The ever-increasing respect for Luther among Roman Catholic theologians and historians of Christian thought is not only a sign of but also a significant contributing factor to contemporary ecumenical openness — especially so in Germany. Yet at the same time we should realize that this more positive evaluation of Luther is based on the conviction that the reformer was born under the star of heresy. While it is granted that he articulated the biblical message of sin, grace and forgiveness in Christ within the context of the late medieval nominalism in which he was reared, it is exactly this context which is regarded as essentially a-catholic or even as anti-catholic to the extent that it obstructed Luther's grasp of the full and true catholic tradition in the Middle Ages. Therefore, from the very beginning, access to the specifically Catholic tradition had been denied to Luther.

Does a principle of Gentile ritual impurity motivate Israelite and late antique Jewish prohibitions of intermarriage? The answer to this question turns upon the answer to an even more basic question: is a principle of Gentile ritual impurity found in ancient Israelite and Jewish texts? Some suppose ritual impurity of Gentiles to be an ancient halakah dating perhaps to early biblical times (Schürer, Alon) and serving as the rationale for laws regulating or reducing Jewish and Gentile interactions of various kinds. Others suppose ritual impurity of Gentiles to be a legal reality only in the Second Temple or Tannaitic period (Büchler, Klawans). On such a view, Gentile ritual impurity did not serve as the rationale for older laws regulating or reducing various forms of Jewish-Gentile interaction, including intermarriage.

Eusebius of Caesarea occupies a unique position in ancient Christian thought. His central problem is to explain and justify a Christian society which is to transform the Roman Empire and which will become the new world civilization supplanting Hellenism and Judaism. Earlier thinkers do not face this problem. The Roman Empire is for them one of the powers ordained of God, but it is pagan and they expect it to remain so. Consequently the question of human government is only peripheral to their thought. Nor do later thinkers see the problem quite as Eusebius does. In the East, for example in Pseudo-Dionysius and John of Damascus, the question of human government again becomes peripheral to Christian thought, and Eusebius has no successor as a “political theologian.” In the West, Augustine gives a general answer to the problem of a Christian society in a Christianized Empire, but his solution contradicts that of Eusebius. To Augustine, the structure of the Christian Roman Empire is still that of Babylon, and human society is still a mixture of two opposed cities, the earthly city and the city of God.

Orphism is more famous and more debated than any other phenomenon of Greek religion. A central place in the stream of religious ideas is assigned to it, and it is regarded as the source of conceptions of the greatest importance in later times. A vast Orphic literature has existed since early times. Orphism was the first Greek religion to have sacred books, and this is perhaps the ultimate, if unconscious, reason why the scientific treatment of Orphism tends to disclose a system of Orphic doctrines. This is true of Lobeck's masterly work and of the impressive chapter on Orphism in Rohde's Psyche which more than anything determined the views of recent scholars. It is also true of the very ingeniously written and admirably constructed parts of Miss Harrison's Prolegomena which are devoted to Orphism; her treatment is much more copious than Rohde's and she covers a much wider field.

The Christian interpretation of the Old Testament was early set upon finding in it a figure corresponding to the Son, or the Word (Logos), in the New Testament, a divine being, intermediary between God the Father and the world in creation, revelation, and redemption. For Christian theology, with its philosophical presumptions, a God who visibly and audibly manifested himself to men in human form and action was necessarily such a being; the Supreme God, in his supramundane exaltation or his metaphysical transcendence, could not be imagined thus immediately to intervene in mundane affairs. In this assumption and to a considerable extent in their particular interpretations the Fathers had a precursor in the Jewish theologian Philo.

It has been customary to identify the author of the Itinerarium Egeriae (It. Eg.) as a nun or a “grande dame” from one of the western provinces of the later Roman empire—Spain, Gaul, or even Italy. Yet, a reexamination of the evidence suggests the possibility of a different solution regarding not only the author's religious affiliation and status in society but also her geographical origin. The newly proposed identification is linked with major developments of Christianity in the West, in particular with its spread within urban milieux and with the receptivity of contemporary society to the idea of pilgrimage.

Theology, as many Puritans saw it, was a combination of sound doctrine, practical exhortation, and precise method. The Marrow of Sacred Divinity by William Ames, a great favorite in many seventeenth-century Puritan homes, owed much of its reputation to a blend of these ingredients of doctrine, practical divinity, and method. Although Puritan theologians wrote few systematic theologies except for creeds and catechisms, the Marrow is one example of theology from a scholarly Puritan perspective. The writings of Ames with their Congregational theories were most at home in Congregational New England, perhaps, but Puritans in England also read and studied Ames. William Ames, 1576–1633, was born in East Anglia and educated at Christ's College, Cambridge; but he lived for over twenty years in the Netherlands as a religious exile. Like his life, his theology combines English nonconformity and Continental Calvinism.

From the first, professional ethics has been a hybrid. The Hippocratic Oath exudes that ambiguity. The scientific enterprise, which basically has universalistic tendencies, created a group with special knowledge and interests; eventually it took on a separate identity as a profession. Concern for the ethical point of view, which has the universalizability of normative statements as its foundation, is particularized by focusing on a specialized body of knowledge of a restricted professional group.

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.

