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?

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.

The evaluation of Tillich's theological system in America and Great Britain (incipient in Germany but almost nonexistent in France) inevitably takes a stand on two questions. It asks whether Tillich is a theologian or a philosopher, and it asks whether he is an existentialist, an idealist, or, perhaps, both. The second question has almost as many opinions as answers. Is Tillich solely or basically a product of the German nineteenth century? Is he an existentialist despite his system, or an idealist despite his demand for existential theology? Or is Tillich merely an existentialist in his general terminology, while the horizon and form of his thought (because of ontology and system) is of the nineteenth century?

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.

On 10 November 1883, addressing his Göttingen colleagues and students in academic celebration of the quadricentennial of Luther's birth, Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89) delivered this remarkable verdict: “The genuine ideas of the Reformation were more concealed than disclosed in the theological works of Luther and Melanchthon.” The Wittenberg reformers themselves, not merely their epigones, had failed to systematize and safeguard those original epoch-making ideas by which they had effected their dramatic reform of religious life within the late medieval church.

The composition dayyenu as preserved in the extant rituals consists of two parts — the first a poem in fifteen strophes (Da), the second a prose summary (Db). It reads as follows:

D

How many are the calls of the Almighty upon our thankfulness!

Hans Lewy's posthumous book, the fruit of many years' devoted study, should arouse fresh interest in one of the most tantalizingly obscure of ancient Greek texts. The Chaldaean Oracles were a divine revelation in bad hexameter verse; its authors were believed to be gods (speaking through the lips of entranced mediums?), but it was given to the world, as Lobeck guessed and Bidez finally proved, by one “Julianus the theurgist,” who lived under Marcus Aurelius. It is of serious concern to historians of religion, as the last important Sacred Book of pagan antiquity, and to historians of ideas, as one of the major influences which shaped the later development of Neoplatonism from Porphyry to Psellus. Unfortunately it has come down to us only in fragments.

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.

Romans 3:21–31 is a perplexing passage made up of important words and phrases. Some of the most crucial elements of Christian theology hinge on it. Entire movements within Christian history have stood or fallen with its interpretation. With few exceptions scholars have given more than ample consideration to every detail, although a consensus of opinion lies in the future. This paper is designed (1) to summarize the issue over the unity of the passage, (2) to list the general conclusions scholars have reached on the most important words, and (3) to offer suggestions toward an understanding of the text in light of Paul's teaching about the inclusion of the Gentiles.

Facing as I do the great and difficult task of writing the second part of my History of Greek Religion, I should like beforehand to state some of the main problems and to bring out some dominant ideas. The subject is so vast that I can offer but a subjective selection; yet let me remark that my standpoint is not that of syncretism as a whole but that of Greek religion, which seems to me to be a factor of syncretism at times neglected.

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.

Adoniram Judson’s life and work have long been the subject of popular and scholarly interest, but the intellectual and exegetical background for his Burmese Bible translation has not been closely studied. This background was the biblical studies movement in New England, which began in the early nineteenth century and flourished before declining and eventually disappearing by about 1870. The opposing New England orthodox Calvinist and liberal Unitarian schools were equally involved in the movement. Judson was an early product of Andover Theological Seminary, the center for orthodox Calvinism in New England. From 1816 to 1840 Judson translated the Bible into Burmese and his references to the scholarly works he used, along with the text-critical and interpretive decisions in his Bible translation, identify him as an ongoing participant in the New England biblical studies movement. This scholarly background helps us understand interpretive decisions in the Judson Bible, which is still the main Burmese version used by Protestants in Myanmar.

The question of how much apocryphal Gospels were rebutted, suppressed or even destroyed in antiquity is a question of perennial interest, both popular and scholarly. The present article makes no attempt at any sort of complete answer to this question, but has the rather more modest aim of analyzing the various testimonia—from antiquity into the middle ages—that make explicit reference to a “Gospel of Thomas.” This article will not touch on the numerous allusions to, or quotations of, the contents of this Gospel, but will be confined to treatments of the title (hence “named testimonia”). The impetus for this particular investigation is of course the presence, at the end of the second tractate of Nag Hammadi Codex II, of a colophon reading “The Gospel according to Thomas.”1 Given the controversial contents of this Gospel, and the equally controversial place that it occupies in scholarly reconstructions of Christian origins, Thomas's reception in antiquity has been widely discussed since the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices (see n. 2 below).

One of the most mysterious and haunting of all medieval halakhic figures must certainly be the fourteenth-century sage Rabbi Jeruham b. Meshullam. During the sixteenth century, he was known as “Tamiri”—“the concealed one”—a moniker given to him by Joseph Karo's heavenly interlocutor, the Maggid. Years later, David Azulai, the eminent eighteenth-century rabbinic bibliographer, reported that “a number of Rabbis who had composed commentaries on his work … were summoned to the heavenly academy [i.e., they died prematurely] or their work was lost.” Even today, scholars who have never opened Jeruham's books are nevertheless aware of the “curse” hanging over the work of this medieval author.

John D. Caputo, a contemporary American philosopher and theologian, is known for his work demonstrating the relevance of Derrida's deconstruction for theology. Vasubandhu, a fourth-century (c.e.) Indian thinker, is a seminal figure in the Mahāyāna Buddhist school known as Yogācāra. Although at first blush an odd pairing, and despite their great differences, these two thinkers share a fundamental presupposition: the priority and centrality of our conditioned condition. Indeed, for them, attending to the ways that we are conditioned makes possible the pursuit of a truth that is beyond our conditioned filters, aspiring to open us to the truth that is unconditioned. For this reason, it is illuminating to read and think Caputo and Vasubandhu together.

This article explores Maimonides’s position with regard to mercy in various aspects—ethics, law, and theology—and examines its unity. The first section discusses Maimonides’s view on the question of mercy in the moral plane: is mercy a virtue? It begins with a short discussion of the Aristotelian stance and then analyzes Maimonides’s view. It shows that Maimonides rejected the philosophical critique of mercy and deemed it a virtue. The second section discusses Maimonides’s view in the judicial plane: may a judge show mercy in judgment and be lenient when ruling? It also explores how Maimonides justifies the negation of mercy in the legal plane in contrast with his view of mercy as a virtue. The third section explores Maimonides’s view of mercy in the theological context. In his discussion of the divine attributes Maimonides interprets the attributes of “merciful and gracious,” and offered a metaphorical interpretation. Since humans are mandated to imitate God, this interpretation has consequences in the normative sphere. The theological discussion therefore raises the question of the moral and legal standing of mercy from a new perspective. It also raises the question of the relation between Maimonides’s position in the Guide of the Perplexed and that in his halakhic compositions. Are these two apparently different positions compatible?

An idea's genealogy is not the idea itself, and still less does an idea's historical context exhaust its potentialities for meaning. The excavation of sources and influences is then for the historian of ideas not an end in itself; it is more properly the inauguration, not the consummation, of efforts in intellectual history. But genealogical investigation does matter, because its vertical depth can illuminate the contours requisite for horizontal discernment, and because exploring its temporal register can free an idea from artificially inert stasis back into the stream of living reflective activity.