A curious parallel exists between two early Christian discussions of prophetic or divine knowledge. Both deal with the Christian problem of sense knowledge about the divine in a thought world dominated by Platonic thinking: how can Christians base their knowledge of the divine upon the reports of the apostles who claim to have seen God in a human shape? The first of these discussions arises from criticisms from outside; Celsus, the second-century Platonist critic of Christianity, calls the Christians a carnal race who say that God is corporeal and has a human form, and complains, “How are they to know God unless they lay hold of him by sense-perception?” (C. Cel. 7.27, 37). The second comes from within the Christian camp, and is to be found in the Clementine Homilies. In this rather enigmatic text Simon Magus, the arch-heretic, accuses Peter in his reliance upon his apostolic experience of “introducing God in a shape,” and opposes to apostolic sense knowledge his own visionary experiences (Hom. 17.3). The examination of these two texts demonstrates that in their common terms and the common shape of their arguments the issue of the knowledge of the apostles was common in Christian polemics. It was also a problem for philosophically minded Christians who would prefer to place the knowledge of God, even if historically mediated by Jesus, in the intelligible knowledge of the soul, rather than in the senses.

In a study recently published in this journal, Lawrence Wills has identified, in a wide range of Hellenistic-Jewish and early Christian literature, a recurring pattern that is sometimes characterized in those sources as a “word of exhortation” (λόγος παρακλήσεως: Acts 13:15; Heb 13:22; cf. Acts 2:40; 1 Macc 10:24; 2 Macc 7:24; 15:11; Apostolic Constitutions 8.5). Toward the end of his article, Wills suggests that the form of this word of exhortation may define a point on a larger rhetorical trajectory within Greco-Roman Hellenism, and that “we can perhaps go further and note the actual compositional techniques that have passed over from Greek rhetoric into Jewish and Christian oratory.” In this assessment Wills is, I believe, quite correct, and in this essay I wish to build upon, and at specific points to refine, his analysis of the form of Hellenistic-Jewish and early Christian sermons.

The religious community of True Inspired at Amana, Iowa acknowledges and reveres as its two “old country” founding fathers the Württemberg theologian, Eberhard Ludwig Gruber (1665–1728) and his younger friend the saddler, Johann Friedrich Rock (1678– 1749). While Gruber is credited with providing wise religious and organizational leadership, Rock was endowed with the gift of inspiration that characterized the budding movement in the early eighteenth century. Karl Barth wrote of him, “Inspiration … seized Rock and made him a seer and a prophet, to whose curious message half if not all of Germany listened.”

To say that Adam and Eve were created in the image of God ought to answer a host of questions, but the historian of exegesis finds that it raises more questions than it answers, since any given interpretation of the image of God reveals as much about the interpreter as it does about the image itself. It would be a bit melodramatic to describe Gen 1:26 as an exegetical Rorschach test, a literary “ink blot” which means only what the interpreter thinks it means. But Gen 1:26 does, in fact, serve usefully as a “weathervane.’ An interpreter's explanation of the imago dei often points to his or her larger theological agenda.

Following the failure of national prohibition, the temperance movement came to be regarded as an alien blight that had afflicted the American landscape. Richard Hofstadter spoke for many historians when he suggested that the story of prohibition seems “like a historical detour, a meaningless nuisance, an extraneous imposition upon the main course of history.” Rather than being viewed as somehow integral to and indicative of developments in American society and culture, the temperance movement has more commonly been exploited as a quarry for providing colorful instances of human folly and fanaticism. The tendency is natural for, unlike other leading reform movements such as antislavery and women's suffrage, which have legacies most historians are eager to affirm, the crusade against drink seems odd and misplaced to contemporary minds. But this approach has overlooked important features of the movement, failing to show why it did not strike its many advocates as a pseudo-concern or do justice to its widespread support and distinction as the longest continuous reform movement in American history.

In recent years, scholars have maintained that sections of the genuine Pauline epistles (especially 1 and 2 Corinthians) and even entire epistles are selfapologies in which Paul defends his apostleship. In the ancient sources, the term “apology” is not restricted to self-defense; the most characteristic Jewish Hellenistic apologies were propaganda on behalf of the law rather than an author's defense against personal accusations. Some fifty years ago, Günther Bornkamm proposed that Paul adapted and modified Jewish Hellenistic apologetic traditions in Rom 1:18 — 3:21. For the most part the thesis of Bornkamm's article and its implications for interpreting Romans have been benignly neglected; even those who accept it only emphasize its pertinence specifically for Romans 1–3. Ernst Käsemann, for instance, believes that with Romans 4, Paul fully embraces “rabbinic methods” and other more traditional Jewish modes of argumentation. This article challenges Käsemann's claim and affirms that Romans 4 is best understood as apologetic theology.

