The debate beween the defenders of free will and of free grace in Christian theology is an age-old one. Those who have argued that human salvation is by God's grace alone seem quite opposed to those who argue that God's grace requires the unaided cooperation of the human will if it is to be successful.

In such a situation the prospect of establishing a mediating position becomes attractive. This is what J. R. Lucas has recently attempted.2 Moreover, his proposal has the added interest and attraction of insisting that mistakes on both sides have been philosophical, mistakes about the nature of causality. According to Mr Lucas the Augustinian has mistaken causal importance for causal sufficiency. Pelagius was correct about the part played by free will in salvation, but wrong in attaching as much importance to that fact as he does, while Augustine is correct in the importance to be attached to God's grace, but wrong in thinking that emphasis on God's grace logically excludes human free will.

Sometimes exegetes differ from one another not so much because they have seen different data but because they are in fact looking for different types of ‘meaning’. For this reason, it is useful to classify different types of analysis of a text, and different types of ‘meaning’ resulting from such analysis.

The need for such classification has increased with the progress of biblical scholarship. Biblical exegetes and theologians have long had to deal with questions like ‘What is the meaning of this word of Scripture?’ and ‘What is the meaning of this verse, paragraph, section, or book?’ The intrinsic difficulties of recovering meaning from dead languages and sometimes unfamiliar cultural settings are often challenge enough. But, as increasing refinement and exactitude are sought, another kind of difficulty can arise, namely a difficulty with kinds of ‘meaning’. Is it indeed true that there is always only one meaning which is the meaning of a text? Is this the case even in poetic passages that may suggest or allude to new perspectives and comparisons without explicitly teaching them?1 Moreover, supposing that someone has arrived at ‘the meaning’ of a text, how is he to communicate this to someone else? In a commentary? In a sermon? In a form like Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the New Testament? Or perhaps even in the form of a painting or a new social and political organisation?

In one of the sermons that he preached at Oxford while still an Anglican, Newman argued that love is the safeguard of faith against superstition.1 This thesis strikes me as being false, for reasons which I shall indicate; but it merits consideration by students of the epistemology of religion, if only because it is a provocative ‘solution’ to some central problems of philosophy and theology which are disturbingly persistent in their relevance. Before we consider whether Newman's position is unsound, let us see how he arrived at it.

The aim of this paper is to outline the thinking of the Canaanite peoples on the subject of death and to compare it with their near neighbour Israel's in the Old Testament. My chief source for the former is the mythological tablets from Ras Shamra (anciently Ugarit), the quoted extracts being taken from the translation in the second edition (for which I was responsible) of Sir Godfrey Driver's Canaanite Myths and Legends. For the Old Testament side of the equation I have mainly followed the survey in the opening chapters of Professor Martin-Achard's book From Death to Life, though I do not necessarily agree with all his interpretations. I have also profited, particularly in my concluding remarks, from rereading after a gap of many years Gustaf Aulén's well-known work of historical theology Christus Victor. Other studies which I found helpful are listed in the select bibliography at the end of the paper.