‘The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for particular purposes.’

Among the many purposes for which Wittgenstein assembled reminders, the deeper understanding of the religious life would have to qualify as one. Though on first reading this would hardly seem obvious, I hope to make this abundantly clear through an examination of his later literature. There are two ways in which he sheds light on religious issues: first, by the personal passion of his own life and the forthright display of intellectual integrity expected of any professional thinker toward any discipline (this I take to be of particular importance for the theologian or religious thinker), and, second, by making his philosophical investigations descriptive. Any analysis of religious issues or the understanding of the religious life should involve the high degree of personal integrity and the rigorously descriptive method which Wittgenstein makes apparent throughout his writing.

This paper is a design which will bring into relief certain striking and crucial similarities between things said in Spinoza's Ethics and Wang Yang-ming's Instructions for Practical Living. I am not concerned with points of close scholarship. My purpose is to deepen our understanding of The Ethics and perhaps, thereby, to make it more useful than it has been. I want also to bring this out: if we read these men as though they presented a philosophy or had worked out a system of ideas, their usefulness as teachers is lost. Finally, I am trying by these means to make mysticism clearer.

What has Jerusalem to do with Athens? The everchanging contours of the answer to this question have taken an arresting shape with the confluence of existentialist theology and analytic philosophy. This improbable union has led to an impressive and attractive account of religious belief and its language. Under the influence of Kierkegaard, Buber, and others, existentialist theology has argued persuasively for the non-theoretical, practical character of religious belief; it has, of late, discovered inspiration and assistance for this position in the reflections of recent analytic philosophy on the difficulties involved in speculative philosophy. The resultant theological point of view is one which argues for a ‘practical’ interpretation of religion, one which holds that the meaning of religious language is to be found exclusively in its use. Religion is seen as a self-contained ‘form of life’, and its language is held to have its own peculiar ‘logic’. It follows that religious beliefs and conceptions are intelligible in their own right and do not need to be explicated or justified with the aid of an ontology or metaphysic. I propose in this essay to appraise a recent statement of this position, and, in so doing, explore the broad question of the bearing of analytic reflections on the question of Christian theology's relationship to philosophy.

A little while ago I thought the ontological argument dead and buried beyond any possible hope of resurrection and no philosophical event has caused me much greater surprise than its revival by a member of the very linguistic school to whose line of thinking it seemed most alien and who were held to have given it its quietus once for all. I am tempted to welcome any relapse into metaphysics by a member of this school as being some sign of grace, but on this issue I must for once take sides with the prevailing tradition against at least this kind of metaphysics. Let me make clear, however, what it is I am combating. The term ‘ontological argument’ has been used for arguments which its original supporters would certainly not have recognised as theirs. It has been used for instance to stand for the claim that it is an essential presupposition of thought that what we must think is true of the real, a claim which could not be used to prove the existence of God unless we had available another proof that we really must think that God exists. It has been used for kinds of ‘idealist’ arguments which I do not want to discuss here. It has been used for the argument that the idea of a perfect being cannot be explained as derived from any other idea and must therefore be explained as produced in us by a being who really is perfect, an argument which appears in Descartes side by side with the ontological argument but which he carefully distinguishes from it.

In his “Theology and Falsification” Professor Antony Flew challenges the sophisticated religious believer to state under what conceivable occurrences he would concede that there really is no God Who loves mankind:

‘Just what would have to happen not merely (morally and wrongly) to tempt but also, logically and rightly, to entitle us to say “God does not love us” or even “God does not exist”? I therefore put…the simple central questions, “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God”?’

Not too many years ago Antony Flew voiced a challenge. His challenge was directed to religious believers and it was this: ‘What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?’ It was Flew's implicit argument that unless such a challenge could be met an utterance like ‘There is a God’ in fact denied nothing and so asserted nothing either (since the meaning of an assertion is the negation of its denial). One great merit of Flew's challenge was that it crystallised a malaise felt by many into a hard, pointed question. As a challenge this question elicited two basic reactions.

The challenge was originally put nearly twenty years ago in the concluding sentences of my initial contribution to a discussion in the now defunct journal University; a contribution reprinted in 1955 in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, and in several other places since then. Those sentences read: ‘We are reassured again. But then perhaps we ask: what is this assurance of God's (appropriately qualified) love worth, what is this apparent guarantee really a guarantee against? Just what would have to happen not merely (morally and wrongly) to tempt but also (logically and rightly) to entitle us to say “God does not love us” or even “God does not exist”? I therefore put to the succeeding symposiasts the simple central questions, “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?”’

In the last section of his article Professor Kellenberger says that Professor Flew misunderstands the nature of religious utterances. These are affirmations of belief or trust, whereas Flew treats them as if they were hypotheses. If ‘God loves us’ is held by someone as an hypothesis then it would be proper to ask what justifies him in holding it, and, equally, what would have to happen for him to feel that he could no longer justifiably hold it. But if ‘God loves us’ is said by someone as an affirmation of trust such questions seem out of place.

C. A. Campbell has written: ‘Almost everyone…takes it to be in principle intelligible to ask whether the self can survive the destruction of its body. But it is taken by no one to be in principle intelligible to ask whether the self can survive the destruction of its mind.’ But is it, after all, so clearly nonsense to suppose that a self can survive the destruction of its mind? This at least is the question I shall raise in this paper. The word ‘can’ in my title should thus be understood in its purely logical sense. For the question, really, is whether or not one can intelligibly speak of a self's surviving the destruction of its mind. By the term ‘self’ I refer to that which is supremely unique in what one calls ‘oneself’; to that aspect or element, in other words, which most decisively distinguishes one self-conscious individual from other such individuals. Now the self thus regarded as the source of one's uniqueness on the one hand, and the self conceived of as the source of one's inner unity on the other, would seem to be but two sides of a single coin. For whatever helps to account for an individual's being identical with itself through internal diversity—or for its being a single individual—must also help, and help in an equal degree, to account for its not being identical with any other individual—or for its being a particular individual; and the converse of this seems equally evident.

The main purpose of this paper is to bring out some significant humanistic characteristics of Chinese religious thought. My account is limited to what is originally and typically Chinese. That is to say, it will exclude what has been influenced by Buddhism from India or Christianity from the Western world. Some of the theses of this paper are based on scholarly works, while others are drawn from the author's primary experience.