Recent studies and archaeological work have focused attention once again on an old problem—the origins and development of the synagogue—by bringing two sides of the issue to light. On the one hand, some studies have reconsidered theories of synagogue origins in the Babylonian, Persian, or Hellenistic periods. The result is that several traditional assumptions typified in the works of Julian Morgenstern, Solomon Zeitlin, George Foot Moore, and Louis Finkelstein have been questioned. The question of origins has come to rest on the Palestinian setting and on the nature of the “synagogue” not as institution in the later Talmudic sense, but as “assembly.” There is no clear archaeological evidence for synagogue buildings from Second Temple Palestine. Only after 70 CE and the destruction of the Temple, did it emerge as the central institution of Pharisaic-Rabbinic Judaism.

Sometime during the second decade of the second century CE, Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, was conveyed under guard to Rome where he expected to leave this world through the mouths of the beasts in the arena. Along his journey he stopped at Philadelphia and Smyrna. At each stop he received visitors from a number of churches in the area. He, in turn, wrote letters to those churches and to the church at Rome. The letters of Ignatius have been the subject of scholarly investigation for over a century. The authenticity of the middle recension of those letters is almost universally acknowledged. These letters have been studied for the light they can shed on church structure in Asia Minor at the beginning of the second century, the theology of Ignatius within its historical context, and the distinctive personality of Ignatius. One aspect of these documents which has implications for all other interests has not been satisfactorily explained, namely, how Ignatius understood his own letter writing activity. What gave Ignatius the audacity to interfere in the life of churches outside of Syria, and what kind of authority did he expect the admonitions contained in his letters to carry?

On the wall in the hallway directly outside the newly refurbished Sperry Lecture Room at Andover Hall, Harvard Divinity School, hangs an oil portrait of the older Willard Learoyd Sperry. It is somewhat dull with age but that probably does not matter to the students and visitors who pass it by. It is doubtful that they know who Sperry was, even though he served as Dean of the Divinity School from 1922 until 1953, longer than any other person. He was not only Dean of the Divinity School, but a preacher to Harvard University for a generation.

A small but growing number of theologians have begun to call for the development of a “public theology.” Although the proposals vary, they are fueled by a common desire to counteract the cultural marginalization of contemporary theology. Having lost its former power to influence public debate about our beliefs and actions, theology has increasingly become a privatized form of reflection. Too often theologians have become comfortable with this state of affairs, abandoning all presumptions to speak to or for those outside their narrow communities. Theological arguments have degenerated into dogmatic assertions or confessional accounts of personal beliefs which lack the power or intent to persuade others. As David Tracy so aptly puts it, we have fled to local “reservations of the spirit” where we need not confront the wider indifference to and impotence of our work.

After Immanuel Kant the issue of whether there is life after death moved to the periphery in the writings of major Protestant thinkers. Of course, the great eschatological images have continued to play a role. There have been discussions of the resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul showing the differences in the anthropologies underlying the two forms of hope. But it is usually difficult to determine what the theologian actually expects will happen after death. The focus is on the symbolic value of these images or on their existential meaning.