Many philosophers as well as many non-philosophers assume that there is no problem about just what religious belief is. They assume that it is something its adherents would like treated along the lines of (if not wholly in the same way as) any other form of belief. But because religious belief does not relate to any empirical entity or person then the belief element in it is conceived of as directed to some trans-empirical or metaphysical realm.

Both Tolstoy and Wittgenstein conceived of religious belief in a very different way from this. They conceded, I believe, that some forms of religious belief do seem to be directed at some apparently trans-empirical Being. However, for them, the genuine religious spirit involves something else. We can best appreciate their shared conception in terms of what I shall call an ‘authentic orientation to the world’.

My purpose in this paper is to elucidate just what this ‘authentic orientation’ consists of and to show how it can be said to be something that both Tolstoy and Wittgenstein had essentially the same view of.

It has become almost a commonplace in theological circles that despite the Augustinian echoes sounded by his doctrine of radical evil and his discussion of the need for divine forgiveness in his Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone, Kant's understanding of salvation remains through and through Pelagian. Such was the verdict of Karl Barth; more recently, Gordon E. Michalson has made the charge that, ‘Kant's conception of grace and divine aid reintroduces an obviously Pelagian element based on human effort and merit’. Michalson has noted further that ‘if the implicit point of a Kantian view of morality and religion is to equate salvation with the individual achievement of virtue, then there seems to be little role left for a heteronomous grace or divine act to play’. And in a similar vein, Nicholas Wolterstorff has argued that on Kant's scheme God is morally required to forgive the person who has altered her fundamental maxim for the good; salvation is thus understood in terms of a system of rights – that is, it is something that the moral individual can expect as that which is her due. It is something that she merits. Wolterstorff reads Kant's project as ‘probing the implications of our human rights and obligations’, and argues that

If we have a moral claim on someone's doing something, then for that person to do that is not for the person to act graciously, but for the person to grant what is due to us, it is to act justly, not graciously. … Thus Kant cannot have it both ways: he cannot hold that we can expect God's forgiveness, since God's failure to forgive would violate the moral order of rights and obligations, and also hold that God's granting forgiveness is an act of grace on God's part. … God must be understood on the Kantian scheme as required to forgive. Of course this means that a gap begins to open between Christianity, on the one hand, and Kant's rational religion, on the other.

Against those who would dismiss Kant's project on the grounds that it is Pelagian, I hope to show that an analysis of the deep structure of Kant's views on divine justice and grace shows them not to conflict with an authentically Christian understanding of these concepts. To the contrary, Kant's analysis of them helps us to understand the implications of the Christian understanding of grace. An unfolding of these implications will also uncover the intrinsic relations that must hold between God's justice and his grace.

In the course of my argument I will show that Kant works with at least three different concepts of grace, all of them operating on distinct levels. Getting clear on what these concepts are and how they operate is of decisive significance if we are to understand correctly Kant's stand on divine aid. Accordingly, the paper will be organized into three parts. In my first section I deal with Kant's general conception of grace. An in-depth analysis of this most general notion should reveal why Kant is not Pelagian. In the second part of the paper I identify two more particular concepts of grace. While the general description still applies to both of them, they are distinguishable from one another in important ways. Not taking account of the differences between the two will make it very difficult to understand Kant's project in the Religion coherently. In fact, it is because the differences between the two concepts have been ignored that commentators such as Gordon Michalson have principally viewed the Religion as a failed attempt to weave together two world views, that of Bible and that of the Enlightenment. While I distinguish between these two concepts in my second section, there I focus on the one which I identify as practically useful. The third section is devoted to an investigation of Kant's understanding of the last of these concepts.

In a number of recent articles D. Z. Phillips has presented an exposition and defence of his views on theological realism, views which are based on his reading of Wittgenstein. Eschewing the label ‘anti-realist’ so often applied to his philosophy, Phillips claims that realists and anti-realists alike have ‘failed to appreciate how radical a challenge Wittgenstein makes to our philosophical assumptions’ (SL 22). Far from supporting non-realism above realism, Phillips – following Wittgenstein – wishes to upset the realist/non-realist debate by showing that the two theories offer equally confused accounts of belief and language, and specifically religious belief and language. If this claim could be substantiated it would, of course, be an extremely significant conclusion, and it is unfortunate that Phillips vacillates in his expression of it. Realism and non-realism are variously described as ‘empty’, ‘idle talk’ or like opposing ‘battle cries’ (RB 35), but despite being vacuous they are ‘not intelligible alternatives’ (RB 34) and ‘equally confused’ (RB 34). Furthermore, realism is ‘not coherently expressible’ (RB 45) and involves an ‘incoherent supposition’ (SL 23) and at least some forms of it can be ‘refuted’ (RR 194). In addition to their vacuity, unintelligibility and incoherence, both theories are also said to be guilty of a misguided reductionism (RB 47), and realists are charged with being ‘foundationalists’ who espouse a theory that ‘cannot take seriously the central religious conviction that God is at work in people's lives’ (RB 47).

