When, in the fifth book of Paradise Lost, Eve reveals her unsettling dream, in which she saw herself eating the forbidden fruit at the prompting of a mysterious stranger, Adam dismisses it as an experience of no importance. Since her will was not involved, he believes, she incurred no guilt. His argument that the dream is without significance persuades her but not us, who have beheld Satan, during the couple's sleep, causing the dream in Eve in order to taint her faculties and perhaps to probe her weaknesses:

Squat like a Toad, close at the ear of Eve;

Assaying by his Devilish art to reach

The Organs of her Fancy, and with them forge

Illusions as he list, Phantasms and Dreams.

(IV, 800–03)

Legal historians have given considerable attention to the question of intention in rabbinic law. Solomon Zeitlin, in the early years of the present century, published a number of articles touching on this matter, in which his chief purpose was to show that the legal significance of intention was one of the central points of contention between the two great Tannaitic schools, the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai. A little later, Michael Higger wrote a doctoral dissertation for Columbia University which he entitled Intention in Talmudic Law. Still more recently, Louis Finkelstein sought to push the dispute over intention back to the days of the Pharisees and Sadducees, attributing to the Sadducees the view that intention by itself has no legal consequence, and as usual explaining this view in terms of the Sadducees' social position.

In the continuing debate over the question of the independence of morality and religion there is a set of issues pertaining to the relation of moral obligation and the expressed will of God which would benefit from some further conceptual clarification. Most often the debate amounts to a defense of one form or another of the following alternatives: either it is true by definition that whatever God wills ought to be obeyed because an expression like “ought to be obeyed” means “willed or commanded by God” (in which case morality is entirely dependent on religion) or it is only a contingent truth that whatever God wills ought to be obeyed because an antecedent moral judgment as to the goodness of God's will is required for its assertion (in which case morality is entirely independent of religion). It is my contention, however, that so long as the debate is carried on in these limited terms we will necessarily be dissatisfied with whichever way the argument goes, for neither alternative can be made fully to harmonize either with our common moral and religious sensibilities or with the facts of our moral and religious usage.

In 1797–98 Coleridge wrote a series of five autobiographical letters in which he presumably recounted everything which he remembered or had been told regarding the period from his birth (21 October, 1772) to his departure from Christ's Hospital in 1791. As it turned out, these first recollections were only a beginning, for Coleridge continued to add to them for the greater part of his life, the most notable additions being contained in the Biographia Literaria and in the biographical notes which he gave to James Gillman. When all of the recollections are assembled, they present an account of the boy Coleridge which would seem hardly creditable even if it were consistent, and it has seemed much less creditable when it is compared with the account furnished by the juvenilia. For this reason, perhaps, the account given by the recollections has presented a problem to biographers. Some of them have dismissed it altogether as a creation of Coleridge's over-active imagination; others have respected it by ignoring the juvenilia or by dealing with the recollections and the juvenilia separately, as if they related to two different persons. In no instance has anyone attempted to reconcile the two accounts. It has seemed to me that such a reconciliation ought to be attempted; for, to the extent that the recollections are dependable, they should provide an invaluable clue, not only to an understanding of Coleridge's early writings, but, more importantly, to an understanding of the basis and direction of his mature thought.

Philosophers have long debated the question of the existence of God. This is one of many philosophical issues in which the motivation for inquiry has come more perhaps from the side of human feeling than from disinterested scientific curiosity. Powerful emotions appear to prompt thinkers to devote effort to the attempt to prove or disprove the existence of God. The urgency of this task has made some of these philosophers pay less than adequate heed to the concepts they employ. It appears to have escaped the attention of many of them that the word “God” does not have a single meaning either in religious language generally or in philosophical theology. It is obvious that one of the important ways in which religious traditions differ is in their conceptions of the Deity. But a considerable number of different God-concepts may be distinguished in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition itself, and not even in Christian theology proper is the word “God” free of ambiguity.

