Prophets speak with the voice of God, but God does not always speak clearly. In the Old Testament prophets delivered harangues against the Israelites, demanded moral reform, revealed hidden truths about the past and the present, and occasionally offered predictions about the future. For all of these types of messages, but particularly for the last, they made use of a rich symbolic and at times impenetrable vocabulary. Indeed, the context and meaning of biblical prophecies were probably as inscrutable to their original audiences as they are to contemporary readers. Every generation has thus inherited traditions that could be reinterpreted according to particular, contemporary circumstances.

This chapter provides an account of Aquinas’s life and works. It then explains his intellectual perspectives as an author while noting how he distinguishes between faith and reason. It notes what he means by ‘divine revelation’ and why he thinks that to be important. It also explains what he has to say about ‘sacra doctrina, ‘articles of faith’, and ‘preambles of faith. The chapter then explains why Aquinas can be thought to be an advocate of ‘natural theology’ and why he takes it to be important. Finally, it provides an introduction to some key terms which recur in his philosophy of God, including ‘ens’, ‘ens per se’, ‘ens per accidens ‘form’, ‘substantial form’, ‘accidental form’, ‘matter’, ‘substance’, ‘accident’, ‘cause’, ‘efficient cause’, ‘final cause’, ‘formal cause’, ‘material cause’, ‘effect’, ‘essence’, ‘nature’, ‘substantial change’, ‘accidental change’, ‘sensation’, ‘individuation’, and ‘being’ (esse).

This chapter explores the setting of Numbers (the desert) and its plot (the forty-year wandering), and how attention to these literary features connect to theological issues, such as God’s care and revelation.

In this chapter, we will examine the Old Testament’s role in religious communities as an authoritative revelation from God – the concept of “scripture” common to the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These texts hardly began as the books that now comprise the Bible; rather, what we will discover is a lengthy, complex development of authoritative texts from oral to written to canon.

This chapter will take us inside the ancient world of the Old Testament’s formation. Words, considered powerful, were painstakingly preserved through centuries in the hands of anonymous authors and editors, scribes and scholars. Texts were collected into books and went through a process of use and standardization by the ancient Israelites, beginning as early as the tenth century bceand lasting through the Babylonian exile and beyond – emerging finally in the canonical form we know today as the Old Testament.

In previous chapters, we focused on the structure and content of the books in the Pentateuch. Here, we will explore the religion of Moses that emerges from these materials. Specifically, we will observe the way in which divine revelation developed from direct communication with individuals such as Abraham and Moses to mediated revelation through a written Torah and the priesthood. We will explore the significant concepts of holiness, covenant, and practical monotheism, particularly as compared to the religion of the ancestral narratives (Genesis) and that of surrounding ancient Near Eastern cultures.

It will be important that we consider the characteristics of Mosaic religion against the backdrop of the ancient Near East at a time when certain polytheistic cultures are known to have elevated a single deity above their other gods – known as a “theology of exaltation.” Furthermore, we will explore some possible influences and origins for the Yahwistic faith – the religion so foundational for the remaining Old Testament and whose roots belong to monotheistic religions down to the present.

This chapter examines the life of Jesus of Nazareth and how his teachings, style of life, and legacy shaped western thought. Emphasizing Jesus as both a historical figure and a moral exemplar, it explores how early followers remembered him and how later premodern readers interpreted him through close readings of the New Testament. Drawing especially on the Gospel of Mark and the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, the chapter shows how Jesus gained authority not through institutional power but through humility, parables, miraculous acts, and a radical ethical vision. He preached inward sincerity over outward ritual, taught that all people possess dignity in the eyes of God, and urged his followers to model their lives on his own. Key themes include divine justice, the challenge of wealth and status, and the contrast between worldly and heavenly authority. Jesus emerges as a moral teacher, healer, and disruptor of conventional hierarchies. His parables and aphorisms – especially those in the Sermon on the Mount – became foundational to Christian ethics. The chapter concludes by noting how Jesus’ model of life and speech created a movement that profoundly transformed the cultural and moral framework of the West.

In the first paragraph of the modern translation of the Rationale divinorum officiorum of William Durand (c. 1230–1296) are markers of the change this book seeks to chart. One is immediately visible. The translator, Timothy M. Thibodeau, chose to distinguish through the use of italics what he then identifies, through the use of brackets, as biblical texts. Those italics and those brackets do not simply mark the modern sense of “source,” of a particular relationship between Durand and Scripture, that postdates Durand himself. They distinguish Scripture and, in so doing, obscure Durand’s understanding of revelation and its relationship to “ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus ac ornamentis.” There in the opening paragraph of the Prologue and throughout the Rationale, Durand presents a different relationship entirely among ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus and ornamentis, and biblical history, prophecies, psalms, Gospels, and Epistles.

This chapter begins with reference to the veneration and obscurity that characterises Webb’s reputation. It relates the early Webb’s mentoring by Norman Lindsay and his subsequent rejection of Lindsay’s secular aesthetics and anti-Semitism. Webb’s expatriate years in Canada and then England are discussed as a search for creative independence, although England was the place of his first hospitalisation for mental illness. The chapter observes that some of Webb’s most resonant poems are responses to the East Anglia landscape. It traces Webb’s return to Australia, his continued hospitalisation, and his Catholic devotion. The chapter explores the concept of schizophrenia as a pathology of language to understand Webb’s poetic language, particularly its metaphorical aspects. Lastly, the chapter focuses on Webb’s ‘explorer’ poems, their metaphorics of journeying, and their relationship to Australia’s cultural history, or national mythology, in the late 1950s and 1960s.

How we sequence events and revelation. Plot shapes and patterns; open and closed endings. How characters make plot. Developing plot, delivering plot, hiding plot and solving plot problems. Checking and testing your plot.

The aim of the translation is to provide an English text that is both scholarly and accessible. The referencing system resembles the familiar biblical chapters and verses; sections are provided with titles that identify their key theme and bring to light the structure of a work often regarded as diffuse and repetitive.

This chapter argues that many New Testament authors develop their Christologies through the use of quotations of Scripture. Images for figures in Jewish interpretation provide a rich resource for these authors as they describe the significance of the work of Jesus for the people of God. This chapter features four passages with a network of scriptural references to illustrate the breadth of Christology represented in the New Testament Epistles.