God's knowledge of individuals becomes an issue only in the face of a Pantokrator, and it remains an issue in each of the monotheistic religions familiar to us. If one seldom finds it raised in more recent times, that can only represent collective prudent counsel, for the history of each tradition records, one after another, the shipwrecks of those who essayed it, as well as bitter aftermaths in their respective religious communities. The more bitter, I believe, as certain stages of this inquiry lead one to dilemmas so harsh that atheism alone could offer plausible rest to the spirit.

In a series of important and influential books, Wilfred Cantwell Smith has convincingly argued that religious traditions are misunderstood if one does not grasp the faith which they express, that these traditions are not static but fluid, and that as a result of greater knowledge and increased contact between members of different traditions, we have entered a period in which it is no longer possible for the traditions to develop in relative isolation. This paper is devoted to an important aspect of Smith's thought – his distinction between faith and propositional belief.

Like David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, J. L. Mackie's most potent blast against the rationality of belief in God, his The Miracle of Theism, appeared after his death. The book is a broadside against not only the traditional arguments for God's existence, such as the onto-, cosmo-, and teleological arguments, but also against proofs from consciousness, miracles, the idea of God, and so forth, and against the validity of religious experience and faith without reason, and it presents as well negative arguments against divine existence. The book will no doubt supply much grist for the mill of future discussions, but in this piece I should like to focus on Mackie's analysis of one particular argument, the kalām cosmological argument. For his discussion at this point seems to me to be superficial, and I think it can be shown that he has failed to provide any compelling or even intuitively appealing objection against the argument.

Christians hold that God is transcendent, that He is other than all else that exists. For example, Paul Tillich claims,

The divine beings and the Supreme Being, God, are representations of that which is ultimately referred to in the religious act. They are representations, for the unconditioned transcendent surpasses every possible conception of a being, including even the conception of a Supreme Being … It is the religious function of atheism ever to remind us that the religious act has to do with the unconditioned transcendent, and that the representations of the Unconditioned are not objects concerning whose existence … a discussion would be possible.

To read the gospels as fiction, as Frank Kermode does in The Genesis of Secrecy, the Charles Eliot Norton lectures delivered at Harvard in 1977–8, does not require the abandonment of all concern for ‘history’ or for ‘truth’, two other fictions which are essential for faith. Nor, In Defence of the Imagination, the title Dame Helen Gardner gave to her Charles Eliot Norton lectures of 1979–80, need apologists for Christianity commit themselves to a wholesale rejection of literary critical methods such as structuralism, as she suggests. There is a middle ground which can accept many of the methods of structuralism and even of post-structuralism without sharing the anti-theological assumptions of some of their practitioners. Structuralist analysis aims for objectivity, a scientific description of the processes at work in the production of meaning, a systematic articulation of the ‘grammar’ of narrative. It is therefore neither for nor against Christianity. Kermode's book, I argue, helps to show how the gospels function as narrative, revealing their capacity to ‘redescribe life’. In recognising their fictive nature, however, we need not consign ourselves with him to ‘endless disappointment’. For the gospels have aregenerating power which can transform our lives.

Any list of important changes in Western religion in the last hundred years would mention the rise ofliberal Protestantism (and the associated ecumenical movement), and the decline in size and influence of the Protestant churches. What has been less obvious is the partial operation of secularization; in Britain and America liberal Protestant churches have declined more than their conservative rivals. In summary one could speak of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries as an era in which liberal Protestantism rose and then declined. This essay will attempt to synthesize, from a variety of sociological ideas, a suggested outline for a comprehensive explanation of that rise and fall. Such an ambitious and necessarily speculative project will require the argument to be conducted at a high level of abstraction but at various junctures details from the biographies of individuals and the careers of organizations will be introduced to illustrate and exemplify the points being made.

