Let me turn in this “Response” to the concerns of those who have been unhappy with particular features of Nicaea and Its Legacy. Although the bulk of my discussion will be taken up with the responses of Khaled Anatolios and John Behr, I want also to range a little more widely. For the most part, criticisms of my book Nicaea have stemmed as much from opposition to my overall attitude towards the task of historical theology as from opposition to my interpretation of particular episodes of the fourth century. A range of related questions focuses on the relationship between the good practice of theology and the implications of the forms of modern historical consciousness that I have clearly found persuasive. The three critics that I engage here all seem to me to be pushing in directions that (consciously or unconsciously) inappropriately restrict the scope and character of theological—and particularly of historical theological—investigation. I must confess at the beginning of this discussion that I assumed the majority of negative responses to my project as a whole (as opposed to negative responses to particular sections of the argument) would come from what might be termed the theological “left”: those who are convinced by some of the fundamental lines of post-Enlightenment and recent liberal critique of classical Christian tradition. It has, however, been fascinating to see other critics emerge from what might perhaps be termed the theological “right”: those sympathetic to modern attempts to retrieve the centrality of classical Christian texts, theologians, and exegetical methods. Both forms of critique demand a response.

This stichometric list is almost altogether unknown to Western scholarship. Yet it is a rather accurate translation of a Greek stichometric list of the same character as the Stichometry of Nicephorus. The text has been published four times in Armenian, each edition based on a different manuscript or manuscripts. The edition of Ter Movsessian was based upon one manuscript—olim Etchmiadzin 154, a Bible dated 1308, and that of Fehratʿian upon two—Vienna No. 30 and No. 130. Murad based his edition upon four Jerusalem manuscripts, No. 773 (1359 C.E.), which served as his text, and Nos. 343 (1450 C.E.), 835 (1640 C.E.), and 936 (1703 C.E.), which he listed in his apparatus. The text was most recently edited by A. G. Abrahamyan. He did not consult Murad's edition, but based his own work upon two Erevan manuscripts, Nos. 2180 (1644 CE.) and 699 (16th century). He has listed all the variants of Ter Movsessian and of Fehratʿian in his apparatus.

The future historian of Modernism will be much embarrassed by the contradictory appreciations and misjudgments which are to be found in our contemporary literature on this subject. One book presents Modernism as a movement of the Latin mind, distrusting individualism and laying stress upon the corporate element in religion; another writer, on the contrary, characterizes Modernism as “a spirit of anarchy, of individualism, of personal distinction and culture.” To some writers Modernism is the greatest spiritual movement ever produced inside the Catholic Church, while to others it is an insignificant and useless dream of a few not completely developed minds. Consequently some of them outline the development of Modernism as an anecdotic history without a real unity in purpose, while others conceive of it as of a system of theology derived from certain fixed and definite philosophic premises.

By the editor's kindness I am permitted to present here some corrections and supplements to papers and notes previously published in this Review. I had hesitated to claim the attention of readers again for matters of minor importance; but justice to other scholars seemed to demand an additional word about some of the following topics, and the interest of the supplementary matter must be my excuse for reverting to the others.

I. The myths and epics of Ugarit are composed in poetic formulae and patterns which reveal original oral composition. Parallelistic structure derives, originally at least, from the techniques of orally composed poetry, and the use of traditional formulae including parallelistic pairs has been well established in Ugaritic and Early Hebrew poetry. Usually the formulaic structure gives an extreme symmetry or regularity to Ugaritic verse.

The oracular writings of the “Christian Socrates” of the eighteenth century, Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), have attracted a number of important philosophers, theologians, and men of letters since the time of Immanuel Kant. Some insist that Hamann was a profound and heroic mystic, and some conclude that he was an impossible obscurantist. A figure of conspicuous protest against prevailing Enlightenment attitudes, Hamann's own views exhibit a strange alliance between religious (Lutheran) faith and sceptical (Humean) empiricism.

