This chapter grapples with a long-standing concern about liturgical activity. The worry stems from a trio of observations. The first is that the major monotheistic traditions enjoin having attitudes such as faith, hope, and love, as well as the performance of actions that express these attitudes. The second is that these traditions call for their practitioners regularly to engage in liturgical activity, participating in rites of corporate worship. There is, however, a condition on whether such activity has religious worth, fittingly relating the community and its members to God: it must align in the right ways with the core religious attitudes and actions. The third observation is that liturgical activity systematically fails to align in the correct ways, often being rote, mechanical, insincere, or focused on whether it is being performed correctly. Hence the long-standing worry that liturgical activity systematically fails to have religious worth. Focusing on the Eastern Orthodox liturgies, the chapter develops a view according to which enactments of the liturgies have religious worth by enabling their participants to gain practical understanding of the “Maximian vision.”

The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures present God as disturbed by the sufferings we human beings undergo and the wrongs we wreak upon each other – and by the way we treat God.

God is of incomparable excellence. That excellence requires of us due acknowledgment in the form of praise, thanksgiving, love, obedience, and the like. “Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name,” says the Psalmist (96:8). But we fail to render to God what due acknowledgment of God's worth requires. The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures present God as disturbed by this, angry. They also present God as forgiving. In presenting God as angry about, yet forgiving of, how we treat God, the Scriptures presuppose that we have wronged God. One can forgive someone only if he has culpably wronged one, and only for the wrong he has done one.

With near uniformity, the tradition of Christian theology has held that in presenting God as disturbed by what transpires in human affairs, Scripture is speaking figuratively. There is no negativity in God, none whatsoever, nor is there any passibility. Thus God is not wronged, and so is not angry at being wronged. God is invulnerably and imperturbably joyful.

Some theologians have recognized that if it is not literally true that God is wronged, then it is also not literally true that God forgives, since forgiveness is of the person who wronged one.

Several years ago, I approached Nick Wolterstorff with the idea of publishing his papers in the philosophy of religion and epistemology. Lying behind the suggestion was the thought that it would be good for the philosophical community to have these essays, which lay scattered in various essay collections and journals, collected together. Nick liked the idea and, fortunately, so did Cambridge University Press. The result is two volumes of Nick's collected papers: Inquiring about God and Practices of Belief.

Nick and I chose to include the thirteen chapters that comprise this volume. Our primary principle of selection was to include self-standing essays that have minimal overlap with each other and the various books that Nick has published. With the exception of the Introduction and chapter 10, “Is God disturbed by what transpires in human aff airs?”, the essays that appear in this volume have all been previously published and are in more or less their original form. Editing has been done here and there to increase clarity, minimize overlap, and bring some language up to date.

I propose saying a good word on behalf of Gaunilo. He has not fared well at the hands of history. While not himself a first-rate thinker – that is clear from the brief text of his that has been preserved – he undertook to debate with one of the genius theologian-philosophers of the Western tradition, namely, Anselm. Yet sometimes second- and third-rate thinkers make good points against first-rate thinkers. I shall argue that Gaunilo made some telling points against Anselm – though not, I readily agree, in a first-rate way. Anselm realized the “tellingness” of these points, so I shall also argue. The sign of his realization, however, is not concession; Anselm does not concede. The sign is rather bluster. Not even the saints are sinless! Anselm's glittering genius has made many reluctant to concede that Gaunilo made any telling points against him; his saintly reputation makes us all reluctant to concede that he concealed when he should have conceded.

Suspicion first arises when, in the course of reading the whole of Gaunilo's defense of the fool and the whole of Anselm's reply, we look to see why Anselm thinks Gaunilo's argument for the existence in reality of an island, such that none more excellent can be conceived, is not a good analogue to his own argument for the existence of that than which nothing greater can be conceived. It's absurd to suppose that one could in this way establish the existence of such an island.

My project in this essay is to offer a broad characterization of recent philosophy of religion in the analytic tradition of contemporary philosophy, then to offer an account of how it got that way and, finally, to offer some proposals for the future. Not predictions, but proposals.

