Malthus' theological ideas were most clearly presented in the final two chapters of the first edition (1798) of his Essay on the Principle of Population. They can be classified under eight main headings. (i) He admitted that the pressure of population causes much misery and evil, but he did not accept that this in any way impugned the benevolence of the Creator. He situated the population problem within the general context of the problem of evil, and argued that population pressure is permitted and ordained by the Creator as a means of stimulating mankind to attain a higher good. (ii) He opposed the traditional Christian notion that this world is a state of trial, with population pressure being one aspect of that trial. He believed that this notion of a state of trial is inconsistent with the notion of an omniscient Creator, and that it is therefore necessary to reject the notion of a state of trial in order to save the notion of Divine omniscience. (iii) Instead of viewing this world as a state of trial, he viewed it ‘as the mighty process of God, not for the trial, but for the creation and formation of mindr. This notion of the growth of mind is the central aspect of Malthus' theology. (iv) He expressed doubts about the omnipotence of the Creator, arguing that God did not have the power to create perfect human beings instantaneously, but required a certain process or a certain time to form beings with ‘exalted qualities of mind’. Malthus seemed to argue that Divine omnipotence and Divine benevolence are incompatible – because a truly benevolent creator would not have subjected mankind to the miseries of this world if He had the power to create a perfect world. Malthus was prepared to sacrifice the notion of Divine omnipotence in order to save the notion of Divine benevolence. (v) He saw the principle of population as part of the Divine plan for the replenishment of the earth, i.e. its full cultivation and peopling. (vi) His attitude to worldly pleasures and comforts was distinctly unpuritanical, and leaning towards hedonism. His ethics were world-enhancing, rather than world-denying and retreatist. (This point is discussed more fully in Part II below.) (vii) He gave a naturalistic interpretation of the Biblical doctrine of original sin, describing original sin as the original state of torpor and sluggishness of every human being at the moment of birth. The purpose of the principle of population, and of the other difficulties encountered in life, is to stimulate man to raise himself out of this original state. (viii) Finally, Malthus' theology included the doctrine of annihilationism (or conditional immortality), according to which eternal life is not an essential part of the human soul at birth, but is granted only to those who attain during life on earth an adequate growth of mind. The others are, at death, not condemned to eternal suffering, but are annihilated, body and soul.

During June, 1836 Soren Kierkegaard attended a soiree in Copenhagen where the wine flowed, witty conversation bubbled from every corner, and he himself was at the centre of merriment – sparkling, acerbic, enormously witty. After the party he returned home and penned the following lines in his journal:

I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away – yes, the dash would be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit…and wanted to shoot myself.

There seems to be a growing consensus amongst both theologians and philosophers that the classical doctrine of God as a simple, eternal (atemporal) being is untenable. Worries are expressed about the very notion of atemporal existence and when the examples of numbers and universals are offered, attention is drawn to the uncertain ontological status of such entities. Further, some of the traditional expressions of divine eternity are strictly speaking incoherent, bearing in mind that eternity means having neither temporal location nor duration. For example, it is clearly self-contradictory to assert that atemporal deity enjoys the ‘Eternal Now’ since this would entail temporal location, and similarly Boethius' famous definition of eternity as ‘unending life existing as a complete whole all at once’ is suspect, for it suggests that God has both infinite duration (‘unending life’) and also no duration (‘all at once’). Of course, the traditionalist will hasten to point out that God's magnum mysterium is forcing him to employ language analogically, but the critics suspect they are rather in the presence of the fog of unknowing and just plain woolly thinking.

If God is not a person, what sense does it make to worship ‘it’? The problem of worship takes on a new aspect in the light of models of God which have recently been promulgated by certain philosophers and theologians – that God is ‘Being itself’, ‘the ground of our being’, ‘experienced non-objective reality’, an inspiring picture, a fictional entity in a religious story, a linguistic device for indicating the fundamentality of our perspective on life or ‘the self not yet become’.

Debate over indigenization of Christianity continues in earnest even after the waning of the missionary zeal of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, set afire in no small measure by the wave of Great Awakening that swept New England and beyond. The context in which the Gospel of Christ is to be heard anew has ceased to be the God forsaken lands of heathens but is now one in which new challenges have emerged, ranging widely from Marxism and Islam, scientific scepticism and technological revolution, to urbanization and the rise of the ‘Third World’. In a country where since the early seventeenth century the Christians have scarcely numbered more than half of one percent of the population, the Gospel continues to intrigue the inquiring minds and the tired souls of the Japanese, particularly among the educated for many of whom the initial exposure to Christianity was through schooling or personal cultural enrichment. While many have regarded Christianity as a passage to Western culture and civilization when Japan still held the West in awe, worthy of emulation, others have taken upon themselves a more sobering, if troubling to some, task of inquiring whether the teaching of Christ could be the spiritual and social force to redeem and to transform the Japanese without relinquishing, if possible, but rather affirming the integrity of their own heritage. In no other country has a religious tradition exerted influence so far out of pro-portion to its membership as has Christianity in modern Japan.

