Judges 5, the Song of Deborah, is and has traditionally been one of the foci of biblical study. Artistically, it evinces a consummate skill, with a series of powerful scenes and strong stanzas. Literarily, it has broad import, particularly in that it is one of the oldest integral texts in the Hebrew Bible. Few scholars dissent from the proposition that the poem is premonarchic. As a result, it represents also a virtually unimpeachable source for the study of early Israel.

Although the importance of anthropomorphic conceptions in rabbinic thought is widely recognized, their original nature and significance are still in need of clarification. A major difficulty in this task stems from the scarcity and the obscurity of some of the most important texts, which, moreover, cannot be dated with any precision.

Paul's use of military imagery in 2 Cor 10:3–6 deserves closer attention than it has received. Moffatt's translation vividly reflects the descriptions of ancient sieges which underlie Paul's statements:

I do live in the flesh, but I do not make war as the flesh does; the weapons of my warfare are not weapons of the flesh, but divinely strong to demolish fortresses-I demolish theories and any rampart thrown up to resist the knowledge of God, I take every project prisoner to make it obey Christ, I am prepared to court-martial anyone who remains insubordinate, once your submission is complete.

In reference to triadological and christological inaccuracies of a nevertheless very important regional synod of Antioch of 268 that definitively condemned and dispossessed Antioch's bishop, Paul of Samosata, St. Athanasius wrote: “Yes, surely every council has a sufficient reason for its own language” (De synodis 45). The Father of triadological orthodoxy indeed changed some of his own technical language in the course of many synods during the fourth century. The creed called liturgically that of Nicaea (325)—which, since the scholarship of the Lutheran Pietist Johann Benedickt Carpzov, Sr., has been called the Niceno-Contstantinopolitan Creed—was ascribed to Constantinople in 381, as a clarification of that at Nicaea, by two readers purportedly reciting the acts of these two councils at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. What is remarkable about Athanasius—referring in the middle third of the fourth century to a synod in the last third of the third century—and about the Fathers of 451—referring back to two earlier ecumenical councils—is that they purported to be expounding an unchanging truth revealed in the Septuagint and the New Testament, once for all delivered (Jude 3), that had simply been made clearer by generations of liturgical practice and theological scrutiny, privately and in synod.

In 1940 and 1944 F. P. Magoun published two articles that commented in detail on part of the pilgrim itinerary of a mid twelfth century Icelander who is identified in the text as “Abbot Nikulás.” The first of Magoun's articles deals with Nikulás’ stay in Rome; the second with his journey from Iceland to Rome, and for both parts of the itinerary Magoun provided, for the first time, a translation into English. Nikulás went on from Rome to Jerusalem before returning to Iceland, where he dictated the account of his travels, which survives in a fourteenth-century manuscript.

It was near the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius (161–80) ca. 178 that a well-read provincial, perhaps a Syrian, of Platonist inclinations set out to analyze the new Christian religion and to warn his fellow provincials of the danger of its spread. Celsus' work, entitled “The True Word,” has only survived in the considerable fragments that Origen cites in his attempted refutation some seventy years later. Celsus took the trouble to observe the practices of different Christian groups, to read a number of Jewish and Christian works, including the Gospels of Matthew and John and parts, at any rate, of the Book of Enoch, and he was well aware of the stark divergencies and dissensions within the church. His description of the profound hostility between the Great Church and its gnostic opponents, and towards the Marcionites, and the strong feminine element among these opponents qualify him as a perceptive observer, and invite what he has to say about the attitude of Christianity in the mid-second century towards pagan society to be taken seriously.

Midrashic literature often employs the exegesis of a biblical text as the source for a story. When the story is coupled with a historic person, a legend is born. Since there are historic aspects to the legend, its historicity is sometimes uncritically accepted in its entirety. In most instances, however, the fictional content of a legend far exceeds its historical content. Some of these legends continue to flourish and evolve into baroque narratives often quite far removed from the original scriptural verse that precipitated their creation. Then, only a careful examination of the transmission history of the story can recapture its original exegetic context. Beginning with the assumption that some stories evolve from a simple exegesis to a full-blown narrative through the accretion of folk motifs and the fixed formulas of story tellers, one may order the versions of a given legend according to their development.

