Brennan Breed’s “The Reception History of Isaiah: Unsealing the Book” takes a single theme attested in just a few verses (Isa 8:16; 29:11; and 30:8) and shows how it has been reinterpreted by readers ceaselessly across the centuries, all the way from later biblical authors to modern times, in response to everything from sectarian divisions to African-American slavery to the trauma of the Holocaust. These verses refer to the words of the prophet being sealed, especially to those who are ignorant, until the time comes for their meaning to be revealed. This theme brings into focus the ways in which Isaiah has been used polemically, and it also points to the text’s power as a seemingly inexhaustible well of meaning.

Although nowadays Vaughan Williams is sometimes associated in popular writing with a Romantic musical style, broadly conceived, this is a view that few of his contemporaries would have recognized. Indeed, his own understanding of the term suggests that he saw himself marking a break with the earlier, largely Germanic Romantic tradition that culminated in Wagner and Strauss.  Nevertheless, several important aspects of his musical and aesthetic views form strong continuity with earlier Romantic thought. These include viewing music as (1) self-expression; (2) the expression of a community; and (3) a revelation or intimation of the beyond.  The tension between these three, partially antithetical, conceptions of music informs his creative output in often productive ways that are teased out over the course of this chapter.

150 words: The books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah contain oracles that address problems in and around ancient Judah in ways that are as incisive and critical as they are optimistic and constructive. Daniel C. Timmer’s The Theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah situates these books in their social and political contexts and examines the unique theology of each as it engages with imposing problems in Judah and beyond. In dialogue with recent scholarship, this study focuses on these books’ analysis and evaluation of the world as it is, focusing on both human beings and their actions and God’s commitment to purify, restore, and perfect the world. Timmer also surveys these books’ later theological use and cultural reception. Timmer also brings their theology into dialogue with concerns as varied as ecology, nationalism, and widespread injustice, highlighting the enduring significance of divine justice and grace for solid hope and effective service in our world.

50 words: This volume examines the powerful and poignant theology of the books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah. Daniel C. Timmer situates these books’ theology in their ancient Near Eastern contexts and traces its multifaceted contribution to Jewish and Christian theology and to broader cultural spheres, without neglecting its contemporary significance.

20 words: This volume draws out the theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, attending to their ancient contexts, past use and reception, and contemporary significance.

The notion of noetic perception may be expanded in relation to the role of the imagination in revelatory experience. Here, the expansion of neo-Platonic perspectives in the understanding of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is significant, as are the notion of the imaginal developed by Henry Corbin and the understanding of the role of the human imaginative faculty in religious visionary experience, as explored by Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar. This kind of analysis has implications for solving certain puzzles inherent in the New Testament accounts of visions of the risen Christ. However, questions arise in relation to this understanding, and these may be tackled in part through recent Christian thinking about the notion of revelation, in which the focus is no longer on ‘information about God’ but on what Yves Congar has called an orientation towards salvation. This suggests an understanding akin to the perennialist separation of exoteric and esoteric aspects of religious traditions in the sense of suggesting a two-component, psychological-referential model of revelatory experience.

Acknowledging Messiaen’s occasional but consistently appreciative references to theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, especially with respect to the theological aesthetics as presented in The Glory of the Lord (Herrlichkeit), this chapter provides a theological and Trinitarian description of Balthasar’s notion of doxa, or “glory,” which may well have influenced Messiaen’s compositions. For Balthasar, “glory” as a theological concept is neither merely aesthetic nor religiously triumphalist, but remains tangled together with transcendental beauty in Western metaphysics, theophany, kenoticism ( “ self-emptying”), a cruciform Christology, eschatology, and apocalyptic thought.

The first section of the chapter explores the history of the religion from its origins in the Vedas up to the present time. The remainder of the chapter is then devoted to two more practical areas where Christianity might have something to learn. The first is Hinduism’s different attitude to the visual and its ability both to critique western stress on the absolute character of the word and to offer an alternative perspective on how, through the concept of darshan, Christianity could better appreciate its own liturgical settings. The question of gender as applied to divinity is then explored through Hinduism’s treatment of female deities, partly through the myths themselves, partly through Francis Clooney’s comparative studies and partly through consideration of Kali’s imagery in her two main temples in Kolkota and Ramakrishna’s accompanying meditations.

