In two recent articles Grace M. (Dyck) Jantzen has argued that an embodied God could be both a being worthy of worship (in the Judaeo-Christian tradition) and omnipresent. In arguing for neither of these claims has she attempted to prove that God (if he exists) is embodied, or even that God (if he exists) must be embodied. Rather, she has urged acceptance of the more modest claim there is no good reason for denying the possible embodiment of God (if he exists) on grounds either connected with his being a worthy object of worship or in terms of a supposed entailment of incorporeality on God's omnipresence. Yet contemporary thinkers with as radically divergent views about God as Kai Nielsen and Father Copleston forward ‘the argument that an embodied God is inadequate for sophisticated theism’; and, Jantzen avers, there is a ‘widespread belief that if God is indeed omnipresent, as we are clearly taught in Scripture, then that doctrine of omnipresence entails immediately that God must be incorporeal’. The purpose of my remarks in this note is not to dispute Jantzen's conclusions, but to question the strength and/or satisfactoriness of some of her arguments for those conclusions. Perhaps the most pervading misgiving arises over her unquestioned equating of ‘embodiment’ with ‘having a body’. Surely at first blush such synonymy appears both obvious and innocuous. But where the notion of embodiment itself is the crux of the issue, careful reflection needs to be given to just what the notion involves. Yet she simply accepts the synonymy ‘without any further ado, as though it were just obviously true’, just as she accuses Findlay of doing regarding ‘the claim that only a being who exists necessarily would be worthy of our worship’.

Among the questions facing the religious there is one that is becoming particularly pressing in our contemporary world of mingled cultures. Expressed as religious people sometimes put it to themselves, it is: How does my religion relate to other religions? There are two very different answers abroad. One is: mine is true and all others, to the extent that they depart from mine, are false and are to be rejected. The other is: mine is valid-for-me, and those of others are valid-for-them. The first answer has the virtue of being utterly straightforward and not mealy-mouthed, but it seems parochial and myopic, for, as John Hick points out:

In the great majority of cases, the tradition within which a religious person finds his relationship to the Real depends to a very great extent upon where and when he or she is born…In view of this situation, can one be unquestionably confident that the religion which one happens to have inherited by birth is indeed normative and that all others are properly to be graded by their likeness or unlikeness to it?

The Christian faith, according to Alfred North Whitehead's familiar premise, ‘has always been a religion seeking a metaphysic’. Although it is debatable whether one should accept this thesis in a constructive sense, it does not appear that Christian belief from either an offensive or defensive position has the option of escaping from its philosophical implications. If, for example, a meeting with Christ occurs—either in an initial New Testament sense or through secondary channels in a contemporary moment—which functionally produces an existential consciousness of liberation that one may even dare to call ‘forgiveness of sins’, what confidence may he have that the experience is real and not only apparent, enduring and not just exuberance of mood, an encounter with life that touches the whole of his concern and not merely one atomistic fragment? These are surely questions which admit varying degrees of solution; yet they are genuine experiential issues which call for a recognition of ontological depth if they are to retain their functional effectiveness. This necessity which theology has of fulfilling its task within the comprehensive context of ontology is portrayed convincingly by Gerhard Ebeling in his essay entitled ‘Theology and Reality’ when he affirms:

‘Theology has to do with reality as a totality—not with the sum of all the realms of reality and all the ways in which reality encounters us…. However much theology is based upon the testimony of Christian faith, it has yet to make good faith's claim by bringing to expression what unconditionally concerns every man in his totality.’

In recent decades, particularly since the publication of Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy (1917; Eng. trans., 1923) and Gerardus Van der Leeuw's Religion in Essence and Manifestion (1933; Eng. trans., 1938), what is known as the ‘phenomenological’ approach to the study of religion has become extremely popular. I myself, in teaching courses in religious studies, have for a number of years used Van der Leeuw's classic study; it is a work of amazing insight and scholarship, and perhaps the single greatest example ofjust how successful the method of phenomenology can be when applied to a distinct field of study. But it is not only in the domain of religious studies that phenomenologists have made important contributions; in the spheres of social and political theory, for example, as well as in the philosophy of art, the philosophy of psychology, and other areas, there have been notable accomplishments.

Anselm's two ‘ontological’ arguments rest upon three fundamental assertions:

(1) The idea of God is the idea of a being than which nothing more perfect is conceivable.

(2) Whatever exists in the understanding and outside the understanding is more perfect than whatever exists in the understanding alone. (Prosologion 2)

(3) Whatever cannot be conceived not to exist is more perfect than whatever can be conceived not to exist. (Proslogion 3)

One of the widely held philosophical doctrines of this century in the English speaking world is that there is no logical bridge between fact and value, between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’. Human nature may be such that all or most of us approve common states of affairs. That is, there seem to be experiential or psychological ways of bridging the gap. But, on this view, no value judgment is ever inconsistent with any description of the world or of part of the world. Describe the world as you will, there is no logical reason to move on to any specific value judgment about the event or events under the given description.

