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In this wide-ranging discussion of Kabbalah—from the mystical trends of medieval Judaism to modern Hasidism—this book considers different visions of the nature of the sacred text and of the methods to interpret it. It takes as a starting point the fact that the postbiblical Jewish world lost its geographical center with the destruction of the temple and so was left with a textual center, the Holy Book. The author argues that a text-oriented religion produced language-centered forms of mysticism. Against this background, he demonstrates how various Jewish mystics amplified the content of the Scriptures so as to include everything: the world, or God, for example. Thus the text becomes a major realm for contemplation, and the interpretation of the text frequently becomes an encounter with the deepest realms of reality. The author delineates the particular hermeneutics belonging to Jewish mysticism, investigates the progressive filling of the text with secrets and hidden levels of meaning, and considers in detail the various interpretive strategies needed to decodify the arcane dimensions of the text.

This book sheds light on the relationship between spiritual and political authority in early modern Egypt. This guide to political behavior and expediency offers advice to Sufi shaykhs, or spiritual guides, on how to interact and negotiate with powerful secular officials, judges, and treasurers, or emirs. Translated into English, it is a unique account of the relationship between spiritual and political authority in late medieval/early modern Islamic society.

One of the twentieth century's most important poets, W. H. Auden stands as an eloquent example of an individual within whom thought and faith not only coexist but indeed nourish each other. This book explores in detail how Auden's religious faith helped him to come to terms with himself as an artist and as a man, despite his early disinterest in religion and his homosexuality. It shows also how Auden's Anglican faith informs, and is often the explicit subject of, his poetry and prose. The book discusses the poet's boyhood religious experience and the works he wrote before emigrating to the United States as well as his formal return to the Anglican Communion at the beginning of World War II. It then focuses on Auden's criticism and on neglected and underestimated works of the poet's later years. Through insightful readings of Auden's writings and biography, this book documents how Auden's faith and his religious doubt were the matrix of his work and life.

For much of the past two centuries, religion has been understood as a universal phenomenon, a part of the “natural” human experience that is essentially the same across cultures and throughout history. Individual religions may vary through time and geographically, but there is an element, religion, that is to be found in all cultures during all time periods. Taking apart this assumption, this book shows that the idea of religion as a sphere of life distinct from politics, economics, or science is a recent development in European history—a development that has been projected outward in space and backward in time with the result that religion now appears to be a natural and necessary part of our world. Examining a wide array of ancient writings, the book demonstrates that in antiquity, there was no conceptual arena that could be designated as “religious” as opposed to “secular.” Surveying representative episodes from a two-thousand-year period, while constantly attending to the concrete social, political, and colonial contexts that shaped relevant works of philosophers, legal theorists, missionaries, and others, it offers an account of the emergence of the concept of religion.

Biblical Truths addresses the question, How can a thinking person of the 21st century, who accepts the conclusions of modern science, historiography, and “facts,” continue to confess the traditional orthodox creeds of Christianity? How can such Christians continue to read the New Testament as a reliable source for “truth,” faith, and knowledge? Biblical Truths uses postmodern, antifoundational theories and philosophy to offer a ways of reading the Bible that are theologically faithful but intellectually respectable.

When the Gospel writings were first produced, Christian thinking was already cognizant of its relationship to ancient memorial cultures and history-writing traditions. Yet, little has been written about exactly what shaped the development of early Christian literary memory. This book explores the diverse ways in which history was written according to the Hellenistic literary tradition, focusing specifically on the time during which the New Testament writings came into being: from the mid-first century until the early second century CE. While acknowledging cases of historical awareness in other New Testament writings, the book traces the origins of this historiographical approach to the Gospel of Mark and Luke—Acts. The book shows how the earliest Christian writings shaped Christian thinking and writing about history.

