Essay 9 - The Age of Universal Religions
- Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam as global movements of inner transformation.
- The humanization of divinity: compassion as the new sacred law.
- Mysticism, incarnation, and surrender as the universal triad of worship.
- Empires of faith and the paradox of universality and control.
Essay 10 - Modernity and the Eclipse of the Sacred
- The Enlightenment’s rational rebellion against myth.
- Science, humanism, and secularization: new gods of reason.
- The disenchanted cosmos and the crisis of meaning.
- Nietzsche’s “death of God” as call to recreate the sacred from within.
Essay 11 - The Rebirth of the Sacred: Process, Panentheism, and the Pluriverse
- Whitehead, Teilhard, and the rediscovery of cosmic consciousness.
- Worship as participation in divine creativity, not obedience to decree.
- From anthropocentric religion to planetary spirituality.
- A metamodern synthesis: faith beyond dogma, reverence beyond creed.
Essay 9
The Age of Universal Religions
As the preceding essays have shown, the religious imagination of humanity has never been static. It unfolds across millennia, shaped by environment, social organization, symbolic cognition, and the deepening of human self-awareness. Yet even within this immense diversity of forms, a persistent pattern remains: human communities repeatedly seek to name, encounter, and align themselves with a reality they perceive as greater than themselves.
It is here that I must make my own standpoint transparent. If given the choice between interpreting the world as bereft of meaning or as infused with significance, I incline toward faith. I do so not as an escape from critical inquiry but as its companion to historical precedent, trusting that the long arc of human religious development may reflect not mere projection but a genuine encounter with the depths of existence.
The aim in the pages that follow - as it was in earlier essays on this topic - is not to privilege any single religious tradition nor to argue for one definitive expression of the sacred. Rather, it is to explore how the diverse trajectories of human religiosity - prehistoric, ancient, and modern - may be understood as evolving responses to a relational and dynamic cosmos. The theological perspective I bring, shaped by process thought, views divinity not as a static absolute but as a living presence that participates in the unfolding of the world, inviting creativity, compassion, and transformation.
Readers need not share this orientation. The preceding essays stand on their own anthropological and historical foundations. But for those who, like myself, see in the human longing for meaning a resonant truth rather than a misstep, the next stage of this project offers a constructive framework: one that honors the plural paths by which different cultures have sought the sacred and one which interprets these paths as diverse expressions of an evolving, relational faith as seen through the eyes of process theology.
Part IV therefore marks a transition - from describing the evolution of religious consciousness to considering its theological implications. It is an attempt to articulate how an evolving cosmos might invite evolving forms of faith, and how such faith might remain open, plural, and deeply human while still grounded in the possibility of a divine presence moving within and through a world of enculturating pluralism.
Preface
This essay examines these developments not as isolated theological breakthroughs, but as expressions of deeper historical forces:
- increasing mobility and cultural contact,
- the rise of empires and transregional networks,
- expanding literacy and philosophical reflection, and
- the intensification of personal ethical self-scrutiny.
These universal religions did not supersede older traditions so much as reinterpret them for a world now marked by pluralism and mobility. They introduced the possibility that ultimate reality could be approached through compassion, self-giving, and inward transformation - offering a spiritual grammar capable of crossing linguistic, political, and cultural boundaries.
Across the long arc traced in the preceding essays, the sacred has appeared in many guises: as ancestral presence, territorial power, cosmic hierarchy, covenantal law, and moral command. In its earliest forms, divinity was inseparable from place - this mountain, that river, this city, that people. Gods were local because life was local. Identity was inherited, boundaries were fixed, and meaning was bound to land, bloodline, and memory.
However, by the middle of the first millennium BCE, the human story had changed. Trade routes stitched continents together. Empires displaced villages. Exile, migration, and conquest fractured inherited identities. No longer could the sacred remain confined to a single soil or sanctuary. If it were to endure, it would have to travel.
The religions that emerged during this period - most notably Buddhism, Christianity, and later Islam - represent a decisive shift in the grammar of the sacred. For the first time in human history, spiritual belonging was no longer primarily inherited but invited. One did not need to be born into the right people, stand on the right land, or serve the right king to participate in ultimate meaning. The sacred was no longer fixed to territory or tribe; it became portable, capable of being carried within persons and communities across cultural and geographic boundaries.
This was not merely a theological development. It was an anthropological and civilizational transformation. Religion began to speak in universal moral terms, to address the inner life of the individual, and to imagine a form of belonging that could transcend political borders and ethnic distinctions. In doing so, it redefined what it meant to be human in relation to the cosmos.
