In recent years, the question of naturalism in the study of religions has been increasingly debated. Primarily, these discussions converge in the widely held view that naturalism is the only way for religious studies as an academic enterprise to exclude supernaturalist assumptions from its methodology. While I fully agree with this view, I argue that naturalism is usually formulated with the help of metaphysical assumptions, which are problematically embodied in the location problem, that is, the problem of how to locate certain phenomena, such as meanings and values, in the order of nature. By unfolding the dynamic between the elements of the location problem, I show that the kind of naturalism based on Wittgenstein’s thought prevents the location problem from arising and can serve as a balanced version of naturalism for use in the study of religion. While metaphysical naturalism often leads to dilemmas, within Wittgenstein’s kind of naturalism, it seems possible both to maintain anti-supernaturalism in the study of religion and to resist the metaphysical temptations hidden in our assumptions about language. These two features make Wittgenstein’s naturalism truly methodological.

Christianity is a religion of the book, and in particular of one book, the Bible. More precisely, it is a religion of a library of plural books (biblia) that eventually became one single book. It is possible to view the history of all Christian traditions, and not Protestantism alone, as a history of the canonical formation, liturgical and devotional use, cultural influence, contested theological interpretation and geographical diffusion of the Bible. In view of the magnitude of the subject, it is not surprising that very few historians have set out to encapsulate this grand narrative in a single volume. Bruce Gordon, the distinguished historian of early modern European Protestantism, has now made the attempt, and it is a valiant effort of stupendous chronological and geographical range, extending across the entire span of Christian history and covering all continents, though Australasia receives only a paragraph, oddly devoted to the New Hebrides. Not quite so rare are historians who have set out to chart the impact of one translation of the Bible on a single nation or family of nations – notably the role of the King James Bible of 1611 (the Authorised Version) in shaping the language and religious culture of English-speaking peoples, including those in the New World of North America.1

The Testament of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste is a document whose authenticity has been debated for decades, but has remained unresolved. Here the Testament is analysed in detail and it is shown that its central issue is the martyrs’ request not to disseminate their relics. In addition, the earliest sources relating to the cult of the Forty Martyrs are presented and recent studies on the beginnings of the cult of relics are cited. On this basis it is shown that the Testament is spurious.

This essay seeks to explain Aquinas’s account of natural law, natural inclinations, and absolute moral norms. According to Aquinas, everything bears the impress of divine wisdom (the divine Word); the cosmos is intelligible and has a teleological order. Aquinas describes this order as expressive of God’s “eternal law,” by which creatures are moved to their perfective ends. Human natural inclinations pertain to how God moves us by our rational nature, as we incline rationally toward the goods that perfect our powers. Since the rational soul is the “form” of the body, everything about the body pertains to the flourishing of the rational creature in interpersonal wisdom and love, rather than being merely a biological substratum. We come to know the human good in the process of seeking particular goods perfective of our modes of existence or powers. The above points ground Aquinas’s account of synderesis, the core precepts of the natural law, and absolute moral norms. These norms, whose intelligibility is darkened by the effects of sin, are reflected in the Decalogue, the teaching of Jesus and Paul, and the Catholic Church’s teaching.

Pascal stressed the importance of ‘reasons of the heart’ in leading us to God, and insisted that the God to whom he turned during his ‘night of fire’ on 23 November 1654 was ‘not the God of the philosophers and scholars’, but the God of the patriarchs and of Jesus Christ. This suggests a very different approach from that of Thomas, who characterises God in seemingly abstract terms, such as ‘being itself’ and ‘goodness itself’. This paper first explores the methodological and epistemological lessons to be drawn from Pascal’s notion of ‘reasons of the heart’ and argues that we have good reason to take them seriously. The second half of the paper discusses Aquinas’s apparently more impersonal conception of the deity, as an ‘infinite ocean of substance’ (John of Damascus) on which all things depend. But it then explores Aquinas’s account of the passage in Exodus where God addresses Moses in personal terms, and argues that this account, together with what Aquinas has to say on the subject of prayer, indicates that the God of his philosophical deliberations can indeed be reconciled with the intensely personal God of Scripture to whom Pascal turned during his night of fire.

Recent work in Protestant soteriology and eschatology has sought to recover and exposit the strands (or doctrines) of theosis present in figures such as Jonathan Edwards, John Calvin and John Wesley, among others. Yet, such ventures can risk unmooring doctrinal convictions from their embeddedness within a larger nexus of theological judgments and concerns. This essay provides a modest contribution to Protestant engagement with the doctrine of theosis, with the help of seventeenth-century Reformed theologian Petrus van Mastricht. In it, I argue that van Mastricht’s ‘upstream’ commitments to Christology and the incommunicability of divine perfections inform his rejection of deification. The essay concludes by highlighting the promise and perils of van Mastricht’s account of the real nature of the unio mystica.

This article summarizes how problems in formalizing scientific inference led to the production of social accounts of science, offering Helen Longino’s feminist contextual empiricism as a way forward. Rather than focus on rules of inference that connect knowledge-claims, Longino constructs norms for knowledge-producing communities which, when followed, ensure equitable dialogue and transformative criticism. It is further argued communities engaged in Christian systematic theology would benefit from developing a similar set of norms, given that theological inference is similarly rooted in social cognition and faces many problems analogous to those with which Longino is concerned. Finally, the extent to which Longino’s norms may serve as a starting point for theological communities is explored.

Panpsychists commonly hang onto the ‘realist’ assumption that our world with its structures has an observer-independent, often spatial element to it, even while they claim that those structures are realized by the experiences of subjects. I argue that this assumption is the ‘worm in the apple’ that lurks behind two of panpsychism’s major problems: the subject (de)combination problem and what I call the ‘inner-outer gap problem’. Abandoning this assumption sidesteps those problems, but commits panpsychism to anti-realism.