The episode of the wood-gatherer () in Num 15:32–36 is concisely narrated. The Israelites, in the wilderness, catch a man gathering wood on the Sabbath. They convey him to Moses and the congregation, evidently for judgment, but they cannot determine what his fate should be. A watch is therefore set over him until the matter can be clarified. Then God, presumably in response to an inquiry by Moses, informs him that the prisoner is to be stoned. The congregation forthwith executes the judgment. The story is sharply demarcated, on the one side by the law concerning unintentional and intentional sins (15:22–31)and on the other by the law of tassels (15:37–41). The present essay offers an interpretation of this story that situates it meaningfully in its current literary context and in the historical milieu in which it was redacted. I shall argue that the episode of the wood-gatherer addresses the force of covenantal law in the aftermath of national catastrophe.

Good morning and welcome to all of you who have gathered on this extremely proud day for Harvard Divinity School to mark the centennial celebration of the HTR, the Harvard Theological Review.

The title of this essay is meant to be perplexing. Schleiermacher is not known for his treatment of grace, much less for a treatise on grace. Few scholars of Schleiermacher's theology have devoted attention to his doctrine of grace, with two notable exceptions. Karl Barth, in his lectures on Schleiermacher, did not hesitate to thrash his nemesis on this point, although to him it was so obvious that Schleiermacher's understanding of grace was not a Christian doctrine of grace, at least not in the Reformation sense, that he barely felt the need to argue the case. “What kind of God is this,” he asked, “What kind of grace?” Richard R. Niebuhr, in his apologia for Schleiermacher, which inspired a new age of scholarship on Schleiermacher in America, included a section entitled “Grace and Nature,” but its focus was on the Christmas Eve Dialogue, not Schleiermacher's dogmatic theology. Neither Barth nor Niebuhr took note of Schleiermacher's more formal, dogmatic treatment of grace—what I am calling Schleiermacher's “treatise on grace”; in the several decades since their influential works, very few have attempted to correct this oversight. Such neglect by specialists has no doubt contributed to a wider sense that, despite the importance of his The Christian Faith (Glaubenslehre), Schleiermacher does not merit a place alongside other theologians when it comes to the history of the Christian doctrine of grace. None of the major scholarly books on the history and development of the doctrine of grace include a chapter or section (or even reference) to Schleiermacher's treatment of grace. Schleiermacher himself almost seems to have anticipated this oversight—worse, really, than any criticism—when he asked, “Does my Glaubenslehre in any way fail to give due honor to divine grace?”

At the beginning of this ceremony I would like to express my gratitude to Dean William A. Graham for his ongoing interest in Harvard Theological Review and for his generosity in helping us to organize this Centennial Anniversary.

In this article, I discuss the Song 宋 Neo-Confucian Cheng Yi's 程頤 (1033–1107) interpretation of two related controversial passages in the Analects, the recorded sayings of Confucius. The term “neo-Confucianism” was coined by Western scholars to refer to the Confucianism of the period from the Song dynasty to the Ming 明 dynasty (and sometimes through the Qing 清 dynasty). Among Chinese scholars, neo-Confucianism is most commonly referred to as the Learning of Principle (li xue 理學). Although before Cheng Yi and his brother Cheng Hao 程顥 (1032–1085) there were three other philosophers who are normally also regarded as neo-Confucians— Shao Yong 邵雍 (1011–1077), Zhou Dunyi 周敦頤 (1017–1073), and Zhang Zai 張載 (1020–1077)—we can justifiably regard the Cheng brothers as the real founders of neo-Confucianism in the sense that principle becomes the essential philosophical concept for the first time in their works. There is no consensus among scholars as to the relationship between the philosophies of these two brothers. The traditional view regards them as substantially different due to the two different schools of neo-Confucianism that developed from their teachings, the realistic school synthesized by Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) from the teachings of Cheng Yi and the idealist school culminating in Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–1529) from the teachings of ChengHao. I, however, tend to think that the philosophical positions of the two brothers are largely similar. Unfortunately, since Cheng Hao did not live as long as Cheng Yi, there is insufficient material to create a systematic picture of his view of the Analects passages with which this article will deal.

In this article I aim to address two questions that might initially appear independent, but are really connected. One is about twentieth century thought, the other is about Paul. Seneca will act as a mediator between the two.

