In 1791, when he was eighteen years of age, Coleridge came across Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Although he was sufficiently interested to read the essay, he was not impressed by it. In fact, if one is to judge his reaction by the jeu d'esprit, “Mathematical Problem,” it was chiefly one of amusement. Although he went on to read Burke's other essays, he was attracted by the character of the author and the style of his writing rather than by his point of view; for, certainly a young man who was an avowed disciple of David Hartley, a champion of the French Revolution, and the originator of Pantisocracy could find little comfort in the works of Edmund Burke. But the zeal for Hartley, the French Revolution, and Pantisocracy was short-lived; and by 1796 Coleridge had turned, a “thought-bewilder'd man,” to a reading of Bishop Berkeley.The influence of Berkeley, especially of the later Platonic Berkeley, began to show in his work almost at once; the influence of Burke continued to lag. Out of his reflections on Berkeley, however, came a new admiration for Burke, particularly for his Philosophical Inquiry; and, from the combined teachings of the two, Coleridge ultimately derived suggestions for a theology broad enough to account for and to give meaning and purpose to all human activities. I should like here to indicate briefly the use he made of these suggestions with respect to science, philosophy, and poetry. I do not mean to imply that there were no other influences at work in the formulation of his views; but I do submit that these two influences are basic and that Coleridge's position can be adequately understood only in terms of them.

One of the incidental, but, as it proved, important results of the Harvard Expedition to Mount Sinai in 1927 was the rediscovery of the Sinaitic inscriptions on Serabit el-Khadim, a desolate mountain in the interior of the peninsula, rendered famous by the ruins of a temple of the Egyptian goddess Hathor and by many exhausted turquoise mines.

Our study criticizes the respective theodicies and methodologies of Joseph Washington, James Cone, and Albert Cleage. Our argument is reducible to the following propositions. (1) On the basis of their own presuppositions, the point of departure for black theology must be the question: Is God a white racist? (2) Accordingly, a viable theodicy, one which refutes the charge of divine racism, must be the foundation for the edifice of black theology. (3) The theodicies of the above theologians leave the issue of God's racism essentially unresolved. Consequently, the remainder of the theological system lacks adequate support.

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.

Since the publication of Philip Hallie's book, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed,1 and the release of Pierre Sauvage's documentary, Weapons of the Spirit,2 many North Americans have become familiar with the rescue efforts carried out in the French Vivarais-Lignon plateau during World War II. It is difficult to know the exact number of persons sheltered, and indeed this statistic has become a point of contention among historians, with some arguing that 700–1000 Jews were rescued, while a few of those who experienced and contributed to the effort estimate 3500 (in addition to approximately 1500 others).3 It is true that during the war a variety of individuals and groups in France assisted people at tremendous risk, but the number saved in the plateau, even if it does hover around 1000, is nonetheless striking.4 The residents of this region welcomed individuals and families from throughout France and Europe, providing food, housing, and assisting many over the border into Switzerland, some 300 kilometers away. Moreover, some local residents participated in the manufacture and distribution of false papers, a crime under Vichy law, but the provision of which aided in the survival of hundreds of persons during the period.5 Although not all of the inhabitants of the plateau were active in the armed Resistance, they resisted nonetheless by resolutely disobeying the Vichy authorities as well as the Germans. These people were the minority throughout France, for while some citizens actively collaborated with the Germans, the vast majority simply waited out the war, neither collaborating nor particularly opposing the changes brought by the Vichy government and the subsequent German occupying forces.6

This paper and the two responses to it were presented as part of “Evangelical Perspectives on Biblical Authority,” a conference held at Harvard Divinity School on 9 and 10 March 2001. The conference was sponsored by the School under the auspices of the Alonzo L. McDonald Family Visiting Professorship of Evangelical Theological Studies.

Professor Abraham has given us a stimulating paper on the central and prophetic nature of revelation. I thank him for it. Several years ago at a meeting of a theological society Professor Gabriel Fackre gently chided David Tracy and myself by asking: “Why do Roman Catholic theologians neglect the work of Evangelical theologians?” This neglect was regrettable, he suggested, for Evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics have much in common theologically. Moreover, although they are numerically very large denominations in society, they both share a certain minority status in the academic community. They should, therefore, pay attention to one another's writings. His admonition has weighed heavily upon me.

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

It is one of the ironies of American religious history that the most thoroughly anti-Catholic work to appear after the Civil War was published in the unlikely decade after the Second World War, when the last good war had been fought and won, and what Gibson Winter termed “the suburban captivity of the churches” was well underway, a “captivity” in which questions of crabgrass ostensibly replaced theology as the major topic of conversation. A series of articles that had begun to appear in the Nation, a staunchly libertarian journal, in November 1947, was published by Beacon Press in 1949 as American Freedom and Catholic Power—a work that would set the stage for increasingly neuralgic exchanges between Catholics and Protestants during a decade in which sociologist Will Herberg announced that the “American Way of Life” was now acceptably packaged in Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish forms. The author of that book, Paul Blanshard, understood himself to be issuing a timely call to protect the First Amendment of the Constitution against the encroachments of a Catholic hierarchy living within the very fortress of the free world, but hostile to American democratic and political values.

