A curious parallel exists between two early Christian discussions of prophetic or divine knowledge. Both deal with the Christian problem of sense knowledge about the divine in a thought world dominated by Platonic thinking: how can Christians base their knowledge of the divine upon the reports of the apostles who claim to have seen God in a human shape? The first of these discussions arises from criticisms from outside; Celsus, the second-century Platonist critic of Christianity, calls the Christians a carnal race who say that God is corporeal and has a human form, and complains, “How are they to know God unless they lay hold of him by sense-perception?” (C. Cel. 7.27, 37). The second comes from within the Christian camp, and is to be found in the Clementine Homilies. In this rather enigmatic text Simon Magus, the arch-heretic, accuses Peter in his reliance upon his apostolic experience of “introducing God in a shape,” and opposes to apostolic sense knowledge his own visionary experiences (Hom. 17.3). The examination of these two texts demonstrates that in their common terms and the common shape of their arguments the issue of the knowledge of the apostles was common in Christian polemics. It was also a problem for philosophically minded Christians who would prefer to place the knowledge of God, even if historically mediated by Jesus, in the intelligible knowledge of the soul, rather than in the senses.

I feel very deeply both the honor and the responsibility attendant upon Professor Carman's kind invitation to speak to you this evening. The attempt to make some sense of the history and context of this Center on the occasion of its silver anniversary is a challenge made poignant by the tragic and repeated experiences of loss we have so recently suffered. This even more than chronological milestones makes such a celebration of memory and community all the more necessary and meaningful. I am very privileged to have been entrusted with this role.

In speaking about his objective in translating the tales of Nahman of Bratslav in July of 1906 Martin Buber said, “In general it is not my goal to gather new facts, but rather solely to give a new interpretation of their coherence, a new synthetic presentation of Jewish mystics and their creations.” Before his death, in responding to harsh criticism of his translations of the Hasidic tales, Buber referred to his work as an attempt “to convey to our own time the force of a former life of faith.” His task, as Gershom Scholem once pointed out in derision, was not primarily historical; it was not a process of fact gathering, but it was hermeneutical. He aimed to present a new interpretation of the Hasidic tales of the past which would render them relevant to the crisis of the contemporary reader.

Following the failure of national prohibition, the temperance movement came to be regarded as an alien blight that had afflicted the American landscape. Richard Hofstadter spoke for many historians when he suggested that the story of prohibition seems “like a historical detour, a meaningless nuisance, an extraneous imposition upon the main course of history.” Rather than being viewed as somehow integral to and indicative of developments in American society and culture, the temperance movement has more commonly been exploited as a quarry for providing colorful instances of human folly and fanaticism. The tendency is natural for, unlike other leading reform movements such as antislavery and women's suffrage, which have legacies most historians are eager to affirm, the crusade against drink seems odd and misplaced to contemporary minds. But this approach has overlooked important features of the movement, failing to show why it did not strike its many advocates as a pseudo-concern or do justice to its widespread support and distinction as the longest continuous reform movement in American history.

To say that Adam and Eve were created in the image of God ought to answer a host of questions, but the historian of exegesis finds that it raises more questions than it answers, since any given interpretation of the image of God reveals as much about the interpreter as it does about the image itself. It would be a bit melodramatic to describe Gen 1:26 as an exegetical Rorschach test, a literary “ink blot” which means only what the interpreter thinks it means. But Gen 1:26 does, in fact, serve usefully as a “weathervane.’ An interpreter's explanation of the imago dei often points to his or her larger theological agenda.

The figure of William L. Sullivan, the Paulist missionary and teacher who renounced Roman Catholicism in 1910 and migrated eventually to Unitarianism, poses a continuing challenge for historians of American religion. How is one to interpret his spiritual pilgrimage? Is Sullivan best understood as a reformer whose abhorrence of the perduring Vaticanism and Romanism in Catholic ecclesiology impelled him towards liberal Protestantism? Was he primarily, as he put it in his unfinished autobiography, “a moral personality under orders,” ultimately restless with every institutional expression of the “religion of the Infinite Spirit”? Or does the key to his life and thought lie in an excessive patriotism and nationalism reflected, in part, by his allegiance to the “cause” of the Americanists? Was he a Modernist? Most provocative, perhaps, is the thesis linking these two heresies: does Sullivan's career stand as the embodiment of the continuity between Americanism and Modernism?