Clemens August Graf von Galen, Bishop of Münster from 1933 until his death in 1946, is renowned for his opposition to Nazism, most notably for his public preaching in 1941 against Hitler's euthanasia project to rid the country of sick, elderly, mentally retarded, and disabled Germans. This biographical study of von Galen views him from a different perspective: as a complex figure who moved between dissent and complicity during the Nazi regime, opposing certain elements of National Socialism while choosing to remain silent on issues concerning discrimination, deportation, and the murder of Jews. The book places von Galen in the context of his times, describing how the Catholic Church reacted to various Nazi policies, how the anti-Catholic legislation of the Kulturkampf shaped the repertoire of resistance tactics of northwestern German Catholics, and how theological interpretations were used to justify resistance and/or collaboration. It discloses the reasons for von Galen's public denunciation of the euthanasia project and the ramifications of his openly defiant stance. The book reveals how the bishop portrayed Jews and what that depiction meant for Jews living in Nazi Germany. Finally, it investigates the creation of the image of von Galen as “Grand Churchman-Resister” and discusses the implications of this for the myth of Catholic conservative “resistance” constructed in post-1945 Germany.

Chinese Theology explores theological writings from mainland China in their historical, social, and textual contexts. From the dialogues of sixteenth-century scholars to the revolutionary writings of theological educators in the twentieth century or the micro-blogs of contemporary house-church pastors, the book concentrates on theologians (mostly from the liberal or intellectual wings of the churches) who question what a “Chinese” theology might mean, who engage with their environment, and who draw on Chinese culture to inform their understanding of God and the world. The book provides an overview of the evolution of Chinese theology from the Ming dynasty to the present while introducing detailed textual analysis of the writings of Xu Zongze, Zhao Zichen, Wu Leichuan, Ding Guangxun, and Yang Huilin. It argues that Chinese theologies need understanding of their textual context: Chinese theology cannot be understood without a sense of its literary form and of the social meaning of the text, as these shape the theology that emerges. In light of this argument, Chinese Theology obliquely critiques the tendency to regard Western systematic theology and its particular philosophical underpinnings and written forms as the standard for theological thinking.

The popularity of Kabbalah, a Jewish mystical movement at least 900 years old, has grown astonishingly within the context of the vast and ever-expanding social movement commonly referred to as the New Age. This book provides a broad overview of the major trends in contemporary Kabbalah together with in-depth discussions of major figures and schools. It places the “kabbalistic Renaissance” within the global context of the rise of other forms of spirituality, including Sufism and Tibetan Buddhism. The book shows how Kabbalah has been transformed by the events of the Holocaust and, following the establishment of Israel, by aliyah.

Christ Child is a book about Christian, Jewish, and Muslim memories of Jesus’ childhood. Its focus is the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a collection of stories originally entitled “The Childhood Deeds of Jesus.” In these stories, Jesus turns clay birds into live ones, curses people to death, and displays preternatural knowledge in school. Drawing on sociologies of cultural memory, the book explores how such infancy tales were transmitted and transformed by different generations of readers, how the figure of a young Jesus was “constantly reimagined … to conform to the eye and image of the beholder” (p. 197). The book is organized in three parts. Part 1 (chapters 1–2) provides an introduction to studies on memory and childhood, and documents the infancy stories’ controversial history of interpretation from antiquity to the present day. Part 2 (chapters 3–5) investigates “sites of memory” in the Graeco-Roman world—texts and material artifacts connected with birds, cursing, and elementary education—in order to understand how ancient readers would have tried to make sense of this enigmatic young Jesus. Part 3 (chapters 6–7) focuses on the way these stories were contested and reshaped in the context of Jewish-Christian and Christian-Muslim religious encounters. An epilogue and three appendixes include discussions of visual art connected with Jesus’ childhood and English translations of important primary sources. The end result is a fascinating book that traces how the Christ child occupied “a unique but ever-shifting place in late ancient and early medieval cultural memory” (p. 44).

