Feigned madness can be a valuable asset. King David once used it to escape from the Philistines (I Sam. 21), and a twentieth century king, Pirandello's Henry IV pulled much the same trick on a modern philistine culture. Thrown from his horse and struck on the head while on his way to a masquerade party dressed as the Henry of Canossa's chill repentance, he had for twenty years insanely identified himself with the eleventh century monarch. At least this is what his family and the court they provided for his humour thought. As the play opens they are unaware that he has returned to sanity, but has continued to play Henry IV for the last eight of the twenty years, preferring the mad world in which he had lived to the sane world to which he would have to return.

One of the most interesting works on Christology to appear in recent years is Wolfhart Pannenberg's Grundzüge der Christologie. The reviewer in the Scottish Journal of Theology could speak of it as ‘a theological thriller’ and ‘very satisfying on account of its erudition, constant confrontation with Roman and Protestant, German and non-German theologians of the past and present’. Certainly we have here a Christology based on a striking knowledge of Scripture, the Councils, the Fathers and a large range of theologians and philosophers, both ancient and modern. Its originality consists perhaps most of all in the way it understands Christ's role as Revealer.

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.

In responding to the problem that evil poses for belief in the existence of an omnipotent and all good deity, a number of Christian philosophers have followed Augustine in making the free will defence (FWD) the foundation of their theodicies. The FWD seems to be well suited for the important role it has played in Christian religious thought. Not only does it admit the reality of evil in God's world, but it also proposes to free God from moral responsibility for at least a considerable portion of that evil. A few philosophers, e.g. Terence Penelhum, have even argued that ‘… the Christian theist is committed to some form or other of the free will defence …’ because of the Christian understanding of the nature of God and man. Whether or not this is true, the argument that it was not possible for God to create free human beings without permitting some degree of evil in his world (the FWD) has been sufficiently influential that those sceptics who have intended to show that the reality of evil makes theism an intellectually indefensible position have usually felt compelled to treat it. For similar reasons, a number of theistic philosophers have felt obligated to defend the FWD against such sceptical attacks.

There is a long tradition in Western philosophical theology of conceiving God as ‘a being’. It dates back to the Hellenistic period, more particularly to the conjunction of Greek philosophy and the Hebrew religion in Alexandria with Philo, and it became orthodox in the Christian tradition through Augustine. In our time most aspects of this religious tradition have been subjected to a salutary re-examination, but in this the concept of God as ‘a being’ has been relatively neglected. After such a long acceptance of so fundamental a doctrine, it is liable largely to have sunk to the status of a presupposition, entailing a loss of intellectual awareness of what precisely it implies. Even where the Augustinian philosophical argument upon which this concept is based is recognized, as it has been in the long Neoplatonic tradition, it has come to appear as essentially self-evident and thus has not been subjected to fundamental critical examination. Significant of this is that even where the personalistic conception of God has been abandoned, e.g. by the idealist philosophy of the Absolute, the conception nevertheless persists of God as ‘a being’.

Although the basic ideas of the ontological argument can be found in Aristotle and Philo Judaeus (cf. AD pp. 141 ff.), the argument received its classical formulation in Anselm's Proslogion and his Reply to the objections raised by Gaunilo. During the succeeding nine centuries the argument has had a chequered career. It was supported by some scholastic theologians but rejected by Aquinas. Descartes and Leibniz offered their own versions of the proof but Kant's refutation of the argument has generally been accepted as conclusive during the past century and a half. Nevertheless, interest in the proof has never completely disappeared—perhaps provoked by Aquinas' suggestion that the proof may be valid for God even though it cannot be valid for us because of the inadequacy of our knowledge of God. Recently there has been a revival of interest in the ontological argument. J. N. Findlay put the argument into reverse to show the necessary non-existence of God in an article in 1948 (Can God's existence be disproved?) but in later writings he has suggested that the argument may have positive significance. In 1960 Norman Malcolm published a paper in which he distinguished two basically different forms of the ontological argument in the Proslogion and defended the possible validity of the second of them.

