Bernard Eugene Meland’s Unpublished Papers [1 ed.] 9781443844260, 9781443842150

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Bernard Eugene Meland’s Unpublished Papers

Bernard Eugene Meland’s Unpublished Papers

Edited by

John N. Gaston and W. Creighton Peden

Bernard Eugene Meland’s Unpublished Papers, Edited by John N. Gaston and W. Creighton Peden This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2013 by John N. Gaston and W. Creighton Peden and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4215-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4215-0

To The Staff of the Hudson Library, Highlands, North Carolina Who have been so helpful in so many ways for so many years.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... ix Meland’s Unpublished Papers by Year 1937 Attachment to Life ...................................................................................... 1 Man’s Religious Outreach ........................................................................ 10 Primary Religion ....................................................................................... 25

1938 Praise and Relinquishment........................................................................ 33 Reality in Process ..................................................................................... 48 Religion Rooted in Nature ........................................................................ 61 When Religion Uproots Life ..................................................................... 70

1939 Mysticism in Modern Terms ..................................................................... 83 The Controlling Concept of Our Times .................................................... 89 The Nature of Man.................................................................................... 94

1944 My Baccalaureate ..................................................................................... 99 The Confessions of a Frustrated Theologian........................................... 108

1946 Art, Religion and the Cultural Mood ...................................................... 121 Towers of the Mind ................................................................................ 141

1950 Kantian Influences in Christian Thought ................................................ 185

1951 Radical Empiricism ................................................................................ 203

1952 The Pathology of Form and Symbol ....................................................... 209

1955 The Roots of Religious Naturalism ......................................................... 221

1956 The New Realism in Religious Inquiry ................................................... 233

1958 Glimpses of India’s Faith and Culture .................................................... 247

1959 The Christian Encounter with the Faiths of Men .................................... 299 The Liberal Evangel................................................................................ 314

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1960 Some Concluding Observations Concerning Theological Method ......... 335

1961 The Changing Role of Reason & Revelation in Western Thought ......... 347

1964 Erik Bernhard Meland ............................................................................ 359

1966 Empirical Theology at Chicago .............................................................. 363

1967 Creativity in William James.................................................................... 383

1968 My Response to Jack Sibley’s Thesis ..................................................... 401

1969 Reflections on the Chicago School ......................................................... 409 Some Autobiographical Reflections ....................................................... 427 The Breaking of Forms in the Interest of Importance ............................. 439

1970 The Continuing Search for Intelligence in Ministry ............................... 477 Beyond Theology and What Else? .......................................................... 493

1971 Reflections on the Role of the Liberal Arts College ............................... 509

1979 Response to Mr. Loomer’s Question Concerning the Being of God ....... 529 Reflections on Changing Cycles of Religious Liberalism....................... 532 Reflections on Loomer’s Interpretation of the “Size of God” ................. 547

Meland’s Unpublished Papers (Undated) Some Directives for Theological Method ............................................... 555 Our Common Faith ................................................................................. 578 Prayer...................................................................................................... 581 Reality Over Reason ............................................................................... 582 The Significance of Henry Nelson Wieman ........................................... 601 Wieman’s Concept of “Creative Interchange” ........................................ 633

Notes....................................................................................................... 647 Bibliography ........................................................................................... 659 Index ....................................................................................................... 661

PREFACE

This volume contains the unpublished papers of Bernard E. Meland and is a companion volume to W. Creighton Peden’s book Life and Thought of Bernard Eugene Meland, American Constructive Theologian (1899–1993) which was published in 2010 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. These papers contain more than forty-six lectures, reports, and other personal documents that Meland wrote at various times between 1937 and 1979. These papers are ordered by the year they were composed and, within the year, alphabetically by title. Several undated papers follow those for which a date is known. Where possible, each of the papers was scanned, processed by optical character recognition software, and visually inspected to ensure that it accurately reflected the content of the original. Papers that could not be scanned were entered manually and then subjected to the same visual inspection process. Because some of these papers are Meland’s notes for lectures, reports, and sermons which he intended to deliver orally, he felt free to change, edit, and update them until the moment of delivery and many of the papers contained material that was either marked for deletion or moved to another location. Also, Meland inserted hand-written words, phrases, and emphasis marks into many of these papers. We have attempted to honor his intent by incorporating his editing changes into the text as we prepared these papers for publication. We believe that the resulting document closely reflects the text that provided the foundation for some of Meland’s lectures, papers, and reports. Meland used a variety of techniques to provide references to quoted or otherwise inserted material, including: footnotes, endnotes, and in-line reference notations. In order to assure uniformity, we have converted all footnotes and endnotes to notes and supplied a complete reference at the end of this document. We have preserved Meland’s in-line references; because there is no uniformity in the preparation of these references—they have been preserved as Meland wrote them. Preparing a useful Index is always a challenge. One must search for and identify the concepts and ideas that undergird the author’s words as well as provide references to the extensive list of individuals with which

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he or she is acquainted. We trust we have succeeded on both counts; however, any omissions or other errors are strictly our own. Readers are referred to Tyron Inbody’s THE CONSTRUCTIVE THEOLOGY OF BERNARD MELAND: Postliberal Empirical Realism (1995) as this work contains a complete bibliography of Meland’s published writings Appreciation is due to the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library and Dr. W. Creighton Peden, Meland’s literary executor, for permission to publish these papers. John N. Gaston W. Creighton Peden —Fall, 2012

MELAND’S UNPUBLISHED PAPERS BY YEAR

1937 Attachment to Life In his deepest moments, man has always sought union with a vaster reality beyond himself. And the annunciation of that union has been the good news of all the religions. This intuition, wrote the late Havelock Ellis in The New Spirit, has found voice in every age. It is this intuition which is the ‘emptiness’ of Lao-Tzu—the freedom from all aims that center in self. This is the great news of the Upanishads. The Buddhist’s Nirvana has the same charm: it opens up the kingdom of the Universe to man… This is the great assertion of Christ, “I and the Father are one,” and whenever Christianity has reached its highest expression, it has sung over again the old refrain of joy at the new birth into eternal life—the union of the soul through Christ with God… Even the austere Imperial Stoic becomes lyrical as this intuition comes to him. ‘Everything is harmonious with me which is harmonious with thee, O Universe!’ As far back as we can trace, the men of all races, each in his own way and with his own symbols, have raised, this shout of exultation. There is no larger freedom for man.1

Psychologically this union has implied varying conditions of relationship. In the Tao-te-King of Lao-Tzu and the native religions of China, it implied at-one-ness with the Way (Tao) of Heaven and Earth. And to the Chinese, Heaven and Earth meant the order of Nature. In the Upanishads and the Buddhist Dhammapa, as well as in certain stages of Christian lore, union meant world denial and an outreach toward a transcendent state of good beyond the horizon of earthly scenes. Union with reality was a condition men longed for, but one that they rarely realized in experience, except in cases where the saving process had become consummated and assured. In present-day empirical philosophies of religion, on the other hand, union with reality implies both a living relationship with a sustaining environment and acceptance of this present, living process as, in some measure, an experienced good. This vital integration with a sustaining environment, accompanied by an affirming commitment to the

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living process, may be described psychologically as attachment to life. I Man’s physical attachment to life is quite beyond his control. He is a creature of his earthly environment in the same sense that all living forms are related to the planetary pattern. And though he has seemingly unlimited powers of flight, he is rooted in nature. His rooting differs somewhat from that of trees and plant life. He is not grounded, yet he is intricately involved in the environing world. Were he able to stand off and observe himself living upon his planet as he views a body of sea life, he would understand that his dependence upon the blanket of atmosphere that envelops him and the soil that sustains his organism is not unlike that relationship that confines the fish to the briny deep. Man is rooted in this planetary home. However mobile his organism, or daring his dreams of flight, he may not venture beyond the bounds of this atmospheric sea, or desert for long the soil that sustains him. This suggests only one aspect of man’s rooting as an earth-creature. There are physical relations growing out of the peculiar biological demands of his organism and the peculiar fitness of the natural environment to serve those demands. There are also psychical connections relating men to the social environment that has shaped his peculiar selfhood. As one pursues the mystery of the human individual participating in his world, he becomes more and more aware of the unfathomable web of organic connections interlacing his life with the life of the planet and with the universe that embraces both. How far this dependence extends, no science or philosophy can as yet tell us. That it is intimate and far-reaching is an assured fact. For the sensitive person, this realization opens up the immense and baffling problem of the vast world of reality with which all the thinkers in religion and philosophy through the ages have been concerned. What does it mean to be sustained by these forces of earth? What is the nature of this order of reality that relates us to these vital sources? How may we know this creative order more clearly? And may life fulfill itself with greater scope and meaning through adjustment to its processes? This is no mere succession of queries. It is a hunger, the unquenchable desire to unite the self with the more-than-self. It is the perpetual outreach for union with the world, and the annunciation of this larger freedom through oneness. Modern man cannot sing the songs of ancient men and find satisfaction enough in their praise of life. He can be stirred by their exultation, and impelled to seek their peace; but his freedom through union can come only by discovery of what actually possesses him and rightfully claims him as creature. His route to this oneness is to become sensitively aware of the

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environing Earth that sustains him. Deep roots hold man inextricably to this vast world of earth-life. To become aware of this rooting and to respond to its demands is to have the elemental experience of the religious man. II Oneness with Earth is only one sense in which modern man may achieve his fulfilling attachment to life. Another basic form of it is manifest in the will to live. This sense of attachment to life is the most elemental creature feeling. As long as it persists, life takes on a normal human coloring. People have desires and an eagerness to fulfill them. When this attachment to life wanes a psychical lag ensues resulting in a sense of defeat, a touch of cynicism, or ennui. The charm of childhood issues from the hearty abandon of these little folk. Life is so obviously worth the candle, no one among them wonders whether or not it should burn. Of course it is unreflective. It is animal faith and the innocent response to the will to live. Then come the transitions leading to the reflective life. Growth does many things to us, the least considerate of which is to thrust us from this sure sense of life’s worth. Misgivings arise at an early age. The passage from the cunning babe to the awkward, growing boy is a subtle change; so gradual in fact that the nearest observers will not seem to notice that it is happening. But the environmental effects of stimuli-response are unfailing. Soon these changes begin to tell. The enveloping hospitality of once attentive adults shades into commonplace tolerance. Ardor chills into a sober awareness of a disturbing presence. The actual psychological changes in the growing child’s environment elude the record. Incidents occur and pass without becoming clear to the growing mind, or hardly apparent to the older ones. Only memories carry the scars. Yet something happens between the ages of four and ten that turns the stride of the eleven year olds from the company of adults, and creates the sense of uneasiness and distrust which increasingly alienates the young from the old, and from the world of life they accept and approve. “Even nice children,” writes Walter de la Mare in Early One Morning, “and not merely the dour and the saturnine may not care very much for the adult—not as a class. …if given the choice between a tea party event of distinguished grown-ups and a solitary visit (whether or not provided with buns) to the Zoological Gardens, there is little doubt they will prefer the animals.”2 The psychologists have had many things to say about this period of estrangement with its storm and stress. We need not repeat their diagnoses. The fact that is of present interest is the fundamental change in creature relation that comes over these growing lives as they pass from the animal faith of their sheltered years into the

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perilous open of wider social experience. Going to school or becoming exposed to group association is a socializing process. It presses upon the ego in ways that make it yield. But yielding to social pressure is not without its price. It may integrate the self in its surroundings while at the same time dissolving the fragile fibers that once formed the attachment to the web of life in its childlike faith. The maturation that comes through social adjustment brings perpetual shock to the emerging person who, in the very process of attaining the sense of selfhood, must enter also upon the forced experience of losing the self, or of at least merging the self in the larger environment. The so-called revolt of youth is more elemental than an intellectual protest against adult values; it is a deep unrest arising from a vague awareness of having been painfully uprooted from one world of being and transplanted to another amid austere environings that only add to the strangeness. Basic to any experience of a confident rapport with life, which is the quintessence of the religious relation, is the sense of being at home in the world. This, the growing child does not have, once he has been thrust from familiar shorelands to embark upon the sea of social reality. His advancing intellectual life may increase the tension. To the degree that new studies awaken the mind to fuller meaning and possibility of exploration, they make for a healthy projection of the emerging self. But this development is always accompanied by a counter process of cleansing the mind of cherished ideas. When the latter process outruns the former (as is so often the case, for the critical awakening is more readily achieved than the constructive ability to recreate concepts of meaningful values) the painful and devitalizing sense of life’s emptiness is inevitable. This is the plight of many thoughtful and sensitive youths who struggle on toward intellectual maturity. In many instances, young people have lost their comfortable possession of animal faith through critical reflection, never to rise again above the level of a wistful agnosticism. Some fail to return that far. Thinking is not in itself as difficult as thinking things through. Although I should not wish to argue from these observations for the abandonment of the intellectual search, I am clear that discrimination in impelling young minds to take up the trail is urgent. They who can stand the gaff of the search, who can condition their feelings sufficiently to keep problems posed, and their total organic response flexible enough for conditions of growth toward maturity may find entrance to a world of meaning that is satisfying beyond all expectations. To enter upon this Promised Land unscathed and free from fatal wounds is to achieve the rarest returns of growing up. All the effort and pain in process are as nothing compared to this high turning. But for those who attain this

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fulfillment, there are proportionately larger numbers who fail to advance beyond their disillusionment. Some find in this state of mal adjustment a new source of freedom and abandonment. It is not the most healthy form of freedom, for it may readily take the turn of flippant defiance of all that passes as value. Detachment in this form becomes irresponsible and irreverent. For the majority of young adults emerging from these strained, growing years, becoming immersed in the organic processes of the common life, through family responsibilities, and employment may be enough to shock them out of their mental wasteland. Taking a job and becoming married, or assuming an active part in the affairs of the community have saved many an active intellectualist from the career of a desert wanderer. Participation in life does not so much answer the mind’s troubling queries; it sublimates them in active effort. It releases the psychic creature in man from the grid of mental obsessions which have developed in situations where intellectual problems have been stressed out of proportion to other phases of life’s interests, and plunges him into experienceable events that return him to the warm valley of human affection and solvable problems. This return to the common life in a responsible role may, for the first time, create a fruitful situation for clear thinking. Problems will pose themselves in ways that open up pursuable paths. Instead of the inertia of mind, formerly experienced from attacking problems too vast, remote or abstract to cope with, giving issue only to stillborn ideas, the revived person may experience a new quickening. It is an observable fact, in any case, that the attachment to life, once held in childhood, then lost during subsequent years of growth, has returned with new vitality when the youth has become a man, engaged in the normal routine of the mature life. That many do not recover this perspective is the sadder side of the story. And, whether recognized or not, this inability to seize life with the zest of the child’s faith, is a loss to the human spirit for which the fruits of sophistication can only partially compensate. No one, who is aware of the facts, will deny that the life of the sophisticate has its rewards. One gets a kind of insight from the perspective of spectator which only isolation and detachment can give. But they who hold to these solitary heights must also yield to the chilling winds. There is a quality of existence, on the other hand, that issues from the organic attachment to life which the child and the peasant unconsciously live with and which some achieve through a more mature conscious commitment, rewarding beyond anything that isolation and detachment can provide. Whoever turns to achieve this quality of existence, turns toward the religious life; for to be religious, in the primary sense, is to attain that emotional relationship with .

