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Book Review: Jonathan Edwards: A life. By George M. Marsden. Yale University Press. 505 pp. Only one portrait of Jonathan Edwards was painted during his lifetime, a rather conventional “likeness” done by the Boston-based painter Joseph Badger. The face is severe, aloof, unsmiling and suspiciously similar to many of the other faces in Badger’s …
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Sixth in a Series: New Turns in Religious Thought Women theologians are still rarities; in another ten years this may not be the case. Fifteen years ago when I started work on a Ph.D. at Yale, they were even more rare, but I realized it less then than I do now. Formation counts, of course, …
Continue reading “An ‘Intermediary Theology’: In Service of the Hearing of God’s Word”
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The world is the outcome of movement. Whether we consider the rocky layers enveloping the Earth, the arrangement of the forms of life that inhabit it, the variety of civilizations to which it has given birth, or the structure of languages spoken upon it, we are forced to the same conclusion: that everything is the sum of the past and that nothing is comprehensible except through its history. ‘Nature’ is the equivalent of ‘becoming’, i.e., self-creation.
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For Charles Hartshorne, a metaphysical statement is a unique form of statement. It is to be distinguished from empirical (that is, factual) assertions, which if true at all are true contingently. Metaphysical statements, if true, are true not contingently but necessarily.
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If religion is significant when it deals with the whole range of man’s experience (which it is the business of reason to coordinate) and when it is concerned with the widest meanings, connections, and implications (all of which are the province of reason), and if religion is good when it promotes community (which is the function of reason in the life of the mind), it follows that reason must be a powerful ally of significant and good religion.
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Hartshorne’s dependence upon Whitehead finds clearest expression in his enthusiastic adoption of Whitehead’s view of the universe as essentially one of perpetual change and becoming, in opposition to the dominant views of traditional Western philosophy and theology that the basic realities of both God and the universe endure permanently without essential change.
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At least there can be no doubt that Jesus like other agitators died on the cross as a Messianic prophet.
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Using the Roman Catholic mass as a metaphor for his philosophical understanding of man in relation to the universe, the author explores in poetic prose the unity and sacredness of all creation using concepts like power, Word (logos), and fire to relate to ecclesiastical terms like communion and prayer, and emphasizing the simplicity, coherence and harmony of everything through the universal presence of the Word.
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Perhaps no other phrase so aptly characterizes the quality and significance of Martin Buber’s life and thought as the one of the ‘narrow ridge.’ It expresses not only the ‘holy insecurity’ of his existentialist philosophy but also the ‘I-Thou,’ or dialogical, philosophy which he has formulated as a genuine third alternative to the insistent either-or’s of our age.
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While achievements in practical and scientific matters has progressed by leaps and bounds, the presentation of the Christian religion is still frequently made in an atmosphere at once stuffy and old-fashioned.
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The difference between I-it and I-Thou is not carried over from the German to the English in translation, but the difference is important in indicating the two stages of Buber’s insight into man — first, that he is to be understood, in general, in terms of his relationships rather than taken in himself; second, that he is to be understood specifically in terms of that direct, mutual relation that makes him human.
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The vast industrial and social system by which we are enveloped does not threaten to crush us, or to rob us of our soul. The energy emanating from it is free in the sense that it represents forces that can be used and also because, in the Whole no less than in the least of its elements, it arises out of a state that grows.
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All experience necessarily takes place within the time sequence. It is not possible to speak meaningfully about anything which is outside time. Religion, if it is anything at all, to the average person is a set of beliefs about the "supernatural", "the eternal", "the future life", "heaven and hell", "immortality", "resurrection", or the "Day of Judgment". It is important to indicate an approach to the interpretation of these ideas in the light of an analysis of religious experience.
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All turns upon whether the “resurrection” really and objectively occurred. The claims of Jesus to represent the character of God, his claim to be the master of men and of their ultimate destiny, and his claim to be sent by God to effect the reconciliation between man and God would remain as the lunatic arrogance of a disordered mind if everything ended in the judicial murder of a field-preacher on a Roman Cross.
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Man is an organic and organized whole, possessing a future consisting not merely of successive years but of higher states to be achieved by struggle, not merely survival, but some form of higher life or super-life.
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The Christian message may be briefly summarized in the single assertion "Jesus is the Messiah." It would seem right to regard as truly "saved" anyone who has been given the grace of a high and noble purpose which draws him out of preoccupation with self into a full creative life which serves the development of community. Without underestimating the relevance of the positive Christian message, it is still important to recognize and gratefully to benefit from the other saving influences at work in human life.
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Unless we are prepared to deny the historical evidence altogether, all of Jesus’ qualities spring from one unforgettable demonstration — that after a public execution Jesus Christ rose again from the dead. To the early Church this well attested fact proved his claims to the hilt.
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Neither universal causality nor destiny prevent a man from being free if he is able to alternate between I-It and I-Thou. But without the ability to enter relation and cursed with the arbitrary self-will and belief in fate that particularly mark modern man, the individual and the community become sick, and the I of the true person is replaced by the empty I of individuality.
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The church is an organism brought into being by the unique series of events associated with the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. Divine inspiration can be intelligibly interpreted to mean that the Scriptures are very particularly transparent to and vehicles of the basic experiences called religious. The prophet is an interpreter because he is able to see the religious dimension in what appear to others as ordinary events. Miracle stories are faith-symbols, fundamentally ways of expressing the conviction that the nature of things is not just what it appears to be, but that there are resident in the world hidden depths and heights of possibility, for which from time to time there is at least some evidence.
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Each individual has a duty to develop his own personality, to be placed in circumstances as favorable as possible to his personal development and not to be deformed by external coercion but inwardly super-organized by persuasion, in conformity with his personal endowments and aspirations.
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Here are the hree most important aspects of Buber’s I-Thou philosophy. The first is the alternation between I-Thou and I-It. The second is the alternation between summons, the approach to the meeting with the eternal Thou, and sending, the going forth from that meeting to the world of men. The third is the alternation between revelation, in which the relational act takes place anew and flows into cultural and religious forms, and the turning, in which man turns from the rigidified forms of religion to the direct meeting with the Eternal Thou.
