Theologians are relatively secure on what counts as relevant topics in ecclesiology; they pursue questions relative to the identity, nature, structures, ministry, sacraments, and mission of the church. It is much less clear what role philosophers should have in this domain. This may arise because the kind of intellectual tools and skills deployed by philosophers simply do not have traction when applied to issues in ecclesiology; the questions that show up in ecclesiology are such that they are not susceptible to philosophical analysis. There is, however, a more likely explanation. Modern philosophy of religion has focused on generic theism. There has not as yet been a systematic exploration of the philosophical dimensions of the whole range of topics that exercises the Christian theologian. This omission may be well and good in philosophy of religion, but it cannot be allowed to stand as the default position in philosophical theology. In the latter instance, the preliminary starting point surely must be that no topic in Christian theology should be off limits to philosophical investigation. Only time can tell whether philosophical reflection on the church can yield the kind of insight that is common, say, on the Trinity or atonement. In this chapter, I focus on conceptual and epistemological dimensions of ecclesiology. I end by sketching the kind of tasks that are likely to detain the philosopher.

Most Christians, indeed most theists generally, believe there exists a God who is a perfect moral being and who has unlimited power and knowledge. However, given the imperfect world in which we live, believing in this God poses a vexing problem with which philosophers and theologians have been grappling for millennia. The roots of the problem go back as far as the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BCE), whose paradox of evil is succinctly paraphrased by David Hume: “Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?” / Does it make sense to believe in God given the evil that exists in the world? Does it make sense to believe in God when, in the midst of terrible suffering and pain, it seems that God does nothing about it? In Shusaku Endo's novel, Silence, a young Jesuit priest from Portugal named Sebastian Rodrigues is sent to Japan to comfort Christian converts and to investigate claims that his spiritual mentor - a Jesuit missionary also sent to the country - has committed apostasy. Out of suspicion and concern about the rapid growth of the Christian faith in Japan, feudal lords, under the auspices of the shogun (the military governor ruling Japan), attempted to drive Christianity out of the country and Christian men, women, and children were rounded up and required to recant or face some of the most gruesome persecutions imaginable.

Theories of divine necessity have had a checkered career. From Plotinus to Kant, it is hard to find a theist philosopher who considered the matter and denied one. In the dark night of post-Kantian Europe, it is hard to find a philosopher who considered the matter. Among twentieth-century analytic philosophers, one doctrine of divine necessity was once in such wide disrepute that J.N. Findlay could base on it a purported disproof of God's existence. Things have changed again: that same doctrine is now the consensus view among “analytic” theist philosophers. I speak of doctrines of divine necessity because the sentence “God exists necessarily” is multiply ambiguous. In what follows, I first sort out the ambiguities, then indicate why divine necessity has been so popular for so long. I then consider some arguments for and against the strongest doctrine of divine necessity.

Among the attributes Christians have traditionally ascribed to God are omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. They not only appear to follow from God's maximal perfection but seem presupposed by his providential governance of creation. Christians have not always agreed on how these attributes are to be understood, however. / Omnipotence / Almost no theists think that God can perform logically impossible tasks. States of affairs such as the interior angles of a Euclidian plane triangle equaling 170 or 190 degrees are logically impossible, and hence no one can bring them about. Some think that necessary states of affairs like 2 + 3 equaling 5, while logically possible, aren't “producible” - that is, they can't have causes. If they can't, then no agent can produce them. Other states of affairs are logically possible and producible but can't be produced by God. For example, the state of affairs consisting in my freely choosing to spend the evening at home can't be brought about by someone other than myself since, if it were, then either the action wouldn't really be my action or it wouldn't be free. These aren't real limitations, though. Since the tasks in question (bringing about a logically impossible state of affairs, producing an unproducible state of affairs, bringing about another person's free action) can't be brought about by any possible being, no being could surpass God by possessing the ability to perform them. Hence, these tasks aren't included within the scope of maximally perfect possible power.