I will assume that the reader knows, well enough for the purposes at hand, what I am referring to when I speak of the analytic tradition of contemporary philosophy. In particular, I will assume that the reader has not fallen for that superficial but popular view that what defines the analytic tradition is the high priority given to rigor of thought and clarity of expression. Defenders of the analytic tradition often cite those priorities as among its glories; opponents cite the same priorities as making it trivial. And it's true that analytic philosophers have given an unusually high priority to rigor of thought and clarity of expression. But their reasons for doing so have not been reasons of taste but of philosophical conviction; those reasons are of more importance than the valuation itself.

My own view is that the identity of the analytic tradition is a narrative, rather than a purely systematic, identity. What makes a philosopher an analytic philosopher is that he places himself within a certain story line of philosophy in the twentieth century. Of course one may try, in one's own work, to amalgamate story lines.

In the 1980s, William Alston published a number of important papers in which he argued that it is possible to affirm something true of God by speaking literally.

The topic was not one that just happened to pique his curiosity. What drew his attention to the topic, and made it important, was the fact that, as he put it in the earliest of the articles, “the impossibility of literal talk about God has become almost an article of faith for theology in this century.”

I share Alston's reason for regarding the issue as important. But I have a more specific interest as well. In my Divine Discourse I claimed that it is philosophically tenable to hold that it is literally true of God that God speaks – commands, asserts, asks, promises, and the like. What I had in mind by “speaking” was the performance of illocutionary acts. Though I myself see nothing impossible in God's performing locutionary acts, nonetheless the traditional claim or assumption that God cannot literally speak very much depended on not having available J. L. Austin's distinction between locutionary and illocutionary acts; the traditional argument, that since God has no body, God cannot literally speak, does not work if it is illocutionary acts that one has in mind. What I did not do is mount a more general argument to the effect that one can predicate of God what is true of God by speaking literally.

THE FLOURISHING OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

The past several decades have seen an extraordinary flourishing of philosophy of religion within the analytic tradition of philosophy. The essays that follow, written over a span of thirty-five years, are located within that development. In the essay that opens the collection, “Analytic philosophy of religion: retrospect and prospect,” I offer a general characterization of the development, along with an account of the changes within the analytic tradition of philosophy that made analytic philosophy of religion possible in the form it has taken.

Most discussions from the Western philosophical tradition that we would classify as philosophy of religion fall under one or the other of three headings. Some are philosophical reflections on some aspect of the human phenomenon of religion: reflections on religious experience, on the nature of religious language, on liturgy and ritual, on the interpretation of sacred texts, on prayer, on the essence of religion, and so forth. Some are philosophical reflections on the epistemology of religious belief: reflections on the nature of religious belief, on what is required of a religious belief for it to count as knowledge and whether some religious beliefs do in fact count as knowledge, on what is required of a religious belief to be entitled and whether some religious beliefs are in fact entitled, on the probability that one and another religious belief is true, and so forth.

Silence is of many sorts. There's the silence of the countryside on a still winter's night, when all the animals are sleeping and all the insects hibernating. There's the silence of Amsterdam on the eve of the fifth of May, when the entire old city halts for two minutes to memorialize those who fell in the war and were silenced. There's the silence of the mute, and the silence of rocks, hills, and valleys. There's silence in music, silence as essential to the music as the sounds. There's the silence of the audience chamber when the imminent entrance of the queen is announced. And there's the hush of the cosmos that the Psalmist enjoins when he announces: “The Lord is in his holy temple, let all the earth keep silence before him.”

The silence of which I will be speaking is unlike all of those. It's the silence of the biblical God – the biblical God being a God who is not only capable of speaking but also has on many occasions spoken. More specifically, I will be speaking of the biblical silence of the biblical God. The biblical silence of God is the non-answering silence of God. It's like the silence of the parent who doesn't answer when the child asks “Why? Why did it happen? Where were you?”