Contrary to much of the commentary tradition, the book of Job is not primarily a discourse on how to properly speak (or withhold speech) about God in the midst of innocent suffering, nor is it aimed primarily at offering up the character of Job as an exemplar of how to suffer correctly (or incorrectly). Neither is it a treatise about human submission to (or rebellion from) God’s mysterious sovereign prerogative in permitting evil. It is instead a theological exploration of the dilemmas and demands of consolation that confront us given the inexplicable enormities of human suffering. Its unifying aim is to confront us with multiple voices that pull us into an open-ended—and decidedly pessimistic—reflection on what innocent suffering reveals to us about our creaturely limits and the fragility of our hope in God, features of the human condition that require our capacities for compassion to exceed our capacities for theological sense-making.

Rabbi Ḥayim (Chaim) Hirschensohn (1857–1935) was one of only a handful of Jewish thinkers to work out a Jewish political theology, and on account of his progressive stances he became a favorite of liberal circles within contemporary Judaism. Therefore, a passage in his book Malki Bakodesh, in which he expresses clear opposition to universal suffrage, “invited” mitigating interpretations. Yet, a survey of Hirschensohn’s various writings reveals that they contain a trend of political elitism. Is this surprising? Hirschensohn’s progressiveness notwithstanding, the article argues that his elitist sentiments are rooted in three major intellectual trends within modern Judaism: Mitnagdism, Haskalah, and Zionism. In the writings of seminal thinkers in each of these movements, we find political elitism and reservations about government “by the people.” Hirschensohn’s personal history positioned him at the confluence of these trends, and so his elitist opinions should be viewed as the outgrowth of these intellectual traditions.

The name of Friedrich II and his nearly half-century reign from 1740 to 1786 are virtually synonymous with the advent and advance of the Enlightenment in Prussia. In his famous 1784 answer to the question posed by the Berlinische Monatsschrift, “What is enlightenment?” Immanuel Kant asserted that enlightenment could be partially conceptualized as a temporal epoch, one whose salient characteristics, especially in regards to religion, were manifested in the personal opinions and public policies of his royal Prussian sovereign. “We do not live in an enlightened age, but in an age of enlightenment – the century of Friedrich.” In a similar spirit, a generation after Kant wrote, Friedrich Schleiermacher delivered a paean to Friedrich II's memory in a January 24, 1817 address to the Prussian Academy of Sciences on what would have been Friedrich II's one-hundred-and-fifth birthday. Schleiermacher heralded Friedrich II as “a friend of the muses,” who doubtlessly conversed with Plato in the afterlife, the legacy of whose domestic initiatives had been to transform Prussia into a more cultured society, while his “heroic” and “glorious” victories secured for the Prussian Army its vaunted reputation for military prowess. As the 29-year-old king himself wrote in a February 24, 1741 battlefield letter from the frontlines of the First Silesian War, “I love war for its glory, but if I were not a ruler, I would be nothing but a philosopher.”

The subject of revelation appears with striking frequency in the writings and sermons of the early Hasidic masters. Their attempts to reimagine Sinai and to redefine its spiritual significance were key to their theological project. The present article examines the theophany at Sinai as presented in the teachings of three important Hasidic leaders: Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobil, Ze’ev Wolf of Zhitomir, and Levi Yitsḥak of Barditshev, all of whom were students of Rabbi Dov Ber Friedman, the Maggid of Mezritsh. Each of the three constructed their teachings upon foundational elements of the Maggid’s theology. This shared inheritance links Dov Ber’s students to one another, but careful consideration of these Hasidic sources will reveal important differences in foci and ideational message. These homilies refer to revelation as an unfolding process in which the ineffable divine is continuously translated into human language, reflecting upon—and justifying—the emergence of Hasidism and its theology through reimagining revelation. Such fundamental questions of language and devotion also throb at the heart of religious revivals the world over. When read critically and carefully, these Hasidic sources have much to offer scholars interested in the interface of renewal, exegesis, and revelation more broadly.

One of the many contributions that Helmut Koester has made to New Testament scholarship is his attention to the importance of archaeological and epigraphical evidence for the study of early Christianity. I offer this study as a small token of gratitude to him for that contribution. It attempts to show the importance of certain inscriptions for the signification of the saying attributed to Jesus in Mark 10:45: “For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

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.

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.

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.

To the very title of this paper, or at any rate to the idea implied in it, the average religious thinker might conceivably make more objections than one. He might in the first place inquire whether any meaning can be found in the term “rational mysticism”; and, examining it either from the standpoint of reason or from that of mysticism, might complain that it attempts to bring together two quite incompatible things. Reason has usually held mysticism in scorn, looking upon it as a sort of quack method, if the word may pass, of accomplishing, or of pretending to accomplish, what reason accomplishes in the professional and only legitimate way. Mysticism, from the other side, has been ready enough to repay scorn with scorn: it has claimed to find its way to the secret places of truth by a subtle process far more efficacious than that laborious following of the trail which reason practises; and its independence of reason, its irreconcilability with reason, it has always taken as its glory rather than its shame. What—the average religious man might say—what can “rational mysticism” mean? How, indeed, can such a thing exist at all? And in the next place, even supposing you could manufacture the curious compound that “rational mysticism” would be, and could link the two seeming incompatibles together, how are you going to make any connection between your newly created rational mysticism and New Testament Christianity? Rational, indeed, New Testament Christianity is, or claims to be; and to show its harmony with reason (provided that the thing be not pushed too far) is one of the chief objects that Christian apologetics may well keep in view.

