When people meet each other for the first time, they often ask questions about each other's profession. In my case, it requires some courage to reply frankly to such questions. Those who are not put off by my admission that I am a philosopher of religion and ask me for my special field of interest, almost invariably betray horror at my answer that I concentrate on the suffering of God. Divine passibility may be theologically en vogue, it is simply not done to be concerned with such a topic day in, day out for several years. It is not only that for many people some kind of taboo seems to be imposed upon abstract thinking; people's aversion is too strong to be based on this alone. The heart of the matter seems to be that to many people prolonged reflection upon the suffering of God seems to be positively morbid; they would not trust their children with a man engaged in it! It is not my intention entirely to remove these misgivings here, but I do hope that my reflections at least will not reinforce them. I will focus on three issues: (1) the alleged importance of divine passibility for the project of theodicy; (2) the importance of divine passibility for our coping with suffering and (3) the relevance of the assertion of divine passibility in the light of the general sense of purposelessness that is characteristic for Western society in our time. This means that I will approach divine passibility from the backgrounds that motivate my interest in it, thus hoping to be able to convey something of the inspiration that prompted me to carry on with this seemingly morbid topic during the past few years.

The Christian practice of meeting for worship and receiving token pieces of bread and token sips of wine seems unlikely to have had Jewish precedents. You don't eat in a synagogue; you eat at home. To be sure, specific acts of eating bread and drinking wine are given religious significance in the setting of the Passover meal, but that is not quite the same, although perhaps we might suppose the Christian practice to have evolved from the Jewish meal.

The revival treatises represent one of the most fruitful and provocative portions of the Jonathan Edwards corpus. The purpose of the treatises, considered as a whole, was (1) to provide a cogent account of the revivals which cropped up in New England in 1734–35 and agin in 1740–1743; (2) to defend the revivals to those, like Charles Chauncy, who objected to their emotional excesses or were skeptical of their validity; and (3) to encourage to moderation and humility those who were taking part in the revivals. In the course of accomplishing these objectives Edwards presents a morphology of the conversion experience, provides a basic description of his anthropology/psychology and gives an indication of the pneumatological side of his doctrine of God. We will consider each of these streams of thought briefly in terms of how they relate to Edwards' soteriology.

The problems surrounding intercessory prayer are manifold and well rehearsed; and few areas of religious observance undergo more of a metamorphosis during the life of a believer. Invocation of God to intervene so that the ‘divine will’ might be done more often than not gives way to a benign acceptance of the status quo and to the hallowing of time in which God is sought in all circumstances. And in this process many unhelpful notions of prayer are laid to rest. Images of God as cosmic messenger, interrupter of the natural order and manipulator of so-called human freedom prove incompatible with the canon of experience, to say nothing of a host of philosophical and theological objections. The resulting interpretations of intercession, however, are often far from convincing, especially when viewed in the light of scripture, which seems to bear witness to a God who, whilst independent from creation, remains intimately involved in its business and, especially, in that of humanity. For instance, there is the impression – stemming, perhaps, from the relative silence of many spiritual writers – that intercession is a ‘lesser’ form of prayer and one which must necessarily be jettisoned in the journey towards God as the soul is dispossessed of all insularity and self-centredness. Then there are the attempts to re-appropriate the language of intercession within a spirituality which is compatible with a modern world view.