In ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy’ Laurence Sterne writes:

That of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best—I'm sure it is the most religious—for I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

The publication in 1957 of the Wolfenden Report occasioned a celebrated controversy in which profound theoretical issues concerning the relation between law and morality, and the legal enforcement of morality were discussed. The principal disputants were Lord Justice Devlin (Sir Patrick Devlin as he then was) and Professor H. L. A. Hart. It is by now well known that the main recommendation of the Wolfenden Report was the reform of the criminal law so that homosexual behaviour in private between consenting male adults should no longer be a criminal offence. As homosexual behaviour in Christendom was at the outset punishable in the ecclesiastical courts, and subsequently, with the demise of the ecclesiastical courts, in the secular courts, the Wolfenden recommendation on homosexuality marked a major departure from the prevailing state of affairs in which the precepts of Christian morality, especially relating to sexual morals, were at first enforced by the ecclesiastical courts, and then by the secular courts.

(1) In this paper I want to discuss a certain way of understanding the concept of religion which I think is more satisfactory than other ways that have often been proposed in the literature, arguing, in brief, that the way to an adequate understanding does not lie through an analysis of the concept of ‘worship’ or ‘the worshipful’ or any notions derivative from these, as some writers have maintained, but instead through a comparative analysis of the various concepts of a ‘highest good’, thought of as a final salvation or ‘liberation’ for its seekers, found in the major religions. I shall also discuss some of the advantages of this way of regarding religion, as well as what I take to be certain of its consequences for the philosophy of religion. The discussion will also lay the groundwork for a pragmatic justification of religious belief (where ‘religious belief’ is understood in the way to be suggested), and will, I hope, help to shed light on the question of what would constitute a religiously satisfactory notion of the highest good.

It is a current commonplace that if the concept of deity is incoherent then no significant truth-claim is made for a formula like ‘God exists’, for it is neither true nor false but meaningless. This is the problem of factual meaning on which such emphasis is laid by critics like A. Flew, R. W. Hepburn, C. B. Martin, K. Nielsen and P. Edwards. I wish here to counter their challenge.

The last thirty years have seen a number of major contributions to the philosophical discussion of the possibility and character of an ‘ethics of belief’. In so far as the concern was focused on the problem of what constitutes ‘sufficient’ or ‘insufficient evidence’, the question of the ‘ethics of belief’ has turned into the current philosophical preoccupation with the question of the character of ‘rationality’ and the possibility of criteria of rationality which are either universal or at least cross-contextual. On the other hand, in so far as the concern was focused on the debated thesis that ‘believing is subject to moral appraisal (including the determination of “duties” to believe)’ the question of the ‘ethics of belief’ is with us today as the double inquiry into the question of the ‘will to believe’ and the relation of belief to action. Though the two concerns are not entirely separable, I will pay more explicit attention in this paper to the latter one in assessing some recent claims concerning the position held by John Henry Newman on these matters. After addressing some of the main points in the modern philosophical discussion of the ‘ethics of belief’, I will attempt to clarify Newman's place in the ‘ethics of belief’ discussion and argue that recent evaluations of Newman misrepresent his position in crucial ways and obscure his contributions to that discussion.

In the wake of Kantian and positivistic critiques of metaphysics and theology, one group of philosophers and theologians has attempted to reconstrue the meaning of religious discourse without making ontological commitments to a mind-independent reality. Another group has refused to abandon such commitments: they remain convinced that religious language is meaningless without them, because it cannot otherwise be ‘about’ anything objectively real; it merely becomes an expression ‘of’ religious piety, sentiment, or emotion.

Rousseau, I argue, held both the belief that humans are not naturally corrupt and the belief that humans do inevitably corrupt themselves. I explore these two outlooks by locating Rousseau at the crossroads of Enlightenment optimism and Augustinian pessimism – a juncture from which Rousseau could remind us of our responsibility for ourselves and our powerlessness to transform ourselves radically. In opposition to the standard interpretations of Rousseau, I show that Rousseau held that human wickedness springs not solely from social structures but from the human breast. Lodged within the human heart is a natural, fallen condition that makes our failures empirically inevitable, yet not ontologically necessary.

