This essay concerns two closely related subjects: the religious philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the need for a new vision in Christian theology today. Though it is the second, more ambitious and adventurous topic that deserves the more sensitive treatment, it is rather to Coleridge himself that I have given the greater part of my attention. The reasoning behind this procedure is based upon a fairly simple fact: Coleridge's religious thought is still largely unknown to most people in the philosophical and theological communities. During the past twenty years or so, as many of Coleridge's hitherto unpublished notebooks and other manuscripts have been brought to light, a number of scholars of English literature have begun to study his thought, including his theology, with greater care. But it is still rare to find a researcher outside literature per se who knows much of Coleridgean philosophy, beyond (perhaps) a few phrases from his theory of the imagination in the Biographia Literaria.

In regard to Western scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages, every one repeats the laconic judgment, that it is “philosophy in the service, under the sway and direction, of Catholic theology.” It could be nothing else; and it seems that one has said everything after announcing this clear-cut formula. This current definition, susceptible of the most different meanings, is found on the first page of a recent book, published during the War, on the philosophy of the Middle Ages; and though the author gives a very mild interpretation of it, it is offered to the reader as an abridged thesis, in which one finds condensed all that is important to know on the subject. “Scholasticism is Philosophy placed at the service of already established ecclesiastical doctrine, or at least philosophy placed in such a dependence on this doctrine that it becomes an absolute Rule when both meet on common ground.”

Now this current definition of scholastic philosophy in the Middle Ages defines it very badly, because it is a mixture of the true and the false, of accuracy and of inaccuracy. It must be distrusted, like those equivocal maxims which John Stuart Mill calls “sophisms of simple inspection,” which by force of repetition enjoy a kind of transeat or vogue in science without being questioned.

With the ultimate purpose of helping to clarify thought on the subject of the supernatural, the present essay is a study of usage mostly in Christian history and particularly of today. It therefore notes the meanings which seem to be assigned to the word and to its synonyms and associates; and it includes some criticism of usage, according to the accepted laws of thought, such as may contribute to the purpose of clarification.

The future historian of Modernism will be much embarrassed by the contradictory appreciations and misjudgments which are to be found in our contemporary literature on this subject. One book presents Modernism as a movement of the Latin mind, distrusting individualism and laying stress upon the corporate element in religion; another writer, on the contrary, characterizes Modernism as “a spirit of anarchy, of individualism, of personal distinction and culture.” To some writers Modernism is the greatest spiritual movement ever produced inside the Catholic Church, while to others it is an insignificant and useless dream of a few not completely developed minds. Consequently some of them outline the development of Modernism as an anecdotic history without a real unity in purpose, while others conceive of it as of a system of theology derived from certain fixed and definite philosophic premises.

In his 1947 article, “Das judäische Königsritual,” Gerhard von Rad argued that the Judean enthronement ritual was heavily dependent on the corresponding Egyptian ritual. He argued persuasively that the of Ps 2:7, the of 2 Kgs 11:12, and the of Ps 89:40 were all simply different designations of the same reality, the Judean counterpart of the Egyptian nḫb.t, the royal protocol that the deity writes and presents to the new king along with the crown at the time of the latter's coronation. The Egyptian protocol contained the five names of the new pharaoh's titulary and the legitimation of his rule by the deity's acknowledgment of the king as the deity's child. Von Rad argued that both of these elements also appeared in the Judean ritual. Ps 2:7 quotes from the protocol marking Yahweh's legitimation of the new Davidic king as God's son, while Isa 9:5 reflects the king's divine sonship as well as his five-fold royal titulary.

In the years since the uprisings of the late 1960s swept the cultures of Europe and America, the emergence of a radical critique of modernity and the heralding of a corresponding transition into postmodernity have increasingly occupied the minds of many cultural critics, theologians, philosophers, and historians alike. These three decades have witnessed the development of a wide array of differing cultural, social, and conceptual possibilities: the academy, for example, has seen the growth of gender studies and inquiries dedicated to previously marginalized communities, as well as the advancement of postmodern theories of culture, action, and knowledge among practitioners of philosophy, sociology, and theology, among others. The story is by now familiar, and while cataloging these changes itself would be an interesting endeavor, suffice it here to underscore that the interests, orientations, foci, and theoretical approaches of the academy have all changed significantly at the end of the twentieth century.

Do the majority of the Greek lectionaries of the gospels agree with one another so consistently that it is possible to speak of their text as “the lectionary text”? It has generally been assumed that the text of lectionaries does not merit serious attention, and that even if they should agree in text, the quality of that text would not justify its study. But the discussion of the quality and significance of this text may reasonably be postponed until its existence has been established.

In his introductory essay on the philosophical sources of The Guide of the Perplexed, Shlomo Pines points out a well-known contradiction between two conceptions of God in Maimonides' theology. On the one hand, Maimonides borrowed the Aristotelian definition of God as the intellect that cognizes itself; on the other, in line with Avicenna's Neoplatonic theory of attributes, Maimonides denied the possibility of saying anything positive about God. Pines proposes two possible solutions; first, that Maimonides was well aware of the contradiction, or, second, that he fell into the contradiction inadvertently. As Pines himself admits, however, neither solution is satisfactory.

