Ben Sira's view of the cult and his relationship to the priesthood are issues which have received much attention from scholars, yet there is no consensus on either question. Most critics cannot escape from the conclusion that Ben Sira had at least an interest in cult and priesthood. Some have argued that he harbored even a domineering interest in cultic worship, but others, like R. Smend and R. Pfeiffer, are ambivalent: they claim on the one hand that Ben Sira had an intense interest in things cultic, but on the other that he kept “a meaningful distance” from the cult (Pfeiffer). In other words, though his interest was intense, the ritual itself really meant very little to Ben Sira. The contradiction in this statement is evident. In a recent monograph, J. Marböck argued that although Ben Sira had a personal love for temple ceremony, he attributed to cultic law and ritual a very subordinate position. J. G. Snaith has made similar claims about Ben Sira's view of the cult.

The relationship of the preaching and teaching of Jesus to apocalyptic has been a vexed one ever since Albert Schweitzer's assault on the liberal “Lives of Jesus” and his advocacy of consistent eschatology along with his characterization of Jesus’ teachings as interim ethics. While many of the details of Schweitzer's hypothesis failed to be persuasive, his insistence that Jesus’ activity be seen in the context of apocalypticism has made a profound impact on subsequent historical Jesus scholarship and, in spite of his own noncommital stance with regard to the Two Document Hypothesis, on the theological characterization of Q.

Max Weber's essay on the relationship of ascetic Protestantism and the spirit of capitalism, published in 1904/05, is certainly the most controversial and perhaps the most complicated piece he wrote. As we all know, two generations of scholars have discussed Weber's essay since 1905, filling the shelves of libraries with the fruits of their labors. Scholars in different fields have expressed their own version of what Weber supposedly wanted to say, often generalizing Weber's remarks and giving their own rather than Weber's original opinion.

According to Goethe, “writing history is a way of getting the past off your back.” In the twentieth century, Protestant theology has a heavy burden on its back—the readiness of some of its most distinguished representatives to embrace totalitarian regimes, notably Adolf Hitler's “Third Reich.” In this matter the historian's task is not to jettison but to ensure that the burden on Protestants is not too lightly cast aside—an easy temptation if we imagine that the theologians who turned to Hitler did so with the express desire of embracing a monster. On the contrary: they did so believing their choice was ethically correct. How could this come to pass in the homeland of the Reformation?

The general concern of Austin Farrer's deservedly well-known approach to our discernment of God's activity in the world is to ground it in our knowledge of our own selves as agents, especially as we interact with God as Divine Agent. In his book The Glass of Vision, Farrer develops an account of how this overall approach applies to the concept of revelation and religious language. The “text” he chose for this book, “Now we see through a glass darkly,” sounds as promising as the title.