It is of course true that the articulation of religious and theological views depends upon and often masks philosophical presuppositions. For example, those who quote with approval Anselm's ‘credo ut intelligam’, ‘I believe so that I may understand’, seldom follow the good example set by Anselm, and make explicit, as Anselm does in the following sentence, the fact that this principle rests upon a further principle: ‘For I believe this also, that “unless I believe, I shall not understand”’ (Proslogion, I). This paper is an attempt to track down and expose one very pervasive set of views about the nature of experience which is implicit in a wide range of religious and theological claims.

Reflection on religion has, in the modern era, been intimidated by the conclusions and the (alleged) methods of science. The latter have been by far the most threatening, since they challenge not simply the conclusions but the possibility of theology. Happily, the philosophy of science has recently developed models of understanding which can be applied less destructively to other modes of thought. Yet the pattern persists: philosophers of religion and theologians receive these as they might receive new revelations from the deity (or, I suppose one must say, as they no longer would receive such revelations).

Pascal's Wager, and the issues raised by it, have, despite a few notable exceptions, been an object of some neglect in recent Philosophy of Religion. Whether this neglect is from an assumption that the argument requires no comment, or from a feeling that there is something not quite academically respectable about it, I have come to believe that it is undeserved. One reason why the argument is deserving of attention from the theologian is that Pascal has managed to put his finger on just the sort of consideration which, rightly or wrongly, is capable of exercising a powerful influence over the ordinary mind – the sort of problem which, in short, keeps people awake at nights. A reason why it should be of interest to the philosopher is that it possesses that characteristically philosophical quality of appearing obviously invalid in some lights, and in others (rather like the Ontological Argument) manages to slip past every supposed disproof, and annoy us with the suspicion that it may, after all, be valid. These reasons alone are sufficient to justify the philosopher of religion in attempting a careful analysis of Pascal's case in the light of which its cogency can be assessed. In this paper, I shall attempt such an analysis, and shall proceed to argue that, correctly understood and within its proper limitations, Pascal's argument is indeed valid.

Some historians of modern Indian religious thought claim that, in respect of a pure monotheism free from pagan or polytheistic myth and a morality free from taboos and superstition, Rammohun was indebted to the Christian missionaries of his time and more particularly to the Baptists of Serampore. Thus, E. Daniel Potts, in his British Baptist Missionaries in India, 1793–1837, observes:

The Brahmo Samaj or Sabha (or Theistic Society) founded by him [Rammohun] in 1828 after he disassociated himself from Adam's Unitarian Association used a congregational form of worship utterly unknown to the ancient form of Hinduism he believed he was restoring; any many of its teachings, particularly ethical, were drawn from those of the Precepts of Jesus. Related organizations to reform Hinduism sprang up in the 1830–s and after, and in the process propagated, though their leaders would not always admit this, the idea of Christian morality – both enterprises begun by Roy's direct response to missionary and particularly Baptist endeavours.’

It was in December 1868, a little less than fifteen years before his death, that T. H. Green entered into correspondence with the young Henry Scott Holland and R. L. Nettleship (later to be his literary executor) on the occasion of the latter's visit to the young Gerard Manley Hopkins, then on the threshold of entering the novitiate of the Society of Jesus. Part of this correspondence is preserved in Stephen Paget's memoir of Scott Holland, and no student of the interpretation of Christianity in the writings and teachings of the British Idealists should neglect either this exchange of letters, or indeed the latter correspondence with Scott Holland in which the young Anglican, on the eve of his own ordination, sought to defend his commitment to his mentor.

I am grateful to Professor White for his stimulating response to my remarks on Buddhist karmic theory. While I cannot follow him in all his criticisms, his response has forced me to clarify my thinking and to make explicit some presuppositions that were not sufficiently developed in the original paper. I hope, too, that this brief response to White's discussion will help in critically assessing the contributions made by Buddhist philosophers to our understanding of the problem of personal identity.

A few years ago I ran across a statement by Jean-Paul Sartre which seemed to imply that if there is a God, then there can be no human freedom. That thesis struck me as questionable, but at the time I did not pause to examine it. More recently I ran across a similar, more explicit statement by Kurt Baier, and I decided the time to pause had come. My knee-jerk response to Baier – and I confess it was probably nothing more – was, ‘Why can't there be human freedom if there is a God? Indeed, can there be human freedom if there isn't a God ?’ The second of these questions has proved to be the more provocative to me, for the more I have thought about it, the more it has seemed to me that it is the atheist and not the theist who should be on the defensive about libertarianism, i.e. the position that human beings do act, that human actions are not determined, that we are the sole cause of our actions, and that all things remaining the same, we could have done otherwise. Indeed, the more I thought about that question – Can there be human freedom if there is no God? – the more convinced I became (and still am) that the atheist has no good reason for believing in libertarianism. Note: I am not saying that atheism is logically incompatible with libertarianism. Perhaps it is, but if it is, that is not yet obvious to me. Rather, I am saying that an atheist who believes in libertarianism must believe in it on the basis of faith and must hold this faith in opposition to the only type of evidence that is available to him. Hence, by denying the existence of God, Baier and Sartre do not make room for human freedom; they make belief in human freedom irrational. By contrast, I shall argue, the theist does have a good reason for believing that humans are free. Let's take separate looks at Baier and Sartre; then I shall summarize the substance of my position.

Professor Wainwright's recent book is the first attempt at a systematic and rigorous assessment of mystical experience since the publication of W. T. Stace's influential Mysticism and Philosophy more than twenty years ago. It is also the first work in English during the period of the critical study of mystical experience inaugurated by Richard M. Bucke and William James at the beginning of this century to adequately formulate and extensively discuss the philosophical problems involved in assessing the cognitive value of mystical experience. Wainwright's conclusions are not unproblematic, but the publication of his work does provide an ideal opportunity for a review of the central problems associated with the assessment of mystical experience. In this paper, therefore, we wish to delineate and discuss the two major areas of difficulty, and to extend and amend some of Wainwright's suggestions in these areas.

In this essay I propose to offer some observations in due course on how Christian thought and practice in general (though some reference will be made to the Indian context) might profit from a central theme in the theology of Rāmānuja, a Tamil Vaisnava Brahmin whose traditional date straddles the eleventh and twelfth centuries of the Christian era. The central theme I have in mind is expressed in Rāmānuja's view that the ‘world’ is the ‘body’ of Brahman or God. We shall go on to explain what this means, but let me state first that my overall aim is to further inter-religious understanding, especially between Christian and Hindu points of view. In professing a concern for inter-religious dialogue I know that I reflect a longstanding interest of Professor H. D. Lewis. I shall seek to show that the Christian religion can profit both from the content and the method of Rāmānuja's body-of-God theology. To this end this essay is divided into two sections. Section I is the longer: it contains an analysis of what Rāmānuja did (and did not) mean by his body-of-God theme – doubtless unfamiliar ground for most of the readers of this essay – and serves as a propaedeutic for what follows in section 2. In section 2 I shall attempt to ‘extrapolate’ Rāmānuja's thinking into a Christian context, with dialogue in mind. Section 2 cannot be appreciated for the promise I hope it holds out without the (sometimes involved) detail of the first section.

He went like one that bath been stunned.

And is of sense forlorn:

A sadder and a wiser man.

He rose the morrow morn.

(The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)

In this paper I wish to explore Coleridge's approach to the study of philosophy and theology and ask whether and in what respects it can contribute to present discussions about the nature and the possibility of a philosophical theology.