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the environing reality of the universe which releases the creative powers of the creature and brings him to maturity and fulfillment. III The words “attachment to life” are not to be taken too narrowly to imply merely the sensuous grasp of experience. There is attachment which is mere creature existence. This is its minimum meaning—mere physical clinging to existence. All sentient creatures manifest this will to live. This elemental relationship with reality is not to be dismissed lightly, however, for it is the fundamental organic fact making for creature striving toward fulfillment. All through the child’s early years this unthinking hold upon life, shared with all kinsmen of earth, undergirds his zestful existence and promotes his growth. But the growing child may develop indefinitely beyond this minimum level, expanding the scope and thereby enhancing the quality of his attachment. The dawn of the reflective life ushers in a new era in the child’s career. This is the more heartening side of the story of growing up. At this state of his development, the child ceases to be a little animal and begins to take on dimensions of the human person. The human status carries with it sensitivities, interests, outreaches, and realizations that go beyond mere creature existence. Human intellect not only controls and directs impulse; it projects it expectantly toward new ends. Thus mind is not merely an instrument that regulates activities; it is a roving searchlight, anticipating new activities and interests. This imaginative capacity of intellect lifts the growing human being out of the company of creatures that seek existence mere and arouses in him the concern, sometimes the hunger, for significance. Men’s yearning for more than existence occurs long before they are able to recognize that for which they yearn. There are human beings, to be sure, who live below the imagination level. Their intellectual powers may assume a normal competency in the regulation of activities. They become highly efficient in the pursuit of enterprises that promote existence and increase its economy. The scope and character of their participation in life, however, may hardly distinguish them from creatures at the animal level of existence. At best they may be able to refine their animal impulses and actions through the regulatory use of intellect. Every outreach, however, that carries the individual beyond the mere interest in existence to a qualitative use of existence, extends his human dimension. The child reading his story book is on his way toward this higher destiny. Much of it is of existence mere: amusing tales of queer old Mr. Penny, living in the house by all those animals, of The Little Family that lives in a little house that has doors and windows and a chimney on

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top. But when the little mind catches the stimulus of the sounds: Some one came knocking At my Wee, small door; Some one came knocking, I’m sure—sure-sure; 1 listened, I opened, I looked to left and right, But nought there was a-stirring In the still dark night: Only the busy beetle Tap-tapping on the wall, Only from the forest The screech-owl’s call, Only the cricket whistling While the dewdrops fall, So I know not who came knocking, At all, at all, at all.3

or the lure of the lines: I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, And the wheel’s kick and wind’s song and the white sails shaking, And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.4

Childhood begins to open beyond creature existence to embrace the human world of creative adventure. School days intensify and extend this human outreach. Some children take to it easily. Others writhe under it. Some grow into adulthood as promising human beings. Many fall back into the rut and routine of animal existence. How they who awaken to the life of the imagination, in the course of this human venture, attain a new kind of attachment to life. While they never wholly lose the zestful concern for sensuous existence, they transcend it in a way that makes it assume a proportionately secondary place in their scheme of things. Explorations of the mind, ventures in the appreciation of beauty, participation in the interests of other people, absorption in causes that carry possibilities of new values, or devotion to enterprises that give promise of furthering the frontiers of the growing earth—these, and many other similar preoccupations consonant with the human spirit become increasingly more primary. Attachment to

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life here takes on objective form. It becomes attachment to that which is living, growing, becoming in a significant sense. This suggests why the harsh fact of the tragic sense of life does not preclude the praise of life. It merely redirects the praise toward life in its vaster form. It arouses men from their absorption with static value to respond to the lure of the growing good. Attachment to life in this vaster form is attachment to life in its eternal sense. When one has pushed on through childhood, then through youth, sensing now this intimation of the more beyond, now that luminous vista, growing into wider awareness through appreciations and reflections that develop, suddenly coming, through maturing vision, upon the realization of this growing, creative order, attachment to life takes on transcendent meaning, infinitely more impelling that the mere will to live. One outgrows the simple cause of the one creature life and enters into the creative cause that is beyond all creatures and all creature existence. This is not to abandon life; it is to integrate one life in the vaster movement of living and growing good. To become aware of this vaster and more significant reality in our midst, and to become committed to it as to very God, is to become religiously awakened and religiously related to the eternal aspect of the existent world. We come back then to this elemental insight which seems profoundly true and peculiarly pertinent for our times: namely, that the sense of the significance of life in the individual person, as well as in the species, rises out of an organic attachment to life. The more consciously aware we become of this deep rooting, the more meaningful becomes our participation in the life of the world. And participation that carries such elemental meaning will bring health to the conduct of life, for it will release energies in affirming says, build up an accumulation of memories to enhance experience, and develop habituated motor response that will condition the mind and spirit for a full acceptance of life with its gifts and its glories. This total response of the creature in the form of commitment to the sustaining reality is the praise of life that opens the way for his creative fulfillment. It has impressed me again and again that the quality of life that one senses in the child and in the peasant reflects a spirituality that is both elemental and ultimate. I do not mean to idealize their existence. I am aware that there is much in their experiences that is ugly and crude and without many of the values that the mature and more sophisticated person demands. Yet both the child and the peasant manifest an elemental capacity which the more civilized people among us appear to lack. I call it the attachment to life—this simple awareness of elemental experience which the child, because of his peculiar physiological state, cannot escape,

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and the peasant, for all his years, has never lost. Somehow in this environment of increasing civilization, man must discover how to grow to maturity, how to extend the scope of sensitivity and awareness, and to increase his technical efficiency, without severing the nerve that connects him with the Sources of Existence. Somehow he must achieve the capacity to cultivate the life of the mind and the imagination without losing this creature-heritage that is organized and vital to his being. Bernard Eugene Meland Pomona College Claremont, California

Man’s Religious Outreach Seen in long perspective, the religious outreach has been the wistful wonder of the child in man, yearning to feel secure and glad. The concern to be secure has impelled men to nervous preoccupation with the powers or forces that affected life. The impulse to be glad has given the religious outreach the forward and adventurous note, thrusting men toward the ideal, the new possibilities of human experience. As one threads his way through the story of religious cultures he finds both interests interwoven, although one or the other will appear dominant in any specific period or among particular groups. When philosophies of religion come to be written, one interest or the other becomes the dominant theme, and the divine reality is presented either as the God who sustains or the God who lures men to higher fulfillment. Traditional systems of religious thought have been concerned mostly with the God who saves and consoles. Current literature seems to emphasize the more robust outreach toward the creative possibilities of man’s life. This distinction may not be drawn with finality, for in a sense, the two aspects of the religious outreach are always concomitant, even though one may be more articulate than the other. When the modern philosopher stresses the ideal element he is impelled to qualify his assertion by acknowledging its relation to the Sources of existence. And the traditionalist can never ignore completely the creative operations of cosmic life. In the common man’s outreach, the divergence has been less marked since the living response tends to fuse and integrate what the intellect finds occasion to divide. In early man the concern for security and self-preservation is so strong that historians of religion have been inclined to make it determining in the emergence of the religious interest.5 That this was inevitable, any sympathetic observer of early man’s life will understand. His precarious mode of existence intensified his concern for survival. Threatened by unfriendly elements in the wilds of nature he was humbled with incurable terror. But there were also experiences that warmed his heart: the coming of the dawn after the dark night, the warmth of the sun, the successful hunt, the sight of folk, and kinfolk. Thus while fear drove him at one time to a despair that became religious in magnitude, gratitude and sheer ecstasy at other times lifted him to a mood of praise. This impulse to praise life has not been given adequate emphasis in the literature on the origin of religion. While one needs to avoid substituting one oversimplification for another, there may be some justification for advancing the thesis that there is more substantial evidence for suggesting

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that the religious response arose out of the impulse to praise life than for supporting the view that religion arose from fear. Without meaning to make too much of this point, I should like to pursue its possibilities. I. Since the impulse to act preceded the impulse to reflect, we can understand why ritual, rather than rational expression, was the primary manifestation of the religious response. Actually there is no real distinction between action and reflection. Thinking is acting in a certain way which involves what we call mental elements in coordination with physiological and psychical phases of the organism. What we specify as action in contra-distinction to reflection is a form of behaving that proceeds from non-mental impulses—impulses that are essentially feeling responses. That the religious response, in its primary expression, took the form of impulsive action is not difficult to understand. Early men felt their environment before they thought much about it. And their elemental feelings doubtless gave rise to actions before they prompted wonderings and musings which became mental. Havelock Ellis makes the claim that the dance preceded all the arts.6 We may safely assume also that religious ritual first made its appearance in the form of the sacred dance. Examination of the rites and ceremonies of primitive religions reveals that the dance is not only elemental, but fundamental in their procedures. As one ascends the scale of culture-religions, he finds the dance sublimated by other forms of expression and interest; but never does it completely vanish so long as ritual remains a prominent feature. It may graduate into a solemn and stately procession, but who will not recognize in the rhythmic, swaying vital movement of the procession, the restrained and sublimated steps of the dance. Perhaps we would come nearer to the primary source of the religious outreach were we to designate rhythm, rather than ritual as the elemental expression. Ritual is the socialized expression of rhythm, and the dance is the most obvious form of ritual which may express the feeling of rhythm. The thesis that response to the impulse for rhythm, resulting in the ritual of the dance, marks the beginning of religious behavior, points also to the fact that the elemental emotion in the religious response is one of “joy” rather than fear, as has been commonly assumed. That early man feared his environment, no student of primitive life will deny. But the reaction most normal to a feeling of fear is to cringe and recede. This early man also did. Had he done that and nothing more, there is little likelihood that he would have assumed a religious relation with his world. It was while in an ecstatic moment of sheer excitation, thrill, or gratitude,

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growing out of some heart-warming-experience: the sight of the sun after the cold, dark night, the successful hunt, a battle, the return of comrades; or out of the exhilaration of anticipated battle, or even the elation of wonder and awe, that this impulse to rhythmic action arose and impelled men to dance out their vital joy. The simple acceptance of life with its elemental joy and spontaneous response gave rise to a normal confidence projecting present experiences hopefully toward their continuance or renewal in the future. This wistful outreach, giving birth to aspiration, thrust man from his confident mood at times, and confronted him with the shadows of fear and impending peril. Men felt the elemental impulse to live and to praise life, and projected their sense of joy into hope and expectation. And this very foretaste of possible destiny thrust them fearfully into the perilous open. “The function of fear,” R. R. Marett reminds us, “is in its way no less universal or supreme than that of hope; though, even so, hope is of superior importance, since ultimately we fear because we hope, and not vice versa. This priority in respect to value comes out even more clearly as we ascend the scale that leads from instinct up to reason.”7 We should not overdo the emphasis upon the healthy emotion of human joy being elemental. That would be to make of early man’s life a false paradise. Certainly the hazards of his environment confronted him constantly. And the remains of his cave life give evidence of a mode of life that involved grim and menacing moments. This was doubtless to give rise to behavior patterns, modifying the impulsive reactions in ritual to rites designed to cope with the environing perils. But this reveals a later reflective tendency, not a spontaneous response. Early man’s primary spontaneous reactions were to cringe when he feared, and to leap with a child’s delight when the impulse to praise possessed him. When he came to think about conditions more soberly, his dance was tempered by techniques that sought security; yet the impulse to selfpreservation, which Moore makes basic in his theory of the origin of religion, must be viewed as more than a physiological response. It was a highly complex reaction, suffused with awareness of life’s satisfactions as well as of its perils. It was the impulse to preserve life issuing from this elemental impulse to praise life. When this spontaneous response to the good of life is taken into account as one of the elemental expressions of early man’s behavior, the practice of worship takes on new meaning. It is not merely the corporate means of cajoling angry spirits or deities; it is the emotional outreach of the creature in man, responding to this impulse to gratitude and appreciative wonder.

