Books in the Perspectives on Philosophy and Religious Thought series

When people prayed, they expected their gods to come, wrote Robin Lane Fox, providing the impetus for this volume of collected essays exploring the concept of how the ancients "envisioned" the deities within various ancient religious traditions.

Pascalian in essence, the approach departs from the Augustinian roots of Western Christian theology and develops a Christian anthropology based on Eastern Orthodoxy.

Additional resources drawn from Chinese philosophy, Jain epistemology, modern philosophy of mathematics, and the Gadamerian hermeneutical tradition serve both to corroborate the argumentation and to provide examples of continuities in reasoning that cross the boundaries of disparate traditions.

Questioning the scholarly assumptions regarding the "heretical" Nag Hammadi Library and the "apocalyptic" Dead Sea Scrolls, Fairen argues that they were not diametrically opposed, but represent a scribal reconfiguration of an Enochic worldview as a critique of foreign rule.

Christianity as a movement developed within the already established, but volatile Jewish movement/religion, expressing a profound sense of inclusivism illustrated in the transcendence of social boundaries.

Dr. Humm analyses early Christian prophetic activity seeking to understand the psychological states behind it. Assuming that the ancients followed the same patterns, most instances described in early Christian literature are reviewed and categorized.

This book describes the development of the Christian understanding of God from the second to the eighth century as witnessed by major theologians who gradually realized that the Incarnate Word made flesh was not the God of the philosophers.