At the end of the second century, four gospels became canonical. Today they are present everywhere in the world at the beginning of the New Testament and at the heart of the Christian Bible, side by side and in the same order, endowed with the same authority. The text of these four gospels has been fixed for a long time, notwithstanding the existence of thousands of textual variants which have troubled European scholars since the eighteenth century. Today no one dreams of publishing interpolated versions of these gospels or of doctoring our holy books. Biblical scholarship devoted to the study of these gospels now occupies a firm place in the programs of numerous theological faculties and departments of religious studies.

The date was 19 July 1859; the occasion, the commencement address at the Harvard Divinity School. Twenty-one years earlier, as Henry Whitney Bellows well knew, Ralph Waldo Emerson had there delivered the famous Divinity School Address, which offended the Unitarian faculty by berating historical Christianity, by advancing that the moral and religious sentiments were synonymous, and by claiming that intuitive apprehension of these sentiments could elevate persons to Christ-like stature. The ensuing “miracles controversy”—including, on the one hand, Andrews Norton's charges about “The Latest Form of Infidelity” and, on the other, George Ripley's, Theodore Parker's, and (early on, at least) Orestes Brownson's efforts to establish a “religion of the heart” by championing Kant over Locke—has been chronicled elsewhere. More to the present point is the way that, at a time when heated controversy over Emerson and his intuitionalist disciples might have seemed dated, Bellows attacked the self-reliant tendencies of Emerson's 1838 address: “The Emersonian and transcendental school at home, acknowledge[s] only one true movement in humanity—the egoistic—the self-asserting and self-justifying movement—which is Protestantism broken loose from general history.” Such criticism was hardly unprecedented in the school of divinity from which Bellows himself had graduated just a year before Emerson would deliver the Divinity School Address; nor would the faculty at Harvard have deemed Bellows innovative in chastising “the transcendental philosophy” for “making the … human and the divine, the natural and the supernatural, one and the same.

Historians of religion in America, as enamored of marking “watersheds” in our culture as other scholars, have long used the famous “Briggs Case” as an event for marking that cultural moment when American mainline Protestants, mostly kicking and screaming, began to confront officially the higher criticism of the Bible. Charles Augustus Briggs, as students of Gilded Age religion know well, was a professor of scripture at New York's Union Theological Seminary who, between 1891 and 1893, underwent a peripatetic heresy trial in various Presbyterian church courts—“the most notorious event in 19th century American church history,” as one of its chroniclers has described it—for advocating the application of modern historical-critical methods to the biblical record.

The figure of William L. Sullivan, the Paulist missionary and teacher who renounced Roman Catholicism in 1910 and migrated eventually to Unitarianism, poses a continuing challenge for historians of American religion. How is one to interpret his spiritual pilgrimage? Is Sullivan best understood as a reformer whose abhorrence of the perduring Vaticanism and Romanism in Catholic ecclesiology impelled him towards liberal Protestantism? Was he primarily, as he put it in his unfinished autobiography, “a moral personality under orders,” ultimately restless with every institutional expression of the “religion of the Infinite Spirit”? Or does the key to his life and thought lie in an excessive patriotism and nationalism reflected, in part, by his allegiance to the “cause” of the Americanists? Was he a Modernist? Most provocative, perhaps, is the thesis linking these two heresies: does Sullivan's career stand as the embodiment of the continuity between Americanism and Modernism?

The literature on the history of biblical criticism is voluminous, but remarkably consistent in its postulation of the Reformation and the Enlightenment as the two mainsprings of modern biblical criticism. That this history is written almost exclusively by heirs of the liberal Protestant tradition ought to sound a warning bell, especially since the extremely rare dissenting accounts of biblical criticism come from the Roman Catholic camp.

