As a way of working out and consolidating one's religious identity, the whole-sale slaughter of people (whether in herem, crusade, or jihad) is exactly what it seems to be, no more and no less. The pressure that builds up naturally in the idea of election is here unleashed, and the idea is given its fullest expression. The Conquest tradition is the primary expression and fulfillment of the idea—the Urtext. The biblical idea of election is the ultimate anti-humanistic idea.Jeremy Cott, “The Biblical Problem of Election,” JES 21 (Spring 1984) 199–228, at 204. Thus did Jeremy Cott, in an article published nearly two decades ago, starkly pose the dilemma faced by anyone who seeks to use the Bible as a moral and spiritual guide today. How can one possibly maintain that the conquest tradition, which relates that God called for the annihilation of every Canaanite man, woman, and child, is an authoritative part of Scripture on a par with other items such as the Ten Commandments or the story of the exodus? The logic behind Cott's statement, at first blush, seems quite compelling. Its central premise, which almost all contemporary theologians and biblical scholars would endorse, is that genocide is morally wrong and could not be a practice decreed by God. Furthermore, the command to commit genocide appears to conflict with other basic biblical concepts, innocent along with the guilty.

As is now widely recognized, the Scriptures and their interpretation did not serve as mere embroidery upon a larger theological dispute during the “Arian controversy.”All dates in this essay are C.E. In the past two decades, scholars have identified many difficulties with the term “Arian Controversy”; thus the quotation marks. In 1988, R. P. C. Hanson (The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988] xvii) stigmatized the term as a “serious misnomer.” Michael H. Barnes and Daniel H. Williams (Arianism after Arius: Essays on the Development of the Fourth Century Trinitarian Conflicts [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993] xiv) have nicely summarized the findings of recent scholarship: “Perhaps the most central finding in the last fifteen years … has been to show how peripheral the person of Arius was to the actual debates which occupied the Church for most of the [fourth] century.” I use the terms “Arian” and “Arianism” in this study, in the absence of a better term, as a shorthand way of referring to the Latin theological opponents of the Nicene party. In fact, the relationship between theological discourse and the Scriptures is rather the reverse of the one often assumed. The Scriptures were themselves the source of the dispute, and not fodder for the proof-texting of predetermined theological positions. Theological discourse was, in fact, the fruit of reflection and argument over key scriptural passages. It may well be true that the controversy stemmed from dispute over the meaning of only a dozen or so such texts. Alois Grillmeier is on the mark when he observes, “However much the whole of scripture continued to be read, theological polemics, precisely in trinitarian and christological discussion, restricted themselves to a certain number of important or disputed scriptural texts.”Christ in Christian Tradition: From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965) 7. But this is very different from suggesting that the Scriptures functioned merely as proof-texts to what was central—namely, philosophically informed theological argument. These scriptural texts were the initial and abiding source of the dispute. As Robert C. Gregg and Dennis E. Groh have observed, “the picture of Arius as a logician and dialectician” has been so “firmly entrenched in all our minds that it has been easy to overlook the degree to which appeal to the Scriptures was fundamental for Arius” and, it might be added, the later Arians.Early Arianism: A View of Salvation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981) 3. Following Athanasius too closely, some modern scholars have argued that it was only the Arian side that so interpreted the Scriptures. See T. E. Pollard, “The Exegesis of Scripture and the Arian Controversy,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 41/2 (1959) 414–29, at 416: “That the Arians were extreme literalists is borne out by Athanasius's criticism of them. He criticizes them, however, not because they interpret the Scriptures literally, but because they isolate carefully selected texts from their context and interpret them literally without any regard for their context of for the general teaching of Scripture.” But the pro-Nicenes were no less capable than their counterparts of reading the text of Scripture in this decontextualized fashion. Indeed, it could be argued that the Arians were generally on much stronger ground when exegeting the Bible. Hanson, too, is on the mark when he states that “the dispute was about the interpretation of the Bible” and that the philosophical language used by Athanasius was “all devoted to what was ultimately a Scriptural argument.”Search, 8, 422. Examining both unmediated, genuine Arian sources as well as hostile orthodox testimony, I will analyze in this essay the extensive dispute in the “Arian controversy” over Mark 13:32, where Jesus appears to acknowledge unambiguously his ignorance of the time of the day of judgment. While both sides agreed that this text was central to the controversy, they disagreed radically on its meaning. Their differences in interpretation, I argue, are rooted in quite different theories of salvation.

