NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 61, Issue 2, 2007

At the end of the nineteenth century, in his famous essay ‘The Ethics of Belief’ the well-known mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford offered a powerful argument against religious beliefs. This article first gives an extensive analysis of Clifford’s evidentialist argument by placing it against the background of his evidentialist epistemology. Second, some arguments of William James, Clifford’s most famous critic, are expounded and criticised. Although there is some plausibility to these arguments, they are insufficient to refute Clifford’s evidentialism. Third, the author presents some problems for Clifford’s evidentialism, having to do with evidentialism as a moral thesis and with doxastic involuntarism, and offers some new arguments against Clifford’s evidentialist argument. Clifford’s argument against belief in God, as it stands, turns out to be untenable.

In dialogue with the Dutch liturgical scholars Marcel Barnard and Paul Post, who recently stated that the context of late modernity takes us necessarily ‘beyond the Liturgical Movement’, Mattijs Ploeger sketches the Liturgical Movement as a school of not just liturgical but also theological (biblical, patristic) reassessment. He calls this primarily theological and only secondarily ritual identity the Liturgical Movement’s ‘unliturgical’ character. Paradoxically, at the time when this theological-liturgical school began to be recognised widely (the 1960s), it was simultaneously regarded as rendered out of date by a new type of theology which became dominant from that time onwards. This article claims that choosing the ethos of the Liturgical Movement as a source for the identity of today’s church is – rather than an outdated attitude – one possible way of responding to the context of late or post-modernity.

It is a modern conviction that religion and emotion belong together. It would be an anachronism to presuppose a priori such a connection in pre-modern times. The article shows that the definition of religious experience as mysterium fascinosum et tremendum (R.Otto) is not anachronistic. Biblical texts express an emotional ambivalence of fear and joy when speaking on God. On the one hand, we may explain this ambivalence with the help of evolutionary psychology as part of the universal conditio humana; on the other hand, fear and joy are culturally and historically conditioned. The article gives a sketch of the history and diversity of these emotions in biblical texts and underlines the connection between emotions and rituals.

In this article the influential study of Johann Maier, Jesus in der talmudischen Überlieferung of 1978, is compared to the recent monograph by Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud of 2007. It is argued that the minimalist approach of Maier does not do justice to the textual evidence and that Schäfer’s work is more sophisticated and convincingly shows that the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud made a sustained effort to refute the claims of the Gospels about Jesus.