In Ambrose’s apologetic writing against the Roman prefect Symmachus, he makes a surprising argument for Christianity’s superiority over Roman religious practices, arguing that Christianity is in fact a newer and therefore superior form of religion. The whole world has “progressed” and so must religious practices. In the letters to Symmachus, Ambrose’s arguments are ad hoc and apologetic, not constructive. This article seeks to understand better the intellectual and historical contexts that make Ambrose’s surprising convictions possible by looking at Ambrose’s writings on creation in the context of the pro-Nicene debates. Considering Ambrose’s writing in the Hexameron, I argue that Ambrose’s account of cosmological progress finds an intellectual milieu in pro-Nicene reflection on the implications of Christ’s divine consubstantiality for a doctrine of creation. When Christ is no longer seen as a mediator between God and the world, a new space is opened up to speak of creation’s change and even “progress” without a worry that doing so will jeopardize creation as the divine handiwork. Ambrose’s apologetic strategy, though apparently not directly related to pro-Nicene debates, is illuminated when seen against this backdrop. The result is a better understanding both of Ambrose’s strategies in particular and of the situation of fourth-century apologetics more broadly.

Nicholas of Cusa read Augustine, like he read Dionysius the Areopagite, as teaching that God was best known and encountered in an understanding of one’s own ignorance of ultimate reality (learned ignorance). Cusa’s use of Augustine in Defense of Learned Ignorance, On the Vision of God, and On the Not-Other helps recover the importance of learned ignorance in Augustine’s own writings. This study tracks learned ignorance as an essential mechanism of Augustine’s pursuit of wisdom through his early writings, the Confessions, and the later anti-Pelagian treatises. Learned ignorance functioned as philosophical dialectic in his earliest treatises, a practice of prayer in the Confessions, and as both polemic and apophatic theodicy in his later writings. Augustine’s shifting conceptualization of learned ignorance, in turn, helps recover how Cusa often preached learned ignorance as the humility of faith. Thus, Cusa’s commitment to learned ignorance derived from both the Neoplatonic dilemma of knowing the unknowable and the Augustinian understanding of original sin as pride and redemption as humility.

This article investigates an uncharted facet of Martin Luther’s Hebrew translation method. It is one of the more fascinating aspects of his translation, which demonstrates both the complexity of how he translated Hebrew and the lasting impact of the Hebrew on his German, neither of which has been fully appreciated by scholars. This article demonstrates how he sometimes blended Hebrew and German idioms in his translation of the Hebrew Bible, specifically in the Minor Prophets. It further shows how he used this translation method to convey various linguistic features of the Hebrew language to his German audience. Finally, it shows how this has a number of important implications for Luther studies, Hebrew and German linguistics, and medieval and early modern history.

Joel Kaminsky and Mark Reasoner offered a concerted critique of N. T. Wright’s account of Israel’s election as well as Wright’s description of the apostle Paul’s messianic atonement theology. They allege that Wright treats Israel’s election as instrumental rather than intrinsic and his exegesis of Rom 5:20‒21 results in a rehearsal of anti-Jewish tropes. This essay responds to them by 1) claiming that many of their criticisms are inaccurate representations of Wright’s views; 2) defending a missional perspective of Israel’s view of election; 3) asserting that Wright’s reading of Rom 5:20 about the Torah multiplying sin within Israel is neither immoral, nor implausible, nor idiosyncratic; and 4) offering some final thoughts about Wright and Jewish-Christian relations.

This rejoinder to Michael Bird’s critique of our argument in Joel Kaminsky and Mark Reasoner, “The Meaning and Telos of Israel’s Election: An Interfaith Response to N. T. Wright’s Reading of Paul,” HTR 112 (2019) 421–46, acknowledges that Wright recognizes a dimension of intrinsic value in God’s election of Israel, while it shows how Wright’s metanarrative is not only unduly skewed toward an instrumental view of Israel’s election but also, in effect, totally redefines Israel. Our rebuttal first reiterates some of our original claims and also presents new arguments against an exegesis of Second Isaiah that portrays Israel as divinely called to bring light or Torah to the nations. Later Second Temple sources also did not understand Israel as failing to fulfill a divine call to missionize the gentiles. Bird’s own inconsistency on the mission orientation of Israel weakens his defense of Wright here. Wright’s exegesis of Rom 5:20–21 as teaching that God intentionally gave Torah to draw the world’s sins onto Israel and Bird’s defense of this on the basis of Isaiah 53 are anomalous and untenable in the light of other scholars’ readings of Romans and the rest of the New Testament. Finally, against Bird, Wright does indeed read non-Christ-confessing Jews out of Israel in a highly problematic way. Bird’s agreement with us against Wright that “all Israel” in Rom 11:26 refers to corporeal Israel strengthens our original critique of Wright’s redefinition of Israel in Rom 9–11.