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Since modern man, for various reasons, is almost completely out of touch with the life and activity of the alert contemporary Church, he must be urged to go back and consider the act of divine initiative on which all Christian conceptions finally rest, before he can fairly observe any contemporary Church.
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Prayer is a process in which the one who prays is constantly related in a profound way to his whole objective world (with both material and mental aspects) and is thereby creatively transformed into a mature person. In worship, the symbols too easily become ends in themselves. As such they are crystallized in the dogmatic finality of an Absolute Church. They are properly only means to an end — the recognition of the whole world as a "sacramental universe".
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From the coming of Man, biological evolution not only rebounds but it rebounds reflectively upon itself. The Darwinian era of survival by Natural Selection is thus succeeded by a Lamarckian era of Super-Life brought about by calculated invention. In Man evolution is interiorized and made purposeful.
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Buber defines ‘philosophical anthropology’ as the study of ‘the wholeness of man,’ and he lists the following as among the problems implicitly set up by this question: Man’s special place in the cosmos, his connexion with destiny, his relation to the world of things, his understanding of his fellowmen, his existence as a being that knows it must die, his attitude in the ordinary and extraordinary encounters with the mystery with which his life is shot through.
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For Christianity, although it is a religion in the sense that it links the life of man with the Life of God, it is far more than one of the world’s great faiths. It is the revelation of the way of true living.
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We must distinguish between two different types of human existence, one of which proceeds from the essence — from what one really is — the other of which proceeds from an image — from what one wishes to appear to be. Like the I-Thou and the I-It relations, these types are generally mixed with one another since no man lives from pure essence and none from pure appearance.
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Everything makes sense, everything glows with life; and the flow of human sap rises to the very heart of the Christian faith. How can we do other than feel that Mankind is in process of re-assessing and re-grouping itself?
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There are those who are filled with admiration for Christ’s demonstrated way of self-giving love, and of his personal non-resistance to the forces of evil. But in practice they may have serious doubts about the efficacy of such methods.
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Absolutely nothing can arrest the progress of social Man towards ever greater interdependence and cohesion.
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>It is entering into relation that makes man really man; it is the failure to enter into relation that in the last analysis constitutes evil, or non-existence; and it is the re-establishment of relation that leads to the redemption of evil and genuine human existence.
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The Christian Faith is sometimes criticized because it depends entirely upon an old-fashioned conception of God and upon the assumption that this little planet is the center of the whole universe.
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A false security prevents us from making real our relationship to God, for the meeting with God takes place in the ‘lived concrete,’ and lived concreteness exists only in so far as the moment retains its true dialogical character of presentness and uniqueness.
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The spirit of Democracy is identified with the ‘evolutionary sense’ or ‘the sense of species’ — signifying, in the case of Man, not merely the instinct for permanence through propagation, but also a will to grow through the organized arrangement of the species upon itself — i.e. super-reflection.
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Evil is inherent in the risky gift of free will. There is an apparent flagrant injustice in the distribution of suffering. The man who has the attitude of mind which is rooted in eternity is neither deceived by the illusive glamours of this world nor unduly cast down by the unexplained suffering and the unsolved problems which confront him on all sides.
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Mankind infolds upon itself. Human socialization has biological value. Human Totalization develops mind; it goes hand-in-hand with ‘psychogenesis’ and is therefore natural, biological.
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The beginning of man’s redemption and that of the world is found in man’s turning from evil and taking the direction toward God. God ‘wishes to redeem us — but only by our own acceptance of His redemption with the turning of the whole being.’ Our turning is only the beginning, however, for man’s action must be answered by God’s grace for redemption to be complete.
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To connect human disease with human sin is misleading. This question of the physical evil in the world leads us naturally on to the question of moral evil, which poses at least as difficult a question, even though it is sometimes argued that they are but different manifestations of the same thing. It seems to have been proved within out time that the problem of human evil is not much affected by better education, better housing, higher wages, and holidays with pay — desirable as all these things may be for other good reasons.
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To connect human disease with human sin is misleading. This question of the physical evil in the world leads us naturally on to the question of moral evil, which poses at least as difficult a question, even though it is sometimes argued that they are but different manifestations of the same thing. It seems to have been proved within out time that the problem of human evil is not much affected by better education, better housing, higher wages, and holidays with pay — desirable as all these things may be for other good reasons.
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This chapter consists of a review of the ideas contained in Buber’s chronicle-novel For the Sake of Heaven. The plot shows that the redemption of God waxes in secret and through the very evil which tries to destroy it; for even the power of destruction derives originally from God.
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The total Unity of which we dream still seems to beckon in two different directions, towards the zenith and towards the horizon. We see the dramatic growth of a whole race of ‘spiritual expatriates’ — human beings torn between a Marxism whose depersonalizing effect revolts them and a Christianity so lukewarm in human terms that it sickens them.
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If we take Christ seriously we cannot avoid the conclusion that our status in the next stage of existence will be largely determined by our behavior in this one. Yet Christ nowhere suggests that we should be “good,” unselfish and loving merely because we shall thereby win a heavenly reward. Nor does he suggest that we should avoid evil merely because we shall otherwise suffer for it hereafter. No one who has seriously put his faith in Christ’s revelation ever wants to go back to a blind and purposeless existence.
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The real conflict for Buber is not between philosophy and religion, but between that philosophy which sees the absolute in universals and hence removes reality into the systematic and the abstract and that which means the bond of the absolute with the particular and hence points man back to the reality of the lived concrete — to the immediacy of real meeting with the beings over against one.
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A vast realm of the Ultra-Human lies ahead of us: a realm in which we shall not be able to survive, or super-live, except by developing and embracing on earth, to the utmost extent, all the powers of common vision and unanimazation that are available to us.
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Christianity is an invitation to true living, and its truth is endorsed only by actual experience. When a man becomes a committed Christian he sooner or later sees the falsity, the illusions, and the limitations of the humanist geocentric way of thinking.
