In this article we respond to arguments from William Hasker and David Kyle Johnson that free will is incompatible with both divine foreknowledge and eternalism (what we refer to as isotemporalism). In particular, we sketch an Anselmian account of time and freedom, briefly defend the view against Hasker's critique, and then respond in more depth to Johnson's claim that Anselmian freedom is incompatible with free will because it entails that our actions are ‘ontologically necessary’. In defending Anselmian freedom we argue that our ordinary intuitions do not support Johnson's case and that Anselmian freedom is compatible with deliberation.

If God commanded something that would ordinarily be classified as a terrible evil, would we have a moral obligation to obey? In two previous articles in this journal, I examined and evaluated several different ways in which a divine command theorist might answer this question. Richard Brian Davis and W. Paul Franks have now provided a vigorous rebuttal, in which they argue that my way of handling the relevant counterpossible conditionals is flawed, and that a divine command theorist who avails herself of the metaphysical platform of theistic activism can consistently say that if (per impossibile) God were to command some terrible evil, it would not be the case that we have a moral obligation to do it. In the present article, I clarify my own view and defend it against Davis and Franks's objections. I also argue that the core claim of theistic activism – that there would be nothing at all if there were no God – does not have all the dramatic implications that Davis and Franks claim for it.

‘I can't believe that,’ said Alice.

‘Can't you?’ the Queen said in a pitying tone. ‘Try again: draw a long breath and shut your eyes.’

Alice laughed. ‘There's no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can't believe impossible things.’

‘I dare say you haven't had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

Theists believe that God is eternal, but they differ as to just what God's eternality means. The traditional, historic view of most Christian philosophers is that eternality means that God is timeless. He is ‘outside’ of time and not subject to any kind of temporal change. Indeed, God is the creator of time. Lets call this view divine timelessness.

Christianity affirms, with Judaism and Islam, that God is the omnipotent Creator of all things. But it diverges from them in also affirming that the Creator assumed a human nature in one figure of history, Jesus of Nazareth. Christ thus differs from other men in kind, not merely in degree; he is absolutely, not just relatively, unique. Admittedly many Christian theologians have held that the difference between Christ and other men is only one of degree. Yet the Church's traditional claim, as expressed in the Chalcedonian Definition, is that Jesus was both creature and Creator, both fully man and fully God.

This article investigates the metaphysical transformation that occurs when a believer becomes a new creation, something which hasn't yet been explored in the literature. I start by setting out what this ontological transformation involves, and then provide two models as to how it might go. The first is a type of substratism, based on a theory of mixing, while the second thinks about this transformation in terms of replacementism. Throughout the article I seek to resolve difficulties that both of these models bring, while also showing how other aspects of Christian thought can be explained by these models.

This article argues that the Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG) literature does not support the claim, made most notably by Eleonore Stump, that suffering tends to promote psychic integration that allows for interpersonal closeness with God (or others). Two strains of argument support this conclusion. First, there are problems internal to PTG research, identified by psychologists and bioethicists in the field, that call the strength and reliability of the findings into question. Second, even if successful in what it purports to do, the PTG literature does not support the conclusions that Stump draws from it. Finally, given that we live in a culture that both prizes and moralizes positivity, often at the expense of sufferers, applying this research in prescriptive and normative ways inappropriately circumscribes the post-traumatic journeys of trauma survivors. Before turning to these arguments, I begin by briefly describing the long-term suffering that trauma can inflict in the forms of post-traumatic stress disorder and other physical and mental health effects. This section illustrates the challenge that trauma poses for the projects of theodicy and defence and provides the backdrop against which the PTG literature must be read.

What is faith? And what makes faith reasonable, when it is so? I first defend approaching the question of faith and its reasonableness by starting from faith in the religious context. Next, I develop a ‘venture’ theory of a specific kind of faith of which religious – and specifically Christian – practical commitment to a whole worldview may be taken methodologically as a paradigm case. Then I consider the conditions under which faith-commitment of this general type may be reasonable. I suggest that faith-ventures of this kind are morally permissible only when they are made reasonably, with epistemic integrity. I consider the role an appeal to epistemic externalism may have in defending the epistemic integrity of venturing beyond (though not against) the available evidence. I advance a moderate fideist thesis (inspired by William James's ‘justification of faith’), and consider the debate between Jamesian fideists and evidentialists for whom epistemic integrity requires commitment to be made to truth-claims only to the extent supported by evidence for their truth.

What is it to lead a Christian life? At least part of the answer, from St Paul to Thomas à Kempis, to makers of WWJD bracelets, is to imitate Christ. But while there is a lot of practical advice in the spiritual literature for imitating Christ, there is little by way of philosophical analysis of what it is to imitate Christ. In this article, I aim to fill this lacuna. I argue that the imitation of Christ, as conceived of by St Paul, Thomas à Kempis, and others, requires a radical transformation of character, which, in turn, I argue, based on considerations from developmental psychology, requires direct engagement with Christ. This conclusion may be surprising, since Christ does not seem to be directly present to contemporary believers in the same way as, say, a mother is directly present to her infant child. I deal with this objection, and conclude with some applications of this approach to the philosophy of Christian spirituality.

Panentheism is the position that the world is in some sense ‘in’ God, and God ‘in’ the world, without the world being identical to God. Thus, it tries, like what I call mainstream theism and against pantheism, to protect the transcendence of God, while giving greater emphasis to his immanence in creation than the former. I aim to explicate an approach that I call Orthodox Panentheism. The word ‘orthodox’ is to be read in two ways. First, the picture is derived from the writings of some of the most important figures in Eastern Christian thought, so that it is Orthodox in the ‘big “O” sense’. Second, I hope to show that it is a legitimate Christian picture of the God–world relation which is both distinctive and worthy of being called ‘panentheism’ – an orthodox panentheism in the ‘little “o” sense’.

