God has a troublesome history in human perception. Sometimes He pervades all of our reality. God is Reality. He professes relief from our finite existence. We are born with a striving towards perfection, or God. Bonaventura, the theologian of the Western High Medieval Age, integrating Greek philosophy and Christianity, called his main work ItinerariumMentis in Deum. At the other extreme God or the Absolute is simply non-existent. In the course of history, the secular world is gradually multiplying. In the Enlightenment, the divine world view is sometimes replaced by a mechanistic and materialistic world view (Descartes and the French materialism), sometimes an organic view, identifying God with nature (Spinoza), and sometimes a combination of both (Leibniz, assisted by Anne Convey). The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the centuries for major scientific discoveries and for further development of modern democracy. To Hegel these movements were the liberation of reason, towards its absolute self-realization. Christianity, he added, belonged to the Medieval Age as its spiritual centre. In modernity reason should be in charge of its own self-understanding together with its understanding of history and society, in all their ramifications. Half a century later Man was acknowledged as the result of natural selection, no longer created in the image of God. “God is dead” is the well-known pronouncement by Nietzsche, and he added that we ourselves have killed him. Even in theology, partly in the tradition of Bultman, the name of God should be avoided for a while, in an attempt to recover the real meaning of the “God”. Man is, however, still striving. That belongs to his nature. The striving towards perfection seems, for many people, also hard to attain. For lay people answers are apparently still to be found. For philosophers, with a few minor exceptions, the transcendental road is blocked.

Heidegger’s search for the meaning of Being failed. Sartre concluded that man’s struggle for combining the pour soi and the en soi, pointing to God’s way of being, is blocked. It is “a useless passion” (une passion inutile).

This poor sketch of Western history suffices to point to difficulties in the philosophy of religion. A systematic inquiry usually requires an object that is identical over time. A fluctuating God or an Absolute that sometimes disappears is hard to get at. One may of course stick to some traditional view on religion as some contributors do, or one may account for the role of religion in a secularised world. In this case the conclusion should come as no surprise: the age of God and religion has come to an end. What we are left with are science and an ongoing production of knowledge. The trouble with this position, promising as it may be, is that the needs fulfilled by religion and religious belief are hardly met by scientific inquiry. They are of a different kind. Some of our basic needs, of a personal and social kind, still remain. They are left unanswered. That may be the reason why some existentialist philosophers and sociologists say we are, as a consequence, living in an age of diminished expectations.

Christianity is a missionary religion. Western nations brought it with them to their colonies, often to the effect that local beliefs and customs were neglected. The great religions like Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism succeeded in taking care of themselves due to their strong institutions and their customs. The congregations of Christians in these countries have so far not been a threat. In nations and continents also occupied by the Christians, especially Latin-America, groups of people including political authorities and philosophers have set out to revive the local, national and continental, pre-Catholic traditions (The Chronicles, Volume 8, Philosophy of Latin America).

Time will show whether they succeed. In the meantime, another more dangerous enemy has entered the scene, often forcefully being imported from the West, the idea of global free trade. Mutual trade is certainly a necessary part of international communication. Global free trade, however, is subordinated to the view that economic growth is most important for all countries, especially to alleviate poverty. Everyone knows, however, that this policy doesn’t quite work out as expected. Of course, millions of people are better off in these countries. There is still, however, 800 million people left in misery, and the number is apparently growing. What is moreover the point, one may ask, in advocating free trade as long as The United States of America and European countries export some subsidiced agricultural products that destroy local production in Africa and Latin-America. Where is the ethical code of trade? It is no doubt the ethics of the old colonialism.

Capitalism, once charged with the ethics of the reformed churches, is now heading for maximum revenues and natural resources. Worse is the refusal of the American delegation to sign an agreement worked out in the Unesco in 2006, saying that each country in the United Nations had the right to support its own cultural creations and institutions. The Americans thought that the agreement would reduce the sale of American cultural products. I take it to mean that no country should be allowed to support its specific cultural, including religious arrangements. The unrestricted global free trade aims, it seems, at giving everyone a share in a life of diminished expectations. It is after all a local and national culture and cultural creations, religion included, that raise life to a higher level and enable us to enjoy cultural and religious events from cultures other than our own.