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A mystical vision of Christ emanating from a painting on a church wall and blending into all humanity as well as the universe itself in a highly visionary description of the omnipresence of God as “all-in-all.”
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The complexities of the modern human scene baffle and bewilder many men and women. They fail to see sense or purpose and are frightened at the new vistas of humna knowledge and power which are continually opening up in a multitude of fields. To them, the church seems almost totally irrelevant, an icon of a bygone age.
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How do you obtain intelligible religious outlook in these times? The procedure is to begin by finding certain universal, ultimate experiences which can be intelligibly described, which shed light upon traditional religious ideas and which may contain valuable further implications.
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Primarily through education, biological heredity proceeds to higher zones of consciousness. Therefore it is through education that there is progress to these higher zones. Thus progresses the gradual incorporation of the world into the Word Incarnate.
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If we now understand religion and morality as forms of life and experience that are quite different from that of science, the same can also be said of our understanding of philosophy and metaphysics.
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It is in a middle position between the unreality and the radical reality of evil that we shall always find Buber. His attitude has changed from a tendency to regard evil in largely negative terms to a tendency to ascribe to it greater and greater emotional and ontological reality. But he has never considered evil an absolute, nor has he lost faith in its possible redemption.
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However little we know of the life of Jesus, if we keep in mind that he was finally crucified as a Messianic agitator, we shall be able in the light of the eschatological message to understand the fragmentary accounts of the end of his activity, overgrown though they are with legend.
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There is something logically arbitrary about every detail of the universe which the determinist cannot eradicate. Hartshorne goes as far as to say that “the world as a whole is a matter of chance.” In the final analysis, things happen just because they happen; there is no sufficient reason why things are as they are, and “preference is ultimate.” Thus human conscious experience is our only reliable key to unlock the mysteries of reality.
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There are two basic ways by which one may influence the formation of the minds and lives of others. In the first, one imposes one’s opinion and attitude on the other in such a way that his psychic action is really one’s own. In the second, one discovers and nourishes in the soul of the other what one has recognized in oneself as the right. The significance for education of this distinction between propaganda and legitimate influence can hardly be overestimated.
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Mankind as a whole is not only capable of unanimity but is actually in process of becoming unanimized. Man’s urge towards Some Thing ahead of him cannot achieve its full fruition except by combining with another and still more fundamental aspiration — one from above, urging him towards Some One.
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We must seize every modern means of communication for re-presenting Christianity. The pressing task is quite simply to tell people what the basic content of Christianity is, and to give them some information of what the Christian Church is achieving in the face of ignorance, fear, disease and sheer physical human need in many parts of the world.
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The critical point of planetary Reflection, the fruit of socialization, far from being a mere spark in the darkness, represents our passage, by Translation or dematerialization, to another sphere of the Universe — not an ending of the ultra-human but its accession to some sort of trans-humanity at the ultimate heart of things.
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Buber’s dialogical philosopohy does not exclude the findings of the more scientifically or mechanistically oriented school of psychology. However, the philosophy of dialogue limits their competence to judge the essence of man as a whole in relation to other men. In this chapter, Buber’s ideas are compared with many in the field: Eric Fromm, Ferdinand Ebner, Victor von Weizäcker, Ludwig Binswanger, Arie Sborowitz, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Hans Trub and Carl R. Rogers.
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Accepting the divine entry of God into human history through the man Jesus Christ explains the extraordinary strength and resilience of the Christian Church, and also why it is a mistake to regard it as a purely human organization of those who happen to share the same religious views.
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That which matters is the critical flame shooting up ever again out of the depths, and the truest source for this critical flame is the individual’s awareness of what he really is, of what in his unique and nonrepeatable created existence he is intended to be. The ethical is the acceptance or denial of actions not according to their use or harmfulness but according to their intrinsic value and disvalue.
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Until Darwin, Man, although he knew that the human race might continue to exist for a long time, had not suspected that it had a future. Now however, because he was a species, and species change, he could begin to look for and seek to conquer something quite new that lay ahead of him.
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Martin Buber has refused to fall into the dilemma of the either-or of individualism and collectivism. In both cases he has resolved the tension between the two poles through a creative third alternative — the relation between man and man. This relation takes place not only in the I-Thou of direct meeting but also in the We of community.
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God is the ‘wholly Other’. He is also the wholly Same, the wholly Present. He is the Mysterium Tremendum that appears and overthrows; but He is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I. Buber’s concepts of symbol, myth and history (of myth) are detailed.
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The new total viewpoint of Buber’s science of Biblical study has without question created a new situation in Old Testament scholarship. For the first time there has arisen a real Jewish critical study of the Bible — Jewish and critical at once — which does not allow its way to be dictated to it by foreign tendencies. Buber’s analysis of the biblical concepts of creation, revelation, the kingship of God, and the God of the sufferers is presented.
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A review of Buber’s inluence on Judiaism, Zionism, Hasidism, his position on the law, and the full meaning of what it means to be a Jew.
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A number of Christian scholars who were influenced by Buber’s thought are listed here. Buber was influenced by Christianity. He writes: "From my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother. That Christianity has regarded and does regard him as God and Saviour has always appeared to me a fact of the highest importance which, for his sake and my own, I must endeavour to understand. . . . My own fraternally open relationship to him has grown ever stronger and clearer, and today I see him more strongly and clearly than ever before. I am more than ever certain that a great place belongs to him in Israel’s history of faith and that this place cannot be described by any of the usual categories."
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It is not farfetched to suggest that the depletion of spiritual capital accounts for the breakdown of moral standards in our society. For moral standards ultimately depend upon something transcending the human scene.
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A world where change occurs must be a surprising world and one where both history and possibility are regarded as real and important. This means that the world will be seen as possessing a depth and a richness beyond the mere appearance of successive states and configurations of things. The awareness of change provides the ground for one of the fundamental forms of religious experience. Some basic religious concepts grow out of an interpretation of this experience.
