In August 1947, a few months after President Harry S. Truman pledged the United States to fight communism around the globe, Time magazine delivered a stern warning to its wide readership from Reinhold Niebuhr, the nation's best-known theologian: “The new idolatry in the U.S. may be a blind, uncritical worship of democracy.” The Time article excerpted a Christianity and Crisis piece on “Democracy as a Religion” in which Niebuhr stressed the hidden dangers of the increasingly ubiquitous paeans to democracy in postwar America. That spring's commencement addresses, he noted, would give any sensible observer the distinct impression that “Americans have only one religion: devotion to democracy. They extol its virtues, are apprehensive about the perils to which it is exposed, pour maledictions upon its foes, rededicate themselves periodically to its purposes and claim unconditional validity for its ideals.”

A fascinating anecdote preserved in the Babylonian Talmud (b. ῾Abod. Zar. 17a) tells the story of a woman who comes before Rav Hisda and discloses to him that her younger son is the product of incestuous intercourse she has performed with her older son. Rav Hisda, in turn, rather than instructing her with regard to her penance, orders the preparation of her shrouds, thus indicating that her death is inescapable and imminent. Although the nature of the encounter between Rav Hisda and the sinner is not explicit in the story itself, the passage is situated within the Babylonian Talmud in the context of a broader legal and theological discussion centered on the penitential requirements for a person seeking to turn away from minut (heresy).

A number of political theologies have emerged within modern Judaism, primarily as a reaction to the rise of Zionism but also, and to a lesser degree, to that of socialism, pacifism, and other ideological movements. Among the characteristics they shared are a “father”—i.e., an individual who fleshed out their tenets in more or less systematic fashion—and an attempt to deal with the nature and governance of a future Jewish state. The majority of these theologies failed to achieve significant influence in the wider public arena. Notably, however, there is one modern Jewish political theology that evolved by means of a different process, one that was gradual and decidedly unsystematic. It also lacks a single founder or figurehead, even though, like its counterparts, it developed and sought to remain within a particular social faction where it has long exercised significant influence and continues to do so to this day. I am referring to the doctrine of Daʿat Torah (literally “the Torah view,” “the opinion of the Torah,” “the knowledge of the Torah,” or “the Torah mind”), which arose in the first half of the twentieth century in Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) circles. It can be summarized in a single sentence: The great religious authorities hold the power to issue rulings not only in their specific areas of expertise but in all areas of life, including the political realm.

As is well known, no Pharisaic document has survived. What we know of this Jewish faction has been transmitted through the mediation of other, frequently hostile, factions, or later sources. The sudden discovery of a Pharisaic document hidden in a cave somewhere would certainly arouse profound interest and excitement. In what follows, I would like to propose that the story of the rupture between King Jannaeus and the Pharisees recounted in b. Qiddušin 66a is actually such a discovery, except that it was not concealed in a sealed jar but rather embedded in the Babylonian Talmud (BT).

The rationalist Johann Friedrich Röhr makes a passing but telling comment in his 1823 review of Schleiermacher's then recently published Glaubenslehre, when moving on from the doctrines of redemption and reconciliation: “We can pass over the explanation of the ecclesial doctrine of the prophetic, high priestly, and kingly office of Christ. More important is the doctrine of justification.” Röhr's disinterest has, in large part, been retained by more recent theological considerations of Schleiermacher. Despite ample recognition of the fact that Schleiermacher rejuvenated the doctrine of Christ's threefold office after a period of general neglect, extended reflection upon the actual implications of Schleiermacher's understanding of Christ as prophet, priest, and king for the rest of his system, and his doctrine of redemption in particular, has been lacking. In both editions of the Glaubenslehre, however, four complete sections are devoted to the threefold office, which with two preceding sections on the redeeming and reconciling activity of Christ make up Schleiermacher's doctrinal heading “Of the Work of Christ” within his division on Christology.

In the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul writes:

In January or February of 384 c.e., the Christian pilgrim known to us as Egeria left Jerusalem, where she had been based, and headed east. According to her own account, she felt impelled by God to climb Mount Nebo. With her traveled “some holy men from Jerusalem, a presbyter and deacons, and several brothers (monks).” The trip, which took them through Jericho and Livias, went very well. Her guides were able to point out further local sites, and, after some instructive detours, they reached their goal. Mount Nebo was high and steep, but the group of pilgrims, now swollen in number by the addition of local monks, made the climb successfully. Close to the summit they found a church commemorating the site of Moses's death. After a short service consisting of readings from Scripture and prayers, the local holy men asked Egeria if she would like to see “the places which are described in the Books of Moses.” This proposal “delighted” her, and together they climbed up to the actual summit.

In recent years, there has been a surge in the study of ritual impurity and its relationship to immorality (or, perhaps more accurately, prohibited activity) in biblical literature and early Judaism. Yet relatively scant attention has been paid to one of the most important topics pertaining to impurity—the menstrual laws of Leviticus (the laws of [niddah]) and their development in early Jewish texts. The niddah laws are uniquely important because they appear both in the context of ritual-impurity legislation (Leviticus 12 and Leviticus 15) and in the context of legislation concerning prohibited acts (Lev 18:19 and Lev 20:18). Or, to put it another way: biblical menstrual laws comprise both impurity and prohibition elements.