I. From Tribal Covenant to Universal Path
The religions of the ancient Near East - as traced through essays 1-8 (including 4 background essays and, at present, 9 supplemental essays) - were deeply embedded in social and political order. Divine authority mirrored royal authority; covenant mirrored treaty; worship stabilized hierarchy. Even ethical developments - justice, mercy, and care for the vulnerable - were framed within the boundaries of a particular people’s relationship with its sacred divine.
What changed in the age of universal religions is not the disappearance of these earlier patterns, but their transformation.
Rather than anchoring salvation, liberation, or righteousness in ancestry or civic membership, universal religions articulate paths - disciplined ways of religiously-living that any person may enter. The sacred is no longer guarded by lineage; it is accessed through practice. What matters is not where one comes from, but how one walks across the life given one.
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Buddhism offers a path of awakening grounded in insight, ethical conduct, and disciplined attention to suffering and impermanence.
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Christianity proclaims a way of life centered on love, self-giving, and participation in the redemptive story of Jesus that transcends ethnic and legal boundaries.
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Islam articulates a comprehensive path of surrender to divine unity, integrating devotion, ethics, and communal responsibility into a coherent way of life.
In each case, the sacred is no longer encountered primarily through ritual allegiance to a local deity, but through transformation of the self per identity with that religion's sacred divine. The divine address turns inward, not as introspective escapism, but as moral and existential summons.
This shift does not abolish community. On the contrary, it creates new forms of community - In India, sangha; in Christianity, ekklesia; in Islam, ummah - each defined not by blood or land, but by shared orientation toward ultimate meaning. These communities are inherently translocal. They can be carried across borders, sustained in exile, and transmitted through teaching rather than inheritance.
The universal religions thus arise at the intersection of two forces: the breakdown of traditional social structures and the expansion of human self-awareness. As the world grows larger and more complex, religion responds by turning inward and outward at once - cultivating interior depth while extending ethical concern beyond familiar boundaries.
In this sense, the age of universal religions does not reject earlier religious forms. It gathers them in, refines them, and releases them into a wider human horizon.
One of the most decisive transformations introduced by the universal religions is the relocation of the sacred from external order to interior life. Earlier religious systems had certainly acknowledged inward dispositions - intentions, loyalties, purity of heart - but these were secondary to visible compliance with ritual, law, and social role. The gods were appeased, honored, or obeyed through acts performed in public space and sacred geography.
In the age of universal religions, this orientation reverses. The decisive arena of religious meaning becomes the human interior: intention, awareness, conscience, desire, and surrender. What one is becoming matters as much as, and often more than, what one outwardly performs.
This interiorization is not a withdrawal from the world. Rather, it represents a reconfiguration of how the world is engaged.
Buddhism: Liberation Through Insight and Discipline
In Buddhism, the sacred is not personified as a creator god but encountered through awakened understanding of reality as it is. Suffering (dukkha) is not imposed by divine judgment but arises from craving, attachment, and misperception. Liberation, therefore, does not depend on divine favor or ritual mediation, but on disciplined insight into impermanence, interdependence, and non-self.
The path of liberation - ethics (śīla), meditation (samādhi), and wisdom (prajñā) - is radically interior in its orientation. Yet its ethical implications are unmistakably social. Compassion arises not from command but from clarity: to see reality rightly is to respond to it gently.
Here the sacred becomes a mode of awareness rather than an external authority. Transformation is achieved not by conquest, sacrifice, or appeasement, but by sustained attentiveness to the structures of experience itself.
Christianity: The Moral Interior and the Imitation of Christ
Christianity, emerging from Jewish covenantal tradition, intensifies the inward turn already present in prophetic critique. Jesus’ teachings consistently relocate moral responsibility from external compliance to internal disposition: anger becomes as consequential as violence, desire as weighty as action, love of enemy as central as love of neighbor.
The sacred law is no longer inscribed primarily on stone or scroll, but - echoing prophetic anticipation - upon the heart. Salvation is framed not simply as juridical acquittal, but as transformation of the self through participation in divine love.
Central to this interiorization is the figure of Christ himself. Incarnation (of Christ) locates the divine not in cosmic distance or political power, but in vulnerability, suffering, and relational fidelity. To follow Christ is not merely to assent to doctrine, but to undergo a reshaping of one’s inner orientation toward humility, forgiveness, and self-giving love.