1 THE SURVEYS

Tomonubu Imamichi gives an overview of the variety of religious beliefs and the great religions of the world. His preliminary definition of religion in general is that it is “a spiritual relationship between the human being and a certain stronger existence in respect to transcendental power”. Religious beliefs range from the variety of natural religions with many mythological deities to polytheism, to some dualistic religions like Manicheism and the way of Ying Yang in Chinese antiquity all the way to the great monotheistic religions, to Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism in the East, and in the West (and in the near Orient) Judaism, Neoplatonism, Mithraism, Christianity, and Islam.

The religious man exists on two levels, as homo manens, a resting dimension, and as homo viator, man the traveller. In the modern society, viator points to the technological man, dominating man’s religious belief. Therefore, Imamichi concludes, God is awaiting our call.

Is a philosophy of religion at all possible in our time? Hasn’t Nietzsche’s “God is dead” made it impossible? Francis Jacques discusses at length the question of justification. He observes that Nietzsche’s pronouncement is directed at the God of Christian ethics, not any type of transcendence. Nietzsche himself introduced the idea of superman (Übermensch). This means that the context of Nietzsche’s work was ambiguous. It was not the context of nihilism only, the history of transcendental philosophy and theology is still present. Our language for instance is still, in many ways, structured by that history. Kant, representing the centre of Enlightenment, still posed the big metaphysical questions. Heidegger began speaking of the piety in the philosophy of Being. The trouble is that the rationality and belief that combine in the building-up of a Christian theology have been torn apart in the advancement of operational and empirical rationality. In addition, there has been a tendency to regard the Christian belief as the true belief. Today we know better: Christianity has no priority over the other great religions.

I shall just point to a few steps in Francis Jacques’ reconstruction of the possibility of a philosophy of religion. First, religion and religious language is a fact. Customs and rituals introduced by religion are still widely in use and should be accepted by philosophy.

Second, respect for the Holy Scripture is a necessary requirement for the philosophy of religion and for a critical partaking in the philosophy of ongoing inter-religious dialogue. In all cases, the philosophy of religion involves and is based on transcendence, the source of which is the Eros, the “erothetic” endeavour within us. It is a loving relationship. And the “secret” of this essential relationship is that it turns the object into being (aimer, c’est faire être). Love is a unique capacity for creation and discovery.
How can a religion be the object of philosophical inquiry? How can an outsider be an insider, that is, give a philosophical account of a religion without extensive knowledge of it and also without having a genuine religious experience?

Richard Schaeffler uses the method developed in Husserl’s phenomenology: It is a theory of the constitution of our objects in the mind. The central methological notions are noesis, the mind’s intentional directedness towards an object, and noema, being that aspect of the object that the intentional act singles out. The relation between a noema and the corresponding noesis is by no means absolute and fixed. On the contrary, it is a “living” relationship, often changing. The reason is obvious. Any intentional act picks out only one aspect, a noema, from a many-sided object. The insight that an object has more noema than the present one is contained in the intentional act at the outset. In any intentional act there is therefore an immanent drive towards a more complete knowledge of the object. Applied to religious phenomena, any one noema, and the corresponding intentional act, point to a rich variety of connected noemas and acts included archaeological and eschatological issues. A major challenge for the philosopher in the case of Christianity is to grasp the meaning of a religious experience. Standing outside religious practice, he may nevertheless try to be personally acquainted with it. It may inspire and enrich his analysis and description of the phenomena in question. 

