Some form of our familiar distinction between letter and spirit in the interpretation of a text is surely older than written language itself. Whenever understanding becomes problematic—and this includes not only instances when an utterance is opaque or ambiguous, but also those frequent instances in which the obvious meaning of an utterance is not its intended meaning—this distinction may come into play as a way of attacking the problem. We find the distinction useful in our ordinary conversation with one another, when we are trying to decide how to take what someone has just said to us: ‘I know what he said, but how did he mean it? What was the spirit of what he said?’ In irony, sarcasm, understatement, allusion, and other devices of our common speech, there is often considerable divergence between the letter and the spirit of the utterance, or between what is said and what is meant. These distinctions were not invented by hermeneuticians trying to rationalise the devious interpretations to which canonical literatures are sometimes subjected. They have grown up with our language.

Thomas Aquinas argued that, while revelation alone can supply knowledge of the divine nature, unaided human reason can infer the divine existence from the world's existence. His proofs of God's existence are, in principle, extensions and elaborations of the patristic natural theologies. The Fathers believed that Neoplatonic and Hellenistic speculations about the eternal One, the arche of the cosmos, constituted a ‘natural’ knowledge of God the Father and his creation. God's selfrevelation in the incarnation was placed in the context of this natural theology. Augustine's version of natural theology both summed up the patristic achievement for the West and laid the foundation for Western medieval exploration of the natural knowledge of God. Like Augustine, Thomas believed one could reason naturally from the sensible world to God's existence; unlike him, Thomas reasoned with Aristotle and not Plato. Thomas' ordering of the natural and revealed knowledge of God repeats, then, the patristic sequence: first one proves that God is the first Cause of the world, and then one reasons from revelation about God's redemptive and reconciling relation to the world.

Christianity, whatever else it may be, is a set of emotions. It is love of God and neighbor, grief about one's own waywardness, joy in the merciful salvation of our God, gratitude, hope, and peace. To be a Christian is to have these and other emotions, and so if it happens that I do not love God and my neighbor, if I do not find my sins abhorrent and find joy in my redemption, if I am not grateful, hopeful, and at peace with God and myself, then it follows quite clearly that I am not a Christian, though I was born into a Christian family and reared in the bosom of the Church, am baptized and confirmed and willing in good conscience to affirm the articles of the Creed.

For centuries the disease of leprosy and the book of Leviticus have been linked together. The description of skin disease given in the thirteenth chapter of that book has long been thought to be that of the disease known to medicine as leprosy or Hansen's disease as modern leprologists prefer to call it in order to avoid the stigma which still attaches to the name leprosy. As a result, the regulations in that chapter have determined the attitude of Western communities towards persons suffering from this disease, and have largely influenced the public health measures of control applied by these communities when cases of the disease were discovered.

There is a small number of places in the Psalter where almost every commentator seems to agree about the need to emend the Hebrew word kabod (glory) to kabed (liver), namely Pss. 7.5 (Heb. 6); 16.9; 30.12; 57.8(9); 108.1(2). The argument that follows is that the reading Kabod should be retained and that it contains strong spiritual implications which are lost in the process of emendation.