This chapter takes up the topic of goodness as it relates to Christian philosophical theology and proceeds by examining the central figures chronologically. An alternative would be to try to schematize the field under a series of types, but the usual type-names, often ending in “ism,” tend to be vague in an unsatisfactory way. An author who attributes views to Kant, for example, can be held accountable to the texts of Kant. But an author is at liberty to characterize “deontologists” any way she likes. Because the history of Christian philosophical theology is largely a history of the contact between classical thought (as represented especially by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics) and the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures (known within Christianity as “Old and New Testaments”), the chapter starts with sections on the classical philosophers and the Bible. It then describes the different approaches that have been taken to the relation between goodness and God in the philosophical and theological tradition over the past two millennia within Christianity. When limited to approximately 6,000 words, there is, inevitably, something absurd in such an undertaking. The article will have to be highly selective and take up only a few key figures. This selectivity is the cost that corresponds to the benefit of accountability.

Charity has compelled the Christian community to engage in some serious metaphysics. The Christian is told to spread the Good News, and the Good News is that God has become a human being in order, by his death and resurrection, to free us from our sins and bring us to life eternal. Good News indeed! But difficult philosophically. How could the omnipotent, eternal, and immutable source of all possibly “become” a human being? And why in the world, given divine omnipotence, would God choose such a messy and complicated process for the salvation of mankind, when, presumably, he could save us by divine fiat? Christian theologians and philosophers have unanimously agreed that the Incarnation is a mystery that we cannot hope to fully grasp. Yet, for two millennia, they have struggled to meet the challenge of the unbeliever who says that the Incarnation is worse than a mystery: it is an impossibility. From the beginning of Christianity, the charge has been made that the Incarnation is, at best, demeaning to God: It is unthinkable that divinity would submit to the biological nastiness involved in Incarnation! At worst, it has been argued, the key claim of Christianity is just logically contradictory. In this chapter I defend the traditional understanding of the Incarnation. By the traditional understanding, I mean the view that was proclaimed to be the correct one, as against a legion of heresies, at the Council of Chalcedon in 451.

The doctrine of the Trinity is not only central to Christianity but one of its most distinctive teachings. Although the term “Trinity” never appears in the Christian Bible, Christians believe the doctrine to be grounded in Scripture. The doctrine developed during the first few centuries of Christianity, as early Christians began to reflect on Jesus' teachings, the writings of the apostles, the sacred writings that Christians came to call the Old Testament, and Christian practices such as worshiping Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Given the difficulties surrounding the doctrine, debates and disagreements inevitably arose, leading to a need for church councils to set agreed-upon teachings. Within the boundaries set by the conciliar decisions, Christians have discussed important issues related to the Trinity, including what a person is, what natures and substances are, and whether the Trinity has implications for the claim that humans are created in the image of God. Since the early twentieth century, Christians of various traditions have paid renewed attention to the doctrine of the Trinity.

The doctrine of divine providence asserts that time is governed by eternity. This assertion provokes the two questions that will occupy us in this discussion: What is eternity? What is it for time to be governed by eternity? Eternity in this context is conceived as the mode of existence of the theistic God, a personal, active, and creative being capable of forming and executing intentions concerning the created world. There are, however, two quite different conceptions of eternity on offer. On one conception, that God is eternal means that God has always existed, with no beginning, and will always exist hereafter, with no end. Traditionally this has been termed “sempiternity”; in recent discussion, the preferred term has been “everlastingness.” This is the notion of eternity that by far predominates in ordinary religious discourse, and also in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. It has, however, been a minority view in the history of theology, with preference rather for the claim that God is timeless, outside of time altogether. Since this is the view that has been dominant historically, and also the view that presents the greater conceptual and metaphysical challenges, I address it first.

Herbert McCabe warns us off thinking that we need to get our ideas of God right before we establish whether or not to pray. It is the other way round, he says: The “way we understand God is as 'whatever makes sense of prayer.'” This seems to be borne out in the negative, too; making no sense of prayer, because of logical, empirical, or moral objections, involves bewilderment at the idea or worship of God. No account of prayer entirely makes sense of it, but the ways of not making sense, and the conclusions drawn from these ways, vary greatly. Philosophers and theologians have many different views, for example, on the point or pointlessness of prayer. We survey five ways of making and not making sense of prayer, turning on the question, “what is its point?” / 1. Communing with God / Most accounts of prayer situate it within the context of relationship with God; its point being to commune with God. This is so of all the positions surveyed subsequently, except for atheist positions and those that see prayer only as expedient to moral training.