The history of the relationship of philosophy to theology is indeed troublesome. Philosophy, once intimately related to theology – itself being a theology dealing with God, substance and the unity of all things – gradually liberated itself from its companion, or, if you want, from its earlier self. The liberation process has by no means been easy. It turned out, for instance, to be extremely difficult to escape the religious and metaphysical language or way of thinking. Even that part of philosophy, describing itself as analytic, ended up sometimes talking about God and the Universe (as in Descartes). The metaphysical and humanistic part of philosophy more closely related to theology, encountered great difficulty attempting to avoid theology. Even Heidegger, engaged in clarifying the meaning of Being, declared towards the middle of the twentieth century that theological and religious language should be removed from philosophical discourse altogether.

Theodore de Boer reviews important steps in the history of the liberation. Quoting from Rousseau’s Émile, doubt has arisen as to the certainty of life. It is even doubtful whether God exists at all. This position is for a while rescued by introducing rational theology. Ecclesiastical belief, Lessing says, can only be justified as a rational, that is, ethical religion. Changes in the concept of reason are a major force in removing philosophy from theology. The same applies for the rise of historical consciousness.
The awakening of historical consciousness “caused a totally new situation to arise in the transmitted constellation of theology and philosophy”. Rational theology became the philosophy of religion. Torstein Tollefsen, who also writes on philosophy and theology, thinks that philosophy is in no way inimical to theology. On the contrary, philosophical analysis is most useful. It serves the clarification of important theological issues, for instance the relationship of God, man and nature, and the concept of belief. He finds support for his position in philosophers like Alwin Plantinga and Jude P. Dougherty. Reason, Tollefsen goes on, is necessary in the presentation of a Christian humanism adequate for our time. The Church Fathers did the same in their time. This leads to the idea of a genuine Christian philosophy applied to our situation.

A significant branch of philosophy in our time has still some of its roots in religious thinking. Ricœur, according to de Boer, thinks that the basis of theology is phenomenology of religion. Gadamer developed philosophical hermeneutics as a theory of transmission of historical experiences, in which religion plays a major role. Although, as Habermas once said, the sources of mankind’s utopian energy are emptied. For those who listen, history will always remind us of them, of our religion, scientific-technological and social utopias. Or, as Levinas says, man will always be exposed to the infinite. In this context, religion, de Boer says, is possible as “reflected spirituality”.

Can reason be a true servant of theology? The answer must be yes and no. Reason can certainly help to clarify religious experiences. If reason, however, is somehow made the foundation of religion, then there is every reason to issue a warning. Then God is based on metaphysics, and Christianity becomes auto-theology. God is regarded as part of Being. He is certainly the highest Being, but nevertheless belongs to the realm to which we ourselves belong. This violates the view that God is transcendent in relation to Being.

Jan-Olav Henriksen relates our understanding of God to the Platonic Eros. Eros is our desire to become more than we are as human beings. Eros is our desire “to become what we are not”. That is to say, desire is our faculty to transcending ourselves. We are, in a sense, born to be elsewhere. We can of course stop here, and with Levinas, saying that humans are exposed to the infinite. Henriksen, however, being a professor of Protestant theology, further reflects on the desire (which may be compared to de Boer’s “reflective spirituality”). Desire may be interpreted as my possibilities. And it is the nature of possibilities to seek fulfilment. As we are finite beings, it follows that no lasting fulfilment can be found in the finite world. (That may be one of the reasons that the medieval world coined the term contemptus mundi.) That is to say, my possibilities open up to something which I am not. This makes perfect sense when translating Eros as love, as our possibilities for loving relationships.

A loving relationship is one which allows you to give your self away. In the New Testament we read that God is love. A loving relationship does not observe any dualism between mind
presented by Georges Lekkas, did not succeed, therefore, in introducing the platonic dualism in religion. A decisive “proof” is the resurrection of Christ, where the spirit and matter is one. More successful is Origen’s reconstruction of the creation. According to Lekkas’ ontological interpretation of imago Dei, the divine logos is at the centre of the Universe. Man as a theomorphic being partakes in the divine logos. The divine logos is a radiating force, expressing itself in action, including moral action, and in all other disciplines, like aesthetics, architecture, science, and also in theology and philosophy. The latter discipline may be regarded as the divine logos’ reflections on itself. Due to the central position of logos in the Universe, it makes sense to say that just as man is a picture of God, God is a picture of man.