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Although the religious response emerged as man’s elementary appreciative reaction, it soon took on more sober aspects and more inclusive proportion, when man himself assumed the responsibilities of a systematic livelihood. Here the religious response as an aesthetic reaction assumes its social character and function. Once this stage was reached, the social significance of the religious ritual replaced the aesthetic motif. The aesthetic element remains, but always as an instrument of social ends. Poet and singer kept alive the appreciative impulse, but priest and prophet turned this impulse to more utilitarian ends. Yet these sober, social functions: the tilling of the soil, harvesting of grain, preparations for battle, became, in turn, the subject matter of their song and poetry. Thus the praise motif persisted and became a transmitting influence, enhancing the strenuous and otherwise drab existence through celebration and ceremony. Fear alone did not make men religious. Like the child and all new-born creatures of the earth, early men embraced life with an unreflective acceptance of its gifts and glory. Their attachment to life impelled them to hope, to aspire, and to dream. And this outreach to hold and to extend the good they felt in life confronted them with the fact of peril. Thus the religious praise of life became deepened with undertones of apprehension. Fear haunted man in his hopeful moments, and at times overwhelmed him with the mood of despair. Taken as a world phenomenon, therefore, the religious life of mankind has been a continuous symphony, alternating the themes of hope and despair. II. More may be said concerning the rise and growth of the religious outreach. The history of religions is the story of men groping toward a convincing and satisfying resolution of the problem of living. Many have sought to define this religious outreach in such a way as to bring into their definitions the elements that suggest its motivation. The complexity of the phenomena makes every such definition inadequate and partial. We are thus compelled to recognize that defining the religious response and describing the course of man’s religious outreach are rarely one and the same thing. When Tylor8 defines religion as “belief in spiritual beings” he is characterizing a particular religious mental set. Frazer,9 in describing it as “propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man, believed to exert control of nature and human life” is stressing the same element in the religious response. Durkheim,10 in suggesting that religions sensitivity arises from group stimulation is dealing exclusively with the crowd phenomenon in the social expression of religion. Crawley,11 King,12 Ames,13 and Coe14 all purposely diffuse the meaning of religion with a

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view to identifying it genuinely with the pursuit and celebration of life’s values, preeminently its social values. Haydon seems to come nearer to a general characterization of the religious outreach of mankind in saying that religion is the cooperative search for the good life.15 There is much in the pageantry of ancient and modern religious practice to document this view. Consider the growth of religious rites and ceremonies. Ancient men at the pastoral stage developed the cultus around the interests of sheep raising and the herding of cattle. Their rites and ceremonies took form as techniques to secure the resources upon which their livelihood depended and to enhance the pursuit of that livelihood. Sentiments clustered about oases, the green hills that gave them pasture, and the shade trees that offered shelter from the noonday sun. Prayers and hymns were chanted to the “shiny ones”—the sky gods who hovered over them through the long nights, and throughout their journeying. The consolation of their constant companionship in the midst of changing pasturelands made them indispensable allies to these shepherds and herdsmen. When men turned to agriculture, whether in the delta of the Nile, the plains of the Punjab, or the Jordan Valley in Palestine, their religious rites celebrated the seasons of sowing and of harvesting. Wherever community life assumed pronounced political importance, civic religions replaced the agricultural and pastoral cults. This is the story of Ptah-Re in Egypt. It is the story of the rise of the civic cult of the Greek states. It is manifest in the persisting social struggle between the Hebrew prophets and the cult of the ruling class. One who reads the plaintive tale in Walter Pater’s Marius, the Epicurean, will know the Roman version of this universal development. In every culture of the world, with the exception of modern Europe and America, the strands of the religious cultus have been inextricably woven into the fabric of society. Consider the worship of the Sun-god and the Osiris worship of Egypt; the religion of Judaism in ancient Palestine; the civic cults of Greece; the old Roman religion and the later emperor worship; Hinduism in its many forms; Confucianism, Shinto, and Islam. Where Buddhism has been dominant, as in Burma, Ceylon, and to a considerable degree in China and Japan; it too has been assimilated into the cultural quest. The cultural history of Christianity is unique in that it has moved in cycles, alternating between assimilation and revolt. Everett Dean Martin has noted in his book, Liberty that to Christianity belongs the credit for initiating that form of freedom which sets the religious conscience above, and at times at variance with, the state. A glance at the broad periods of Christian history will disclose these alternating cycles of freedom and absorption. For three centuries Christianity combated Rome, and then became the religion of the Roman world. When Roman culture fell, Christianity survived, becoming

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the formative influence shaping the medieval world of the West. For a full thousand years Christianity remained the culture religion of the West. When this cultural synthesis reached high tide, dissolution of the bond between Christendom and western culture was in process. The cleavage within Christianity, giving rise to Protestantism, turned the issue from one of religion versus culture to that of rival religious cultures. For, following the break in Christendom in the sixteenth century, Protestantism entered rapidly into coalition with the emerging capitalistic culture. Now after four centuries of mutual development and rapport between Protestantism and Capitalism, a new revolt is threatening, aiming to extricate the Christian religion from cultural entanglements.16 Inquiry into the historical development of other religions of the world will disclose sects within the religious culture that have developed independently of the common cultural quest. The mystery religions of Greece and Rome, and the thirteen sects of Shinto are clear examples. On first thought the several sects within Hinduism such as Buddhism, Yoga, Bhakti, and the several philosophic cults would seem to belong in this category. Yet India presents a unique situation. While Hinduism in its historical development never achieved the degree of solidarity found in Egyptian sun worship, the Hebrew commonwealth, the religion of the Greek state, or Confucianism, it did develop a cultural social mind that was oriented to a common objective. The coordinating elements were beliefs in transmigration and dharma. However distinctive these several Indian faiths might appear, they all represent various methods of achieving the Hindu ideal: namely, release from the cycle of rebirths. In this sense, Hindu cults, with all their diversity, present a common quest. When one views man’s religious outreach, then, not as a single universal phenomenon, but in terms of the diverse developments in the cultures of the world, the social motivation implied in Haydon’s definition seems evident. Religion has been a cooperative quest for a satisfying life. Two important qualifications, however, need to be noted: One is that within every religious culture, the forward thrust toward the religious ideal has rarely been dominant, except in creative periods. The other is that in each of these cultures, the religious outreach in its most mature and qualitative form has been a solitary venture going beyond the cooperative quest for the good life. The limitations of the strictly social conception of the religious life become apparent in these considerations. The creative and venturesome note implied in Haydon’s view of religion can be discerned in certain periods of the world’s religions. It was evident in the thrilling religious reform is Egypt under Ikhnaton. It appeared in the pioneer period of the ancient Hebrew religion and again in

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the reforms of the eighth century prophets. The recrudescence of Hebrew culture in the emergence of Judaism, following the exile, provided another marked instance of it. The Galilean youth movement which gave rise to Christianity presented further evidence of it. Buddhism is the clearest expression of it in India. Other examples could be cited. In our own day, certainly the religious Humanism, which Mr. Haydon views as the contemporary extension of man’s age-old quest, is a clear expression of the search for the good life. But these rising tides of prophetic religious striving are the occasional waves upon a vast sea whose waters for the most part have remained placid. Conventional control of cherished values has been more evident at times than the search for the good life. This reveals again the difficulty of characterizing the religious outreach as a single phenomenon. The impulse to enhance the common life through religious emotion has varied in expression according to circumstances and leadership. Bergson has presented this contrast in somewhat different terms, distinguishing between static religion and dynamic religion.17 Except for his metaphysical expression of this contrast, his thesis would seem to further the distinction between the priestly and the prophetic elements in religious cultures. The second qualification we have noted carries the meaning of the religious outreach beyond the sphere of social effort and enterprise. It focuses the religious response in the light of the solitary heights, reached by such rare spirits as Ikhnaton, the Buddha, Jesus Christ, St. Paul, Plotinus, St. Augustine, to mention the seers. There have been writers who have insisted that religious experience in this high solitary sense is the only response that may properly be called religious. Whitehead, for example in his Religion in the Making, writes: “Religion is solitariness, and if you are never solitary you are never religious. Collective enthusiasms, revivals, institutions, churches, rituals, bibles, codes of behaviour, are the trappings of religion, its passing forms. They may be useful, or harmful. They may be authoritatively ordained or merely temporary expedients. But the end of religion is beyond all this—. In its solitariness, the spirit asks, what, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world loyalty.” Hocking brings these two emphases together in saying: Speaking broadly, there are two distinct phases of experience wherein God is apt to appear: in the experience of Nature and in social experience. Not everywhere in Nature, but at special points, well-known and numerous enough the awareness of God seems, as it were, to have broken through, or to have supervened upon our ordinary physical experience of those objects.

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When man has acquired so much imagination that he is capable of being stirred by Nature, he seems capable at the same time of something more than imaginative stirring—namely, of superstition, religion. If that element of the man is present which we call the sense of mystery, then the apparitions of heaven begin to work upon it, and to cooperate with it; the infinitudes of space and time are teeming with presentiment and omen; and man’s nature-world is on its way to be judged divine. So of social experience: it is not everywhere, but at special junctures and crises, that the awareness of God has come to men; at the events of death and birth, of war and wedlock, of dream and disease and apparition. Given the imagination, the sense of mystery, and withal so much selfconsciousness as is required to make the idea of soul, or double, or shadowy spiritual counterpart; and these crises of social experience become clothed with a significance not limited to this visible context; the unseen world becomes peopled with spirits, and in time, with gods… Although we have here two different regions of religious suggestion, destined to great historic careers in relative independence, it is evident that in looking for original sources we cannot keep them apart nor assign to either a priority over the other. For the religious experience of Nature means nothing if not finding Nature living, even personal, thereby socializing that experience. Whereas the religious meaning of social experience arises in the first place only as birth, death, and the like are regarded as the work of that same inexorable power displayed in Nature.”18

How then, shall we interpret man’s religious outreach? One reply is to view it in the same general manner that we interpret his political outreach and his economic outreach. The terms political and economic are broad abstractions, each covering a wealth of organized activity in respective fields, aiming to serve a singular purpose. By calling them abstractions, we do not minimize their reality; we simply recognize them as too inclusive in meaning to be restricted to any specific form of manifestation. Man’s economic life, for example, may be understood to include the savage finding nuts and berries, or hunting game and fish. It covers the nomadic labor of the herdsmen and of the shepherd. Man’s economic life applies to activities that develop in connection with that pursuit. It becomes more clearly relevant in our modern mode of thinking to the intensive efforts of commerce, industry, and transportation. And within these three phases of modern economic life, we have a vast variety of individualized vocations and modes of activity constituting the day’s work. Man’s political life is likewise greatly diversified in its concrete expression. Everything from tribal rule to the democratic state is included in man’s political activity. The chieftain of the tribe is every bit a genuine exponent of man’s political life as the Oriental monarch, ruling over a vast domain. Their realms differ, their procedures differ, almost every concrete

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form of activity differs, but the pattern of action, in both cases, remains political. The reason we are not perturbed by this diversity of meaning in the words “economic” and “political” is that neither is forced upon us with normative implication. We engage in economic activity, in whatever form it presents itself to us, as a matter of course. There are no priests or prophets impelling us to do so. The drives of the human organism provide incentive enough. Likewise, we respond to political demands with less conscious awareness than in matters of religion. Nevertheless, the cult of politics is a more pronounced form of overt organized expression than the cult of labor or industry. Yet, somehow, neither the word economic nor political has come to have the disputed meaning that applies to the word “religious.” We use the word “economic” in a purely descriptive sense. When we raise the question of a matter of being “economical,” or of “good” and “bad” economics, however, we do touch upon a normative problem, for we then enter into debatable issues upon efficient and inefficient ways of doing things or even into the more fundamental area of sound or unsound economic theory. In the latter case the word “economic” entails emotional implications comparable to the tensions and urgent feeling manifest in religious matters. In no instance, however, does the economic or political tension in the mind of the common man raise the normative question, “What do you mean by economic, or by political?” A further explanation of our readiness to accept the meaning of the words economic and political is to be found in the degrees of their apparent use to man. The results of economic life are tangible and its neglect brings immediate and imperiling effects. The political relationship is neither as immediate nor as imperative as economics; but it is more so than that of religion. The implications of the religious adjustment may be so remote as to be experienceable only through projected imagination or a disciplined sensitivity. In this respect religion is like the arts, music, and poetry. The cult of religion may, in fact, openly announce that the religious life has nothing to do with the practical pursuits of the common life, as in the mystical quest, or in the highly ritualized religious expression of otherworldly sects and movements. The seeming remoteness of religious value has doubtless been the chief reason for its neglect among common men, which in turn gives basis for the frequency of the inquiring smirk, “What do you mean by religious?” Underneath this query is the implied question, “Are you talking about something relevant to my needs and worth-my concern, or something esoteric and fraudulent?”

