It is a curious feature of the present time that a boom in secular interest in the idea of a life after death seems to be matched by a recession in high level theological interest in that possibility. There is today a wave of popular non-religious concern about death and about a post-mortem existence, expressed in parapsychology, occultism, thanatology, and talk of mediumship, reincarnation, out-of-the-body experiences and the reports of those who have been revived after having been clinically dead. And yet at the same time some of the best Christian thinking today is inclined to deemphasize the idea of the life to come, even to the point of virtually abandoning it as an element in the Christian message. It is true that there is much talk of the future (sometimes with a capital F), and of Christian hope and of the radically eschatological character of the gospel. For example, Jürgen Moltmann has said that “From first to last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward looking and forward moving. …” But when we read on we find that the hope of which he speaks is, in so far as it has any content, a this-worldly hope and that ‘the life everlasting’ has been reduced to a penumbra of mythic imagery.

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.

What has Paul to do with Quintilian? For a host of scholars this question would answer itself, rhetorically. A stock device, the rhetorical question has long been favored in argument. Even Paul is no exception. “Where is the wise man?” he asks. “Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (1 Cor 1:20). Paul would appear to be dismissing everything his contemporary, Quintilian, stood for. Yet one point remains. As Cicero once wrote of Plato, “it was when making fun of orators that he himself seemed to be the consummate orator.” The following, a rhetorical study of the letter to Philemon, will suggest that Paul too employed basic tactics of persuasion taught and widely practiced in his day.

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.

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.

“Christian Natural Law is the acceptance and reinterpretation according to Christian and ecclesiastical principles of Stoic Natural Law. …” Thus runs Troeltsch's classic and influential formulation of the view that Stoicism forms the “preparation of the gospel” with regard to the law of nature in Christian theology and ethics. Historians of political theory similarly assume that it was the Stoic doctrine of natural law that decisively influenced both the rationalization and universalization of Roman law and medieval political theory.

Josephus dates the publication of his Jewish Antiquities to the 13th year of Domitian's reign and the 56th year of his own life (93/94 C.E.). Because the Autobiography evidently forms an appendix to the Antiquities (see below), many scholars in the 19th and early 20th centuries dated it along with or soon after the Antiquities' publication. A problem with this supposition, however, is that the Autobiography assumes the death of Agrippa II, while the 9th-century ecclesiast Photius apparently places his death in the 3rd year of Trajan (100 C.E.). Thus, with the conflict of testimony, other scholars dated the Autobiography after 100 C.E.

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 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.

Stories of mortals offending the gods and being punished for their impudence occupy a prominent position in Greek religious tradition. Almost all of the major deities receive some affront, and the manner in which they avenge themselves is a significant, though usually minor, component in defining their nature. In the case of Dionysos, however, the pattern of affront and vengeance occurs too often to be a mere episode in the god's history and instead forms one of the central mythical features by which he is characterized.

The well known passage about the “archives” and the “gospel” in Ignatius’ Letter to the Philadelphians (8.2) is one of the most intriguing glimpses given us of debate in the church early in the second century. Wide agreement about the meaning of the passage seems to have been reached, and the current view may be summarized more or less as follows: Ignatius recalls a conversation that picks up just after he had made a theological point during his visit to Philadelphia (he gives us no direct information on the subject of the discussion). His opponents had replied (according to most commentators) that if they did not find it in the “archives” (that is, the Old Testament), they did not believe it to be in the “gospel.” Ignatius had retorted that Scripture in fact supported him: “It is written” (γέγραπται). But his opponents had answered that his certainty was not well grounded: “That is just the question.” The passage concludes with a statement that may represent not so much what Ignatius said then as what he now regards as an appropriate way of ending such debates. The “archives” (he says) are Jesus Christ; or (as he rephrases it) the “inviolable archives” are Christ's cross, death, resurrection, and the faith that comes through him. If this is what the passage means, it represents a remarkable reliance on the “gospel” and the events of salvation as opposed to the formal authority of the (Old Testament) Scriptures.

In a 1963 article in the Journal of Religion, Langdon Gilkey examined the troubled condition of the doctrine of providence and concluded that it had become “the forgotten stepchild of contemporary theology.” He attributed its demise to the violent eruptions of evil in our century, the unfortunate link between the doctrine and now defunct theories of natural theology, as well as the pervasive Arminianism and naturalism of contemporary thought. Current neglect of the concept was all the more striking, he reflected, because of its integral relationship to nearly all the theological systems of the preceding century.

Philosophical hermeneutics concerns itself with the philosophical concepts a theologian uses to express the content of revelation. This paper is an exercise in the philosophical hermeneutics of Karl Rahner. It will focus on one particular aspect of his philosophical background, namely those elements which he shares with the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel. This exercise is designed to be conceptual in nature, rather than historical. The question of how much of Rahner's thought is directly influenced by his reading and study of Hegel is probably not answerable with certainty and, at any rate, is not as interesting as the conceptual question of how these two thinkers took recourse to very similar ideas in order to solve some common problems.

To state that the period dominated by events at Canossa was a watershed in the history of ecclesio-political relationships is almost trite. But it is not so commonplace to state that this same period was also a high plateau in the history of liturgical scholarship. For modern students the picture of investiture by ring and staff represents the struggle between Church and State in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, but it should not be overlooked that the tradition of these tangible instruments was a liturgical act also signaling an intensity of concern for the liturgy and its proper performance and interpretation unequaled since the Carolingian age. Thus it comes as a surprise to many students of ecclesio-political theory to find that a majority of the publicists of the age of the Investiture Controversy whose works fill the three fat volumes of the Libelli de lite of the Monumenta Germaniae historica were avid observers of the liturgy. Peter Damian, Humbert of Silva Candida, Bonizo of Sutri, Bernold of Constance, Ranger of Lucca, the Norman Anonymous, Ivo of Chartres, Sigebert of Gembloux, Hildebert of Le Mans, and Honorius “of Autun” all wrote tracts in which aspects of liturgy were described and explained. And while the political ideas of these publicistic worthies have lost their cogency in modern times, their liturgical scholarship still graces the footnotes of many a modern popular exposition of the liturgy.

What do we know about Luther's mother?

According to the biographers, very little. We have “only a very shadowy conception,” Heinrich Boehmer says, in spite of Spalatin's remark that Martin was her “spit and image.” Even Erik Erikson, who is quite ready to offer clinical extrapolations from scant evidence, admits that a “big gap exists here, which only conjecture could fill.”