An icon confirms the unity of mind and body. An icon, a rare topic in theological discussions, is painted in a sacred style usually reflecting the painter’s personal belief. An icon presenting a glorified person in a sacred style offers us the opportunity for contemplation, in which the mind “transcends its material constituents” moving forward to the “divine sphere beyond space and time”.

Tollefsen briefly outlines the history of icons. To be noticed is that Christianity in its earlier history attacked the cult of images. The New Testament, however, speaks of God coming in the likeness of man, Christ being the image of the invisible God. St. Luke appears to be the first icon painter. The second stage is the Byzantine and orthodox icon painting related to the most developed Christian metaphysics in Byzantine. It is found in the seventh century monk St. Maximus the Confessor, formulating a Christocentric cosmology, according to which man is made in the image of God. The access to the Universe of an icon is possible only in an intelligible light.

That a religious belief arises simultaneously with a sceptical attitude to it may at the outset appear as a curious event. Sukumari Bhattacharji even quotes Alfred Tennyson, saying doubts are as old as faith and in a sense “there lives more faith in honest doubt”. It may perhaps be called the principle of a double mind, or, as Bhattacharji calls it, a mind that vacillates between unbelief and belief.

The Vedic religion in Pakistan and India developed gradually. From being a religion that “knew only natural gods like the sun, moon, storm, fire, sky or dawn, it developed into belief in gods like Indra and finally into Vedic theophanies like Braham and Bramarappati and Purusa”.

It is easy to see how scepticism could arise and be confirmed: when prayers and sacrifices are not answered, when new gods are introduced year after year, when the fees of the priests are steadily increased. These and similar questions are followed by more radical ones: who are the gods? How did they come into being? Can they be trusted? The force of such questions increased when the entire creation was put into question. Who created the gods, of what stuff are they made, and who knows them really? And Indra and Agri, which “moral knows you truly”? Questions such as these made Vedic theology invalid, which according to Bhattacharji led to the triumph of scepticism.

It led to other things as well. It led to a period of materialism, denying any higher purpose in life. Religion is an aberration, and there is no need to introduce God for the purpose of explaining the world. Morality, too, is naturally a matter of convention and not a divine command. There is no need to control our passions and instincts. They are nature’s instructions to us.

Vedic materialism gave no comfort to the restless human mind. More positive promises, however, lie ahead in the middle of the sixth century: in the wakening of Jainism and Buddhism.

To transcend the surface of an icon to get hold of the religious universe behind it is a demanding process. It is hardly possible unless one at the outset entertains a corresponding belief system. The usual method in the great religions is meditation. Meditation is a long-term focusing. What the mind focuses on depends on the variety of schools of meditation. None of them can be said to be compatible with the present culture of media, consumption, and travelling. In any full sense meditation has hardly ever been compatible with life in society, where change is the dominant feature. That is surely a main reason for the building of monasteries and temples – places secluded from the outer world of change. The holy places are dedicated to the inner world, to men’s self-knowledge and self-improvement.

This is the topic of Jon Wetlesen’s account of Buddhism. Now Buddhism is a religion that, as most other religions, is composed of many schools. A starting point, however, appears to be common to all: life is suffering; liberation from suffering is dependent on wisdom and detachment. A man who suffers can hardly have much self-insight. Unknown external forces are dominating. Knowledge of what one is not, as some Buddhists hold, may therefore be a just as viable a way to “true and real” knowledge of the self.

Wetlesen outlines the three steps towards a proper selfknowledge, called “the three turnings of the wheel of dharma”. The first is the teaching of the four truths, about suffering, its causes, its cessation and the path to its cessation. The analogy to a medical procedure is striking: diagnosis, aetiology, prognosis and therapy. As is evident, the four truths are all practical orientations. The second turning of the wheel is discourses on the perfect wisdom, leading on to the third step “emptiness” of one’s own Being, which is including freedom from the outer world and from cognitive distortion.

