This Spring I received a long distance telephone call from Dean Samuel Miller, who invited me to give this year's Ingersoll Lecture on human immortality. Three days later, Dean Miller was dead. When I heard the sad news, I, as many of you no doubt, began to think about the way he had influenced me, especially during my theological training here at Harvard Divinity School. One of my most vivid memories was a point which he emphasized in his class on Religion and Literature. Sam Miller felt strongly that in our modern 20th century two of the most profound and important experiences of human life are becoming more and more insulated from everyday existence. These two experiences, birth and death, have the potential for affecting the character and quality of the rest of life. But in each instance, they are falling victim to modern technological efficiency and adding to the process of dehumanization rather than counteracting it.

Believing belongs to experience. It does not generate itself. When men today repeat the Lord's Prayer, saying Jesus' words after Jesus, “Lead us not into trial but deliver us from evil,” they are giving voice to their believing for a reason. The reason is the experience of being diminished and enlarged in the world of death, beauty, and renewal — in the great world of action that is the “circumpressure” of God. Believing (literally, holding dear) arises in times of testing in which human faithfulness takes shape and becomes tangible as an affection. How faithfulness becomes palpable is the subject matter of the following account.

For many years now, it has become very common for Old Testament scholars to refer to the numerous parallels between the patriarchal customs reflected in the stories of Genesis and the Custom law of the cuneiform documents of the second millennium B.C. Particular attention has been given to the Nuzi texts and to custom law related to marriage. The present study is directed to a reexamination of the parallels to marriage customs as they have been applied to the story of Jacob's marriage to the daughters of Laban.

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.

Dr. Pahnke's field of interest, just described, is of very great importance. I can say this even though he and I might have some differences as to methodology. Questions must be asked in terms in which they can be answered. Thus Dr. Pahnke has sketched for us a new and promising approach to problems in an old field, and I am with him all the way in this interest.

Despite the persistence of significant differences over the interpretation of humilitas in Luther's early works, an apparent consensus is afoot on both the nature of the problem which drove him to his Reformation theology and the nature of the discovery which forms the heart of this theology. As the picture now comes into focus in the secondary literature, the problem Luther apparently confronted so despairingly might be summarized as the viator-status of Christian life within the traditional medieval ordo salutis.

A recent article by George B. Murray draws the attention of philosophers and theologians to a problem in the thought of Teilhard de Chardin which they often tend to overlook. The “synthetic theory” of evolution held by the majority of contemporary biologists, Father Murray points out, is not to be found in Teilhard's scientific writings. Instead, Teilhard proposes a theory of orthogenesis, a word and concept now almost universally rejected by biologists. This discrepancy between Teilhard and the best contemporary biological thought is often ignored by those who find his writings a promising approach to the reconciliation of science and Christianity or to problems of science and philosophy. Father Murray gives a very useful analysis of probable reasons for Teilhard's insistence on retaining the word “orthogenesis” in the face of opposition from fellow-scientists and in spite of the fact that his modifications of the meaning of orthogenesis might have been more readily acceptable had he described them by a different name. However, much more important than the reasons why Teilhard insisted on the use of the word “orthogenesis” is the question, which Murray does not discuss, of the importance and place of orthogenesis in Teilhard's thought, whether it is legitimate for philosophers and theologians to accept the general outline of Teilhard's theories and leave this technical scientific question to the scientists, or whether Teilhard's whole system of thought stands or falls with a discredited theory of biology.

Among recent proposals to give clarity and precision to theological concepts, none is more considered and provocative than that of Gordon D. Kaufman. Kaufman has correctly discerned that the question put to religious belief by the contemporary mood is one which concerns not only its truth but, even more fundamentally, the very meaning of its language. Abjuring the obscurity of much theological terminology and analysis, Kaufman accepts the challenge to clarify the meaning of crucial religious terms in the context of ordinary experience and discourse, an undertaking as refreshing as it is suggestive. While I am fully prepared to accept Kaufman's claim that he has put his finger on a, if not the, crucial issue for present theological reflection, I find myself unable to accept the results of his inquiry. In stating my disagreement with his conclusions, I hope to develop a brief but coherent response to the issues which Kaufman addresses.

Birth and death are the most elemental symbols of the mystery we are to ourselves. Birth: the original moment of creativity through which new life comes into being with all the potentialities for joy and sorrow and meaning which we know to be most deeply human. Death: the dissolution and passing away, and even violent destruction, of all of this, disappearing forever from human consciousness. Events of such importance can never be left by men to lie undisturbed in their bare facticity: they will be elaborated and interpreted in myth and theory; they will be transformed in their character and their import for human life by deliberate techniques of control, as well as by the more unconscious impact of long established custom and practice. There are no obvious criteria for deciding what is significant and what is true, what is right and good, with regard to such events. The most we can do, perhaps, is formulate a negative criterion: above all, with events of such real and such symbolic import for human life, we want to avoid serious illusion or delusion.