Prophet or messiah, the figure of Jesus serves as both the bridge and the barrier between Christianity and Islam. This book takes the reader on a personal, theological journey exploring the centrality of Jesus in Christian–Muslim relations. Christian and Muslim scholars have used Jesus and Christological themes for polemical and dialogical conversations from the earliest days to modern times. The book concludes with some reflections on the cross and its possible meaning in the Muslim faith. Through a careful analysis of selected works by major Christian and Muslim theologians during the formative, medieval, and modern periods of both religions, the book focuses on themes including revelation, prophecy, salvation, redemption, sin, eschatology, law, and love. How did some doctrines become the defining characteristics of one faith and not the other? What is the nature of the theological chasm between Christianity and Islam?

Followers of Muhammad b. 'Abd al-Wahhab, often considered to be Islam's Martin Luther, shaped the political and religious identity of the Saudi state while also enabling the significant worldwide expansion of Salafist Islam. Studies of the movement he inspired, however, have often been limited by scholars' insufficient access to key sources within Saudi Arabia. This book includes details from interviews and observations gathered from research in important Saudi archives. The text studies the Wahhabi religious movement from its founding to the modern day. Gleaning information from both written and oral sources and employing a multidisciplinary approach that combines history, sociology, and Islamic studies, the text presents a new reading of this movement that transcends the usual resort to polemics.

First published in Arabic in 1994, this book's controversial approach argued that conventional fundamentalist interpretations of the Quran and other Islamic religious texts are ahistorical and misleading. Conservative religious leaders accused this book's author of apostasy. Marking the first time a work by this author is available in its entirety in any Western language, this English edition makes the author's erudite interpretation of classical Islamic thought accessible to a wider audience at a critical historical moment. The book discusses the life and work of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1943–2010); the rise of the Islamist movement, a phenomenon that Islamists call the Awakening; religious discourse; the Islamic left; and the problematic aspects of reading the religious texts themselves.

This book reevaluates the place of converts from Judaism in the narrative of Jewish history. Long considered beyond the pale of Jewish historiography, converts played a central role in shaping both noxious and positive images of Jews and Judaism for Christian readers. Focusing on German Jews who converted to Christianity in the sixteenth through mid-eighteenth centuries, it explores an extensive trove of their memoirs and other writings. These original sources illuminate the Jewish communities that the converts left, the Christian society they entered, and the unabating tensions between the two worlds in early modern German history. The book begins with the medieval images of converts from Judaism and traces the hurdles to social acceptance that they encountered in Germany through early modern times. The author examines the converts' complicated search for community, a quest that was to characterize much of Jewish modernity, and concludes with a consideration of the converts' painful legacies to the Jewish experience in German lands.

This challenge to prevailing views of New Testament sources argues that the origins of passages in the book of Acts are to be found not in early Christian legends but in the epics of Homer. The book focuses on four passages in the book of Acts, examines their potential parallels in the Iliad, and concludes that the author of Acts composed them using famous scenes in Homer's work as a model. Tracing the influence of passages from the Iliad on subsequent ancient literature, it shows how the story generated a vibrant, mimetic literary tradition long before Luke composed the Acts. Luke could have expected educated readers to recognize his transformation of these tales and to see that the Christian God and heroes were superior to Homeric gods and heroes. Building upon and extending previously adopted analytic methods, this book opens an appreciation not only of Acts but also of the composition of early Christian narrative in general.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls provides unprecedented insight into the nature of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament before its fixation. This book presents a complete account of the formation of the canon in Ancient Judaism from the emergence of the Torah in the Persian period to the final acceptance of the list of twenty-two/twenty-four books in the Rabbinic period. Using the Hebrew Bible, the Scrolls, the Apocrypha, the Letter of Aristeas, the writings of Philo, Josephus, the New Testament, and Rabbinic literature as primary evidence the book argues that throughout the post-exilic period up to around 100 ce, there was not one official “canon” accepted by all Jews; rather, there existed a plurality of collections of scriptures that were authoritative for different communities. Examining the literary sources and historical circumstances that led to the emergence of authoritative scriptures in ancient Judaism, the book proposes a theory of the majority canon that posits that the Pharisaic canon became the canon of Rabbinic Judaism in the centuries after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.

