Side by side with his notable career as a conservative politician, Lord Arthur James Balfour was what we would today call a public intellectual. Endowed with a complex personality, he evinced very broad interests, expressed in a series of writings on such varied topics as the philosophy of history, literature, music, painting and the supernatural. More than anything, however, his lifelong intellectual pursuit focused on the struggle between science and religion. Through a series of writings, he sought to unite science and religion in a common frame. His conception of Christianity was actually a kind of Deism, and his support of the Zionist cause had more to do with humanism than with Christian Zionism.

Guy G. Stroumsa is Martin Buber Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Professor Emeritus of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions and Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall at the University of Oxford. He is a Member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich. He is a laureate of the Humboldt Research Award, and a Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite. Together with Professor Sarah Stroumsa, he is the recipient of the Leopold-Lucas-Preis for 2018. His most recent books are Religions d’Abraham: histoires croisées (Geneva, 2017) and The Scriptural Universe of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, Mass., 2016).

The lecture was delivered on 2 November 2017.