In his long and distinguished career which bridged two centuries, Sir Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) was one of the most versatile intellectual figures in England. His discoveries in physics placed him in the first rank of British science. For his work in electricity, radio, and wave theory Lodge was awarded the Rumford and Alfred medals by the Royal Society. He also was a Romanes Lecturer at Oxford, a president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the first Principal of the University of Birmingham. Lodge's publication record is breathtaking: more than 1,200 items, including nearly forty books, over a sixty-year period. While more than half of these were purely scientific or technical, it is significant that more than 100 pieces dealt with psychical research and an additional 170 books and articles dealt with topics in philosophy and religion. More than half of Lodge's writings in this latter category appeared between 1896 and 1914.

Although Meister Eckhart himself might have been puzzled by the term, he is traditionally known as a mystic. The designation surely does apply, in the sense that Eckhart sought and recommended a kind of union between the soul and God. But as soon as one proceeds to analyze the precise nature of that union, difficulties abound. In recent literature it has become clear that the Christian mystical tradition has employed various distinct concepts of union with God, and scholars have inquired what sort of union one or another mystic sought. This effort has been made, for example, in studies of John Tauler and The Cloud of Unknowing. In examining these and other mystics, particularly those of the Western medieval tradition, scholars have asked whether they viewed union with God as a momentary experience or as an ongoing way of life, and whether they saw this union as continuous and compatible with ordinary religious experience and knowledge or as discontinuous and incompatible. The present article will attempt to answer such questions in regard to Meister Eckhart, in hopes of clarifying an aspect of his thought which, though fundamental, is most commonly approached only tangentially in the literature.

Twice in the book of Exodus where tradition preserves the revelation of the divine name to Moses, God employs a peculiar idiom which S. R. Driver has called the idem per idem. In Exod 3:14 God says:

I will be what I will be

and again in 33:19 he tells his servant:

But I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious

and I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy

The idem per idem is a tautology of sorts which Driver says is employed “where the means or the desire to be more explicit does not exist.” Driver calls the idiom Semitic, and indeed it is, as one can see by perusing the many examples from Hebrew and Arabic cited earlier by Paul de Lagarde in his Psalterium Iuxta Hebraeos Hieronymi. But it is also found, as we shall see in a moment, in other languages both ancient and modern.

Tolstoi's Confession is the story of the spiritual crisis which its author experienced during the late 1870s, when the man who had written War and Peace and Anna Karenina came to believe that he had accomplished nothing in life, that his life was meaningless. Although there are parallels between the torments of Levin in Anna Karenina and Tolstoi's own conflicts in the Confession, the latter piece was written in 1879, two years after the publication of the former, and represents a more developed reflection on “the problem of life.” As I shall argue in this article, the resolution of the crisis related in Tolstoi's Confession comes in a movement of faith which emerges as the fourth aspect of a four-dimensional change or metamorphosis within the individual. The four-dimensions of the metamorphosis may be described as (1) the encounter with death, (2) the onset of despair, (3) the struggle for possibility, and (4) the movement of faith. Let us now see how an analysis of the movement of faith as revealed in Tolstoi's Confession may be rendered in these terms.

In his influential study The Sacred Canopy, Peter Berger asserted that “the power of religion depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men as they stand before death or, more accurately, as they walk, inevitably, toward it.” Berger was not suggesting that religion is primarily a private obsession of the individual with death. Rather his thesis is that religion is a social phenomenon, part of the human enterprise of “world-building” by which we attempt “to impose a meaningful order upon reality.” The significance of death is not an individual matter because “death radically challenges all socially objectivated definitions of reality—of the world, of others, and of the self. Death radically puts in question the taken-for-granted, ‘business-as-usual’ attitude in which one exists in everyday life. Here everything in the daytime world of existence in society is massively threatened with ‘irreality’—that is, everything in that world becomes dubious, eventually unreal, other than what one used to think.” In short, death is a threat to the meaningfulness not only of the individual life, but of the common enterprise of society and, indeed, of any attempt, social, religious or philosophical, to perceive reality as a coherent and purposeful order.

Ce mot, quoique trs utilis en linguistique, n'a pas encore reu dans ce domaine les conditions d'une dfinition precise. Dcrire suppose en effet deux donnes prliminaires: d'une part, la reconnaissance de l'objet dcrire comme une unit; d'autre part, a l'intrieur de cette unit, l'existence d'une autre unit, beaucoup plus petite, mais qui, associe un certain nombre de fois a elle-meme, compose la grande unit. La premiere unit, c'est Ia macrostructure; la seconde unit, c'est la microstructure. Dcrire, c'est toujours dcrire une macrostructure; la description d'une macrostructure consiste a partir de la microstructure pour retrouver la macrostructure.