The understanding of Hebrew prophecy has made great advances in modern biblical scholarship. To be sure, such is the diversity and complexity both of prophetic texts within the Hebrew canon and of contemporary methods of interpretation that many unresolved—perhaps irresolvable—issues remain. Yet recent hermeneutical debate, like the philological and historical work of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, can offer fresh lenses through which to read the text, in ways that at least sometimes may help make progress beyond seeming impasses. My purpose in this paper is to focus on one particular prophetic narrative, one which is often used as a case study: the story of Micaiah ben Imlah in 1 Kgs 22:1–38. I hope it may illustrate something of the kind of fresh understanding of a difficult prophetic text which is achievable.

A common uncritical criticism claims that dogma robs humans of the freedom to think and act. This dogmatic pronouncement reflects a sad misunderstanding con-cerning the function and meaning of dogma. When countering the negative effects of this attack, a systematic theology cannot be coerced into a defensive position. Rather, theology must clearly and creatively think of how a precise determination of dogma can remain principally open to a plurality of both experiences and inter-pretations of those experiences. Fixed by the dogma, the referent of a religion is the subject that is experienced in each successive generation of a living religion; the life of the religion is constituted by the varied experiences of its referent. If the religion is to have flexible permanence, then the referent must be presented anew to each new generation in a way grounding the diverse possibilities of experienc-ing that same referent. Dogma should be formulated not to repress and suppress, but to make possible both true activity as the “concretion of freedom,”This term is rephrased from the title of an article by Christof Landmesser, “Freiheit als Konkretion von Wahrheit: Eine exegetische Skizze zum Lebensbezug des Evangeliums in der paulinischen Theologie,” in Befreiende Wahrheit: Festschrift für Eilert Herms (ed. Wilfried Härle, Matthias Heesch, and Reiner Preul; MThSt 60; Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 2000) 39–56. and true thinking that can only take place in freedom.

Today, New Testament scholars interpret the book of Acts and its account of the Hellenists—Stephen's martyrdom in particularSee Acts 6–8.—while historians of Christianity study the cult of Saint Stephen and the healing power of his relicsParticularly in the eyes of Augustine; see De civitate Dei, 22.8; also p. 290, below.. In contrast to the situation in earlier scholarship, there is, alas, little dialogue between the two groups, because the first does not investigate the reception of the book of Acts,Even in the German collection Evangelisch-katholischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament, whose intention is to respect the Wirkungsgeschichte, Rudolf Pesch's commentary on the book of Acts presents only one reference to a Christian text influenced by Luke's account of Stephen's martyrdom, the story of the martyrs of Lyon preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea, Hist. eccl. 5.2.5; see Rudolf Pesch, Die Apostelgeschichte. 1.Teilband (Apg 1–12) (2d ed.; EKK 5.1; Solothurn: Benzinger; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1995) 267. and the second does not bridge the gap between the time of the New Testament and the fourth century, when the cult of the saint begins to be well attested. My long-term intention is to establish links between the two scholarly fields and to consider Stephen's career in the New Testament and his role in the life of the church as two phases of a continuous history. This paper, an expression of my short-term intention, fulfills two preliminary tasks: to present the modern research on the hagiography of the first martyr and to collect the ancient material on Stephen. As far as I can judge, such a file or “dossier” on Stephen, the first martyr, does not exist.

No sooner does the Abraham of Genesis arrive in Canaan than the narrator informs us that “the Canaanite was then in the land” (Gen 12:6). Yet immediately God an-nounces his intention to give this land to Abraham's descendants (v. 7). From the outset of the Abraham narrative, the divine promise of nationhood and territory is haunted by the presence of the indigenous inhabitants of Canaan. Though mostly a silent feature of the landscape, they emerge from time to time to encounter and threaten the first family.

The Mashafa dorho, or Book of the Cock, is an apocryphal passion narrative that survives in an Ethiopic () version, which in turn has clearly been translated from an Arabic Vorlage. The anonymous author describes it as an oral teaching (the terms are dersān, “homily, discourse,” and temhert, “doctrine, instruction”) that he or she received from the apostles themselves. One of the author's main concerns is to relate “in detail” (4:18) “all that has happened” to Jesus (4:8). At the end of the narrative, the author acknowledges his or her debt to John the Evangelist, who was—“in tension with, yet finally in harmony with Peter”—one of the foremost eyewitnesses to the events of the passion. Although a fragment of the Book of the Cock has long been known to Western scholars, and the entire work enjoys to this day a privileged place in the liturgy of the Ethiopian church, the antiquity of the traditions that it preserves has not been recognized; hence the claim to have “newly discovered” an apocryphal text, the origins of which lie in the fifth or sixth century C.E.