It is well known that the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher and sceptic David Hume was a severe critic of religious belief, but what may not be so familiar, and has been brought to our attention in recent years by Isaiah Berlin, is that some religious believers have found in Hume's sceptical arguments a source of nurture for their religious faith. In particular, Berlin singles out the example of Hume's contemporary, Johann Georg Hamann (17388), a devout but unconventional believer as well as one of the leaders of the German Counter-Enlightenment. Hamann's primary claim to fame, however, rests upon his influence upon the Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard. Although Kierkegaard never met Hamann, he was familiar with his writings, and calls Hamann ‘his only teacher.’ Kierkegaard's vast influence on modern Christianity, especially Protestantism, is, of course, a commonplace. What, though, is often overlooked, and Berlin calls our attention to, is that this man who influenced Kierkegaard was himself deeply influenced by Hume. The student of religion, as well as the philosopher, cannot help but be struck by this historical connection between Hume and believers such as Johann Hamann and thus, ultimately, between David Hume and modern Protestantism.

Navajo religious rituals are so multifaceted that one has trouble perceiving any centre of gravity. The inevitable question is: What are the sources of unity behind the diversity of the chant system? Let us see what evidence there is among the Navajo that all religions tend to seek some point of contact with the divine.

A decade has passed since Victor Turner published his long and important paper defining pilgrimage as a ritual process. There and in his earlier article ‘The Centre Out There’, which appeared a year earlier, Turner provided a social explanation for the ubiquitous and still expanding phenomenon of pilgrimage. His simple model, developed from Van Gennep's ‘rite de passage’ seemed profound; it offered us a means for comparing the sacred journeys of one people with those of another, and for comparing pilgrimage with other kinds of ritual processes. Moreover, a vast amount of sociological data having to do with class, age, caste, and status of pilgrims could be usefully mobilized within this model. It continues to have some value although subsequent studies have shown that often pilgrim-groups are not as coherent or homogenous as Turner's model suggested they would become as they moved ever closer to the sacred centre of their shared faith.

In a 1953 paper H. H Price described a possible set of afterlife conditions for a disembodied self or consciousness. His model has remained something of a benchmark for dualist philosophers up to the present day. The purpose of this article is to begin with Price and, noting certain major weaknesses in his position, put forward an alternative view which is both more consistent and more theistic.

Hume's famous discussion of miracles in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is curious both on account of the arguments he does deploy and on account of the arguments he does not deploy, but might have been expected to. The first and second parts of this paper will be devoted to examining, respectively, these two objects of curiosity. The second part I regard as the more important, because I shall there try to show that the fact that Hume does not deploy an argument that he might have been expected to deploy in fact reflects a weakness in the view of natural laws that has (rightly or wrongly) come to be associated with Hume's name. I shall argue, in fact, that it is a symptom of the defectiveness of the ‘Humean’ view of natural laws that on that view it is only too easy to rule out the possibility of a miracle ever occurring. In the third part of the paper, I shall show how another view of laws can overcome this problem.

It is through ritual that religions often express their deepest truths, and historians and anthropologists of religion have long recognized the impor-tance of its symbolic dimension. Yet it remains to be explained how religious rituals perform this function. That is, in what ways do ritual gestures (the term of art I will henceforth use to refer to all actions and objects that achieve ritual status) symbolize or refer – reserving these two general terms to cover all ways of bearing semantic-like relations to objects, events, and states of affairs? In this essay I will take some first steps toward answering this question by constructing a taxonomy of symbolic gestures in the rituals of Judaism, drawing for this purpose on various categories of reference, first distinguished by Nelson Goodman in his study of symbol systems, including the arts, and more recently elaborated by Israel Scheffler.

Through the Manichaeans, the Islamic world, and the Christian East, the story of the Buddha became known to the Christian West. If the teachings of the Buddha reached the West in an attenuated form, his life and the ascetic ideal which it symbolized were a positive force in the spiritual life of Christendom. It is one of the vicissitudes of history for which Christianity and Buddhism can both feel grateful. For the Legend of Barlaam and Josaphat demonstrates powerfully the intimate connections between these two traditions to the extent that they both pursue the spiritual life and the ascetic ideal. As Max Müller has aptly put it

Whatever we may think of the sanctity of saints, let those who doubt the right of Buddha to a place among them read the story of his life as it is told in the Buddhist canon. If he lived the life which is there described, few saints have a better claim to the title than Buddha; and no one either in the Greek or in the Roman Church need be ashamed of having paid to Buddha's memory the honour that was intended for St Josaphat, the prince, the hermit, and the saint.