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The real essence of Hasidism is revealed not so much in its concepts as in the three central virtues which derive from these concepts: love, joy, and humility. For Hasidism the world was created out of love and is to be brought to perfection through love. Love is central in God’s relation to man and is more important than fear of God, justice, or righteousness.
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Martin criticizes Hartshorne’s methodology through a rigorous use of Symbolic Logic. He holds that Hartshorne does not develop an adequate concept of aesthetics in relation to metaphysics, and that his distinction between existence and actuality is hopelessly unclear. Hartshorne rebuts him point by point.
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The mass of mankind, when it has passed beyond its ‘critical point of socialisation,’ will penetrate for the first time into the environment which is biologically requisite for the wholeness of its task.
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Behind the poetic language and imagery Chardin depicts creation as an evolutionary process with the existence of matter as the necessary precondition for the appearance on earth of spirit, and describes matter as the “matrix of spirit” in which life emerges and is supported.
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Jesus as rabbi, his understanding of the Old Testament, his consideration of the “Law,” his ethic of “obedience,” his attitude towards wealth, the commandment of Love, the “Will of God” and the coming of the Kingdom.
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Hartshorne reasons that man is more than his cellular processess and is as much a “single dynamic unit” as any of the electrons or cells that constitute his body. A particular man is the common denominator of a connected series of experiences. “Social” is the coordinate processes of weaving one’s own life from strands taken from the lives of others and giving one’s own life as a strand to be woven into their lives. Love is the supreme ethical standard. And the experiences of the dead are all everlastingly preserved in their total value, exactly as originally experienced, in the everlasting and omniscient memory of God.
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Religion grows out of a consciousness of dependence. This is expressed in thankfulness which begets generosity, confidence, and humility.
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The author disagrees in part with Hartshorne’s neoclassicism and his anti-Thomistic views. Hartshorne replies that becoming as sheer growth, increase without loss, is the concrete reality and the secret of both being and becoming.
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Buber’s thought gradually matured from the time of his earliest essays to a mature philosophy during the first two decades of the Twentieth Century. The early period of mysticism evolved into a period of existentialsm to a developing diaological philosophy. However, he does not discard the thoughts of the earlier period, but they are preserved in changed form.
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A collection of short meditations. In a thoughtful way Chardin explores the omnipresence of God in the world, humans as supernatural beings in the natural evolutionary process, and the meaning of human endeavor as the realization of Christian charity.
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However bitter our disillusionment with human goodness, there are stronger scientific reasons than ever before for believing that we do really progress and that we can advance much further still, provided we are clear about the direction in which progress lies and are resolved to take the right road.
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Science has very little to offer in solving problems of human relationships, even though these are the problems which most need to be solved.
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Jesus’ concept of God: similar and different from Jewish thought — different from Greek thought — a God of the future (influence of dualism) — the providence of God and God’s justice — miracles — prayer–Faith — God as father — God remote and near — Sin and forgiveness.
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Hartshorne examines the shortcomings of humanism, classical theism, and explains the differences between pantheism and panentheism (meaning “all-in-God”). Every possible argument for God must show that doubt of God is doubt of any and all truth, renunciation of the essential categories of thinking.
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Hartshorne has very little to say about Christology and is genuinely perplexed by such traditionally Christian ideas as individual survival after death and petitionary prayer.
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The world is ordered in many ways: by a temporal order, by causal connection, as located, in terms of quantity, with various qualities, the possibility of classification, by the relatedness of things. Order my also be described in terms of community, of law, and moral order. Still other aspects of order are in "The Word of God," including "The God of Love." Illumination, meaning, insight, and confidence are also instruments of order.
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In Buber’s early philosophy of Judaism good is identified with decision of the whole being, evil with the directionlessness that results from failure to decide. His existentialism, his philosophy of community, his religious socialism, and his dialogical philosophy all develop within his philosophy of Judaism as well as outside of it.
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Does logic reflect the nature of reality, or is it a merely formal structure governing the use of language’? In short, are we to have no more than “logic without ontology’’? Smith believes that Hartshorne takes too lightly the view that logic marks out the domain of the “necessary,” while the “real” coincides with the domain of fact. The problem with this juxtaposition is that the “real’’ and the necessary are mutually exclusive.
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We all owe an incalculable debt to the science which is applied to our common life. But there are ways of apprehending some kinds of truth which are quite independent of the scientific method. Sometimes these are intuitive and sometimes they are developed by long practice, and of course sometimes they are both.
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In order to match the new curve of Time, Christianity is led to discover the values of this world below the level of God, while Humanism finds room for a God above the level of this world.
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What does the world-adventure upon which we are embarked look like, when we seek to interpret it both objectively and hopefully in the light of the widest, soundest and most modern concepts of astronomy, geology and biology?
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The originality of Hartshorne’s discussions about the nature of God, and particularly his daring and novel defense of the ontological argument, have led some to overlook the fact that, as he himself says, his primary interest lies elsewhere. Weise indicates the way he believes Whitehead’s and Hartshorne’s views should be altered, and how they could be extended and filled out — while maintaining their characteristic thrust and flavor.
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Buber’s thoughts go beyond transcendental ideals through the influence of Kant to Wilhelm Dilthey, to Nietzsche, to Kierkegaard & Dostoievsky, to his own reflection in the unity of the philosophy of realization.
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Value is the ground of loyalty. It also gives zest and interest to life. It destroys boredom. It leads to sensitivity rather than callousness, to responsibility rather than neglect, to decisiveness in place of faltering. It is the source of energy for creative living rather than static existence. Out of the experience of value spring not only the positive responses of faithfulness and love but also the sense of tragedy.
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There may be suprahuman wisdom, and we might well assume an attitude of wholesome humility when we reflect upon our relative insignificance. Can we not accept the suggestion that there are facts, even “scientific” facts, which we can never know because we are incapable of understanding them?