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The results of this discussion come to this; actually there is no more reason to expect singularity in the descriptive meaning of the word “religion” or “religious” than in the terms economic or political. And the reasons for the common insistence upon singularity and consistency issue, not from any difference of bestowed expression, but from differences in their respective relevance to the pursuits of common man, and the varying capacities of men and women to discern the human values of the religious life. If then, we choose to speak of “religion” or the “religious” in a singular sense, let us be clear that we thereby make of these terms, abstractions which will prove cumbersome when applied to specific acts of the religious life. Since there is value in employing abstractions for deriving generalized meanings, this should not discourage our use of them. Only let us recognize their limitations and their degree of distortion. John Dewey has seen fit to distinguish between religion and the religious, meaning by the former, specific cults or organizations that promote religions interests in terms of a certain creed and through certain forms; and by the latter, any and every act or event that brings the ideal into actuality.19 It must be recognized that this distinction rests upon a normative judgment which itself is creedal; if not in statement, at least in implication. It is a judgment to which many of us, persuaded by the demands of contemporary life, would accede. But so far as clarifying the historical problem of designating the religious outreach, the distinction seems of doubtful value. To say that “religion is what one does with his solitude” and that “if you are never solitary you are never religious,”20 seems also to be a subjective characterization. It selects a certain form of religious activity as primary. Or again, to conceive religion as the cooperative quest for the good life, though more inclusive than either Dewey’s or Whitehead’s view, excludes or minimizes what Whitehead, for example, holds to be genuinely religious. The definition of Wieman that religion is devotion to that which is supremely worthful for all mankind, opens the way for correlating the descriptive and normative conceptions, although in its given form it implies a normative selection of meaning. Descriptively it would imply all the forms of devotion that have resulted from what men historically have considered to be supremely worthful. Normatively, it would call for a theory of value which would demonstrably determine what actually is supremely worthful for all mankind. Wieman, in working out his conception of Supreme Value in terms of the growth of connections making for mutual support, enhancement, and meaning, has placed his view of religion upon significantly defensible grounds. His historical error, if it may be so designated, would seem to be in dismissing all other

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forms of devotion as not being genuine religion. This is the language one needs to use cautiously. The counsel of Santayana and of Hocking is pertinent: “Religion,” says Santayana, “is never false or true; but ‘only better or worse.”21 Hocking has said: “Religion has been a force of huge potency making for good and evil.”22 When this fact is recognized, namely that religion, like politics and economics, is multiple in expression and graded in value, one is in a position to observe it historically as it has appeared throughout the world and through the centuries, and to evaluate it philosophically and ethically as it has functioned for the increase or decrease of defined and tested value. III. The historical task of arriving at a descriptive understanding of religion thus seems fairly clear. We need to ask: What have been the various forms in which man’s religious outreach has expressed itself? There have been at least six recognizable forms, beyond the elemental ecstasy, rising out of early man’s vital joy: 1. The religious outreach as the emotional counterpart of the will to live. In early man this was paramount. Self-preservation, as Moore has pointed out, was a primary felt need, and gave rise to every form of device that seemed to aid this pursuit. It still continues in this form, despite the fading of the primitive characteristics, where the will to live is abnormally thrust to the fore by threatening circumstances. For many people, religion, rather than science, still serves this function. 2. The religious outreach as the emotional enhancement of the economic life. The ancient Hebrews developed their rites to accompany the sowing; to encourage the growth of crops, and ceremonies to assure a successful harvest. “Tilling the soil,” writes George Foote Moore, concerning the agriculture of early people, “is not only an art but a religion; from the breaking of the ground to the ingathering of the harvest, religious rites attend every stage.”23 This economic expression of the religious life continues straight through the rise of more complex civilizations until the methods of economic activity become clearly defined in terms of empirical cause and effect. Yet, in its most developed states, the haunting fear that something more than human effort and design entered into the affairs of business has persisted. Great cultural crises have intensified this feeling. Broken business men have turned to religion to restore their faith in life and their confidence to carry on. 3. The religious outreach as the sober counterpart of the aesthetic experience. Dance, song, and ritualistic pantomime continued to develop out of the stimulus to effect practical ends through religious ritual. Through such means, soil was fertilized, crops were increased; wars were

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won. Thus religion, art, and the common life were inextricably woven into a single social fabric. Because these acts of ritual evoked aesthetic enjoyment in the very act of performing, they became aesthetically significant in their own right and thus continued as expressions of art long after their religious and economic significance had passed. Yet certain phases of the religious connection never vanish, as is evidenced by the use of music, symbols, poetry, and dramatic ritual in the ceremonies of religious worship. The sacred dance which was once the most prominent expression of religious emotion was expelled from certain religious cults, notably from the rites of the Christian religion. Yet, its rhythmic movement survived in the marching procession. Among certain contemporary religious groups, the dance is returning with all its historical sacred significance, enhanced by more mature poetic and aesthetic conceptions. 4. The religious outreach as a professionally administrative function, evidenced in the role of the priest. In this form, the religious response has been a highly complicated mode of action, involving the intimate phases of the holy of holies, and at times the most crass elements of the world of affairs. Of all the forms of religious expression, the priestly function has been most severely criticized and suspected. The reasons are many. Here we need only note its nature and dominant tendency. The priest arose when religious interests became of sufficiently social importance to demand public cultivation and promotion. The rise of the priest is one aspect of the division of labor, operating in the realm of religion. His way of expressing the religious outreach has been determined in part by the interests he promoted and the circumstances in which he promoted them. These circumstances involved both the cultural level of the people he served and the social organization of society in which the culture existed. Both conditions have historically imposed a natural conservatism upon the priestly function. By sheer reason of their common responsibilities in their respective roles, the priest and administrator have become singular in type. Where the functions of the religious and the political realms are clearly defined or a working policy of subordination and superiority has been established the priest and political administrator become allies in a common cause: to preserve the existing cultural values as well as institutions through which they are implemented, and to strive for their effective operation in the commonwealth. Upon the relations between priest and administrator has depended, to a considerable degree, the peace of society. Much of the conflict of history turns upon the tensions and rivalries that have developed between these two exponents of the social good.

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The religion of the priest, then, is dominantly conservative. It may even become static, in the sense in which Bergson employs the term. It is of necessity institutionalized, for in no other form could it be made a public enterprise. Its institutional forms comprise a body of formal and officially adopted rites, usually a creed or body of beliefs, including dramatic myths which give meaning and lend emotional enhancement to the performance of ritual, as well as a moral code that defines the religious way. Often these beliefs and myths are embedded in a sacred literature which is generally held to be peculiarly unique and authoritative. The priestly expression of religion is not confined to the officials of the cult, though their leadership tends to give it its dominant character. All the devotees who participate in its forms and help to promote its institutional life thereby share in its expression. To the degree that this priestly conception of religion is tempered by the prophetic interest, these forms begin to lose their official and authoritative character and take on a more flexible character through rational reinterpretation. This is the process that has been going on in the religions of the world, giving rise to liberal Christianity, reformed Judaism, the new Islam, the new Buddhism, etc. 5. The religious outreach as a prophetic spirit. The prophetic expression of religion has persisted wherever organized religion has been found. It may arise as the creative genius of a new religious culture and will continue in its dominant role so long as the cultural life is in its formative stage. The moment society relaxes its creative stride and begins to settle into permanent grooves, the priest displaces the prophet. The latter may then become the stimulus toward new change. In any case he will be the voice of protest. Whether or not that protest will take creative form and make for new efforts toward reconstruction will depend upon the temper of the times and the status of the prophet. The days of prosperity generally favor the priest and leave the prophet a man out of joint with his time. But social break-downs or catastrophes that undermine the established forms of society and release the acid currents of criticism, rapidly discredit the administrative leaders of both religion and the wider social group. The prophet then returns to status and continues to be the authoritative voice so long as the need for change or for new growth is more evident than the desire to conserve what now exists. Prophetic religion is dominantly active and urgent, in contrast to the quiescent mood of mysticism and the complacent spirit of priestly religion. It appears impatient both with the mystical and the priestly expression of religion, but actually its impulse is of mystical origin. The prophet is rarely a social engineer, nor does he proceed from motives that are purely social

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in source or end. His concern for the social cause issues from a mystical awareness of what should be, in the light of the divine ideal. Justice as he views it is a condition among men consonant with the divine intention. The exception to this characterization of the prophet is to be found in the modern movement of religious humanism. Here social idealism, pursued with all the fervor of traditional prophetic religion, has abandoned theistic devotion and has transferred the emotional commitment to the Great Ideal of a new human order. Although restricted in appeal, since only those capable of envisaging the New Day and of responding unselfishly to hasten its coming, can embrace it with full enthusiasm; it nevertheless offers a positive program of prophetic devotion. Its singular advantage is its readiness to employ the techniques of the social sciences to implement its idealism and to further its crusade for a better world. Wherever the prophet appears in command of the religious situation, religion takes on both urgency and dramatic power. Except to those who resist change, and worship the unchanging, the prophets’ religion has irresistible appeal. 6. The religious outreach as the ascetic search for mystical satisfaction. Normally this this form religious outreach is a solitary adventure, sometimes collectively pursued as in the monastic orders. Yet it may find expression through the conversational forms of public worship. The mystical expression of religion is distinguished by an intensive preoccupation with what we have come to recognize as psychical phenomena bearing upon the self and tending to a sense of complete and genuine union with the ultimate condition of divine reality. The differences in degrees of significance attained through the mystical adventure turns upon the locus of attention; whether the mystic becomes absorbed in the psychical enjoyment of its strange phenomena, or in the ardent faith of devotion to that which effects self-transformation and release. Bastide24 has called attention to the fact that this difference in the area of absorption divides the lesser from the great mystics of all religious cults. There is a form of mystical adventure which is wholly non-theistic, such as early Buddhism and the Sankya philosophy of India. Here the mystical life is clearly a technique for attaining definite psychical changes in the human organism, leading to a divided state of mind and feeling. In both early Buddhism and Sankya, this condition of the organism assured release from the natural phenomena that were thought to be obstructive to complete religious freedom and peace. This is the mystical method applied to the problem of life as it was defined by the Hindu culture and mental set.

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Mysticism may imply a philosophically defined world view, with a specific theory of knowledge, or it may imply simply a method of approach. In all the historic religions it has developed along the line of the former, always involving the latter, however. In later years it has come to have specific meaning as a method, irrespective of any particular world view, in contrast to the rational and scientific approach. An incident involving three college professors suggests the nature of this contrast. A convocation was about to gather. One professor was helping his colleague struggle into his academic gown, obviously with considerable effort. A third professor, happening along, remarked, “We’ll have to have a meeting of the social science division and let the seams out.” To which the assisting colleague rejoined, “There’s your social science mentality—let the seams out! Being a mystic, I should say, tell Sait to reduce.” The mystical method has involved two significant aspects. On its negative side it has urged the gospel of asceticism, involving, in its extreme expression, the denial of the self; and in restrained form, the transformation of the self. On its positive side, it has urged the gospel of identification with the divine, affirming and committing life to the morethan-self reality. When these many varying expressions of the religious outreach are brought into focus, in differentiation from other modes, particularly the aesthetic and the scientific, the religious approach takes on more singular meaning. Three words will probably suggest the distinctive characteristics of these three approaches: devotion, appreciation, and understanding, directed toward control. Whatever else these several forms of the religious outreach involve, they all imply devotion to what demands commitment and shapes destiny. Such devotion may express itself in many ways, but back of it all is the feeling of dependence upon reality that extends beyond the self and the human sphere, relationship, with which imposes the religious imperative. Religion, then seeks to promote or to recover the religious relationship with reality, which in its elemental essence, is attachment to life and in mature form becomes identification with what in life carries value. In the solitary expression it may become the search for significance within the life-span. In its social expression it tends to become either the conservation of the recognized values, or the exploration into new and potential experiences of value. When it is full-orbed, the religious outreach embraces all of these dimensions: it seeks solitude and it tends toward social expression, both in preserving the inherited values and in accommodating experience to the creation and growth of new values. Bernard Eugene Meland, Pomona College, Claremont, California 1937–38

Primary Religion One has hardly dealt adequately with the problem of the criterion of the religious life when he has described it solely as a projection of the self toward ends and values beyond the ego. This must be regarded as only the first stage of religious living. The final stage is the attainment of an inward realization of high value for which there are no adequate external norms. Walter Lippmann has pointed out in his Preface to Morals25 that “which is an aristocratic principle in all the religions which have attained wide acceptance.” Unlike the popular conception of religion, which is a matter of commandments and obedience, this way emphasizes the refinement of the will of man and of his sensibilities. “This alteration of the human will,” Lippmann continues, “they conceived as good not because God commands it, but because by the test of experience it yields happiness, serenity, wholeheartedness.” (p.195) Thus religion, in its mature sense, according to Lippmann’s aristocratic principle, becomes, in Whitehead’s language, “the art and theory of the internal life of man so far as it depends on the man himself, and on that is permanent in the nature of things.”26 What Lippmann means by his aristocratic principle in religion, in contrast to popular religion, is doubtless comparable to Santayana’s distinction between primary and secondary religion. Primary religion, Santayana suggests, is spontaneous; secondary religion is imitative.27 “To the former,” he says, “divine things are inward values, projected by chance into images furnished by poetic tradition or by external nature, while to the latter, divine things are in the first instance objective factors of nature or of social tradition, although they have come, perhaps, to possess some point of contact with the interests of the inner life on account of the supposed physical influence which those superhuman entities have over human fortunes.” Incidentally, this passage reveals the means by which the subjective note in Santayana takes on transcendent meaning. This distinction between primary and secondary religion strikes at the central problem of religion, and therefore invites careful consideration. Religion that conveys only the assent of the mind or the consent of the will, Santayana is saying, is still outside the citadel of the soul. It may be earnest religion, even devout religion; but if its motivation comes from a loyalty beyond itself, it still expresses a derived rather than an intrinsic quality of faith. It becomes intrinsic when the sentiments and values it affirms are native to the one who emulates them. The I speaks of truth, not because it does obeisance to truth, but because it, in itself, is possessed of truth—is, in its own nature, the revealer of truth. The I by its own inward

