ISSN 2053-5163 Issue 11 Autumn 2017 Challenging Religious Issues Jeff Astley on Ian Ramsey on Religious Language Samuel Tranter on Protestants and Natural Law: Rejection and Retrieval James Francis on The Earliest Easter Narratives Emily Pollard on Thomas Aquinas and Just Cause for War Supporting A-level Religious Studies. The St Mary’s and St Giles’ Centre Challenging Religious Issues Supporting Religious Studies at A-level and beyond Issue 11 Autumn 2017 Contents Ian Ramsey on Religious Language 2 Jeff Astley Protestants and Natural Law: Rejection and Retrieval 8 Samuel Tranter The Earliest Easter Narratives 15 James Francis Thomas Aquinas and Just Cause for War 22 Emily Pollard Editor Professor Jeff Astley (University of Warwick) Managing Editor Dr Tania ap Siôn (University of Warwick, St Mary’s and St Giles’ Centre) Editorial Advisors Professor Leslie J. Francis (University of Warwick) Dr Ian Jones (St Peter’s Satley Trust) Libby Jones (The St Giles’ Centre, Wrexham) Professor William K. Kay (Chester University) Professor David Lankshear (University of Warwick) Phil Lord (System Leader, GwE) Professor Peter Neil (Bishop Grosseteste University) Professor Stephen Parker (University of Worcester) The Right Revd Dr David Walker (University of Warwick) Design: Phillip Vernon Challenging Religious Issues The St Mary’s and St Giles’ Centre St Peter’s Saltley Trust Llys Onnen Grays Court Abergwyngregyn 3 Nursery Road Gwynedd Edgbaston LL33 0LD Birmingham B15 3JX Telephone: 01248 680131 Telephone 0121 427 6800 E-mail: [email protected] E- mail: [email protected] Website: www.st-marys-centre.org.uk Website: www.saltleytrust.org.uk Challenging Religious Issues is a free, open access on-line journal designed to support teachers and students engaged in A-level Religious Studies. Challenging Religious Issues is designed to bring recent and relevant scholarship and research from the University into the A-level classroom. Three issues are published each year, and each issue contains four original articles. Challenging Religious Issues St Mary’s and St Giles’ Centre Issue 11 Autumn 2017 ISSN 2053-5163 © Jeff Astley Ian Ramsey on Religious Language Jeff Astley This article critically surveys the account of descriptive religious language provided by Ian T. Ramsey. Specification links: WJEC/CBAC/EDUQAS Unit 5: Philosophy of Religion, Theme 3: Religious language (part 1) = Component 2 Philosophy of Religion, Theme 4: Religious language, C. Religious language as non-cognitive and analogical: Proportion and attribution (St Thomas Aquinas) and qualifier and disclosure (Ian Ramsey). OCR Philosophy of Religion, 5. Religious Language: Negative, Analogical or Symbolic. AQA 1 Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, A: Philosophy of Religion, Religious Language. Also: All Religious Experience topics. Born and brought up in Bolton, defence of religion and metaphysics Lancashire, Ian Thomas Ramsey (1915- against the positivist critique that they 1972) was a philosopher of religion and were meaningless because their liberal Christian theologian who taught at statements were not verifiable by sense Cambridge and Oxford, before serving as experience. Bishop of Durham. (He is not to be Moments of religious experience or confused with Michael Ramsey, who was ‘discernment’ (intuitions) are an individual’s also once Bishop of Durham, and responses to active ‘disclosures’ (non- eventually Archbishop of Canterbury; propositional revelations) on the part of and was not a relative.) God. Ramsey argued that there were parallel disclosures in practically all other Ramsey’s theory of religious areas of knowledge – including knowledge mathematics, poetry, morality and I. T. Ramsey came to describe his ordinary human situations. characteristic philosophy of religion as a ‘broader empiricism’, arguing that I use ‘disclosure’ not in relation to religious belief can only be justified if it is information, but to refer to situations grounded in some form of religious about which various metaphorical experience. This view provided his phrases are commonly used. Such Challenging Religious Issues, Issue 11, Autumn 2017 2 Ramsey on Religious Language phrases, e.g., are those which speak social life, or the whole of the physical of situations ‘coming alive’, ‘taking on creation. None of these ‘mores’ can ever depth’, situations in which ‘the penny be adequately captured in straightforward drops’, where we ‘see’ but not with language – in the ‘plain, flat descriptive eyes of flesh, where something ‘strikes language’ that characterises the medium us’, where ‘eye meets eye’ and where through which they are disclosed. ‘hearts miss a beat’. (Ramsey, 1972, In order to speak about these ‘mores’, p. 115) we therefore need to use words and phrases that will appear to many to be In such contexts, the ‘ice breaks’ and the rather ‘odd’, by comparison with the ‘light dawns’. These are disclosure- more everyday, empirical language that situations in which, for example, we may: describes their observable media. recognise a pattern (Ramsey refers Ramsey’s theory of religious to