In a previous article published in this journal, I discussed the relation between the neurological system and some culturally prescribed forms of self-inflicted pain. I showed that the way humans experience and communicate pain depends on the cybernetic features of the peripheral and central nervous system. The body-self, our sense of coherent and embodied agency, was also discussed in its relation to neural function—Ronald Melzack's “neurosignature.” These topics traced a basic epistemology of self-inflicted pain. I showed that an intentional manipulation of systemic neural features could result in states of “self-transcendence,” or effacement, to which many mystics have aspired. These dynamics take place beneath the level of consciousness. They constitute a neuropsychology. But what happens at the conscious level, in the awareness of the self-mutilator? How do the neurological processes translate into decisions to hurt oneself, and what are the consequences of such pain? These questions are the subject of the present work. The discussion now moves to the psychological level of the experience of pain, but it builds carefully on the neurocybernetics of the previous article. There will be no deus ex machina Self who becomes magically reborn through the ordeals of pain. For reasons that will become explicit shortly, I will adhere to the strict rules of phenomenology that regulated the first article. The subject who undergoes pain will only be discussed as an expansion of the body-self.

“Lord, at this time are you restoring the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6)

The disciples' leading question in Acts 1:6 sets the context for Luke's narration of the last words which the risen Jesus speaks on earth. The Lord's oracular answer clearly divides in two parts. Acts 1:7 conveys a sharp caution to those who would speculate about God's timetable: “It is not yours to know the periods or occasions which the Father has established in his own authority.” Yet Jesus' final words respond positively to the question of restoration by revealing the deployment of theocratic dominion, even indicating the geographic staging of Acts: “But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and unto the end of the earth” (1:8).

Toward the end of the first century the Christian church at Rome seems to have made a convert of whom it was never very proud. He was not a great man. His writings were not included in the New Testament, though they were seriously considered for it. But his book throws a flood of light on the life, the labors, the trials, the hopes, the fears of Christians at about the time when the canonical books were being selected and put together into a collection.

Historians of Buddhism in China have long ago noted the fact that after the T'ang dynasty Buddhism no longer played a creative rôle in the literature and arts of China, and that the Buddhist church ceased to make any significant contributions toward the religious and social life of the nation. Some people are inclined to attribute this decline of Buddhism to the suppression of 845, when 260,000 monks and nuns were ordered defrocked, and over 40,000 temples and shrines ordered destroyed. It was held that the religion never recovered from this blow. However, this view does not take into account the fact that during certain periods of the Sung dynasty, the number of monks and nuns actually exceeded that under the T'ang; in 1021, monks 397,615, nuns 61,239; in 1034, monks 385,220, nuns 48,742. It would be necessary therefore to look for some other factors to account for the decline in the influence of the sangha, especially during and after the Sung dynasty.

Liberal Christians have affirmed their faith in religious certainty on the strength of two basic claims: namely, that Jesus revealed the character of God—a morally good God; and that Jesus revealed God's purpose for the world—a morally perfect humanity in accord with God's own character. The outlook of liberal Christianity, embracing both its theology and its ethical program, centres in its certainty concerning these two doctrines which form its sources.

A study of rabbinic legal rulings concerning the barren wife reveals the subordinate place of women in rabbinic Judaism's systematic vision of an ideal reality. Yet at the same time, aggadic texts demonstrate that demands of necessity and compassion often prevailed over halachic prescription, illuminating the rift which not infrequently separated rabbinic theory and actual practice. Moreover, a review of aggadic reflections on barren women also yields suggestive insights into the dilemma of suffering, and the efficacy of prayer, as well as examples of the ways in which biblical models could become paradigms and symbols of empowerment in women's lives.

In 1919, Cuthbert Butler, abbot of Downside abbey and one of the major figures in Roman Catholic intellectual life in England in the early years of this century, published an interpretation of Benedictine history which stressed the cenobitical spirit of the Benedictine Rule. Butler felt that Benedict avoided the excesses of physical asceticism and lonely competition found in earlier, more eremitical forms of monasticism and emphasized instead a life of obedience and stability within the monastic family. This interpretation has so dominated more recent scholarship on medieval monasticism that few students of the Benedictine Rule have noticed how little discussion of community it actually contains.

Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho has been considered one of the basic documents for an understanding of the theological contacts and discussions between Christians and Jews in the second century. Several scholars have studied the Dialogue in an attempt to ascertain the main ideas, the fundamental questions, and the principal attitudes involved in such contacts. The inquiry, however, does not appear to have reached definitive conclusions. There has been a diversity of opinion due mainly to the complexity of the problems, to the ambiguity of the pertinent data, and to the theological presuppositions of the researchers. Specific questions like “How well did Justin know and represent his contemporary Judaism?” seem to be more and more, but not completely, settled. Others, however, such as the degree of friendliness or hostility between Jews and Christians displayed in the Dialogue, remain in a condition of fluidity.

In 1875 the collector and scholar Wilhelm Froehner published a short text incised on a gem of red jasper that had been offered to him in Nazareth for possible purchase. Of the six lines of this text only the first three have been much cited because they consist of three gods’ names, and reference has customarily been not to Froehner's original publication but to Louis Robert's quotation from it in his Collection Froehner of 1936. In making an apposite allusion to the Froehner gem in her excellent study of the cults of the Hawran in the Roman period, Dominique Sourdel was under the impression that the great nineteenth-century collector had actually acquired the piece; but Froehner himself reports unambiguously that he refused to pay the dealer's price. The object has therefore been lost to the world of scholarship. Nonetheless Froehner's transcription, entirely baffling to him in its second half, is worth resurrecting in the light of more recent discoveries in the Roman Near East. It bears upon several important cults among the inhabitants of provincia Arabia.

The number of writings appearing on Teilhard de Chardin is increasing daily, with the great majority of them treating his philosophical, theological or humanistic ideas. Discussion of his evolutionary theory from a more scientific point of view is relatively rare. For one thing, he seems to have leaned heavily, though not exclusively, on a neo-Lamarckian explanatory viewpoint. The major problem, however, is that he espoused a theory of evolution, orthogenesis, which is rejected by the majority of scientists today on the ground that there is no evidence for it. Many writers force one to conclude that they are unaware of the ramifications of holding a theory that is considered unviable in the scientific community. In the same vein, too many authors do not seem to take seriously the critics of Teilhard who have made this point, e.g., George G. Simpson, Peter Medawar and Theodosius Dobzhansky. One gets the impression that there is a wider gulf between “the two cultures” than he might have imagined. Little concern for Teilhard's orthogenetic evolution leads us to suspect that writers do not know that it makes a difference what type of evolution Teilhard espoused. There may be a cultural lag between science and the other disciplines, but orthogenesis has been around for many years now, and has been rejected by biologists for at least fifteen years, which is a conservative estimate.

The importance of William Law has never been in doubt. Scholars have regarded him as an extremely effective High Church apologist by virtue of his replies to Bishop Benjamin Hoadly on ecclesiology and eucharistic theology, and as an influential pastoral guide by virtue of the success of his Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. He is also considered the most notable post-Reformation English mystic by virtue of his later works, written under the influence of the early seventeenth-century Silesian theosophist, Jacob Bohme. This Behmenism, however, has served to reduce the admiration expressed for him. Even sympathetic contemporaries regarded Law's enthusiasm for Böhme as certainly eccentric, and perhaps even more objectionable than that. Retrospection did not blunt eighteenth-century disapproval. Dean (later Bishop) George Home, who was an ardent admirer and indeed disciple of the pre-Behmenist Law, lamented the descent of “one of the brightest stars in the firmament of the church…into the sink and complication of Paganism, Quakerism, and Socinianism, mixed up with chemistry and astrology by a possessed cobbler.” The writers of the Romantic era were far more disposed to acknowledge the value of that from which the eighteenth-century had recoiled as “enthusiasm.”

Martin Luther's revolutionary insight concerning the location of the event of justification in the “bottom of the heart” contained, as is well known, some ancillary results toward the displacing of external activities—”works”—from a central position in the quest for salvation. One effect of his theology was a radical redistribution of weight in his anthropological understanding, a shifting of focus away from a person's active participation in liturgy and the sacraments, asceticism and good works, and toward the event of justification in the “consciousness,” “depths of the heart,” or “the inmost heart.” Moreover, a new understanding of the psychological situation in which the Gospel can operate involved Luther in new methods for preparing and reinforcing the justification event. This article will examine Luther's description of the psychological situation in which justification occurs; his revised anthropology, especially as it affected his view of the human body; his identification of the ear as the direct access to the “bottom of the heart”; and, finally, the consequences of Luther's anthropology for the understanding of asceticism, death, and the sacraments.

