The distinguishing trait of twentieth-century intellectual life is emergence and proliferation of the “meta-disciplines” (or “metasciences”): e.g., meta-mathematics, meta-logic, meta-ethics, meta-jurisprudence, meta-politics, meta-theater, meta-language (hermeneutics and linguistic analysis), meta-sociology (sociology of knowledge), etc. The emergence of these meta-disciplines signifies a fundamental change in human orientation. We may compare this contemporary movement with the development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the special sciences as self-contained disciplines: chemistry, biology, botany, geology, history, psychology, etc. Whereas this earlier period proliferated special sciences through the application of rigorous techniques which critically reduced (and therefore multiplied) the objects of science per se, the characteristic of contemporary intellectual life is the proliferation of meta-disciplines through the critical analysis of the methods and the presuppositions of the special sciences themselves. I believe this peculiar intellectual activity, which underlies the emergence of all contemporary meta-disciplines, is the major clue to understanding the fundamental reorientation of personal and social consciousness which is going on today. Moreover, this change is rich with possibilities for new ways of dealing with the technological and institutional impasse which is the fruit of the development of the special sciences.

Most analysts acknowledge that guilt is a pervasive element in modern society. Possessed of a strong sense of impending doom through nuclear warfare, crises of ecology or overpopulation, modern man is haunted by an overriding sense of fear and guilt, wondering what quality in himself caused such an imminence of death. But surely this sense of guilt is not a creation of the modern world. Indeed guilt in the form of sin is even more comprehensible in earlier periods of history, where the culture was religiously oriented and where the wrath of a personal God could be visited upon a population in the form of plague or famine because of the sins of the people. Theories of guilt as applied to history, however, are much too sparse. One reason for this deficiency is that in order to use the psycho-historical technique, historians would be removed from the factual world and would be forced to probe the labyrinthine internal world that is illogical, devious and intangible. A few brave souls have explored the uncharted realms of the unconscious in the study of religion, both past and present. Yet, strangely enough, no one has ever focused upon guilt as an impetus in perhaps the most important aspect of religion—at least of Christian religion—the role of witness, better known as martyrdom.

In the past decade a number of influential theologians have claimed, based on the analogy of modern science, that Christian theology is or should be public discourse, a public discipline which is addressed to all people and which uses criteria acceptable to all. This claim is usually contrasted with a view in which theology is understood as private, subjective, authoritarian, based on faith or a special revelation, and limited to a particular community. In this essay I shall explore in particular David Tracy's claim that theology should be public discourse, point out some difficulties with regard to this claim, and make an alternative proposal.

The mystagogical catecheses of Theodore of Mopsuestia which were published for the first time in the year 1933 by Mingana have enriched our knowledge of the Eastern Liturgy in an unexpected way. Investigations have been made concerning the Eucharistic service which he describes. The rite of Baptism which he presents is of no less importance, as we find the more we study its details.

In a joint article on the Koridethi Gospels, published by K. Lake and the writer some years since, attention was called to the eclectic character of the Greek alphabet employed in the Koridethi codex, and emphasis laid on the mechanical and unnatural ductus of the writing. I there advanced the hypothesis that these peculiarities, when taken in connection with certain others, tended to show that the scribe was not a Hellene by birth, but probably a foreigner, and that the presence of a Coptic word in one of the adscriptions would show that the MS. was written in an area not too far removed from Egypt. Sinai was suggested as the possible place of origin. My arguments were attacked by J. de Zwaan and, although on certain fundamental points I felt obliged to differ with his interpretation, I could at the time adduce no further data in support of my contentions.

