The Christian doctrine of the Atonement has been interpreted in several ways. In Responsibility and Atonement, Richard Swinburne offers us a version of the sacrificial account of Christ's redemptive work. This version claims that in the life and death of Jesus we have a gift of great and fitting value, which God himself has made available to us, and which we can in turn offer to God as reparation and penance for our sins. My paper has two main parts. In the first I shall argue that his account is conceptually incoherent; in the second that it is morally flawed. I then briefly suggest that the exemplary theory can capture, better than can the reparation theory, those features which Swinburne believes to be desirable in any account of the Atonement. I take Swinburne's account as my target because it is the best modern exposition of the theory, but my argument is intended to have wider significance.

From at least the time of the writing of The Philosophical Fragments, Søren Kierkegaard's work takes a special interest in both the transition from unbelief to faith and the character of the life of true faith. Trained in Lutheran dogma and convinced of the radical nature of human freedom, his work on this subject demonstrates a profound concern for and grasp of Lutheran orthodoxy, as well as a remarkable degree of subtlety. After all, it is no simple task to give an account of the central features of the Christian life that is faithful to both a libertarian conception of human freedom and the doctrines of the church founded by the author of The Bondage of the Will. This paper proposes to accomplish two things: first, to state a problem that lies on the surface of Kierkegaard's account of the transformation involved in Christian conversion and second to present a resolution of the problem that is faithful to Kierkegaard's intentions.

Does anyone ever survive his or her bodily death ? Could anyone? No speculative questions are older than these, or have been answered more frequently or more variously. None have been laid to rest more often, or — in our times — with more claimed decisiveness. Jay Rosenberg, for instance, no doubt speaks for many contemporary philosophers when he claims, in his recent book, to have ‘demonstrated’ that ‘ we cannot [even] make coherent sense of the supposed possibility that a person's history might continue beyond that person's [bodily] death’.

Ever since the Proslogion was first circulated (c. 1077), critics have been bemused by St Anselm's brazen attempt to establish a matter of fact, namely, God's existence, from the simple analysis of a term or concept. Yet every critic who has proposed to ‘write the obituary’ of the Ontological Argument has found it to be remarkably resilient (cf. McGrath, 1990: 212). At the risk of adding to a record of failures, I want to venture a new method for attacking this durable argument. Neither the common version of Anselm's argument from Chapter II of the Proslogion nor the previously unrecognized modal version uncovered by Norman Malcolm from Pros, III (1960: 52) can possibly get under way without Anselm's celebrated assertion that

(1) God is that than which no greater can be conceived.

The classical pragmatists were as concerned as any of their modern philosophical predecessors that the moral and religious aspects of human life not be swamped by the successes of the physical sciences. It was John Dewey, after all, who said that

The problem of restoring integration and cooperation between man's beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about the values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem of modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from that life.

In his Gifford Lectures, An Interpretation of Religion, John Hick presents his pluralistic hypothesis in its fullest form, a religious account of the variety and unity of the great faith traditions. He summarizes this hypothesis in the assertion that in religious traditions and experiences an ‘infinite Real, in itself beyond the scope of other than purely formal concepts, is differently conceived, experienced and responded to from within the different cultural ways of being human’. It is in relation to this infinite Real that salvation/liberation takes place within each religious tradition as the ‘ transformation of human existence from self-centredness to Reality-centredness’.

Anyone who wishes to talk about angels has to respond to the mocking question, how many of them can dance on the point of a pin. The answer is: ‘just as many as they please’. Angels being immaterial intellects do not occupy space to the exclusion of any other such intellectual substance, and their being ‘on’ the point of a pin can only mean that they attend to it. The question, however, is not one that concerned our mediaeval predecessors, although it seems as difficult to persuade anyone of this as it is to clear Canute of the charge of insane conceit.

In Religious Studies xxvi (1990) Harold W. Noonan and Charles B. Daniels severally take issue with my ‘Reincarnation and Relativized Identity’. Both make valuable points but both, I think, have somewhat missed the point of my original article. In that paper I singled out five different views on the possibility of life after death: (1) that we are reincarnated in the self-same body we had in our pre-mortem state; (2) that we are reincarnated in another — in a different — body; (3) that we continue to exist (with or without a temporal gap) in a disembodied form, which may or may not culminate in re-embodiment; (4) that pre-mortem life is a dream from which postmortem life is the awakening; (5) that none of the above holds: there is no life after death.

Ethics and mysticism, we are regularly instructed, are if not antithetical, then certainly, at the very least, unrelated. This common wisdom is predicated on a specific understanding of morality and a flawed, though widespread, conception of mysticism and mystical traditions. It is yet another distorted and distorting manifestation of the still more universal misapprehension that mystics are essentially arch-individualists, ‘Lone Rangers’ of the spirit, whose sole intention is to escape the religious environments that spawned them in order to find personal liberation or salvation. Accordingly, mystics are portrayed as rebels and heretics, antinomians and spiritual revolutionaries, if not also underminers of existing social and religious structures. But this characterization, despite its popularity, needs revision. In this essay it is not possible to argue all the detailed reasons why this construal is simply incorrect, but, as a shorthand summary of a much larger, more complex interpretative reconstruction, I would call attention to the fact that mystics share not only the metaphysical problematic, the metaphysical diagnosis of existence, as this is conceptualized within their particular traditions, but also view its overcoming or deconstruction in ways consistent with the teachings of their ‘faith’mmunities. They are, that is to say, fully situated in the ontological, theological, and social contexts of their traditions. Essentially, they share the Weltanschauung of their inherited circumstance and seek to realize, experience, the ‘solutions’ proposed by their tradition.