For many years now, it has become very common for Old Testament scholars to refer to the numerous parallels between the patriarchal customs reflected in the stories of Genesis and the Custom law of the cuneiform documents of the second millennium B.C. Particular attention has been given to the Nuzi texts and to custom law related to marriage. The present study is directed to a reexamination of the parallels to marriage customs as they have been applied to the story of Jacob's marriage to the daughters of Laban.

The approaching tercentenary of the founding of Plymouth incites, not to say compels, a review of the remarkable developments and departures from the doctrines of the fathers that have taken place in these three hundred years and calls for a conscientious consideration of what these changes ought to lead to in theological and ecclesiastical readjustments. It is a task which overawes as well as invites and one in which there is need of wide coöperation.

When I was completing my book on foundational theology, I presented a paper on the concept of broad reflective equilibrium and foundational theology to a group of colleagues at a conference sponsored by the Association of Theological Schools. This paper summarized the book's concluding section, which dealt with the relationship between contemporary criticisms of foundationalism and a foundational theology employing the method of broad reflective equilibrium. It advanced a systematic and historical argument. Systematically, the section argued that the method of broad reflective equilibrium offered a vision of foundational theology that avoided the pitfalls of foundationalism, overcoming the foundationalism of fundamental theology. It appealed to current discussions about methodology, specifically, the discussions on reflective equilibrium in the philosophy of science and in political ethics. The historical argument appealed to Schleiermacher by relating Schleiermacher's stance on the relationship between systematic and philosophical theology to the conception of a nonfoundationalist foundational theology, employing the method of broad reflective equilibrium.

The old and very illegible inscription from Athens containing the charter of the Eleusinian Mysteries was happily completed by a few small fragments discovered during the American excavations on the Agora. It was not an easy task for Professor B. D. Meritt to bring together the broken pieces and the stone bearing the inscription (now in the British Museum). He did it with his usual epigraphical expertness and contributed very much to the reading and to the restoration of a document which has been a real problem to many scholars for a long time. Of course, the inscription so old and so badly preserved will continue to be debated by specialists in different fields of Classical studies, but the part of Professor Meritt in elucidating this important testimony of the ancient Greek cult always will be gratefully appreciated. I should like to discuss some passages of the document in question in the hope that small changes in certain lines may perhaps make it more intelligible.

This paper is about the relevance of Jacques Derrida's thought to biblical interpretation. It focuses specifically on the question of determinacy: whether there is something definite and determinate which is the object of textual interpretation, or whether texts are subject to an infinite number of incompatible, but equally valid, readings.

With eager expectations and with wistful yearning men have always turned to the poets as to watchmen of the night. The great poets see beyond the sunset and the stars, and read the writing of the wind upon the darkness. They are our prophets. God has whispered his secrets to them. And what they hear in the silence of the eternal, they proclaim in the streets of men. The poets are the pioneers of the spirit. They wander in desolate places; they are voices crying in the wilderness; and by the rivers of Babylon they see visions. The poets, at their best, have been leaders in religion.

So for these reasons many people ask today, Who are the new poets, and what message do they bring?

In the number of this Review for January 1921, Dr. George La Piana discussed, in the light of the most recent discoveries at Rome, the several hypotheses which have been put forward in regard to the ancient tradition connected with the church of San Sebastiano at Rome. He there controverts the view proposed in my Petrus und Paulus in Rom (1915) that a translation of the relics of Peter and Paul to the Catacumbae, that is to the site of the later basilica of San Sebastiano, took place on June 29, 258, and defends the opinion, held also by eminent archaeologists in Rome, that what took place ad Catacumbas in the year 258 was only the establishment of a memorial festival in honor of the two apostles. His acute argument skilfully detects the weak points of my position, and at the same time contains so much that is new as to give me a welcome opportunity for a reëxamination of the evidence.