‘What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What accord is there between the Academy and the Church? Our instruction comes from the porch of Solomon, who has himself taught that the Lord must be sought in simplicity of heart. Away with those who have brought forward a Stoic, or Platonic or dialectic Christianity. As for us, we need not be concerned to know anything but Jesus Christ, in quest of anything but the Gospel. Inasmuch as we have faith, we need not believe anything else.’ Such are the thoroughly uncompromising terms in which, about the year 200, Tertullian defined an entirely negative relationship—what he at least considered the utter incompatibility—of Christianity and pagan philosophy.

To mount a critique of Freud's views on any polemical issue is almost always a risky business. This is partly because one remembers the fate of so many of his earlier critics. As Phillip Rieff so delightfully puts it, ‘much of Freud's polemical writing is so superior to that of his opponents, that it takes on the character of a totem feast in which the most powerful sons are carved up with swift clean strokes, the father, meanwhile, justifying his action at every stroke’. There is also the possibility that exposure to psychoanalytic theory of one's own presuppositions and views will result in their being transformed into something quite different or to their being quite psychoanalysed away. Nevertheless the task must be undertaken. Freud's approach to religion has had too pervasive an influence upon modern thought to be ignored. Also, its complexity and potential have not always been sufficiently discerned by those who, especially from a Christian point of view, have sought to grapple with it.

People not only disagree about religious belief, but they disagree about what it is to disagree about religious belief; and consequently about what it would be for one religion to be uniquely true. What I shall try to do first is to characterise the nature of religious disagreement; and next to suggest in what the uniqueness of Christianity might consist.

When we think of the problem of ‘universals’, we tend first of all to identify this issue with medieval philosophy. In that period the arguments ran hot and heavy, and the result was that philosophers almost came to be classified according to the position each took about the relation between the individual and universal concepts. Of course, the fact is that the problem of universals has been important in every philosophical age in western thought. Metaphysics as an enterprise may rise and fall in popularity, but the problem of universals is always with us. Yet, like most philosophical problems of importance, it has not always meant one thing.

In a recent article Professor Phillips has argued against Mascall's contention that the role of philosophy in relation to religious belief is to justify that belief by seeking ‘rational grounds for asserting the existence of God’. In this paper I shall investigate the case Phillips presents and the argument he utilises from Winch to establish the conclusion that it is a fundamental misunderstanding to think that one could justify religious belief and I shall further point out a serious dilemma in Phillips's position on the question of religious truth. It is my claim that Phillips does not establish that Mascall's enterprise is an impossible one and that his own position in criticising Mascall leads him into the dilemma I have alluded to.

The late Karl Barth once wrote that no one can hope to overcome Ludwig Feuerbach ‘…with whining or with angry criticism of his views of religion.’ This is plainly correct, for Feuerbach's argument that religious language is always anthropological is an argument of great attractiveness—and, apparently, of great explanatory utility to psychologists, historians, and philosophers. Barth's solution to the problem raised by Feuerbach is less satisfactory. It just will not do for Christian believers simply to cleanse Christian theology of anthropological foundations by admitting ‘…that even in our relation to God,… we can lay claim to his truth, his certainty, his salvation as grace and only as grace’. Nor will it do for Christian believers, secure in the promise of divine succour, to ‘… laugh… at Feuerbach’ for his naive view of human possibilities. Even though a cleansing of theology may be helpful to the Church, it will have little (more likely, no) effect upon the widespread popular and scholarly acceptance of Feuerbach's conclusions.

In a recent article ‘The Problem of Natural Theology’, Professor N. H. G. Robinson has considered the requirements of a ‘genuinely empirical natural theology’. For the first section of it, a very clear sorting-out of recent debates on the ontological argument, I have nothing but admiration. It ends with the question: ‘Granted that if we think of God we must think of him as necessarily existing, why must we think of God at all?’, followed by the comment: ‘We seem thrown, without any prospect of rest, between apriorism and [Barthian] empiricism’. Robinson is rightly dissatisfied with that situation, and in his second section he raises the question whether there cannot be an approach to God which the debates on the ontological arguments (as so far described) have overlooked and which may be properly called an ‘empirical’ one, free from Barthian presuppositions. He finds what seems to be such an approach in Professor E. L. Mascall's Existence and Analogy but concludes that it is in fact after all a form of ‘rationalism’. In the third section he criticises Professor T. F. Torrance's defence of Barth's position in a way which seems to me most satisfactory, and in the fourth he makes his own positive proposals. With these I am in substantial agreement. It is only his account of Mascall's position, in particular at the end of his second section, which seems to call for critical comment.