In this way, Christianity universalizes the sacred by locating it within the moral and relational depths of every human life.
Islam: Intention, Submission, and the Ordering of the Self
Islam likewise places decisive emphasis on interior disposition, particularly through the concept of niyyah - intention. Acts of worship, ethical conduct, and communal obligation derive their meaning not solely from outward performance, but from inward orientation toward divine unity (tawḥīd).
Submission (islām) is not passive resignation, but conscious alignment of the self with the moral order of reality as willed by God. The struggle (jihād) most emphasized in classical Islamic spirituality is not external conflict, but the inner struggle against ego, injustice, and forgetfulness.
While Islamic practice is highly structured and communal, its moral force depends upon sincerity of heart and accountability before God beyond any human authority. The sacred thus resides neither in lineage nor priesthood, but in the lived integrity of intention, action, and remembrance.
A Shared Transformation
Across these traditions, the sacred migrates inward without becoming privatized. Interior transformation generates outward consequence. Compassion, justice, hospitality, restraint, and care for the vulnerable are no longer merely civic virtues or divine mandates; they become expressions of an interior alignment with ultimate reality.
This interiorization allows the sacred to travel - to survive exile, persecution, and displacement. A temple may fall. A city may burn. A kingdom may dissolve. But a disciplined heart, an awakened awareness, or a surrendered will can be carried anywhere.
In this sense, universal religions answered a new historical condition: a world in motion. As humanity becomes more mobile, plural, and self-reflective, religion adapts by locating its deepest authority not in place or power, but in the transformation of persons.
Yet this very strength also carries a latent tension. When inner transformation becomes the center of religious life, questions inevitably arise: Who defines authentic transformation? How is it taught, guarded, or enforced? And what happens when interior faith becomes aligned with institutional power?
These questions lead directly to the next development in the universal religious imagination: the emergence of compassion as a trans-cultural sacred law - one that binds inward transformation to outward responsibility.
III. Compassion as a Trans-Cultural Sacred Law
As the sacred moved inward, it did not dissolve into private spirituality. On the contrary, interior transformation generated a new and expansive ethical horizon. Across the universal religions, a striking convergence emerges: compassion becomes the decisive moral criterion by which spiritual authenticity is measured.
This convergence does not arise from shared doctrine or metaphysical agreement. Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam differ profoundly in their cosmologies, theological claims, and ritual expressions. Yet each arrives, through its own path, at the insight that genuine encounter with ultimate reality must manifest as care for others - especially the vulnerable, the suffering, and the marginalized.
In earlier religious systems, ethical obligations were largely circumscribed by kinship, city, or covenant. Justice applied primarily within the boundaries of the sacred community. And yet, arising universal religions expanded this moral field. Ethical responsibility now extends beyond tribe and nation, grounded in the shared condition of humanity itself.
Compassion Without UniformityIn Buddhism, compassion (karuṇā) arises from insight into interdependence. When the illusion of isolated selfhood dissolves, the suffering of others is no longer experienced as foreign. Ethical response becomes an expression of clarity rather than obedience.
In Christianity, love (agapē) is not merely a virtue but a participation in divine life itself. God is encountered not through power or dominance, but through self-giving love - most radically expressed in forgiveness, solidarity with the oppressed, and willingness to suffer for the sake of others. The neighbor is no longer defined by proximity or kinship, but by need.
In Islam, mercy (raḥma) stands at the center of divine identity. Nearly every chapter of the Qur’an begins with the invocation of God as “the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.” Ethical life flows from remembrance of this mercy and from the responsibility to reflect it in acts of justice, generosity, and restraint.
These ethical visions are not identical, nor do they require philosophical reconciliation. What unites them is not metaphysical agreement but moral direction. Compassion becomes the shared orientation through which the sacred enters the social world.
Ethics Before OntologyOne of the most significant implications of this convergence is that ethics begins to precede ontology. One need not resolve ultimate metaphysical questions in order to act rightly, compassionately, lovingly, mercifully. The demand for compassion does not wait upon perfect doctrine.
This inversion marks a quiet but profound shift in religious consciousness. Rather than grounding ethics in cosmic hierarchy or divine fiat alone, universal religions increasingly ground moral responsibility in relational awareness - awareness of suffering, dependence, vulnerability, and shared fate.
Here the sacred is no longer validated primarily by metaphysical coherence or ritual precision, but by its fruits in lived relation. A faith that fails to generate compassion is exposed as hollow, regardless of its claims to authority or to its orthodoxy.