In a study recently published in this journal, Lawrence Wills has identified, in a wide range of Hellenistic-Jewish and early Christian literature, a recurring pattern that is sometimes characterized in those sources as a “word of exhortation” (λόγος παρακλήσεως: Acts 13:15; Heb 13:22; cf. Acts 2:40; 1 Macc 10:24; 2 Macc 7:24; 15:11; Apostolic Constitutions 8.5). Toward the end of his article, Wills suggests that the form of this word of exhortation may define a point on a larger rhetorical trajectory within Greco-Roman Hellenism, and that “we can perhaps go further and note the actual compositional techniques that have passed over from Greek rhetoric into Jewish and Christian oratory.” In this assessment Wills is, I believe, quite correct, and in this essay I wish to build upon, and at specific points to refine, his analysis of the form of Hellenistic-Jewish and early Christian sermons.

It has been customary to identify the author of the Itinerarium Egeriae (It. Eg.) as a nun or a “grande dame” from one of the western provinces of the later Roman empire—Spain, Gaul, or even Italy. Yet, a reexamination of the evidence suggests the possibility of a different solution regarding not only the author's religious affiliation and status in society but also her geographical origin. The newly proposed identification is linked with major developments of Christianity in the West, in particular with its spread within urban milieux and with the receptivity of contemporary society to the idea of pilgrimage.

At the end of the second century, four gospels became canonical. Today they are present everywhere in the world at the beginning of the New Testament and at the heart of the Christian Bible, side by side and in the same order, endowed with the same authority. The text of these four gospels has been fixed for a long time, notwithstanding the existence of thousands of textual variants which have troubled European scholars since the eighteenth century. Today no one dreams of publishing interpolated versions of these gospels or of doctoring our holy books. Biblical scholarship devoted to the study of these gospels now occupies a firm place in the programs of numerous theological faculties and departments of religious studies.

In his foundational work on the problems of anxiety and self-affirmation, The Courage to Be, Paul Tillich refers to the twentieth century as an age of anxiety. He describes the century as an era in which humankind has become deeply and disturbingly aware of the threats of meaninglessness and spiritual nonbeing. This anxiety, Tillich asserts, has become a central theme for modern artists and writers, whose works have frequently depicted humankind and society as teetering on the brink of an ontological and spiritual abyss. As Tillich was aware, however, the concept of anxiety did not magically appear in literature in the year 1900. Although Tillich considers the anxiety of meaninglessness to be paramount in the present day, he gives extensive treatment to other anxieties (for example, the anxieties of guilt and death) that deeply concerned writers in earlier times. Tillich mentions T. S. Eliot, Camus, and Sartre, but he also hails Flaubert and Dostoyevsky as explorers of the “deserts and jungles of the human soul.” Another nineteenth-century novelist, who should not have passed without notice, escaped Tillich's attention: Herman Melville.

Mani established his religion on very broad syncretistic grounds, in the hope that it could conquer the whole oikumene, East and West, by integrating the religious traditions of all peoples—except those of the Jews. Although Manichaeism as an organized religion survived for more than a thousand years, and its geographical realm extended from North Africa to Southeast China, this ambition never came close to being realized, and the Manichaeans remained, more often than not, small and persecuted communities. Yet, in a somewhat paradoxical way, Mani did achieve his ecumenical goal. For more than half a millennium, from its birth in the third century throughout late antiquity and beyond, his religion was despised and rejected with the utmost violence by rulers and thinkers belonging to all shades of the spiritual and religious spectrum. In this sense, Manichaeism, an insane system, a “mania,” appeared as the outsider par excellence.

One of the perennial, and more vexing, problems in religious thought and philosophy has been the question unde malum. In ancient, medieval, and modern thought, the issue has been viewed mostly in its theological context. From the perspective of traditional monotheistic theology, the problem thus presents itself: If God is truly all good and all powerful, then why would God cause or even allow evil, whether natural (e.g., earthquakes, floods, human disease) or moral (murder, rape, and the like), to exist? Inasmuch as the existence of evil, at least from the phenomenological point of view, is an indisputable fact, it would seem that either divine omnipotence or benevolence must be limited.

Troeltsch studies, and new translations of his writings, have become increasingly prominent during the past fifteen years. Theologians reflecting a wide range of positions have begun to discover in Troeltsch their own issues and concerns. Some found in Troeltsch the prototype for a “fundamental theology,” grounding the particularity of Christian faith in a more universal philosophical framework. Others took up Troeltsch's role as “theologian of the history of religions school” as a model for the interaction of theology and religious studies in our own time. Theologians concerned with the status of Christian truth claims in the context of religious pluralism have grasped hold of Troeltsch as the pioneer in this endeavor, at least within the history of Christian theology. In brief, Troeltsch now seems to be very relevant, a nineteenth-century thinker who somehow anticipated a multitude of religious concerns prominent in the late twentieth century and hence, the subject of more interest and activity than at any time since his death.