When the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court conclude that some law, or some decision of a lower court, violates the U.S. Constitution, no great difficulties of principle or sentiment need accompany their decision to abrogate the opinions of the earlier legislators or judges. The justices, and others, are expected to understand their decision either as correcting a mistake that had been introduced by fallible people who, with intentions good or bad, or unintentionally, had violated the system's basic rulebook, or as reflecting the fact that since the time those legislators or judges made their decisions something relevant (such as notions of “cruel and unusual punishment” or of what affects interstate commerce) had changed, so what was once constitutionally acceptable no longer is. Thus, however upsetting the substance of the justices’ decision may be, it need not imply a condemnation of their predecessors nor entail a disruption of the system's authority structures—as is seen in the fact that the justices, and American citizens, readily use such explicit verbs as “reverse,” “strike down,” or “overturned” for what the justices do

As the first Christian bishop executed by his Christian episcopal opponents through a secular court, Priscillian of Avila has stirred the interest and imagination of many scholars. A well-known problem with reconstructing both Priscillian's life and theology is that, apart from some authentic treatises, most of the information about him comes from the polemical statements of his sworn enemies, such as Ithacius of Ossonuba. Sulpicius Severus contended that Ithacius was a “worthless . . . bold, loquacious, impudent, and extravagant man,” and yet he “poured forth entreaties full of ill-will and accusations against Priscillian.” Although Ithacius's book is lost, writers such as Filaster, Sulpicius Severus, Orosius, Jerome, Consentius, Augustine, Leo the Great, Vincent of Lérins, Prosper of Aquitaine, Hydatius, and Isidore of Seville received their information about Priscillian mostly from Ithacius's book or from the readers of his book. Later perceptions of Priscillian (and Priscillianists) have, no doubt, been influenced by what these prominent figures reiterated following Ithacius.

Past historical-critical research into Amos 1–2 has typically relied on one of two strategies in relating the historical Amos's identity as a prophet to the authority and scriptural status of the book. In the first strategy, many interpreters have detected in these eight stanzas allusions to and descriptions of particular political relations, economic contexts, or military engagements, supposing that such correlations secure the book's roots in the eighth century b.c.e. Such chronological benchmarks, in turn, are implicitly thought to sustain the importance of Amos's prophetic identity—i.e., the Amos of Tekoa named in 1:1—in effect constituting the text's nature as scripture. A second, somewhat related strategy has centered on the reconstructed “original” or “secondary” status of certain passages. In this redaction-critical variation of the historical-critical endeavor, interpreters assume that an understanding of the text's chronological development can help to flesh out the picture of Israel's (and Judah's) developing theology or theologies. Again, this model tacitly accepts that prophetic identity plays an intimate and necessary role in the text's authenticity (and conversely, that redactional composition contributes to a passage's supposed “inauthenticity”) and also, therefore, in its authoritativeness within various temporally-constrained interpretive communities.

The study of Origen's anthropology has generated a great deal of interest in the last few decades. This ongoing reassessment has filled considerable lacunae and redressed fundamental misconceptions in this area of his thought. There remains, however, an aspect of his anthropology in need of more thorough analysis. Scholarship on Origen's understanding of sin remains underdeveloped. Most studies of his conception of sin have concerned themselves with his famous teaching on the preexistent fall found in First Principles. Seldom has scholarship traced this theme beyond this early treatise. A notable exception is the ambitious attempt by Georg Teichtweier to offer a comprehensive account of Origen's understanding of sin in his Die Sündenlehre des Origenes. However, the scope of Teichtweier's project is so broad that any sustained expression of any particular aspect of Origen's hamartiological teaching is inhibited.

Albert Schweitzer's engagement with Judaism, and with the Jewish community more generally, has never been the subject of substantive discussion. On the one hand this is not surprising—Schweitzer wrote little about Judaism or the Jews during his long life, or at least very little that was devoted principally to those subjects. On the other hand, the lack of a study might be thought odd—Schweitzer's work as a New Testament scholar in particular is taken up to a significant degree with presenting a picture of Jesus, of the earliest Christian communities, and of Paul, and his scholarship emphasizes the need to see these topics against the background of a specific set of Jewish assumptions. It is also noteworthy because Schweitzer married a baptized Jew, whose father's academic career had been disadvantaged because he was a Jew. Moreover, Schweitzer lived at a catastrophic time in the history of the Jews, a time that directly affected his wife's family and others known to him. The extent to which this personal contact with Jews and with Judaism influenced Schweitzer either in his writings on Judaism or in his life will in part be the subject of this article.

Modern philosophy has been inhospitable to the soul. In the English-speaking world, the dominant tendency, since Hobbes and Locke, has been to subordinate the mental to the physical. Even where mental phenomena are granted real existence, they are construed as effects of underlying physical processes. To explain them is to identify their physical causes. Physicalist approaches to the mind cannot but see the soul as, in Gilbert Ryle's derisive phrase, a “ghost in the machine.” It is an unwanted leftover from a religious age with a bygone philosophical psychology. To the extent that mental entities do any explanatory work, modern philosophy favors “mind” over “soul.”

At the pinnacle of his career, the renowned sociologist Robert Bellah did not choose to write a magnum opus refining the influential work of a lifetime, focused particularly on contemporary American society. Nor did he choose to offer an unbuttoned reflection on the future of his discipline or the culture he had so closely studied. Instead, he devoted thirteen years to a project of breathtaking scope, religion in the evolutionary history of the human species, from the primordial soup to the Dalai Lama. He asked where religion had come from, not where it was going. He eventually felt compelled to truncate this story at the “axial age,” in the first millennium before the Common Era. This 700-page “fragment” of the original vision (before his recent death, he held out hope for a smaller companion book to round it off) is a work of judicious audacity. It is high tribute to Bellah's intellect and industry that it merits the first modifier no less than the second.