For a long time, Lucien Febvre was obsessed by an arduous problem in cultural history: how could some brilliant intellectuals of the Renaissance have believed in witches? Influenced by the parallel that Lucien Lévy-Bruhl drew between child and primitive mentalities,Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, La mentalidad primitiva (Madrid: Akal, 1982). The original French edition was published in 1922. the French historian proposed an answer: in early modern times many beliefs could be upheld because a real Sense-of-the-Impossible did not exist. Febvre declared: “men in 1541 never said impossible.”Lucien Febvre, El problema de la incredulidad en el siglo XVI: La religión de Rabelais (México: Uthea, 1959) 382. Six years later he returned to the same issue, explicitly stating the dilemma in the title of an almost forgotten paper, “Sorcellerie, sottise ou révolution mentale?” How could Jean Bodin reconcile the publication of his Six Books of the Commonwealth with the ridiculous witchcraft stories included in his Dèmonomanie des Sorciers? In Febvre's view, Bodin could believe in the sabbat because until the middle of the seventeenth century there was no real Sense-of-the-Impossible in Western culture.Lucien Febvre, “Sorcellerie, sottise ou révolution mentale?” Annales 3 (1948) 15. See also Alexandre Koyré's 1949 article, “La aportación científica del Renacimiento,” reprinted in Estudios de historia del pensamiento científico (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1988) 43.

In 1974 I published a paper arguing that behind the pseudepigraphic presenta-tions of the religious experiences attributed to apocalyptic seers by the Jewish apocalypses of the Second Temple period, there lay a kernel of actual visionary activity or analogous religious experience.Michael E. Stone, “Apocalyptic, Vision, or Hallucination?” Milla Wa Milla 14 (1974) 47–56; repr. in Selected Studies in Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha with Special Reference to the Armenian Tradition (SVTP 9; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991) 419–28. This was not the regnant view then. Indeed, it had long been a prevalent opinion of scholarship that pseudepigraphic apocalypses are in some sense forgeries and that they present completely fictitious narratives about their claimed authors, with no roots in reality. The actual course of historical happenings might be presented in a symbolic vision, often culminating in prediction, but the framework, the seer, and his doings or feelings (there are no women among the supposed authors) are fictional. At most, the pseudepigraphic framework may hint at the general circumstances in which the work was composed. A Baruch or Jeremiah work about the destruction of the First Temple might well have been written after the destruction of the Second, but that had to be proved on other grounds than correspondence between the fictional situation and that of the author. (Indeed, the book of Baruch was not written in the context of the destruction of the Temple, nor the Qumran Jeremiah Apocryphon.) Scholars regarded words and actions ascribed to the pseudepigraphic author as fiction.In fact, this is an oversimplification. 4 Ezra was written after the destruction, but despite the overall temporal congruity, the framework is not a full one-for-one equivalence. Though the temporal framework can be shown, on various grounds, to be roughly accurate, we hesitate to say the book was written in Rome because the author says he was writing in Babylon; see 4 Ezra3:1 and Michael E. Stone, Fourth Ezra: A Commentary on the Book of Fourth Ezra (Hermeneia; Min-neapolis: Augsburg-Fortress, 1990) 10. Moreover, they often maintained that pseudepigraphic apocalypses were forwarding one or another particular and partisan viewpoint, and using a literary fiction to do so.

And never be joyful, save when you look in love upon your brother.

—a probably authentic saying of Jesus recorded in the now lost Gospel of the Hebrews