In response to John Bishop's (2007) account of passionally caused believing, Dan-Johan Eklund (2014) argues that conscious non-evidential believing is (conceptually) impossible, that is, it's (conceptually) impossible consciously to believe that p whilst acknowledging that the relevant evidence doesn't support p's being true, for it conflicts with belief being a truth-oriented attitude, or so he argues. In this article, we present Eklund's case against Bishop's account of passionally caused believing, and we argue that it's unpersuasive, at least to those who accept permissivism about evidence, that is, that it's possible for there to be more than one rational response to a given body of evidence. We do this through a novel application of a case of nurtured belief, that is, of a person holding a belief simply because she was caused to do so by her upbringing, and we use it to show exactly where Eklund's argument goes wrong. We conclude by drawing a general lesson drawn from this debate: if permissivism about evidence is true, then belief being truth-oriented is consistent with non-evidential believing being possible.

According to the divine command theory of morality, what is right or wrong, good or bad, is entirely dependent on the will and command of God: what He commands is right and what He forbids is wrong just because He commands or forbids it. It is argued here that the principal religious objection to this theory – that if it were true, moral precepts would be arbitrary – is rendered ineffective when due consideration is given to the consequences of God's omnipotence, and in particular, to His rationality and to His responsibility for deciding, in creation, what the characteristics of human nature are to be.

The Issues at Issue: (1) Heidegger declares metaphor to be a function of metaphysics. Ricoeur's tension theory of metaphor takes the understanding of metaphor beyond metaphysics. (2) Ricoeur's theory of metaphor is a theory of metaphorical statement not of naming. The classical, lexical theory of metaphor focuses on a primary meaning of each metaphor (grounding metaphor in what Aristotle calls pros hen equivocity). As such metaphor is merely ornamentation in language. What it names could more appropriately be accomplished in literal language. In contrast, metaphor is understood by Ricoeur to be a semantic event made possible by three kinds of tensions. (3) One may understand symbols to function with the same metaphorical tensions. In the case of symbols, however, these tensions function not at the level of the sentence but rather of the narrative. Metaphor and symbol both have an ‘ontological priority’ over other elements of discourse and experience. They ‘work’ because of the event character of both understanding and experience. Understanding (made possible by the dialectic of belonging and distanciation according to Ricoeur) and experience (made possible by temporality, dynamis) have event as their condition of possibility. (4) Metaphor and symbol both have a ‘temporal priority’, as well, for they serve as the shock to think ‘more’. This can occur, however, because they are part of a circularity that is non-metaphysical, that is, the circularity of the event character of the Being-of beings. Hence, just as metaphors are always ‘larger’ than the sentence, so are symbols always ‘larger’ than the narrative.

God is thought to be eternal. Does this mean that he is timeless? Or is he, rather, omnitemporal? In this article we argue that God cannot be omnitemporal. Our starting point, which we take from Bernard Williams's article on the Makropulos Case, is the intuition that it is inappropriate for persons not to become bored after a sufficiently long sequence of time has passed. If Williams is right, then it follows that, if God were omnitemporal, he would suffer from boredom. But God is the greatest possible being and therefore cannot be bored. God, hence, is not omnitemporal. After the presentation of our argument, we address several objections by examining possible differences between human and divine persons.

The post-war expansion of university faculties climaxed in the early 1970s. Since then, there have been more professional philosophers than ever before in history: a startling claim, but sober truth. In analytic philosophy, they have worked with more rigour and better training than even the Scholastics. It would take a surprising lack of talent among us, or perhaps argue some deep defect in the questions we ask, if the result were not more progress in philosophy than most periods can boast. And in fact, those who know what progress in philosophy looks like can see a lot of it: just compare Malcolm's 1960 piece on the ontological argument with Plantinga's 1974 treatment in The Nature of Necessity, and then both with Oppy's book on the subject.

Comparative study of religions and philosophies, in spite of its significance and urgency, has been neither fully appreciated nor developed in the study of religion or philosophy. Comparative study, historically speaking, is still young and complex in its approach. Religious Studies as an intellectual discipline has traditionally concentrated on the investigation of a single tradition, enabling a student to become an ‘expert’ in that particular tradition. The world in which we live, however, no longer allows us to be content with the idea, the value, the way of thinking in our own tradition alone. In short, we no longer live in a ‘provincial’ age but in a ‘global’ age.

I am grateful to Mr Levine for his careful and accurate rendering of the thesis which I presented and defended in my first paper on the topic of ‘self-authenticating religious experience’. As should be reasonably clear from his remarks, I defended therein the negative and somewhat modest epistemological thesis that even if it is inconceivable (or logically impossible) for there to occur self-authenticating experience of God, it is far from obvious that such is the case. Hence, it seems to me that the claim of more than a few theistic mystics to have had such experience is entitled to something more than the rather cavalier rejection it has received at the hands of many ‘tough-minded’ epistemologists of religion. (I except Mr Levine: his rejection of that claim inclines towards the distinctly non-cavalier.)

In this century the major insight in the field of moral philosophy has been that moral arguments need not proceed by way of the deduction of moral conclusions from non-moral premises. This realisation sprang from a recognition that the purpose of moral argument was not just to get one party to a moral disagreement to assent to a proposition that at the outset of the discussion he denied. If a moral argument was to be able to be considered successful it was insufficient for someone to recognise that an action he had previously considered right was wrong; it was essential that this recognition have an influence on his subsequent conduct. The change in belief was important only in so far as it led to a change in action. And although this insight led people to over diminish the importance of belief and propose various types of non-cognitive theories of ethics, it is none the less true that the acceptance of a proposition of the form ‘action X is wrong’ must have an impact of some kind on the behaviour of those who accept it.