“Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind (adam) in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion….’ And God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Gen 1:26–27 clarifies that the Hebrew term adam stands for the generic species of humanity which is composed of men and women. If there is any doubt on this interpretation, Gen 5:2–3 declares and defines again: “When God created humankind, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them humankind when they were created.”The “image of God in man and woman” opens us to transcend both the masculine and feminine metaphors for God which abound in the Bible and to transcend our historical selves and social institutions in recognition of the Holy One. It would appear that whatever one's interpretation of the “image” and “likeness” of God, one would have to recognize that the biblical text makes explicit that in our resemblance to the Divinity and in our dominion over the earth and animals, men and women share a common human dignity.

Process theology is generally defended in one or more of three ways: In some cases it is proposed as the only coherent and consistent way to satisfy the requirements of a constructive, systematic metaphysics. In other cases it is presented as the only way to avoid the fatal paradoxes inherent in the classical notion of an unchanging God. In still other cases it is urged as the only view compatible with the God of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures and the Christian religious experience.

The first two considerations quite naturally exercise whatever appeal they have on minds of a certain philosophical bent and background. The third consideration is attractive to a far wider audience. For it seems to rest on a reading of the Scriptures and a lived religious experience shared by large numbers of people with limited philosophical interest or expertise.

In light of our present knowledge it seems clear that the Essenes, despite all their intentions to be “true Israel,” in fact constituted a digression from the Judaism of their times, both in their mode of life and in certain of their basic concepts. As to their concepts, one can think of dualism, determinism, astrology, manticism, and perhaps also their highly developed hierarchical angelology; as to their modes of life, illustrations include their extreme segregation, their living in communes, common property, common meals, solar calendar, and baptism as a principal part of their ritual. Many attempts have been made to trace these traits within the Stoa, Cynicism, and Neopythagoreanism, as well as in the Persian religon. Some have been content with comparing the Essenes to other sects of the Hellenistic era. In the following pages I assume the well-established theory of the identity of the Essenes depicted in Philo and Josephus with the community of the Qumran scrolls and propose to show that the accounts of Philo and Josephus did not contain commonplace topoi of classical Utopias.

The historical reconstruction of biblical events represents a difficult and often speculative task, which is well demonstrated by the various scholarly attempts to understand the reform of Hezekiah and to establish defensible conclusions concerning its historicity. A wide range of scholarly opinion has grown out of fundamental disagreements concerning the accuracy and intent of the two biblical sources which describe Hezekiah's reform. The Deuteronomistic book of 2 Kings and the priestly-oriented later work of 2 Chronicles diverge mightily in their handling of Hezekiah's whole reign and especially the reform. In the early years of critical inquiry, the historicity of pre-Exilic events exclusively reported by the Chronicler was entirely dismissed in most circles. The description of Hezekiah's reform in the Book of Kings was dubbed “a mixture of the general and specific that does not inspire much confidence.” Consequently, it became fashionable to dismiss Hezekiah's religious changes as anachronisms inserted by later writers to parallel the reform of Josiah.

Although it is widely agreed that the phylacteries mentioned in Matt 23:5 are tĕfîllîn, this equation has not gone entirely unquestioned. L. Blau stated that only the words těfîllâ (singular) and tĕfîllîn (plural) are used in Talmudic literature, and that conclusions based on the word phylacteries are without foundation, “since this name was not used in truly Jewish circles.” G. G. Fox argued that since Greek phylaktēria refers to charms or amulets, and since for the Pharisee the tĕfîllîn were truly spiritual symbols rather than magical amulets, Matthew's use of the term must be a misrepresentation, probably intentional, expressing his contempt for tĕfîllîn.

Within the last fifteen years, scholars have shown considerable interest in the ritual life of women in antiquity, and have been particularly successful in recognizing the traces of women's initiatory rituals in various Greek and Roman ceremonies and myths. With regard to the Greek materials, the Arrephoria and Brauronia festivals have been treated in this light, as have two ceremonies in which details of the Demeter-Persephone mythos were reenacted: the Thesmophoria and the Haloa.

Among the cults of classical antiquity, the worship of the Greek god Dionysus is one of the most intriguing, ranging in form from rural agricultural festivals in Greece and Asia Minor to complex mystery rites established throughout the Roman Empire. While various aspects of Dionysiac religion have received detailed scholarly treatment, existing studies have paid surprisingly little attention to the extent to which women appear to predominate in the cult as it may be reconstructed from the available sources. The frequent references to the involvement of women in the mythographers and historiographers have usually been explained away in modern scholarship by unsubstantiated appeals to the “emotional” needs of women, and by the association with fertility themes and fertility magic which are considered more appropriate to women than to men.

