Christians frequently request God's forgiveness and have their Lord's assurance that if they refuse to forgive they will not be forgiven (Matt. 6:15). Forgiveness is thus integral to Christian moral existence even if life presents few opportunities to forgive those who have genuinely wronged us. This infrequency of opportunity is neither regrettable nor surprising. Sane persons after all do not wish to be routinely wronged so as to be able to forgive regularly. But perhaps the infrequency with which we forgive others helps to explain why we are mystified by the nature of forgiveness.

The final phase of jonathan Edwards' work centers around his defense of Calvinism against ‘Arminianism’. Along with certain tendencies in this ‘Arminianism’, which included its undermining of the unconditionality and freedom of the grace of God and its narrowing of the conception of God to those attributes acceptable to current cultural standards, it also held to the view that the human will is not determined by God or nature, or anything prior to its own acts, butis ‘self-determining’, possessing ‘a certain sovereignty over itself and its own acts’, thus determining its own volition. The notion of ‘indifference’, the mind's being ‘in equilibrio’ prior to any ‘act of volition’, was essential to the Arminian conception of liberty, as was ‘contingence’, understood as a lack of connectedness to any prior chain of causation.

In a previous paper I have argued against the assumption made by much German literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, that Luther is the religious forerunner of Kant. Even though it is the Lutheran mythology that Kant is demythologizing, Luther still cannot be considered as the religious forerunner of Kant. There are two main reasons for this. First, Kant has an entirely different conception of the religious life in terms of freewill and salvation. Kant affirms freewill, Luther denies it. Kant considers good works as a prerequisite to salvation, Luther rules outworks as playing any part in the quest for salvation, since justification is by faith alone. Secondly, Kant's view of evil and human nature in general is far removed from the Lutheran conception of human depravity. Luther claims that human beings are totally corrupt, and in need of God's grace in order to become good. Kant argues that although human beings have a disposition towards evil, their underlying nature is good.

Theologians are not generally aware of the influence of the concept of spirituality in education. Is it not remarkable, not to say amazing, for example, that the secular Parliament of Great Britain should pass a bill listing ‘spiritual development’ as the first aim of the school curriculum?1 But educationists are not generally aware of the rich heritage of thought about spirituality in Christian faith and practice. And one is also tempted to say that theologians and educationists do not read much material from philosophy about ‘spirit’ and ‘spirituality’. Yet spirituality is too important to be confined to narrow treatments in separate academic disciplines.