On the east wall of the south balcony in the St. Thomas Church of Leipzig, one of the principal churches where J. S. Bach worked as musical director from 1723 to 1750, there hangs in memory of one Bartholomæus Helmut a large, anonymous sixteenth-century painting now known by the title Gesetz und Gnade (“law and grace”) or Gesetz und Evangelium (“law and gospel”).A badly mangled reproduction, with many important elements cut off from all four edges, can be found in Herbert Stiehl, “Das Innere der Thomaskirche zur Amtszeit Johann Sebastian Bachs,” Beiträge zur Bachforschung 3 (1984) 91; a serviceable one in Ernst-Heinz Lemper, Die Thomaskirche zu Leipzig: Die Kirche Johann Sebastian Bachs als Denkmal deutscher Baukunst (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1954) 213; and a good one in Landesamt f¨r Denkmalpflege Sachsen, ed., Die Bau-und Kunstdenkmäler von Sachsen: Stadt Leipzig, Die Sakralbauten (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1995) 1.280. The picture presents a powerful series of theologically conventional contrasts of type with antitype. At the far left Moses is shown on his knees at the edge of a precipice receiving stone tablets—the law—from a pair of hands sticking out of a cloud; at the far right, in a roughly parallel position, Mary, with wavy blonde hair, is shown receiving a cross-bearing baby Jesus—the gospel—from a fully visible God. At the left, further below, humanity's Fall is depicted: Adam and Eve break God's law by eating of the forbidden fruit (from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil), and are shown thus bringing death into the world; at the right, divine redemption is depicted: Jesus, with heavenly rays beaming from his head, suffers on the cross (a sort of tree), and is shown conquering death. Likewise at the left is found the bronze serpent amid exodus encampments of the Hebrew people in the wilderness;See Num 21:4–9; cf. 2 Kgs 18:4. at the right is a large church of Christian worship amid the established city of God, the New Jerusalem.

For some two hundred years now, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834) has been the subject of intense interest and heated debate among Christian theologians. As the author of a seminal work in the theory of religionFriedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (trans. Richard Crouter; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). as well as a treatise in Christian doctrine that ranks second to none for its originality, methodological self-consciousness, and systematic stringency,Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (trans. H. R. MacIntosh and J. S. Stewart; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1928). In 1839 Johannes von Kuhn of the Catholic Tübingen school rightly observed that “among all the theologians of later and contemporary times, only Schleiermacher can be compared to [Thomas Aquinas] so far as scientific force and power are concerned.” Cited in Robert Stalder, Grundlinien der Theologie Schleiermachers: I. Zur Fundamentaltheologie (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für europäische Geschichte Mainz 53; Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1969) ix. Schleiermacher's significance in the history of modern theology is secure. By his liberal Protestant sympathizers he has been hailed as the “Reformer of theology,” the pioneer of a style of theologizing that is as peculiarly suited to the distinctively Protestant understanding of faith as it is capable of meeting the intellectual demands of the modern world.This honorific title was widespread in the second half of the nineteenth century and prior to the rise of dialectical theology in the twentieth. Representative is Wilhelm Herrmann, “Die Lage und Aufgabe der evangelischen Dogmatik in der Gegenwart” (1907), in ibid., Schriften zur Grundlegung der Theologie (ed. Peter Fischer-Appelt; 2 vols.; Munich: Kaiser Verlag, 1966–1967) 2:16–20. To his equally numerous and vocal theological critics, Schleiermacher represents the enslavement of the Word of God to a pagan mysticism and speculative philosophy,Emil Brunner, Die Mystik und das Wort: Der Gegensatz zwischen moderner Religionsauffassung und christlichem Glauben dargestellt an der Theologie Schleiermachers (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1924). the subjectivistic collapse of Christian theology into anthropology,Karl Barth, introduction to Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (New York: Harper, 1957). or, more recently, the classic exemplar of a linguistically naïve and apologetically motivated “experientialist-expressivist” misunderstanding of the nature of religious doctrine.George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984). To friend and foe alike, however, he remains—for better or worse—the undisputed “father of modern theology.”In the English-speaking world, the work of B. A. Gerrish remains the best introduction to, and most sophisticated treatment of, Schleiermacher's theological achievement. See B. A. Gerrish, A Prince of the Church: Schleiermacher and the Beginnings of Modern Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984) and the essays devoted to Schleiermacher in Continuing the Reformation: Essays on Modern Religious Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), and Tradition and the Modern World: Reformed Theology in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

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.

In the chapter on “Shaftesbury and Spinoza” in his monumental biography of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey makes a puzzling claim. Not only does he identify the Earl of Shaftesbury, along with Spinoza, as one of Schleiermacher's most significant influences, he does this in a way that suggests that Shaftesbury may actually have had the greater weight. This assertion is surprising enough. More perplexing still is that Dilthey offers almost nothing by way of concrete evidence to back it up. Instead, he presents only a general account of Shaftesbury as the leading representative in eighteenth-century German thought of what he calls “pantheistic monism.” According to Dilthey, it was in this manner that Shaftesbury “everywhere prepared the way” for what would eventually become the widespread acceptance of Spinoza later in the century and would lead ultimately to Schleiermacher's own enterprise.Wilhelm Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers (ed. Hermann Mulert; 2d ed.; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1922) 1:174.