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goodness communicates what is its own. As one ponders these distinctions made by Lippmann and Santayana, the question arises, Can this inward grasp of value for its own sake take place until the earlier stage, represented by popular religion, or secondary religion, has in some fashion occurred? Is not primary or high religion an achievement at the end of the process, that process arising originally out of an elemental dread, or out of a second hand rationale which nay insulate one from that dread, passing gradually into a growing awareness of the truth of reality as it is apprehended and possessed? Is this process not described by Whitehead when he speaks of the transition “from God the Void, to God the enemy; and from God, the enemy to God, the companion?28 Until these prior tensions have been resolved, in many instances, one does not rise to the inward, spontaneous faith. Before the religious response becomes a valuational attitude, it more often is a simple outcry of creature dependence, arising out of great loneliness, where the first impulse toward praise has subsided, and passing finally, after strenuous searching and mental labor, into a confident mood in which the cosmic dread is displaced by a mature sense of cosmic companionship. Santayana quotes St. Augustine as one to whom religion was a primary experience of valuation. Yet one cannot read Augustine without feeling that imperative mood rising out of a prior mood of emptiness and despair. Take this passage from his Confessions: Oh! that I might repose on Thee: Oh! that thou wouldest enter into my heart, and inebriate it, that I may forget my ills, and embrace Thee, my sole good! What art Thou to me? In Thy pity, teach me to utter it. Or what am I to Thee that Thou demandest my love, and if I give it not, are wroth with me, and threatenest me with grievous woes? Is it then a slight woe to love Thee not? Oh! for Thy mercies’ sake, tell me, O Lord my God, what Thou art unto me. Say unto my soul I am thy salvation. So speak, that I may hear. Behold Lord, my heart is before Thee; open Thou the ears thereof, and say unto my soul, I am thy salvation.29

Does not Augustine express here the elemental experience of all the great saints who have sought God and found Him? The sense of unworthiness and the isolation it brought have impelled them to reach out toward healing sources that they might become worthy, and that their loneliness might become transposed into an experience of comradeship. This reaching out toward God is the crucial act, leading to the primary experience of religion. And the distinction to which Santayana points relates to the divergence of interests that arises here. If reading out toward God involves simply the matter of allowing the self-imposed barriers of the ego to collapse, whereby the indwelling of God in the human heart

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may become known, as in Augustine’s experience, then the outreach is simply the prodigal’s return. It is the self-sufficient life finding anew, or recovering, its selfhood in the larger relationship of the Good. This describes the nature of the process when the separation or alienation from God is on moral grounds; and, when despite this estrangement, some theory of the ultimate good is at hand as a potential affirmation of faith that is to say, when one has been conditioned to identify the good with what is authoritatively defined as God, as in the Catholic faith, or with what is overwhelmingly experienced as the deep propulsion of the heart, as in orthodox Protestantism. In both instances, the conditioning may enable the individual to trust the heart and to regard the intellect with diffidence. Wherever such conditioning breaks down; however, alienation or estrangement from God becomes an intellectual as well as a moral problem. The breakdown of this conditioning influence in the 16th century was an event of historic moment because it gave rise to an entirely new religious culture which in time reversed the traditional Christian form of conditioning, causing men to trust the mind and to regard the heard with diffidence. This reversal in response, setting mind above the heart, explains the deep divergence between religious men and women of orthodox affinities and those of the modern temper. The conditioning among Catholic minds has been more enduring than that of Protestants because Catholicism retained the objective criterion of value in the form of an authoritarian church, while Protestantism opened the way for the increase of subjective determinants. Thus what Luther and the reformers of his time accomplished went far beyond the intent of their purpose. Looked at in the light of consequences, the reformers’ withdrawal from the Catholic Church was an appalling step: not for them, but for those who were to come after them, for it removed the parental protection of an institution that had conditioned men to “trust the heart,” and turned men forth upon their own as freed individuals to accept God and his grace directly, without mediation or interference from an institution. Here was the crucial cultural change which precipitated the turn of thought that was to initiate what many may choose to call the tragic era of Christianity; the rise of the autonomous individual accompanied by a corresponding decline in capacity to “trust the heart.” The individual could not condition himself by placing institution second to [the] individual; the Protestantism he promoted could not rise to this parental task. For a great many, this made very little difference; for, freedom or no freedom, they were able to choose but one course; to follow the faith set before them. Consequently many who carried the banners of Protestantism enacted the role of the Catholic. For them the church took on parental proportions. But for others—at first a

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few, then increasingly an expanding majority—the rational implications of the Protestant principle were compelling. Out of their ranks have come the rationalists, the positivists, the modernists, the liberals, and the humanists. V. This rationalizing tendency in Protestantism, coming to final form in liberal Christianity and religious humanism is not the outcome, simply, of impoverished imagination, as Santayana and others have said.30 It is the outgrowth of the detachment of the individual from the institution in which an inherited rationale of religious faith is communicated with conditioning effect, leaving the individual to draw upon his own resources for the faith that is in him. This is only part of the story. The release of the intellect from ecclesiastical control gave rise to numerous independents in the field of human endeavor—economics, politics, art, and scholarship, all of which in turn, accentuated the autonomy of the individual, and dissipated his capacity for devotion.31 One who has not been born into this freeman’s world can hardly understand the meaning of this situation. Every formative influence rising from this new culture contributes to a rational autonomy, impelling men to trust the mind and to be wary of that which impairs its judgment. The point I am concerned to make here is that no faith, be it the simple commitment of cannon men, or the highly refined and appreciative response of the inward vision when one looks at life symbolically, is without its rationale. In the one case, the voice of tradition suffices without qualification. In the other, the voice of tradition still suffices when given symbolical rather than literal meaning. But when there is no natural kinship with the Voice of Tradition, yet the heart longs to believe, only one course is open: reconstruct the foundations of belief. This is the course liberals and humanists have followed. The historic situation into which they came and their peculiar relation to it; impelled them to put reason before feeling. They were not without imagination; they were bereft of the conditioning influence and the inherited affinities to the rationale which might have impelled them to “trust the heart.” Their capacity for devotion had to grow out of first-hand efforts to fashion a philosophy of faith. For, as is the experience of many, clouds of intellectual perplexity obscured the sunlight of faith. Not all have been impelled to the same degree by the will to believe. Where emotions were most distraught, the will to believe has been most pronounced. Here the intellectual search has been compromised most readily. In instances where loyalty to mind developed beyond the passion for faith, the will to believe has subsided almost wholly, pending bases that could be adequately verified. Here the religious effort has become

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identified almost solely with the intellectual quest. The whole movement of modernism may be characterized as an effort to reduce religious faith to an intellectual affirmation. Those who have lived through the experiences of an emancipated Protestant will understand the motive of modernism. Those who have not can see in it only what Santayana sees in it, the pathetically strenuous rational labor of minds that are shorn of imagination and fine feeling. No one can really deny that modernism ever was adequate as a religious solution or as a religious faith. Only men and women who were small-gauged emotionally could rest permanently in it. Even recourse to a social gospel could not compensate completely for its deficiency in elements of the imaginative and appreciative life. Yet, I insist that modernism was an inevitable, ever a necessary transition for enlightened minds that had been subjected to Protestant influences. Looked at in the light of history, modernism was modern man’s effort to recover through intellectual clarification, certitude which confident Catholics are able to hold to a greater degree on authoritarian grounds. It was the climax to the long process that began with Protestant individualism. Let it not be assumed that modernism is merely an individualist’s faith. On the contrary, it is the recovery of a common body of doctrine through the scientific method. Like the institutional church, it seeks to establish objective criteria for religion; only its criteria have the objectivity of science rather than the objectivity of revelation. VI. Modernism, however, can hardly carry one beyond the stage of what Santayana calls cosmic piety; for, being dependent upon science for its justification, it is thereby confined to structures of meanings consonant with the method of science. Actually, in its most prevalent form, it rarely went beyond ethical meanings. In the form in which it developed in the earlier stages of Wieman’s thought, however, it assumed metaphysical proportions. In his recent thought, he has gone beyond the application of scientific method to the concepts of religion to explore the nature of value and the function of myth in religion. In this turn of his thought one sees the possibility of a development beyond cosmic piety and a transition toward primary religion. In its present expression, however, Wieman’s philosophy seems still to be concerned with issues of cosmic piety. We should be clear about the importance of this transitional stage. Without adequate groundwork upon the issues of cosmic piety, the emphasis upon spirituality as primary religion may be merely a poetic substitute for a genuine religious appraisal of life. The ease with which Santayana dismisses “cosmic piety,” for example,

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raises question as to whether he has willfully shunted off difficulty, through recourse to symbols, or, because of his zeal for the rewards of the imaginative course, has simply been blinded to the process through which “spirituality” is attained. The request of St. Augustine still persists. “Grant me, Lord, to know and understand which is first, to call on Thee or to praise Thee?” If first means more seasoned, more mature, more intrinsic an expression of the religious response, then “to praise” is more primary. But in process, “to praise” is to have first called on the divine. I cannot avoid the conviction that what Santayana calls “cosmic piety” and “spirituality” are not lesser and higher forms of religion; but, rather, degrees of religious yearning which to some degree presuppose one another. I think it is important to see that the philosophies of Edward Scribner Ames and of John Dewey have accomplished through pragmatic methods what George Santayana achieved through poetic imaginations—namely, the identification of religion with the process of idealization. Thus they have found the meaning of God in aspects of nature which, in accordance with man’s own judgments, can be called ideal aspects. Religion, so defined, ceases to have necessary connections with conditions operative in nature, except, of course, as they function in human imagination and thought. Rather, the religious response becomes a sense of value born of human experience, and extended to aspects of nature only in so far as the human consciousness becomes aware of its operations there. Now from Santayana’s own point of view, this pragmatic conception of religion must be classified as primary religion; for it designates spirituality that is inward value, “projected into images furnished by poetic tradition or by external nature.” Yet we should not overlook what has been sacrificed to attain this pragmatic affirmation of faith. The issues of cosmic piety have been set aside, and the intellectual search into its problems has been relinquished. Thus, while this view offers a working faith for those who can take hold optimistically within the limits of social experience, it abandons to their own disillusionment, those for whom these issues continue unresolved. There is a stage in the process of living for the good, however, in which concern for the cosmic support of high value does become of secondary consideration. This may take two forms—it may be the affirming counterpart of a growing skepticism, wherein one finds the grounds of his devotion in his own high appreciation of the good, irrespective of its permanence or intrinsic connections with cosmic existence. This, I believe is the form which Santayana approves. Again, it may be the flowering of a faith rooted in the reality of existence. It then becomes a transition toward maturity in religious response, wherein one

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chooses the good, the divine, not because of any good it might bring too oneself, or deliverance from impending evil, but purely because one is the kind of individual who finds satisfaction in devotion to the good. This element is in all of the empirical philosophers we have mentioned. Religion has then ceased to be a way of salvation and becomes a cause to serve and a channel through which to give expression to one’s ennobling feelings and sentiments. Many people have achieved this level of religious living without realizing it. They may think that the drive in religion is ulterior, contingent upon a guarantee of future reward. But actually their faith is more intrinsic. And there is little likelihood that their commitment to the good would subside, even if they should be compelled to face the possibility of personal dissolution.

