God's knowledge of individuals becomes an issue only in the face of a Pantokrator, and it remains an issue in each of the monotheistic religions familiar to us. If one seldom finds it raised in more recent times, that can only represent collective prudent counsel, for the history of each tradition records, one after another, the shipwrecks of those who essayed it, as well as bitter aftermaths in their respective religious communities. The more bitter, I believe, as certain stages of this inquiry lead one to dilemmas so harsh that atheism alone could offer plausible rest to the spirit.

Whenever the discussion of the relation between religion and science or science and faith arises in circles imbued with various trends of modern thought, immediately the history of the confrontation of the Church with Galileo or of Protestant theology with Darwinianism comes to mind and the problem is viewed from the particular vantage point of the West. Those who have kept pace with the most current speculations of certain scientists in quest of a new world view may point to the fact that there are more recent works which compare the movement of electrons with the Dance of Shiva or speak of the search for the Tao of modern science. But even in such works which are becoming popular, although reference is made to Oriental doctrines, these teachings are usually viewed in separation from the traditional universe to which they belong and the philosophical and scientific framework remain Western. In the modern world the usual background for the understanding of the relation between religion and science continues to be the Western experience from the revolt of modern science against its scholastic theological background during the Renaissance and the seventeenth century to the final abdication by religion from the domain of nature and its surrender to the scientific enterprise and the latter's particular methodology and philosophy for the study of the natural world. Even when certain works step outside the Western world view in search of a rapprochement with certain Oriental doctrines, science remains Western science and the suppositions made upon the nature of Reality do not change in an ultimate way.

The word ‘sin’ is unlikely to be found in the index of a book on moral philosophy. It belongs to the vocabulary of theology. But the serious student of both subjects is bound to wonder how the concept of sin is to be related to the topics that interest moral philosophers. The problem is complicated by the evident fact that ‘sin’ is what W. B. Gallie has called an ‘essentially contested concept’ and that unanimity is as rare among moral philosophers as it is among theologians. It is not a matter, therefore, of applying an agreed philosophical method to a clearly defined theological concept, but of looking for a way of thinking about sin which is theologically defensible and which can approve itself to a reasonably sympathetic moral philosopher.

Not only during his lifetime but for some years after his death Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling remained a figure of controversy. Few academic philosophers have been more execrated by their opponents, since with him intellectual differences quickly turned into personal animosities. That this was so was not simply his ill–luck; Schelling was always an ‘awkward customer’ to deal with. His vanity, which was inordinate, was no doubt basically temperamental, but it had been stimulated by the remarkable literary success of his early years, in which he appeared before the world as a prodigy. Increasingly touchy and irritable as he grew older, the least criticism struck him as a personal affront and disagreement as intended injury. The bitterness of his response, to intellectual equals and inferiors alike, was almost invariably such as to end in severed relationships. Thus he quarrelled in turn with Jacobi, with Fichte and with Friedrich Schlegel, as well as with lesser lights such as Baader and Eschenmayer, and even with his own pupils –J. J. Wagner, Krause, Stahl, Kohn and others. Those who managed to stay on good terms with him – men like Windischmann, Victor Cousin and his own publisher Cotta – had to learn to put up with his rancour. But of all with whom he fell foul the most eminent was Hegel, whom he regarded as his arch–enemy. The reason, little creditable to Schelling, is not far to seek. Originally fellow–students at Tübingen, they later became colleagues at Jena, where Schelling, the younger of the two, had already acquired national fame. By contrast the future author of the Phenomenology of Spirit was evidently as yet no more than a worthy but hardly scintillating collaborator with his academic senior in running a philosophical journal.

The relation between morality and religion has often been discussed. However, it is not always recognized that the relation varies greatly according to the variety of religions. I shall here be concerned solely with Christian theism in its traditional form. I take the latter to signify, essentially, belief in a morally perfect Creator who exists in the threefold form of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and who, in the person of the Son, became man in Christ for our salvation. I thus exclude from consideration all non-theistic accounts of God or the Absolute (such as pantheism or process thought). Also I shall consider, not simply bare theism of the kind that Christians share with Jews and Muslims, but also the distinctively Christian form of theism that is generated by distinctively Christian revelation. Many otherwise sound descriptions of the relation between morality and theism are defective because they fail to consider the distinctively Christian contribution to the theistic concept of God and of his relation to the world.