One of the most inclusive of the Armenian Canon lists is that compiled by Gregory of Tatʿew (1346–1410 C.E.). He was a man of great and comprehensive learning, head of the monastery of Tatʿew, in the province of Siunikʿ. This was a most important center of Armenian learning, which flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The claim that all the virtues are somehow one is advanced in different ways by Socrates and Plato, by Plotinus and Augustine, and by Aquinas. The doctrine of the unity and the interconnection of the virtues is thus common to a number of major thinkers in both ancient and medieval philosophy. But it has hardly been a fashionable view in recent philosophy, and it is apt to seem paradoxical. The purpose of this essay is to indicate the structure of the doctrine as Augustine expounds it and to indicate its relevance to clarifying and making plausible certain other ethical doctrines in Augustine's thought.

One of the celebrated moments of the Reformation age occurred in Leipzig in the summer of 1519. The young Wittenberg theologian Luther, with his colleague Carlstadt, engaged in debate with the even younger scholar from Ingolstadt, John Eck. The present article is an assessment of a well-known conclusion reached about that debate. I mean Luther's judgment that Eck “imitated Proteus” and contradicted himself, rejecting against one debater a position he had affirmed against the other. The charge, which Luther published, did nothing to enhance Eck's reputation at a time when he had already cultivated an assortment of enemies on other grounds.

“The Decline of the Diaconate” was a title given by T. G. Jalland to the addendum to his well-known article, “The Doctrine of the Parity of Ministers.” In this addendum Jalland showed that in the late patristic Church, at the very time when the presbyter's office was being equated with that of the episcopate, the deacon's office was being minimized. In the ante-Nicene Church the deacon had basked in the reflected glory of the bishop and had wielded administrative and consultative powers great enough to make any presbyter envious, but by the fourth century this prestige and power had begun to slip.

As a youth of nineteen, Jonathan Edwards was full of questions and anxiety about his conversion. Like many another Puritan seeker, Edwards was eager to obtain the reward of faith but found it impossible not to doubt the genuineness of his religious pretensions. Doubt and self-distrust were hardly unusual in the religious life of a New England Puritan. Indeed, as Edmund Morgan has observed, they were an expected, even prescribed, part of the Christian pilgrim's journey toward God. “This was the constant message of the Puritan preachers: in order to be sure [of one's standing before God] one must be unsure. … [T]he surest earthly sign of a saint was his uncertainty….” Edwards' reflections upon his experience, however, brought to light another, more interesting reason for hesitation—and one that was anything but conventional. He observed a marked discrepancy between what he had experienced and what the theorists of conversion—among them his esteemed grandfather Solomon Stoddard—said he ought to experience. Furthermore, far from glossing over this discrepancy between theory and experience, Edwards brought it to the very center of his attention. He did not seek to evade his difficulty but determined instead to make this aporia the basis for an inquiry that eventually led him to reject the step-by-step model of conversion that had provided the framework for New England's discussion of the knotty problem, never satisfactorily resolved, of how to formulate a reliable procedure for determining who were the visible saints. Even those skeptical about the possibility of arriving at such a procedure, like Solomon Stoddard, phrased their objections within that framework. Stoddard never doubted the truth of the preparationist, step-by-step description of conversion; he did doubt that any reliable procedure for distinguishing true faith from its imitations could be constructed on the basis of that description. Edwards' eventual rejection of his grandfather's open communion practice was a consequence of a critical reevaluation of the step-by-step model upon which New England thought and practice had been based.

John Hick has recently observed that within the “spectrum of disarray” in recent Christian theology regarding life after death, some “moderately traditional theologians,” while retaining the idea of an afterlife, have moved to an avowal of universal salvation. In part the importance of this trend lies in the fact that theologians of a universalist persuasion—Hick himself being a notable example—may now increasingly be accounted significant rather than peripheral figures. While universalism has always been an available option for a few, constituting since the early Christian centuries “a small underground stream of belief,” it has usually been strongly opposed by orthodox thinkers.

John Donne's “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” is justly regarded as one of the finest devotional poems of the English Renaissance period. It is likewise significant for what it reveals about the theology of a major English poet and divine and, more broadly, for what it reveals about the spiritual psychology of his time. The personal nature of the poem, which was written during the troubled years before his ordination in 1615, underscores the force of its ideas for Donne. At the thematic center of the poem is a necessary connection between Godgiven corrective affliction and the sinful soul's turning to God.

The nadir of the Tridentine papacy occupied those years which spanned the dissolution of the Jesuit order in 1773 and the imprisonment of Pius VII by Napoleon from 1809 to 1814. The suspension of the Church's most distinguished organ of Ultramontane sentiment alleviated the further spread of Febronian or Josephist principles throughout the Netherlands and the German and even Italian sections of the Empire. Yet, Pius VI's concern with the Punctuation of Ems or the Synod of Pistoia paled in comparison with the challenge to spiritual and temporal papal authority contained in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and other doctrines and consequences of the French Revolution.