It is one of the ironies of American religious history that the most thoroughly anti-Catholic work to appear after the Civil War was published in the unlikely decade after the Second World War, when the last good war had been fought and won, and what Gibson Winter termed “the suburban captivity of the churches” was well underway, a “captivity” in which questions of crabgrass ostensibly replaced theology as the major topic of conversation. A series of articles that had begun to appear in the Nation, a staunchly libertarian journal, in November 1947, was published by Beacon Press in 1949 as American Freedom and Catholic Power—a work that would set the stage for increasingly neuralgic exchanges between Catholics and Protestants during a decade in which sociologist Will Herberg announced that the “American Way of Life” was now acceptably packaged in Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish forms. The author of that book, Paul Blanshard, understood himself to be issuing a timely call to protect the First Amendment of the Constitution against the encroachments of a Catholic hierarchy living within the very fortress of the free world, but hostile to American democratic and political values.

In 1791, when he was eighteen years of age, Coleridge came across Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Although he was sufficiently interested to read the essay, he was not impressed by it. In fact, if one is to judge his reaction by the jeu d'esprit, “Mathematical Problem,” it was chiefly one of amusement. Although he went on to read Burke's other essays, he was attracted by the character of the author and the style of his writing rather than by his point of view; for, certainly a young man who was an avowed disciple of David Hartley, a champion of the French Revolution, and the originator of Pantisocracy could find little comfort in the works of Edmund Burke. But the zeal for Hartley, the French Revolution, and Pantisocracy was short-lived; and by 1796 Coleridge had turned, a “thought-bewilder'd man,” to a reading of Bishop Berkeley.The influence of Berkeley, especially of the later Platonic Berkeley, began to show in his work almost at once; the influence of Burke continued to lag. Out of his reflections on Berkeley, however, came a new admiration for Burke, particularly for his Philosophical Inquiry; and, from the combined teachings of the two, Coleridge ultimately derived suggestions for a theology broad enough to account for and to give meaning and purpose to all human activities. I should like here to indicate briefly the use he made of these suggestions with respect to science, philosophy, and poetry. I do not mean to imply that there were no other influences at work in the formulation of his views; but I do submit that these two influences are basic and that Coleridge's position can be adequately understood only in terms of them.

Was there a “Q community”? There are many who think that any quest for a “Q community” is a fool's errand. In this paper, I revisit this vexing question by focusing on several distinctive textual coordinates with which we can map Q's author within the social, textual, and theological landscape(s) of Second Temple Judaism. Since the author of Q was capable of crafting innovative scriptural allusions and adapting inherited Jesus traditions, I suggest that Q is not an isolated “Galilean” phenomenon but a textual production that combines Galilean Jesus traditions in conversation with contemporary Jewish apocalyptic traditions and can be located alongside the wider “Essenic” networks that pre-dated and co-existed with the Palestinian Jewish Jesus movement.

One of the many contributions that Helmut Koester has made to New Testament scholarship is his attention to the importance of archaeological and epigraphical evidence for the study of early Christianity. I offer this study as a small token of gratitude to him for that contribution. It attempts to show the importance of certain inscriptions for the signification of the saying attributed to Jesus in Mark 10:45: “For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

‘Cette grande personnalité chrétienne’: the phrase, applied to him by a Swiss theologian, M. Guiran, is rightly fixed upon by M. Loisy in his Mémoires as the mot juste in describing Friedrich von Hügel. In language no less well chosen the same writer has gone on to speak of those ‘valeurs intimes et profondes que M. von Hügel a si magnifiquement et si humblement incarnées.’ For it was indeed not by the construction of a system that von Hügel promoted our understanding of religious experience, nor even chiefly by originating or giving currency to new and fruitful ideas in this department of study, but rather by the impression made by his unforgettable personality upon those who were brought into contact with it, whether through actual conversation or correspondence with him during his lifetime or through the reading of what he wrote and stamped with the peculiar and distinctive style in which that personality found so characteristic an expression. Therefore, while in the case of any thinker who takes as the subject of his lucubrations one which, like religion, must be comprehended, if at all, by an experience in which the whole man is engaged, some acquaintance with his biography will perhaps be found necessary to the understanding of his thought; in the case of such a thinker as he of whom I am now to speak to you it is certainly indispensable.