“I have never had any contemporaries,” said Lord Acton toward the close of his life; and, in the main, he was right. His broad cosmopolitanism made him impatient of English insularity. His belief in the necessity of freedom of conscience alienated him, in spirit if not in form, from the church of his birth. His insistence upon the absolute validity of the moral law as the final measure of all things isolated him in the midst of a century which seemed largely to have concluded that morality and success are synonymous. Certain it is that his own age did not estimate him over highly. At his death in 1902 there were not a few who asserted that for all his depth of erudition, Acton had contributed nothing to the sum of human knowledge. He had been an omnivorous reader and possessed a greater knowledge of the sources of modern history than any other man of his day. Yet all this store of learning had been of no avail to the world, for Acton had written nothing. At his death, a lecture in English, a letter in German, were all that represented Acton on the shelves of the library of his own university, Cambridge. Even today, after his lectures, his letters, and his periodical writings have been collected and edited, his output remains small: two volumes of lectures, three of letters, two of historical essays contributed to the reviews of his time. Yet in spite of the scantiness of his written work, Acton must be numbered among the great historians of the last century.

Prefatory Note. This letter has a lengthy history. More than thirty years ago I felt the necessity of a knowledge of and clearing up of the modes and lines of thought of unlettered people and wrote down a draft of a lecture upon which I have drawn here. Later on I applied my views to a special field, the concept, or to speak more justly the concepts of the soul, in a lecture delivered to the Fifth Congress for the History of Religions at Lund in 1929. Then I put the subject aside, although it always lurked at the back of my mind. Certain recent tendencies in the science of religion caused me to reconsider the problems involved and to write down a draft in order to coördinate and to systematize my views in regard to certain fundamental questions of this science. I happened to mention this in a letter to Professor Nock, and, as he wanted to take cognizance of the draft I had made for private purposes, I translated it into English and sent it to him. When he wished to publish it I asked him to subject my draft to the judgment of an expert anthropologist and to let me know his opinion. Professor Kluckhohn of Harvard was kind enough to read my manuscript and to supply some useful remarks and references. As he found my considerations useful, I consented to their being printed. I thank these two colleagues warmly for the interest they have taken in them. I am under a heavy debt of gratitude to Mrs. W. L. Sperry for her kindness in undertaking the difficult task of revising my English style in this paper as well as in others which I have published in the Harvard Theological Review.

The following exposition of a certain pattern of the spiritualization of sacrifice in the Christian and Hindu traditions is an experiment in “comparative theology”: that discipline within theology which seeks to reflect upon data from two (diverse) religious traditions taken together, for the sake of the new light thereby shed upon the two sets of data and on related issues, particularly in one's own “home” tradition. In particular, I will juxtapose a certain understanding of the development of the Biblical theology of sacrifice with one line of development in orthodox Vedic liturgical theology and its heirs: the Pūrva (or “prior”) Mīmāṃsā of Jaimini (ca. 200 BCE), the Vedānta (Uttara or “latter” Mīṃāmsā) of Rāmānuja (ca. 1000 CE), and the Śrīvaiṣṇava theology of Vedānta Deśika. It is not my intention to break new ground in the study of either the Biblical or Mīmāṃsā traditions, but rather to show how certain information that is already available regarding each of these traditions might be used in a comparative fashion in order to illuminate the other, and to ask about the value of the method herein employed.

In their struggle against the Church of Rome, a number of sixteenth century English reformers became students of ecclesiastical and secular history. To support their contention that the Roman Church had deviated from New Testament principles, these reformers studied the available records concerning the dogma and ritual of primitive and early medieval Christianity. To prove their charge that for eight hundred years the Church of Rome had usurped the temporal power of European and English rulers, they turned to the medieval chronicles.

E. R. Dodds, in his article “Maenadism in the Bacchae,” notes a number of parallels in other cults to the Dionysiac practices mentioned in Euripides' Bacchae. His list of parallels, while long, is by no means intended to be exhaustive; and it is proposed here to point out still another — the dancing and ecstasy characteristic of that unique movement in modern Jewry known as Hasidism.

