As a scholar I am expected to deal with my subject matter in an objective way. If this were to mean without emotional concern, and without a personal standpoint, I have to admit failure in advance…. I do not hesitate to admit that in giving this lecture my aim is to contribute … to a change of attitude and behavior towards nature.

The relationship between Israel, the nations, and Israel's God in the eschatological future has long occupied exegetes and theologians. The meaning of the pilgrimage of the nations to Zion and the servant's charge to become a “covenant to the people (), a light to the nations ()” (Isa 42:6) is a significant locus of dispute. Some argue that here the text charges the Israelites to missionize the Gentiles, while others contend that Second Isaiah holds only a passing interest in the status of foreigners. These disagreements are not unfounded, for the text itself contains seemingly contradictory exclamations right next to one another. In Isa 45:22, for example, YHWH proclaims: “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth!” In the very next verses, however, Isaiah depicts the nations as subservient to Israel and elsewhere as even licking the dust of the former exiles' feet (49:23)—an image which, at least at first glance, seems incompatible with the notion that foreigners and Israelites similarly benefit from YHWH's saving acts.

The copious works of Eusebius of Caesarea are rarely investigated for their importance as testimonials to ancient knowledge of racial groups or to classical conceptions of ethnicity. Ancient ethnographical literature is not, however, an unimportant background for reading the bishop's works; nor are conceptions of race and ethnicity absent from his prolific literary output. In fact, racial assumptions are integral features in the development of various aspects—especially ecclesiological—of Eusebius's thought. Eusebius's prominent characterization of Christianity, which remains consistent throughout his entire literary career, is “the Church from the nations.” Such an appellation carried within itself the impulse to describe and define further the “nations” from which members of the Church were drawn. Persians, Scythians, Phoenicians, Egyptians and other “barbarian” nations, as well as Greeks, left behind the identities of their former lives when they adopted the new way of life and the new identity offered by Christ.

The Psychomachia of the fifth-century Latin poet Prudentius provides a straight-forward portrait of heresy generally shared in the west: The wolf, with gory jaws, conceals himself in a soft fleece, Counterfeiting milk-white sheep while carrying on bloody murders by devouring lambs.It is by this means that Photinus and Arrius disguise themselves, those wolves so wild and savage.

As one of the central concerns of De hominis opificio, Gregory of Nyssa attempts to reconcile the biblical claim that God made human beings in the image of God (, Gen 1:27) with the reality of humanity's present misery and corruption. How, Nyssen asks, can God invest human beings with rational faculties that equip them as God's viceroys over creation and yet find themselves subject to the dominion of non-rational, sensual impulses? He answers the question by distinguishing human nature in its present form and orientation from those lofty, intellectual aspects of human nature that God intended for humanity in the beginning and in the resurrection. He characterizes the former by passions and pain; the latter, by the blessedness of communion with God. But this raises some key questions: If the passions cause our present misery, what does that say about gender and sexuality? Does he associate them solely with our present condition? Do they represent an accommodation or a cause of our present corruption? Or do gender and sexuality form part and parcel of human nature as God willed it from the beginning?