William James's essay on ‘The Moral Equivalent of War,’ written in 1910, at the end of his life, has received an increasing amount of attention during the last thirty years. This paper would raise two questions about its relation to the main body of James's work. We recall that in the essay James argues for the worthwhileness of the martial virtues in themselves and claims that, since it would in any case be difficult to get rid of them, some way of expressing them in peaceful channels should be found. A few phrases have a peculiarly modern ring. “It would be preposterous,” he says, “if the only force that could work ideals of honor and standards of efficiency into English or American natures should be the fear of being killed by the Germans or the Japanese.” Instead of military life, a conscription of youth for the battle against nature is therefore recommended. “A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings.”

The middle decades of the thirteenth century saw a remarkable upsurge in Christian missionizing activity. While efforts to spread the regnant faith by eloquent persuasion had never been totally lacking in medieval Christendom, widespread interest in proselytizing and the creation of effective missionizing techniques are especially prominent during this period. Old and new ecclesiastical institutions channeled their energies towards evangelizing, and some of the most learned and original minds lent their talents.

A question which historical critical scholarship can no longer evade is whether it still contributes fundamentally to the strengthening of faith, or whether it is effecting its dissolution. Where biblical research continues to be done within the framework of Christian convictions, a crisis of identity threatens, since the historical critical approach with its related methodologies tends to dissolve the most fundamental assumptions of the New Testament Christian faith, namely, that salvation is possible only in relation to Jesus Christ. William Mallard focused sharply on this problem when he pointed out that even “when critical research supports a historical religious claim, the character and function of that claim is thereby undermined, and the past event in question loses the force of revelation.” In the same context J. Maxwell Miller argued that there could be no resolution of the conflict between critical inquiry and the biblical view of history because a historical critical understanding can have no place for God's repeated “intrusions” into the course of the Old Testament history. To use Mallard's formulation, a critical explanation for these divine intrusions into the Old Testament history effectively abandons the Old Testament understanding itself. According to Miller: “If the Jewish historian does not offer a natural explanation for the origin of the Exodus traditions, he is untrue to the critical method of historical research. If he does offer a natural explanation, he destroys the basis of his Jewish faith — i.e., that God intruded upon human history at the time of the Exodus and made a covenant with the fathers which applies even today. The same would seem to be true of the Christian historian who attempts to deal with the incarnation or the resurrection.”

In 1843, the Reverend Robert Baird, “an esteemed minister of the American Presbyterian Church,” sojourning seven years in Europe “for the prosecution of certain religious and philanthropic objects,” published a book for the benefit of the various Europeans who had addressed to him “innumerable inquiries … respecting his native country, and especially respecting its religious institutions.”

The spread of pre-millennial and kindred views—by which we mean the scriptural thousand years of peace following the more or less early return of Christ in physical manifestation—is an unmistakable fact of present-day religious thinking. Some of the causes of the pre-millennial revival are incidental and can be dismissed in a word. For example, some pre-millenarianism is the after-effect of the powerful personality of Dwight L. Moody. Mr. Moody was one of the greatest personal forces for righteousness of his time; and some of the movements which resulted from his influence—like the Student Volunteer Movement—were at their beginning considerably colored by the Moody theology. Again, as a plain matter-of-fact, pre-millenarianism has made an appeal to not a few rich men who have given their money to carefully planned propaganda. Furthermore the Great War has raised in many minds the question as to whether the world is not indeed standing at Armageddon.

Nicholas of Cusa read Augustine, like he read Dionysius the Areopagite, as teaching that God was best known and encountered in an understanding of one’s own ignorance of ultimate reality (learned ignorance). Cusa’s use of Augustine in Defense of Learned Ignorance, On the Vision of God, and On the Not-Other helps recover the importance of learned ignorance in Augustine’s own writings. This study tracks learned ignorance as an essential mechanism of Augustine’s pursuit of wisdom through his early writings, the Confessions, and the later anti-Pelagian treatises. Learned ignorance functioned as philosophical dialectic in his earliest treatises, a practice of prayer in the Confessions, and as both polemic and apophatic theodicy in his later writings. Augustine’s shifting conceptualization of learned ignorance, in turn, helps recover how Cusa often preached learned ignorance as the humility of faith. Thus, Cusa’s commitment to learned ignorance derived from both the Neoplatonic dilemma of knowing the unknowable and the Augustinian understanding of original sin as pride and redemption as humility.