To the very title of this paper, or at any rate to the idea implied in it, the average religious thinker might conceivably make more objections than one. He might in the first place inquire whether any meaning can be found in the term “rational mysticism”; and, examining it either from the standpoint of reason or from that of mysticism, might complain that it attempts to bring together two quite incompatible things. Reason has usually held mysticism in scorn, looking upon it as a sort of quack method, if the word may pass, of accomplishing, or of pretending to accomplish, what reason accomplishes in the professional and only legitimate way. Mysticism, from the other side, has been ready enough to repay scorn with scorn: it has claimed to find its way to the secret places of truth by a subtle process far more efficacious than that laborious following of the trail which reason practises; and its independence of reason, its irreconcilability with reason, it has always taken as its glory rather than its shame. What—the average religious man might say—what can “rational mysticism” mean? How, indeed, can such a thing exist at all? And in the next place, even supposing you could manufacture the curious compound that “rational mysticism” would be, and could link the two seeming incompatibles together, how are you going to make any connection between your newly created rational mysticism and New Testament Christianity? Rational, indeed, New Testament Christianity is, or claims to be; and to show its harmony with reason (provided that the thing be not pushed too far) is one of the chief objects that Christian apologetics may well keep in view.

Beginning with Flinders Petrie scholars have been struck by the similarity between the script of these inscriptions and the Egyptian hieroglyphs. As the inscriptions were found in the neighborhood of numerous Egyptian monuments, an attempt was naturally made to read them as in the Egyptian language; but this proved unsuccessful, and it was evident that although the signs show close relationship with hieroglyphs, the language is not Egyptian. On Sinai, it was natural to think of a Semitic language. Further, the Egyptian phonetic value of the signs does not yield Semitic words, so that it appears that not only the language but the phonetic value of the signs is Semitic, not Egyptian.

In regard to Western scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages, every one repeats the laconic judgment, that it is “philosophy in the service, under the sway and direction, of Catholic theology.” It could be nothing else; and it seems that one has said everything after announcing this clear-cut formula. This current definition, susceptible of the most different meanings, is found on the first page of a recent book, published during the War, on the philosophy of the Middle Ages; and though the author gives a very mild interpretation of it, it is offered to the reader as an abridged thesis, in which one finds condensed all that is important to know on the subject. “Scholasticism is Philosophy placed at the service of already established ecclesiastical doctrine, or at least philosophy placed in such a dependence on this doctrine that it becomes an absolute Rule when both meet on common ground.”

Now this current definition of scholastic philosophy in the Middle Ages defines it very badly, because it is a mixture of the true and the false, of accuracy and of inaccuracy. It must be distrusted, like those equivocal maxims which John Stuart Mill calls “sophisms of simple inspection,” which by force of repetition enjoy a kind of transeat or vogue in science without being questioned.

Since the publication of Philip Hallie's book, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed,1 and the release of Pierre Sauvage's documentary, Weapons of the Spirit,2 many North Americans have become familiar with the rescue efforts carried out in the French Vivarais-Lignon plateau during World War II. It is difficult to know the exact number of persons sheltered, and indeed this statistic has become a point of contention among historians, with some arguing that 700–1000 Jews were rescued, while a few of those who experienced and contributed to the effort estimate 3500 (in addition to approximately 1500 others).3 It is true that during the war a variety of individuals and groups in France assisted people at tremendous risk, but the number saved in the plateau, even if it does hover around 1000, is nonetheless striking.4 The residents of this region welcomed individuals and families from throughout France and Europe, providing food, housing, and assisting many over the border into Switzerland, some 300 kilometers away. Moreover, some local residents participated in the manufacture and distribution of false papers, a crime under Vichy law, but the provision of which aided in the survival of hundreds of persons during the period.5 Although not all of the inhabitants of the plateau were active in the armed Resistance, they resisted nonetheless by resolutely disobeying the Vichy authorities as well as the Germans. These people were the minority throughout France, for while some citizens actively collaborated with the Germans, the vast majority simply waited out the war, neither collaborating nor particularly opposing the changes brought by the Vichy government and the subsequent German occupying forces.6