In two interconnected theoretical works published in 1962, Lévi-Strauss argued that the tendency among primitive societies to formulate animal classification systems and to express these systems ritually cannot be explained as a side-effect of social classification, as Durkheim and Mauss had argued, nor can it be explained on the narrow materialistic grounds posited by Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski. The negative evidence adduced by Lévi-Strauss is empirical: animal classification systems are neither limited to societies in which there exists a fixed correlation between social groups and animal species, nor do they pertain to species that are of significant material or symbolic value to the classifying culture. According to Lévi-Strauss, the ritual expression of the mental act of classification functions like a language, containing “stressed” and “unstressed” elements and aiming to convey theoretical messages.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am here as the best that could be got, which is to say that there are at least three others who would be much better suited to the task assigned to me than myself. Two are dead, my great teacher George Williams, who knew everything about everything and would have kept us much longer than I intend to keep you today; Bill Hutchison, whose field was modernism, of which the Harvard Theological Review is a remarkable example, and Conrad Wright, who is not dead but is retired, and may have decided never again to darken our precincts. These three, all of whom were my friends, teachers, and colleagues, would be able to explicate all the interstices of the year 1908 with fascinating and passionate insights, while I, as their student and the only one here, shall simply do the best I can with the assignment.

Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, in his Herrlichkeit, laments the eclipse of the aesthetic in modern theology, noting that the being of a Christian is itself a thing of beauty inscribed by the grace of God; that is, it is a form of existence “opened up to us by the God-Man's act of redemption. . . . God's incarnation perfects the whole ontology and aesthetics of created being.” Von Balthasar traces the loss of the aesthetic dimension from Protestant theology to the Reformation principle of sola scriptura, which seeks to abstract “data” of scriptural revelation into objective formulae. This approach leads to the historicism of Hegel, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Barth, effectively removing the meditative gaze from theological contemplation. Von Balthasar's ultimate argument is that it is necessary for Protestant theology to revive the Alexandrian tradition in order to recover the “transcendent principle of beauty as derived from and most proper to God,” which is to be “for us the very apex and archetype of beauty in the world.”

In November 1985, the British Museum turned over to me photographs in their files that they had made while conserving the leather binding of 75 for the Bibliothèque Bodmer, which contained fragments of Luke and John not previously published in the editio princeps or otherwise available to scholarship. This article reports on these fragments and includes three plates of the photographs.

In discussing the work of indexing the Harvard Theological Review, I shall begin by describing the organization and development of the project, and the various ideals and principles involved in its design. Then I shall show what some specific keyword selections will call up on searches; these selections collectively exemplify the many diverse and distinctive features of the Harvard Theological Review's collection. This article merely serves as an introduction to the Index; when I complete the project, I shall elaborate further on various matters and exemplary elements in a forthcoming expanded version of this lecture-based article.

Ibn Kātib Qayṣar's long-neglected Commentary on the Apocalypse of John is a veritable treasure trove for those interested not only in the early transmission of the biblical text and its history of interpretation, but also in the way ancient definitions of prophecy and vision were reconceived in Arabic Christian theology. Written in Cairo by a thirteenth-century Egyptian author, it is one of only two large-scale medieval commentaries on Revelation produced in the Arabic language. The other such commentary was composed by a fellow Copt, Būlus al-Būshī, who was a near contemporary of Ibn Kātib Qayṣar. Together, these two works provide a compelling witness to the currency of this apocalyptic biblical text among Christians living in Islamic Egypt.

In order to answer the question of the involvement of Harvard Theological Review in the publication of essays relating to the New Testament, I have gone through all the published indices that were issued by the journal. The first index was published in 1938 and covered the journal's first thirty years; thereafter indices were published at ten-year intervals. The figures to which I shall refer in this paper are not necessarily exact, but they offer a reasonably good indication of the commitment of Harvard Theological Review to the field of New Testament studies. I did not limit the following survey to essays that deal with the New Testament proper, narrowly defined. There are numerous articles that contribute to New Testament studies indirectly, as they deal with the literature of postexilic Israel, the so-called Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, or rabbinic Judaism. Other areas of scholarly endeavor relating to the New Testament and early Christianity are the history of ancient Christianity, New Testament apocrypha including the writings from Nag Hammadi, the Apostolic Fathers, early Christian apologists, and ancient church history in general. Finally, many of these essays, often written by New Testament scholars, deal with material from the Greco-Roman world.