A brief final chapter then tries to set the arguments of the book as whole in the context of some of the major writers in the field of inter-faith dialogue. The key role of cultural conditioning is once again deployed to suggest that a more nuanced position is required than what was eventually adopted by major figures such as Cantwell Smith, John Hick, Keith Ward and Paul Knitter. The chapter then ends by exploring some more practical ways of furthering dialogue, together with their implications; among them occasional attendance at one another’s places of worship and a better appreciation of some underlying shared foundations in religious architecture and other forms of symbolism.

This chapter investigates the contours of prognosis itself. It begins by describing prognosis in the Neoplatonist Iamblichus’ De Mysteriis. It then “catches” Iamblichus in the act of inventing a new definition of prognosis in his response to Porphyry, shifting it away from discrete knowledge of particular events towards panoptic knowledge that emerges as an expression of divine substance. This chapter then shows how both the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and the Manichaeans were also theorizing prognosis along similar lines.

This book explores the shifting discourses of prophethood and prophecy in the late antique Near East. It rejects the “Cessation of Prophecy” metanarrative that frames prophecy as perpetually in decline, and charts instead a novel trajectory for understanding prophethood and prophecy as discourse. It does so by working through a number of texts from the late antique Near East, including Manichaean literature, the classical rabbinic corpus, early Jewish mystical literature, the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, and Neoplatonic literature. It argues that we should read these communities’ developing notions of prophethood and revelation alongside and against one another, on the one hand, and within broader developments in the late antique Near East, on the other.

This chapter first investigates the meaning of ‘revelation’ in ancient Christianity and ancient non-Jewish and non-Christian religions, especially in ‘pagan’ Platonism of the early imperial period. ‘Revelation’ was characterised by the stress on authoritative sources of revealed knowledge (e.g., the Bible, the Chaldaean Oracles). The objective is to argue that ‘pagan’ Platonists faithful to Plato (and commenting just on Plato) cannot be simplistically opposed to Jewish or Christian Platonists faithful to the Bible (and commenting exclusively on the Bible). The chapter examines how philosophical allegoresis was applied by Stoics and Platonists – ‘pagan’, Jewish, and Christian Platonists – to their authoritative texts and revelations. This study provides an accurate examination of the conceptual and methodological intersections between the works of ‘pagan’ and Christian Platonists, and points to cases that break the binary between ‘pagan’ commentaries on ‘pagan’ authoritative texts and Christian commentaries on Scripture. It will also suggest that Amelius commented on the Prologue of John in light of his previous knowledge of Origen’s Commentary.

In this chapter I explain Jean-Luc Marion’s developing uses of the word “icon,” not primarily as a painted image, but precisely as the way God shows himself, breaking through the idolatry of the finite human perspective through the counter-gaze, or reversal of intentionality. Despite his language that appears to be iconoclastic, I argue that Marion’s discussion of the kenosis of the sacred image is deeply faithful to the patristic iconophile spirit, transposed to a phenomenological key. In this, Marion opens up a third way of understanding mediation, which I explain through the metaphor of the transparent window. Just as glass is not an obstacle to the rays of the sun, provided it is cleared of smudges or flaws, the finite limits of creatures are no obstacle for the infinite, as long as they are open to receive what is communicated.

This chapter argues that Jewish philosophers throughout the ages have tended toward an epistemology that might be described as “communitarian.” To that end, it explores three key notions at the heart of Jewish epistemology: knowledge by testimony, corporate knowledge, and epistemic rootedness. These notions are mined from the Hebrew Bible in conversation with Rabbinic commentaries and two great medieval philosophers, Rabbi Yehuda Halevy and Maimonides. In contemporary times, a number of philosophers have described themselves as communitarian epistemologists. This chapter argues that they might more aptly be described as communist epistemologists, and that Jewish thought is a better guide to how a communitarian epistemology might look.

This chapter highlights an important but neglected type of evidence for Christianity: the content of the Christian revelatory claim. This content consists, at its core, of scriptures and definitive statements of doctrine; these are structured, vivified, and interpreted through various media. Though evidence of this sort is neglected by natural theologians, it has substantial evidential value in the minds of ordinary believers, underwriting both God’s existence and Christianity itself. The chapter offers beginning defenses of three theses: (1) The content of a revelatory claim may provide evidence enabling an inquirer to assent simultaneously to the revelatory claim and the embedded proposition that God exists; (2) Aquinas’s systematic unfolding of Christian revelatory content can enhance the plausibility, both for agnostic inquirers and for believers, of the claim the content was revealed; and (3) An argument from revelatory content can reasonably persuade agnostic inquirers that assent to theism and Christianity is personally obligatory.