In recent decades, the idea that moral facts are not discovered but constituted by some hypothetical procedure or the attitudes of rational agents has been gaining support inside and outside of religious ethics. Often referred to as constructivism, this metaethical view proposes that moral facts are constituted by the attitudes of agents, i.e., what people would agree under some rational or idealized procedures of construction, not by facts determined by independent moral reality.

A script is merely an artifact until a performer brings it to life; a text is a starting point, despite the fact that its finality suggests a destination. With works that were meant to be performed in some fashion (however generously understood “performance” may be), the dynamic relationship between performer and audience shapes and even defines their reception; such works, fully expressed, are visual, auditory, and kinetic. The written word may mediate this relationship, shaping the arc of the narrative and the words of the characters, but it is performance that gives the narrative life and the characters voices and bodies.

John D. Caputo, a contemporary American philosopher and theologian, is known for his work demonstrating the relevance of Derrida's deconstruction for theology. Vasubandhu, a fourth-century (c.e.) Indian thinker, is a seminal figure in the Mahāyāna Buddhist school known as Yogācāra. Although at first blush an odd pairing, and despite their great differences, these two thinkers share a fundamental presupposition: the priority and centrality of our conditioned condition. Indeed, for them, attending to the ways that we are conditioned makes possible the pursuit of a truth that is beyond our conditioned filters, aspiring to open us to the truth that is unconditioned. For this reason, it is illuminating to read and think Caputo and Vasubandhu together.

Moses Mendelssohn famously penned his Jerusalem; or, On Religious Power and Judaism in response to a public challenge. Mendelssohn had declared “ecclesiastical power” to be a contradiction in terms, and had thus come out strongly against the use of coercion in religious life, and against the ban of excommunication by rabbinic authorities, in particular. In the anonymously published The Search for Light and Right, August Cranz defies Mendelssohn to explain how he could reconcile this liberal view of religion with his continued commitment to—and his insistence that Jews were still obligated to observe—Jewish law. “As reasonable as all you say [about religious power] may be, to just that degree it contradicts the faith of your fathers . . . and the principles of its church . . . expressly set down in the books of Moses,” Cranz argues. “The theocratic ruling staff drove the whole people . . . with force and punishment.” True, Cranz concedes, exile reduced the capacity of Jewish authorities to enforce Jewish law, “but these ecclesiastical laws are there even if their exercise is no longer a must.” Cranz challenges Mendelssohn to explain his apparently irreconcilable commitments: “How can you persist in the faith of your fathers and shake the whole structure by clearing away its cornerstones, dear Mr. Mendelssohn, when you contest the ecclesiastical law given as divine revelation through Moses?”

Georges Florovsky (1893–1979) was a prominent Russian émigré historian, philosopher, Orthodox theologian, and ecumenist. He was also the first Orthodox theologian to teach at Harvard Divinity School (1957–1964). In the 1920s, Florovsky wrote and defended his dissertation on the leading nineteenth-century Russian public intellectual, Alexander Herzen (1812–1870). Until now, the full text of Florovsky's work had been considered lost. I recently found five documents containing a substantial portion of the dissertation in the Georges Florovsky Papers archive of the St Vladimir's Seminary Library (GFP SVS). This newly discovered material amounts to about one-half of the dissertation and contains some important clues for reconstructing the remaining half of the work. My article discusses: 1) the plan of the dissertation and the history of its composition; 2) Florovsky's defense of the dissertation in Prague in 1923, as summarized in Alexander Izgoev's report, preserved in the Georges Florovsky Papers at the Princeton University Library (GFP PUL); 3) Florovsky's preparation of the dissertation for publication; 4) the description of the newly discovered archival material; and 5) the reconstruction of the dissertation, as preserved in the redactions of 1928–1930. The dissertation is the only monographic study that Florovsky ever finished, his other book-length studies being surveys rather than monographs. The dissertation is also important for understanding the methodological presuppositions of Florovsky's magnum opus, The Ways of Russian Theology (1937).

When members of the early rabbinic group created the Jewish legal text known as the Mishnah in the late second or early third century, the concept of heresy was relatively common in the wider cultural discourse of the Roman world. Christian apologists, among others, frequently employed the Greek term hairesis (“heresy”/“heretic,” originally meaning “school of thought”/“adherent”) as part of their larger projects of drawing boundaries, defining identities, and making an argument for the authority of their own ideas and practices.