Mani established his religion on very broad syncretistic grounds, in the hope that it could conquer the whole oikumene, East and West, by integrating the religious traditions of all peoples—except those of the Jews. Although Manichaeism as an organized religion survived for more than a thousand years, and its geographical realm extended from North Africa to Southeast China, this ambition never came close to being realized, and the Manichaeans remained, more often than not, small and persecuted communities. Yet, in a somewhat paradoxical way, Mani did achieve his ecumenical goal. For more than half a millennium, from its birth in the third century throughout late antiquity and beyond, his religion was despised and rejected with the utmost violence by rulers and thinkers belonging to all shades of the spiritual and religious spectrum. In this sense, Manichaeism, an insane system, a “mania,” appeared as the outsider par excellence.

It has been customary to identify the author of the Itinerarium Egeriae (It. Eg.) as a nun or a “grande dame” from one of the western provinces of the later Roman empire—Spain, Gaul, or even Italy. Yet, a reexamination of the evidence suggests the possibility of a different solution regarding not only the author's religious affiliation and status in society but also her geographical origin. The newly proposed identification is linked with major developments of Christianity in the West, in particular with its spread within urban milieux and with the receptivity of contemporary society to the idea of pilgrimage.

In speaking about his objective in translating the tales of Nahman of Bratslav in July of 1906 Martin Buber said, “In general it is not my goal to gather new facts, but rather solely to give a new interpretation of their coherence, a new synthetic presentation of Jewish mystics and their creations.” Before his death, in responding to harsh criticism of his translations of the Hasidic tales, Buber referred to his work as an attempt “to convey to our own time the force of a former life of faith.” His task, as Gershom Scholem once pointed out in derision, was not primarily historical; it was not a process of fact gathering, but it was hermeneutical. He aimed to present a new interpretation of the Hasidic tales of the past which would render them relevant to the crisis of the contemporary reader.

It is a familiar fact that it is difficult for revolutionary “worldviews” to gain recognition and acceptance. The most successful way to overcome this problem was termed by Hegel Aufhebung. In the ideal case envisaged by Hegel, Aufhebung says that the new “worldview,” or the theory which articulates that worldview, reconstructs within itself elements of the old perspective on the world, together with a critique of that perspective. However, the preservation of old worldviews in new theories can also take a more straightforward form. Only rarely do new worldviews emerge thoroughly developed. As a rule they continue to employ numerous leading concepts which belong to the older tradition. Only after a relatively long period of time are the old leading concepts replaced or reformulated—or, on the other hand, is the new theory withdrawn. We are well acquainted with such a course of events. But that does not prevent us from living de facto with theoretical orientations towards the world which represent mixed forms of old and new theories. We simultaneously employ new perspectives and old observations, new forms of thought and old theses. We think that we can enjoy the new cake and still eat the old one. This situation usually leads us to form an unrealistic picture of the power of the newer worldview. We fail to recognize the fact that new worldviews, as a rule, substantially overextend their credit. The dangers of granting too much credit to these new conceptions are seldom seen clearly and are often underestimated.

It often happens that the papers of a departed master are gathered and winnowed by a faithful disciple in search of one last harvest of truth: an act of respect mingled with a desire for reflected glory. But in Jonathan Edwards's editing of the diary of David Brainerd the elder served the younger.

Since the end of the Second World War, both in scholarship and in the practical affairs of churches, there has been a burgeoning interest in the material setting of early Christian worship. Scholarship on the subject is impressive, both in its scope and its quality. On the practical side, European Christians, both Protestants and Catholics, have been faced with the often daunting task of rebuilding their places of worship. At the same time, they have been at pains to recover the principles of early church planning and design. The themes that have emerged out of this search for the past have had a profound effect in shaping the attitudes of post-war European Christendom.

One of the perennial, and more vexing, problems in religious thought and philosophy has been the question unde malum. In ancient, medieval, and modern thought, the issue has been viewed mostly in its theological context. From the perspective of traditional monotheistic theology, the problem thus presents itself: If God is truly all good and all powerful, then why would God cause or even allow evil, whether natural (e.g., earthquakes, floods, human disease) or moral (murder, rape, and the like), to exist? Inasmuch as the existence of evil, at least from the phenomenological point of view, is an indisputable fact, it would seem that either divine omnipotence or benevolence must be limited.

I feel very deeply both the honor and the responsibility attendant upon Professor Carman's kind invitation to speak to you this evening. The attempt to make some sense of the history and context of this Center on the occasion of its silver anniversary is a challenge made poignant by the tragic and repeated experiences of loss we have so recently suffered. This even more than chronological milestones makes such a celebration of memory and community all the more necessary and meaningful. I am very privileged to have been entrusted with this role.