The claim that faith is creative of its objects resides primarily in the conviction that the richness of the life of faith demands that it shall be subject only to its own laws. Its very diversity of expression is indication that it should not be fettered or confined by a restrictive model that outlaws the marvellously unexpected quality of its explorations. Yet that metaphor itself suggests caution; for exploration is necessarily of a territory that the explorer does not bring into being by his voyage or journey. His travels have their own richness; thus Shackleton's famous boat journey has its place in the records of human endurance. But travel assumes a ground to be traversed, and the journey of Ernest Shackleton and the men who sailed with him was not conjured out of nothing, but an achievement made necessary as response to a situation that was itself in no sense of the explorer's contriving. Yet of course we are impatient with the suggestion that it was a mere, largely passive reaction to natural emergency, and only marginally regarded as humanly creative.

In his recent article1 Stewart Sutherland rightly and trenchantly criticizes some accounts of hope which ignore, or radically misrepresent, how it is conceived in religious contexts. The most surprising, to me, is Chesterton's, that hope is ‘the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate’. Surprising, not so much for its content as for its source. However, this particular example could be of one who would risk giving scandal for the sake of wit; what he could have had in mind is that ‘the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us’ (Rom. viii. 18; cf. John xvi. 33: ‘… you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer.’). Sutherland also makes clear the unhelpfulness (in this context, not the one they had in mind) of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ analysts' account of the concept; not least because it is given without reference to the religious concept, and often is irrelevant to the notion of hope ‘in its proper conceptual surroundings’.

The role of belief in religion is always the subject of the greatest misunderstandings, as well as some of the subtlest meditations. The student of religion may be drawn to those direct expressions of spiritual insight with regard to which belief seems abstract and superfluous; and yet when one wants to indicate the religious attitude, the commitment to ‘something higher’, as a fact of personal significance, few notions seem more apt than belief or faith. The peculiar logic of religious faith is that unlike beliefs which are held in lieu of verified knowledge, faith is often valued precisely because it is faith, and does not concern the objectively verifiable.

Picture the following scene. A minister takes communion to one of her elderly home-bound members. When she arrives she is met by her parishioner and two visiting friends. She invites both visitors to partake of communion with her and the parishioner. One woman happily agrees to do so. The other woman declines by giving a mini-sermon explaining that because she feels unworthy to partake of the Lord's Supper she would be guilty of sin if she did so. Furthermore, if she took communion in this unworthy state God would cause her to be sick. After communion, the minister inquires if she might wash the communion cups. The woman who participated in the sacrament with the pastor and church member asks if she might perform this function. But then she hesitates and asks with a sense of temerity, “Is it alright if I do so?” “I mean,” she continues, “may be I'm not supposed to wash them. They are holy cups and my hands are so tainted with sin. It might be wrong for me to handle them.” Finally, the shut-in who was the original object of the visit in the first place tells her young, and by now bewildered, pastor, “You know. Last month when you brought me communion my hip was killing me. After you served me the elements the pain just went away. I know the sacrament healed me.” The pastor offers a final prayer not knowing if her words will be heard as a prayer to God or as an incantation or spiritual good-luck charm.

Man has always hoped to survive his bodily death, and it is a central tenet of many religions that such survival is a reality. It has been supposed by many that one form such survival might take is reincarnation in another body. Subscribers to this view include Pythagoras, Plato sometimes, and a large number of Eastern thinkers. Other thinkers have, of course, disputed that reincarnation is a fact, and some have even denied that it is a possibility. But seldom has it been claimed by its opponents that reincarnation is a logical impossibility.

Western philosophers are generally very unsympathetic to the notion of reincarnation, especially the idea of rebirth in another body in this world. This paper will argue that retributive rebirth as it is traditionally understood in Hindu thought involves serious problems given the ambiguousness of personal identity in the conception, difficulties which are born out in a moral tenuousness and which bring the reasonableness of the belief into question. However, though this conception of rebirth is the culturally and historically dominant version in Indian thought, it is not the sole conception. The ‘soul-making’ version I will develop and defend in this paper does not overcome the ambiguity associated with personal identity in the retributive version, but it nevertheless reasonably overrides the problems retributive rebirth encounters in such an association. And though soul-making rebirth is quite different in tone and in emphasis from the traditionally dominant retributive version, it can be found in varying degrees in certain Hindu philosophies, most vividly perhaps in Aurobindo Ghose. Moreover, this conception is not exclusive to Hinduism and is compatible even with some Christian theologies.

In ‘Reincarnation and Relativized Identity’1 J. J. MacIntosh argues that reincarnation is impossible. I wish to make a slightly backhanded defence of reincarnation by showing that MacIntosh's argument does not succeed. I do not follow his recipe for defence of reincarnation exactly:

The purpose of this paper is to outline the developments in the thinking of Rudolf Otto, as far as possible through his theology, philosophy, psychology and phenomenology. The fact that Otto's interests took him into so many fields at once suggests serious breaks and inconsistencies in his work. This paper, however, will argue for a consistency in his thought and development. To achieve this requires an appreciation of the close connection he felt to exist between his philosophy and psychology, the theoretical and the empirical. We know that Otto was strongly influenced by the philosophy of J. Fr. Fries. Yet it is by no means necessary to agree either with Fries or with what Otto made of Fries' system in order to trace continuity. We simply need to understand Otto's development in the context of the time.

Nobody is likely to claim that the name of Henry Longueville Mansel is an important one in contemporary Anglican theology. During the 130 years since he gave his Bampton Lectures in 1858 his work has been only sporadically reviewed. But he deserves more than this. As the title of his lecture – The Limits of Religious Thought – suggests, Mansel was partly responsible for bringing the philosophy of Kant into British religious thinking; and the problems he faced in trying to make a concept of regulative truth consistent with orthodox Anglican doctrine make his intellectual dilemma of unusual interest to the modern reader.