One thing our modern dialogue-consciousness has given us is what might be called an historical ‘sounding board’ harking back to the Hebraic tradition in which reverberate refrains of words like ‘When he calls, I shall answer, I am with you’ (Psalm 90). Set within the framework of our own age, which could be termed an age which speaks of God grown silent, these echoes can have a particular poignancy for us and we can at times find special relevance in the discovery of comparable tensions in the past. Such a tension is revealed in a study of the religious verse of two seventeenth-century English poets, John Donne and George Herbert.

In looking for criteria by which to assess religious conceptual systems, many philosophers have turned for help to scientific methodology. Perhaps this is because they felt philosophers of science were themselves looking in the right epistemological direction, and had a viable way of describing what they saw. Richard Swinburne has provided a strong, sustained treatment of the application of scientific method to religious truth claims, in The Existence of God. He there makes use of what he sees as ‘the close similarities which exist between religious theories and large-scale scientific theories’ in assessing the epistemic status of belief in God. The goal of this paper will be to give enough of Swinburne's position to see what criteria might be plucked therefrom, to subject both the criteria and the underlying methodology to scrutiny, and to assess where one must go from here in appraising the truth-claims of religion.

Every man, says Mencius, has within him this mind (heart) of commiseration, this pu-jen chih hsin that cannot bear to see another person suffer. To support his argument, Mencius cites the parable of the child about to fall into a well. A man with an innate mind of compassion unable to bear to see the child suffer would naturally feel the urge to run ahead to save the child (Mencius 2A.6). Yet elsewhere in Mencius 4A.17, it appears that had the potential victim been a drowning sister-in-law, the man would also be momentarily checked by a fear of impropriety. Since the sense of propriety has its beginning in the mind as much as the sense of compassion, is not the mind of goodness somehow divided against itself? The present essay will examine this possible dilemma.

Many philosophers in the analytic tradition have recently sought to explore the question of the meaning of life. In the first part of this article I subject two important approaches from this tradition – those of John Cottingham and Susan Wolf – to criticism. I then suggest that Cottingham and Wolf articulate certain assumptions about the meaning of life that are widely shared amongst analytic philosophers. I go on to subject those assumptions to criticism and seek to develop an alternative approach to the question, one that is largely overlooked in the contemporary literature.

Nobody is likely to claim that the name of Henry Longueville Mansel is an important one in contemporary Anglican theology. During the 130 years since he gave his Bampton Lectures in 1858 his work has been only sporadically reviewed. But he deserves more than this. As the title of his lecture – The Limits of Religious Thought – suggests, Mansel was partly responsible for bringing the philosophy of Kant into British religious thinking; and the problems he faced in trying to make a concept of regulative truth consistent with orthodox Anglican doctrine make his intellectual dilemma of unusual interest to the modern reader.

The need to address our question arises from two sources, one in Kant and the other in a certain type of response to so-called Reformed epistemology. The first source consists in a tendency to distinguish theoretical beliefs from practical beliefs (commitments to the world's being a certain way versus commitments to certain pictures to live by), and to treat theistic belief as mere practical belief. We trace this tendency in Kant's corpus, and compare and contrast it with Aquinas's view and a more conservative Kantian view. We reject the theistic-belief-as-mere-practical-belief view: it is bad descriptive anthropology, it embraces a misguided ideal of a fragmented self unattainable by human beings, and it will deter people from the most desirable sort of faith. The second source consists in the idea that since theistic beliefs function as answers to why-questions, their epistemic status hangs on whether they meet certain distinctively explanatory standards, whatever support they might receive from other sources. We argue that this is a non-sequitur and suggest questions for further research.

In this article, I propose a new Latin account of the Trinity, according to which each of the persons of the Trinity is an improper part of the Godhead.

