Divine Utterances

Why does the Christian walk often feel like an ongoing struggle and why does God’s creation include imperfection, let alone forces that are intent on thwarting God’s creative work? In seeking a response to these questions, this book argues that the biblical accounts describe creation in terms of a progressive transformation process whereby the initially incomplete created order will reach perfection only in the fulfillment of new creation. The following discussion then outlines a comprehensive framework for the biblical theology of humanity’s struggles, centered on three key themes: corporeal temptation, deficient social structures, and the much-debated notion of spiritual warfare. The book presents an overarching canonical narrative that threads together a series of diverse biblical topics, from Job's temptation to the Atonement. The final part surveys biblical teaching on how human conduct can be aligned with God’s creative purpose, and discusses three “assignments” from Jesus to believers: to celebrate the Eucharist, to pray the Lord’s Prayer, and to fulfill the Great Commission.

Essays in this collection explore the complex relationship between text and orality in colonial situations of antiquity from Homer, Plato, and Mithras to the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and rabbinic tradition. Orality could be a deliberate decision by highly literate people who chose not to put certain things in writing, either to exercise control over the tradition or to preserve the secrecy of ritual performance. Exploring both theoretical issues and historical questions, the book demonstrates the role of text as a form of imperial control over against oral tradition as a means of resistance by the marginalized peasantry or marginalized elite of Israel and the early Church. Paperback edition is available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org)

Despite its importance and the frequent references made to it by modern scholars, this commentary has never before been translated into English in its entirety. This volume, which includes an extensive introduction, fills this gap, thus providing a needed contribution to medieval scholarship.

What is language? How did it originate and how does it work? What is its relation to thought and, beyond thought, to reality? Questions like these have been at the center of lively debate ever since the rise of scholarly activities in the Islamic world during the 8th/9th century. However, in contrast to contemporary philosophy, they were not tackled by scholars adhering to only one specific discipline. Rather, they were addressed across multiple fields and domains, no less by linguists, legal theorists, and theologians than by Aristotelian philosophers. In response to the different challenges faced by these disciplines, highly sophisticated and more specialized areas emerged, comparable to what nowadays would be referred to as semantics, pragmatics, and hermeneutics, to name but a few – fields of research that are pursued to this day and still flourish in some of the traditional schools. Philosophy of language, thus, has been a major theme throughout Islamic intellectual culture in general; a theme which, probably due to its trans-disciplinary nature, has largely been neglected by modern research. This book brings together for the first time experts from the various fields involved, in order to explore the riches of this tradition and make them accessible to a broader public interested both in philosophy and the history of ideas more generally.

A study of the life and work of 'the Maggid"—a major figure in the mystical thought of early Hasidism Enshrined in Jewish memory simply as "the Maggid" (preacher), Rabbi Dov Ber Friedman of Mezritsh (1704-1772) played a critical role in the formation of Hasidism, the movement of mystical renewal that became one of the most important and successful forces in modern Jewish life. In Speaking Infinities, Ariel Evan Mayse turns to the homilies of the Maggid to explore the place of words in mystical experience. He argues that the Maggid's theory of language is the key to unpacking his abstract mystical theology as well as his teachings on the devotional life and religious practice. Mayse shows how Dov Ber's vision of language emerges from his encounters with Ba'al Shem Tov (the BeSHT), the founder of Hasidic Judaism, whose teaching put forward a vision of radical divine immanence. Taking the BeSHT's notion of God's immanence as a kind of linguistic vitality echoing in the cosmos, Dov Ber developed a theory of language in which all human tongues, even in their mundane forms, have the potential to become sacred when returned to their divine source. Analyzing homilies and theological meditations on language, Mayse demonstrates that Dov Ber was an innovative thinker and contends that, in many respects, it was Dov Ber, rather than the BeSHT, who was the true founder of Hasidism as it took root, and the foremost shaper of its early theology. Speaking Infinities offers an exploration of this introspective mystic's life, gleaned from scattered anecdotes, legends, and historical sources, distinguishing the historical personage from the figure that emerges from the composite array of textual and oral traditions that have shaped the memory of the Maggid and his legacy.