Resurrection is the notion that after death our bodies will disintegrate but at some future point God will miraculously raise them from the ground and reconstitute us as persons. Christians believe that resurrection comes in two stages. The first stage is the Resurrection of Jesus; the second (the “general resurrection”) is the resurrection of all dead human beings (Acts 24:15). The Christian view of resurrection is based on four assumptions. (1) The existence of a God who has the ability and the intention to raise the dead. (2) The miraculous nature of resurrections; they occur only because God makes them occur. Human persons do not naturally live after death. (3) The existence after death of embodied persons. Resurrection is not an immaterial existence in a world of pure mind or spirit. Raised bodies will be changed (transformed, glorified, made fit for the kingdom of God) but are bodies nonetheless. (4) The identity of those persons with the persons who lived previously. The one who will be raised is the same person as the one who died, not a replica or a “closest continuer.”

That God is entirely simple is a teaching that has been reiterated by generations of Christians. It is found in the writings of Augustine of Hippo, Anselm of Canterbury, and Thomas Aquinas. It was formally ratified by the Fourth Lateran Council and the First Vatican Council. No historian of Christianity can plausibly deny that it has featured significantly in Christian discourse. Yet, recently, some Christian (and some non- Christian) analytic philosophers who have turned to the claim that God is simple have rejected it. Are they right to do so? I shall shortly suggest that they are not. To start with, however, I need to explain what the doctrine of divine simplicity amounts to, and I shall do so by focusing on the way it is presented in the work of its most systematic defender - Thomas Aquinas. / Aquinas on simplicity / (a) Preliminaries / When it comes to divine simplicity, thinks Aquinas, everything hinges on the notion of God as Creator.What should we mean by saying that there is a God who creates? Some would reply that we should only take ourselves to be saying that something or other got the universe started.

The doctrines of heaven and hell are climactic components in a dramatic narrative that elevates the meaning and significance of our lives to epic proportions. At the center of this drama is the eternal God, in whose image we were created for the purpose of knowing and loving him. As free actors in this divine drama, we may choose whether or not we accept his will for our lives, with consequences of monumental import. To accept his grace is to participate in the eternal joy and satisfaction that will result when his work of redemption is complete and his will is done on earth, as it is in heaven. To reject his grace is to decline the role God intended for us and thereby to choose for ourselves eternal misery and suffering. There are versions of the doctrines of heaven and hell in religions other than Christianity, but the uniquely Christian picture of God shapes these doctrines in a distinctive way. In particular, the Christian doctrine that the one God exists in three persons gives vivid expression to the claim that God is love in his eternal nature, and created us to share in the loving relationship of the Trinity. The Christian doctrines of the Incarnation, Atonement, and Resurrection of Jesus reveal the love of God for us and the extent of his desire to be in relationship with us.

In philosophical theology, any discussion of sin and salvation involves a notion of God, particularly if sin is regarded as at least sin against God and salvation is regarded as at least salvation by God. A central use of the term God in traditional monotheism offers the term as a maximally honorific title that entails worthiness of worship in a titleholder. Worthiness of worship requires, among other things, moral perfection, including a perfectly loving character altogether free of hate toward other agents. As such, an agent who hates some people will not be a genuine candidate for the titleholder of God. As a result, many alleged Gods fail to qualify as the true God, and emerge instead as imposters. Sin and salvation take on distinctive traits against the background of a God worthy of worship. We shall identify some of these traits in order to illuminate the topic of divine-human redemption in Christian philosophical theology. / Sin / It is arguable that we humans are experts regarding sin, even if we don't know it and even if we don't like to talk about it. It doesn't follow, of course, that we can immediately offer an adequate portrayal of sin. One can be an expert regarding deception, for instance, even if one can't offer an adequate portrayal of deception.