Many have observed that modern man, more than the man of any other age, lives in a world from which God is absent, a genuinely secular world. Our forefathers had a sense of God's continuous providential guidance of history as a whole and of their individual destinies in particular; they found their lives meaningful because they were lived within the context of God's purposes, each man having his own unique place and task. But such meaning as most men of our time find is the this-worldly humanly-created meaning emergent from ordinary social intercourse and/or cultural activity. For some this loss of a transcendent source and purpose has reduced human life to meaning-lessness and absurdity, a pointless and empty burden simply to be endured (Beckett); others react with bitterness and revulsion (Sartre); still others seem to find sufficient satisfaction in their daily round of activities, punctuated occasionally by aesthetic experience or unusual excitement, not to miss or lament the dimensions of depth and transcendence and mystery in which previous generations found their lives ensconced. But in any case the radical “eclipse of God” (Buber) or even the final irretrievable “death of God” (Nietzsche) appears to be the most momentous theological fact of our age. Given this cultural context, it is little wonder that linguistic analysts find it dubious whether the word “God” has any genuinely specifiable meaning, and theological writers, in a desperate attempt to rescue the Christian faith from what appears to be its certain demise, seek wholly “secular” interpretations which go so far as to dispense with the word and idea of “God” entirely.

In 1962, papyri of the fourth century B.C. were discovered by Beduin in a desolate canyon north of Jericho on the rim of the Jordan rift. These documents, known by their place of discovery as the Wâdī Dâliyeh Papyri, were inscribed in Samaria during the half century before the conquest of Alexander the Great. The papyri are without exception legal documents, not a few executed before the governor and prefect of Samaria. Among the surprises to be found in the new documents is the appearance twice of the name Sanballat, or more properly Sin'uballiṭ. In each instance Sanballat is listed as father of the governor of Samaria, once on an official sealing inscribed in Palaeo-Hebrew script, once in Aramaic in the context of a document of about the mid-fourth century.

In the two decades since publication of Finite and Infinite made him visible from afar, Austin Farrer has exported from Oxford some thirty writings of uncommon range, acumen, and wit. By 1959 a reviewer in the TLS judged that “in Dr Farrer the academic world has one of the most interesting minds of the century….” His books, several of which issued from major lectureships, have been widely reviewed and cited in print; it has become an open secret that, in private, they have evoked fascination, puzzlement, and exasperation. Yet little sustained examination of his work has appeared. At a convergence of import and quandary such as this, I propose to examine the phase of Farrer's thought that has remained central for him, despite excursions into other genres — his philosophical theology. This article will center on his insistence upon doing that discipline metaphysically. For his insistence upon doing that, even out of season, provides a key to both his thought and its larger significance. After glancing at his response to opponents of this attempt, I shall inquire how certain metaphysical elements function in his account of our discourse about God and, in conclusion, essay some judgments about his achievement to date.

The ever-increasing respect for Luther among Roman Catholic theologians and historians of Christian thought is not only a sign of but also a significant contributing factor to contemporary ecumenical openness — especially so in Germany. Yet at the same time we should realize that this more positive evaluation of Luther is based on the conviction that the reformer was born under the star of heresy. While it is granted that he articulated the biblical message of sin, grace and forgiveness in Christ within the context of the late medieval nominalism in which he was reared, it is exactly this context which is regarded as essentially a-catholic or even as anti-catholic to the extent that it obstructed Luther's grasp of the full and true catholic tradition in the Middle Ages. Therefore, from the very beginning, access to the specifically Catholic tradition had been denied to Luther.

According to Aristotle himself, all the philosophers before him are agreed that the world was generated, which implies that he was the first to introduce the conception of an ungenerated world; but, according to John Philoponus, Aristotle was only the first among the natural philosophers who discovered a new method to establish the principle that the world had no beginning. Among the Church Fathers, Lactantius sometimes attributes the belief in the eternity of the world explicitly to Aristotle, but sometimes he refers it vaguely to “those who say that the world always existed.” Vague references to a belief in the eternity of the world, or to such a belief described as held by some people or by some philosophers, are to be found also in the works of such Fathers as Justin Martyr, Theophilus, Origen, Arnobius, Basil, Augustine, and Diodorus Tarsus. Two pre-Socratic philosophers are mentioned by some Fathers as exponents of the belief in the eternity of the world: Xenophanes by Hippolytus, Eusebius, and Theodoret of Cyrrhus; Pythagoras by Tertullian. Various arguments are used by the Fathers in their refutation of this view. These arguments, selected and grouped into six types, are the subject of discussion of the present paper.