In a series of important and influential books, Wilfred Cantwell Smith has convincingly argued that religious traditions are misunderstood if one does not grasp the faith which they express, that these traditions are not static but fluid, and that as a result of greater knowledge and increased contact between members of different traditions, we have entered a period in which it is no longer possible for the traditions to develop in relative isolation. This paper is devoted to an important aspect of Smith's thought – his distinction between faith and propositional belief.

The aim of this paper is to sketch a theory about the possibility of symbolism in general; to give an account of a primary role that symbolism can play in a religion; and to argue, from the theory, that if a religion makes use of symbolism in this role, there may be a sense in which such use needs to be metaphysically validated.

Professor Mitchell's strategy for answering the question before us appears to be straightforward. Part, at least, of saying that the concepts of sin and moral wrongdoing belong to different vocabularies is that they are intensionally different. But this does not exclude their being related. Taken as concepts in extension there appear to be five possible relations between sin (S) and moral wrongdoing (M) not all of which Mitchell considers:

Like David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, J. L. Mackie's most potent blast against the rationality of belief in God, his The Miracle of Theism, appeared after his death. The book is a broadside against not only the traditional arguments for God's existence, such as the onto-, cosmo-, and teleological arguments, but also against proofs from consciousness, miracles, the idea of God, and so forth, and against the validity of religious experience and faith without reason, and it presents as well negative arguments against divine existence. The book will no doubt supply much grist for the mill of future discussions, but in this piece I should like to focus on Mackie's analysis of one particular argument, the kalām cosmological argument. For his discussion at this point seems to me to be superficial, and I think it can be shown that he has failed to provide any compelling or even intuitively appealing objection against the argument.

My title is of course a variation on Professor H. D. Lewis' well-known Our Experience of God. There he expounded a variety of religious intuitionism, which stands in the line of Schleiermacher, Rudolf Otto and Martin Buber. These and other writers have characteristically made ‘the move to experience’, as a new blend of natural and revealed theology. The move makes a great deal of sense. On the one hand it grounds belief at a time when the older natural theology apparently had crumbled. On the other hand, it points to the dynamics of religious inspiration and gave a new perspective on revelation. It softens both reason and faith, of course, but it also provides a defence against skepticism. It fits well with a liberal attitude to scriptures and tradition. So there are manifest advantages of the move to experience, for those who wish to make it in the context of the Western theistic tradition. The writers I cited above, and Professor Lewis himself, have discussed religious experience from a mainly Western and theistic angle – even Otto with his great comparative concerns did so; and more needs to be said about the nature of religious experience in the broader context of Eastern and other religions. Lewis, however, paid attention to this wider problem, for instance in his 1963 article ‘Buddha and God’. In some respects this issue of the relationship of apparently non-theistic religions to theism is the most important one in contemporary crosscultural philosophy of religion.

Of the pungent aphorism traduttori traditori, one of the inherent delights is that the phrase itself cannot be translated into other languages without betrayal; at the least, of its pithy charm. All language is imperfect, a reader (or hearer) always understanding what is said in a way that leaves out something of what the writer (or speaker) means, and a way that adds something of what the reader (or hearer) supposes, or imposes, Ortega y Gasset has thoughtfully argued. I agree with this, yet hold that this characteristic of the human situation need not dishearten. We do better to marvel at how much the written or spoken word succeeds in communicating among persons – succeeds in building community between and among persons – than to bemoan that it does not succeed flawlessly.

Christians hold that God is transcendent, that He is other than all else that exists. For example, Paul Tillich claims,

The divine beings and the Supreme Being, God, are representations of that which is ultimately referred to in the religious act. They are representations, for the unconditioned transcendent surpasses every possible conception of a being, including even the conception of a Supreme Being … It is the religious function of atheism ever to remind us that the religious act has to do with the unconditioned transcendent, and that the representations of the Unconditioned are not objects concerning whose existence … a discussion would be possible.