That there is something strange and unusual about the ‘consecration’ coinage of Faustina the Elder, and, to a less degree, of her daughter too, has always been apparent to the student: it was forced on my own attention while I was writing the Introduction to B. M. C. Empire, IV. If I return to the subject, it is because it seems that there is still something to be added to the results already obtained.

The growing general awareness that the order of nature within which man lives is a delicate ecological balance — a balance which cannot be indiscriminately exploited by men much longer without destroying the continuing possibility of human life — has not been without repercussions among theologians. There is an increasing attentiveness to nature as a theological problem and an interest in developing theologies of ecology and conservation. In addition there appears to be a growing belief that the theological focus on “history” in recent years has been extravagant or even entirely misplaced: it has turned attention in theology away from the natural world, which is “our real home”; it has led to a theological ignoring of the natural sciences and has thus helped to isolate theology from some of the most important and influential streams of human learning in modern culture; and it has contributed to and mightily re-enforced man's sense of self-importance and insularity, for history is preeminently the human story, and the “God of history” seems principally involved in transactions with men (although of course he is said to be the creator and father of all). What we need, we are told, is a “theology of nature” that will enable us to understand the orders of life and being within which we live and of which we are part, and even a “natural theology” that will illuminate for us, and teach us properly to worship, the God implicit in nature.

Although conversion to Judaism in antiquity has been studied many times, the subject remains elusive. This essay is not a historical study of either ancient philo-Judaism or the relations between Jews and Gentiles in antiquity, but a historiographical study of one of the major bodies of relevant evidence, the writings of Josephus. I hope to answer two sets of questions. First, how does Josephus understand respect for Judaism by Gentiles? What forms does this respect take and what terminology is used to describe them? Second, what is Josephus's attitude towards respect for Judaism by Gentiles? Does his attitude change from his earliest works to his latest?

The fifth-century mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome represent the oldest surviving program of mosaic decoration in a Christian church. Its political context includes the steady drain of political authority and power to the Eastern empire from the early fourth century forward, the proscription of paganism at the end of the fourth century, and the massively disruptive Sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 CE. In the vacuum of political power in the West, the papacy under Sixtus III made a strong claim for a new basis of Roman power—the religious primacy of the city of Peter and Paul under papal leadership. The building and decoration of Santa Maria Maggiore played an important role in the consolidation and public announcement of papal power.

Immortality is one of the language symbols engendered by a class of experiences to which we refer as the varieties of religious experience. This term is perhaps no longer the technically best one but it has the advantage of a great precedent, especially here at Harvard. Hence, its use will be convenient to secure, I hope, a common and immediate understanding about the subject-matter of inquiry.

On several occasions we have attempted to demonstrate the significance of a certain type of linguistic analysis, for discussing biblical texts whose date of composition is questionable. The main advantage of this analysis lies in the fact, that, being an autonomous and independent criterion, one may use it without subscribing to any particular theory prevailing in biblical Higher Criticism. Most of the complicated and unresolved problems of Higher Criticism — literary, historical and theological — simply have no bearing upon its procedures.

Recently R. S. Hartigan examined Augustine's position on war and killing particularly in relation to the fate of the innocent. Although attention was rightly focused on some of the difficulties inherent in Augustine's views, Hartigan's handling of certain supportive texts is, in the view of this writer, open to question. It may be profitable, then, to reconsider his arguments and, more fundamentally, to question his structuring of the problem as a whole.

Euhemerus is one of the most elusive and disconcerting writers in the Hellenistic period. He survives chiefly in the pages of Diodorus Siculus, who almost certainly had not taken the measure of his author. Our other chief source of information comes from the translation made by the poet Ennius, which in turn is known only through the works of later writers, who cited him for purposes of their own. Other authors have paid Euhemerus the compliment of imitating him, and something of their work has survived, also in fragments. Philo of Byblus wrote in the same spirit, and recent excavations at Ras Shamra have shown that his Phoenician History must be taken much more seriously than has been the fashion. Under these circumstances it may be worth while to re-examine the Euhemeristic tradition in an attempt to define its characteristics and its influence on the writing of history.

“Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind (adam) in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion….’ And God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Gen 1:26–27 clarifies that the Hebrew term adam stands for the generic species of humanity which is composed of men and women. If there is any doubt on this interpretation, Gen 5:2–3 declares and defines again: “When God created humankind, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them humankind when they were created.”The “image of God in man and woman” opens us to transcend both the masculine and feminine metaphors for God which abound in the Bible and to transcend our historical selves and social institutions in recognition of the Holy One. It would appear that whatever one's interpretation of the “image” and “likeness” of God, one would have to recognize that the biblical text makes explicit that in our resemblance to the Divinity and in our dominion over the earth and animals, men and women share a common human dignity.

On a foggy evening in the spring of 1906, nine days before the San Francisco earthquake, several black saints gathered in a small house in Los Angeles to seek the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Before the night was over, a frightened child ran from the house to tell a neighbor that the people inside were singing and shouting in strange languages.Several days later the group moved to an abandoned warehouse on Azusa Street in a run-down section of the city. Soon they were discovered by a Los Angeles Times reporter. The “night is made hideous … by the howlings of the worshippers,” he wrote. “The devotees of the weird doctrine practice the most fanatical rites, preach the wildest theories and work themselves into a state of mad excitement.”