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‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God’ (Matthew 5.8; NRSV), so says Christ at the beginning of his greatest sermon, the Sermon on the Mount. But just what it is to be pure in heart and what it is to see God, he never explains. Following this beatitude, Christian writers in Scripture, and in the subsequent Christian tradition, have developed the doctrine of the beatific vision, according to which a person who is completely sanctified (is pure in heart) has immediate knowledge of God (sees him). While this doctrine has exerted considerable influence on the Christian tradition, it has received scant philosophical attention. In this issue, we begin to sketch what a philosophy of the beatific vision would look like.

Analytic philosophers are generally advised to steer clear of the substantive use of literary tropes whose ‘semantic content outstrips their propositional content’ (Rea, 2009: 6). But this poses a problem for analytic theologians whose primary texts are beset by such literary devices. Can such material be usefully marshalled, or should it be left to one side, to remain unemployed by analytic theologians? In The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture Yoram Hazony offers what I take to be the most convincing argument to date that the entire biblical narrative (literary tropes and all) ought both to be read as philosophy and that the philosophical content contained in the biblical narrative can be marshalled into non-narrative propositional arguments. In this paper I will address three areas of concern for his project, and by extension, what I take to be concerns for other analytic theologians who might follow his lead.