This ethical primacy will later become a point of tension as religious institutions seek to preserve doctrinal boundaries and social control. But at its core, the universal religious impulse insists that the sacred must make the world more humane or it loses its claim upon religious conscientiousness.
Toward a Universal Moral HorizonCompassion thus functions as a kind of trans-cultural sacred law - not codified in a single text, not enforced by a single authority, but recognized across traditions as the unmistakable sign of spiritual depth. It offers a moral grammar capable of crossing linguistic, cultural, and theological boundaries without erasing difference.
In this sense, the universal religions do not merely expand belief; they expand responsibility. They invite humanity to imagine itself as morally bound to strangers, enemies, and future generations. The sacred becomes not only something to revere, but something to enact.
Yet this very universality carries risk. When compassion becomes institutionalized, translated into law, doctrine, and empire, it can be distorted into coercion. When love is mandated, it may become enforced. When mercy is claimed as exclusive possession, it can be withheld from those deemed outside the fold.
To understand how the universal religions both liberated and constrained the human spirit, we must now turn to the structures through which the sacred was embodied and transmitted - mysticism, incarnation, and surrender - and to the paradoxes they introduced into the history of faith.
IV. Mysticism, Incarnation, and Surrender
As universal religions took shape, they developed not only ethical frameworks and communal identities, but enduring symbolic patterns through which finite human beings sought encounter with the infinite. Across diverse traditions and cultures, three modes of religious experience repeatedly emerge: mystical union, incarnational presence, and surrendered alignment. These are not doctrines imposed from above, but lived responses to the same existential tension—the longing to bridge the distance between human finitude and ultimate reality.
Though expressed differently in each tradition, these three modes function together as a universal triad through which the sacred becomes experientially accessible.
Mysticism: Direct Encounter Beyond MediationMysticism names the human intuition that ultimate reality can be encountered directly, beyond symbol, language, or institutional mediation. In mystical experience, the boundary between self and world softens; the sacred is not observed from a distance but participated in.
In Buddhism, this encounter takes the form of awakening to emptiness (śūnyatā) and interdependence, dissolving the illusion of a separate, enduring self. In Christian mysticism, it appears as union with God through love, silence, and contemplative surrender—often described as intimacy rather than comprehension. In Islam, particularly within Sufism, mysticism emerges as annihilation of the ego (fanāʾ) in the presence of divine unity.
Mysticism thus functions as a corrective to over-institutionalization. It insists that the sacred cannot be fully captured by doctrine or authority. It reminds religious communities that symbols point beyond themselves, and that the deepest knowledge of reality is transformative rather than propositional.
Yet mysticism alone is unstable. Detached from history and embodiment, it risks becoming esoteric or socially disengaged. The universal religions therefore pair mystical immediacy with a second movement: incarnation.
Incarnation: The Sacred Within HistoryIncarnation names the conviction that the sacred does not remain abstract or distant, but enters the textures of historical life. In Christianity, this conviction is explicit and central: divinity is revealed not in imperial power or cosmic spectacle, but in a particular human life marked by vulnerability, compassion, and suffering.
Yet incarnational logic extends beyond Christianity alone. Buddhism locates awakening within embodied practice and ethical discipline, rejecting salvation through metaphysical speculation alone. Islam affirms divine transcendence while insisting that God’s will is made known through concrete guidance shaping daily life, community, and law.
In each case, the sacred becomes accessible not by escaping the world, but by engaging it rightly. History, body, and relationship become sites of encounter rather than obstacles to transcendence.
Incarnation grounds mysticism, anchoring spiritual experience in ethical responsibility and communal memory. It resists spiritual elitism by insisting that the sacred is present within ordinary human struggle.
Surrender: The Relinquishment of Egoic ControlThe third movement of the triad—surrender—addresses the existential obstacle that underlies all spiritual seeking: the human impulse to control, possess, and secure reality according to one’s own will.
In Buddhism, surrender takes the form of relinquishing attachment and craving. In Christianity, it appears as self-denial, trust, and willingness to lose one’s life in order to find it. In Islam, surrender is named directly as the heart of faith: aligning one’s will with divine unity.
Surrender is not passivity. It is a disciplined openness to transformation—a refusal to absolutize the ego as the measure of meaning. Through surrender, the sacred is no longer encountered as a rival power but as a relational horizon within which the self is reshaped.
