In three books and numerous articles, Calum M. Carmichael argues for a radical transformation in the way the laws of Deuteronomy are to be understood. His most recent work, Law and Narrative in the Bible, maintains that the legal corpus of Deuteronomy, far from being “law,” rather constitutes “literature,” in which the Deuteronomistic historian reflects upon the full range of pre-exilic Israelite narrative, Genesis through 2 Kings. In the course of this argument, Carmichael makes fundamental assertions about the composition of Deuteronomy, the history of Israelite literature, and the history of interpretation. Carmichel introduces his work as an attempt “to overturn longstanding views on material that has always been in center stage in the study of the Bible” and as “radical in its results.” His work has already generated a series of further studies of narrative allusion and drafting techniques in Deuteronomy that presuppose his arguments.

Factual and theological riddles continue to cluster around Charles Chauncy (1705–1787), pastor of the First (“Old Brick”) Church in Boston and the one most deserving of the title “theologian of the American Revolution.” No one knows the exact place of his burial. It has not yet been determined whether he wrote several anonymous treatises attributed to him (including the anti-revivalistic tract A Wonderful Narrative), and in many recent publications and index files of major libraries he is still confused with his great-grandfather of the same name, the second president of Harvard University from 1654 to 1671–72.

Although evangelicalism is “spiritual” and empiricism is “natural,” the great principle of empiricism, that one must see for oneself and be in the presence of the thing one knows, applies as well to evangelical faith. Each of these two methodologies operates along a continuum that joins emotion to intellect; each joins externality to words through “ideas/ideals of sensation,” that is, through either perception or grace-in-perception or both. While empiricism refers to immediate contact with and direct impact from objects and subjects in time and place, evangelicalism entertains the notions that religious truth is concerned with experiential presuppositions and that experience need not be nonreligious. On the basis of the experiential common denominator between empiricism and evangelicalism, through the “both/and” logic of philosophical theology, I argue that John Wesley (1703–91), founder of British Methodism, and Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), leader of the American Great Awakening, theologize empiricism. They ground transcendentalism in the world, balance religious myths and religious morality with scientific reverence for fact and detail, and ally empirical assumptions with “disciplined” spirit. Above all, they share the simultaneously rational and sensationalist reliance on experience as the avenue to both natural and spiritual knowledge.

The first decades of the nineteenth century saw a resurgence of interest in critical biblical studies in the United States. Though many colonial religious leaders were well trained in the area of biblical studies because of their European educations, this field of study declined to a very low state in America in the eighteenth century. The nineteenth-century revival of biblical studies in America, led by scholars such as Edward Robinson, William E. Channing, Andrews Norton, and Moses Stuart, was a homegrown, broad-based movement that ran the gamut of theological positions from conservative Calvinist to Unitarian. One unique feature of this movement was its interest in the biblical criticism of German writers; indeed, many works of German scholarship were translated into English by these American writers long before they achieved circulation in England. The resulting American biblical scholarship flourished not only at seminaries and divinity schools, but also on more practical levels. Edward Robinson, for example, led an expedition to the Middle East to study the geography and antiquities of the Holy Land. This scholarship was also tied to the prevalent missionary impulse, resulting in the translation of the Bible into many additional languages, especially those of the Middle and Far Eastern missionary fields.

Paradox, a subject that has intrigued philosophers and scientists since ancient times, not long ago also captured the attention of many literary critics and historians of religion. A key analytic term among the old New Critics, paradox—along with irony and ambiguity—was for decades taken as central to poetic language, the force of which was understood to derive from the play of multiple, often contradictory meanings. In history of religions, a concept of paradox was essential in the monumental work of Mircea Eliade, who repeatedly pointed to the power of conjoined opposites in myth. To many scholars in both fields, these paradoxes of poetry and myth have by now become passe—taken for granted, perhaps, but no longer topics for further exploration. They gain new significance, however, with the increasing interest in the critical study of academic writing over the last few years. For despite the hard-minded academic stance found in much contemporary religio-historical writing, the paradoxes familiar from religion and literature still often come into play, indeed, sometimes to explore striking contradictions that are posed in the fashion of paradoxes from science.