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Rowan Williams, David Ford and others have drawn attention to the importance of the ‘informal theology’ of ordinary believers, its validity as representing genuine insights, and the risk of detachment that occurs if academic theologians do not take it into account. Jeff Astley has examined the phenomenology of informal theology (which he calls ‘ordinary theology’) and processes that have been and can be followed in examining it. Largely, however, he has not surveyed the actual content of believers’ informal theology. This thesis examines the most basic, yet profound, theist concept, that of ‘God’, in historical, academic theology since the Second World War, and in contemporary informal theology measured by an exercise in practical theology. The historical theology consists of a review of academic and popular writings by professional United Kingdom Anglican theologians (as they have taken into account logical positivism, human suffering and scientific insights). This review is presented according to a series of eight themes. The thesis then describes the preparation and execution of a survey of the understanding of God on the part of a sample of Angelican church-attenders in Winchester, carried out by questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, together with analysis of the results. Most importantly, the thesis then sets the results of this exercise in practical theology against the views of academic theologians, draws out areas of commonality and deviation, and offers a distinctive contribution in this respect. The writer’s thesis is that the informal theology of ordinary believers coincides in most ways with academic theology over fundamental issues of understanding God. The practical research contributing to this thesis have revealed many ordinary believers’ capacity to assimilate and hold a variety of views of God, and to do so in creative tension, sometimes despite paradoxes of apparent contradiction. The thesis sets out some proposals for further research and makes some recommendations as to how the findings within the thesis could inform practice in the Church of England. However, its distinctive contribution to scholarship lies in its relating the content of some informal theology to a wide spread of Angelican academic theology, and its finding considerable spiritual and theological insight within a sample of ordinary believers.

In this study , I examine the concept 'postsecular' to direct it towards a path that imparts it more normative and analytical power. Contrary to the literature, which construes the concept as the 'return of religion ', I argue that postsecular has normative and analytical weight when construed as a denaturalising problematisation of the secular. I argue that such a problematisation translates in the political sphere to the conceptualisation of the secular as a form of life, which in turn creates a normative thrust to further open the public sphere to religion. This theoretical starting point allows me to examine and develop the concept along two threads: normatively and analytically. Analytically, I argue that we should understand 'postsecularisation' as a social and political process in which a 'conceptualisation of the secular as a form of life' takes place as a result of the 'problematisation of the secular'. Based on this theoretical frame, I argue that, instead of construing 'postsecular society' to refer to secular societies where religion makes a return, we should understand them as those in which there has occurred a denaturalisation of the secular. I engage with these theoretical issues in relation to Turkey. I argue that the social and political transformation associated with Adalet ve Kalkil1ma Partisi (AKP) cannot be considered as the emergence of a postsecular society. I argue that 'postsecularisation', as I construe it, provides a theoretical framework to explain Gezi Park protests which mobilised a group of secular, middle class citizens who were predominantly concerned about restrictions on their way of life / lifestyle. Normatively, I problematise the consensus in the literature, which affirms religion for the sake of peace and solidarity. As an alternative, I explore a truth-oriented affirmation of religious language with the hope of directing the concept towards this track. I use Habermas and Taylor as my interlocutors. I argue that Habermas does not develop an outlook that broadly affirms the truth-value of religious language. I find that Taylor's 'post-Heideggerian hermeneutics' is stifled due to an understanding of the self as lacking and seeking empowerment. Instead, I assert that religion can be thought of as potentially inhabiting a truth-value that can be revelatory and expressive of the human condition and defend the view that religious language is admissible to the extent that it is framed in a way that provides others with a chance to refute it.

