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).

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.

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.

The liturgical forms depicted in William Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814) provide the foundational instance of the nineteenth-century resistance to excarnation and the natural/supernatural binary. Rather than naturalizing otherworldly Christian doctrines – as seminal readings of Romanticism suppose – The Excursion’s rituals disclose how material reality already participates in the divine. This participatory vision challenges voluntarist pictures of God as a large, powerful being who exercises his arbitrary will over creation – a picture of God often unwittingly adopted by modern readers. Divine participation, moreover, challenges typical readings of Wordsworth’s lyrical inwardness. For, liturgy not only draws the poem’s characters out of themselves, it also sacralizes nature. Nature’s sacredness in turn opposes the desecrating rituals – or anti-liturgies – of industrialization. Via liturgy, then, Wordsworth comments on material conditions and remains historically engaged. The Victorians will repeatedly echo this use of liturgy to sacralize material reality and to resist any forces that would violate that sacrality.

Hanne Løland Levinson’s “Gendered Imagery in Isaiah” looks at one of the most significant and striking features of Isaiah: its repeated use of feminine imagery for God. She begins with an advanced yet accessible discussion of how metaphors work, then goes on to analyze how the use of imagery comparing God to a pregnant woman, a midwife, and a breastfeeding mother—alongside more widespread masculine imagery—combine to challenge and transform the ways in which readers perceive God. In conclusion, she points out the importance of female god-language in a world in which gender continues to be a basis for inequality and exclusion.

With its many voices that are joined together, Isaiah is akin to a massive choir or symphony, and it sometimes strikes dissonant notes. Matthew R. Schlimm, in “Theological Tensions in the Book of Isaiah,” looks at a number of different themes on which the book contains contrasting testimonies: God is portrayed as both a loving savior and a wrathful punisher; God is said to be a mighty sovereign, and yet humans frequently do not act according to his will; God is universal and transcendent, and yet is also portrayed as intimate with his people, particularly Zion; humans are sometimes seen as pervasively sinful, but are exhorted to do good; the creation, too, is sometimes good and blessed, and yet elsewhere seen as corrupted; and the same leaders and empires are alternately condemned and used as divine agents. Schlimm reflects on the way in which these complexities press readers beyond simple answers.

This chapter moves from the imaginative inhabitation of the world in general to the question of religious faith in particular. Religious faith concerns both the objects of perception and their frame: God is both an object of (partly imaginative) apprehension and a frame for our perception of the world at large. Drawing on both anthropological and psychological scholarship and on C. S. Lewis’s theory of transposition, the chapter examines the inalienable role of imagination in the perception of God and the necessary limits of such imaginative engagement. It concludes with a discussion of the significance of acknowledging experiences that do not make sense.

Darwin’s assertion in his Autobiography that the “old argument of design…as given by Paley…fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered” underlines an antithesis between two competing ways of explaining the appearance of design in nature, in one case laden with theological connotations, in the other providing a license for the expansion of scientific naturalism. The contrast between the two has often structured accounts of Darwin’s achievement and has made it easy to suppose that he had been consistently motivated by the desire to refute Paley’s argumentation. The chapter will highlight evidence for significant changes over time, from Darwin’s Cambridge days when he had been “charmed” by Paley’s reasoning about design that, at the time, he considered “so conclusive”, through  to the time of his writing  On the Origin of Species when the conclusion was still “strong in my mind” that there was an intelligent First Cause and when he was still defining “nature” as the “laws ordained by God to govern the universe”, a trope consonant with Paley’s theism. The diachronic trajectory falsifies any claim that Darwin had always been fighting against Paley.  Throughout the chapter, it will be stressed that the fact that Darwin’s theory of natural selection could be presented as a refutation of Paley does not logically mean that it had been devised specifically and deliberately to serve that end.

Chapter 7 examines Goethe’s unconventional attitudes to religion and religious authority, and their influence on his creative work. It emphasises that, despite his opposition to institutionalised Christianity, Goethe remained interested in Christian beliefs and convinced of the value of scriptural reading. The chapter details his engagement with Spinozist Pantheism (the view of God as embodied in the world), with Judaism and the Hebrew Bible, and with Islam. It argues that we should see in Goethe’s approach not the rejection of religious narratives, but their reframing and rewriting.

This chapter traces the complex legacies of multiple religious traditions, including Christianity, Islam, and syncretistic spirituality, as they inform utopian strands of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American fiction, including the miraculous realism of Toni Morrison, the lyrical historicism of Marilynne Robinson, and the religiously themed science fiction of James Blish and G. Willow Wilson. Apocalyptic concepts, with a strong emphasis on transformative and liberatory possibility, are a recurrent element of these narratives.  The term “spirituality” itself is ambiguous, particularly in a national context in which religion has been a source of both oppression and hope. The chapter draws on postsecular critiques of literature and culture that, in John McClure’s terms, indicate “a mode of being and seeing that is at once critical of secular constructions of reality and of dogmatic religion.” It argues that skeptical perspectives do not necessarily militate against the aesthetic and ethical potential of theologically oriented utopian fiction.