Shelley has traditionally been associated with radical atheism and freethought. This chapter places those movements in a wider context by tracing historical definitions of religion and atheism. It suggests that Shelley’s doctrine of Love moves beyond atheism and the radical enlightenment that influenced Shelley’s early verse. The entry concludes with a discussion of the Victorian Shelley, capable of being understood as a non-doctrinal spiritual guide whatever his private opinions were. This leads to some reflections about how scholars define and analyse religion in literary texts.

Chapter 4, ‘The Efficacy of Empirical Vision’, argues that physical sight can and should lead to belief in John. Scholars often cite John 2:23; 4:48; and 20:29 as evidence for John’s own critique of physical seeing as a means of coming to belief. The chapter argues that close reading of John 2:23 and 4:48 reveals human hearts to be the true cause of unbelief and shows that physical sight is the catalyst for all unbelief and all belief. Neither does John 20:29 condemn sight as a means of acquiring belief. Rather, it suggests that mediated seeing – via the text of the Gospel – can be as efficacious for belief as an actual encounter with Jesus. The chapter concludes that sight is complex, but that no critique of the positive relationship between sight and belief exists in John.

Chapter 1, ‘My Lord and My God’ in John 20:30–31’, asserts that the cause, content, and consequences of belief all suggest that Jesus is God. In John 20:27–29, Thomas sees Jesus and calls him ‘my Lord and my God’. After Jesus blesses those who believe without seeing him, John claims that he has written down signs in this book so that his readers can come to believe that ‘Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God’ and ‘receive life in his name’ (John 20:30–31). The proximity of both statements is not coincidental but reveals that 20:30–31 describes the same fullness of belief as Thomas’s exclamation. What emerges is that John’s portrayals of the ‘signs’, the titles ‘Christ’ and ‘Son of God’, and the resulting ‘life in his name’ are fundamentally theological. True belief will always make Thomas’s declaration.

This chapter articulates God’s purpose, which could be identified with the term ‘election’, but which here I break down into three themes – incarnation, creation and eschatology. If God’s character is not to change, God’s way of bringing about that purpose must be entirely consistent with the nature of that purpose. Thus the incarnation is both the means and the end of God’s purpose. God’s ultimate purpose is for us to be with God: God achieves that purpose by being with us. The incarnation is God being with us: the eschaton is us being with God. Creation is incarnational, because the purpose of creation is to be the theatre of God’s relationship with humankind, and because Jesus demonstrates what creation is and where it belongs in the story of God. The gospels portray the incarnate Jesus as the one through whom creation turns into heaven, and the flaws in existence are overwhelmed by the foretaste of essence.

The Bible and religious tradition imply that 1. It is wrong to worship anything other than God, and 2. There is no good excuse for worshipping anything other than God. One question (1) raises is, wrong for whom? Jews and Christians, certainly. I suggest that there is no clear case that idolatry is a sin for Gentile pagans in the Hebrew Scriptures. Christian belief that (1) applies to pagans stems from New Testament texts and philosophy. I consider some broadly philosophical arguments that all idolatry is wrong, no matter by whom. I then argue that (2) rests inter alia on a robust doctrine of “general revelation,” and suggest some of what must go into that doctrine if it is to support (2).

The introduction raises the question of how one ought to understand the challenge of God’s invisibility/visibility in the Fourth Gospel with regard to its stated purpose: ‘These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.’ Scholars and theologians have often taken God’s invisibility to be ‘absolute’, in the sense that it describes an immaterial, eternal God whose deity is invisible by nature. While John claims that no one has ever seen God, it also describes God as incarnate in Jesus Christ, the one in whom the Father may be seen. The introduction shows that scholars have not yet satisfactorily defined the nature of divine invisibility in John nor reckoned with the import of this important theme for John’s purpose. It proposes that, according to John, God must become physically visible in Jesus in order for belief to obtain.

We have little basis to doubt (a) that we have good reasons to worship God, (b) that God is worthy of worship, (c) that worship of God is reasonable, (d) that it is unreasonable not to worship God, and (e) that worshipping God is obligatory. But none of these normative states of affairs amounts to or entails our owing God worship. The central aim of this chapter is to show that we do not by nature owe God worship; our owing God worship could be no more than a contingent matter. That our owing God worship is contingent does not entail or even suggest that there is any imperfection or limitation in God, and there are good reasons to hold that it is an attractive view of the relationship between God and humans that our owing God worship is a matter of a special contingent relationship between God and us rather than something that holds by nature.

A brief conclusion summarizes the argument as a whole, asserts that God is physically visible in Jesus’s body, considers the impact of this conclusion on Johannine scholarship, and suggests further areas of research.

Recognizing God in Jesus may be the goal of belief, but one must ask whether God himself is available for recognition. Chapter 2, ‘Divine Visibility’, argues that John’s Christology affirms the visibility of God by reconciling the notion of an ‘unseen’ God to the visibility of the Father that Jesus presents. It proposes that John 1:18a is best read as ‘no one has ever [fully] seen God [yet]’. Three pieces of evidence support this claim, chief among them a survey of Early Jewish, biblical, and Rabbinic literature revealing that one may not assume that all – or, perhaps, even many – Hellenized Jews embraced Platonist notions of invisibility. If one reads John’s God as ‘unseen’, rather than as ‘invisible’, the visibility of God in Jesus becomes possible and the tension between the seeing and not seeing God passages can be resolved.

Understanding human morality is important in appreciating the ethical dimensions of environmental problems. As a first approximation, morality is a behavioral system, with an attendant psychology, that has evolved among some social animals for the purposes of regulating their interactions. This chapter discusses and rejects challenges to morality from amoralism, theism, and relativism, arguing instead that morality is ubiquitous and difficult to escape, does not need the support of God in order to have content or be motivating, and is not culture-bound. However, this does not imply that there is a single, true morality, that belief in God is inconsistent with morality, or that there is no conflict between morality and individual desire. Armed with this understanding of human morality, we are now prepared to discuss some substantive questions in moral philosophy.