The most important recent philosophical treatment of Ghristology is that of Thomas V. Morris in The Logic of God Incarnate, defending the high-orthodox position that ‘Jesus of Nazareth was one and the same person as God the Son, the Second Person of the divine Trinity’ (p. 13) against the charge that the characteristics of deity and humanity are non-compossible in one person at one time, so that it is a contradiction to attribute both sets of qualities to the historical Jesus of Nazareth. I believe that Morris's defence, impressive though it is, does not succeed but on the contrary provides yet another illustration of the thesis that any attempt to spell out the idea of divine incarnation as a metaphysical theory, rather than as religious metaphor or myth, is bound to be unacceptable or, in traditional terminology, heretical.

It has been widely argued that beliefs in general are not under direct voluntary control. It is not the case that we can by decision of the will (however construed) decide what to believe or what to refrain from believing in many ordinary instances of believing. Doxastic voluntarism now seems a dubious doctrine at best, regardless of how emphatic Descartes and other traditional epistemologists seemed to be in their support of the doctrine.

Justice will once (more) take the place which the Magians are keeping now, for it is they who lord it over the world.

(Manichaean Homily, fourth century)

One of the hallmarks of the early modern rationalists was their confidence that a great deal of metaphysics could be done by purely a priori reasoning. They thought so at least partly because they inherited via Descartes Anselm's confidence that the existence of God could be established by purely a priori reasoning in an ontological argument. They also inherited a Thomistic and scholastic confidence that the concept of God as supremely perfect being, if subjected to serious and deep analysis, would yield sound doctrine. Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz all three took it that they had in their stock of ideas an idea of God sufficiently clear and detailed that a little analytic work could produce real metaphysical results, not only about God himself, but also about the universe in which they found themselves (for Spinoza, these turned out to be the same thing). Though they start with what purport to be ideas of the same God, they get radically different results in their analyses.

The chief, but far from only, thinker to shape the modern discussion of miracles was David Hume. Ever since, his collaborating off-spring (both those who defend and those who reject the coherence of the idea of miracles) have routinely made several (false) assumptions about the laws of nature and the idea of miracles, which, together with the rich and varied debate arising from them, constitute what I shall refer to as the Humean tradition.

‘Truly this is the sweetest of theologies’, William said, with perfect humility, and I thought he was using that insidious figure of thought that rhetors call irony, which must always be prefaced by the pronunciatio, representing its signal and its justification – something William never did. For which reason the abbot, more inclined to the use of figures of speech, took William literally…

The consecration of Dr David Jenkins as Bishop of Durham, and many of his public utterances before and since, have concentrated public attention on the resurrection of Christ. What happened on the first Easter Day? Can we ever know for sure? If not, is that a bad or a good thing? What do Christians mean by their credal professions of faith? Do we, must we, all mean more or less the same thing when we repeat them? If that mysterious but constitutive event was not just a conjuring trick with bones, what else may it have been?

What is central to the debate around such questions is the symbolic character of the resurrection story. That is to say, the resurrection was not just a dead person coming to life, although it may include that. It concerns also who the dead person was, and what his coming to life again might be believed to effect. So the resurrection story is the symbol, and the meaning to which it points is what is symbolized. A symbol is an event, act, story, object which essentially points beyond itself to such ulterior meaning, and also participates in the reality to which it points, according to Tillich's definition. The question at issue in this debate centres on the relation between the symbol and the symbolized. One extreme view tends to affirm the literal facticity of the symbolic event, and to assume that its meaning is ipso facto incontrovertibly established. The other extreme regards the precise nature of the event as irrecoverable, and as anyway irrelevant to the validity of the symbol's meaning.

In a Dutch weekly it was recently stated that man's moral powers are overestimated in the christian faith. The proponent of this belief, the Dutch–American philologist and philosopher Staal seems to me to be closer to the truth of this matter than his distinguished German colleague Nietzsche. The latter used to fascinate me as a young student with his devastating criticisms of christian culture and the christian view of life. According to Nietzsche, the christian religion has not too high, but rather too low a view of mankind: it wanted man to be ugly and evil; in this way it has succeeded in making man so. The insignificance, ugliness and sinfulness of man is the outcome of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Someone who is being told again and again how insignificant, bad and sinful he is, will end up believing it and behave accordingly. A not implausible theory, I thought at that time. However, as I see the matter now, I would support Staal rather than Nietzsche (supposing that my choice would be restricted to them). The christian faith has an optimistic view of man. Does it overestimate him? Does it attribute imaginary moral powers to him? Does it demand the morally impossible? A positive answer to these questions is not unreasonable if one does not want to go beyond a secular, evolutionist or sociobiological under-standing of man and does not take into consideration the affirmations of the Church.