Two decades ago J. H. Waszink proposed in these pages a solution to the puzzle produced by Vergil's use of the phrase agmina sororum of the Furies at Aeneid 6.571–72. His suggestion has received the serious attention which it warranted; but on further reflection his solution to the problem is seen to be unsatisfactory

Both Kant and Hegel focussed their attention on the problems of self-knowledge and self-scrutiny. Both elaborated a carefully considered view of conscience and sought to wrestle with the moral threat of self-deception. Both believed that a solution of the problems in this area was decisive for their understanding of the moral life and the task of ethics. In his analysis Hegel came to formulate what he considered to be decisive criticisms of Kant. The purpose of this paper is to examine the contrasting views of the two philosophers and provide a context in which the merits of each can be assessed.

Examination of Exodus 25–31 and 35–40 shows that preciousness and aesthetic considerations were not the main precipitants of the use of gold in the tabernacle. Rather, the distribution of this metal in both the tabernacle and the priestly garments reveals a theological criterion for its use and distribution. It is suggested here that this criterion is rooted in pre-Israelite Yahwism, and that it emanates from the parallel of gold, approached as the metal produced by YHWH, and copper, its human-made counterpart. Accordingly, YHWH’s residence within the tabernacle is associated with pure gold, whereas the function of communion with the Israelites in this facility is attached to a gold-copper alloy (ordinary gold). It is shown that the theological significance of gold related in Exodus contrasts with the considerations of prestige and magnificence associated in Kings with the use of gold in the Jerusalem temple. These observations reveal a divergence between the Priestly and the Deuteronomistic sources in regard to the status of gold and, by extension, of the pre-Israelite background of Yahwism. It is concluded that the description of the tabernacle in Exodus challenges the abandonment of the theological dimension of gold and metallurgy in the Jerusalem temple in the late monarchic period or, alternately, serves as fundament for a theodicy that justifies the fall of the city.

Catholic writers on Scholastic Theology do not hesitate to admit that no work contributing new and valuable additions to this science has been published since the days of Bellarmin, Suarez, and Lugo. The collapse of scholastic philosophy after the fifteenth century could not fail to affect also scholastic theology, which in losing all contact with the new scientific progress lost also its strong appeal to speculative minds. Moreover, the Church, instructed by the events of the Reformation, had become so suspicious of novelties that any attempt to introduce new additions to the traditional teaching of theology was more likely to bring a thinker into the hands of the Inquisition than to lead towards a cardinal's hat.

In Jewish philosophy, be it medieval or modern, a comprehensive Jewish theological discourse about Christianity is conspicuously absent. There are, however, two prominent exceptions to this rule in modern Jewish philosophy: The Italian Sephardic Orthodox Rabbi Eliah Benamozegh (1823–1900) and the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929). In both men's thought, Christianity plays a pivotal (and largely positive) role, so much so that their Jewish philosophies would not be the same without Christianity, which has no precedent in Jewish thought. Though Rosenzweig was not aware of his Sephardic predecessor, there are some striking parallels in the two thinker's Jewish theologies of Christianity that have far-reaching interreligious implications. These parallels concern as well the basic paradigm for a positive evaluation of Christianity—the paradigm of the fire (particularist Judaism) and its rays (universal Christianity)—as well as the central flaw both of them attribute to Christianity: a built-in disequilibrium that threatens the success of its legitimate mission. These parallels are all the more striking as two thinkers arrived at their conclusions independently and by different paths: the one (Benamozegh) took recourse to Kabbalah, the other (Rosenzweig) to proto-existentialist philosophy. A comparative study of these two protagonists’ Jewish theologies of Christianity seems thus imperative.

