To rise from the dead and live in the age to come is the appointed destiny of the children of God. In that continuing personal life they are like angels and can no longer die, for as children of the resurrection they are children of God. He is the God, not of the dead, but of the living, for in him all are alive. That was the message of Jesus handed down to us through the Evangelists as an essential part of the Gospel. Jesus did not speak of an ‘immortality’ which depends on the natural force of the soul to resist the corruption of death, but spoke instead of a life-relation with God which cannot terminate for it is anchored beyond our mortal existence in the ever-living God himself. He preferred to speak of this as ‘eternal life’ which is freely given by the heavenly Father to his children on earth and which, far from ending with death, results in a resurrection to a fullness of imperishable life in God.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that a rite is ‘a formal procedure or act in a religious or other solemn observance’. The word comes into English through the French rite from the Latin ritus. Its original meaning escapes etymologists; and this is a mixed blessing, for we neither can nor must attempt a retrieval of its hidden roots. We are told by respectable etymologists (if such there be) that the word is associated from earliest times with Latin religious usage, but that even in the early Latin it was already extended to ‘custom, usage, manner or way’ of a non-religious sort. [Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary.] So, too, in modern languages the terms ‘rite’ and ‘ritual’ have specifically religious meaning, but they are also used in social and cultural settings that we would not call religious. What first strikes us about the terms ’ and ‘ritual’ is an emphasis upon a certain formality, upon a regular and stable way in which an action or set of actions is to be performed. A ritual is more than a formalism, however, since there are formalisms that are not rites, such as the logical rules for making a valid argument. Moreover, the term is frequently associated with the terms ‘myth’, ‘symbol’ and ‘faith’. These, too, are primarily religious, but are also extended to non-religious contexts. Indeed, there seems to be a network of such terms whose usage touches upon some extraordinary quality in things. Like them, the term ‘ritual’ shares both a wide variety of meanings and a certain hint of impropriety. The variety of ritual forms is notorious, ranging from the most sacred religious liturgies to the absurdities of a fraternity initiation; and the impropriety of the term breaks out whenever we brand a certain action ‘ritualistic’, just as we sometimes refer slightingly to an assertion, saying it is ‘mythical’, ‘merely symbolic’ or ‘credulous’.

What good is divinity if it can come only in dreams and shadows…? (Wallace Stevens)

It is a well-known and rarely challenged assumption that one of the chief merits of Whitehead's cosmology is that it enables religious thinkers to come at the problem of God in relation to the presence of evil in an entirely new way. Among the virtues most commonly appealed to in praise of the Whiteheadian theodicy are its emphasis on God's persuasive, rather than controlling power; its defence of the moral goodness of the God whose nature is reconceived in the light of the problem of evil; and its provision for a realistic hope in the redemptive processes operative in divine and human history. However, none of these aspects of process theodicy is without serious problems. In what follows I will present certain reasons why I do not believe process theism has made good its claim to have solved, with the help of Whitehead's philosophy, the problem of evil. Rather, I will suggest that like the story of what happened to the donkey laden with salt, who took to the water, process theology's ‘solution’ to the problem of evil dissolves in the dialectic river of life, until nothing is left but the verbal sack in which it is contained. Much of the force of this critique will hinge on recognizing the systematic implications of the role of ambiguity in a processive-relational universe, a position I will summarize in conclusion.

I believe in…the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. (The Apostles' Creed)

The ancient Christian affirmation of a bodily resurrection still echoes today, and admittedly makes this paper's title sound odd. Resurrected persons are supposedly people with bodies, at least within Christian eschatology. How then can they be disembodied?

The counter-question is whether the notion of bodily-resurrected persons can satisfy certain problems raised by that same Christian eschatology, and this paper is an exploration of these issues. The first part draws attention to the importance of resurrection in contemporary philosophical discussion, in particular for John Hick's notion of eschatological verification. Part II examines critically the adequacy of this view of resurrection. In Part III we turn to a thesis about St Paul's concept of the resurrection body which avoids some of the problems raised in Part n. But the thesis raises its own difficulties, and the paper concludes with a sketch of further complexities in the logic of Christian eschatology.

Let me, to begin with, outline the main points of my paper.