1938 Praise and Relinquishment Praise and relinquishment suggest two levels of affirmation, the one embracing the goods of life appreciatively; the other expressing a disenchantment with life. Both levels of affirmation appear as motifs in the various religions of the world, though it is more common to find one in the ascendancy with the other persisting as a minor motif. Thus in the early nature faiths as well as in the agricultural religions of the early Vedic period, or of the Hebrew Commonwealth, or the old Roman religion, the praise motif, exemplifying a robust attachment to life was dominant while the denial of this attachment appeared only as an occasional ascetic strain. In later religious expressions among what have been called “the redemption religions,” beginning with the mystery cults of Egypt and Greece, the note of relinquishment assumes dominant form; for redemption in this case was conceived to be a form of release from the attachment to life which presumably had brought so much evil and ill. Here the praise motif, relenting to the goods of life, persisted only as a vestigial mood among the unredeemed who had yet to be purged of the mortal habit of clinging to life. The Christian religion has retained both levels of affirmation, though it, too, has had its cycle of emphases. When one tries to determine which is the primary emphasis; as a total, characterizing tendency, one has difficulty making up his mind. If one says that the praise of life has been, on the whole, the more characteristic of the two, meaning to cite the prevalence of a world-affirming attitude in the West as contrasted with the world-denying mood of the Orient; one is immediately brought up short by the realization that this observation certainly overstates the matter. The dominant theologies, however much concession they may have made to the natural life of man, have been orientated toward a life beyond these natural scenes; and this focus of their thought has weighted the emphasis upon relinquishment. It would be difficult to make a case for claiming anything to the contrary, though considerable could be said for the opposite side, recalling the influence of the Greek theologians, the Renaissance Christian Humanists, and the liberal theologians who embraced the ideals of both the Enlightenment and the Romantic era. Yet the moment one makes this point, namely, that relinquishment has held a primacy in Christian thought, one is stopped again by the query, “Do you

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mean to say that asceticism is the more characteristic emphasis in Christianity?” This, too, would be difficult to claim without citing so many qualifications that the generalization would mean little or nothing. Not being able to get far in reaching a satisfactory generalization of this sort, one may wish to ask, how have these two levels of affirmation been regarded in relation to one another? So long as one is not implying in his question, how should they be considered, the answer is fairly clear. It is my opinion that the answer among theologians has been given all too easily as if there were no real issue being raised. They have implied by what they have said, for example, that the one represents the Christian affirmation at the level of childhood, or at the level where accommodation is made to the elemental demands of creatural existence. At this level, the simple joys that arise from an attachment to life are given common expression. The other, they imply, represents the Christian affirmation in its more mature form—not as a child would exemplify it, but as a grown man, awakened to the demands of conscience and tragedy, would do so. I submit that once you have opened this question you have come to the heart of the Christian valuation upon life and to a troublesome inquiry for which there is no easy answer. How is this elemental preoccupation with the joys of existence to be related to what is conceived to be the more mature stage of existence, wherein the note of relinquishment, following from a sense of responsibility in living, appears to be the more primary virtue? Theologians like St. Paul, St. Thomas, Calvin, Ritschl, and Brunner, and philosophers like Kant and Hegel; and I am inclined to add the names of Wieman and Niebuhr have apparently had little difficulty with this problem. The demands of logical thought or of ethical criteria have swept aside the plaintive cry of the simple heart for whom anguish and great joy seemed to have an ultimate reference. Even Kierkegaard, who, one would suppose, had a sense for these things, beyond the usual thinker, ultimately capitulated to the moralist, it seems, in his stages along life’s way, associating this elemental outreach of the human spirit with the aesthetic stage which one must eventually outgrow. The renewal that comes from reading men like St. Augustine, St. Francis, Luther, Schleiermacher, and even Barth and Tillich is in part due to the way in which they handle this elemental outreach of the human psyche. I am impelled to say, however, that I think theologians have not yet found an adequate resolution of this tension that exists, or this discrepancy, this contradiction that persists between these two levels of affirmation wherein, on the one hand, life is acknowledged as good, life is lived with zest, with expectancy; life is held to, enjoyed, and when withdrawn, lamented; and, on the other hand, life in

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robust form is relinquished, given up, transcended, lost—willingly lost; at times without expectancy; seemingly without lament or a sense of loss. When you have resolved this contradiction you will have resolved the issue of life and death; and you will have understood the mystery of the Christian religion. Theologies, I say, are characterized by their indifference to this problem; or by their ready solution of it. I simply wish to record that my own theology is characterized by the poignancy with which this problem persists, demanding an answer. I. The praise of life is an energy of the human spirit that overflows frustration, defeat, or even death. Often it appears simply as a mood of optimism that is oblivious to the tragic sense; and in this form it may be shallow and irresponsible; but anyone who dismisses this affirming spirit as shallow optimism misses its full dimension. For the impulse to praise life proceeds as well from a deeply religious orientation in which the perception of good in existence is clarified, freed from egoistic desire, and awakened to the rich fullness of meaning that is in existence to enjoy. This quality of perception appears in the simplest of folk as well as in the disciplined saint. Among the former it is a spontaneous zest that reveals a habitual response of taking each moment for what it may have to give, whether it be ill or beneficent. The hardship is assumed with equal spontaneous acceptance, as if it were fate, against which no mortal hand should be raised. But when the good is given, it is received in festive mood, not only because the hand of fate has been momentarily stayed; but because the gift of grace has been given. In this circumstance, the praise of life seems of dubious merit. It is childlike, indeed, evidencing no discriminatory power to cope with the problem of good and evil. Yet the capacity to see and to accept the good in the very routine of existence which is so heavily weighted with hardship, even tragedy, must not be dismissed lightly. This is a human power of a sort, a technique, if you please, for keeping the balance of good and evil sufficiently to the fore to make life, as it comes to them, both bearable and rewarding. What is absent in these simpler cultures is the accentuated egoism of the more civilized person which impels the latter to seek an overbalance of the good in existence. The unrestrained yearning for happiness or for well-being and the endless investment of time and energy in their preservation breeds in us, who live at the civilized level, the anxiety that precludes perception of good. We rarely live with the good of the moment or with the present evil; rather we fix upon its consequence, ominous or otherwise. The very act of transcending what is presently given in the hope that something better may be given; or in the fear that what is given will be withdrawn,

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robs us of the capacity to receive what is given with zest or praise; or, if it is evil, with genuine suffering such that the evil is courageously borne. Mixed as one’s judgment must be of this praise of life as it appears in elemental folk, one cannot cancel out completely the genuine expression of human vitality that enables them to receive its meager goodness with zest, and its evil with fortitude. The praise of life as it appears in the saint may also seem to be of dubious merit because here the discriminating talent of ordinary men would seem to have atrophied. Something of the rose-colored glasses philosophy appears to be sublimating the real world which buffets them about. They do not know when life is doing them ill. This, however, overlooks the realism which has motivated the choice of the Saint. The saint should be considered as one of the elemental people in a specialized role. What distinguishes the saint from priest or prophet, in fact, is his voluntary identification of himself with common folk. But where the latter are in the normal position of having possessions, however, meager, such that they are vulnerable when loss or tragedy strike, the saint is dispossessed on principle. He has empties himself of the goods of the world as things to possess; thus he, above all other, has a capacity for receiving them in their own right as things to enjoy. The companionship that the saint feels with all of nature and with all men is evidence of his perception of good in all that surrounds him. As St. Francis declares in his Canticle of the Sun: O most high, almighty, good Lord God, to thee belong praise, glory, honor, and all blessing! Praised be my Lord God with all his creatures, and especially our brother the sun, who brings us the day and who brings us the light; fair is he and shines with a very great splendor: O Lord, he signifies to us thee! Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, and for the stars, the which he has set clear and lovely in heaven. Praised be my Lord for our brother the wind, and for air and cloud, calms and all weather by the which thou upholdest life in all creatures. Praised be my Lord for our brother fire, through whom thou givest us light in the darkness; and he is bright and pleasant and very mighty and strong. Praised be my Lord for our mother the earth, that which doth sustain us and keep us, and bringeth forth divers fruits and flowers of many colors, and grass. Praised be my Lord for all those who pardon one another for his love’s sake, and who endure weakness and tribulation; blessed are they who peaceably shall

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endure, for thou, O most Highest, shall give them a crown. Praised be my Lord for our sister, the death of the body, from which no man escapeth. Woe to him who dieth in mortal sin! Blessed are they who are found walking by they most holy will, for the second death shall have no power to do them harm. Praise ye and bless the Lord, and give thanks unto him and serve him with great humility.32

The perception of goodness in life often comes as a heightening experience to people who, having lost some of their sensory powers temporarily, recovers them suddenly in convalescence. Or people, having been withdrawn from normal intercourse with the common experiences of the natural world, or even with the routine hubbub of a city street, may rise to ecstasy in the flush of their first perception of its restored reality. A striking instance of such an experience was recorded in The Atlantic Monthly some years ago. The account is well known for it has been cited many times; but it so aptly exemplifies this form of perceptiveness that I repeat it here. “It happened to me on a day when my bed was first pushed out-ofdoors to the open gallery of the hospital… It was an ordinary cloudy March day, almost a dingy day. The branches were bare and colorless, and the half-melted piles of snow were a forlorn gray. Colorless little city sparrows flew and chirped in the trees. Here, in this everyday setting, and entirely unexpectedly, I caught a glimpse of the ecstatic beauty of reality. I cannot say exactly what the mysterious change was, or whether it came suddenly or gradually. I saw no new thing, but I saw all the usual things in a miraculous new light—in what I believe is their true light. I saw for the first time how wildly beautiful and joyous beyond any words of mine to describe, is the whole of life. Once out of all the gray days of my life I have looked into the heart of reality; I have witnessed the truth; I have seen life as it really is— ravishingly, ecstatically, madly beautiful, and filled to overflowing with a wild joy and a value unspeakable.”33 Again, one who has lived with familiar scenes long enough to anticipate the rhythms of life are re-enacted season after season, develops a perception of its goodness that is of a similar mood to the one just cited, though the source of the heightening is of an opposite kind. It is not the absence of the sight that stimulates a fresh awareness of the good, but the abundance and persistence of it that keeps one alerted to its appearance. One suspects that the writers of the Psalms exemplify this form of it. The Psalms offer abundant evidence of the praise motif, though in few

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instances, if any, does the mood of praise exist by itself. There is a parallelism running through this literature which couples the perception of life’s goodness and the goodness of God manifest in existence, with the tragic sense in almost every passage. The following modern psalms suggest a similar perceptiveness precipitated by familiarity with the abundance of experienceable goodness: I. God, I have seen how April earth is waking with new life: Seeds that have lain beneath the winter’s frost have felt the warmth of sun again in falling rain. Thy gentle hand is lifting up the withered grass; Trees with their arms outstretched, that prayed through sleet and wind for spring to come, are greening with a tender bud. The earth looks washed and clean where waters rising, flooded over it. And there is music in the winds that was not heard up here before the rivers thawed. O God! There is the smell of morning on the earth! My heart is lifted up and glad. II. Now there is morning after a night of rain. The widened sky is blue with scattered streaks of gray. Only the mist against the mountains has remained to gather up the gloom in morning tears. All else is jubilant with spring: The freshened blossoms on the greening limbs; The grasses basking in the sun, And dew that sparkles over them; The youngest of the birds, their untried wings, and birds that flit through air now glistening. God, there is morning after rain that rises clear and clean After a heavy sleep.

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III. God of the early spring! Thou who art infinite we praise for tender almond blossoms and the bloom of peach; For greening hills and buds upon the aging branch of sycamore; For grasses that are young, For blue delphiniums in regiments of pink; For gentle sun that filters through the haze, for stillness, And for windless days. For silent growing underneath the earth, and for the rising stem; For creatures nestled where a fallen leaf has wintered undisturbed; For all that wakens, God, for death, for birth, for perishing that brings new life, Thou who art infinite we praise, God of the early spring!

This capacity to perceive the good in existence, whether it be a pathological heightening of experience, or a cultivated habit of normal living, has a religious quality that is to be reckoned with. In the form in which we have presented it we may have accentuated its aesthetic value; but the significance goes far deeper. It signifies a creatural capacity to relate oneself with concrete events in appreciative ways such that the mutuality that is there as a metaphysical ground becomes personally acknowledged—first, as an act of appropriating its redemptive good. For it is by these simple acts of perceiving and acknowledging the good that is in existence that we avail ourselves of the redemptive features of the structure of experience that daily sustains us; and, in fact, contains our very being. Life lived with indifference to this sustaining structure or with not vivid intimation of its support, gathers in loneliness, even withdrawing increasingly, first from the companionship of people, then from solidarity with all created things. It is a common observation that the individualization of the person proceeds at tremendous spiritual cost. This can be observed in the person leaving the small community to take up a career in the person leaving the small community to take up a career in the city; or the young man or woman leaving home to attend college or the university. What occurs is more than what is commonly noted. What is noted is the breaking with familiar relationships: the family and friends, and a

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corresponding failure to take up readily with equally agreeable companions. Their sense of belonging goes and the sense of being alone and on their own aggravates their insecurity. This, however, is only part of the story. What is missed beyond this association with familiar faces is the environment of familiar sights and experiences in which one’s perception of good has been nurtured, and in which it can be active. To be dislocated is to be emotionally torn from the sustaining structure of experience in which goodness in the form of minute and momentary assurances can reach one to awaken one’s sense of belonging and one’s realization of the social nature of existence as a personal, concrete experience. The perception of goodness in existence may be at this level of personal reassurance, which always borders upon an egoistic dependence; or it may reach the proportions of almost self-less identification with what in experience defines our ground as a sovereign good. One might wish to grade the measure of religious motivation between these levels of perceiving the good; but I should be willing to forego this effort if only the point can be made that there is a religious quality in the attachment to life, whatever the level, and that this religious quality is exemplified in our concern with concrete goods. Now, to be sure, this is the very path to idolatry. The goods of existence are of ambiguous meaning. What is redemptive under circumstances that establish our solidarity may become demonic in becoming our preoccupation. This is a common fact. Love can become perverted, in a mother as well as in the beloved. Art and music that have rescued the mind from intellectual despair, possibly preserving its sanity, may become absorptions of such intensity that a genuinely religious adjustment is blocked. All the goods of existence which are in concrete form present a threat to our spiritual security, even as they offer their beneficence. This fact has led more single-minded theologians and philosophers to chart a safer course by denying the beneficence of these concrete goods—denying certainly that they are in any sense redemptive, in theory or in fact. For them the solution to the problem which was initially posed then becomes immediately clear. The denial of these concrete goods as spiritual aids must turn them away from their aesthetic or creatural lure and toward the more severe and single-minded devotion to the sovereign good which underlies or which transcends their frail and illusory support. Thus the Platonist has pointed to Reality being the illusory appearances; and the modern Naturalist, to the creative good underlying all created goods. If attachment to life’s goods leads to idolatry, then it must follow, within this single-minded logic, that redemption can be had only by way of their