Theology, as many Puritans saw it, was a combination of sound doctrine, practical exhortation, and precise method. The Marrow of Sacred Divinity by William Ames, a great favorite in many seventeenth-century Puritan homes, owed much of its reputation to a blend of these ingredients of doctrine, practical divinity, and method. Although Puritan theologians wrote few systematic theologies except for creeds and catechisms, the Marrow is one example of theology from a scholarly Puritan perspective. The writings of Ames with their Congregational theories were most at home in Congregational New England, perhaps, but Puritans in England also read and studied Ames. William Ames, 1576–1633, was born in East Anglia and educated at Christ's College, Cambridge; but he lived for over twenty years in the Netherlands as a religious exile. Like his life, his theology combines English nonconformity and Continental Calvinism.

What is the proper “object” for theological attention? It was the overwhelming judgment of Protestant thinkers in the 19th century that for theology God and faith belong inseparably together. Theology deals with God, but in so far as God is the object for theology, man as believer is also always given in his concrete choosing and affirming and apprehending that is faith. God is available as an “object” only from and with the point of view of a subject.

The name of Feuerbach is usually associated with the philosophic critique of religion. Feuerbach is seen, and quite rightly so, as the spokesman par excellence for the philosophic attack of religion — an attack launched from the anthropocentric viewpoint of modern cultural awareness against transcendental religion. There is no question but that Feuerbach has given a most vivid, forceful and persistent expression to this philosophic critique. But it should be also clear that his contribution here is precisely this and nothing more. The substance and basic outline of the critique are not the unique or distinctive contribution of Feuerbach. They had been formulated long before Feuerbach and expressed repeatedly throughout the history of Western philosophy before and after Feuerbach. Thus, while Feuerbach still remains an excellent representative and spokesman for this critique, he is by no means the only one.

The remarks which follow are aimed at revealing the magic power which Confucius saw, quite correctly, as the very essence of human virtue. And it is finally by way of the magical that we can also arrive at the best vantage point for seeing the holiness in human existence which Confucius saw as central. In the twentieth century, this central role of the holy in Confucius' teaching has been largely ignored because we have failed to grasp the existential point of that teaching.

Philosophers have long debated the question of the existence of God. This is one of many philosophical issues in which the motivation for inquiry has come more perhaps from the side of human feeling than from disinterested scientific curiosity. Powerful emotions appear to prompt thinkers to devote effort to the attempt to prove or disprove the existence of God. The urgency of this task has made some of these philosophers pay less than adequate heed to the concepts they employ. It appears to have escaped the attention of many of them that the word “God” does not have a single meaning either in religious language generally or in philosophical theology. It is obvious that one of the important ways in which religious traditions differ is in their conceptions of the Deity. But a considerable number of different God-concepts may be distinguished in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition itself, and not even in Christian theology proper is the word “God” free of ambiguity.

That Jonathan Edwards was greatly influenced by the writings of John Locke scarcely needs asserting. Edwards himself regarded his reading of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding as the major intellectual event of his youth. His major writings and private notebooks abound with comments and reflections on matters discussed by Locke. What is fascinating concerning the history of Edwardsean scholarship, however, is that the decisive significance of Locke, for Edwards, has been elucidated only very recently, in the writings of the renowned Puritan scholar, the late Perry Miller.

The very conception of change in the social and cultural climate of the Christian society as providing a meaningful setting for an exchange of ideas between Jews and Christians in Germany during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries needs clarification. Some scholars characterize Jewish life and thought in that time and place as dominated by almost total social isolation and strict spiritual traditionalism. According to their view, this seclusion was as much self-willed as imposed by Christian society. It is admitted that there was defence against danger and refutation of libel on behalf of the Jews. The Shtadlan Josel von Rosheim, the great Jewish diplomat of those days, represents this Jewish response to external challenge. It is, of course, well established that Johannes Reuchlin acquired his Hebrew from Jewish teachers, but this is seen mainly as a feature of awakening European Hebraism. Very little has been done to ascertain what relation obtained between the cultures of the pupil and his teachers. Even his defence of the Talmud — beneficial to the Jews in its results — is seen as unrelated to their trend of thought.