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The rising of the masses and the socialisation of Mankind is associated with the closed shape of the earth, the mechanics of generation and the psychic properties of human matter. In the cosmic sense, because it is the expression and prolongation of the primordial process whereby, at the uttermost extreme from the disintegrating atom, psychic force is born into the Universe and continuously grows, fostered by the ever more complicated grouping of matter.
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Buber’s dialectic combines a theory of religious symbolism with a philosophy of history. Culture and religiousness replace one another in the history of peoples. Culture is the stabilization of the life impulse and life forms between two religious upheavals. Religion is the renewal of the life impulse and life forms between two cultural developments.
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A brief exploration of Peirce’s use of continuity in his account of individual existence as well as a review of this account in the light of Professor Hartshorne’s criticisms.
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The idea of progress comes out of the sense of imperfection, as does the idea of God as transcendent. Thus a sense of divine purpose along with a religious experience growing out of hope is generated.
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The idea of progress comes out of the sense of imperfection, as does the idea of God as transcendent. Thus a sense of divine purpose along with a religious experience growing out of hope is generated.
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Too many have allowed themselves to be put off by the hypocrites, the obscurantists and the lovers of power, who exist in any religious system — as they do elsewhere. The man who possesses a strong religious faith knows very well that there are hundreds of questions which are likely to remain unanswered. But he is in possession of a strong clue to reality and a conviction that he is cooperating with a purpose transcending present observed material phenomena.
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Neither the socialist power-state nor the capitalist state are evil in themselves, but both are evil whenever they prevent the springing-up of the good. The answer is found in the strengthening of the forces of good through the will for genuine relationship and true community.
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The world as it meets one in religious experience is a person-producing and person-enhancing world. Any encounter of this kind is a personal encounter. Therefore God is personal. Impersonal encounters are experiences of the relatively static, the unrelated, the random, the irrelevant and the conservative. Other concepts are also discussed: The meaning of the Word "God, Monotheism, "God" defined, God’s existence, Polytheism, Arguments for existence of God, Omnipotence, Omniscience, Immanence and Transcendence, Creation, and God as personal.
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Hartshorne’s concern is more with the question of what anything must be to be at all, than with determining which entities in the universe have which characteristics. On the whole Cobb has accepted and adopted Whitehead’s cosmology, though much in his thought is distinctively his own.
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As modern knowledge advances and hitherto insoluble problems are solved, a good deal of religion will be seen to be based on false premises, to be inadequate for modern conceptions of the universe, or to be little more than a collection of superstitious taboos.
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Each of our actions has its deep-seated repercussions upon our subsequent inner orientation. The final effect of the light cast by the atomic fire into the spiritual depths of the earth is to illumine the over-riding question of the ultimate end of Evolution — that is to say, the problem of God.
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It is extraordinary that men and women of unusual ability in their respective spheres have rarely taken the trouble to give their adult attention to such a unique way of life as that proposed by Jesus Christ. Each one of us must eventually face the real issue, which is quite simply: do I believe after adult examination of the evidence that Jesus Christ was what he claimed to be, or am I prepared to assert quite definitely that he was wrong in his major claims and that, though much of his teaching is beautiful, he himself was a self-deceived fanatic?
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Faith in peace is not possible except in a world dominated by faith in the future and the progress of Man.
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Community is the ultimate standard by which good is measured, Therefore the basic sin is destruction of community. Love is the fundamental law of life and hate and estrangement are the fundamentals of sin.
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Wolf looks at Hartshorne’s philosophy from the perspective of a psychologist. He suggests tht we monitor spontaneous, complex events in individual atoms and transduce these events into a form that can readily be perceived. Suppose it turned out that people regularly sense something aesthetically or emotionally familiar in the atomic patterns but not in the control patterns. This would not by itself be convincing evidence that there is sentience present. But it would raise interesting questions for further inquiry.
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Each thing and being has a twofold nature: the passive, appropriable, comparable, and dissectible and the active, unappropriable, incomparable, and irreducible. He who truly experiences a thing that leaps to meet him of itself has known therein the world. The contact between the inexpressible circle of things and the experiencing powers of our senses is more and other than a vibration of the ether and the nervous system — it is the incarnate spirit.
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(ENTIRE BOOK) A clear statement of Hartshorne’s “Process Theology” in lay terms. Hartshorne enthusiastically adopts Whitehead’s view of the universe as essentially one of perpetual change and becoming, and relates this concept to traditional Christian theology.
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In this interview, noted German theologian Jürgen Moltmann discusses the development of his theology, his interest in the international Pentecostal movement and his participation in the Christian-Marxist dialogue during the 1960s. Moltmann feels that the future of the Protestant church in Europe lies not with the large state church, but with small communities of faith, …
Continue reading “Communities of Faith and Radical discipleship – An Inerview with Jürgen Moltman”
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The author gives a quick summery of Buber: Compared with Kierkegaard, Dostoievsky and Nietzshe; his philosophy of dialogue; the inclusion of tragedy within the redemption of evil which marks Buber’s deepest realism; Buber’s insight in the I-Thou to I-It concepts.
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The trend of modern thought, with its concentration upon making the most of this present life and the tacit assumption that death means extinction, makes it particularly easy for people to disbelieve in, or to ridicule, life after death. But historically, it is the conviction of unseen realities which has given men and women invincible strength.
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As the end of time approaches a terrifying spiritual pressure will be brought to bear on the limits of the Real, born of the effort of souls desperately straining in their desire to escape from the Earth. The extraordinary adventure of the World will have ended in the bosom of a tranquil ocean, of which, however, each drop will still be conscious of being itself. The dream of every mystic will have found its full and proper fulfillment.