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, several ethnologists became interested in the phenomenon of fasting. They found, in the words of one study, that “the custom of fasting is wide-spread among peoples at very different stages of civilization, and is practiced for a variety of purposes.” The impulse to order such multifarious data led later scholars to construct systems of classification. One such attempt describes the motivations for fasting as follows: “it may be an act of penitence or of propitiation; a preparatory rite before some act of sacramental eating or an initiation; a mourning ceremony; one of a series of purification rites; a means of inducing dreams and visions; a method of adding force to magical rites.”

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–1993) is often cited as the outstanding figure of modern Orthodox Judaism in the twentieth century.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the British Association of Jewish Studies Conference, University of Southampton, England, in July 2002. Born into one of the most famous rabbinic families of nineteenth-century Lithuanian Jewry, Soloveitchik held unimpeachable “Orthodox” credentials, and as head of the Talmud faculty at New York's Yeshiva University, he spent his active working life as a teacher of Talmud. With his deep roots in the world of the Lithuanian yeshivah (Talmudic academy), Soloveitchik was an exemplar of the sophisticated “Brisker” method of Talmudic study that had reached its apotheosis in the hands of his grandfather, the great R. Chaim Brisker (1853–1918). This “Brisker” method,So called after the town of Brest-Litovsk (Brisk), where R. Chaim settled after his time as the rosh (head) of the Volozhin Yeshivah. with its emphasis on conceptual precision and abstract analysis, was characterized by the value it placed on the intellectual pursuit of Talmud study “for its own sake.”For further discussion of the Brisker method, see Norman Solomon, The Analytic Movement: Hayyim Soloveitchik and his Circle (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1993); Marc B. Shapiro, “The Brisker Method Reconsidered,” Tradition 31, no. 3 (1997), 78–102; and Moshe Soloveitchik, “‘What’ Hath Brisk Wrought: The Brisker Derekh Revisited,” The Torah u-Madda Journal 9 (2000)1–18. Significantly, though, the intellectual pursuits that Soloveitchik valued expanded his intellectual horizons far beyond traditional Talmudic fare. Thus, in a famously pioneering break with family tradition, at the age of twenty-two he went to study at the University of Berlin where he would receive a doctorate in philosophy, concentrating on the epistemology and ontology of the Neo-Kantian Jewish philosopher, Hermann Cohen.

Although Schleiermacher's Christology is one of the most commented-upon doctrines of his dogmatic system, little scholarship exists on its relation to patristic Christology.One exception is an article by Richard Muller (“The Christological Problem as Addressed by Friedrich Schleiermacher,” in Perspectives on Christology [ed. M. Shuster and R. Muller; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Publishing House, 1991] 141–62) that shows how “the doctrinal intention behind Schleiermacher's way of affirming the divinity of Christ evidences common ground with the dogmatic intention” of Chalcedon (p. 142). Muller's main objective is to demonstrate that Schleiermacher's Christology does not violate what he calls “patristic orthodoxy.” He does not explore in detail how Schleiermacher's doctrine of Christ may draw (whether intentionally or not) on the Christologies of specific patristic figures or schools. George Hunsinger, in an article outlining Karl Barth's debt to Martin Luther, makes a very brief comparison between Schleiermacher's Christology and that of Theodore of Mopsuestia, labeling both as “spirit-oriented” because they hold that “Jesus points us to the Holy Spirit” and not vice versa. Thus, in Hunsinger's view, these Christologies are focused only formally on Christ, but substantively on the Holy Spirit. See “What Karl Barth Learned from Luther,” Lutheran Quarterly 13:2 (1999) 129. Given Schleiermacher's view of the church, as well as his conception of the dependence of the believer and the community upon Christ, Hunsinger's interpretation is not convincing. To many this gap in scholarship will seem understandable and even appropriate, given Schleiermacher's famous rejection of two-natures language in his major dogmatic work, Der christliche Glaube.Henceforth Gl. All references to passages from Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche in Zusammenhange dargestellt follow the English translation of the second German edition offered in The Christian Faith (ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1928). Occasionally I supply in parentheses the German original, from the standard critical edition edited by Martin Redeker (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1960). In this essay, I shall identify parallels between Schleiermacher's Christology and some of the Christologies “behind” Chalcedon—those conflicting Christologies that Chalcedon attempted to mediate. By examining the way in which certain emphases of Cyril of Alexandria, on the one hand, and Theodore of Mopsuestia and Nestorius, on the other, are present in Schleiermacher's own doctrine of Christ (especially in Gl. §§93–99), I shall argue that Schleiermacher does not simply reject Chalcedon, but rather reconfigures its combination of apparently disjunct christological traditions in a new and creative way.

