As the comparative study of religion has advanced in recent years, one of its most salutary effects has been the qualification, if not the removal, of old caricatures about other people's religions. It is increasingly recognized that only distance and ignorance make religious traditions seem homogeneous entities, and that the tensions they encompass within themselves are often at least as extreme as the gulfs that separate one tradition from another.

In the Greek ritual of animal sacrifice a rather unusual use was reserved for the tongue of the victim. While most of the animal was either burned in offering to the deity or enjoyed as a feast by the participants, the tongue was cut out and laid aside. Why the tongue was treated differently from the rest of the victim and what exactly was done with it are the questions which I propose to deal with in this paper. These problems have been dealwith before, but the evidence has never been fully consideredand all previous discussions have been inconclusive.

In his important Christological study, The Crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann addresses the problem of the ultimate relation Christ to believers, using as the focus of his analysis Calvin's exegesis of 1 Cor 15:24–28. Moltmann argues that this locus classicus of Pauline subordinationism— “Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father … then shall the Son also himself be subject”—marks the point in Calvin's Christology at which “divine rule” is transferred from Christ's humanity to his divinity.

Although Jewish conversions to Christianity in the latter Middle Ages pose many unanswered questions, one can be dispensed with relatively easily: Were those converts who subsequently decided to abandon Christianity and return to Judaism required to undergo a special immersion (tebilâ in Hebrew) as part of a special “rejudaization rite”?

When Jonathan Edwards was installed as assistant to his grandfather Solomon Stoddard at Northampton in 1727, he not only assumed the major pastoral responsibility for the largest congregation in western Massachusetts, but he also became coadministrator of the “lax” mode of admission to the sacraments that had prevailed at Northampton and throughout the Connecticut River Valley for some thirty years. This system granted both baptism and communion to all persons of age who had historical knowledge of the gospel and were of a “non-scandalous” life, on the grounds that all divinely established ordinances were capable of “begetting” faith. Although Stoddard did not originate the “lax” system, the practice was generally referred to as “Stoddardeanism” because from the time of his celebrated dispute with Increase Mather in 1700 (the so-called “Stoddardean controversy”) Stoddard had been its most systematic, persistent, and influential proponent in New England.

In the summer of 1801 a sharp, even bitter exchange of correspondence passed between the Court and Cathedral Preacher in Berlin, Friedrich Samuel Gottfried Sack, and his ministerial protégé Friedrich Schleiermacher. The points of contention were Schleiermacher's circle of Berlin friends, whom Sack considered inappropriate company for the young minister, and Schleiermacher's book of 1799, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, containing theological views judged by Sack to be irreconcilable with the Christian religion Schleiermacher had been ordained to preach. This candid exchange was Schleiermacher's first official encounter with rising tensions between his theological liberalism and the orthodoxy of his Reformed Church background. Indeed these two letters argue theological issues that plagued Schleiermacher throughout his career and have haunted his theology to our own day, the most central of these being Schleiermacher's refusal to apply terms of personality to God. Yet these seminal letters have received scant attention in German secondary literature, and to the English reader they have remained all but inaccessible.