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.

The purpose of this article is to develop a solution to the problem of evil within the context of a ‘revisionist' concept of God. The traditional approach to the problem of evil has been to assume one particular model of God, and then to ascertain how evil can be reconciled with that model. I hope to demonstrate that this is a mistake. What needs to be done, rather, is to acknowledge the existence of evil, and to ask whether this problem is generated by a faulty model of God. What I shall contend is that it is the traditional concept of God which generates this area of philosophical and theological perplexity, not the nature and function of evil. In particular, I shall attempt to show that the problem admits of a much more acceptable solution if the Christian believer abandons the notion of God as ‘a person’ or a disembodied agent, and conceives of God in a less overtly ‘personalistic’ manner.

Is (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?1

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’.

To read the gospels as fiction, as Frank Kermode does in The Genesis of Secrecy, the Charles Eliot Norton lectures delivered at Harvard in 1977–8, does not require the abandonment of all concern for ‘history’ or for ‘truth’, two other fictions which are essential for faith. Nor, In Defence of the Imagination, the title Dame Helen Gardner gave to her Charles Eliot Norton lectures of 1979–80, need apologists for Christianity commit themselves to a wholesale rejection of literary critical methods such as structuralism, as she suggests. There is a middle ground which can accept many of the methods of structuralism and even of post-structuralism without sharing the anti-theological assumptions of some of their practitioners. Structuralist analysis aims for objectivity, a scientific description of the processes at work in the production of meaning, a systematic articulation of the ‘grammar’ of narrative. It is therefore neither for nor against Christianity. Kermode's book, I argue, helps to show how the gospels function as narrative, revealing their capacity to ‘redescribe life’. In recognising their fictive nature, however, we need not consign ourselves with him to ‘endless disappointment’. For the gospels have aregenerating power which can transform our lives.

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.

My claim in this article is that the thesis that Buddhism has no God, insofar as it is taken to apply to Buddhism universally, is false. I defend this claim by interpreting a central text in East-Asian Buddhism – The Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna – through the lenses of perfect being theology (PBT), a research programme in philosophy of religion that attempts to provide a description of God through a two-step process: (1) defining God in terms of maximal greatness; (2) inferring the properties or attributes that God must have in virtue of satisfying the definition. My argument comprises two steps. First, I argue that, since PBT is a method for providing a description of God starting from a definition of God, any text that contains a PBT ipso facto contains a notion of God. Second, I argue through textual evidence that The Awakening articulates a PBT, concluding that it contains a notion of God. Since the method of PBT leaves open what descriptions are to be inferred, my argument allows me to conclude that a text contains a notion of God without previously committing to any particular conception of the divine, which makes it particularly versatile and powerful.

Reasoning about religion would seem to involve both explicit and tacit factors. These latter are what Pascal had in mind when he spoke of the ‘reasons of the heart which the reason knows not of’. Moreover, these reasons of the heart are the more interesting by virtue of being at least the more difficult and perhaps the more crucial. In these pages I want to examine the notion of reasons of the heart from the angle provided by the insights of Michael Polanyi. Space will not permit a review of the major features of Polanyi's crucial concept of tacit knowledge.1 I shall simply introduce and explore certain of these features as they seem relevant to the main concern of the paper. I trust this can be done in such a way as to be both meaningful to the reader and fair to Polanyi.

Justice will once (more) take the place which the Magians are keeping now, for it is they who lord it over the world.

(Manichaean Homily, fourth century)

As the title suggests, the thesis of this essay is that any view which would affirm the orthodox concept of a theistic God and yet deny the existence of a devil is inherently untenable; or, alternatively put, that ‘fundamentalism’ (if it may be so called), which affirms the existence of both God and a devil, and atheism, which denies the existence of both, are the only viable options with respect to the question of the theistic God. The support for this conclusion comes from the problem of evil, together with considerations drawn from common sense.

The final chapter of Peter Winch's book on Simone Weil discusses Weil's idea of supernatural virtue. Weil uses this language in connection with certain exceptional actions: actions of a kind which are for most of us, most of the time, simply impossible. She is particularly struck by cases in which someone refrains from exercising a power which they have over another: in which, for example, someone refrains from killing or enslaving an enemy who has grievously harmed him and who is now at his mercy. We could also speak of cases in which someone helps an enemy, or a stranger, at very real cost, or risk, to himself. In such cases Weil speaks of the ‘supernatural’ as being at work.

In this article I challenge Kantian constructivism both as an interpretation of Kant's own philosophical commitments and on its own merits as a moral theory, and argue in favour of a moral realist interpretation of Kant. I do so by focusing on Kant's own religious views and the question of whether a Kantian moral theory can be religiously neutral. I show that constructivist readings have severe problems on both fronts, while realist readings of Kant do not. This provides strong evidence that realist forms of Kantian ethics are preferable both as readings of Kant and as approaches to moral theory.

Accounts of religion, like almost all influential academic and intellectual exercises, as indeed much else, in the last two or three centuries, have generally been the work of Western scholars and intellectuals, often less familiar with, but sometimes simply disinclined to take seriously, non-Western religious traditions. Consequently most of these accounts have tended to be parochial, failing to apply to, say, Eastern religions, not to mention so-called ‘primitive’ religions; and have often given to what should only have been ‘local squabbles’ the appearance of universal religious concern. As a result, even philosophers of religion have largely explicated what might be called the ‘prescriptive grammar’ of religion. With a view to rectifying the situation, I intend to outline what I hope will be a ‘descriptive’ account, i.e. one which will be true of at least the major living religions of the world, e.g. Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and their main schools or sects. Inevitably, such a general account will fail to incorporate the unique features of any one religion; but it should have the advantage of restoring the proper perspective in debates concerning religion and religious issues, including those relating to the semantic and/or logical features of religious belief and so-called ‘religious language’.

Although a personal god of mixed moral character is logically possible, no personal god that has been represented as less than wholly good has gained more than a strictly local appeal. The Judaeo-Christian god is no exception. The god is represented as merciful, kind, longsuffering, forgiving, loving - in a word, wholly good. Of course, representing a god as wholly good is one thing; providing a convincing defence of his goodness is quite another. Indeed, many would contend that of all the defences provided within the Judaeo-Christian system, the defence of the goodness of God is the least convincing.

Christian theists have not normally wished to deny either of the following tenets:

T1 God creates human agents such that they are free with respect to certain actions and, therefore, morally responsible for them.

T2 God is an omniscient, wholly good being who is omnipotent in the sense that he has (sovereign, providential) control over all existent states of affairs.

The great Falsification Debate about the logical status of religious beliefs seems fairly quiescent at present. Most philosophers of religion have opted for one or the other of two opposite responses to the falsificationists' challenge.

Bonhoeffer's fragments from prison are some of the few bits of thought which have caused real theological excitement and bewilderment in recent years. In these letters and papers Bonhoeffer explores the theological problem of Christian faith and ethics in the mid-twentieth century. In an attempt to understand these fragments, we shall first outline the ‘situation’ Bonhoeffer describes and in which he himself lives. Then we shall summarise the ‘problem’ which this situation presents to theology, and, finally, explore Bonhoeffer's hints at a ‘solution’.

This article accomplishes two things. First, it explores and defends Kierkegaard's distinctive solution to the Problem of Total Devotion, a problem which has been helpfully identified by Robert Adams. Second, it extends that solution by advancing an interpretation of the command to do all things to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31) according to which we are being commanded to intentionally make every one of our actions such that it simultaneously counts as a divine action: in other words, to act intentionally in all things such that it is God who acts through us.