Jerome translated the Hebrew Bible into Latin over a decade and a half beginning in about 390 c.e. With each translation he included a preface dedicating (in most cases) the translation to a friend or patron and defending his reliance on what he called the hebraica veritas (Hebrew truth) against his many detractors. This last feature of the prefaces proved necessary because by choosing the Hebrew text of the Old Testament as his base text, Jerome directly challenged the traditional position of the Septuagint within the church. The unpopularity of this move in some circles compelled Jerome repeatedly to justify his adherence to the Hebrew text. Similarly, in his Preface to Samuel and Kings (the “Helmeted Preface” or Prologus galeatus) he famously advocated the Hebrew canon as the Christian Old Testament and relegated all other books to the apocrypha. As part of this latter category, Jerome named six books outside the Jewish canon that were finding acceptance as fully canonical in some quarters and would much later receive the label “deuterocanonical,” these books being Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and 1 and 2 Maccabees. In multiple ways Jerome sought to restore the Christian Old Testament to what he considered the original Hebrew text and canon.

In this article I pursue two interrelated goals. First, and more narrowly, I argue that the in Rom 5:1 plausibly refers to Christ's (conventionally translated as “faith” or “faithfulness”) and not to the of Christ followers; and certainly not to the of Christ followers that is specifically “in Christ.” To my knowledge no modern commentator identifies the in Rom 5:1 as Christ's own. Several scholars suggest it in passing, and one presents a partial argument turning on several claims of coherence with his broader reading of Paul. I offer a more thorough case for the plausibility of this suggestion, especially by demonstrating how my reading of Rom 5:1 makes sense as an encapsulation of Paul's emphases in Rom 3:21–4:25.

Among the quotations from Luther's works condemned by the pope in 1520 was the statement that free will is something that exists in name only. In his defense of this statement in Assertio omnium articulorum, published in December 1520, Luther goes one step further. Here he not only declares “free will” to be a concept without factual reference, he even insists that there is no one in the position even to think on one's own, either good or bad, as everything happens with absolute necessity.

Ben Sira, a Jewish sage who lived and worked in Jerusalem in the early second century b.c.e., takes up the topic of pride in a discussion of politics in order to indict those who behave proudly as betraying the created nature of humans. Within his reflections on anthropology he links pride and sin in Sir 10:13 and then proceeds to assure his students that God will surely punish the proud through humiliation and calamity. Yet, from its rather unassuming role in Ben Sira's discussion of power, the link between pride and sin in Sir 10:13 became a locus of scribal activity and interpretation in subsequent centuries. As the text was transmitted and translated in Second Temple Judaism and late antiquity the versions of this verse in the Greek, Syriac, and Latin texts show vividly the interdependence between textual transmission and theological tradition. When placed within their historical context, the transformations of Sir 10:13 found in the forms of the verse evidence a dialogical interaction with current discussions regarding virtues and vices in moral theology in early Judaism and Christianity. A significant historical turning point occurred when Augustine made the Vulgate version of Sir 10:13a, “pride is the beginning of every sin,” a key prooftext in his discussions of sin. Thereafter this verse came to play a central role in Western Christian hamartiology, especially as it was connected to the placement of pride at the head of the capital vices or “Seven Deadly Sins.” This article will begin with a discussion of the role of pride in Ben Sira and then trace the textual transmission of Sir 10:13 and the theological influences that shaped its transmission and translation. Additionally, the story of how Sir 10:13a became a central text in Western discussions of the nature of sin will be shown to have significant theological implications for an understanding of the relationship between canonical text and the development of theological traditions.

Does biblical criticism have anything to contribute to a theologically engaged study of Scripture? The answer implicitly provided by many scholars, both within the guild of modern biblical scholarship and outside it, is clear: The biblical critic's findings are irrelevant to constructive projects. These findings may be the product of intensive philological, comparative, and historical work, but they are no more connected to the tasks of the modern thinker than artifacts dug up by an archaeologist. Indeed (some theologically and literarily minded readers assume), biblical critics often produce work that impedes an interpreter who is oriented towards larger ideas. Those ideas, after all, emerge from textual wholes that are subtle, creative, and innovative, while biblical critics (these readers believe) have a penchant for dismembering texts or reducing them to hackneyed representatives of types of thinking or textual genres found elsewhere in the ancient Near East. As a result, not a few theologians and philosophers who attend to the Bible shun the work of biblical critics.