When Augustine was a young man, he tells us in his Confessions, he asked himself and his friends,

“Do we love anything but the beautiful? What then is the beautiful? and what is beauty? What is it that attracts and wins us to the things we love? for unless there were in them a grace and beauty, they could by no means draw us unto them.” And I marked and perceived that in bodies themselves, there was a beauty, from their forming a sort of whole, and again, another from apt and mutual correspondence, as of a part of the body with its whole, or a shoe with a foot, and the like. And this consideration sprang up in my mind, out of my inmost heart, and I wrote On the Fair and the Fit, I think two or three books. Thou knowest, O Lord, for it is gone from me, for I have them not, but they are strayed from me, I know not how.

Although the relationship between the Biblical figures Abraham and Adam underlies episodes in Books V, VIII, XI, and XII of Paradise Lost, only the significance of the parallels in the last two books has been explored fully. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski finds that the transition from vision to narration in Michael's presentation of history, coinciding with the story of Abraham, symbolizes Adam's initial revelation through faith of a covenantal relationship with God. Stressing the similarities between Abraham's departure from Ur and Adam's from Eden, Mother Mary Christopher Pecheux believes that this association “enriches and universalizes Milton's theme, helps to emphasize the virtues of the Christian hero, and reinforces the paradox of the fortunate fall.” Moreover, the topic of Abraham's departure from his homeland affords Milton the opportunity of incorporating the epic-journey motif into his poem.

At the twelfth International Congress of the Historical Sciences there were a number of papers read on the subject of religious tolerance and heresies in modern times. Among these there were two which are of particular relevance to anyone interested in the religious thought of the Reformation Era. Professors Martin Schmidt and Gerhard Schilfert, the authors, were especially concerned with English Puritanism and its relations with continental radical ferment. Schmidt analyzed the work of Hermann Weingarten, who believed that England's century of Reformation was the seventeenth rather than the sixteenth and that it was during the struggle against the Stuarts that the history of the English church became a record of new intellectual and religious movements. Hence, the chiliastic Independents of the English Interregnum were analagous to the Anabaptists of continental fame in the early sixteenth century. In fact, during the unrest of the English Puritan Revolution, German influences presumably transmitted from the Netherlands were willingly accepted. Among the writers involved in this process were Jakob Böhme and Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil. From these sources came the belief in the second coming of Christ which formed the unifying bond for all shades of English revolutionary Christian thought. Cromwell, himself, was deeply affected by chiliastic thought, but when he assumed political responsibility, he had to act in a more rational way. Finally the enthusiasm of the Fifth Monarchists and the Levellers subsided into the quiet mysticism of the Quakers and the natural rights position of the Age of Reason.

Not all religious discourse or talk is about God, and not all that is about God is also about the world. Let us here pay attention, however, to that religious talk which is about both God and the world, not in bare conjunction (e.g., “God exists and the world exists”), but in some richer relationship (e.g., “God is present in the world”). And let us call this latter sort God-and-the-world talk. Such talk is interesting to theologians and to plain men, and it is therefore of interest to the analyst of religious language.

In 1843, the Reverend Robert Baird, “an esteemed minister of the American Presbyterian Church,” sojourning seven years in Europe “for the prosecution of certain religious and philanthropic objects,” published a book for the benefit of the various Europeans who had addressed to him “innumerable inquiries … respecting his native country, and especially respecting its religious institutions.”

That Jonathan Edwards is an idealist is a commonly held view among historians of American philosophy. Not surprisingly, the early essays “Of Being,” “The Mind,” and the so-called “Notes on Natural Science” figure prominently in the substantiation of this judgment; for they offer not infrequent and at times unambiguous testimony to a tendency in Edwards' writings which seems to reduce all reality to the status of exclusively mental existence. Yet despite the claim which such a characterization can lay to Edwards's own words, it can be seriously misleading unless viewed within the context of his broader theological, scientific, and epistemological commitments. Because the very works which are most conspicuous in their idealistic tendencies also evidence the countervailing emphases entailed in Edwards's empiricist orientation, an examination of those early essays can itself serve to place his metaphysics in perspective.

The problem of evil has always been a great enigma. But there is something even more enigmatic about Emerson's handling of the problem. Critics have found that in the writings of Emerson this becomes an enigma shrouded in a mystery. We shall first sum up the important critical opinions about the Emersonian solution of this problem, then elucidate his theory of evil, and finally demonstrate how he overcomes the antinomy between the philosophical problem of evil and the personal problem of evil.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the usage of hwqyc in classical Hebrew with a view to proposing that hwqyc is a specialized usage in the context of covenant institutions. We shall first investigate the occurrences of hwqyc in biblical Hebrew, then discuss its etymology, and finally analyze pertinent covenantal institutions that may shed some light on the subject of this investigation.