In this paper we will evaluate the arguments Phillips advances for rejecting realism and non-realism, and consider the sort of problems they might pose for realists. Phillips opposes the positions the realist and non-realist take on two crucial issues: first, whether religious practices and life are grounded in the belief that God is real, second, whether God may be considered to be an object. These are the two principal questions that occupy Phillips in his work on realism; it is in connection with the former that he puts forward his ‘refutation’ of realism. We aim to assess his arguments for their philosophical cogency and value.

In his recent two volumes on epistemology, Alvin Plantinga surveys contemporary theories of knowledge thoroughly, and carefully defends an externalist epistemology. He promises that in a third volume, Warranted Christian Belief, he will present John Calvin's sensus divinitatis as an epistemic module akin to sense perception, a priori knowledge, induction, testimony and other epistemic modules. Plantinga defines the sensus divinitatis as a ‘many sided disposition to accept belief in God (or propositions that immediately and obviously entail the existence of God) in a variety of circumstances’. Like other epistemic modules, it produces beliefs in an appropriate cognitive environment, aims at the production of true beliefs, and generates beliefs which have a high statistical probability of being true.

No one doubts that Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript is one of the most important, one of the most artistically contrived, and certainly one of the wittiest works in the history of philosophy. Further, the Postscript has often been accorded a kind of centrality in the Kierkegaardian corpus. Kierkegaard himself seems to have assigned it some such role. He informs the reader in the ‘First and Last Declaration’ that he originally intended the Postscript to be his last word before retiring from his authorship (hence part of the significance of the word ‘concluding’). In The Point of View for My Work as an Author he himself calls it both ‘the turning-point’ (repeatedly) and ‘the middle point’ in the sense that ‘this work concerns itself with and sets “the Problem”, which is the problem of the whole authorship: how to become a Christian’. Aside from the way in which Kierkegaard may have conceived the Postscript as being central or pivotal to his whole enterprise, certainly scholars have sometimes treated the Postscript as, at least in some ways, his magnum opus and summum verbum – as I would also. But our concern here is not with the centrality of the Postscript but with the centrality within the Postscript. Most everyone would, I think, acknowledge that a central section of the Postscript may be identified, though I would go farther and claim that within this a central, pivotal, solitary statement may be identified.

There are some quite striking similarities between the moral psychology Maimonides presents in ‘Eight Chapters’ and Aristotle's moral psychology. They both deny that individuals have the virtues and vices by nature; they put a great deal of weight on habituation as a formative factor with respect to character; and they both characterize virtues in terms of lying in a mean between excess and defect. These are fundamentals of moral psychology that they share. But there are some very significant differences as well, and these are brought out quite clearly by a consideration of Maimonides' ‘Laws of Repentance’. It is worth looking at these differences not just for the sake of seeing how some Aristotelian claims are modified by the Jewish tradition, but also in order to see how moral psychology and the interpretation of the scope of human volition are altered by certain types of theistic commitments.

For Søren Kierkegaard, ‘How is it possible for one to become a disciple?’ was the fundamental question. The Philosophical Fragments, first published in 1844 under the pseudonym of Johannes Climacus, propounds a hypothetical metaphysical framework within which an answer to this question is formulated. This framework is usually construed simply as a general account of what must be the case if Christianity is true. But this has given rise to some perplexity regarding how the Climacian framework is to be interpreted. This is the result of the failure to take into account the specific function which it is meant to serve – namely, as the framework for ascertaining how becoming a disciple is a possibility. My present objective is not to pass any judgement on the adequacy of this framework as a model purporting to represent reality. Rather, I shall simply attempt a consistent elucidation of the framework which Climacus presents; and in so doing, I indicate the way in which, given this framework, the question ‘How is it possible for one to become a disciple?’ is to be answered – what I shall call ‘the Climacian answer’.

Part 1 of this article provides a basic account of the framework by explaining its key concepts and their relationship to one another. I then employ this account as the foundation for the thesis developed in Part 2: namely, that, for Climacus, faith is the condition of discipleship. In conclusion, I outline the answer which, on my interpretation, Kierkegaard's Climacian framework yields to the question ‘How is it possible for one to become a disciple?’