Friendship, though a topic of considerable humanistic and cross disciplinary interest in the contemporary academy, has mainly been ignored by scholars of the Hebrew Bible, possibly on account of its complexity and elusiveness. Yet friendship in the Hebrew Bible warrants the kind of thorough, detailed exploration that friendship has received from specialists in neighboring fields such as Classics and New Testament and in any number of other fields. The author of this book provides an in-depth, theoretically engaged, philologically grounded, and contextually sensitive study of friendship in the Hebrew Bible. It is the first book-length study of its kind, filling in a significant gap in our knowledge and understanding of the constellation of social relationships represented in biblical texts and contributing to contemporary, incipient cross-disciplinary theorizing of friendship. Topics covered include how the expectations of friends and family members overlap and differ, including what makes the friend a distinct social actor; failed friendship; friendships in narrative such as those of Ruth and Naomi, Jonathan and David, and Job and his three comforters; and friendship in the second century BCE Hebrew wisdom text Ben Sira, including how Ben Sira’s notions of friendship relate to ideas expressed in earlier biblical texts and in Greek sources.

This book examines how German Protestant and Catholic missionaries reconsidered their attitudes toward Confucianism and, more broadly, Chinese culture. In the 1860s, German missionaries attacked traditional Chinese values as antithetical to their goals of converting China to Christianity, and congregational leadership lay solely in German hands. By the 1930s, missionaries commented that Christianity’s global survival—both in China and the West—depended on a synthesis of Christ and Confucius. Even before they were forced by the Communists to leave in the early 1950s, the German missionaries had relinquished leadership to Chinese clergy. Why did these institutional and ideological shifts occur? How did German missionaries come to repudiate their former beliefs and tactics? This book argues that German missionaries, since their first entry into China, considered their missionary work in China as a failure. Propelled by failure, the German missionaries sought to reform their practices. These missionaries began to challenge Germany’s imperial project and even abandon central theological ideas such as the exclusivity of Christian salvation. Chinese Christians were crucial partners in the process, pushing the German missionaries to relinquish their previous claims of Christian superiority. In time, this thinking catalyzed a revolution among European Christians about the nature of Christianity itself. This book sheds light on the roots of Christianity’s global shift from being a predominantly European religion in the nineteenth century to a non-European one by the twenty-first century.

Herbert Butterfield was an important British historian and religious thinker whose ideas, in particular his concept of a “Whig interpretation of history,” remain deeply influential. This biography focuses on the creative processes that lay behind Butterfield's intellectual accomplishments. Drawing on his investigations into Butterfield's vast and diverse output of published and unpublished work, the book explores Butterfield's ideas and methods. It describes Butterfield's lifelong devotion to his Methodist faith and shows how his Christian spirituality animated his historical work. It also traces the theme of dissent that ran through Butterfield's life and work, presenting a man who found himself at odds with prevailing convictions about history, morality, politics, religion, and teaching, a man who elevated the notion of dissent into an ethic of living in tension with any established system.

Centuries on, what the Reformation was and what it accomplished remain deeply contentious. This new history argues that sixteenth-century England was a society neither desperate for nor allergic to change, but one open to ideas of reform in various competing guises. King Henry VIII wanted an orderly, uniform Reformation, but his actions opened a Pandora's Box from which pluralism and diversity flowed and rooted themselves in English life. With sensitivity to individual experience as well as masterfully synthesizing historical and institutional developments, the book frames the perceptions and actions of people great and small, from monarchs and bishops to ordinary families and ecclesiastics, against a backdrop of profound change that altered the meanings of religion itself. This engaging history reveals what was really at stake in the overthrow of Catholic culture and the reshaping of the Church of England.