Rudolf Bultmann's dissertation is still the best general description of diatribal style and remains the authority on the subject for most NT scholars. Bultmann draws attention to the dialogical element in the diatribe in which a speaker or writer makes use of an imaginary interlocutor who asks questions or raises objections to the arguments or affirmations that are made. These responses are frequently stupid and are then summarily rejected by the speaker or writer in a number of ways, for example by οὐδαμῶς (“by no means”), οὐ πάντως (“not at all”), οὐ μὰ Δία (“indeed not”), or minime (“by no means”). The limited purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which μὴ γένοιτο (“by no means”) is widely used in the diatribal literature, usually thought to be represented in Greek by the Dissertation of Epictetus, certain Moralia of Plutarch, various works of Philo, and by Bion, Teles, Musonius, Dio Chrysostom, Lucian, and Maximus of Tyre. In fact, however, this particular rejection, as it appears as a response in a dialogue without being part of a larger sentence, is unique to Epictetus and Paul. Bultmann's interpretation of the diatribe is heavily dependent on Epictetus despite the latter's peculiar development of the style, and the generalization about the use ofμὴ γένοιτο in the diatribe is made on the basis of Epictetus.

The publication of The Blue Bird a year or two ago, and later its successful presentation on the stage, has awakened new interest in an author whose fame and influence seemed somewhat on the wane. It is now some twenty years since a little volume of essays by Maurice Maeterlinck caused the author to be proclaimed with a flourish of French trumpets as the “Belgian Shakespeare,” the “European Emerson,” and the “greatest mystic of the age.” And these epithets and designations were not without some reason. The Treasure of the Humble, which helped to call them out, became of genuine soul-value to many people who could lay no claim to that particular virtue. The author's later essays, too, were conceived in a somewhat similar vein.

The figure of the rose with which Dante tops the soaring structure of his Paradiso may seem to have stimulated comment enough by now, and the present note, pointing out yet another possible analogue, serve merely to expand the raw bulk of such materials, which, though interesting in themselves, add little essential to our knowledge of the poem. But no Stoffkritik has yet explained entirely happily to the student of the popular otherworld traditions, the origin of this figure in the Divine Comedy or the peculiar fitness of its use there. And the present parallel has the virtue that it is really a parallel, and not confined to the rose alone, whose figure and symbolic significance are common property in the Middle Ages. On the contrary, it describes at the supernal heights of heaven a city which is shaped like a rose, is also the special paradise of the Virgin, and contains traces of another motif — the empty thrones and the waiting crowns and vestments reserved until the Time shall come for the just and the poor in spirit —, which Dante also places for the elect within the limits of this heavenly city. All this, moreover, appears in a work belonging to that body of otherworld lore from which the Divine Comedy, itself the most elaborate literary example of this genre, frequently borrows.

Le problème des anges dans le paganisme ancien et dans le christianisme a été discuté plusieurs fois déjà par les théologiens et les historiens sans accord sur la question fondamentale, quels éléments dans ce culte sont païens et quels sont juifs et chrétiens. Ainsi Dibelius, Bousset et Andres ont vu dans les documents relatifs à ce sujet les idées et les formules grecques, le rapport des anges avec le monde souterrain surtout leur parut particulièrement grec. Selon Cumont le culte des anges était un apport oriental dans le monde grec et romain. Dans ses derniers travaux Cumont examine les similitudes entre les croyances eschatologiques païennes et chrétiennes et conclut qu'elles proviennent d'une source commune, notamment du mazdeisme. Les chercheurs modernes ne sont pas d'accord sur la signification du terme angelos qui se rencontre dans les épitaphes de Théra. Selon M. Guarducci les inscriptions sont païennes, selon H. Gregoire, A. Ferrua et L. Robert elles sont chrétiennes. M. P. Nilsson ne se prononce pas sur le fond du problème, mais il remarque que la question reste ouverte, si à côté de l'ange juif et chrétien il y avait dans les croyances anciennes un ange païen.

My purpose in this article will not be to deal with the tradition history behind Matt 25:31–46 or with the actual eschatological identity of the nations, the sheep and the goats, and Jesus' least brothers, although some attention will need to be given to the latter. My primary purpose will rather be to inquire about the nature and quality of the stance or posture or self-understanding that constitutes the responses of the sheep and goats—which responses Matthew is implicitly calling his readers respectively to actualize and to reject. And what is required of human beings has implications for the possibilities and nature of human beings. The first order of business, however, will be to locate the text generically and in the context of Matthew 23–25.