Eine der drngendsten Aufgaben des Urchristentums bestand darin, dem Leiden und gewaltsamen Tode Jesu von Gott her einen Sinn abzugewinnen. Da Jesus, der Sohn Gottes und Messias, leiden mute, konnte dem Willen Gottes nicht zuwiderlaufen, soundern mute im Wort der Schrift des Alten Testaments bereits verankert sein. So wurden im Laufe der Zeit nicht nur Gesetz und Propheten (so etwa das vierte Gottesknechtslied Jes lii. 13 liii. 12), sondern auch die Psalmen dazu herangezogen, das Leiden des gerechten Gottesknechtes Jesus als von Gott gewollt verstndlich zu machen (vgl. Lk. xxiv. 27 mit xxiv. 44, wo die Psalmen ausdrcklich neben Gesetz und Propheten genannt werden). Eine besondere Bedeutung fiel dabei schon frh, d. h. schon im markinischen, wenn nicht vormarkinischen Passionsbericht, den Psalmen lxix (lxviii) und xxii (xxi) fr die theologische Deutung des Leidens Jesu zu. Doch gab es daneben auch andere Psalmen, in denen die Urkirche bereits prophetisch das Wort des leidenden Jesus vernahm. Zu ihnen zhlt Ps xlii (xli): Wie der Hirsch drstet nach Wasserquellen, zu dem nach der Auskunft der Alttestamentler Ps xliii (xlii) ursprnglich mit dazugehrte. Zusammen ergeben beide Psalmen drei Strophen von je sechs bzw. fnf Versen, die jeweils durch einen gleichlautenden Kehrvers abgeschlossen werden, dessen Anfang Eingang in die markinische Getsemaniperikope gefunden hat: ἵ , ( xli. 6, 12; xlii. 5) ἐ ἡ (Mk xiv. 34).

Engeance pacifique, les spécialistes du Nouveau Testament et des origines chrétiennes sont souvent irrités par le grand retentissement que connaissent des théories tapageuses présentées au public par des personnes plus ou moins qualifiées. Nous avons quelque peine à admettre que des travaux aussi contestables monopolisent l'attention d'un grand nombre de lecteurs et leur dissimulent les recherches scientifiques sérieuses dont les auteurs ne visent ni au scandale ni à un succès facile. Toutefois, il est relativement aisé de traiter ces phénomènes déplaisants par l'indifférence ou, le cas échéant, par l'ironie.

Four years ago Paul Ricoeur gave a lecture here in Tübingen on ‘Philosophische und theologische Hermeneutik’,and advised us theologians in particular to give thought to our current practice and teaching in regard to the understanding of the biblical text. A real understanding of texts means, according to Ricoeur ‘to understand oneself in the light of the text. It does not mean imposing upon the text one's own limited capacity for comprehension, but exposing oneself to the text…It is not the (understanding) subject who forms…understanding, but … the self is formed by the “subject matter” of the text’ If we follow Ricoeur and attempt to practise such a form of understanding of the biblical text, then in the present-day situation of theology and church we fall all too quickly into a dilemma. The splendid tradition of modern biblical criticism, founded in Tübingen above all by F. C. Baur, seems to conflict with Ricoeur's proposal. How are we, trained and dedicated as we are to the historical and critical investigation and analysis of the biblical texts, to return again to that readiness and capacity for exposing ourselves to the texts and understanding ourselves anew in the light of them, i.e. before the tribunal of the Bible? Would that not mean precisely to abandon the scientific ethos to which we have so long considered ourselves bound? It is a searching question and, as we well know, a source of distress to many. This distress is intensified when today we hear not a few Christians pronounce a decisive ‘No!’ to all scientific biblical criticism. For them ‘understanding oneself in the light of the text’ of the Bible is only possible when all the historical insights we possess in regard to the Bible have first been rejected. A study document of the Lutheran Missouri Synod affirms: ‘We reject the doctrine, which under the name of science has gained wide popularity in the church of our day, that Holy Scripture is not in all its parts the Word of God, but in part the word of man and hence does, or at least might, contain error. We reject this erroneous doctrine as horrible and blasphemous, since it flatly contradicts Christ and His holy apostles, sets up men as judges over the Word of God, and thus overthrows the foundation of the Christian church and its faith.’

Vor reichlich 50 Jahren erschien M. Dibelius' ‘Formgeschichte des Evangeliums’ und R. Bultmanns ‘Geschichte der synopt. Tradition’. Das Gedenken an diese beiden großen Gelehrten wäre gewiß der gegebene Anlaß, in dem Eröffnungsvortrag unserer diesjährigen Konferenz ihr für unsere Wissenschaft bahnbrechendes Werk angemessen zu würdigen. Doch habe ich es vorgezogen, nicht einen Gedenk-und schon gar nicht einen Jubiläumsvortrag zu halten, sondern möchte versuchen, auf dem von den Altmeistern der Formgeschichte (FG) offen gelassenen und nur ansatzweise bestellten Feld der sogenannten Redaktionsgeschichte einige Schritte weiterzugehen.

Die Gesetzesinterpretation bei Paulus und Jesus soll durch ein erstes Eingehen auf die Beiträge der modernen Toposforschung gefördert werden. Dieses Vorhaben ruht auf der Voraussetzung, daß biblische Exgeten sich nach wie vor den Methoden der literaturwissenschaftlichen Forschung verpflichtet wissen, und daß die moderne Toposforschung für die Exegese von besonderem Interesse ist. Dieses Interesse wird allerdings im negativen Sinn dadurch bestimmt, daß im Fall der Gesetzesinterpretation bei Paulus oder Jesus methodisch immer noch weitgehend einseitig, wenn nicht gar ausschließlich historisch oder theologisch vorgegangen wird. Im positiven Sinn aber wird das Interesse an der modernen Toposforschung dadurch bestimmt, daß man in der literaturwissenschaftlichen Arbeit, zu der ja die biblische Exegese gehört, neuerdings von ‘radikalen Veränderungen’ spricht, die angeblich notwendig sind angesichts der Forderung, daß in dieser Arbeit ‘nach den Regeln eines expliziten Argumentationsschemas argumentiert… und über den Status der verwendeten Daten, Begründungen, Stützungshypothesen etc. entschieden und die empirische Qualität von argumentativen Ergebnissen diskutiert werden soll’.2 Beim Eingehen auf diese Forderung verdient der rhetorische Topos besondere Beachtung.