King Creon had, for political reasons, forbidden the burial of Polyneices. But Antigone, for religious ones, defied Creon and buried her brother. She justified her act by drawing a distinction between the changing regulations of a human ruler and the eternal laws of heaven. Creon speaks: “Knowest thou the edict that forbade this deed?” Antigone answers: I knew it. Why, how else? for it was public. Creon: And such laws thou couldst dare to overstep? Antig.: Yes; for it was not Zeus that published them … I did not deem your edicts of such force That a mere mortal could o'erride the Gods' Unwritten, never-failing ordinances. For these live not today nor yesterda But always; none knows when they first came forth.

Concerning the effort to recover rabbinic biographies, Professor Judah Goldin writes:

… Such works are hardly biographies in the serious sense of the word, … for not only do the primary sources disappoint us deeply in the amount of reliable historical detail they provide, but even as regards the opinions and teachings of the Sages, one is left to guess what is early and what is late. In short, there is practically no way to get at development, surely and desperately necessary for the historian and biographer. These books therefore are filled with speculation, sometimes plausible, sometimes not. As reflections of the author's own imagination and interpretation, however, and as collections of data about the specific sage, they are informative exercises.

My research exhibits, alas, the deplorable qualities to which Goldin points. At the same time, I have continued to reflect on what we know about Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai. Here are some of the results.

The discussion about “oral tradition” in Israel seems to have yielded at least one result, namely, that scholars now talk about traditions rather than sources. This is certainly very often to be preferred, because we really do not know what sources have been used in the composition of a given text, and the text itself is, of course, also a source. It should be pointed out that the word “tradition” can be seen under three main aspects: first, denoting a “literary” tradition — written or not — such as a saga, legend, law, prophetical oracle, myth, psalm, etc.; second, signifying the growth of these smaller unities of traditions as they are handed down by some circle of tradents, priests, disciples of prophets, scribes, minstrels, etc.; and third, denoting the way of doing something, of living, the traditional way of thinking. In discussing oral and written tradition in the Old Testament we deal mostly with the two first aspects. One of the main emphases in the discussion has been the technique of handing down the traditions through generations, though this cannot be separated from the literary tradition itself. The concern of this article will then be with this technique, the transmission.

Fragments of biblical psalms have been found at Qumran in Caves 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and ll; and there is the Psalms Scroll from Cave ll. There were undoubtedly more texts of the Psalter in the Qumran library than of any other biblical literature — 27 accounted for to date. By and large, the biblical psalms recovered thus far from Qumran are in very close textual agreement with the psalms of the early medieval Ben Asher manuscripts from Cairo and Aleppo (the textus receptus). In fact, all witnesses to the texts of the biblical psalms, whether in Hebrew or in early Greek, Latin, Aramaic, or Syriac translations, are in broad general agreement, that is, are of one basic recension. It is because of this that it was possible, in a comparatively short time in 1961–62, to construct a supporting critical apparatus for the scientific edition of the Psalms Scroll. The texts of the 38 biblical psalms in the Psalms Scroll are, with some interesting exceptions, the texts we have always known; the order of the psalms and the presence among them of nonbiblical psalms, however, are very surprising.

The Hebrew originals of the above-mentioned Psalms have been recently published by J. A. Sanders from a scroll containing approximately the last quarter of the Psalter which was found in the Eleventh Cave at Qumrân. In his preliminary notice on the unrolling of this scroll Sanders had already written:

There are seven non-canonical compositions, aside from Ps 151, interspersed among the psalms. One of these is a prose account of the psalms and songs composed by David and the purposes for which he wrote them. The total number of musical compositions attributed to David is 4050.

The accuracy of Max Weber's grasp of Puritan religious experience has persistently been called into question by the critics of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber is alleged either to have misunderstood the sources of Puritanism, or to have overlooked the real character of Puritan belief and action, or to have misconstrued its social significance. In short, Weber is generally accused of failing to assess correctly the causes, content, and implications of Puritanism.