Theology’s role in modern society is slight, to say the least. People are not waiting with baited breath for new ideas from theologians—unless, of course, they are theologians themselves. Scientists and, for that matter, scholars in general, cannot easily be persuaded to read a theological essay. And surely it is also the case that, while theologians themselves may be rather more ready to read in the literature of the human and even the natural sciences, they will often find it hard to relate what they read to theology. It is little comfort to them to be told that other academics too know astonishingly little about what is happening outside their own field.

The specialisation that goes with expertise partly explains this state of affairs, but this fragmentation of knowledge is also a reflection of the fragmentation of human society. We are all supposed to be autonomous adult beings obliged to live together, in the same time and space. We behave like cars passing one another on the same motorway (and hopefully in the same direction), without much communication that reveals who we are, what we desire, hope for, love. When we enter the motorway we have to fight for our place. It is not self-evident that we have one. Society is not any more a warm blanket woven from many threads, where every thread the weaver may add has already its place before it is woven in. We are free. In principle we may choose our place, competing with those who happen to covet the same place as we do.

The surrealist farce known as the Book of Jonah, surely the one consciously witty book in the Bible, is easily summarised. God commands Jonah to go and cry doom on Nineveh, a city whose viciousness has just come to his attention, but Jonah doesn’t reckon much to this mission and takes off instead for Tarshish. A divinely engineered storm threatens his ship, and he requests the crew with remarkable sang froid to pitch him overboard. God sends a fish to swallow Jonah up and spew him out again three days later, whereupon Jonah does manage to get himself to Nineveh and wanders the city proclaiming imminent catastrophe. Unusually enough, the inhabitants of the city, prodded a bit by their king, take Jonah’s prophecy to heart and repent, which infuriates Jonah so much that he goes and sulks outside the city hoping to die. God fools around with him briefly, sending a plant to shade him, then a worm to devour the plant, then a sultry wind to make him faint from heat, and finally treats him to a short homily about divine mercy.

Why was Jonah so reluctant to go to Nineveh in the first place? Perhaps because hectoring a seedy bunch of strangers about their vices isn’t the best guarantee of a long life. But in the storm scene Jonah shows scant regard for his own safety, and indeed by the end of the text is betraying a powerful death wish. The fact is that he refused to obey God because he thought there was no point, and tells God as much after he has spared Nineveh.

Philosphers of religion sometimes appeal to religious experiences as evidence for the existence of God. To take one notable and philosophically sophisticated example, Professor Swinburne argues that religious experience constitutes good C-inductive ground for belief in the existence of God; and that the contribution of the argument from religious experience to the ensemble of arguments for the existence of God as a whole makes the ensemble a good P-inductive rather than just a C-inductive argument. This is a substantial claim: a C-inductive argument merely adds to the probability of some claim, without making it more probable than not. A P-inductive argument, by contrast, establishes that the probability of the claim it defends is greater than fifty percent.

Not all religious experience is covered by Swinburne’s claim. Non-theistic experiences and theistic experiences not claiming to be of God are excluded from this discussion. This article will deal with unequivocal claims to have had experience of God, not with weaker claims (to have had an experience as of God touching one, for example). Weaker claims might be indefeasible, but offer little joy for the theist. Univocal claims, by contrast, are non-trivially true if true at all.

What marks an experience as an experience of God? H.P. Owen’s definition of God as ‘the Creator, who is infinite, self-existent, incorporeal, eternal, immutable, impassible, simple, perfect, omniscient and omnipotent’ is useful in answering this question. A claim to have had an experience of an infinite, eternal, omniscient and omnipotent being, say, is a claim to have had an experience of God: here, a sufficient number of attributes secures the identification.

It is easy to forget priorities, particularly our priorities about Scripture. The novel or obscure often dominate our scholarly publishing about the Bible because academics give priority to new interpretations and to solving problems. In this article I would like to reflect on two of our foundational texts: the commandment to love God in Deuteronomy 6: 4—5 and Mark 12: 28—34.

In Deut 6, we encounter the most famous statement of Israelite faith, v.4, joined to the most fundamental commandment of the Old Testament, v.5: ‘(4)Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; (5)and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might’.

A balance between the collective belief of the ancient Israelite community and the obligation of each individual is immediately struck by the simple use of pronouns: in v.4 the Lord is identified as our God; in v.5 he is called your (ms. sg.) God. Moreover, the latter has a double reference both to the collective Israel evoked in the preceding verse and to each individual Israelite. To reflect this balance between the individual and community perspectives I shall employ both ‘you’ and ‘we’.

Each of us is then commanded to love God in three ways, but ways that are usually masked in English translations. By returning to the language in which the author wrote, in this case, Hebrew, we can gain a fuller sense of God’s Word to us.

Can God be closer to you than you yourself are? I believe that the answer to this question is ‘yes’. Indeed, God is such that it is impossible for you to be closer to yourself than God. Surely this is a paradoxical claim. It would be paradoxical to maintain that something could be closer to, say, a stone than a stone. Not even God could get closer to the stone than the stone itself. How then could God be closer to you than yourself? In part, I believe that the answer lies in appreciating the nature of what it is to be psychologically present to someone, including oneself. There is more to ourselves than meets our eyes, but not the eyes of God. A rich appreciation of personal identity and psychological presence can illumine the sense in which God is supremely present in our lives, indeed closer to us than we are. I spell out the nature of this Divine human proximity and conclude with reflection on what it is for someone to be indwelt by God.

I shall be assuming the intelligibility of certain classic tenets about the God of Christianity. God is the all-knowing, all-powerful, loving Creator of the cosmos. I shall also help myself to some garden-variety claims about persons. Persons have beliefs, emotions, desires, and sensations. They have a conscious and unconscious life. They act (or are capable of acting) in the world. They often have a past and future. These are not to be taken to be necessary conditions for personhood.