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relinquishment. II. Relinquishment as a mood, under some circumstances, may not be out of key with this quiet joy or even with a zest for life, about which we have been speaking; though in the form in which it most often appears, either in theological analysis, or in the discipline of the mystic, or even in the resolution of tragedy or disillusionment in ordinary folk, it amounts to a complete denial of this first level of affirmation. Such disenchantment with life often follows from a prolonged experience of suffering or tragic struggle, wherein conditions are created, either real or imaginary, which thrust the individual into a restless yearning for peace through release from their present bondage. When this happens, religious attachment, if sought or attained, may cease to be a normal and natural rooting in the structure of experience and become, instead, almost an irrational commitment to whatever gives promise of deliverance. Such artificially projected religious behavior is apt to accompany or follow experiences of severe illness wherein the established routines that once gave order and purpose to living are routed, leaving one incapable of taking up the threads of one’s former life. One of the most graphic and, in fact, most moving delineations of the process of disenchantment with life which has come to my attention is one which is given anonymously in the book, In The Shadow. It is the record of one who faced the grim reality of an incurable illness, and then struggled through to a new sense of freedom, by way of becoming thoroughly uprooted from experiences that once afforded joy. “Yesterday will always be a marked day in my memory. For yesterday I found out. Now there will be no more uncertainty. Yesterday was like the clanging of a dreadful gate, shutting me out from all sweet, hopeful, changeful, misty uncertainties. Yesterday brought me out alone into a place so narrow, so small, so terribly enclosed that there is no room left for uncertainty.34 There is no fog between me and the reality I face. The laws that govern experience do not seem to me merciful, but dark and cruel.35 July 2.—How can one live these days of futile suffering, fallen spirit, broken soul? To live in the midst of a lost kingdom that yet is not withdrawn, but rises around one like a phantom city, offering no entrance, nor any shelter, how can one meet the days? If I might go back but for one hour and know the days again as once I knew them, and gave to that miracle of experience the worship that is its meed, then I think I could come back and be where now I am and endure and not repine. And yet, it could not be. Never is life lived as vision sees it, across the gulf of final renunciation. Sacrifice has burned away all the rebellion, all the doubt.

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The joy of it runs through the earth like the breath of God.36 August 20.—Life flamed in me today, a fever that would not be stilled. It was an intoxication to be poised on the brink of danger. It was a thrilling adventure to snatch an hour’s excitement from that perilous denial that has engulfed so much. So when afternoon came, bringing great heat and kindly pleas on loving voices, I got up and dressed in one of the pretty pale dresses I chose with such reckless hope in early summer, and went down, into the sunshine, to the chair upon the lawn…37 How can I have said that life was far away? It is so near that it is a wound. It pierces through defenses that are no longer potent against it, and reaches a remoteness in me that receives it in pain and cries out against it, and yet cannot pluck it out and cast it away. It is August, and all the thoughts that belong to August are stabbing me. And August is hurrying past me, leaving me none of its treasures. Pictures of the heather rise up before me—the pungent, mysterious banks of purple heather—the little brilliant bells of the long that I see always wearing the raindrops. Pictures of the brown streams, breaking into golden foam against wet boulders, come to me, and the music of the running water sings and moans in my ears, so that I feel if I could hear it once again I should understand it forever and be consoled…38 August 21.—Summer is over now… Today it is autumn. It is a curious sharpening—like a warning, yet it is an enchantment. And all this I knew today, in a sudden moment of freedom and response. Then the door closed once more upon all the exquisite, inexplicable, piercing impressions the pageant of this earth can so wonderfully make upon us.39 This alternation between recovered ecstasy and deep lament, rebellious at times, reaches its darkest mood in the next utterances and is followed by a steady disenchantment with life as it was formerly experienced, after which the movement toward new adjustment is rapid. November 12—I have looked into a region of horror. With inner eyes I have seen, and with every fibre of my being I have felt, a world where there is nothing but an unutterably dreadful, mechanical pulsing, that beats on forever without mind, without purpose, without response to our hearts and minds, with no relationship whatever to those things we perpetually crave. Hope, beauty, wisdom, renewal, expression, love, effort, aspiration, the intertwining of our spirit with them all—these are life itself. But I had entered upon an agonized existence where not one of them was, where they were made to seem but some foolish, unreal, mocking mist that sometimes fell in illusory consolation, and hid that relentless throb of mindless law, whose naked ruling was the only permanence. I longed to

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struggle against it, but I could only suffer in terror. No appeal could enter it. It was law, but it had no knowledge. It ruled, but without intent. It was cruelty, but without malice. I knew myself and every living thing to be entangled in it. It convinced me utterly, and under it, helpless, how I suffered.”40 The ascent of spiritual adjustment follows: December 8.—For a month I have dwelt in a region of shadows and silence—dwelt, a rejected guest, between heaven and earth… It is an inward world that is mine now, where I lie alone and ponder this ineffable, piteous mystery of suffering. What did I see—that strange and terrible night that filled my vision with undreamt-of darkness? What strange and awful law separated me from every desire? Was it the ‘earth cursed for our sake’? Did I fall deeper into the forbidden laws, that clutch and hold us against all that within us loves and remembers and desires a different destiny?41 …Did I see a vision of life as it would be, did it remain forever unpierced by Spirit? To Spirit, then, belong all the divine, sweet lovely things that fill the days with joy and nameless sweetness and wonderful fears. To Spirit belongs all that we call life.42 Disenchantment with earth scenes is complete now: “Once the summer morning, blue with the haze of coming heat, woke passionate desires, and the poignant thrill of pleasure. Once the mild spring winds, carrying the scents of the earth when it is broken by the upward push of growing things, full of the nameless lure of the earth’s renewing life, met me with bewildering magic and called my pulses to a splendid beat. The snow in sunlight had its own ridiculous merriment, the snow at night its cold, mystic enchantment. But now the eyes carry no message to the slumbering senses. They gaze out of my high window and they see the rain and the sun, the snow, the blue sky and the wandering city smoke, but they bring none of these things to me… The frame of quivering nerves and hidden senses that I call myself, now is tuned to a different tension. It is strung to a changed key.43 I think I can never again desire anything so much as to gaze upon knowledge in the revealing rapture of that greater knowledge.44 The kindly gloom fills my room, my flowers shine in it—little ghostly presences. But not the night, nor the flowers, not the silencing voices, nor relief of solitude have called this deep stillness into my spirit. It is a deeper stillness than any night can bring. Thoughts shine in its shadows as pale flowers shine in dusky woods. Gone is the agony of separation—the fire of desire—the frustration of

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love and memory. The gathering darkness, the brooding stillness brings me life and union again. To all for whom the summer day has held the fullness of its joy, as for me—night comes—with separating touch—with imperious stillness. For all; whom life endows and claims and gladdens, the greater night, that closes life itself with purpling shadows, waits—the great detachment—the transcending silence.”45 These piercing utterances make clearer than by discussion could possibly accomplish the manner in which religious solace enters experience to uproot the human consciousness and its sensory response from a functioning relationship with the events of life. Not until despair becomes complete, does the religious response of solace begin to assert itself. So long as one is capable of rebelliousness, he may be said to have attachment to life, in its normal sense, at least in its minimum experience—a sort of clinging to its joys by way of lament and reluctance to acknowledge their passing. Renunciation, with firm and final resolve, opens the way to new compensatory adjustment through what is recognized as the consoling Presence of Spirit. When this vision takes hold, the disenchantment with life is complete and irrevocable. Only a musing wonder, as to how life could have held such charm, remains to remind one that life once did hold enchantment. What is here graphically delineated as the submergence of the sensuous rapport with existence, and a corresponding transcendence of all sensory appeal has been restated in various ways by theologians who have sought to establish some hierarchy of existence by which a criterion of human good or of a condition essential to the Christian life might be established. To be sure, the poignancy of the struggle has not been noted, nor has the radical separation of the condition of attachment to life and relinquishment been so vividly made. There has often been, in fact, a readiness among theologians to recognize the innocence of creatural goods in the attempt to avoid the excesses of certain forms of metaphysical dualism; but this often turns out to be merely a concession in the interest of theological purity. It does not become convincing as a genuine attempt to see the meaning of these perishing goods in the context of the dedicated life. This is a borne out by the fact that the problem of human fulfillment is rarely incorporated in the doctrine of redemption. The theological problem is so readily solved if one can make an issue between God and man, or between creative good and the concrete goods; or between transcendent value and values immersed in the stream of history, that the theologian is apt to take one of these courses as the most direct way out of the dilemma. How may the problem of human destiny, which defines the meaning of

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existence, be answered in a way that leaves this question of life’s meaning without doubt: that leaves the matter such that one can truthfully say, “Life is good; so also is death good.” Except as attachment to life and relinquishment of life can be carried simultaneously in the human spirit, one cannot really say that the religious issue has been resolved. Where attachment to life is sought as an alternative to the life of relinquishment, something of a short-range exaltation of mere existence ensues. Where relinquishment of life is made the alternative, however, the essence of existence is made an unreality. Man then clings to a shade that refuses to become fully embodied. Attachment and release are two dimensions of living which provide for a fullness of being in the human creature. Attachment is to be understood as a sensuous embracing of the goods of existence as they are conveyed or communicated through the perceptual powers of the creature. It is the exercise of the perceptual powers of the creature. It is the exercise of the appreciative powers of man, a going out of his nature toward evident value that can elicit the response of praise and joy at their existence, and, at their death or dissolution, awaken them to lament that is genuine grief. This tender attachment to concrete goods is in no way contradictory to the capacity to release from existence what must be taken away or be given up in the creative passage of events. It is the source of a pathos that gathers like a gossamer web about the whole fabric of existence, giving to it the tenuous quality of spirit which only regret and the shattering of great joy can bestow. Where it is accompanied by capacity for release, this tragic attendance of a sense of loss and grief infuses into the life of relinquishment a softened ardor which rescues the religious man from his own ruthlessness. Devotion to creative value without such tender regard for created goods can make of religion a cruel enterprise, and of the religious person an impoverished man. The attachment to life, which can be taken to mean a subjective enjoyment of the concrete events of life, is the source of that persisting yearning of the human spirit for more of life, more than can be granted to any individual existence. It is what rises in protest against the mortal limitations of the life-span; and what presses the human consciousness to define its ultimate meaning when the spectra of dissolution appears before it. Heaven and immortality are not spiritual concepts in the sense that they voice the summit of human devotion and dedication; they are the transmutations of the will to live. They are, in fact, desperate creations of the religious mind to justify in an ultimate sense this subjective enjoyment of concrete events. Nevertheless these concepts that carry the human

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venture to an imagined fulfillment designate a spiritual concern which cannot be set aside without doing violence to the human spirit. Crude as they often are, they bespeak the necessity of carrying this two-dimensional thinking of attachment and release beyond the embodied life. Now a philosophy or a theology that seeks devotion to creative value at the cost of complete relinquishment of the created good can offer no solution to this persistent problem of the human spirit. Its solution can only be relinquishment unto the utmost, which, as we have said, carries a note of ruthlessness and of indifference to man’s concrete nature and to his ultimate end. How does an insistence upon carrying the attachment to life and relinquishment of life simultaneously in the human spirit illumine this problem of man’s destiny? I think it merely points it toward a light; it does not lift to wholly from our human darkness. This it cannot do because, in the context of man’s natural existence, darkness is a constituent of our world of light. But to recognize this is to advance beyond that sheer empiricism that seeks to know only the world of light. Empiricism to gain depth and full dimension must be aware of light and shadow in its conception of man’s destiny. The light is where a criterion of value can give measure and direction to life, for it attends to the creatural existence that has emerged as a human history. The shadow is the penumbra of mystery that is always the deeper dimension of light. Whoever stares into light, as a moth looks into a night flame, will find the light becoming his darkness. The fringe of shadow that is beyond this empirical realm of light is the border of being that is not yet, because emergence has reached in us a stop. The psychical thrust is temporarily arrested in the human life span. Any theology, if it is to articulate the deeper dimension of empiricism must be attentive to this margin of the life-process that seems to give hint of a farther range of human destiny. Except as it brings this more tenuous aspect of the life-process (the aspect where life borders upon death) into genuine continuity with the more evident and observable area of experience to which a criterion of value can rightfully apply, empiricism cannot do justice to the sense of depth in existence, or to the tragic sense, which are dimensions of experience that derive from the realization that the span of evident experience rides upon a vast ocean of yet unexplored possibilities of meaning and existence. The island character of life’s enterprise is a fact not to be lost sight of in any religious interpretation of experience; for in this imagery of existence the true nature of the lifeprocess is revealed—an upsurge of visible terrain in the midst of vastness which we cannot explain.

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Positivism did lose sight of this fact. And religious naturalism may well lose sight of it if concern for observable events leads it so far inland as to lose sight of the water’s edge. All religions may be said to arise from this cry of man as he confronts at one and the same time the possibilities and limitations of his existence. This, at least, is the elemental basis of what becomes his faith—the impulse to praise and to lament his fate. These impulses may become obscured, over-laden with the tapestries of belief and ritual, but the ultimate appraisal of their functions as a faith brings them back to this elemental human cry. And the measure of their function as a faith is this: What is their response to this cry? I think we would have to say that the traditional faiths measure quite high in this regard. For their time they served the human psyche almost unfailingly. Certainly the Christian faith has been preeminently a redemptive faith in this sense, setting life and death in juxtaposition in its drama of redemption. The Christian faith may be taken to affirm the inseparableness of these two dimensions, adding as a corollary the concern to hold this principle of life and the principle of death in tension. The Cross is the symbol of the one; the Resurrection is the symbol of the other. The Cross without the Resurrection is the search for value without awareness of the concrete good.

