Chapter 4, ‘The Efficacy of Empirical Vision’, argues that physical sight can and should lead to belief in John. Scholars often cite John 2:23; 4:48; and 20:29 as evidence for John’s own critique of physical seeing as a means of coming to belief. The chapter argues that close reading of John 2:23 and 4:48 reveals human hearts to be the true cause of unbelief and shows that physical sight is the catalyst for all unbelief and all belief. Neither does John 20:29 condemn sight as a means of acquiring belief. Rather, it suggests that mediated seeing – via the text of the Gospel – can be as efficacious for belief as an actual encounter with Jesus. The chapter concludes that sight is complex, but that no critique of the positive relationship between sight and belief exists in John.

Chapter 1, ‘My Lord and My God’ in John 20:30–31’, asserts that the cause, content, and consequences of belief all suggest that Jesus is God. In John 20:27–29, Thomas sees Jesus and calls him ‘my Lord and my God’. After Jesus blesses those who believe without seeing him, John claims that he has written down signs in this book so that his readers can come to believe that ‘Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God’ and ‘receive life in his name’ (John 20:30–31). The proximity of both statements is not coincidental but reveals that 20:30–31 describes the same fullness of belief as Thomas’s exclamation. What emerges is that John’s portrayals of the ‘signs’, the titles ‘Christ’ and ‘Son of God’, and the resulting ‘life in his name’ are fundamentally theological. True belief will always make Thomas’s declaration.

The introduction raises the question of how one ought to understand the challenge of God’s invisibility/visibility in the Fourth Gospel with regard to its stated purpose: ‘These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.’ Scholars and theologians have often taken God’s invisibility to be ‘absolute’, in the sense that it describes an immaterial, eternal God whose deity is invisible by nature. While John claims that no one has ever seen God, it also describes God as incarnate in Jesus Christ, the one in whom the Father may be seen. The introduction shows that scholars have not yet satisfactorily defined the nature of divine invisibility in John nor reckoned with the import of this important theme for John’s purpose. It proposes that, according to John, God must become physically visible in Jesus in order for belief to obtain.

A brief conclusion summarizes the argument as a whole, asserts that God is physically visible in Jesus’s body, considers the impact of this conclusion on Johannine scholarship, and suggests further areas of research.

Lucian’s position as a commentator on religion has been debated intensely since late antiquity: for most of the last two millennia, it has been the main focus for commentators. This is primarily due to Lucian teasing Christians in a couple of places (although in fact they get off relatively lightly); but he is also, and indeed much more insistently, scathing about aspects of Greco-Roman ‘paganism’. This chapter begin by unpicking some of this reception history, and showing how modern scholarly perspectives remain locked into nineteenth-century cultural-historical narratives (which were designed to play ‘Hellenism’ off against ‘Christianity’, in various forms). It then argues that we should set aside the construct of Lucian’s status as a religious ‘outsider’— a legacy of nineteenth-century thinking — and consider Lucian instead as an agent operating within the field of Greek religion, and contributing richly (albeit satirically) to ongoing, vital questions over humans’ relationship with the divine. He should be ranged, that is to say, alongside figures like Aristides, Pausanias, and Apuleius as keen observers of the religious culture of the time.

Polus admires orators for their tyrannical power. However, Socrates argues that orators and tyrants lack power worth having: the ability to satisfy one’s wishes or wants (boulêseis). He distinguishes wanting from thinking best, and grants that orators and tyrants do what they think best while denying that they do what they want. His account is often thought to involve two conflicting requirements: wants must be attributable to the wanter from their own perspective (to count as their desires), but wants must also be directed at objects that are genuinely good (in order for failure to satisfy them to matter). We offer an account of wanting as reflective, coherent desire, which allows Socrates to satisfy both desiderata. We then explain why he thinks that orators and tyrants want to act justly, though they do greater injustices than anyone else and so frustrate their own wants more than anyone else.

This chapter traces the complex legacies of multiple religious traditions, including Christianity, Islam, and syncretistic spirituality, as they inform utopian strands of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American fiction, including the miraculous realism of Toni Morrison, the lyrical historicism of Marilynne Robinson, and the religiously themed science fiction of James Blish and G. Willow Wilson. Apocalyptic concepts, with a strong emphasis on transformative and liberatory possibility, are a recurrent element of these narratives.  The term “spirituality” itself is ambiguous, particularly in a national context in which religion has been a source of both oppression and hope. The chapter draws on postsecular critiques of literature and culture that, in John McClure’s terms, indicate “a mode of being and seeing that is at once critical of secular constructions of reality and of dogmatic religion.” It argues that skeptical perspectives do not necessarily militate against the aesthetic and ethical potential of theologically oriented utopian fiction.

This introduction broaches the question of how naturalism rose to dominance in the modern West. Naturalism in this context is understood as a rejection of belief in the supernatural. This distinctive feature of Western modernity is at odds, not only with its own religious past, but also with what has been true for virtually all other cultures. Whereas it was once impossible not to assume the existence of the supernatural, this has now become one option among others, and one that is typically thought to be lacking in rational support. The book seeks to account for this unique historical development in two related ways. First, it explores the histories of the two key terms in this understanding—‘belief’ and ‘supernatural’—showing how they came to take on their present meanings in the modern period. Second, it shows how advocates of naturalism necessarily subscribe to a progressive view of history that can vindicate the adoption of these two categories in their modern sense.

This chapter traces the fortunes of our modern understanding of ‘belief’ which is deeply informed by its original uses in a religious context. It begins with an account of faith/belief (Greek: pistis) in early Christianity, showing how the primary meanings of the term related to trust rather than intellectual assent. In the medieval period, this social component of faith/belief was formalised in the conception of ‘implicit faith’, which enabled lay believers to affirm abstruse theological doctrines without the requirement of a full intellectual comprehension of what was being affirmed. While it is possible to speak of the propositional content of belief during this period, the identity of the faithful was established more by liturgical practice than assent to doctrinal propositions.