The methodological implications of the motives that underlie the study of religion and, more particularly, the academic study of religion have not, I think, received the attention they deserve. They are of the utmost importance, however, for the differences of motivation between the study of religion legitimated by the modern university and the scholarly study of religion that antedates it, sponsor radically different, if not mutually exclusive, approaches to its study. In asking why the study of religion is undertaken as an academic exercise – which is, after all, a comparatively recent development – I shall be attempting to delineate, to some extent, the relation of motive to method in what has come to be called Religious Studies. In clarifying that relation I hope also to show that Religious Studies – that is, the academic study of religion – must be a vocation in very much the same sense that Max Weber speaks of science as a vocation and, therefore, that such study must take as merely preliminary a ‘religious studies’ that is concerned only to ‘understand’ rather than to explain the phenomenon of Religion.

The Issues at Issue: (1) Heidegger declares metaphor to be a function of metaphysics. Ricoeur's tension theory of metaphor takes the understanding of metaphor beyond metaphysics. (2) Ricoeur's theory of metaphor is a theory of metaphorical statement not of naming. The classical, lexical theory of metaphor focuses on a primary meaning of each metaphor (grounding metaphor in what Aristotle calls pros hen equivocity). As such metaphor is merely ornamentation in language. What it names could more appropriately be accomplished in literal language. In contrast, metaphor is understood by Ricoeur to be a semantic event made possible by three kinds of tensions. (3) One may understand symbols to function with the same metaphorical tensions. In the case of symbols, however, these tensions function not at the level of the sentence but rather of the narrative. Metaphor and symbol both have an ‘ontological priority’ over other elements of discourse and experience. They ‘work’ because of the event character of both understanding and experience. Understanding (made possible by the dialectic of belonging and distanciation according to Ricoeur) and experience (made possible by temporality, dynamis) have event as their condition of possibility. (4) Metaphor and symbol both have a ‘temporal priority’, as well, for they serve as the shock to think ‘more’. This can occur, however, because they are part of a circularity that is non-metaphysical, that is, the circularity of the event character of the Being-of beings. Hence, just as metaphors are always ‘larger’ than the sentence, so are symbols always ‘larger’ than the narrative.

The problem I want to discuss has to do with believing as distinct from perceiving, imagining, positing, resolving, and hoping, as well as from knowing. Since these distinctions are not always observed, we must remind ourselves what ‘belief’ means when it is deliberately preferred to other intentional descriptions, and we ought to characterize it in such a way that we can see why it matters immediately, not just consequentially, whether one believes in something or not. I propose putting it this way: Believing in X (where X is what a belief-proposition is about) means taking X to be real, which in turn means accepting X as something to be dealt with. (A further implication of ‘real’, precluding private fantasy zones, is that any real X is dealt with not in isolation but in connection with everything else one has to deal with. ‘Real’ implies ‘the world’.) Unlike knowledge, which is originally conceived, so to speak, from the object to the subject – given that X is there, if I come along and see it there, then I am among those who know it is there – belief is conceived from the subject to the object: given that I am looking about me, if I see X there, then X is among the things I believe in, unless I mistrust it for some reason.

Stephen Sykes' The Identity of Christianity is a seminal contribution to the emerging literature on the problem of how Christians can tell whether a developing Christianity is remaining Christian. Because this work takes us in such interesting and fruitful directions I want to offer here some criticisms of one of its themes, which might otherwise frustrate progress in those directions. I would question the way Sykes characterizes Christian diversity and its inevitability.

That God has acted in history has been, and usually still is, a central Christian affirmation. Its explication has been sought after in a number of ways: by investigating God's relationship to the world, by considering the nature of miracles, by poring over what might be called historiographical problems, by discussing the interrelation of divine and human wills. Each of these approaches has its own worthy place, as do several others. However, what seems to be the obvious preliminary task has often been given less generous space, and is sometimes completely neglected. For how can one use the verb ‘to act’ of God at all without first enquiring what we commonly mean when we use it in any other context? without gaining a prior understanding of what its use seems to imply and entail? This paper attempts to examine the concept of action. It does so with the conviction that such an examination will illumine our use of the concept in a theological context and that, further, it may offer hints as to the way we ought to use the word in such a context.

Recently there have been in the journals a large number of papers on miracles. The issue debated centred on whether miracles, as violations of natural law by a deity, are possible. Alstair McKinnon, George D. Chryssides and P. S. Wadia contend that the concept of a violation of natural law is defective. Others like Guy Robinson and Malcolm Diamonds claim that the acceptance of miracles constitutes a challenge to scientific autonomy. There have also been defenders of miracles, to name just a few: R. F. Holland, Richard Swinburne and R. C. Wallace. What is, however, overlooked (at any rate not extensively considered) in these polemical discussions is whether theist religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) require miracles, and if they do, whether the concept of a miracle required is that of a violation of a law of nature by God. In the present paper I shall argue for an affirmative response to both questions.

Julian N. Hartt once observed that Calvin so accentuates divine causation that he denies all secondary agency. A strong statement of God's omnipotence commits Calvin to the position that divine causation is the only connection that has any foundation in reality. And this claim, Hartt noted, places Calvin dangerously close to Spinozism. I have no stake (nor does Hartt) in any analysis that attempts to indicate affinities between Calvin and the Dutch rationalist whom he predates by several generations. But, as Hartt suggested and as I will demonstrate, a persuasive case can be made for Calvin's commitment to a thoroughgoing causal determinism that has God at the helm directing every event. Now one should note at the outset that Calvin has solid theological reasons for stressing the role of God's all-determining will in the course of events. As a Reformation theologian, he is a persistent defender of the utter gratuitousness of grace, thereby denying that the moral, spiritual, and epistemological chasm separating the human and the divine can in any way be reconciled by human being. Yet, for Calvin, grace possesses an omnicompetence – even faith is the gift of grace – which, when examined within the total context of his thought, reveals the radical dependence of the entire created order upon the will of God.

This inquiry is motivated by the question: if atheism is true, is it nevertheless the case that holiness or sacredness is exemplified? I believe the answer to this question is affirmative, and that the path to its affirmation lies in the rejection of the traditional assumption that holiness is a single and simple property of a divinity that eludes analysis. The opposite view, that there are several complex properties comprising holiness, makes it manifest that there are holy beings, even a holy ‘supreme being’, even if there is no God and no gods.