“In the next place, for the wholesome counsel Mr. Robinson gave that part of the Church whereof he was Pastor, at their departure from him to begin the great work of Plantation in New England. Amongst other wholesome instructions and exhortations, he used these expressions, or to the same purpose:

We are now, ere long, to part asunder; and the Lord knoweth whether ever he should live to see our faces again. But whether the Lord had appointed it or not; he charged us, before God and his blessed angels, to follow him no further than he followed Christ; and if God should reveal anything to us by any other Instrument of his, to be as ready to receive it, as ever we were to receive any truth by his Ministry. For he was very confident the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy Word.

Three women in Josephus's Antiquities are well known for their purported devotion to Jewish religious practices: Poppaea Sabina, the consort/wife of the emperor Nero, whom Josephus describes as “God-fearing” (θɛοσɛβής); Fulvia, a Roman convert of consular rank whom he pegs as the source of the expulsion of Jews from Rome under Tiberius; and Helena, Queen of Adiabene, also a convert to Judaism. In this article, I show that the stories of these three Gentile noble women, who share an interest in Jewish religious practices, are part of a larger narrative pattern in the Antiquities that repeatedly characterizes Gentile women of high standing as saviors and benefactors of the Jewish people. According to Josephus, imperial women intercede on behalf of Jewish aristocrats before every Julio-Claudian emperor, often with ramifications for the entire Jewish people. He also claims that Domitia, the wife of the emperor Domitian, was one of his own patrons. Patronage on behalf of the Jewish community is integral to the stories of both Fulvia and Queen Helena of Adiabene. Furthermore, the salvific acts of foreign noblewomen feature prominently in Josephus's retelling of the story of Moses early in the Antiquities.

A remarkable phenomenon in African Christianity occurred between about 1912 and 1930 when, mostly out of the ferment of indigenous reaction to Western Christian missions, local “prophets” emerged and founded African Independent Churches. “Independency” is the term employed to characterize this phenomenon which came to embrace both the charismatic prophet figures and the separatist churches they or their followers created. Over six thousand such movements were identified throughout Africa in 1968, with the situation still in considerable flux. By the end of the twentieth century it is estimated that some 350 million Africans will have converted to one form or another of the various types of Christian practice now active on the continent.

For many years now, it has become very common for Old Testament scholars to refer to the numerous parallels between the patriarchal customs reflected in the stories of Genesis and the Custom law of the cuneiform documents of the second millennium B.C. Particular attention has been given to the Nuzi texts and to custom law related to marriage. The present study is directed to a reexamination of the parallels to marriage customs as they have been applied to the story of Jacob's marriage to the daughters of Laban.

If we speak here of contemporary literature, let us nevertheless recall that in all ages men have recorded certain common responses to death and mortality that vary little. The universal themes of dread and stupor, of grief and compunction, of transience and corruptibility — such poignancies of our finite condition underlie whatever special cultural or even religious influences come into play, or whatever particular hopes are projected. It is for this reason that elegies for fallen heroes and laments for toppled cities and broken hopes, in Job or Homer, are still moving, or the heartbreak in a papyrus letter, or the plangent grief of Catullus as he comes across many seas to his brother's grave,

ut te postremo donarem munere mortis

et mutam nequiquam adloquerer cinerem.

Indeed, we must say that it is only in total openness to such common experience of grief and trepidation that other more positive overtones of death can make themselves felt and justify themselves.

The oracular writings of the “Christian Socrates” of the eighteenth century, Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), have attracted a number of important philosophers, theologians, and men of letters since the time of Immanuel Kant. Some insist that Hamann was a profound and heroic mystic, and some conclude that he was an impossible obscurantist. A figure of conspicuous protest against prevailing Enlightenment attitudes, Hamann's own views exhibit a strange alliance between religious (Lutheran) faith and sceptical (Humean) empiricism.

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.

A Puritan sloth is as hard to imagine as a Puritan humorist. The Saints have been called many things since the sixteenth century, but seldom if ever have they been accounted lazy. From Ben Jonson's caustic caricature of Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, ready to intrude his opinions on any subject, to Michael Walzer's portrayal of them as the indefatigable pioneers of modern radical politics, observers have readily acknowledged their “extraordinary activism.” To link this enterprise with the ethic of striving that lay at the heart of Puritan thought is easy, for the preachers always spoke of the godly life as arduous. “I say shew your grace, shew your regeneration, by being new creatures, by doing more than others,” John Preston urged, and he practiced what he preached. Chaplain to Charles I, Master of Emmanuel College at Cambridge, participant in Puritan Parliamentary politics while commuting between lectureships at both Lincoln's Inn and Trinity Church in Cambridge, Preston forced several careers into the less than two decades between his conversion and his death at the age of forty from consumption probably exacerbated by exhaustion. “[H]e never (by his good will) rested that day since God was truly known unto him untill [his death],” wrote his first biographer, “God gave him therefore now an everlasting rest.” Few people more fully exemplified the Puritan ideal that pious performance is the thanksgiving for the gift of eternal life.

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.