In his seminal 1968 study of Francis Bacon's political thought, Howard B. White argued that the New Atlantis is “a rewriting of a Platonic myth, and a rewriting clearly intended as a refutation.” Bacon's attack on Plato, however, is partially mediated through his critique of Christianity. Indeed, Bacon pays more explicit attention to the tropes and themes of revealed religion than he does to those of the story of the “old” Atlantis told in Plato's Timaeus and Critias. Scholars are divided as to the exact nature of Bacon's intentions in his treatment of religion in the New Atlantis. Richard Tuck suggests that “the desire for a reconstructed religion” is “explicit in the blend of Protestantism and Judaism” created by Bacon. Most scholars, however, unlike Tuck, argue that Bacon was more interested in undermining religion—or more specifically, its political authority—than in reconstructing it. Laurence Lampert's argument that Bacon stands at the head of “the actual holy war fought in Europe . . ., the warfare of science against religion that tamed sovereign religion” typifies much of the scholarly commentary on the New Atlantis since White's reading of it almost forty years ago. The consensus view is that Bacon promotes the politic manipulation of the tropes and themes of revealed religion so that they might be made to support the modern scientific project and the cause of peace from religious strife: “Bacon's lifelong concern for religion uniformly expressed itself in arguments for moderation in religion.” White argues that Bacon demonstrates how “religious turmoil” can be countered “not only by religious toleration, but also by religious eclecticism, amounting to religious universality.”

Much ink has been spilt over the question of “Nietzsche and the Jews” ever since the distortion of Nietzsche's manuscripts by his sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, forged the links with Nazism that would be further developed by the likes of Alfred Bäumler into a “carefully orchestrated cult.” Though it is a portrait long dismissed in the academic world, a combination of Nazi propaganda and some subsequent scholarship has ensured that the picture of Nietzsche as a virulent anti-Semite who provided Nazism with its conceptual underpinnings lingers in the popular mind. Most scholars, however, now accept at worst a more ambivalent picture. Others go beyond ambivalence, with Weaver Santaniello turning the accusation of anti-Semitism on its head by arguing that Nietzsche's contempt for anti-Semitism was one of the driving forces behind his critique of liberal Christianity, which in its use of “conservative theological concepts . . . perpetuate[s] anti-Semitism.” Even Crane Brinton, arguably one of those scholars most responsible for perpetuating the misrepresentation of Nietzsche as an anti-Semite, insisted that he had never maintained “that Nietzsche was a ‘proto-Nazi’.” But whilst Nietzsche is almost universally exonerated from the charge of personal anti-Semitism, Brinton's claim that “occasionally [Nietzsche] comes very close indeed to the Nazi program,” though based on poor use of Nietzsche's writings and rightly dismissed by Walter Kaufmann, continues to find echoes even amongst more careful Nietzsche scholars, who claim that he “did have some responsibility for Nazi crimes.”

The first words of the inaugural issue of the Harvard Theological Review in January 1908 were those of Francis Greenwood Peabody, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and sometime Dean of the Faculty of Divinity, from 1901–1906. An ordained Unitarian minister, Peabo, as he was affectionately called by the undergraduates, was known most prominently around College haunts for having convinced the Corporation (the President and Fellows of Harvard College) to make Chapel attendance optional while he was Preacher to the University. More importantly, however, he was the main proponent of Social Ethics in both the College and the Divinity School and Harvard's own expositor of the Social Gospel some years before Walter Rauschenbusch made that term popular. Peabody was also a key professor of German thought and theology in the Divinity School.

We celebrate the Harvard Theological Review's 100th anniversary with admiration for this splendid journal; but we may also share the uncertainty Francis Greenwood Peabody expressed in the opening paragraph of the first article of the first issue:

In its centenary year, the Harvard Theological Review stands at a threshold that reflects Harvard Divinity School's renewed determination to do justice to the cultural and ethnic diversity of our contemporary world, to foster interdisciplinarity, and to enter into dialogue with the social and natural sciences. Davíd Carrasco's Convocation Address at the Harvard Divinity School in September 2006 boldly outlined some of the implications of this resolve, and suggested that we adopt the notion of borderlands not only to refer to the expanding U.S.-Mexican borderlands where diverse cultures, languages, politics and religious practices converge, collide and undergo transformation, but as a lens through which to interpret and understand the dramatically changing religious, social, and cultural landscapes in which we are all living today. It is this existential sense of the term borderlands that Carrasco, Jackson and Premawardhana address in their explorations of the new forms of intellectual identity, academic writing, teaching practice, and religious creativity that arise in the destabilized and transgressive lifeworlds we now inhabit.