Philosphy is not necessary to religion, and philosophy in the modern West proceeds without much reference to religion. In so far as religion is taken to be a matter of reverence for the traditional gods of place and people, its rites and stories are as resistant to philosophical analysis as are the works of poets and dramatists. Yet insofar as a religion makes claims about the nature of the real world, claims based on some allegedly special mode of access proper to that religion, then it is bound to come under critical scrutiny. The Socratic method of seeking an analysis of meanings and an exposition of modes of knowledge can be readily applied to any religious believers who claim to understand what religious concepts mean and who further claim that they know some of their beliefs to be true. Although Plato has Socrates participate in sacrifices to the gods, he never considers the rites of ancient Greek religion to be worthy of serious philosophical comment. Instead, he invented his own austere, mathematical, cerebral religion, the contemplation of the Good, which provides knowledge of how to live justly in society. Ever since that time, philosophers in the West have tended to invent their own vastly unpopular religions of intellectual supremacy, and to leave the mass of popular religion to superstition and illusion. Theologians, however, conscious of the need to provide some intellecutal basis for their faith, have tended to adopt the philosophical positions of a few, or even of a few hundred, years ago, and baptize them, sometimes very roughly, into the Christian or some other faith.

This paper has four roots.

First, an increasing dissatisfaction over the gulf between classical and theological studies. Christianity in origin, after all, is a part of the story of the ancient world, and has to be seen in context. The context is complex: it is Judaea as part of the Hellenistic world under the rule of Rome: we ignore any part of that context at our peril. Classical scholars tend to be suspicious of those with theological interests: I was forbidden by an examining board of the University of London to set the first verse of St John's Gospel for comment in a paper on Greek philosophy: they were being doctrinaire, not I. But equally some theologians have neglected the disciplined study of the ancient world. It would not be so bad if they left the context out; but instead they offer windy generalisations, secondhand, ill-based and false. Some corrective is needed.

Despite the bad reputation of the legal profession, law remains king in America. A highly diverse society relies on the laws (and especially the Constitution) to maintain a working sense of the dignity and inviability of each individual. And a persistent element in contemporary debates is the fear that naturalistic theories of the human person will erode our belief that we have a dignity greater than that of other natural objects. Thus the endurance of the creation vs. evolution debate is due less to the arguments of creationists, or to the continued influence of the book of Genesis, than to the reading of the evidence provided by Phillip E. Johnson of the University of California, Berkeley, Law School.

Agnostics often hold that, since there is not a clear preponderance of evidence either in favour of theistic belief or against it, their position of suspended belief is more rational than either theism or atheism. I would like to examine an objection raised recently by Clement Dore against the agnostic's reasoning on this matter.

Anselm's Cur Deus Homo argues that only by the Incarnation can God save humanity. This seems to sit ill with the claim that God is omnipotent and absolutely free, for this entails that God could save humanity in other ways. I show that features of Anselm's concept of God and treatment of necessity make the claim that the Incarnation is a necessary means of salvation problematic. I then show that for Anselm, all conditions which make the Incarnation necessary for human salvation stem from God's nature and prior choices. If so, the Incarnation's necessity restricts neither God's freedom nor His power. For that the Incarnation is necessary given God's actual choices does not entail that it would have been necessary had God made other choices, or that God could not have made choices which would have made the Incarnation non-necessary.

Have process philosophers understood what Christian theologians are trying to say? The process critique of the broad tradition of Christian theology is motivated, at least in part, by the belief that the God of the Church's traditional confession is too unreservedly transcendent; that is, that he is insufficiently related to his creation. In response, process philosophers have defended a ‘dipolar’ concept of God according to which God is fully transcendent in his ‘primordial nature’ and fully immanent (i.e. ‘surrelative’) in his ‘consequent nature’. The dipolar construction undoubtedly solves the ‘problem’, but the question remains whether there really is a problem to be solved in the first place. Many Christian theologians, after all, have understood their faith, as well as their attempts at the rational exploration of their faith, to depend upon the divine-human relationship constituted by God's own self-disclosure. They have further understood the meaning of the terms of their theological explication to be immanent to this same experiential context of divine-human encounter, within which relationship with God is the primary reality experienced. As a particular aspect of the controversy aroused by the process critique of Christian theology, therefore, the question arises whether process philosophers have taken adequate account of the manner in which Christian theology has been conditioned by this context of divine-human encounter. I have no pretensions within the scope of this brief essay to address this question in its full generality, either with respect to the multifarious theological positions which the process critique has engendered, or with respect to the wide range of difficulties involved in any attempt to understand the relation of the Creator to his creation.