Toward the end of his nine-year tenure as Fellow, Thomas Hooker awoke in his sleeping quarters at Emmanuel College terrified by a sense of “the Just Wrath of Heaven.” His God, the same God in whom he had always put his trust, had turned against him and was furious at his sinfulness. Dreading divine punishment, Hooker found himself “fill'd. . . with most unusual Degrees of Horror and Anguish.” Alone in the night, Hooker was haunted by the anger of a terrifying God.

It is well known that the demonstration of God's existence is a crucial problem in early modern theology and philosophy. In contrast to the medieval period, in the seventeenth century atheism became not only an individual standpoint, but a true philosophical and epistemological position. Accordingly, any attempt to prove the existence of God had to address both atheist and libertine attacks against the classical proofs of his existence. In this sense, it is not possible to understand fully Descartes's metaphysical project, including his proposal of new proofs for the existence of God, without reading it as a reaction to this intellectual context. In spite of the charge of atheism brought against him in the Admiranda methodus novæ philosophiæ Renati Des Cartes (Utrecht, 1643) by the Utrecht Theologian Gijsbert Voetius (1589–1676) and his follower Maarten Schoock (1614–1669) (who accused Descartes of replacing the traditional arguments for God's existence with new proofs intentionally made susceptible to the criticism of atheists), Descartes consistently claimed that the demonstrations proposed in the Meditationes de prima philosophia (Paris, 1641) aimed to establish the existence of God against the atheists.

According to rabbinic literature of late antiquity, a Jew could be excommunicated or banished from the community for around twenty-four spiritual and social violations. The Talmuds’ list of sins that necessitated the separation of a transgressor includes, for instance, profaning the name of God, selling forbidden meat, insulting one's master, and obstructing justice. Once condemned, the sinner was physically isolated from other people and prohibited from the same actions that a mourner was, such as cutting one's hair or wearing phylacteries. After the sinner repented or a certain amount of time passed, the ban was then lifted, typically by the master who had initiated it. Indeed, the master-disciple relationship is often at the center of banning and cursing in rabbinic literature. Although the rabbinic concept of excommunication draws from earlier biblical and Second Temple precedents, such as the book of Ezra, it is in many ways a late antique innovation featuring prominently in Babylonia. The reason that bans and excommunication emerge as a salient feature of Jewish society in this period is related to the rabbis’ historical contexts within Roman Palestine and Sasanian Babylonia. As I show in this article, exegesis and history both played a role in the formation of the talmudic laws of banishment.

Ever since Leopold Zunz inaugurated the critical study of rabbinic literature in 1818, scholars of the school of midrash known as Tanhuma-Yelammedenu (TY) have given priority to analyzing questions of textual history, dating, aesthetics, form-critical issues, and the literary qualities of these texts. This scholarship has focused on questions of form rather than content; for the most part, the distinctive ideas of these texts, their values and theologies, have yet to be explored. In an article devoted to form-literary issues in aggadah, Yonah Fraenkel argues that “indeed there were also changes in the [Tanhuma's] ideas, like their ethical and social values and their overall world view . . . these types of issues need further research.” Unfortunately, very few scholars have responded to Fraenkel's call. In fact, two excellent scholarly works on rabbinic thought have ignored the content of the TY altogether: neither David Kraemer's Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature nor Ishay Rosen-Zvi's recent work, Demonic Desires, engage TY texts. While Kraemer and Rosen-Zvi extensively discuss sixth- and seventh-century Babylonian texts, such as the Babylonian Talmud, they do not do the same with sixth- and seventh-century Palestinian texts, such as many TY texts. These two important studies exemplify how, in a more general sense, late Palestinian midrashim have been conspicuously neglected by scholars of rabbinic literature working on content-based projects.

This paper argues that the Renaissance philosopher Lorenzo Valla's De libero arbitrio (1439) appears to anticipate Luther's De servo arbitrio (1525) on several key issues. This thesis was defended in the 1940s by the well-known Renaissance scholar Charles Trinkaus, who expressed regret over the fact that modern interpreters of Valla's dialogue had “failed to see its connection with the Reformation.” As we shall see further on, however, Trinkaus's position does not seem to have had much impact on the subsequent literature.