As is evident, a mere reading of Buddhist texts gives no proper understanding and self-knowledge. For a full appropriation three steps are necessary: hearing or reading the texts, reflecting on them and, most important, meditating upon them. It goes without saying that the steps are life-long procedures. Holding on to our proper self is hard work.

Three procedures are not valid for Buddhist texts only. They applied to all religious texts, and, I would add, to a number of classical and modern texts in philosophy. The reason is simply that these texts ask one to improve one’s understanding of oneself and the world. Plato and Spinoza are cases in point. What Dante says in the Purgatorium may easily be applied to philosophy: Anyone who enters, leave all hope aside (of remaining the same).

Diaspora – dispersed, removed from home – is usually a brutal experience. History abounds of examples. Africans in the slave trade and the Jews in the twentieth century are just two examples. A remarkable fact in our time, I may add, is that modernization and the process or secularization has lead to a general Diaspora. Relationships in families and communities are dissolving. The divorce rate in the United States is between 60 and 70%. In Norway the rate is already around 50%. Many people do not belong to someone any longer. Loneliness is the new widespread suffering, an internationally wellknown professor of architecture, Christian Norberg-Schulz says in his many books used in schools of architecture the world over: “The tragedy of modern man is that he has lost his place”. Statistics from psychological and psychiatric treatment indicate the consequences.

Less known is the Jewish Diaspora in Spain in the first half of the previous millennium. Spain was then the centre of Jewish community and as Yirmiyahu Yovel points out, the Jewish community “flourished” under Islamic rule. The situation changed radically when Christians seized power. Anti-Jewish pogroms developed all over Spain, torturing and killing thousands of Jews. If Jews were to stay in Spain, they had to convert to Catholicism. They became New Christians, conversos, or, with the same meaning, marranos. An extra Inquisition independent of Rome was erected, and continued the persecution of the Jews. Some fled to Portugal, which, they learned, had a milder policy towards the Jews. However, as King João II, wanting to unite Spain and Portugal into one kingdom, prepared to marry the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabel, the condition was that he first expelled all the Jews. In addition, the Inquisition together with the Catholic authority introduced the ideology of “purity of the blood”. This new ideology hit the Jews and of course all other “foreign” ethnic groups.

In the course of the century 1391–1492 hundreds of thousands of Jews were either killed or expelled from Spain and Portugal. The atrocities exercised against the Jewish population are but a reflection of those later on exercised against the Indian communities in Peru and Mexico. The historian Thomas de Bry reports that entire Indian communities hanged themselves in the trees just to avoid the cruelties of the Spanish invaders. Thus the history of Spanish (and Portuguese) policy towards the Jewish community to some extent is part of the history of European colonialism.

Africa as well as Latin America are continents of religious and spiritual encounter. In Africa a variety of local traditions encountered Christianity and Islam. Leaving more or less violent invasions and colonialism aside, this was an encounter between different religious and cultural traditions, of different ways of thinking and feeling. JeanGodefroy Bidima draws attention to some of the most important ones:

Christianity and Islam are both textually-based religions. They are religions of the written and spoken word, of sermons and prayers, all directed towards the individual. Luther played a decisive role in the individualization of Christianity. It is the individual’s direct relation to God that matters, not to the church. Religion and cultural expressions in Africa serve the communal life. All rites, all rites du passage serve the progress of supporting and strengthening the social ties: no individual can be properly understood without taking into account the communal values. An individual represents, or in a way is the value of the community of which he is a part. As Kenneth D. Kaunda, former president of Zambia, says, if anyone for some reason or other finds himself outside the community, everyone expect him to join the dancing again. Dr. Kaunda is often called the great humanist of Africa. Anyone who has witnessed ritual dancing in Africa will know its absorbing power.

Religious rituals in Africa are distinct from Christian and Islamic ones in that they are highly expressive – often to the point of being violent. A rite du passage from childhood to an adult being often causes much pain. It is the cost of qualifying for membership in communal life.

