In his recent book, Survival and Disembodied Existence Terence Penelhum presents a convincing case against the belief in disembodied personal survival. His formidable attack constitutes, I think, one of the strongest cases that has yet been made out against such a belief. I am in substantial agreement with his position.

The late Karl Barth once wrote that no one can hope to overcome Ludwig Feuerbach ‘…with whining or with angry criticism of his views of religion.’ This is plainly correct, for Feuerbach's argument that religious language is always anthropological is an argument of great attractiveness—and, apparently, of great explanatory utility to psychologists, historians, and philosophers. Barth's solution to the problem raised by Feuerbach is less satisfactory. It just will not do for Christian believers simply to cleanse Christian theology of anthropological foundations by admitting ‘…that even in our relation to God,… we can lay claim to his truth, his certainty, his salvation as grace and only as grace’. Nor will it do for Christian believers, secure in the promise of divine succour, to ‘… laugh… at Feuerbach’ for his naive view of human possibilities. Even though a cleansing of theology may be helpful to the Church, it will have little (more likely, no) effect upon the widespread popular and scholarly acceptance of Feuerbach's conclusions.

Since the last half of the nineteenth century western Christian theologians have argued periodically about the supernatural, with liberals ordinarily denying the value of the concept and conservatives affirming it. The debate has usually turned around its function or disfunction within apologetics or the philosophy of religion. The anti-supernaturalists have claimed that the concept seriously inhibits the conversation between Christianity and contemporary culture. The pro-supernaturalists have replied that, whatever its current cultural status, the supernatural is absolutely essential to Christianity. And any attempt to abandon it for apologetic or philosophical reasons would falsify the very meaning of the Christian message itself. The debate commonly ends there with both sides fixed in disagreement.

Bultmann has been charged by critics of both right and left with building a basic inconsistency into his position, in that he lays down a programme for intepreting the New Testament in terms free of mythological elements, but continues to talk about God's decisive act in Christ, the eschatological event. My enquiry here is occasioned by the appearance of an exposition of Bultmann's doctrine of history in which the claim is made that he is not inconsistent at all; on the contrary, the author Norman Young argues that Bultmann's understanding of Jesus Christ as eschatological event is consistent with and indeed shaped by his complex view of history. In this paper I want to examine that view of history to see whether it, at any rate, can be rendered consistent and to assess the adequacy of his account of historiography.

In a recent article ‘The Problem of Natural Theology’, Professor N. H. G. Robinson has considered the requirements of a ‘genuinely empirical natural theology’. For the first section of it, a very clear sorting-out of recent debates on the ontological argument, I have nothing but admiration. It ends with the question: ‘Granted that if we think of God we must think of him as necessarily existing, why must we think of God at all?’, followed by the comment: ‘We seem thrown, without any prospect of rest, between apriorism and [Barthian] empiricism’. Robinson is rightly dissatisfied with that situation, and in his second section he raises the question whether there cannot be an approach to God which the debates on the ontological arguments (as so far described) have overlooked and which may be properly called an ‘empirical’ one, free from Barthian presuppositions. He finds what seems to be such an approach in Professor E. L. Mascall's Existence and Analogy but concludes that it is in fact after all a form of ‘rationalism’. In the third section he criticises Professor T. F. Torrance's defence of Barth's position in a way which seems to me most satisfactory, and in the fourth he makes his own positive proposals. With these I am in substantial agreement. It is only his account of Mascall's position, in particular at the end of his second section, which seems to call for critical comment.

In The Retreat to Commitment (London, 1964), Professor W. W. Bartley III argues for a certain theory of rationality and contends that by this criterion it is not possible for a christian theist to be rational. His theory of rationality has already aroused considerable criticism, but his application of it to religious belief in particular, has not hitherto been widely considered.

One would be hard pressed to deny the ordinary man's trust in the moral deliverances of his conscience. Joseph Butler put the case for the infallibility of conscience, when he remarked: ‘Had it strength, as it had right; had it power, as it had manifest authority; it would absolutely govern the world’ (Fifteen Sermons, ii, 13, 14). I think it obvious, in retrospect, that Butler underestimated its ‘strength’ and ‘power’, while overextending its ‘right’ and ‘authority’. Perhaps it is too rash a claim to maintain that conscience serves as an inadequate guide in our moral deliberations, but, to be sure, it can hardly be defended as a sufficient guide to moral conduct.

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’.

‘In the world today there are three religions: Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto. Some think they represent the three different countries, India, China and Japan; while others consider them essentially one, or else dispute with one another over the truth or falsity of each. However, the way which may be called the Way of all ways is different from these, and what each of these three teachings calls the Way is not in accord with the Way of Truth. The reason is that Buddhism is the Way of India, and Confucianism is the Way of China. Because they are peculiar to these countries they are not the Way of Japan. Shinto is the Way of Japan, but because of the difference in time, it is not the Way for the present generation. Some may think that the Way is always the Way despite differences in nationality and differences in time; but the Way is called the Way because of its practicality, and a Way which is not practical is not the true Way. Thus, the Way as taught by the three teachings mentioned above is not a Way practicable in present-day Japan’.

The major religions are committed to incompatible world-views. Are there criteria available on the basis of which we can rationally decide among these sets of religious beliefs? Ninian Smart in Reasons and Faiths assumes that there is no a priori reason to suppose that such criteria are not possible or unavailable, and sets out a procedure for the justification of religious beliefs which primarily, though not exclusively, depends upon an appeal to religious experience. In this paper I wish to appraise the results of applying his criteria to different sets of religious beliefs and, in addition, I wish to appraise these criteria.