As the comparative study of religion has advanced in recent years, one of its most salutary effects has been the qualification, if not the removal, of old caricatures about other people's religions. It is increasingly recognized that only distance and ignorance make religious traditions seem homogeneous entities, and that the tensions they encompass within themselves are often at least as extreme as the gulfs that separate one tradition from another.

Karl Barth's concept of the divinity of Jesus Christ is subject to two opposing interpretations. According to one, Barth maintains that Jesus Christ is a complete, human person who is distinct from God but who can be said to be divine because of God's unique presence in and with him. In this view, divinity in the strictest sense belongs only to God, but it can be attributed to Jesus because of his relation to God and his role as the special medium of God's revelation. If this interpretation were correct, Barth would stand in the Antiochian theological tradition.

Jonathan Edwards expected his inquiry on the Freedom of the Will to be the definitive work on that subject, establishing for all time the truth of predestination on the twin pillars of reason and revelation. He answered every objection of the Arminians with irrefutable scriptural texts, biting satire, and devastating logic. He brought the revolutionary insights of Locke and Newton to the defense of Reformed doctrine, restructuring ancient truths on the foundations of the latest science.

The effort was immediately successful. For sixteen years no one dared to publish a rebuttal. Then, in 1770, with Edwards safely dead, James Dana of Wallingford, Connecticut, published An Examination of the Late President Edwards's Enquiry on Freedom of Will.

In the history of biblical interpretation and dogmatic speculation, Gen 1:26–28 has proved remarkably fecund as a source of exegetical and theological reflection. Literature on the passage is now boundless, but shows no sign of ceasing or abating, despite the appearance in recent decades of several exhaustive treatments of the text and the existence of substantial consensus among biblical scholars. The reason for the perpetual fascination of the passage lies in the nature and limits of the text. The verses contain a fundamental, and unique, statement of biblical anthropology and theology–presented in a terse and enigmatic formulation. A rare attempt within the OT literature to speak directly and definitively about the nature of humanity in relation to God and other creation, the statement is at once limited in its content, guarded in its expression, and complex in its structure. As a consequence, philologist and theologian are enticed and compelled in ever new contexts of questions and understandings to explore anew the meaning and implications of creation “in the divine image”–for it is this striking and unique expression, above all, that has dominated the discussion.

In 1952 there appeared a short article in Theological Studies entitled “Heraclitus' Alleged Logos Doctrine.” As one may guess from the title, the author, T. F. Glasson, reported to his largely theological audience that the conception of Heraclitus' Logos as a cosmicmetaphysical principle, far from being a possible source for the Logos of the Fourth Gospel, rests upon a gigantic mistake. The truth is, rather, that Glasson's report rests upon a gigantic mistake, as well as several lesser ones. At the very least it does not do justice to a quite different interpretation, an interpretation which, indeed, has become in the meantime the “accepted” one. Our task, also intended primarily for theologians and nonspecialists in pre-Socratic philosophy, is to provide a corrected and updated report, and to make a few observations of our own.

E. H. Carr's injunction that “when we take up a work of history, our first concern should be not with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it” is well justified by the current state of research in the field of Iberian cryptojudaism and its subsequent development outside the peninsula. As in the study of Iberian history itself, vested interests, strong personal biases, and allegiances to national or partisan schools of historiography have frequently stood in the way of dispassionate inquiry into the subject and led to polarizaton and obfuscation. Over and above this, fruitful study has been impeded by the “blind-men-and-the-elephant” fallacy.

In the Greek ritual of animal sacrifice a rather unusual use was reserved for the tongue of the victim. While most of the animal was either burned in offering to the deity or enjoyed as a feast by the participants, the tongue was cut out and laid aside. Why the tongue was treated differently from the rest of the victim and what exactly was done with it are the questions which I propose to deal with in this paper. These problems have been dealwith before, but the evidence has never been fully consideredand all previous discussions have been inconclusive.

In 1 Cor 4:8–13 Paul sharply contrasts his life of hardship as an apostle with that of the Corinthians who glory in spiritual riches and power. In this context he admonishes the Corinthians to imitate him (μιμηταί μoυ γίνεσθε) and even sends Timothy to remind them of “my ways in Christ” (ἀναμήσει τὰϛ ‘δoύϛ μoυ τὰϛ ἐν Ξριττῷ 'I7eta;σoῦ, 1 Cor 4:16–17). But Paul offers almost no guidance that would enable us to ascertain specifically what aspects of his life are to be imitated. The lack of specificity on Paul's part has vexed many interpreters of 1 Cor 4:16. In the hope of clarifying what Paul means by the central term, “imitator,” scholars have studied its use elsewhere in the Pauline corpus (1 Cor 11:1; 1 Thess 1:6–7; 2:14; Phil 3:17; cf. also the deutero-Pauline passages, 2 Thess 3:7–9; Eph 4:32–5:1).

The admonition to ransom captives has a long paraenetic and social tradition that is documented in a variety of genres in early Christian literature. It is a tradition which, like many of its companion pieces in paraenetic literature, springs from roots in the Hebrew Scriptures which were consciously adopted by Christians as an important base upon which to build their own theology. The development of this particular tradition in early Christianity is an interesting example and test case of how a theological and moral conviction was not limited to verbal expression but was effectively translated into practice and creatively adapted to changing situations.

Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed is a book of puzzles. Worried lest his radically intellectualist teachings harm the unschooled reader incapable of replacing naive faith with reasoned conviction, Maimonides took extraordinary precautions to conceal them from him. He cut up his arguments as with a jig saw, placed the pieces in careful disarray, and tossed in a goodly number of extra pieces which seemingly fit but do not. His presupposition, of course, was that any reader keen enough to piece together his puzzles would be intellectually prepared to cope with his teachings. No one will gainsay that Maimonides did a superb job of concealment. After almost eight centuries, students of the Guide are still trying to figure out how to solve its puzzles.

In his important Christological study, The Crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann addresses the problem of the ultimate relation Christ to believers, using as the focus of his analysis Calvin's exegesis of 1 Cor 15:24–28. Moltmann argues that this locus classicus of Pauline subordinationism— “Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father … then shall the Son also himself be subject”—marks the point in Calvin's Christology at which “divine rule” is transferred from Christ's humanity to his divinity.

Reginald Pecock, D.D., thirty-second bishop of Chichester (1450–1458/59), had a meteoric career as a historic personage. He made a bright, unexpected appearance out of an obscure background. He shone brightly, first as a curiosity in his world and then as a seeming threat to it. Colliding with the power realities of his time, his career was shattered and his reputation permanently blackened by the Paul's Cross bonfire that reduced some fourteen of his books to powdery ash. This once proud figure (the obvious pun on his name was apt and widely used by his enemies) was now quite pathetic. He was required to suffer the humiliation of standing before 20,000 people to confess his errors and to assist in piling upon the fire the material expressions of his lifetime of thinking and of defending the Church. When those flames subsided, Reginald Pecock returned to the obscurity from which he had emerged, and there he died. Thus, for this the most famous lord spiritual of the Lancastrian regime; author of the most ambitious theological program of the fifteenth century in England; the first bishop of the English Church to be formally convicted of heresy–for this man we have no certain knowledge of the date of his birth or the date of his death, the place of his origin or the site of his burial.

Although Jewish conversions to Christianity in the latter Middle Ages pose many unanswered questions, one can be dispensed with relatively easily: Were those converts who subsequently decided to abandon Christianity and return to Judaism required to undergo a special immersion (tebilâ in Hebrew) as part of a special “rejudaization rite”?

The “judicious” Richard Hooker (1554–1600) gave classic expression to the via media position of Elizabethan Anglicanism. He attempted to steer a middle course, appropriating what he considered to be the truths and avoiding what he considered to be the errors and excesses, between Roman Catholicism and the Magisterial Reformation (Lutheranism and especially Calvinism). It has often been pointed out by scholars that Hooker sometimes inclines more in one direction than the other on certain key doctrines. For example, it has been said many times that his view of the relation of God and the world, of grace and nature, of faith and reason, is characterized by continuity rather than discontinuity, and that in this he was true to the medieval Catholic thought of Thomas Aquinas. But his view of justification has been said to be nearer to that of the Magisterial Reformation than to that of Rome.

One of the most important questions to ask when one is beginning to reformulate the views of a historic author on the human body is the question of what role his discussion of the body plays in his theology. Does his theology require and depend on his evaluation of the meaning and value of the body? Do pressing polemical or cultural discussions demand the author's interest in describing the role of the body in human life? These questions are consistently useful in illuminating the author's intent in writing about the body. Placing ideas of the body in the theological and anthropological context in which they appear is essential if we are to avoid the inevitable distortion of an author's ideas, which is the result of “proof-texting” the author's statements about the body.

In assessing the importance of William Ellery Channing to his generation, Ralph Waldo Emerson pronounced him “our Bishop” and put in sharp focus what was for him an intellectual problem, and what has remained for us a historical one. It is not the word “bishop” that is problematic, for almost no one disputed the leadership of Channing in the first decades of the nineteenth century, that crucially formative period for our culture. His first biographer, nephew William Henry Channing, noted that he “was everywhere recognized as the most eloquent and effective preacher in Boston,” and after his death Emerson remarked that he “left no successor in the pulpit” (JMN, 1. 470). New Englanders generally recognized him as the key spokesman for the liberal or Unitarian theology, and social reformers of all stripes looked to him with hope to support their endeavors. On the basis of a handful of literary essays and religious polemics, he became, in Sydney Ahlstrom's phrase, “the most influential American religious thinker being heard abroad,” and Robert Spiller noted that in the critical world, he was “among the first American writers to win British critical consideration.”

A fourth-century inscription from Thessalonica includes an enigmatic symbol for which no explanation has been offered. The symbol appears on a stone marking the graves of a certain Σαμβάτιϛ and, presumably, his wife, Mαξήμα, and represents three intersecting staffs.

When Jonathan Edwards was installed as assistant to his grandfather Solomon Stoddard at Northampton in 1727, he not only assumed the major pastoral responsibility for the largest congregation in western Massachusetts, but he also became coadministrator of the “lax” mode of admission to the sacraments that had prevailed at Northampton and throughout the Connecticut River Valley for some thirty years. This system granted both baptism and communion to all persons of age who had historical knowledge of the gospel and were of a “non-scandalous” life, on the grounds that all divinely established ordinances were capable of “begetting” faith. Although Stoddard did not originate the “lax” system, the practice was generally referred to as “Stoddardeanism” because from the time of his celebrated dispute with Increase Mather in 1700 (the so-called “Stoddardean controversy”) Stoddard had been its most systematic, persistent, and influential proponent in New England.