There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books." -George Santayana 1 in a well-known book, we find a whole raft of arguments about the dangers of new communication technologies. The new technology will change the way we understand truth; it will change the way we use language; it will erode our memories and our relationships; it will take the "soul" out of language and turn language into a mere "image," a deceitful apparition of true understanding. in short, this new technology is not merely a useful invention; it is something that threatens the very fabric of our society. The text i am referring to is, of course, not a book about the internet: it is Plato's Phaedrus, written in the fourth century bc, warning against the transition from an oral culture to a culture of writing. 2 Poised between two worlds, Plato perceived that literacy was not merely a convenient new technology, but a practice that would usher in a new way of being-in-the-world. our very humanness would change under the impact of this technology.

English translation: Metaphysics and the Idea of God, transl. by Philip Clayton (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990). The English edition includes two further essays (chapters 7-8) which are not in the German edition. Except in the case of these final two chapters, references to this work give the page number in the English edition followed by the page number of the German edition in parentheses.

According to Sir Walter Raleigh, the entire plot of Paradise Lost“radiates” from a single point: the moment when Eve plucks and eats the forbidden fruit. 1 Referring to this moment, Raleigh remarks that “there is not an incident, hardly a line of the poem, but leads backwards or ...

T. F. Torrance has made a significant contribution to theological method with his model of the stratified structure of theological knowledge. According to this model, which is grounded in Torrance's realist epistemology, the knowledge of God takes place at three distinctive levels of increasing conceptual refinement. First, at the level of tacit theology, we intuitively grasp God's trinitarian reality through personal experience, without yet understanding that reality conceptually. Second, at the level of formalised theology, we develop an understanding of the economic trinitarian structure which underlies our personal experience. Finally, at the meta-theological level, we penetrate more deeply into the structure of God's self-revelation in order to develop a refined conceptualisation of the perichoretic relations immanent in God's eternal being. The conceptuality achieved at this meta-theological level constitutes the ultimate grammar and the unitary basis of all theological knowledge; and a concentration of thought at this level offers the promise both of thoroughgoing theological simplification and of a shared ecumenical vision of the essential content of theological knowledge. Central to Torrance's entire model is the homoousial union of Jesus Christ with God: the homoousion enables a movement from a personal encounter with Jesus Christ to a knowledge of the economic Trinity, just as it further enables a movement from the economic to the ontological Trinity. Although our theological thought thus moves towards increasingly refined concepts and relations, it remains always grounded in and coordinated with our personal knowledge of Jesus Christ.

Abstract John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) offers a creative seventeenth-century reconstruction of the doctrine of predestination, a reconstruction which both anticipates modern theological developments and sheds important light on the history of predestinarian ...