Some years ago in an examination of the text noted above, I hypothesized that it could well be a response to some Christian theological position being set forth and argued against Judaism in Galilee in the fourth and fifth centuries. My choice of doctrine was that of the atonement: Christ's atoning death for the sins of humankind. The chapter, to be dealt with below in detail, is in its entirety an argument for the atoning efficacy of the death of righteous persons, that is, a doctrine of vicarious atonement. The material included centered upon the lesson read in the synagogue on the Day of Atonement, the sixteenth chapter of Leviticus. This details the ritual procedures that were to take place once a year on the tenth day of the seventh month in the cult center, in order to expiate for the ritual uncleannness and acts of rebellion, that is, “all the sins of the people.” It concludes with the words: “This shall become a rule binding on you for all times, to make for the Israelites once a year the expiation required by all their sins.”

The striking text which Codex Bezae presents, aside from evoking much controversy and several novel theories, has long been at the center of the yet unsolved mystery of the so-called “Western” text, which is itself one of the most urgent and yet most enigmatic areas of New Testament textual criticism. B. H. Streeter did not exaggerate when he said that many a scholar “… has met his Waterloo in the attempt to account for, or explain away, the existence of the Bezan text.”

Throughout the history of western Christianity, a major stumbling block has been agreement upon the definition of certain terms. Milton and his critics have shared in the difficulty of communication which lack of a common terminology has caused. Nowhere is this more evident than in his discussion of the Son of God in the Christian Doctrine, where his employment of “substance,” “subsistence,” “essence,” and “hypostasis” has confused students who were attempting to understand the complex meanings which lie back of these words. Milton has often not followed the interpretations of these words usually held in Christianity; rather, he has adopted meanings which were very early associated with them but which lost currency centuries ago, even though they have never been completely forgotten.

E. K. Rand tentatively ascribed the Paris MS B. N. 4404, s.IX, to the Scriptorium of Tours which he reconstructed in the monumental studies in the Script of Tours. Bruno Krusch offered a detailed description of this manuscript which Theodor Mommsen used for his edition of the Theodosian Code. The MS contains a collection of Roman and Germanic law codes and sources of law. Here we are especially interested in the Lex Romana Visigothorum, also called the Breviarium Alaricianum, and in the Salian and Ripuarian Codes, i.e., sources of law used in the Frankish Empire of Charlemagne. Some capitularies of Charlemagne, issued during and after the year 803, are attached at the end of the MS, which occupies an important place in the much discussed text transmission of the Lex Salica. Turonian provenience of the MS has been denied by Philippe Lauer, Bruno Krusch, Wilhelm Köhler, and C. H. Beeson, but Rand assumes that it deserves a listing among the books of Tours, since its script “seems nearer to that of Tours … and yet … none versed in manuscripts has ascribed the book to Tours.”

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.

Beginning with Flinders Petrie scholars have been struck by the similarity between the script of these inscriptions and the Egyptian hieroglyphs. As the inscriptions were found in the neighborhood of numerous Egyptian monuments, an attempt was naturally made to read them as in the Egyptian language; but this proved unsuccessful, and it was evident that although the signs show close relationship with hieroglyphs, the language is not Egyptian. On Sinai, it was natural to think of a Semitic language. Further, the Egyptian phonetic value of the signs does not yield Semitic words, so that it appears that not only the language but the phonetic value of the signs is Semitic, not Egyptian.

‘Cette grande personnalité chrétienne’: the phrase, applied to him by a Swiss theologian, M. Guiran, is rightly fixed upon by M. Loisy in his Mémoires as the mot juste in describing Friedrich von Hügel. In language no less well chosen the same writer has gone on to speak of those ‘valeurs intimes et profondes que M. von Hügel a si magnifiquement et si humblement incarnées.’ For it was indeed not by the construction of a system that von Hügel promoted our understanding of religious experience, nor even chiefly by originating or giving currency to new and fruitful ideas in this department of study, but rather by the impression made by his unforgettable personality upon those who were brought into contact with it, whether through actual conversation or correspondence with him during his lifetime or through the reading of what he wrote and stamped with the peculiar and distinctive style in which that personality found so characteristic an expression. Therefore, while in the case of any thinker who takes as the subject of his lucubrations one which, like religion, must be comprehended, if at all, by an experience in which the whole man is engaged, some acquaintance with his biography will perhaps be found necessary to the understanding of his thought; in the case of such a thinker as he of whom I am now to speak to you it is certainly indispensable.