Since the original publication of this title, the twelfth-century Calabrian Abbot Joachim of Fiore has been accorded an increasingly central position in the history of medieval thought and culture. In this classic work Marjorie Reeves shows the wide extent of Joachimist influence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries and demonstrates the continuity between medieval and Renaissance thought in the field of prophecy. Reeves pinpoints some of the most original aspects of Joachim's theology of history and traces his reputation and influence through succeeding centuries. She also explains how his vision of a final age of the Spirit in history became a powerful force in shaping expectations of the future in Western Europe. The book traces in detail the development of the three great images in which these expectations came to be focused: New Spiritual Men, Angelic Pope, and Last World Emperor. In addition, Reeves illuminates how the pervading influence of Joachim's concepts of a future golden age forms the basis for an understanding of prophetic visions in later centuries. In light of the current expansion of Joachimist and millenarian studies, medieval scholars and students will appreciate the renewed availability of this volume and the addition of a new annotated bibliography of material published on Joachimism between 1969 and 1992.

Justin Stratis explores the meaning of the biblical phrase 'God is love' through an examination of two quintessentially modern Protestant theologians: Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Barth. This book contains both a detailed engagement with Schleiermacher's untranslated lectures on Dialektik and their relation to his more well-known work, as well as a new assessment of Barth's doctrine of God which both respects his radical innovations and yet places him within the stream of traditional, catholic trinitarianism. After considering the complexities of theological predication, and comparing several classical and contemporary approaches to the implication of 'love', Stratis presents and ultimately commends the distinct approaches of Schleiermacher and Barth for their tendency to treat divine love as a 'conclusion' to the doctrine of God, rather than as a conceptual starting point. In contrast to many contemporary approaches, Stratis concludes with the suggestion that God's love is best conceived as his being toward fellowship, rather than as the eminent instance of loving fellowship understood according to human experiences of love.

The most discussed and most significant issue on the religious scene today is whether it is possible, or even desirable, to believe in God. Mr. Kaufman's valuable study does not offer a doctrine of God, but instead explores why God is a problem for many moderns, the dimensions of that problem, and the inner logic of the notion of God as it has developed in Western culture.

His object is to determine the function or significance of talk about God: how the concept of God is generated in human experience; the special problems in turn generated by this concept (for example, the intelligibility of the idea of transcendence, the problem of theodicy) and how they are met; and under what circumstances the idea of God is credible or important or even indispensable. He does not try to prove God's existence or nonexistence, but elucidates what the concept of God means and the important human needs it fulfills.

Four of the eleven essays have been previously published, at least in part; seven are completely new.

How can we become aware of pure unconditional love? With simple yet shattering words, Stephen Turoff seeks to awaken us to knowledge that already resides deep in our hearts: that God is love and love is God. Love is the power that created the universe and permeates all Creation. When we realize this, we are led to a recognition of our true nature as human beings. Stephen's astonishing message - presented here as transcripts from a series of six seminars - can rouse us to reassess our lives and the way we think and act. We are perfect beings who have forgotten our divine nature. Our true self wants to awaken to the divine presence within. With guidance, we can teach ourselves to listen to the voice of our heart, in order really to know and experience truth. Stephen leads us to a deeper understanding of our connection with God and the purpose of our lives on earth. The knowledge he shares is based on profound life experience and a singular understanding of God and universal laws.

The wager fragment in Blaise Pascal's "Pensees "opens with the phrase ""infini rien""--"infinite nothing"--which is meant to describe the human condition. Pascal was responding to what was, even in the seventeenth century, becoming a pressing human problem: we seem to be able to know much about the world but less about ourselves.

The traditional European view of human beings as creatures made in the image of God and potentially capable of a mystical union with God was increasingly confounded by the difficulty of finding God in nature. Despite his own scientific work, however, Pascal argued that if one does not know whether or not God exists, one should bet that he does: if one is right the rewards are infinitely good and, if one is wrong, what one has lost is, by comparison, utterly trivial.

The argument behind this wager is one of the most celebrated--and disputed--in the history of philosophy. It has been seen in terms of the calculus of probabilities, as a piece of religious apologetic, as an event in the religious and psychological life of Pascal himself, and as an event in the life of the Jansenist movement and its various expressions at Port-Royal.

In this book, Leslie Armour explores the underlying logic of ideas brought to the surface by the intersection of two philosophical lines of thought. He shows that Pascal had come to philosophy by way of two particular strands of Platonism, one strongly mystical, associated with the founder of the French Oratorian order, Pierre de Berulle, and the other the Augustinian Platonism associated with Duvergier de Hauranne and Cornelius Jansen. At the same time Pascal was engaged in an internal struggle with skepticism. While he agreed that it is difficult to find God in physical nature, he disagreed with the claim that we know nothing of nature. The problem is that the human being is both infinite and nothing.

Thus, Armour locates Pascal's wager within the confluence of a vital neo-Platonism and an intellectually powerful skepticism. He concludes that even today, "If we must act and cannot know enough, we must bet."