Full of allusions and images derived from the Garden of Eden, dreams of Daniel, and schematics of Ezekiel’s temple, and populated with rebooted characters like Balaam and Jezebel, this concluding chapter addresses the question of whether an overarching narrative arc can be discerned in the Bible’s final book.

While Hopkins’s poetry has long ignited the imaginations of religious readers, surprisingly few theologians have engaged deeply with his work. This chapter considers the limited body of theological discourse that engages directly and substantively with Hopkins’s work, focusing on the way that his poetry has been taken up in the field of Christian systematic theology (narrowly conceived). Much of the chapter is dedicated to unpacking a highly influential essay by Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. As I demonstrate, while Balthasar’s essay offers numerous valuable insights, it also exhibits several of the most ubiquitous limitations in theological receptions of Hopkins. Thus, at the conclusion of the chapter I propose a way forward for renewed engagement with Hopkins’s theological vision, building on the innovative approach of contemporary Anglican theologian Ben Quash.

The term “grace” refers to unmerited gifts of God, among which might be gifts of knowledge. Does God offer knowledge over and above what we could have learned just through the still earlier gift of our inbuilt reasoning powers? At stake is the authenticity of the deeds, and the truth of the teachings, recorded in Holy Scripture. Thomas Aquinas always takes natural reason as far as he can before turning to what God has revealed by grace; he wants us to trust Revelation, but only authentic Revelation. Now, though, he turns the inquiry around. In order to know all that we need to know about God, do we need His grace at all? This inquiry amplifies the one in Question 1, Article 1.

This chapter explores the relationship between Christianity and ecology in Clare’s poetry, letters, and biblical paraphrases. Critics tend to secularize Clare’s writing and so overlook its biblical, religious, and metaphysical content. The chapter redresses this by assessing Clare’s early Christian faith, his relationship to Wesleyan Methodism and the Ranters, his distrust of organized religion, and his divine ecology as an expression of rural Christianity. Clare looks beyond pantheism and natural religion to identify an interwoven and sacred creation inseparable from the parish. As such, Clare valued Christianity as a ‘religion that teaches us to act justly to speak truth & love mercy’, a social and ecological politics embedded in prayer, mystery, scripture, and faith.

It would hardly be persuasive for St. Thomas to say that we need divine Revelation just because divine Revelation tells us so. He does quote from Holy Scripture to show that it confirms his conclusions, but the argument in this Article is based squarely on reason: we need Revelation because some of the things we need to know cannot be found out by reason alone, and because even many of those things which can be are very difficult for reason to ascertain.

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.