First of all, I shall draw a very basic distinction between three parts or aspects of reality. I shall then go on to claim that there are certain kinds of understanding and explanation which correspond to each of these three parts, and to discuss the sort of experience these different kinds of understanding involve. Within this perspective, religion will emerge as one kind of understanding and explanation, different from and parallel to scientific understanding. Having reached this point in the argument, we shall be able to see one demarcation-line between scientific and religious understanding, and to offer one explanation why this demarcation-line is changing and culturally dependent. The next step, leading to Part II of my paper, claims that our attempt to understand our situation in the world involves the formation of an overall or ‘total’ view, an all-inclusive picture of reality. I shall then go on to discuss how the different kinds of understanding explained in Part I affect the formation of a total view. This leads to a classification of world-views into four main types, corresponding to the former distinctions. In this scheme, we see how religion can be a kind of understanding different from but dependent on that pointed out in Part I, and bearing a complicated relation to scientific understanding. In explaining this I shall also discuss the reasonableness of different world-views.

By far the most common term in Professor Jeffner's paper is ‘understanding’, and it is clearly with understanding that he is primarily concerned. However, at the beginning of his paper he talks of understanding and explanation, and at least in the case of his third kind of reality he clearly sees understanding and explanation as intimately related. In this he is surely right. I myself would say that understanding is cognizing a manifold as a single whole in all its internal relationships, and this ties up with what Jeffner has to say about Gestalts on pp. 220–221. And explanation, as I hope to show, depends upon or presupposes the understanding that flows from the possession of a Gestalt. However, Jeffner adopts Hempel and Oppenheim's deductivist account of scientific explanation, and I believe this account to be fundamentally mistaken, and to have serious consequences for his argument. One does not achieve explanation merely by finding a set of empirically true premises from which a proposition expressing the explanandum can be deduced – if that were so one would explain Socrates' mortality by pointing out that everything snub-nosed is mortal, and that Socrates was snub-nosed. It is interesting, in this respect, to compare Hempel's account of explanation with that of Aristotle. There are substantial similarities between the two accounts, but there is one fundamental difference. Hempel insists that there can be no explanation unless events are connected in some way, and so rejects, for example, a mere sequential narrative as constituting an explanation.

Let us start with rephrasing the question in order to make sure that we have, roughly speaking, the same things in mind when we discuss it. There is no difficulty about the word belief. In the subtitle of my lecture, it is defined as ‘to be committed to a religion’. I propose that we stick to that definition, and see how far it brings us in our search for an answer.

The questions set in the draft programme for this session of the conference are:

Is it possible to understand the religion of somebody else, or must one be committed to a religious position in order to understand it? Is belief a condition for understanding?

These questions give the contemporary form of the debate about the perennial problem of the relationship between belief and understanding, and I sympathise with Professor Kuitert's sense that these questions themselves require further definition. Fortunately for the sake of philosophical dialogue I do not fully accept his conclusions. This however, is not because he wants to deny that belief is a condition for understanding, whereas I wish to affirm this. The main part of my paper will be devoted to showing what I find to be unsatisfactory in such an antithesis.

In this short paper, I want to say one thing about the problem of communicating religious understanding. But first it might be helpful to locate the problem in current thinking on religious education.

Dr Lloyd maintains that a teacher's commitment is not only compatible with but a necessary condition for successfully teaching religious understanding within the system of public education. As I am in sympathy with this thesis, I do not wish to argue against it but to add some further interpretation of it. Lloyd's thesis deals with a certain process of communication, specified in two directions: first as to its subject (‘religious understanding’), and secondly as to its context (the system of public education). His thesis contains two points: (1) the kind of communciation he has in mind is at least possible and (2) the necessary condition for its success is the commitment of the teacher.

I want in what follows to suggest – it would take a great deal of space to argue the matter in detail – that each of the prevailing schools of philosophy, the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and the ‘Continental’, has its characteristic strengths and weaknesses; and that to make effective progress in the philosophy of religion, one needs the virtues of both.

Dr Meynell calls the two traditions he is writing about ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Continental’ instead of ‘Analytic’ and ‘Hermeneutic’. His main argument for this choice is that ‘Continental’ philosophers also practice some kind of analysis. But if we use ‘Analytic’ in its terminological meaning for that kind of philosophy (of religion) which is aiming at sharp and clear distinctions between concepts (including their uses), then we can well differentiate an analytic tradition from a hermeneutic one which has fundamental objections to present to that kind of ‘language-dissection’ (or better: ‘vivisection’) and which tries to understand religion in its irreducibly individual forms as a whole by means of empathy and description. (By the way: I do not affirm that this distinction between analytic and hermeneutic tradition is a complete one.)