The aim of this essay is to show the significance for a new situation of Barth's attack upon some of the historical scholarship of his day over fifty years ago. Barth was motivated by Christian theological concerns, but what he stood for has important implications for New Testament studies generally, and in particular for its purpose and place within a Religious Studies syllabus. If what is written has a mildly polemical edge this will betray the scarcely veiled theological interests which prompt the warning against New Testament studies that spurn theology and a theology that spurns the New Testament. But the argument depends upon considerations arising from the character of the New Testament material and the educational reasons for studying it outside the Christian church. Within the theological circle, liberal protestantism is at last emerging from under the cloud cast over it by the dialectical theology. The rediscovery of Schleiermacher is rightly being followed by a rediscovery of Troeltsch. But for reasons for which dialectical theology is itself partly to blame this is being accompanied in some quarters by a failure to insist upon the importance of the Bible for Christian theology. Despite all their differences, liberals and dialectical theologians agreed in defending biblically rooted theologies. Some of those engaged in revising the map of recent theological history need reminding that the emphasis upon the theological use of the New Testament which has dominated the work of Barth and Bultmann has more than a narrowly confessional interest. It is directly relevant to the recent swing towards Religious Studies in British universities and colleges of education.

One of the consequences of the breakdown of physical barriers between the various peoples of the world has been that the question of the relationships between the major religious traditions still actively functioning at the present time has become more acute than it ever has been before. Previously a degree of exclusivity, either partial or total, could be maintained without adherents of one particular tradition being seriously troubled by the fact that elsewhere men worshipped ‘other gods’ through other forms. To maintain a rigorous exclusivity today in the name of one particular tradition is a far more difficult matter, for it means denying the validity of what appear to be manifestations of the Spirit outside this particular tradition; and to go to these lengths would be a sign of an extreme prejudice. But how, on the other hand, is one to account for these manifestations? Are they simply to be regarded as evidence of the Spirit blowing where he wills? Or do they indicate the intrinsic sacred quality of the traditional forms through which they occur, with the implication that each tradition within which they do occur is equally and fully with each other such tradition a divinely-instituted way of spirituai realisation? It is to this latter point of view that many most seriously concerned with the question are now tending to subscribe. Yet it does have serious implications. One of these is that it appears to involve the assumption, tacit or explicit, not only that there are the particular traditions themselves but also that there is something which one can only describe as the Tradition: a body of doctrine or form of revelation which is intrinsically superior to other religious traditions and which in some manner completes or subsumes them. How does this come about and what does it amount to?

When philosophers approach philosophy of religion, they typically ask two questions: (a) are there any sound arguments to prove the existence of God; and (b) is talk about God even rationally intelligible? Theologians, for their part, primarily expound the meaning and relevance of Christianity. I am by profession a philosopher, but apart from Secs. VI and VII I am here writing as a puzzled twentieth-century man. My prime worry is whether we philosophers and theologians are beginning with the right questions.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and to discuss the implications of some features of Hinduism which seem to be of universal significance for Christian thinking. The title ‘Christian Response Within Hinduism’ refers to aspects of Hindu spirituality which a reasonably detached observer might find hard to distinguish from Christian spirituality in its better moments, but which, if only on account of the absence of the institutional Church, is likely to be classified as Hindu rather than Christian.

Karma and Saṁsāra are ideas common to both Hinduism and Buddhism. They cannot be properly applied to the latter, however, without a critical modification of their significance. For at the heart of Buddhism lies an apparent ethico–metaphysical accountability which implies an ‘agent’ who is accountable; yet the personal existence of such an agent has not been held as philosophically admissible. While a familiar moral emphasis and relative freedom are integral to the faith's dukkha motif, one scarcely exaggerates in saying that ‘perhaps one of the hardest of the Buddhist doctrines is that of Karma’.

I try in this article to shed some light on what it is and what it is not to understand certain kinds of beliefs, of which religious belief is the most prominent instance. Much has been written on the subject, and I make no apologies either for taking for granted a context for discussion, or for disregarding a number of familiar issues. I try, in particular, to explain why a rather curious thesis about understanding religious belief has found wide acceptance when, on the face of it, it cannot possibly be correct. I begin with one or two points about belief; I then take what I hope is a fresh look at two theses about understanding religious belief; and finally I draw some tentative conclusions about puzzlement, understanding and understandability.

The rival claims of religion, philosophy and science as dispensers of light have come to the fore in successive periods of history. Betwixt and between them all is the discipline known as theology, a rational study of the concept of God and attendant concepts connected with theistic belief. The dominant period of the connection between religion and philosophy in the west extends from Neo-Platonic thought to the seventeenth century. Before that for the most part philosophy tried to steer clear of ‘mysteries’, and after that philosophy made strenuous efforts to free itself from religion, and even more, from theology. Secular influences on religious language are legion. I mention only a few: governmental analogies (King, government, etc.), agricultural analogies (Shepherd, flock, sower and the seed), analogies from art (Design and Designer), historical approaches of the early Romantic movement (used by Renan and others), and influences from science (Paley's ‘watch’ metaphor, the idea of evolution as shown in the concept of ‘progressive revelation’, the ‘new theology’ of the twentieth century and so on). Recent interest in religious language is part of the last of these influences (influences from science) in so far as the desire to find some empirical moorings for various types of discourse is one of the early springs of the analytical movement. This interest is symptomatic of the trend to rethink ontological matters in terms of epistemology, a trend for which Galileo and Kepler bear a considerable responsibility. Earlier interest in religious language, it must be remembered, was deeply rooted in ontological concern. I refer to the skilled use by Catholic theologians of the method of analogia entis. The basis of this method, and it was a method of argument, was specific beliefs concerning the distinction between finite and infinite being and the relation between them.

It is arguable that without a decline in the credibility of life after death, Western civilisation, with its frenetic attempts to manipulate man's physical environment, could hardly have developed as it did. As long as human life is regarded sub specie aeternitatis, changes in the conditions under which it is lived can hardly be thought of as being of supreme importance. Conversely, current indications of a renewal of interest in the great theme of personal immortality may owe something to the eclipse of our science-based culture and the increasingly precarious nature of life in this world. It is still far too soon to be sure. In the circumstances it may be of interest to look at a work written almost 200 years ago by a man who has often been hailed as the first Russian revolutionary. Though it has never been translated, it is generally known in English as the Treatise on Immortality. Highly literate and articulate, the author affirmed his belief in the indestructibility of the human spirit in face of imminent bodily dissolution. The arguments he deploys are not essentially dissimilar to the terms of the immortality debate today. First, however, a minimum of information about the writer is necessary if his views are not to be presented in a vacuum.

The ‘traditional’ view among philosophical (and many other) theologians, that God is eternal not merely in the sense of being everlasting but in the sense of being outside time altogether, has come under sharp criticism in recent years, both from biblical theologians and from philosophers. It is against the latter form of attack, particularly as represented by the detailed criticisms of Professor Nelson Pike, that I wish to try and defend the notion of a divine timelessness.