During the middle decades of the thirteenth century, the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church committed itself to a program of extensive missionizing. While converting the infidels had always been a professed ideal of the Church, rarely were significant resources allocated for a serious effort in that direction. Now, with western Christendom increasingly disillusioned with the prospect of military subjugation of Islam and increasingly confident over the rationality of its cause, ideological victory over its enemies seemed both preferable and achievable. Just as it had once called forth armies for the military crusade, now western Christendom organized its institutional and intellectual forces for a new confrontation. The Dominican and Franciscan orders became the shock troops in this battle: schools for training missionaries were organized; handbooks of argumentation were composed. The total effort was broad and impressive.

From 1906–13, Abbot Aelred Carlyle (1874–1955) enjoyed immense popularity as an Anglo-Catholic, and, according to some, could have easily become the spokesman for this section of the Anglican Church. Through perseverance and diplomacy, he singlehandedly founded the first Benedictine monastery in the Church of England since the Reformation. Unlike others who sought and failed to bring Roman Catholic practices into the Established Church, Abbot Carlyle enjoyed the explicit ecclesiastical sanction of an Archbishop of Canterbury for his work, and with this seal of approval he could dismiss critics and disbelievers. By 1910, Abbot Carlyle and his community on Caldey Island, South Wales, had become a paradise for High Churchmen. The Abbot's charismatic and hypnotic personality attracted many who nostalgically longed for the glories of a medieval and united Christendom. Armed with a High Church theory of Benedictinism, Caldey became an enclave of ritualism, the “naughty underworld” of the Edwardian Anglican Church. Caldey was, at its peak, an exemplar of pre-Reformation Roman Catholic monasticism. In 1913, the experiment was in ruins. Carlyle refused to yield to the reforming zeal of the Bishop of Oxford and his attempts to force Caldey to conform to the comprehension of the Anglican Church. The result was sensational: a group of monks renounced the church of their baptism and sought admission to the Church of Rome.

[We] should … set upon our affairs with looking up to heaven for permission, power, and sufferance. … Let us therefore in all our affairs be holy, and not bind or limit our holiness only to coming to church; but seeing at all times and in all places we are Christians, and ever in the presence of God, let us place ourselves still in his eye, and do nothing but that we would be willing God shall see. … [We] ought not to set upon anything, wherein we cannot expect God's guidance.

Richard Sibbes

In Cromwell's rebellion the cause was managed by whining hypocrites, and no wonder if they cheated.

Roger North

At the beginning of the ninth century, George Syncellus, a monk of Constantinople, composed a chronicle of world history which extended from the beginning of the world up to the reign of Diocletian. As the title suggests, the chronicle was an ἐκλογή of excerpts and citations from highly diverse sources. Among other things, these excerpts include kings lists from Africanus' and Eusebius' chronicles, arranged in parallel columns for the sake of comparison, material from various ethnic histories, and several extracts from Jewish and Christian pseudepigrapha. These pseudepigraphic citations are clustered together in the antediluvian portion of his chronicle, and include material from Jubilees, the Life of Adam, the Testament of Adam, and the Jewish pseudepigraphon known as 1 Enoch. The citations from 1 Enoch consist of two large excerpts, both of which Syncellus assigns to the “Book of the Watchers.” Expanding on the Genesis 6 legend of the fall of the sons of God, these excerpts recount the descent of the Watchers from Mt. Hermon, their revelations to and intercourse with the daughters of men, and the subsequent corruption of the earth.

There is widespread disagreement as to exactly what Augustine might have meant by his theory of learning, in which Christ, the truth, teaches within. The precise interpretation of Augustine's doctrine of illumination has been the subject of centuries of debate. How is this kind of learning process which Augustine outlines—a process by which the word of God illumines the soul—to be understood? The major schools of thought on this subject have been: the ontologistic version, which regards the immediate presence of the divine light, the continuity between the mind of man and the mind of God, as primary in the act of learning; the ideogenetic version, which regards the activity of the word of God, mysteriously producing ideas in the human mind, as primary in the learning process; and, finally, what we might call the normative version, which understands the metaphor of illumination to refer to the way in which the divine light provides an ultimate standard of certainty by which knowledge is evaluated, rather than describing an inner, psychological process through which the act of learning occurs.