Like so much of early Jewish literature, the strange Dead Sea scroll known as the Copper Scroll (3Q15) remains suspended somewhere between reality and fantasy. Even before scholars had fully unrolled its copper plates in 1956, they were able to discern that it recorded a list of treasures, but there soon broke out a dispute over whether this treasure was real or not. Some scholars felt that the treasure was too large to be real and that it was a figment of its author's imagination. They sought the origins of the scroll in ancient Jewish legend. Others believed the treasure to be quite plausible, probably connected to the Temple in some way. The scroll itself, however, revealed nothing that might settle the issue in one direction or the other. In what follows, I wish to explore a way beyond this impasse, not resolving whether the treasure was real or not, but suggesting how it could be both at the same time. Such a claim will seem contradictory, but it is my hope over the course of this essay not just to establish the possibility of such a position but to demonstrate that such a reading is actually more consistent with the evidence we have than any reading that imposes an either/or choice between reading the treasure as fictional or genuine.

When we read early Christian narratives such as the Acts of Paul and Thecla, what is the relationship between the characters portrayed in the story and the “real-life” persons and groups who composed and transmitted the work? In the second-century Greek account, Thecla abandons her fiancé and family to follow Paul and his ascetic message. She endures a trial by fire in Iconium, resists sexual assault on the road to Antioch, and survives attacks by beasts in the Antiochene arena, all the while supported by a wealthy widow as her patron, a friendly lioness as her protector, and a chorus of women in the stadium who extol her perseverance and cry out to the governor for mercy. In the end, after baptizing herself, Thecla is released, dresses herself like a man, and begins preaching the gospel as an itinerant apostle.

In T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets an attempt is made to investigate—often in a discursive manner—notions of time, language, and the divine. Yet the poet is hindered by certain limitations: words—as a primary vehicle of expression—collapse under the pressure, frequently sabotaging attempts at true articulation as detailed in the poem's opening quartet, Burnt Norton: “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension. . .” (V: 149–51). Consequently, the medium of language itself frames an apparent contradiction throughout the Quartets: how a contrived system can represent notions intrinsically elusive and ephemeral. This conundrum inculcates all four of the poems, making them in some ways the ironic frame of their own reference. Despite this inherent dilemma, Eliot recognized that harnessing certain imagery—both animate and inanimate—and exploiting it for its numinous qualities was indispensable to achieving his aesthetic and thematic aims. Such imagery included elements taken from the natural world which pointed beyond their own outward forms to some ideal form that lay behind them. It was an approach motivated in part by what Frye describes as the poet's concern with Heraclitean logos zynos—or a “common logos”—and had as its aim the participation of man in the divine. To achieve such ends, Eliot relied on bird calls, echoes, bones, bells, and other seemingly prosaic phenomena and transformed them into conduits by which revelations might occur. That is, certain central images the poet adopts in Four Quartets—though not endowed with the capacity for human language—are nevertheless engendered with communicativeness of a uniquely numinous kind. Aligned with this notion was Eliot's belief that the way to commune with the past and with the divine was through ritual; by employing common natural objects and investing each with sacramental significance, the poet was able to evoke a temporal link with the ineffable world. It was also a means of reconciling what he perceived as the disjuncture with conventional language. By grounding the effort in an approach reminiscent of sacred Christian ritual and aesthetically portraying a new mode of communication consistent with transformative ceremony, Eliot aimed at the restoration of a past community of values. This highly distinct mode of communing came to represent its own unique type of langue, carrying forward thematic concerns while at the same time detailing a stylistic approach to poetic composition not prevalent in Eliot's earlier work.

Carl W. Griffin and David L. Paulsen have shown that anthropomorphism, one of the most popular and equally biblical tenets of ancient Christianity, was spread out not only among the simpliciores (the simple) of the early ecclesia but also among its eruditi (its educated members), particularly such docti (learned) in Stoicism like Tertullian. Following previous researchers, Griffin and Paulsen have also argued that Christian Platonizing authors, starting with Origen in the East and Marius Victorinus in the West, developed a sturdy campaign of promoting the doctrine of an incorporeal God. At a time when the clergy itself was largely conceiving God as a corporeal entity, the Christian Platonists were heavily employing the rhetoric of erudition in order to uphold an anti-anthropomorphist agenda. Other scholars have noticed that Origen of Alexandria was the first (or among the first) to relate the anthropomorphist position to the uneducated members of the Christian community, the simpliciores. Later on, Cassian, Socrates, Sozomen, and Palladius will communicate the events of the Origenist debate by means of the same distinction between simpliciores and eruditi. As Elizabeth A. Clark observes: