The purpose of this paper is to show that the various layers of meaning in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling are embedded in a hidden, new Christian communication. I trace the traditional Christian understanding of the “sacrifice of Isaac,” in which Isaac is the prefiguration of Jesus, and then argue that Kierkegaard departed from this traditional teaching to make Abraham the Christ-figure of the story. To Kierkegaard, Abraham is the true sacrifice of the story.

Traditional Christians face a puzzle concerning the freedom and perfection of Christ. Jesus the man, it seems, must have possessed significant freedom forhim to serve as a moral example for us and for his death to have been truly meritorious. Yet Jesus the Son of God must be incapable of sinning if he is trulydivine. So if Jesus is both human and divine, one of these two attributes - significant freedom or moral perfection - apparently needs to be surrendered. In thisessay, it is argued that if (and perhaps only if) a Molinist approach to divine providence is embraced, one can plausibly affirm both the freedom of the manand the impeccability of the Son.

Because many of Aquinas’s most distinctive philosophical claims are embedded in theological works, in order to see what his philosophy comes to it is necessary to do a great deal of extracting and reconstructing. A major school of interpretation, however, cautions that such efforts are misguided, since Aquinas’ philosophy and theology are inextricably bound together. We respond that some versions of this inseparability thesis are too strong to be true and the remainder too weak to stand in the way of renewed efforts to identify Aquinas’ pure philosophical systems. Nonetheless, a good deal is to be learned about Aquinas (and about other religious philosophers) by pondering the inseparablist challenge to rational reconstruction.

In “Three Versions of Universalism,” Michael Murray asks what purpose our earthly life might serve if universalism is true; and in this brief response, I suggesta possible answer.

On a Molinist account of creation and providence, not only is there is a complete set of truths about what every possible person would freely do in any possible set of circumstances, but these conditional truths are part of the very explanation of our existence. Robert Adams has recently argued that the explanatory priority of these conditionals undermines libertarian freedom. In the present essay, I take at close look at Adams’ argument and at the Molinist response of Thomas Flint. After showing that Flint’s response is inadequate, I develop what I believe to be a more successful Molinist response to Adams’ argument. Along the way, I seek to provide some insight into the nature of libertarian freedom and the proper interpretation of the much discussed “principle of alternate possibilities.”

J. L. Schellenberg’s Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason claims that the existence of reflective persons who long to solve the problem of God’s existencebut cannot do so constitutes an evil rendering God’s existence improbable. In this essay, I present Schellenberg’s argument and argue that the kind of reasonable nonbelief Schellenberg needs for his argument to succeed is unlikely to exist. Since Schellenberg’s argument is an inductive-style version of the problem of evil, the empirical improbability of the premise I challenge renders the conclusions derived from it empirically improbable as well.