Much has been written about Wilfred Cantwell Smith's account of the nature of religion, particularly by those who, broadly speaking, may be called Religionswissenschaftler. Surprisingly little, though, has been written about his theology. In part at least, this can be attributed to the incipience of his theological thought within the broad parameters of his studies of religion. Theological ideas have been more imbedded in the wealth of materials aimed at the elucidation of the nature of belief, faith, religious truth, and cumulative tradition than presented in any overt and systematic way. But the recent appearance of the third volume of his trilogy, Towards a World Theology, enables us to concentrate more directly on his theological thought and, in light of this, to reflect upon the theological nuances of his earlier work.

Theodicy, in its classical form, requires the adherent of a theistic faith to reconcile the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and morally perfect God with the existence of evil. The so-called problem of evil has a venerable ancestry, extending beyond the Christian era, and was apparently first formulated by Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) in the form of a dilemma which perhaps receives its most succinct formulation in the words of David Hume:

Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?

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.

Eloisa, the medieval nun torn between “grace and nature” in Alexander Pope's Eloisa to Abelard, has proved to be one of the poet's most fascinating and popular female creations among religious scholars as well as literary critics. Yet there appears in Pope's masterpiece another female figure who has been largely ignored and whose nature and function in the poem have never been accurately described. In the midst of Eloisa's spiritual and emotional conflict between her carnal memories of Abelard and her religious obligations as a nun, she imagines that she sees sitting in front of her the figure of “Black Melancholy,” a woman spreading spiritual gloom over the entire scene:

But o'er the twilight groves, and dusky caves,

Long-sounding isles, and intermingled graves,

Black Melancholy sits, and round her throws

A death-like silence, and a dread repose;

Her gloomy presence saddens all the scene,

Shades ev'ry flow'r, and darkens ev'ry green,

Deepens the murmur of the falling floods,

And breathes a browner horror on the woods.

A recent rereading of Paul Ricoeur's influential study, The Symbolism of Evil, led me to a surprising realization: the dialectic of primary symbols in that book, which superficially resembles the dialectic of subject and object found in many phenomenological studies of religion, can be extended to Ricoeur's analysis of myths and even to his hermeneutical program. The result is a systematic dialectical structure which recalls Hegel's phenomenology more than that of Husserl. This structure also suggests a solution to the problem Ricoeur encounters when he tries to understand the historical linkage between the Christian myth of Adam's fall and the Gnostic myth of the soul exiled in the body. Most significantly, the systematic structure of The Symbolism of Evil helps to illustrate the radical difference between transcendental and historical phenomenologies.

Historical studies of the American social gospel have concentrated on the social and economic viewpoint of the movement. Such a focus is understandable since the fundamental premise of the social gospel was the belief that social change should be controlled and directed through the rational application of religious ideals. Scholarly interest in the movement has thus naturally gravitated towards questions of practical import: how the social gospel galvanized the churches to social action; how it challenged dominant political assumptions; how it contributed to the success of the progressive movement; how it helped to promote cooperative social ideals and a limited type of Christian socialism; and how it struggled with the problem of finding a realistic political philosophy.

Among the outstanding scholarly careers of the Jewish Middle Ages, none seems so dominated by polemic as that of Saadya Gaon (882–942). His intellectual environment was crowded with a bewildering array of rival religious groups and philosophical creeds engaged in vigorous debate. The chaotic variety and aggressiveness of intellectual life in Saadya's Baghdad are frequently illustrated by the account of some remarkable theological debating societies given by a contemporary Muslim visitor:

At the first meeting there were present not only people of various [Islamic] sects, but also unbelievers, Magians, materialists, atheists, Jews and Christians, in short, unbelievers of all kinds. Each group had its own leader, whose task it was to defend its views, and every time one of the leaders entered the room, his followers rose to their feet and remained standing until he took his seat. In the meanwhile, the hall had become overcrowded with people. One of the unbelievers rose and said to the assembly: we are meeting here for a discussion. Its conditions are known to all. You, Muslims, are not allowed to argue from your books and prophetic traditions since we deny both. Everybody, therefore, has to limit himself to rational arguments. The whole assembly applauded these words. So you can imagine … that after these words I decided to withdraw. They proposed to me that I should attend another meeting in a different hall, but I found the same calamity there.

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.