Martin Heidegger's explication of Pindar's assertion that ‘to glorify was the essence of poetry’ puts it quite well. He tells us that for Pindar the word does not derive its force from what is already complete in itself. For then man would be glorifying what is already glorious, that which already has the power to impress men. At best the word then would denote an acknowledgment or a confession of being impressed. Instead, he insists, the word denotes the power of making to appear, or to extol a place.1

One of the most peculiar features of the belief in God is the accompanying claim that God is an indescribable mystery, an object of faith but never an object of knowledge. In certain contexts – in worship, for example – this claim undoubtedly serves a useful purpose; and so I do not want to dismiss the idea altogether. But when pious remarks about the ineffable nature of God are taken out of context and turned into philosophy, the result is usually an epistemological muddle. The trouble, of course, is that those who insist on God's mysteriousness still manage to say all sorts of things about him; he is an incorporeal spirit, he created the world, he loves his creatures, and so on. To assert these things is to presume some understanding of God, but no understanding is possible if God is completely incomprehensible. So if that is how it is, if the object of religious belief is utterly incomprehensible, then it makes no sense to say – or believe – anything about God.

What has become known as the ‘faith/history’ problem for historical religions like Christianity centres on the attempt to combine the ontological decisiveness, for faith, of an historical event characterized as an actual Incarnation of God with the epistemological indifference, or irrelevance, of historical information about that event which is decisive for faith. Without the former there is nothing to be related to or personally appropriated; without the latter faith is rendered vulnerable to the vagaries of historical research. Soren Kierkegaard's Climacus writings – the Philosophical Fragments and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript – provide a classic formulation of the inherent tension. Twentieth-century variations on the same theme are found in the writings of Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann, among others. In what follows I want to highlight an element in Kierkegaard's Climacus account which crucially distinguishes his attempt to deal with the faith/history relation from other attempts to deal with it, and thus offers what I suggest is a novel approach to overcoming the tension. This element – effectively a kind of a priori or conceptual proof – has been neglected, and whatever one's final judgement on its contribution to the problem as a whole, a consideration of it and its implications is, at the very least, integral to a full understanding of the thought-experiment in the Fragments. Moreover, in the process, useful light can be shed indirectly on twentieth-century attempts to deal with the faith/history problem.

A rough circumscription of our area of study will be achieved when I say that by images I mean the kind of thing about which Ian Crombie and Austin Farrer have written in Faith and Logic and Farrer also in The Glass of Vision. In the latter work Farrer cites as examples of religious images the Kingdom of God, the Son of Man, the Israel of God and the ‘infinitely complex and fertile image of sacrifice and communion, of expiation and covenant’. Farrer's images are essentially verbal pictures whose function is to interpret and elucidate revelatory events. He writes:

The great images interpreted the events of Christ's ministry, death and resurrection, and the events interpreted the images; the interplay of the two is revelation. Certainly the events without the images would be no revelation at all, and the images without the events would remain shadows on the clouds. The events by themselves are not revelation, for they do not by themselves reveal the divine work which is accomplished in them: the martyrdom of a virtuous Rabbi and his miraculous return are not of themselves the redemption of the world.

One of the hallmarks of the early modern rationalists was their confidence that a great deal of metaphysics could be done by purely a priori reasoning. They thought so at least partly because they inherited via Descartes Anselm's confidence that the existence of God could be established by purely a priori reasoning in an ontological argument. They also inherited a Thomistic and scholastic confidence that the concept of God as supremely perfect being, if subjected to serious and deep analysis, would yield sound doctrine. Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz all three took it that they had in their stock of ideas an idea of God sufficiently clear and detailed that a little analytic work could produce real metaphysical results, not only about God himself, but also about the universe in which they found themselves (for Spinoza, these turned out to be the same thing). Though they start with what purport to be ideas of the same God, they get radically different results in their analyses.

Theistic modal realism argues for an extension of Lewis's modal realism capable of accommodating a theistic God. By affording elegant solutions to many atheistic challenges, the view is of great theoretical utility for the theist. However, it has been objected that within a Lewisian framework God cannot be causally efficacious on pain of collapsing intuitively distinct modal notions. In this article I explain why these worries are ill-founded and show how God's existence and causal power over the pluriverse can be consistently understood. If successful, the proposal offers a congenial theistic way to adopt modal realism and address the atheological problems.