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During last year’s Albert Schweitzer Centennial Symposium at UNESCO in Paris, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm raised a pertinent question: “Is Schweitzer’s religious ethic of reverence for life dependent upon a belief in God?” The question is not as easy as it appears, but it is my contention that, mutatis mutandis, the ethic of reverence for life …
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Last year Yale Divinity School bid farewell to a teacher whose intellect and character shaped generations of students who sat for his lectures, sermons and seminars. Paul Leroy Holmer retired from a teaching career that spanned 40 years, a career that left its mark upon pastors, philosophers, seminaries and churches across the land. In the …
Continue reading “Disciplined by Theology: A Profile of Paul Holmer”
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The Puritans were earnest folk They had little patience with those who had no depth, no deep conviction, no profound concern with what God was doing in their lives. They wanted everyone to become a believer of course — to assent to the reality of God and God’s providence, justice and compassion, and thus find …
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During the ten years immediately following the war, which were an exciting period of biblical renewal and theological ferment, American theological students were reading the works of the existentialist Søren Kierkegaard, the Lundensian Lutheran theologians Anders Nygren and Gustaf Aulén, and the so-called dialectical or neo-orthodox Swiss theologians Karl Barth and Emil Brunner. Though the …
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Raised in Spain by a Catholic mother and a Hindu father, Raimon Panikkar has made inter-religious dialogue his life’s work. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1946, and is attached to the diocese of Varanasi in India. Panikkar is the author of some 40 books, including The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, The Trinity …
Continue reading “Eruption of Truth: An Interview with Raimon Panikkar”
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(ENTIRE BOOK) These chapters present a criticsl discussion among eminent philosophers, theologians, and Hartshorne himself on Hartshorne’s method, his logic, his theism and his metaphysics. Both proponents and critics of this honored philosopher contribute essays to this volume, and Hartshorne writes extensive response to each writer.
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The limits of self-analysis are obvious, and I shall not dwell on them. But as I look back over the past ten years of my life, I am impressed less by how my mind has changed than by how it has remained the same. True, I have already entered my sixth decade, and having thus …
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BOOK REVIEW: Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion. by Van A. Harvey. Cambridge University Press, 319 pp., $59.95. Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols. —John Calvin According to the Hebrew scriptures, humans were made in the image and likeness of God. But the perceived kinship between deity and humanity …
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Twenty years ago, on April 10, 1955, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin died, bequeathing to his friends the critical task of sorting through hundreds of manuscripts on theology, mysticism, philosophy and evolution whose publication the Roman Catholic Church — and Teilhard’s vow of obedience to it — had forbidden. As his books and papers continued to …
Continue reading “From Earth to Heaven: Teilhard’s Politics and Eschatology”
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(ENTIRE BOOK) The relationship of man with the contemporary God. Man’s conditions of life, his perceptions and outlook, his attitude of mind, both toward himself and toward any possible Creator, have all changed so enormously in the last sixty or seventy years that we face an almost a new situation.
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Christians in general and Evangelicals in particular typically believe that God acts. These believers want to talk coherently and adequately about God’s action in the world: in their own lives, in the lives of others, and in all creation. The Bible, which is the Christian’s primary resource for theology, indicates that God is active throughout …
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In a passage in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, one monk furiously upbraids another one for presuming to think that Christ ever laughed. We may dismiss his rigidness as excessive, but the question remains: Why does laughter hold such a meager place in our religion? In the church I attended as a boy, …
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All who believe and think about what they believe are theologians. The theology of all believers is the foundation for every academic theology. But does that mean that Christian theology can be nothing other than a self-related “doctrine of faith,” to echo the title Schleiermacher gave his modern theology? Does it mean that only people …
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I find myself in a rather odd position writing on Martin Heidegger. I find it particularly odd writing on the relation between his political life, on the one hand, and his philosophical and methodological view, on the other. Odd because, despite my best efforts at finding the “bottom line” in his thinking, I have never …
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BOOK REVIEW: Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, by Rüdiger Safranski. Harvard University Press, 474 pp., $35.00. “Moths fly into the light.” So Heidegger’s most prominent student, Hans- Georg Gadamer, characterized Heidegger’s effect on his students at the University of Marburg in the 1920s. Although Heidegger expressed doubts about whether he would ever be capable …
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"In hope we were saved" (Spe salvi facti sumus). Pope Benedict’s encyclical Spe salvi, released in late 2007, begins with this quote from Paul’s letter to the Romans (8:24). Benedict goes on immediately to speak of redemption: "According to the Christian faith, "redemption "– salvation — is not simply a given. Redemption is offered to …
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(ENTIRE BOOK) Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, scientist and Christian mystic, draws on his background in both science and theology to present a unique harmonizing of their often divergent attempts to define and understand reality.
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(ENTIRE BOOK) This book is addressed to both believers and unbelievers and examines a number of areas of religious thought and practice including an approach to intelligible religion, the fundamentals of religious experience, the existence and nature of God, the problem of good and evil, the meaning of the supernatural and of future life, the significance of Christ, the Church, the Bible, miracles and prayer.
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This preparatory word presents a broad framework for approaching the thought of Pere Teilhard, particularly his concept of the omnipresence of the divine Word.
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How philosophers think about religion may well depend largely on how they have encountered it in childhood and youth. Believing this, Hartshorne tells us a bit of the genealogy that makes up his genes and the background that provides the grounds of his theology.
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The subject of this book is not the life or the personality of Jesus, but only his teaching, his message. Little as we know of his life and personality, we know enough of his message to make for ourselves a consistent picture. What the sources offer us is first of all the message of the early Christian community, which for the most part the church freely attributed to Jesus. This naturally gives no proof that all the words which are put into his mouth were actually spoken by him. As can be easily proved, many sayings originated in the church itself; others were modified by the church.
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(ENTIRE BOOK) An historical presentation of the teachings of Jesus in the setting of the thought of his own time. There is here a summary of Bultmann’s controversial method of Biblical interpretation, which tries to recover the deeper meaning behind the mythological concepts of the New Testament.