Are mystical states essentially ‘everywhere the same’? Though this question is notoriously obscure and difficult to answer, many contemporary writers on mysticism seem to favour an affirmative response to it, for a variety of reasons. First of all, some are impressed by the undeniable similarity in the testimony of mystics from widely divergent backgrounds and cultures; like most readers of mystical literature, they are deeply struck by the degree of apparent consensus between Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist contemplatives, for example. Secondly, there is a commendable desire in recent times to adopt a more positive and open-minded approach to other religions, and to acknowledge the value of their spiritual traditions; consequently, Christian authors today tend to focus on the common elements in Christian and non-Christian spiritualities, downplaying any differences. In the third place, those who wish to defend the cognitive value of mystical experiences on the basis of the ‘universal agreement’ of mystics will naturally maintain that there is a fundamental unanimity behind their different reports.

To many Western students of India, svarāj and mokṣa have often seemed to represent two very different ideals of freedom, the former social, political, and modern; the latter individual, spiritual, and traditional. It is not surprising that the Hindu ideal of spiritual freedom is most commonly known by the term mokṣa (liberation), for it is this word that is usually listed as the fourth and supreme goal in the famous four ends of man (puruṣārtha). The first three ends, desire (kāma), success (artha), and morality (dharma), find their fulfillment within society, while mokṣa, it is generally said, takes one beyond society. It is pertinent to note, as Ingalls and others have pointed out, that mokṣa is a relatively late term, which came to be added to the older, first three goals of man. As a noun, mokṣa does not appear until the latest of the Upanisads, and then only three times, in Śvetāśvatara 6.16 and Maitrī 6.20 and 30. In addition, some orthodox schools did not accept the ideal of mokṣa for several more centuries, the Mīmāṁsā denying it until the eighth century A.D.

Recent defences of the Divine Command Theory have ranged from those which attempt to meet objections half-way, and in the process transform the theory, to restatements and defences of the theory in its full rigour. Philip Quinn's Divine Commands and Moral Requirements is one of the latter. Quinn's purpose is to show that the theory, in its several variants, can be stated precisely within several current systems of deontic logic, and that contrary to a common belief, there are no logically decisive objections to the theory. In accordance with this limited aim, there is little positive argument for the theory, little attempt to exhibit it as a plausible or attractive position, and this gives the book a rather narrow formalist aspect.

‘That a corporeal substance, which hath absolute existence without the minds of spirits, should be produced out of nothing by the mere will of a spirit hath been looked upon as a thing so contrary to all reason, so impossible and absurd, that not only the most celebrated amongst the ancients, but even divers modern and Christian philosophers have thought matter co-eternal with the Deity.’

Pascal's Wager, and the issues raised by it, have, despite a few notable exceptions, been an object of some neglect in recent Philosophy of Religion. Whether this neglect is from an assumption that the argument requires no comment, or from a feeling that there is something not quite academically respectable about it, I have come to believe that it is undeserved. One reason why the argument is deserving of attention from the theologian is that Pascal has managed to put his finger on just the sort of consideration which, rightly or wrongly, is capable of exercising a powerful influence over the ordinary mind – the sort of problem which, in short, keeps people awake at nights. A reason why it should be of interest to the philosopher is that it possesses that characteristically philosophical quality of appearing obviously invalid in some lights, and in others (rather like the Ontological Argument) manages to slip past every supposed disproof, and annoy us with the suspicion that it may, after all, be valid. These reasons alone are sufficient to justify the philosopher of religion in attempting a careful analysis of Pascal's case in the light of which its cogency can be assessed. In this paper, I shall attempt such an analysis, and shall proceed to argue that, correctly understood and within its proper limitations, Pascal's argument is indeed valid.

I am grateful to Professor White for his stimulating response to my remarks on Buddhist karmic theory. While I cannot follow him in all his criticisms, his response has forced me to clarify my thinking and to make explicit some presuppositions that were not sufficiently developed in the original paper. I hope, too, that this brief response to White's discussion will help in critically assessing the contributions made by Buddhist philosophers to our understanding of the problem of personal identity.

He went like one that bath been stunned.

And is of sense forlorn:

A sadder and a wiser man.

He rose the morrow morn.

(The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)

In this paper I wish to explore Coleridge's approach to the study of philosophy and theology and ask whether and in what respects it can contribute to present discussions about the nature and the possibility of a philosophical theology.