A Shared Grammar of TranscendenceTogether, mysticism, incarnation, and surrender form a shared grammar through which universal religions articulate the encounter between humanity and the sacred. Mysticism offers immediacy, incarnation offers embodiment, and surrender offers transformation. None is sufficient alone; each corrects the excesses of the others.
This triad allows the sacred to be both intimate and ethical, transcendent and historical, inward and communal. It explains how religions with radically different theologies can nonetheless generate similar spiritual fruits—and similar tensions.
For while these modes of encounter deepen religious life, they also invite institutional response. Mysticism must be regulated, incarnation interpreted, surrender directed. Over time, structures emerge to guard, transmit, and enforce these experiences, giving rise to religious authority, orthodoxy, and empire.
It is to this paradox—how religions of inner liberation became engines of social control—that we must now turn.
V. The Paradox of Universality: Liberation and Control
The very qualities that enabled the universal religions to transcend tribe and territory also rendered them capable of unprecedented scale and influence. A faith that could travel could also govern. A message that addressed the inner life could also shape law, culture, and empire. In this way, religions born from compassion, surrender, and interior transformation gradually became entangled with structures of authority and control.
This development was neither accidental nor purely corruptive. As universal religions spread across vast and diverse populations, they required mechanisms of transmission, interpretation, and cohesion. Teachings had to be preserved. Practices had to be standardized. Communities had to be organized. What began as paths of transformation became traditions, then institutions.
Scripture was canonized. Doctrine was formalized. Orthodoxy emerged to guard against fragmentation. These processes stabilized religious identity and allowed faith to endure across generations. Without them, the universal religions might have remained ephemeral movements, dissolving under the pressures of cultural diversity and political change.
Yet institutionalization carried a cost.
When the sacred is administered, it can be regulated. When compassion is codified, it can be enforced. When surrender is interpreted by authority, it can be demanded rather than freely offered. The inward turn that once liberated conscience now risked submission to external control.
Religion and EmpireNowhere is this paradox more visible than in the alliance between universal religions and empire. Buddhism found patronage under imperial rulers. Christianity moved from persecuted minority to state religion of Rome. Islam emerged as both a spiritual and political community, rapidly expanding across continents.
Empires provided protection, infrastructure, and legitimacy. Religions provided moral vision, social cohesion, and cosmic justification. The exchange was mutually reinforcing—and morally ambiguous.
Universal compassion now coexisted with exclusion. Love of neighbor was bounded by orthodoxy. Mercy was extended selectively. Violence could be sacralized in the name of order, purity, or divine will.
This was not a betrayal of religion by politics alone. It reflected an unresolved tension within the universal religious imagination itself: how to preserve moral universality without dissolving into chaos; how to maintain coherence without suppressing conscience.
The Ambivalence of AuthorityReligious authority arises in response to genuine need—the need for continuity, shared meaning, and communal discernment. Yet authority, once established, tends toward self-preservation. Over time, the language of transformation can harden into the language of control.
Mystics are tolerated, then regulated. Reformers are honored, then domesticated. Radical compassion is praised, then constrained by doctrine and law.
The universal religions thus generate their own critique from within. Prophetic voices re-emerge to call institutions back to their founding vision. Reform movements arise to restore interior depth and ethical integrity. These cycles of renewal and resistance repeat across centuries.
A Threshold, Not a TerminusThe age of universal religions represents a decisive expansion of human moral imagination. It universalized ethical concern, interiorized the sacred, and articulated pathways of transformation capable of crossing cultural boundaries. But it did not resolve the fundamental tension between freedom and order, experience and authority, compassion and control.
Rather than a final stage in religious evolution, the universal religions mark a threshold. They prepare humanity for a deeper reckoning—one in which inherited cosmologies, institutional certainties, and metaphysical guarantees would be challenged by new ways of knowing the world.
The next epoch will not abandon the sacred. It will question its forms.
As reason, science, and historical consciousness rise to prominence, the sacred will appear to recede—not because it has vanished, but because the structures that once mediated it can no longer command unquestioned trust. The eclipse that follows will be unsettling, disorienting, and creative.
It is to that eclipse—and to the modern struggle to reimagine meaning in a disenchanted cosmos—that the next essay turns.
Conclusion
The age of universal religions transformed the sacred from local allegiance to global horizon, from inherited identity to chosen path, from external authority to interior transformation. In doing so, it expanded humanity’s capacity for compassion, responsibility, and self-reflection.
