As far as I am aware the topic of God's forgetting is unfamiliar philosophical terrain. It is a topic that has many ramifications and in seeking to plot some sort of map of the area, as I see it, I am conscious that I have by no means covered all aspects nor avoided all pitfalls and that my approach would not necessarily be that chosen by other would-be surveyors.

The theological situation today demands both a restatement and a reinstatement of the Christian doctrine of reconciliation. The essential prerequisite of any attempt to interpret, reinterpret or restate that doctrine is a due appreciation of the historical origins and subsequent development of the concept. It is clearly futile to develop or defend theories of reconciliation which originally rest upon some manifestly incorrect interpretation of a Hebrew root, or which represent a comparatively recent distortion of an older and more considered doctrine, or which represent a theological response to a particular Zeitgeist which no longer pertains today. Of the several concepts employed in the Christian articulation of the reconciliation effected between God and his world through Jesus Christ, the most important is that of justification.

Over the past few decades philosophers have gathered quite a few logical and linguistic insights from a close study of traditional religious claims and arguments: But on the whole, theologians have not benefited reciprocally from those philosophical explorations into their territory. I believe this has been due in part to the philosophers' unhelpful approach. Their procedure, all too often, has been to lay out a claim or argument in its traditional form, and then go ‘fallacy hunting’, finally to reject it as hopelessly ridden with logical error and based on some outmoded metaphysical notions which are entirely unsalvageable. In all this there is seldom evinced any sensitivity to that religious perception the communication of which was intended by the particular formulation of doctrine they have examined. Thus the philosophical enterprise has time and again come across as inimical to the theologian's interest. In this paper I hope to show that this is not a necessary course of affairs. I intend to examine some traditional Christian claims about the person of Christ as presented by St. Thomas, primarily in the third part of his Summa Theologiae. I shall reject the bulk of his particular formulations but at the same time concur with some of the insights which found expression in those formulae. The particular topic I shall address is the question of the identity and unity of the person of Christ.

At the end of his celebrated wager argument, Pascal advises the sceptic to whom it is addressed to take up a religious way of life in hope of thereby cultivating religious beliefs he does not presently hold, and this because of the immense advantage to him of believing. Many who have shown some sympathy with the wager argument or the understanding of religious belief on which it is based have found this advice, if not silly and dangerous, at least uninstructive. William James, for example, whose philosophy of religion has striking similarities to Pascal's, objected that the advice is unsound because the sceptic has no reason to believe that religious practice will have its promised result. The tone of James's discussion and the fact that he misrepresents Pascal's advice as a simple belief in the efficacy of ‘masses and holy water’, however, suggest that his rejection of it ran deeper than the force of this objection. In fact, the context of his remarks indicates that he regarded this part of Pascal's wager as a particularly clear example of the cases in which to base belief on volition is ‘simply silly’. Even one as sympathetic to Pascal's thought as Donald Baillie seems troubled by the advice. On the one hand, Baillie does not rule out the possibility that some cases of doubt or disbelief may be adequately treated by a measured dose of religious practice.