What must I do to be saved? And is what I must do the same as what you must do? The Philippian jailor in the book of Acts received a most peculiar answer to the question: ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ’, said St Paul, ‘and you will be saved.’ In the context, this hardly seems appropriate. The jailor was not asking how he could be assured of a place in the next world, or how he could be reconciled to God or have his sins forgiven. His was a cry of quite unreligious desperation: was there any alternative to suicide, now that his prison was no longer secure and he had failed in his duty? The curious thing about the story is that it is recorded, not as an example of over–zealous bad manners, but as ultimately the right answer for even the jailor's situation. When Paul instructed him further, he and his household were baptized: the writer clearly intended the story to show that Paul's initial response was exactly right, and that belief in Christ brought salvation to the jailor and his family.

What is the relationship between the concept of sin and that of freedom? There is a powerful tradition in European thought linking the idea of moral evil with human freedom. Only with a broadening of consciousness, with the awareness of alternative possibilities, did man become able to choose between good and evil, and was responsible for that choice. The myth of the Fall, it seems, shows that eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil gave man the ability to sin, because the awareness of alternatives allowed man to pursue one rather than the other. Without that freedom thus acquired man was innocent and incapable of moral evil.

Some decades ago in his intriguing book on Jonathan Edwards, Perry Miller used to great effect the device of supposing a two-fold biography of Edwards, an external one consisting of the historical record embracing the major events of his life and times, and an internal one aimed at an interpretation of the mind of Edwards and the development of his thought.

In the Christian tradition it has generally been claimed that God, being perfectly good, has the attribute not only of impeccantia (freedom from sin) but also of impeccabilitas (inability to sin). Thus, for example, Aquinas held that ‘God is unable to will anything evil. Hence it is evident that God cannot sin’; and according to the Westminster Confession, ‘God,…being holy and righteous, neither is nor can be the author or approver of sin’.

To read the gospels as fiction, as Frank Kermode does in The Genesis of Secrecy, the Charles Eliot Norton lectures delivered at Harvard in 1977–8, does not require the abandonment of all concern for ‘history’ or for ‘truth’, two other fictions which are essential for faith. Nor, In Defence of the Imagination, the title Dame Helen Gardner gave to her Charles Eliot Norton lectures of 1979–80, need apologists for Christianity commit themselves to a wholesale rejection of literary critical methods such as structuralism, as she suggests. There is a middle ground which can accept many of the methods of structuralism and even of post-structuralism without sharing the anti-theological assumptions of some of their practitioners. Structuralist analysis aims for objectivity, a scientific description of the processes at work in the production of meaning, a systematic articulation of the ‘grammar’ of narrative. It is therefore neither for nor against Christianity. Kermode's book, I argue, helps to show how the gospels function as narrative, revealing their capacity to ‘redescribe life’. In recognising their fictive nature, however, we need not consign ourselves with him to ‘endless disappointment’. For the gospels have aregenerating power which can transform our lives.

Logical positivism and its derivatives cast a sustained philosophical shadow over religious faith and theological reflection. Any number of issues continue to surface in explicit and subdued forms, all of them relating to the status of religious beliefs. In fairly recent years, much fruitful discussion is dependent on the later writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's last notes, collected in On Certainty, are still largely unmined by those wishing to gain clarity about religious belief. It turns out, however, that these pages promise to be among the most helpful. In what follows, therefore, there is first offered a summary of the dominant themes of On Certainty – Wittgenstein's critique of G. E. Moore and his treatment of Moore's truisms of common sense. By a painstaking analysis, Wittgenstein shows that the truths defended by Moore are among any number of other fundamental propositions which have an extraordinary logical role in our language and judgements about the world. Next, partly by reference to Wittgenstein's lectures on religious belief and other collected notes, it is argued that many beliefs in Christianity share significant logical features with those fundamental propositions. Not least is the fact that, like the latter but unlike scientific hypotheses, Christian beliefs are removed from the ordinary traffic of verification and falsification. Despite the likenesses, notice is also taken of various dissimilarities which further set the peculiarity of Christian articles of faith into bold relief. The disparities, however, do not impugn the logically fundamental role which those beliefs have in the language and lives of those who embrace the faith.