A full appreciation of the religious and cultural traditions in Africa is difficult because they lack a proper institutional organization. They are, as Bidima holds, hardly visible, except in action. Together with their emphasis on emotional expression, they make any immediate cooperation with the monotheistic religions difficult. These religions are, however, widely accepted because of their substantial contribution to schooling and the health service. Both religions have a long standing in the caritas movement.

The question whether Christianity and Islam and the various African religions and cultural traditions will ever melt together is more difficult to answer. There are, however, strong arguments for holding that the organized religions based on texts in the long run will have the stronger hand. In that case the world will have lost cultural riches never heard of elsewhere.

Man’s relation to nature appears to be a perennial problem. Even today we, or some of us, fear the reaction of our environment to our exploitation and misbehaviour. And, if not, we have every reason to fear the new wave of hunger, pain and unfulfilled life. History obviously repeats itself. The same, or an even deeper feeling of anxiety and suffering occupied the pre-hispanic Maya and Nahatl people. The surrounding nature and cosmos, according to Juliana González Valenzuela and Mercedes De La Garza Camino from Mexico, was frightening. It was ever more frightening in view of the temporary character of life. As the ancient Greeks said, as soon as you are born, you are old enough to die.

To overcome fear, knowledge is required. Old cosmogonic myths were rewritten “in Indian language in Latin characters by the Indians themselves”. These myths gave them stories of creation. And these stories initiated the idea of responsibility towards nature. Closely connected with responsibility is freedom, another basic idea in ethics. However, there is no freedom from death. These ancient people found the solution in poetry and art on the one hand, and in community building on the other. Poetry and art connect us with nature and with our fellow men. And by supporting a community, life seems to survive death. The old Indians obviously entertained a synthetic view on man, society and nature (cosmos): we belong to each other. There is no answer to the question of who we are unless it takes account of our relation to nature and to each other.

That literature and literary critics are great promoters of religious belief and criticism is well known. Following Maria Filomena Molder, Walter Benjamin is one of the major literary critics in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in 1892 in Germany he fled to France at the outbreak of the 2nd World War, and to Spain to take a ship to the United States. At the check point on the French-Spanish border he was told, since he was a Jew, that he would be handed over to Gestapo. This message made him end his own life.

Walter Benjamin was a visionary in the first half of his career on behalf of Christianity and later on, on behalf of Marxism. They are both utopian belief systems, the difference between them may not be so radical as one may think.

Benjamin was a sceptic continually seeking the truth. And truth cannot be found separated from history and from theology. Truth cannot be thought if one avoids objects of theology. This is a natural metaphysical disposition of the historian and of the critic. History is not only a science, it is a rememoration of what has happened, and the truth can be conceived as the sum total of lived life. The idea is a way of presenting the world and turning it into a symbolic representation. Every idea or set of ideas represent a higher level of questioning. We should not forget, Benjamin holds, the ideas representing discontinuity. Names like death, history, art and tragedy signify literary forms and profound human experience. Although we don’t know as yet the overall uniting idea, we know how to continue to work on the pattern like the Byzantine mosaics, of historical development. The most frequent references to truth (in Benjamin’s sense) and to theological concepts are to be found in the Préface to L’Origine du drame baroque allemand and in Le livre des Passages.

The idea of a global free trade is widely accepted. The age of national protectionism is apparently coming to an end. A number of politicians and chiefs of state think that free trade is the best way to overcome war and conflicts between states and to create a unified world. Yasin Ceylan considers whether the same mission can be accorded ecumenism, but thinks it cannot. In his “Religion and Modern Man” he also writes about the possibility of cooperation between the world religions. He observes that religion has survived enlightenment and materialist and secular movements and is still a powerful culture in modern society. Modernity has, however, caused a general scepticism in the population that makes them reluctant to accept dogmatic statement, be it religious or political. There is reason to assume that the sceptic lacks the ability to acquire an in-depth understanding of religious concepts. Or, as Ceylan observes, “no time is granted for reflection on either philosophy or scientific development”. Religion, we may answer, is even worse off.