In this paper I will offer an analysis of what it means to be a ‘historical tradition’. My purpose in undertaking this analysis is to apply the result to a problem of modern Buddhology, namely, the important question as to whether the Sino-Japanese ‘Pure Land School’ of Buddhism is to be considered as part of the Buddhist Historical Tradition. Before defining the term ‘historical tradition’, let me remark that I shall be seeking a descriptive or ‘empiricist’ view of what constitutes a given historical tradition. I shall not deal with any particular theory of history containing non-empirical elements, such as for example the Marxist View of history. My view could also be described as the Earl‘ Buddhist View of history. One might ask, is there such a thing as ‘Early Buddhism’? I take it as having been demonstrated by Dr David J. Kalupahana that there is such a thing as ‘Early Buddhism’. His method is to compare those same suttas occurring in the Pali Nikayas and Chinese Āgamas. Since these sources are most likely the earliest historical material available to us, then it is reasonable for us to take any common and consistent doctrines we might find in them as the ‘Early Buddhist View’. As Dr Kalupahana very ably demonstrates, we do indeed find such a common doctrine, which amounts to a form of empiricist philosophy. Thus, we can label this as the Early Buddhist View.

Most contemporary general studies on Hinduism affirm the view that this tradition proposes several distinct and independent ways (mārgas) for the attainment of ultimate spiritual freedom (moksha). The methods most often mentioned are karmayoga (the way of detached selfless work), bhaktiyoga (the way of love and worship towards a personal God), and jñānayoga (the way of reason). These studies, however, make little or no attempt to critically assess the assumptions of this thesis or to demonstrate in any convincing detail the relationship between the particularities of a specific method and the attainment of moksha. In spite of the way in which this claim has entered into modern writings on Hinduism, discussion still tends, on the whole, to be vague and generalized.

According to Anselm, all Divine qualities are tightly interrelated: they are implied by the unique central property of being absolutely perfect. In the second chapter of the Proslogium, Anselm claims that it is the essence of our concept of God that He is a being greater than which nothing can be conceived. From this, he argues, it is possible to infer that He is eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and so on. In other words, given an absolutely perfect being we can derive all the attributes commonly ascribed to Him.

John Hick's eschatological verification has continued to receive attention for twenty-five years. I would like to focus here on the changes in Hick's concept of eschatological verification in ‘Eschatological Verification Reconsidered’ the implications of these changes for eschatological verification, and how these changes illustrate problem areas for Hick's theology.

Many theists of a traditional bent have been bothered by the apparent tension between God's essential omnipotence and his essential moral goodness. Nelson Pike draws attention to the conflict between these two attributes in his article ‘Omnipotence and God's Ability to Sin’, and there have been many attempts to respond to it since that time. Most of these responses argue that the essential omnipotence and essential goodness of God are not logically incompatible, so that the traditional conception of God is not incoherent; I think the arguments have been largely successful. However, some theists have found the typical responses to Pike less than convincing, and are tempted to surrender the claim that God has moral perfection essentially in favour of the more modest claim that God is morally perfect in the actual world (and cannot gain or lose this perfection) though in some possible worlds God is morally defective. I argue in this paper that this fall-back position is incoherent. More accurately, I argue that a necessary being who is essentially omniscient and essentially omnipotent (a ‘NOO’ being) cannot be contingently morally perfect or contingently morally defective. Any such being is either essentially good or essentially evil. Since the latter alternative seems unattractive, I argue that theists should embrace the essential moral perfection of God.

Hume after arguing for the compatibility of liberty and necessity, a view now known as soft determinism or compatibilism, noted that it is not ‘possible to explain distinctly, how the Deity can be the mediate cause of the actions of sin and moral turpitude’. It seems that Hume is correct if the explanation must show specifically why an omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity must permit certain actions that to human reason seem to be unnecessary evils. On the other hand if such specifity is not required, the soft determinist who also happens to be a theist can argue that it is possible that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds even though the reason for any specific apparent evil cannot be known. If seemingly evil choices are free in the soft determinist's sense but determined by an omnipotent and omniscient deity, then either that deity is not omnibenevolent or that deity has determined the world to have the maximum possible goodness through including seemingly evil choices in the scheme of things. Consequently if, as the traditional theist believes, the creator is omnibenevolent as well as omnipotent and omniscient, the occurrence of seemingly evil choices are necessary for maximizing the goodness of the whole.

The Free Will Defence has been attacked as being unsound, implausible and, more recently, irrelevant. The first section of the paper returns to a discussion on the relevance of the Free Will Defence, arguing that the case for its irrelevance is inextricably impaled on the horns of a dilemma. In the second section it is shown that Free Will Theodicy, even in a form extended to include natural evil, need not be as implausible as it is sometimes portrayed for it demands no more than that good, on the whole, outweighs evil, on the whole. Finally, some tempting objections to the strategy employed in this argument are considered and rejected, both on the grounds that they are untenable in themselves and on the paradoxical ground that, if valid, the objections would appear to rule out any creation.