The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die in extreme agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, shall be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should will one venial untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse (John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua)

At the beginning of his book, Principles of Christian Theology, John Macquarrie says that theology ‘implicitly claims to have its place in the total intellectual endeavour of mankind’. The question I want to discuss is this: in what terms, if any, can that claim be justified?

Among the questions facing the religious there is one that is becoming particularly pressing in our contemporary world of mingled cultures. Expressed as religious people sometimes put it to themselves, it is: How does my religion relate to other religions? There are two very different answers abroad. One is: mine is true and all others, to the extent that they depart from mine, are false and are to be rejected. The other is: mine is valid-for-me, and those of others are valid-for-them. The first answer has the virtue of being utterly straightforward and not mealy-mouthed, but it seems parochial and myopic, for, as John Hick points out:

In the great majority of cases, the tradition within which a religious person finds his relationship to the Real depends to a very great extent upon where and when he or she is born…In view of this situation, can one be unquestionably confident that the religion which one happens to have inherited by birth is indeed normative and that all others are properly to be graded by their likeness or unlikeness to it?

I shall argue that the question ‘Can we speak literally of God?’ is fundamentally an epistemological question concerning whether we can know that God exists. If and only if we can know that God can exist can we know that we can speak literally of God.

If one believes in a personal God, must one also believe that God is a person? I hold that the former is essential to Christian faith, the latter an impediment to it. Several recent writers in the philosophy of religion have however assumed that to believe in God is to believe in a person. The most subtle and influential proponent of ‘bodiless person theism’ is Richard Swinburne. I hope to show that this philosophical presentation of theism is unwarrantable and misrepresents what the theological tradition says about God. In section (I) I describe how Swinburne justifies his view that God is a person. In section (II) I show that this view is defective. In section (III) I uncover a common, though mistaken, procedure among several other advocates of this type of theism. In section (IV) I suggest that the belief that God is a person is foreign to Christian theology, with the unfortunate consequence that a philosophical defence of it is not only mistaken: it is also pointless.

It is well known that in the latter half of the 1870s Tolstoy suffered an arrest of life. He relates in A Confession that the attempt to find a meaning in life that would be immune to death had almost led to his own suicide. He asks: ‘Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?’

In my paper, ‘Agnosticism’, I asked the reader to consider the following three propositions. (1) There is more evidence for theism than for atheism. (2) There is more evidence for atheism than for theism. (3) There is roughly the same amount of evidence for both. And I claimed that if it is not known which of (1) to (3) is true, then theism, atheism and agnosticism (suspension of judgement without the claim that this is the epistemically superior position) are all equally rational positions. As against that claim, Professor Brinton cites the following epistemic principle: When the state of the evidence on some question ‘p?’ is uncertain, suspension of belief is the most appropriate doxastic attitude. However, my paper contained the seeds of a refutation of this principle. I wrote there that the agnostic