Ecumenical groups were early on at work in all the major confessions. They can even be found in the Old Testament. In our time ecumenical work first appeared in the nineteenth century among the Protestants, but was soon promoted also by the Catholic Church. The main purpose was to unite the Christian Churches, but also to open up Christianity to other religions. A document regarding the Muslims was published in 1970 by the Vatican secretariat: “Orientation for dialogue between Christians and Muslims”.

Yasin Ceylan takes into account the effects of the ongoing secularization process on religion. He observes that Christian and Muslim clerics at times with the participation of Jewish and Buddhist authorities have arranged many “symposia and panels”. These groups no longer monopolize their dogma. Instead they respect each other, “enjoying an atmosphere of equality”. Even then there is no unity among those who believe in God.

The idea of a unity of Mankind is, however, still actual – although not on the basis of cooperation between religions. Ceylan notes the enormous progress in science and technology over the last centuries. This gives a strong belief in man and human reason. Reason, being common to all humans, should be the source of the coming unification.

Reason may also be the origin of moral values. Kant has shown how, in his concept of practical reason. Moral values are necessary both to account for the unifying relation between men and to take responsibility logical for the poor and the oppressed. Whether we in the secularisation process will be able to take care of our neighbour remains to be seen. The categorical imperative asks us to do so. According to Kant, it reminds us of the humanity in ourselves.

Some Muslim groups may be a challenge. The secularisation or emancipation has turned them into fundamentalists. They have a specific reaction to attacks from Western forces: they multiply. If you want them to join the unification process, the approach should be different. A mere recognition of the other as equal to yourself is of no use. Usually it suffices for partnership. Towards the Muslim fundamentalist an additional recognition is needed: recognition of one’s own failures. Most of our failures are related to our concept of freedom, freedom without commitment to humanity.

Issues in epistemology are the topic in Abdullah Kaygi’s contribution. The issues are the usual: what is knowledge? And how can it be verified? Can we have knowledge of value and how can this type of knowledge be verified? Kaygi holds in general that philosophy “deals with the meaning of being a human being” and takes “the human being as a research object”. Claims related to human phenomena can be the object of verification.

The exact meaning and extension of these somewhat sweeping statements are difficult to decide. It is even more difficult if you ask for a definite verification procedure for each possible statement. The procedure, described by logical positivism, as Kaygi notes, is clearly insufficient: the verification of value statements, for instance, requires a procedure for the observation of action.

A main purpose of the paper is to show the difference between philosophy and theology. Theology deals with the world as a whole, and no knowledge of, or insight into, the world as a whole can be verified. Philosophy, on the contrary, can only deal with verifiable knowledge, and is in no position to produce knowledge of the world as a whole.

It should be remarked that this may be a difficult position to defend. First, to ask philosophy to produce only verifiable knowledge may be impossible. Even in mathematics there are theorems that cannot be verified. Correspondingly in philosophy, no piece of philosophy, let alone a philosophical system, can be produced without relying on some self-verifying proposition. The history of philosophy is, moreover, for a great deal a history of self-verifying systems. Instances can be found nearly up to our time. The old model of verification, the corresponding theory, cannot cover the mind’s often self-made creation. This is the fact underlying religious belief. That is to say, neither in theology nor in philosophy are there “objects to look for”. What is left in both disciplines, is the mind’s self-reflection.

In Le pharisianisme en quête de Dieu Ami Bouganim issues a reminder, if not to say a warning: the Jewish teaching of God as One has been taken over by the Christians (and by the Muslims) and by the Western philosophers. They are, as it were, thieves of Jewish property. Bouganim asks, how can one be sure that the promises of salvation and eternal life can be fulfilled when the One God is seen in a different context? He briefly surveys the use of the One God in philosophy. Both Plato and Aristotle speak about God in their own non-religious way. Even in the Renaissance and Enlightenment the idea of Oneness is taken care of, for instance in Spinoza’s pantheism, where God is identified with nature as a whole. In Hegel the Logos, historically developed, is the final caretaker of the One. Even Heidegger, in Bouganim’s view, is a pantheist. His philosophy of Being is always a philosophy of the Being of entities – similar to an Aristotelian position. Heidegger, however, takes a more modest position. He is concerned with the meaning of the question of Being.

