A striking feature of the Eastern Orthodox liturgies is how much movement and touching occurs during their performance. For example, when participants in these liturgies enter into a church building, they do not simply look at the icons; they typically venerate them by kissing them. Call events such as these scripted movement-touching sequences. The question I pursue in this article is why movement-touching sequences play such prominent roles in the performance of the Eastern liturgies. The answer I offer is that the performance of these actions has religious worth. I then consider two models that attempt to explain why the performance of scripted movement-touching sequences has religious worth. After exploring and rejecting what I call the instrumentalist model, I develop what I term the authorization-appropriation model of the composition of the church's liturgies. According to this model, the religious worth of scripted bodily liturgical action lies (in part) in the fact that God has both authorized the composition of and appropriated the liturgical scripts that prescribe the performance of such actions.

The Participatory Model of Atonement (PMA) offers an alternative view of Christian salvation, drawing on Pauline theology. It conceives of sin as a contagion which can usually be escaped only by dying. By ‘participating’ in Christ's death, the believer can escape its effects without having to die. This notion of ‘participation’ is obscure. I consider a possible way of clarifying it using metaphysical ideas taken from Jonathan Edwards. ‘Participation’ might involve becoming similar to Christ through the action of the Holy Spirit, to such a degree that a person might be called identical (in some sense) with Christ.

The canonical gospels often portray Christ as limited in various ways, for example, with respect to knowledge. But how could Christ be divine yet fail to know certain true propositions? One prominent answer is known as kenoticism, the view that upon becoming incarnate Christ ‘emptied’ himself of certain divine properties, including omniscience. A powerful objection to kenoticism, however, is that it conflicts with Anselmian intuitions about divinity. Specifically, kenoticism implies that Christ was not the greatest conceivable being. I articulate a modified version of kenoticism that avoids this powerful objection while remaining faithful to the depiction of Christ found in the gospels.

According to non-doxastic theories of propositional faith, belief that p is not necessary for faith that p. Rather, propositional faith merely requires a ‘positive cognitive attitude’. This broad condition, however, can be satisfied by several pragmatic approaches to a domain, including fictionalism. This article shows precisely how fictionalists can have faith given non-doxastic theory, and explains why this is problematic. It then explores one means of separating the two theories, in virtue of the fact that the truth of the propositions in a discourse is of little consequence for fictionalists, whereas their truth matters deeply for the faithful. Although promising, this approach incurs several theoretical costs, hence providing a compelling reason to favour a purely doxastic account of faith.

According to theistic consubstantialism, the universe and God are essentially made of the same stuff. If theistic consubstantialism is correct, then God possesses the essential power to have knowledge de se of the contents of the mind of every conscious being internal to God. If theistic consubstantialism is false, then God lacks this essential property. So either God is essentially corporeal and possesses greater essential epistemic powers than God would have otherwise or God is essentially incorporeal and has a diminished range of essential epistemic powers. In light of this dilemma, I argue that theists should accept theistic consubstantialism.

Hypocrisy challenges religious belief in two ways. Arguments to Absurdity contend hypocrisy is defeasible evidence of the irrationality of a doctrine or practice. Arguments from Betrayal contend that hypocrisy confronts institutionally loyal believers with a tragic dilemma: that because loyalty is justified by the goodness of its object, hypocrisy requires believers to sacrifice either their conscience (to remain loyal) or their character and identity (by abandoning their loyalty). This article presents philosophical and theological reasons that both arguments are unpersuasive.

In a recent paper, Alvin Plantinga defends occasionalism against an important moral objection: if God is the sole direct cause of all the suffering that results from immoral human choices, this causal role is difficult to reconcile with God's perfect goodness. Plantinga argues that this problem is no worse for occasionalism than for any of the competing views of divine causality; in particular, there is no morally relevant difference between God directly causing suffering and God indirectly causing it. First, we examine Plantinga's moral parity argument in detail and offer a critical evaluation of it. Then we provide a positive argument, based on the doctrine of doing and allowing, to show why there is a morally relevant difference between God's direct and indirect causation of suffering.

This article argues that everlasting God can be in boredom, but cannot fall into boredom. Hence, the argument by Andric and Tanyi (2017) in this journal that God could not be everlasting in time, because God would fall into boredom, is shown to be unsound, since it is logically impossible for God to fall into boredom.