Yet by aligning with empire and institution, these traditions also exposed the fragility of universality itself. The sacred, once made universal, risked becoming uniform; once liberating, it risked becoming coercive.
This unresolved tension does not invalidate the universal religions. It reveals their historical task—and their limitation. They carried humanity to the edge of a wider horizon. Beyond that edge lies modernity, with its rebellions, its disenchantments, and its longing to rediscover meaning without surrendering freedom.
Essay 10 will explore that passage.
~ Continue to Part IV, Essay 10 ~
Evolution of Worship & Religion- Part I - Foundations: The Birth of the Sacred
- Essay 1 - Animism and the Living Cosmos
- Essay 2 - From Tribe to Totem
- Part II - The Age of Gods
- Essay 3 - The Mesopotamian Fertile Crescent
- Essay 4 - Egypt, Indus, and Minoa Sacred Cultures
- Essay 5 - From Polytheism to Henotheism
- Part III - Axial Awakenings
- Essay 6 - Ancient Israel, Persia, and Monotheism
- Essay 7 - India's Axial Age
- Essay 8 - Greece and the Birth of Reason
- Part IV - The Sacred Made Universal
- Essay 9 - The Age of Universal Religions
- Essay 10 - Modernity and the Eclipse of the Sacred
- Essay 11 - The Rebirth of the Sacred
- Essay 12 - A Processual Summation of Worship and Religion
- Essay 13 - The Way of Cruciformity: When God Refused Power
- Part V - Supplementary Materials
- I - The Ancient History of Mesopotamia
- II - The History of Language in Ancient Mesopotamia
- III - The Ancient History of the Hebrew Language
- IV(A-C) How the Ancient Near East Gave Shape to Israel's God
- Why the ANE is Essential for Israel's Received Theology (I-II)
- Affecting Cultic Syncretism Across the Ancient Near East (III-V)
- Cultural Identity Formation & the Rejection of Syncretism (VI-IX)
- V (A-C) The History & Compilation of the Hebrew Bible
- From Oral Memory to Proto-Canon (I-II)
- Exile, Redaction, and the Birth of Scripture (III)
- Second Temple Scribalization to Canonization (IV-V)
- VI - The Unhelpful Oxymorons of "Biblical Authority" & "Inerrancy"
- VII - The Evolution of Inerrancy: From Ancient Plurality to Modern Certainty
- VIII - A Historical-Theological Study of "Son of Man" vs "Son of God"
- IX - The Song of Gilgamesh & Other Ancient Flood Stories
- Part I - Foundations: The Birth of the Sacred
- Essay 1 - Animism and the Living Cosmos
- Essay 2 - From Tribe to Totem
- Part II - The Age of Gods
- Essay 3 - The Mesopotamian Fertile Crescent
- Essay 4 - Egypt, Indus, and Minoa Sacred Cultures
- Essay 5 - From Polytheism to Henotheism
- Part III - Axial Awakenings
- Essay 6 - Ancient Israel, Persia, and Monotheism
- Essay 7 - India's Axial Age
- Essay 8 - Greece and the Birth of Reason
- Part IV - The Sacred Made Universal
- Essay 9 - The Age of Universal Religions
- Essay 10 - Modernity and the Eclipse of the Sacred
- Essay 11 - The Rebirth of the Sacred
- Essay 12 - A Processual Summation of Worship and Religion
- Essay 13 - The Way of Cruciformity: When God Refused Power
- Part V - Supplementary Materials
- I - The Ancient History of Mesopotamia
- II - The History of Language in Ancient Mesopotamia
- III - The Ancient History of the Hebrew Language
- IV(A-C) How the Ancient Near East Gave Shape to Israel's God
- Why the ANE is Essential for Israel's Received Theology (I-II)
- Affecting Cultic Syncretism Across the Ancient Near East (III-V)
- Cultural Identity Formation & the Rejection of Syncretism (VI-IX)
- V (A-C) The History & Compilation of the Hebrew Bible
- From Oral Memory to Proto-Canon (I-II)
- Exile, Redaction, and the Birth of Scripture (III)
- Second Temple Scribalization to Canonization (IV-V)
- VI - The Unhelpful Oxymorons of "Biblical Authority" & "Inerrancy"
- VII - The Evolution of Inerrancy: From Ancient Plurality to Modern Certainty
- VIII - A Historical-Theological Study of "Son of Man" vs "Son of God"
- IX - The Song of Gilgamesh & Other Ancient Flood Stories
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