Prefatory Note: In July, 1976, Rudolf Bultmann, the last of the great Protestant theologians of this century, died in Marburg, Germany, a few weeks before his 92d birthday. An almost life-long friendship, beginning with my being his student in the 1920s, bound me to this man of towering scholarship, clarity of mind, purity of character, and deep — if troubled — piety. In November, 1976, the Theological Faculty of Marburg University held a memorial for its longtime professor of New Testament studies, which was attended by many persons from all over Germany and neighboring countries this side of the iron curtain. Of the two academic lectures delivered before that audience, one was by a New Testament theologian and erstwhile student of Bultmann, Professor Erich Dinkler from Heidelberg, the other by me, not a theologian but a philosopher, not a Christian but a Jew. The complete proceedings of the memorial meeting have been published under the title Gedenken an Rudolf Bultmann by J. C. B. Mohr in Tübingen, 1977. Only part of what I had prepared in writing was orally presented at the occasion, but the whole was printed. I here submit my own English version of the unabridged German essay, which in the spirit of Bultmann's own openmindedness pushes some of his theoretical concerns beyond the point which he himself had reached.

Here in this particular world—of our Divinity School, the Center for the Study of World Religions and the Committee on the Study of Religions and all who are associated with us — we devote ourselves to the understanding of the spiritual and social laws which govern what authors of old called the sense of divinity and the religion that is born from it, making us beings who seek what is of surpassing worth, seek that which is and does not come into being or pass away, seek that which can bestow on us fullness of life and arouse us to adoration and imitation. The identification and the interpretation of these laws is the guiding purpose both of the study of religion and of theology, which also criticizes them. The appropriation of these laws, the incarnating of them into our spiritual reason, is the serious purpose of religion or of the communal and personal faith, into a full measure of which we aspire to grow. But what we call the serious work of appropriation—the task of realizing and becoming the faithful, religious beings we are in potentiality—also involves an element of play. That, at least, is the observation of the historian Johan Huizinga; and it is an observation that many of us have come to accept. The word “play,” however, here signifies something other than the simple copying of exemplars or obeying of rules of action; “play” means participating in the actualization of the ideal realities'that summon us. Hence, our spiritual propensity to retreat into ourselves and to venture out beyond ourselves in order to discover and to celebrate such being as constrains our whole-hearted respect and love, subordinating all our other inclinations and tendencies: that propensity is our spiritual play by which we help to actualize the supreme worth we seek. And in nothing characterizing our human nature does this native propensity show itself more plainly than in the imagination's play with symbols. It is about this play of symbols that I propose to speak— as a tragic play.

The major purpose of this article is to study the dynamics of biblical poetry, especially in terms of its dominant device, parallelism. The goal of poetic analysis is to understand the ways in which a poet strengthens his message through effects engendered by formal devices. The process of analysis needs a principled and reasoned method of study which can be applied to poetic materials. In poetry, as in music, a disciplined approach will deepen not only one's understanding but also one's appreciation of the poetic system as a whole and of individual poems.

If the book of Wisdom (Wisdom of Solomon) was written in Alexandria in the Late Ptolemaic or early Imperial period, as seems most probable, it is a priori likely that its author and intended audience were familiar with the Egyptian goddess Isis, at least in her hellenized form. This is all the more likely since, as many critics have acknowledged, the author of Wisdom was cognizant of other aspects of Hellenism and was able to adopt some of these in his presentation of Jewish theology. Thus, for example, there are reminiscences of Homer and Hesiod, allusions to Egyptian religious practices, and Greek philosophical vocabulary. That the author was aware of Isis and her mythology need not mean, of course, that this influenced his representation of Sophia to any significant degree. But given the popularity of the goddess, this possibility can scarcely be excluded. It will be the purpose of this article to examine the evidence for the influence of Isis upon Sophia and to inquire into the function of the reshaping of Jewish wisdom speculation as it is encountered in the Wisdom of Solomon.

While the discovery of the Manichaean, and then the Gnostic, MS collections in Coptic has provoked a number of studies on the broad cultural context of these two religious movements, the specific Egyptian environment in which the MSS were transmitted remains largely unknown. Lack of documentation generally accounts for this ignorance. Especially in the case of the Coptic Gnostic library, all sorts of ideas and religious sects have been called forth to comment upon the corpus and to explain, it seems, everything except what was common in the Nile valley in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.

In 1891 Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) opened her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection, with a romanticized account of her family tree entitled “Ancestral Shadows.” Little more than one hundred pages later she closed her presentation with a confident prediction that in future centuries the “Tree of Life” would “blossom” under the influence of “Divine Science,” benefiting all the nations. Between these extremities of genealogy and eschatology she grouped a potpourri of reflections— personal, historical, literary, and theological —which defy easy categorization and lack apparent organization. To this day her selfportrait remains a puzzle, a resource often ignored by those struggling to understand this “remarkable” woman. This essay is an attempt to unlock the enigma of Retrospection and Introspection by examining the content and the structure of the text itself, thereby shedding light on Mary Baker Eddy's self-conception as the discoverer and founder of Christian Science.

During a tour of Europe in 1860–61, Lev Tolstoy had the opportunity to meet the internationally famous French socialist, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, who was then living in exile in Brussels. Since by that time Proudhon's reputation in Russia was already well established, and since the young Russian author was thoroughly familiar with his Qu' est-ce que la propriété?, Tolstoy looked forward to the meeting with great anticipation. By all accounts he was not disappointed. The two men hit it off remarkably well, and even toward the end of his life Tolstoy remembered Proudhon with affection and admiration. This is not to say that their views on politics, society, religion, and international law were in complete accord. Tolstoy was, after all, quite skeptical about Proudhon's socialism both before and after their encounter. But in the main he respected him for his impassioned commitment to moral truth and social justice.