Twenty years ago I attempted to clarify thinking about Judaism in proposing a more refined terminology which, if properly used, would eliminate the all too frequent fallacies of equivocation by which discussion is bedevilled (‘Defining Judaism:Some Ground-Clearing’, Jewish Journal of Sociology, VII, 2, 1965, pp. 153–75). It is not my purpose here simply to exhume that article: on the other hand, I do not feel that I can usefully begin again ab initio, since the situation has not been radically transformed as it had been in the thirty years preceding 1965. The two decades since and including the Six Days War have witnessed much entrenchment of position, intensification of doctrinaire assertion, and heightening of enthusiasm, but little inclination (until the Lebanon War began to stimulate it in Israel) towards questioning what have become popularly accepted axioms:and it is still the case that anyone who dares to question the assumption that Israeli national sovereignty now is, and for all time will remain, a sine qua non for the survival of Judaism will not get much of a hearing. What I intend here is to reconsider my earlier findings from the angles of belief, authority, and peoplehood, particularly since I feel that the last-mentioned had perhaps been allowed inadequate weight in my previous endeavour. I consequently repeat here, for convenience of reference, the terminological distinctions proposed in that article, together with the tentative working definition of Judaism with which it concluded. I doubt its usefulness, save from a negative standpoint, i.e. what it excludes. But if we are to consider peoplehood, we need to know who, and what, is a Jew: and the only uniquely valid definition of a Jew that satisfies me is a transmitter of Judaism. The question seems to me otherwise meaningless without some terms of reference, e.g. who is a Jew for purposes of joining synagogue X, or speaking for Anglo-Jewry or world Jewry at forum Y, or qualifying for Israeli citizenship under the law of return, etc. Here, then, is my tentative formula:

Knowledge is desirable both for its own sake (because it is something most of us, from curiosity, want) and because without it we will not be able to take the right means to whatever ends we happen to have. Much knowledge is interesting to oneself and others as well as useful, and a man without it will be an impoverished bore, as well as being unsuccessful in his enterprises.

What has become known as the ‘faith/history’ problem for historical religions like Christianity centres on the attempt to combine the ontological decisiveness, for faith, of an historical event characterized as an actual Incarnation of God with the epistemological indifference, or irrelevance, of historical information about that event which is decisive for faith. Without the former there is nothing to be related to or personally appropriated; without the latter faith is rendered vulnerable to the vagaries of historical research. Soren Kierkegaard's Climacus writings – the Philosophical Fragments and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript – provide a classic formulation of the inherent tension. Twentieth-century variations on the same theme are found in the writings of Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann, among others. In what follows I want to highlight an element in Kierkegaard's Climacus account which crucially distinguishes his attempt to deal with the faith/history relation from other attempts to deal with it, and thus offers what I suggest is a novel approach to overcoming the tension. This element – effectively a kind of a priori or conceptual proof – has been neglected, and whatever one's final judgement on its contribution to the problem as a whole, a consideration of it and its implications is, at the very least, integral to a full understanding of the thought-experiment in the Fragments. Moreover, in the process, useful light can be shed indirectly on twentieth-century attempts to deal with the faith/history problem.

Traditional discussions of miracles focus primarily on the issue of whether miracle reports are credible, either in fact or in principle, and whether they could be used as the foundation for theistic belief. Some commentators (such as Hume and Mackie decide that such reports are not credible; others decide that they are, or at least that they can be (Swinburne, Davies). All parties to this dispute presuppose that there is a coherent concept of miracle about whose application we might sensibly dispute. A good example of this assumption explicitly stated is found in a recent book by Davies. Davies implicitly takes over Hume's definition of a miracle as ‘a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity’, and, after making clear that he is using ‘impossible’ in the sense of ‘logically impossible’, he comments

…it is hard to see that miracles are impossible when considered as violations of the laws of nature…it is hard to see that there is any contradiction involved in saying that they [miracles] have happened. Where would the contradiction lie?

The Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent is now generally recognized as the culmination of John Henry Newman's longstanding preoccupation with what might be called the ‘Catholic problem of faith’. In numerous places Newman noted that prior to writing this work he had made sporadic and fruitless attempts to deal with the problem. In the widely cited insight of 1866 he received new ideas about the concepts involved in the problem and work on the Grammar ensued.

If God is not a person, what sense does it make to worship ‘it’? The problem of worship takes on a new aspect in the light of models of God which have recently been promulgated by certain philosophers and theologians – that God is ‘Being itself’, ‘the ground of our being’, ‘experienced non-objective reality’, an inspiring picture, a fictional entity in a religious story, a linguistic device for indicating the fundamentality of our perspective on life or ‘the self not yet become’.

Debate over indigenization of Christianity continues in earnest even after the waning of the missionary zeal of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, set afire in no small measure by the wave of Great Awakening that swept New England and beyond. The context in which the Gospel of Christ is to be heard anew has ceased to be the God forsaken lands of heathens but is now one in which new challenges have emerged, ranging widely from Marxism and Islam, scientific scepticism and technological revolution, to urbanization and the rise of the ‘Third World’. In a country where since the early seventeenth century the Christians have scarcely numbered more than half of one percent of the population, the Gospel continues to intrigue the inquiring minds and the tired souls of the Japanese, particularly among the educated for many of whom the initial exposure to Christianity was through schooling or personal cultural enrichment. While many have regarded Christianity as a passage to Western culture and civilization when Japan still held the West in awe, worthy of emulation, others have taken upon themselves a more sobering, if troubling to some, task of inquiring whether the teaching of Christ could be the spiritual and social force to redeem and to transform the Japanese without relinquishing, if possible, but rather affirming the integrity of their own heritage. In no other country has a religious tradition exerted influence so far out of pro-portion to its membership as has Christianity in modern Japan.

Through the Manichaeans, the Islamic world, and the Christian East, the story of the Buddha became known to the Christian West. If the teachings of the Buddha reached the West in an attenuated form, his life and the ascetic ideal which it symbolized were a positive force in the spiritual life of Christendom. It is one of the vicissitudes of history for which Christianity and Buddhism can both feel grateful. For the Legend of Barlaam and Josaphat demonstrates powerfully the intimate connections between these two traditions to the extent that they both pursue the spiritual life and the ascetic ideal. As Max Müller has aptly put it

Whatever we may think of the sanctity of saints, let those who doubt the right of Buddha to a place among them read the story of his life as it is told in the Buddhist canon. If he lived the life which is there described, few saints have a better claim to the title than Buddha; and no one either in the Greek or in the Roman Church need be ashamed of having paid to Buddha's memory the honour that was intended for St Josaphat, the prince, the hermit, and the saint.

In this paper I will offer an analysis of what it means to be a ‘historical tradition’. My purpose in undertaking this analysis is to apply the result to a problem of modern Buddhology, namely, the important question as to whether the Sino-Japanese ‘Pure Land School’ of Buddhism is to be considered as part of the Buddhist Historical Tradition. Before defining the term ‘historical tradition’, let me remark that I shall be seeking a descriptive or ‘empiricist’ view of what constitutes a given historical tradition. I shall not deal with any particular theory of history containing non-empirical elements, such as for example the Marxist View of history. My view could also be described as the Earl‘ Buddhist View of history. One might ask, is there such a thing as ‘Early Buddhism’? I take it as having been demonstrated by Dr David J. Kalupahana that there is such a thing as ‘Early Buddhism’. His method is to compare those same suttas occurring in the Pali Nikayas and Chinese Āgamas. Since these sources are most likely the earliest historical material available to us, then it is reasonable for us to take any common and consistent doctrines we might find in them as the ‘Early Buddhist View’. As Dr Kalupahana very ably demonstrates, we do indeed find such a common doctrine, which amounts to a form of empiricist philosophy. Thus, we can label this as the Early Buddhist View.