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Lutheran scholar Joseph Sittler, now nearly 80, is widely considered to be one of the era’s most distinguished — and best-loved — theological educators. Those who have been his students, themselves now noted teachers, preachers and scholars, pay homage to his singular ability to relate the academy to the parish — and to the wider …
Continue reading “Joseph Sittler and the Theater of Human Existence”
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The Vatican’s recent lifting of the "silencing" of Brazilian Franciscan theologian Leonardo Boff for writings deemed injurious to the faith means that his voice and pen once more have their full power. This happy outcome provides an occasion to examine the broad sweep of Boff’s writings — not only those that got him in trouble. …
Continue reading “Leonardo Boff: Theologian for All Christians”
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Greatness, by definition, is not typical or cheap. We expect to pay a price. We sense the need for a degree of imperfection in every great art form, some “redeeming defect.” We expect great persons to have dark secrets. Every greatness, we suspect, has its grave. We expect greatness to be impure, and come in …
Continue reading “Liberalism and Lost Days: A Re-evaluation of Fosdick”
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Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death, by Richard Marius. Harvard University Press; 542 pp. $24.50. Most of Martin Luther’s biographers end their books in the 1520s, some 20 years before Luther’s death. This allows them to leave Luther as a revolutionary (and theological) hero, rather than as an established curmudgeon. And it enabled …
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(ENTIRE BOOK) A comprehensive, richly documented research into Martin Buber’s philosophical and theological teachings and his influence upon philophers and theologians of his times.
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On October 2, 1940, The Christian Century published a W. H. Auden sonnet called "Luther." Its last four lines focused on the central problem which haunts celebrators of Martin Luther on his 500th birthday: "All Works and all Societies are bad; The Just shall live by Faith," he cried in dread. And men and women …
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When I talked to Yale theologian Miroslav Volf last summer, he was being considered as possible dean of Harvard Divinity School. He had told Harvard’s president Lawrence Summers quite clearly that if he were to head the school, he would want to lead HDS back to its roots in constructive theology and the formation of …
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Confessions, by St. Augustine. Translated by Maria Boulding. New City Press, 248 pp., $29.95; paperback, $19.95. Translation . . . is the creation of something new. —Michael P. Steinberg A new translation of a classic text provides an occasion for reading a well-thumbed favorite afresh. Maria Boulding’s translation of the Confessions is the first fruits …
Continue reading “On Reading Augustine and on Augustine’s Reading”
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Augustine of Hippo was converted to Christianity just over 1,600 years ago. Except perhaps for Paul, he is of unsurpassed importance for the entire Western Christian church; and, surprisingly, he is almost equally significant for understanding the entirety of subsequent Western culture. The element of surprise derives from the fact that Augustine is, in many …
Continue reading “Ordering the Soul: Augustine’s Manifold Legacy”
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Our society is marked by no accepted standard of values beyond the purely material, the false god of success, the lure of glamorized sex, the love of money and the "rat-race" of business or social competition. When the true God is unknown, that combination of awe, love, respect, admiration and wonder, which we call worship, becomes diverted toward human beings who exhibit unusual gifts in the public eye. Without the Spirit of the living God the public conscience is capricious and ill-informed.
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The most obvious form in which the unity of Buber’s thought expresses itself is his philosophy of dialogue, and much of this book is centered on the development and implications of that philosophy. Buber’s thoughts are drawn together in terms of his attitude toward the nature and redemption of evil. The author shows the significance of this attitude for such fields as ethics, social philosopohy, psychotherapy, and education.
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Charles Hartshorne has become the most forceful and convincing interpreter of Whitehead, and to him belongs principal credit for shaping the influence of process philosophy upon contemporary philosophical theology.
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Pere Teilliard de Chardin, a figure-head in the unfolding of a new cycle in the life of mankind, moves us profoundly not only by the amazing lucidity of his scientific vision but also by his love, his immense love, of God, which enabled him to see, everywhere throughout the created world, what the majority of …
Continue reading “Prefatory Letter, from H.M. Queen Marie-Jose (Belgium)”
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In my last conversation with Karl Barth, in 1961 — a conversation that was for both of us in some ways painful — I asked him what he expected of his former students, seeing that he was so dissatisfied with what I was then doing (i.e., developing what was to be The Secular Meaning of …
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Panikkar understands what pluralism means and what it can offer us — in his language, he is attuned to the “myth” of pluralism — without succumbing to it as another “ism.” His working proposition is that for modem persons of any persuasion “isolation is no longer possible and unity is not convincing since it destroys …
Continue reading “Raimundo Panikkar: Pluralism Without Relativism”
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The hundredth anniversary of Albert Schweitzer’s birth has been marked by observances commemorating his contributions to medicine, music, theology and world peace. Perhaps the most notable of these celebrations were the blue-ribbon conference hosted by UNESCO in Paris and the Atlanta Symposium of the Albert Schweitzer Centenary. The latter featured performances by the Atlanta Symphony, …
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Rudolf Bultmann — who died on July 30, 1976 at the advanced age of 91 — was the last of the theological giants who grew up in the universities of the Kaiser’s Germany (he began to study theology in 1903 at 19), and the last of the prophets who struggled to hear the word of …
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Book Review: The Theology of Thomas Aquinas. Edited by Rik Van Nieuwenhove and Joseph Wawrykow. University of Notre Dame Press, 472 pp.’ $37.50. Holy Teaching: Introducing the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas. By Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt. Brazos, 352 pp., $27.99 paperbavk. One of the fascinating aspects of the events surrounding the passing of Pope …
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I. Works by Hartshorne An exhaustive bibliography of Hartshorne’s published writings from 1929 to 1967, compiled by Mrs. Charles Hartshorne, included in Ralph E. James, The Concrete God: A New Beginning for Theology-The Thought of Charles Harishorne (Indianapolis-Bobbs.Merrill Company, 1967), pp. 195-223. A less exhaustive but useful bibliography of Hartshorne’s writings, also compiled by Mrs. …
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I am treading deeper and deeper into leaves and silence. I see more faces watching, non-human faces. Ironically, I who profess no religion find the whole of my life a religious pilgrimage. The religious forms of the present leave me unmoved. My eye is round, open, and undomesticated as an owl’s in a primeval forest …
Continue reading “The American Spirituality of Loren Eiseley”
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(ENTIRE BOOK) Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest, paleontologist and Christian mystic. This collection of his essays reveals his concepts of “social heredity” and progress, “the planetization of mankind,” and the Noosphere — a biological interpretation of human history. Teilhard was prevented by the church from publishing his work while he remained alive.
