What is it to lead a Christian life? At least part of the answer, from St Paul to Thomas à Kempis, to makers of WWJD bracelets, is to imitate Christ. But while there is a lot of practical advice in the spiritual literature for imitating Christ, there is little by way of philosophical analysis of what it is to imitate Christ. In this article, I aim to fill this lacuna. I argue that the imitation of Christ, as conceived of by St Paul, Thomas à Kempis, and others, requires a radical transformation of character, which, in turn, I argue, based on considerations from developmental psychology, requires direct engagement with Christ. This conclusion may be surprising, since Christ does not seem to be directly present to contemporary believers in the same way as, say, a mother is directly present to her infant child. I deal with this objection, and conclude with some applications of this approach to the philosophy of Christian spirituality.

Panmetaphoricism is the view that our speech about God can only be metaphorical. In this article, I do not assess the reasons that have been given for it; rather, I aim to understand what it says and, thereby, to gain a clearer view of the God it offers.

God is thought to be eternal. Does this mean that he is timeless? Or is he, rather, omnitemporal? In this article we argue that God cannot be omnitemporal. Our starting point, which we take from Bernard Williams's article on the Makropulos Case, is the intuition that it is inappropriate for persons not to become bored after a sufficiently long sequence of time has passed. If Williams is right, then it follows that, if God were omnitemporal, he would suffer from boredom. But God is the greatest possible being and therefore cannot be bored. God, hence, is not omnitemporal. After the presentation of our argument, we address several objections by examining possible differences between human and divine persons.

Martin Heidegger argues against the possibility of Christian philosophy in his Introduction to Metaphysics. Christians, Heidegger tells us, cannot authentically ask the fundamental question of philosophy – ‘Why are there beings at all rather than nothing?’ – because they already suppose that they have an answer to this question in their Creator-God. Moreover, Christianity, says Heidegger, takes philosophy to be foolishness and, thus, would never try to answer its questions in the first place. Finally, Heidegger insists that any thoughtful questioning in a Christian context is theology and not philosophy. I argue that none of these reasons for rejecting Christian philosophy ultimately holds up. I also criticize an interpretation of Heidegger on this topic proposed by Walter Kaufmann.

In response to John Bishop's (2007) account of passionally caused believing, Dan-Johan Eklund (2014) argues that conscious non-evidential believing is (conceptually) impossible, that is, it's (conceptually) impossible consciously to believe that p whilst acknowledging that the relevant evidence doesn't support p's being true, for it conflicts with belief being a truth-oriented attitude, or so he argues. In this article, we present Eklund's case against Bishop's account of passionally caused believing, and we argue that it's unpersuasive, at least to those who accept permissivism about evidence, that is, that it's possible for there to be more than one rational response to a given body of evidence. We do this through a novel application of a case of nurtured belief, that is, of a person holding a belief simply because she was caused to do so by her upbringing, and we use it to show exactly where Eklund's argument goes wrong. We conclude by drawing a general lesson drawn from this debate: if permissivism about evidence is true, then belief being truth-oriented is consistent with non-evidential believing being possible.

J. L. Schellenberg's Philosophy of Religion argues for a specific brand of sceptical religion that takes ‘Ultimism’ – the proposition that there is a metaphysically, axiologically, and soteriologically ultimate reality – to be the object to which the sceptical religionist should assent. In this article I shall argue that Ietsism – the proposition that there is merely something transcendental worth committing ourselves to religiously – is a preferable object of assent. This is for two primary reasons. First, Ietsism is far more modest than Ultimism; Ietsism, in fact, is open to the truth of Ultimism, while the converse does not hold. Second, Ietsism can fulfil the same criteria that compel Schellenberg to argue for Ultimism.

Animalists, those who hold that human persons are identical to human animals, seem committed to holding that, in becoming incarnate, the Son of God became a human animal. Unsurprisingly, a number of philosophers have argued that this is impossible. In this article, I consider several objections to an animalist account of the incarnation based on kind membership, viz. objections drawing on kind essentialism, constitution essentialism, and the persistence conditions of animals. After developing each objection in detail, I respond by drawing on my preferred formulation of animalism. My goal in addressing these objections is to take the first steps toward demonstrating the compatibility of animalism and the incarnation.

Traditional Christianity holds that Jesus Christ somehow helps to bring about our salvation. A ‘theory of atonement’ is a theory about how he does this. One influential and elegant theory of atonement is Richard Swinburne's reparation theory. In this article, I contend that this theory fails to satisfy an important condition of adequacy on theories of atonement that has been overlooked in the literature. I first argue that in order to be plausible, a theory of atonement must not imply that failure to believe in the correct theory of atonement greatly hinders one from being benefited by Christ's salvific work. I then argue that reparation theory does have this problematic implication.