a 3D cube discerned language through the In particular, Ramsey claimed that two-dimensional religious language is often made up of lines of a drawing – models drawn from our sense experience see figure); of the world (‘good’, ‘powerful’, ‘Father’, grasp an idea (say of the colour ‘rock’, etc.), which are regularly coupled yellow, which is more than and other with qualifiers. These qualifiers are than any or all yellow objects); usually adverbs or adjectives whose discern a duty; or significance it is easy to overlook, such as recognise another person (or ‘infinitely’, ‘all’, ‘eternal’ and ‘heavenly’.2 ‘another mind’). As the models themselves are essentially analogies and metaphors We then respond to these disclosures derived from this-worldly language, their with an appropriate commitment. meaning must change when they are In the religious disclosure-situation, the applied to a God who transcends this discerned object (and active subject) of world and this language. Such models, the disclosure is God, mediated mainly Ramsey insists, are not ‘picturing models’ through nature or history. It is in such a – (Ramsey, 1971a, p. 213). often ‘cosmic’ (all-inclusive and unlimited) Qualifiers have no descriptive meaning – disclosure that people respond with the of their own, any more than a square ultimate commitment of faith, and also root sign has a numerical value. (If you supremely ‘come to themselves’. doubt this, ask yourself how to solve the Ramsey claimed that all disclosures reveal a transcendent ‘more’ through and qualifiers tell us to do something with the beyond the empirical medium of its value they sit next to. In fact, they tell us disclosure.1 This medium is made up to do two things. either of objects and events that are known through sense experience, or of the language that describes them. In the 1Ramsey argued that, in the end, all disclosures reveal the same object, for these many disclosed realities are all part case of disclosures of persons, duty or of the One Reality of God. God, for example, the media are 2Although the qualifiers are not always explicitly expressed, (respectively) human bodies and their they are implied. So, when people speak of God simply as ‘king’ we (and they) need to remember that God is actually behaviour, situations in our personal or the ‘heavenly king’. Challenging Religious Issues, Issue 11, Autumn 2017 3 Ramsey on Religious Language Religious language as representative from fastening onto a single model to First, qualifiers help us to represent the understand (say) God, the church or the transcendent God (that is, to ‘describe’ atonement; whereas ‘orthodoxy aimed at God, as well as any language about having every possible model’ (Ramsey, humans and nature can). As God is 1957, p. 170). different, our language must show this. Yet Ramsey allows us to express some Qualified models (‘infinitely good’, preference among religious models. ‘heavenly Father’, ‘eternal Rock’, etc.) tell Indeed, that is one of the prime tasks of us to note the difference between theology. ‘A model like person is better descriptive God-talk and our usual than, say, shepherd or potter because it descriptions of this-worldly fathers, can say all that these other models can goodness, rocks, and so on. But the say and more besides; in this way it can model words these phrases contain also absorb the discourse from two or more speak of a likeness, for God is not utterly models’ (Ramsey, 1971a, p. 214). different. Technically, Ramsey was a ‘critical Religious language as evocative realist’ who believed that the transcendent Qualified models not only have a God may be represented but not literally cognitive (fact-asserting) function of described. One of his catch phrases was representing the nature of God, they also that we can be ‘sure in religion’, indeed serve the non-cognitive function of ‘sure of God’, but must always be evoking a disclosure in which God is ‘tentative in theology’: certain of the known. Ramsey makes the empirical reality of the object of our disclosures, claim that most of our models of God are but never more than provisional about ultimately derived from religious any account of the nature of that reality experiences, being drawn from the (Ramsey, 1965, p. 89). medium of religious disclosures. God has Ramsey strongly maintained that God been disclosed to people ‘through’ or is a mystery, and claimed that only one ‘around’ the being and behaviour word – ‘activity’ – can be used of God (or language about the being and with the same basic sense that it has for behaviour) of fathers, mothers, kings or us.3 All other language must be heavily shepherds, and even of rocks, fortresses, qualified. As we have seen, this may be fire and wind.4 That is why God may be done explicitly by adding qualifier words. But it can also be done by means of the 3Ramsey believed that he was presenting a form of analogical religious language that was independent of the mutual qualification that happens Thomist’s metaphysics of an ‘analogy of being’ between through a jostling together of different God and the created world.