Recently several philosophers have claimed that miracles cannot occur or that belief in them involves a misunderstanding of the scientific enterprise. In this paper I will argue that these claims, particularly the latter, are mistaken. By examining the characteristics of the believer's conception of the miraculous I will be able to show how he can meet these sceptical challenges. In particular, I will argue that the believer can hold that certain particular events are the result of intervention by divine agency and are thus not to be explained scientifically but nevertheless can grant the scientist autonomy to investigate all types of events. While I urge that belief in the miraculous does not rest on a confusion I do not argue whether or not this belief is rational or justified.

Much contemporary philosophy of religion is preoccupied with highly general problems about the nature of religious belief and of religious language, rather than with how to interpret, in detail, specific religious beliefs or forms of religious discourse. Among the matters of dispute there seem to be two of overriding importance. The first concerns the relation between religious beliefs and experience and centres on the question, what sorts of experience are relevant to the acceptance or rejection of religious beliefs. The second concerns whether or not religious beliefs have an explanatory function. Discussion of both these themes in relation to theistic belief is still largely dominated by conceptions of God and of his relation to the world which have been developed by natural theologians, particularly, though not exclusively, those who have worked within traditions significantly influenced by Thomas Aquinas. Thus the idea that religious beliefs have an explanatory function is commonly associated with the view that they present answers to questions raised by those alleged traits or features of the world which have been the concern of natural theologians and which have been described by means of concepts of ‘contingency’, ‘purposiveness’, ‘order’, and ‘design’. Consequently, the sort of experience often held to be relevant to the acceptance or rejection of theistic belief is that which is relevant to the application of these problematic concepts.

The religions of Indian origin occupy considerable space in the Encyclopedia. There are literally hundreds of articles, some quite extensive, that deal with the relevant material. Such a generous treatment need not come as a surprise. The editor in chief was the late Mircea Eliade, the author of a highly influential work on yoga; he himself honoured the Encyclopedia with the entry on the same subject. Moreover, in any global account of religion the Indian traditions ought to figure prominently, given their enormous influence all over Asia.

From at least the time of the writing of The Philosophical Fragments, Søren Kierkegaard's work takes a special interest in both the transition from unbelief to faith and the character of the life of true faith. Trained in Lutheran dogma and convinced of the radical nature of human freedom, his work on this subject demonstrates a profound concern for and grasp of Lutheran orthodoxy, as well as a remarkable degree of subtlety. After all, it is no simple task to give an account of the central features of the Christian life that is faithful to both a libertarian conception of human freedom and the doctrines of the church founded by the author of The Bondage of the Will. This paper proposes to accomplish two things: first, to state a problem that lies on the surface of Kierkegaard's account of the transformation involved in Christian conversion and second to present a resolution of the problem that is faithful to Kierkegaard's intentions.

There is an undercurrent to be detected in Anselm's record of the meditative experience that issued in the Ontological Argument and, although it points to a profound and perennial problem in the interpretation of religion, this undercurrent has been largely ignored. The Argument, as is well known, moves entirely within the medium of reflective meaning focused on the idea of God and, unlike the cosmological arguments of later theologians, it makes no appeal whatever to a principle of causality or to the discovery of a sufficient reason for finite existence. Anselm seems to have had his own sense of what one may call the unadulterated rationalism of the Argument when, in his own words, he wondered, ‘if perhaps it might be possible to find one single argument that for its proof required no other save itself, and that by itself would suffice to prove that God really exists’. Here we are entirely within that inner chamber of the mind so dear to the Augustinian tradition, a mind from which one is to exclude all thought save that of God. The task of the one who reflects is to penetrate the inner meaning of this thought in order to discover what it implies beyond what is evident on the surface. With such an eminently rational or logical aim occupying the centre of attention, it is quite understandable that the presence of another, and quite opposed, concern should have been overlooked - Anselm's concern, namely, to transcend, as it were, the medium of thought itself, and enter into the presence of God. The reason that this concern introduces a tension in the search for a proof is that the realization of presence would seem to render proof superfluous, while the inference in an argument - especially one moving towards existence – inevitably suggests, in some sense and to some degree, the absence of what is sought for.

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.

I wish to examine certain aspects of Barth's development of special ethics which are puzzling to me, and which I believe pose difficulties that mitigate considerably the possibility of a successfully completed programme in theological ethics. Whether these aspects are puzzling to others remains to be seen. At any rate, an important part of theological ethics, as I see it, lies in seeing what sorts of responses are engendered by taking up a position and attempting to elaborate it.