An “interreligious epilogue” at the end of the article exposes the contemporary need for a reassessment of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity from a Jewish perspective—especially in light of the deep theological revision that characterizes the approach of the Catholic Church towards Jews and Judaism following “Nostra Aetate”—but at the same time delineates the theological limits of the current Christian-Jewish interreligious endeavor. In this light, the pioneering theology of Christianity in the works of Rosenzweig and Benamozegh might yield some relevant insights.

Currently two competing models exist side-by-side to explain the “antinomian” or “free grace” controversy, in which Anne Hutchinson and her theology are said to have played a key role. The differences in these narratives appear to require a return to the sources and a careful examination of Hutchinson's own statements—as far as they can be reconstructed—in the context of her first interrogation by a group of clergymen in the autumn of 1636. Since one of the narratives casts doubt on John Winthrop's assertions of her manifest unorthodoxy at that time, a central question will be whether the views she expressed then deviated significantly from the mainstream of theology espoused by godly contemporaries in Britain and if so, in what particulars. Hutchinson's remarks at the outset of the controversy could then serve as a baseline in an investigation of how the dispute escalated and evolved over the following months.

Among the quotations from Luther's works condemned by the pope in 1520 was the statement that free will is something that exists in name only. In his defense of this statement in Assertio omnium articulorum, published in December 1520, Luther goes one step further. Here he not only declares “free will” to be a concept without factual reference, he even insists that there is no one in the position even to think on one's own, either good or bad, as everything happens with absolute necessity.

Any purely phenomenological description of the human being as in some sense “finite” must avail itself of a concept of finitude that does not rely, implicitly or explicitly, on the concept of God. Theologically motivated descriptions, however, face no such dilemma; they can and, indeed, must avail themselves of some concept of the human creature as a finite being created in God's image (Gen 1:27 KJV). For there to be a meaningful difference between these two descriptions, the concept of finitude common to both must have a different sense in each. These are some of the methodological requirements Heidegger lays down in Sein und Zeit §10: “The Delimitation [Abgrenzung] of Phenomenology from Anthropology, Psychology, and Biology.” Heidegger's strategy for distinguishing the analytic of Dasein, in which the concept of finitude (Endlichkeit) plays a foundational role, from what he refers to as “the anthropology of Christianity” consists in distinguishing between two concepts of finitude: (1) finitude as lack or imperfection, defined as ens finitum relative to God as ens infinitum, and (2) an original concept of finitude, which, not being defined relative to God, is purely phenomenological and constitutes the horizon of any and all understanding of Being.

In the Syriac Book of the Cave of Treasures, which in a general way we may reckon among the rewritten Bible texts, in ch. 27.6–11, an apocryphal fourth son of Noah appears, Yōnṭōn by name. This figure resides near the seashorein a far-easternland and possesses oracular and astrological wisdom. In 1980, Stephen Gero interpreted this figure against a Jewish background. Recently, however, Clemens Leonhard, following Witold Witakowski, has questioned this approach and denied any prehistory to Yōnṭōn; he regards him as an “invention” of the Syriac author of the Cave of Treasures. In the present article I aim to investigate whether it is possible indeed to trace a Jewish origin of Yōnṭōn's appearance in the Cave of Treasures. Taking Gero's interpretation as a starting point, I will first investigate the setting in which a figure like Yōnṭōn could have evolved within a Jewish context. Secondly, I will attempt to actually identify Yōnṭōn in earlier Jewish sources. In this I will follow a recent assertion of Su-Min Ri, that Yōnṭōn originates in the Biblical person of Yoqṭān (Gen 10:25). While Ri's assumption derives from the possibility of a misspelling, I will produce internal evidence which renders the identification of Yōnṭōn and Yoqṭān very probable, thus justifying the direction of thought taken by both Gero and Ri over against the allegations of Leonhard and Witakowski. Moreover, the following discussion will shed light on how Jews received influences from Hellenistic astronomy and astrology and how they read these concepts into, or set them in opposition to, the Bible.