as love for the neighbor and, as such, it is not something to pursue or cultivate for its own sake. That all three of these tendencies are significantly related to one another should become evident from our further discussion of them.

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the mythic dimension of rabbinic thought. Much of this work emerged from debates between scholars of Jewish mysticism over the origins of kabbalistic myth. Should these origins be sought in external traditions that influenced medieval Judaism or within the rabbinic tradition? As is well known, Gershom Scholem claimed that the rabbis rejected myth in order to forge a Judaism based on rationality and law. Moshe Idel, on the other hand, argues that mythic conceptions and specifically the mythicization of Torah appear in rabbinic literature. While the medieval kabbalists elaborated and developed these ideas, they inherited a mythic worldview from the rabbis. Scholars are now increasingly likely to characterize many classical rabbinic sources as mythic. Medieval myth need not have been due to external influence, but should be seen as an internal development within Judaism. Despite the appearance of mythic thought in rabbinic literature, however, a tremendous gulf remains between rabbinic and kabbalistic myth. The full-blown theogonic and cosmogonic myths of the kabbalists, the complex divine structure of the Sefirot, and the detailed expressions of the theurgic effect of ritual (that is, the effect that specific rituals have upon God or the Sefirot) represent a mode of mythic thinking far more comprehensive than that of the rabbis. In rabbinic literature one finds mythic motifs—succinct, independent, and self–contained expressions—not fully developed myths. How exactly did rabbinic myth develop into medieval mystical myth?

Antigonus of Socho, who flourished in the first decades of the second century B.C., was ranked among the “Fathers” of the Synagogue by the later Pharisaic teachers, but they had no recollection of his words and deeds. A solitary maxim kept his memory alive and passed his name on to posterity.

In his work, Nicaea and Its Legacy, Lewis Ayres raises a number of issues important to the discipline of theology. The first is simply the difficulty of studying the past, especially the fourth century, one of the key periods in the formation of Christian theology. Reading texts from fifteen hundred years ago is sufficiently challenging, but these texts are set in a very complex history (or histories) of theological, social and imperial controversies and transitions. Then there is the task of relating the study of historical theology to modern systematic theology, knowing that simply retelling the history more thoroughly will not solve or resolve modern issues, for they have their own complicated genealogy. There is also the need to be aware of the involvement of different exegetical practices and presuppositions—then and now—in all of this. Finally, and most broadly or ecumenically, there are the implications that such work now has for dialogue between “Western” and “Eastern” trinitarian theology, and the questionable usefulness of such categories. That Ayres has remained sensitive to these, and other, dimensions of difficulty, while also engaging with a substantial body of literature, numerous primary texts, and diverse secondary texts (if that is still a useful distinction) makes his work both challenging and significant.

In the early or mid-second century c.e., a Jewish proselyte named Aquila1 translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek.2 The translation survives today only in fragments, but both Jewish and Christian sources from Late Antiquity offer perspectives on and information about Aquila as well as citations of his translation. To fully understand the role his legacy played in Jewish and Christian communities requires careful analysis of each of the sources. I believe that prior scholarship, especially regarding ancient perspectives on Aquila and his translation, as well as the popularity of his translation in various communities, has drawn conclusions based on overall impressions of texts that may appear quite differently when examined closely and in context. My goal in the following pages is to develop a more nuanced understanding of the history of Aquila's Bible translation in Late Antiquity.

“Spirit” in antiquity was seen as the uncontrollable, dynamic, and numinous presence of divine power. It had no relation to rationality, nor were human beings masters of this spirit. On the contrary, it was thoroughly irrational and entirely the agent of the gods. When the spirit was present in human beings, its manifestations were poetry, prophecy, visions, ecstasy, and speaking in tongues.

For more than a hundred years the Excerpts from Theodotus (especially 42–65) and Irenaeus' Treatise have served as primary sources of Valentinian eschatology. Since Dibelius' article appeared in 1908, discussion of Valentinian eschatology has followed his premise that these two sources contain essentially the same teaching, and may be derived from a common source. Dibelius makes this claim on the basis of observable parallels of terminology and structure between the two passages.