Proponents of perfect being theism have recently explored the resources of compatibilist accounts of free will, such that freedom is compatible with necessity, as a way of countering the charge that it is not possible to reconcile God’s essential perfect goodness with any significant degree of divine freedom. However, William Rowe and others have charged the proponents of this strategy with saving divine freedom while at the same time jeopardizing other fundamental ideas within traditional theism. A small number of analytic philosophers of religion (most notably Edward Wierenga, Katherin Rogers, and Thomas Talbott) have drawn from the resources of compatibilist accounts of free will as a way of understanding God’s freedom, one that they do not think is inconsistent with traditional theism. To this day, however, no one has produced an extended articulation and defense of a compatibilist outlook of divine freedom, an outlook which I will call in this dissertation, Divine Source Compatibilism (DSC). In chapter 1 and 2 I introduce both this study and the view of divine freedom under consideration, namely, DSC. Chapter 3 explores whether or not DSC seriously deviates from the claims of the Christian tradition regarding divine freedom. Chapters 4 and 5 are focused on the issues of divine aseity and divine thankworthiness. Here I investigate whether or not DSC is inconsistent with each of these two fundamental attributes of perfect being theism. In Chapter 6 I explore whether a certain variation of traditional theism, which I call Theistic Compatibilism, is committed to DSC in light of its metaphysical commitments to freedom and explanation. Finally, in chapter 7 I offer a conclusion and point out some areas that await further study. In this dissertation, I argue that DSC need not fall prey to the charges typically leveled against it. I argue that this outlook of God’s freedom does not seriously deviate from the claims of the Christian tradition with respect to God’s freedom and is consistent with divine aseity and divine thankworthiness. Moreover, I argue that DSC is the most plausible view of God’s freedom for a particular outlook on theism, namely, Theistic Compatibilism.

This thesis has been undertaken to critically engage with, reframe and rehabilitate a burgeoning body of contemporary research on ‘non-religion’ within the critical academic study of ‘religion’, and to explore the benefits of such a reframing for empirical research. I begin by critically introducing research on ‘non-religion’ and identifying a number of key problems which directly relate to ever-raging debates surrounding the definition of ‘religion’. I then justify my chosen approach—discourse analysis—and provide a discursive re-reading of studies of ‘non-religion’, arguing that it should be approached as part of a ‘religion-related field’, before outlining the theoretical questions addressed in the thesis. I argue for locality as a productive means through which to examine religion-related discourse, justify the selection of Edinburgh’s Southside as my field site, and introduce my data sources and the specifics of my analytical approach. Chapter 4 presents my analysis of the Peoples of Edinburgh Project (PEP), conducted in the mid-1990s, while Chapters 5–7 present the analysis of my own empirical work in the contemporary Southside, and place this into conversation with the PEP. In these chapters I demonstrate that the religion-related field is entangled with a variety of powerful discourses that are inflected by the Southside’s local and national particularity. I also demonstrate the importance of looking beyond the supposed ‘religious’ or ‘non-religious’ character of discourses, in order to assess the underlying structures and entanglements, and to avoid unjustifiably reifying the religion-related field. In some cases the ‘non-religious’ is implicit in the subject position of actors utilizing religion-related discourse. It also appears that being positioned as ‘religious’ or ‘non-religious’ means more in certain circumstances than in others. Furthermore, I reflect on the notion of religious ‘indifference’, arguing that, in some instances, the performance of indifference is a tactic for coping with contextually meaningful difference.

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Much cutting-edge research has been produced in the quest to find out which metaphysical account of modality is best. Comparatively little rigorous investigation has been devoted to questioning whether such accounts are compatible with classical theism. This thesis remedies some of this neglect and charts some of this previously under-explored territory existing at the intersection of metaphysics and philosophy of religion. Such an investigation is important since salient among the tenets of classical theism are ones that are characteristically modal. Not only is the classical monotheistic deity supposed to exist and possess the various divine-making properties necessarily; many of these properties themselves seem to include a modal component. An omniscient being is one who could not fail to know some proposition (once it’s true); and an omnipotent being is such that, for an appropriate set of tasks, it could perform them. Classical theism also comprises modal commitments about non-divine individuals: everything distinct from God is supposed to be necessarily dependent upon God; and human beings are supposed to have been granted the freedom to do otherwise. In short, the unique metaphysical properties of a classical monotheistic deity burden the theist with substantial metaphysical and ethical commitments any theory of modality must uphold; this thesis questions which one may do so best. However, the discussion must be limited to a small number of theories. Those examined here explain modality in terms of something ultimately non-modal; either by reducing modality to something else (e.g., a particular ontology of possible worlds), or by denying that modal discourse has the function of describing, in a truth-apt way, some part of mind-independent reality. So this project is a partial investigation into a more specific question: which of these theories which deny that modality is fundamentally real best fits with theism?

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