Readers of St. Jerome's works are familiar with the fact that he often quotes Greek and Hebrew words in the course of these, sometimes depending on his master Origen, sometimes depending on his personal knowledge of both languages, which was considerable. In the autographs of these works it was his custom to place a line over the top of such words, as a sign that they were foreign. Really old manuscripts of Jerome's works, apart from Vulgate MSS., are now rare. Such as were known to Traube are listed in his Hieronymi Chronicorum codicis Floriacensis fragmenta Leidensia, Parisina, Vaticana phototypice edita (Lugd. Bat.1902). But good early minuscule MSS. of his works in many cases preserve these horizontal lines, and record the Greek and Hebrew words with considerable accuracy. As time goes on, the lines tend to disappear, and Latin transliterations, with or without the Greek, become more and more common. Most of the editions of Jerome are defective in two respects among others: they were not based on the oldest and best manuscripts, and the editors did not know very much Greek. It is hoped that the details furnished below will have some interest for students of Greek writing in the latter part of the fourth century.

This stichometric list is almost altogether unknown to Western scholarship. Yet it is a rather accurate translation of a Greek stichometric list of the same character as the Stichometry of Nicephorus. The text has been published four times in Armenian, each edition based on a different manuscript or manuscripts. The edition of Ter Movsessian was based upon one manuscript—olim Etchmiadzin 154, a Bible dated 1308, and that of Fehratʿian upon two—Vienna No. 30 and No. 130. Murad based his edition upon four Jerusalem manuscripts, No. 773 (1359 C.E.), which served as his text, and Nos. 343 (1450 C.E.), 835 (1640 C.E.), and 936 (1703 C.E.), which he listed in his apparatus. The text was most recently edited by A. G. Abrahamyan. He did not consult Murad's edition, but based his own work upon two Erevan manuscripts, Nos. 2180 (1644 CE.) and 699 (16th century). He has listed all the variants of Ter Movsessian and of Fehratʿian in his apparatus.

In a letter written on his thirty-fifth birthday, November 21, 1803, Schleiermacher called the year just past the unhappiest of his life. This troubled year provides the background for three letters Schleiermacher wrote to the Würzburg theologian Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus in January, February, and May, 1804, which are published for the first time below. The first letter is Schleiermacher's reply to an invitation, transmitted by Paulus, for Schleiermacher to join the theological faculty of the University of Würzburg. The second relates to Schleiermacher's acceptance of this Bavarian appointment and to his plans to move there. The third explains the necessity Schleiermacher subsequently faced of breaking his Würzburg contract in order to obey King Friedrich Wilhelm III's command to remain in his Prussian fatherland.

Parallel with the main current of the Protestant Reformation there ran from the very beginning another powerful current which has always received far less consideration from historians than it deserves. Some have supposed it to be a mis-guided, if not a monstrous, undertaking. Others have considered it one more among the many “lost causes” about which history is more or less silent. Neither of these positions is, however, quite tenable. It was, like Bunker Hill in the American Revolution, “a battle lost but a cause won,” since nearly everything which these minor reformers aimed at has since been achieved or is on the way to achievement.

When the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court conclude that some law, or some decision of a lower court, violates the U.S. Constitution, no great difficulties of principle or sentiment need accompany their decision to abrogate the opinions of the earlier legislators or judges. The justices, and others, are expected to understand their decision either as correcting a mistake that had been introduced by fallible people who, with intentions good or bad, or unintentionally, had violated the system's basic rulebook, or as reflecting the fact that since the time those legislators or judges made their decisions something relevant (such as notions of “cruel and unusual punishment” or of what affects interstate commerce) had changed, so what was once constitutionally acceptable no longer is. Thus, however upsetting the substance of the justices’ decision may be, it need not imply a condemnation of their predecessors nor entail a disruption of the system's authority structures—as is seen in the fact that the justices, and American citizens, readily use such explicit verbs as “reverse,” “strike down,” or “overturned” for what the justices do

One manner in which to investigate the life of Jesus' sayings in the early church is to ask how communities preserved and transmitted their memory. I ask here, however, a somewhat different question, namely, what did Christians accomplish by remembering certain words and actions specifically as those of Jesus. In particular, I inquire in this article into the consequences of remembering Jesus' words and actions as authoritative within the cultic context of the Corinthian community. What is the memory of Jesus that informs chapters 10 and 11 of 1 Corinthians? What light, moreover, might an answer to this question shed upon the formation of a narrative about Jesus? To this end, I present a reading of materials in 1 Corinthians 10 and 11 that attends to cult, both its ritual and its narrative, and to the function of authoritative speech in cultic context.

If in the Civil War God was preserving American nationality, giving the nation a baptism of blood, after that sacramental rebirth the question naturally arose, why had nationality been preserved, and what purpose was the regenerated nation to serve? In asking the question Protestant clergymen assumed that history had meaning, a plot, and that the United States would play a role in it. When they looked forward, what did they see ahead for America on the world stage? Upon investigation that forward look emerges as more than a blurred daydream. Leaders of Protestant thought analyzed American destiny in terms of sophisticated contemporary interpretations of history. From their analysis grew serious intellectual ideas of destiny which in retrospect appear as a prelude to later imperialism.

Although few Christians were likely to suffer the most violent consequences of persecution under the Roman Empire, the experiences of those imprisoned, tortured, or killed were significant far beyond the lives of the individuals concerned. These living martyrs took on a significance that was important for the whole of Christian identity, becoming spiritual patrons dispensing grace, or exemplars of an alternative mode of life.

Confucianism, with its elaborate ritual, its bloody sacrifices, its antiquated symbolism, and its fine ethical teaching, has again been made the State religion of China. Several recent mandates by the President, Yüan Shih-k'ai, have restored to it in the school, in the civil service, and in the army, the authority which previous to the revolution it had held almost uninterruptedly for two thousand years.