Arnold, Matthieu, and Rolf Decot, eds. Frömmigkeit und Spiritualität: Auswirkung der Reformation im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz 54. Mainz, Germany: Philipp von Zabern, 2002. 184 pp. € 29,80 hb.

Scholarly treatments of the Christian Socialist movement, which gained a modest notoriety in the United Kingdom from 1848 to 1854, invariably draw attention to the resolute political conservatism of its spiritual leader, Frederick Denison Maurice.See, for example, Gilbert Clive Binyon, The Christian Socialist Movement in England: An Introduction to the Study of Its History (London: SPCK, 1931); Olive J. Brose, Frederick Deni-son Maurice: Rebellious Conformist (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1971); Torben Christensen, Origin and History of Christian Socialism 1848–1854 (Universitetsforlaget I Aarhus, 1962); Frank Maudlin McClain, Maurice: Man and Moralist (London: SPCK, 1972); Edward Norman, The Victorian Christian Socialists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) esp. 1–34; Charles E. Raven, Christian Socialism 1848–1854 (London: MacMillan and Co., 1920); and David Young, F. D. Maurice and Unitarianism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Maurice's self-confessed “anti-democratical heresies,”The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice Chiefly Told in His Own Letters (ed. Frederick Maurice; 4th ed.; London: Macmillan and Co., 1885) 2:136. his unflagging concern to defend the institutions of monarchy and aristocracy, and his near pathological dread of social programs are taken to be indicative of a “monumental conservatism”Brose, Rebellious Conformist, xv. that ruined his close relationship with his key colleague John LudlowJohn Ludlow (1821–1911) was arguably the initial political inspiration for Christian Socialist movement. He equipped Maurice with an understanding of cooperative groups. Though less theo-logically-minded than Maurice, Ludlow was the other major public voice of Christian Socialism from 1848 to 1854. and thereby ensured the movement's rapid demise. This paper does not attempt to overturn entirely such an assessment of Maurice, but it does seek to complicate matters significantly by way of a critical analysis of Politics for the PeoplePolitics for the People, Nos. 1–17 (London: John W. Parker, 1848). (1848) and Tracts on Christian SocialismTracts on Christian Socialism, Nos. 1–7 (London: George Bell, 1850); Tracts on Christian Socialism, No. 8 (London: John James Bezer, 1850). (1850–1851)—two populist journals that attempted to spread the gospel of Christian socialism to both the English working classes and Anglican clergy. I argue that while often endorsing conservative political values“Conservative” is, of course, a term with meanings relative to context. To call Maurice politi-cally “conservative” is to acknowledge his basic unwillingness to countenance a large-scale political reorganization of English society. Maurice showed little interest in a redistribution of wealth or government ownership of the means of production; nor did he believe that the basic socio-economic structures of English society—such as class—should undergo change. there was also a subversive dimension to Maurice's thought that recent commentators have not appreciated. This subversiveness proceeded from a theological basis: a powerful and imaginative anthropology that conceived of all human beings as sharing in the infinite goodness of Christ, not the corruptive sin of Adam. Cast in political terms, this anthropology enabled Maurice to propose that radical changes to English society might begin in unexpected ways, animated by agency of the marginalized, the downcast, and the disenfranchised. In light of the solidarity of all in Christ, church affiliation, class status, gender, and the like were no barriers to an individual inaugurating the transformation of English society. Anyone could challenge the competitive principle of political economy and promote the Christian ideal of cooperation.

In his recent book on post-Holocaust Jewish thought in America, Michael L. Morgan claims that among Jewish Holocaust theologians, Emil Fackenheim's thought is “the richest and most developed.”Michael L. Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 155. One can only endorse this assessment. Fackenheim is by far the best-trained philosopher among Jewish Holocaust thinkers, and his reflections on the Holocaust are therefore unparalleled in their philosophical subtlety and sophistication. He has also outstripped his rivals in the sheer quantity of material he has produced on the Holocaust. He has authored nine books and scores of articles, most of which are devoted to his reflections on this one subject.A good deal has been written about Fackenheim's Holocaust theology. The following are some of the more important discussions: Steven T. Katz, Post-Holocaust Dialogues: Critical Studies in Modern Jewish Thought (New York: New York University Press, 1983) 205–47; Louis Greenspan and Graeme Nicholson, eds, Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), which also contains a complete bibliography of Fackenheim's writings up to 1992; Zachary Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) 134–60; Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz, 155–95.