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May 24, 1978 marks the 100th anniversary of the birthday of Harry Emerson Fosdick, America’s greatest liberal preacher of the 20th century. For more than 40 years Fosdick was at the forefront of theological and social thinking and controversy as he brought to his country a prophetic voice of reasoned faith and enlightened hope. I …
Continue reading “The Living of These Days: A Tribute to Harry Emerson Fosdick”
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If The United States and Great Britain are “two nations separated by a common language,” then perhaps Christian theologians of the two countries are separated by a common theology.” American and British theologians oft en find themselves in significant agreement — drawing on similar sources and reaching shared conclusions — but geographical distance as well …
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Ten years ago this spring the Macmillan Company brought out a slim paperback volume titled The Secular City. The apprehensive publisher chanced a first printing of 10,000 only after being assured by the officers of the National Student Christian Federation, at whose request I had written the book, that at least half the copies could …
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Mysticism: it begins with mist, centers on "I" and ends in schism. Or so I was taught in my conservative Protestant upbringing and then at a Presbyterian seminary. I also recall learning that mysticism was vaguely medieval and Roman Catholic. Not until 1970 — late in my graduate school training — was a profound and …
Continue reading “The Thoroughly Modern Mysticism of Matthew Fox”
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When the winter quarter ended this year at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Langdon Gilkey, the Shailer Mathews professor of theology, retired after a quarter-century at the school, where he had been a colleague of such eminent theologians and scholars of religious studies as Paul Tillich, Mircea Eliade, Paul Ricoeur and David Tracy. Although …
Continue reading “The Ultimate and the Ordinary: A Profile of Langdon Gilkey”
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It was some 16 years ago that I was graciously invited (challenged?) by The Christian Century to write one of the articles in the series "How I Am Making Up My Mind" ("Dissolution and Reconstruction in Theology," February 3, 1965). Now, 16 years later, writing for the awesome series "How My Mind Has Changed," I …
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Whether there can be theology here and now becomes a serious question only when the subject of theology is taken to be of the utmost seriousness. This condition has hardly characterized the religious scene in recent times. The question has therefore appeared to be not so much serious as interesting, or academic. Not knowing what …
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BOOK REVIEW:In Face of Mystery, by Gordon Kaufman. Harvard University Press, 509 pp., $39.95. For nearly 25 years, Gordon Kaufman has been a senior professor of theology at Harvard. His earlier books, such as Systematic Theology: A Historicist Perspective (1968), God the Problem (1972): and An Essay on Theological Method (1975), have been important contributions …
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It is rare, I believe, for one theologian to be able to give us general priorities for congregational life. Most theological authors are specialists: one interprets the scriptural foundations for preaching and teaching, another explains how to “manage” ministry, and others confine themselves to some particular subsection of parish life — liturgy, youth work, pastoral …
Continue reading “Thomas Merton: The Global Future and Parish Priorities”
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Ten years have now gone by since the tragic and untimely death of Thomas Merton. His death was a tissue of ironies: a man who had fought for monastic solitude for over 25 years died thousands of miles from his Kentucky hermitage; this passionate pacifist was flown back from Thailand in a military plane, from …
Continue reading “Thomas Merton: The Pursuit of Marginality”
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Book Review: With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology By Stanley Hauerwas. Brazos Press, 250 pp. Religious liberals need Stanley Hauerwas, a perpetual disturber of their peace. Religious conservatives can find him fruitfully unsettling too, since he is a pacifist and opposes capital punishment. But he offers basic reassurance to …
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The translator offers a brief rationale of his task of presenting a rendering that is faithful to both the poetic and scientific natures of the text.
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The eschatological interpretation of human life was not merely the teaching of a prophet nineteen centuries ago, but is essentially true today as then. Jesus’ message as he delivered it, not some modern variation or dilution of it, is his message today. The details of apocalyptic imagery are transitory (here is the germ of “demythologizing”), and wishful thinking about the world to come is valueless, even harmful; but the eschatological message, “The kingdom of God is at hand,” “among you” not “within you,” is relevant to any age, including our own.
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The elaborate neologisms and allusive formulations of words used by Teilhard to get around the shortcomings of language in expressing his thought, causes great problems to the translator. Some French does not translate well into English (and, of course, the reverse is often just as illusive).
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Love is primary for any adequate ethic. At least that is what most Christian traditions say. Most Christians also believe that love is the heart of the virtuous life. But can human minds and neural systems – especially of those who love often and well – tell us anything about love and a life of …
Continue reading “Types of Love and Types of Exemplars: Implications for Virtue Science”
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“How well do philosophy and religion agree in a man [sic] of sound understanding!” – John Wesley (Journal, Tuesday, July 3, 1753) The bulk of this paper entails my descriptions of four elements in a typology. I describe types of Wesleyan philosophy in terms of interests that those in the Wesleyan Philosophical Society might pursue. …
Continue reading “Types of Wesleyan Philosophy: The General Landscape and My Own Research”
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The occasion of Francis of Assisi’s 800th birthday anniversary in 1982 commanded the attention of the Christian world, Catholic and Protestant. Last year Protestants of every stripe (and many Catholics) put aside denominational differences to celebrate the 500th year since Martin Luther’s birth. In the words of Isaiah, we “look to the rock from which …
Continue reading “Ulrich Zwingli: Prophet of the Modern World”
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What are we to make of a thinker who sets forth a philosophy of “ethical mysticism,” and yet maintains that “all real progress in the world is in the last analysis produced by rational thought”? How are we to understand one who says: “Every world- and life-view which is to satisfy thought is mysticism,” and …
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Thomas Aquinas has had a long but, on the whole, not very happy history among Protestants. While some early Protestant reformers were well versed in Thomistic theology, Martin Luther was not among them. Most of Luther’s important teachers were disciples of the Franciscan theologian William Ockham. The Occamists taught a theology of grace that tilted …