As opposed to both Christianity and metaphysical philosophy, Bouganim presents the two schools of Judaism, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and the controversies between them. The Sadducees are a group of priests holding on to the strict meaning of the Torah, a kind of Jewish rationalism, later on represented by great scholars like Maimonides. To Bouganim, however, the Pharisees are the true scholars of Judaism. In interpreting the Torah they use the hermeneutical advices in Talmud. Important scholars like Léon Askénazi hold that the distinction between the Pharisees and the Sadducees is at once more differentiated and also trivial and hardly worth mentioning.

The question that naturally lends itself to further reflection is whether the idea of God as One is a genuine Jewish idea or belongs to the human mind, if not in general, so in major parts of the world’s cultures. The answer seems to be both yes and no. Everyone concerned knows that Christianity is based on the Old Testament and that the same Testament underlies the conception of the Quran. Philosophers know that Aristotle called Plato the first theologian and that a major part of philosophy right up to the present day has been an Ontotheology.

Now, whether Plato was inspired by Moïse via his followers is hard to know. What we know for sure is that Jewish and Greek settlers lived side by side in Asia Minor some hundred years later. We also know that, for instance, Spinoza was influenced by the great Jewish thinker Maimonides. He was, however, just as much influenced by his contemporary Descartes and by science, mathematics, and political theory of his day. These disciplines are also, in their own way, looking for the overall One, or simpleness – in explanation of the world.

So it is hard to decide both empirically and speculatively whether Judaism may be credited with the idea of God as One alone. Psychologically it is also hard to accept the authority of Judaism as to the position of the One: hardly anyone is able to accept the idea of God as One from outside unless the idea itself resides potentially inside. In view of what the idea has led to, in theology, philosophy, literature, in art and science, it is tempting to conclude that the search for God as the One is a basic existential need for every one of us, at least in our part of the world.

2 OUTLOOK

The articles in the volume are obviously, with some exceptions, inspired by the secularisation thesis: God and religious belief have come to an end. What is left is the scientific production of knowledge. Recent research thinks otherwise. In 1999 Peter L. Berger, perhaps the most prominent sociologist of religion, edited a collection of articles on the various religions and religious beliefs. He has himself many years ago (1967) written a book confirming the thesis of secularisation. Now he concludes that the secularisation thesis is false.

In most parts of the world religion is strengthening its position. This volume contains articles on the Roman Catholicism, on the age of John Paul II, on the Evangelical Protestant upsurge and its political implications, Islam and politics in the modern world, on religion in the People’s Republic of China, political Islam in national politics and international relations. The booklet also deals with Europe with the subtitle: the Exception that proves the Rule. The book is introduced by Peter L. Berger, who gives an overview of this important field of research.

That Europe is an exception is only partly true. Every day there are substantial protests against violence in the world and against the power of the material cultures. The protests are not in favour of religion, but in favour of the human mind, and its interpersonal relationships. Knowledge production does not suffice. It does not serve our relationships.

In a recently published book, Asecular Age (2007), Charles Taylor sets out to explain the roots of secularisation. It arises out of Christianity itself and is not caused by the growth of science. Having lost our religious belief, it does not follow that we are living in a more stable society. We are, as Taylor expresses it, “living in an age of quieting disbelief”. There is much unrest under the surface. The secular age, he says, is suffering from schizophrenia, a state of bewilderment that may create a longing for stable relationships. According to research in social medicine, that is what religion promises (for instance Per Sundby, a Norwegian professor of social medicine). In a haunting situation we are usually forced to look for new ways of living. It may be that the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin has a point when he proclaims: when the crisis is growing, so does the solutions (Wenn die Gefahr wächst, wächst auch die Rettung). As everyone knows, welfare society can ever erode the finite character of human being.