Reality in Process Paul Elmer More, expressing the modern skeptic’s approach to religious faith, wrote in his Pages From An Oxford Diary, “The fool hath said in his heart there is not God; yet after all, is there a God? One thing is certain: despite the innumerable essays of pagan and Christian rationalists, reason has never been able to prove to its own satisfaction the existence of a God. And what reason cannot demonstrate, the ‘fool’ has some excuse for rejecting.”

More was not acclaiming the “fool’s” skepticism. For him, God was a settled matter so far as religious faith was concerned. What he meant to question was the modern search for God through such intellectual inquiry as the philosopher or the scientist might venture. Any rational effort to define or designate deity seemed to him futile. One can well understand this view, for no undertaking has seemed so unrewarding as the attempt to arrive at a commonly accepted view of God in modern terms. Almost two decades have passed since Gerald Birney Smith wrote his memorable essay, “Is Theism Essential to Religion?,” later revised as “The Modern Quest For God” in his book, Current Christian Thinking. In this essay, Professor Smith voiced a mood that had come to wield a spell over the intellectuals of the twenties, reflecting a skepticism not unlike that of Professor More’s. The difference was in their resolution of the problem. While More relaxed theologically into a modified orthodox view of deity which enabled him to pursue the interests of humanism unabashed, the intellectuals to whom Professor Smith addressed his query put their signatures to the credo, “I affirmatively disbelieve in God!” I. The issue that Professor Smith was raising, however, was not touched by either of these forms of humanism. If the sciences, Professor Smith would say, have brought us to the place in our thinking where we are compelled to acknowledge a sustaining reality in the environing world, upon which all life, including human life, depends, does it matter whether or not we sharpen up our concept of that reality so as to bring it within some recognizable conception of deity? Is it not enough to discover what the environing reality demands of us as creatures of its life, and then order our living accordingly? There is no need, he cautioned, turning to the religious humanists, to speak disparagingly of man’s plight in this

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untheistic setting, or to exaggerate the unfriendliness of the natural exterior; the relationship is there! And, perchance, if the experiment can be satisfactorily ventured, one might find that companionship is there, too. Gerald Birney Smith did not live to carry this view further, or to generalize upon the mystic experiment which his view suggested; nevertheless, the direction of thinking upon God that has followed in modern thought since, while not altogether in line with his view, has tended to confirm his supposition. Organismic philosophy had already begun to point the way to a new metaphysics when Professor Smith’s essay was written. S. Alexander’s work Space, Time and Deity has appeared in 1920, and C. Lloyd Morgan’s Emergent Evolution in 1923. The next year, 1924, Whitehead’s Concept of Nature was published, and was followed by Science and the Modern World in 1925. By 1926, with the publication of Jan Smuts’ Holism and Evolution, and Whitehead’s Religion in the Making, the main outlines of this philosophical outlook were clearly drawn. What this organismic view contributed was a new set of substantial arguments for conceiving deity in the role of Creator, relating man and the whole order of psychic life to this creative operation in such a way that dependence upon the natural environment became something more than a psychological attitude. It assumed biological importance, reaching even to inorganic levels of reality, before structures or any organic connections became visible. Whether or not the new metaphysics succeeded in establishing its speculative ground, there can be no doubt but that it brought back into religious thinking the sense of the wider, metaphysical background, making religion a cosmic relation, rather than a concern, merely, of the social experience of man. For this they have not been thanked by humanists like Haydon, or by pragmatists like Ames. To turn to such ambiguous metaphysical inquiries, said they, is to return to the speculative stage of religious thinking from which a generation of painstaking scientific thinking has delivered us. Gradually, says Haydon, we have been led to the defensible position that man is cradled and sustained by a planetary environment which reaches him through his social experience. How can we build illusions about the grandeur of this environment until we are persuaded that its near aspects, within the social matrix, are worthy of so revered a name a God?46 Ames has put the matter similarly, although within reasonable limits, he is willing to apply the term, “God” to this social reality, taken in its idealized aspects. Yet God in this sense, he contends, is an honorific term, designating the religious quality of this social reality undergirding us, not a descriptive term, identifying a special deity.47

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The fusion of the new metaphysics of organismic philosophy and pragmatic empiricism has produced a naturalistic theism which sets limits, on the one hand, to the metaphysical venture, yet abandons the restricted course of pragmatism which sought only to provide a conceptual view of God. In this view, God becomes an actual operation in space, as experienceable as any sensory datum, and knowable only in terms of this sensory medium. Naturalistic theism is best represented perhaps in the writings of Henry Nelson Wieman. Wieman has brought to theological thinking something of the procedure of the logical positivist. He is not indifferent to aspects of the metaphysical reality that go beyond the designative datum within human experience, but he means to interpret it in terms of observable data that are clearly recognizable as being evidence of Supreme Value. He takes the position that if these invasions bring true reports of the vaster relationship, then something within the common life must bear relation to its reality, or give evidence of its working in the events that transpire about us. When this conviction takes hold of one, he is not able to leave reflections upon God suspended from rarified heights of mystical awareness. Rather one is impelled to become alive to the operations of this power in the common life and to bring men’s lives and institutions into rapport or adjustment with its ways. One is led further to become aware of the happenings, events, trends, movements, attitudes, people, and organizations, together with their possibilities, devotion to which brings high fulfillment of personal life and the increase of value for all mankind. But to be alive to these implications of the operational route of God requires first that one have clearly in mind just what the way of God is. Why the Way of God? Why not the being or simply the nature of God? Because to speak in these terms is to throw the discussion of deity back into a language which has ceased to be adequate for conveying the full meaning of realities. This point has not been sufficiently recognized in theological and religious circles, as is evidenced by the widespread objection to speaking of God in terms of process or activity. A word on this matter may therefore be in order. The implications of the new physics are by no means altogether clear or determined; but the shift in its language from static or substantive terms to operational concepts in defining realities seems an accepted change. Matter is a way of behaving. Organic matter is a peculiar system of related behaviors, capable of increasing its bulk and general state, and even of giving rise, under proper conditions, to other systems of related behaviors similar in kind and function. Personal matter is a still further complex and potent system of related behaviors. For purposes of convenience and

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practical communication we identify personal matter with what we see in separate, individual human organisms and call them personalities; yet the clear-sighted metaphysician knows that each personality is vastly more than what appears in the form of this walking, talking, loving, hating organism. The point I am trying to make here is that the scientists, philosophers, and theologians who undertake to envisage the world about them with the perspective made imperative by the new physics see this wealth of environing detail as operations and relations rather than as static substance or being. Now this is not to ignore the fact that certain activities and relations tend to maintain a persistent pattern and thus, over an extended period of time, assume what seems to be a form implied by the terms substance and being. But the fact that change and growth are so fundamental in the character of this emerging pattern makes the use of these traditional terms substance and being very misleading, if not erroneous. Doubtless the prevalent aversion to conceiving persons as well as deity in terms of behavior is due to the seeming emphasis upon change and activity to the exclusion of this persistent identity. What we love in a friend is not these seething activity relations, but a “something” as we say, that seems to mean John or Margaret. But that “something” is a growing, developing complex of relations. And our appreciation of it is dependent fully as much, perhaps, upon its growing and increasing richness as upon its persisting identity. Now God, like human personality, to be adequately apprehended and appreciated, must be thought of as a complex system of changing, growing relations which at the same time retains a persisting identity. We may best envisage his reality, therefore, by conceiving the way of God, taken as a persistent growth or movement in cosmic life. II. This concern to discern the operational route or functional datum designating the reality we call God, in contrast to the mere acknowledgment of that reality, marks a new advance in the effort to become definitive in philosophy of religion. The earlier approach of pragmatism developed so significantly in the thought of Edward Scribner Ames, sought definitiveness, and, at the same time, simplification, at this point by abandoning altogether the search for God as a spatial reality, choosing rather to use the concept God instrumentally for designating that portion of the world’s life which was qualitatively ideal and functionally sustaining. Just as the search for the “soul” as an object within the human organism has been found devoid of meaning, suggests Ames, so the search for God as one definite object or observable fact somewhere within the known world of phenomena has been fruitless.

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Now the point that Ames is making here is clearly a sound one if by spatial reality one means an entity of physical description such as any organ of the human body might be described. But the fact remains that while the word “soul” no longer connotes such a visible entity, it does connote a relationship of activities or behaviors which, when brought into configuration designated by a given personality or individual, takes on qualitative as well as quantitative characteristics. However fictional the term soul may appear, it nevertheless designates an operational datum that yields qualitative meaning. Its operations exert an influence upon events and people. Where this qualitative functioning is present in individuals or communities, or governments, the common life of man is enhanced. Where men and communities and government are devoid of it, the common life of man is continually harassed by inhumanities and ruthless actions. In similar fashion, the concept God connotes an operational datum, the full implications of which may not be known or observed. But in so far as this datum operates within the context of human affairs and natural events which are observable, influencing these events, even shaping their course, it may be said to be empirically discoverable. It is this minimum, empirical operation of the reality men call God which Wieman has been concerned to bring into focus. He has been reluctant to go beyond this minimum, observable level, lest the language of philosophy of religion lose its definitive meaning. But he has never meant to imply that in this minimum envisagement of reality, the total meaning of God has been grasped. “Whatever else God may be, empirically He is this operational datum visible in the events of the common life, devotion to which brings fulfillment and maximum value.” Wieman thus has seemed to discern what many have indiscriminately ignored—namely, the operational datum that sustains and qualitatively influences events and men. And in this datum he has recognized the marks of a vaster operational reality, the full meaning and nature of which may not be wholly known. Now where Wieman’s thought stops with an exclusively working concept of God, Ames’ concept, more inclusive and with less specific content, reaches beyond the observable data to reality idealized. Thus Ames’ concept would seem to supplement Wieman’s. III. What then is the way of God? What, in other words, is the persisting growth or movement in cosmic life that is worthy of the devotion of all mankind, devotion to which fulfills personality and makes for the increase of higher value?

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Wieman has given this suggestion: It is that growth of connections and communication that makes for mutual support, mutual enhancement, and ultimately mutual meaning. Growth of connections and communications! What can that mean? Limiting our observations to the human sphere, consider this growth from the dawn of humankind to the present. Early men did not live in isolation, but the connections that shaped their lives were few and simple. The search for food in the form of the hunt and their combined efforts to resist such common enemies as the storms, the cold, the beasts, and rival tribes, with such accompanying ritual and corporate planning as seemed practical, were the extent of the connections making for social interchange and development. But the connections grew. With the domestication of animals, men passed from the crude level of the hunt to a livelihood based upon the herding of sheep and cattle, a more systematic occupation carrying with it increasing facilities for sharing and promoting social experience. From that of shepherds, men passed into the role of farmers, and later to merchants, tradesmen, artisans, engineers, manufacturers, etc. In the course of these transitions men’s minds developed, greater variety of tools took form, organization of activity and energy increased, appreciations awakened, creative art and inquiry developed, all contributing to the flowering of civilization and culture. One need not accept the dogma of progress to acknowledge this growth. That culture rose to heights and fell, then to new levels only to decline again suggests simply that the course of this growth has not been even and uninterrupted. The fact of this growth of connections and communication, giving rise to greater value, is an historic event, however temporary or partial it may appear. This point deserves further evaluation but we shall not deal with it here. Again this growth of connections is revealed in the child growing to maturity. At first just a physically formed organism with high possibilities, vaguely alive to the undifferentiated mass of material about him, he gradually attains a degree of coordination. Repeated stimuli give rise to recognitions. Sensitivities develop. Awareness of objects and meanings increases. Gradually, in the course of his growing years, habits, sentiments, attitudes, aspirations, and planned or projected action give shape to a clearly defined personality. The boy becomes a man. Thus far we have cited the growth of connections without regard to any qualitative results, except that the increase of connections issue in a more complexly organized system of relations. But God is a particular type of growth, qualitatively defined. God, says Wieman, is that growth of connections that makes for mutual support, mutual enhancement, and

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mutual meaning. Apart from this view of functioning value, Wieman’s conception of God loses its religious force. Fully envisaged it becomes a religious vision, the lure of which is inescapably exciting. Let us consider its meaning. It makes for mutual support. That order of human living offers greater degree of value and possibility wherein the numerous activities tend to support rather than to frustrate or destroy one another. Neighborliness is more productive of human value than community conflict. To say that conflict at times is necessary and socially more imperative than tranquil goodwill does not gainsay this basic observation. It simply calls attention to the fact that neighborliness in any genuine sense is not easily attained, and in some situations, is definitely precluded. Cooperative effort in industry is more productive of human value than industrial warfare. Again it does not follow that peace at any price is sound social philosophy. Demonic forces of organized control frequently impose conditions that demand conflict and reaction. Yet, even here, the more basic observation stands. Were these conditions overcome, cooperative effort would be more productive of human value than social conflict. And this vision is imperative if any sound social reconstruction is to be achieved. Mutual support then humbly implies a relationship between activities, whether mechanistic, organic, or personal, in which the many ends involved are served and promoted, and served, moreover, through that relationship in ways not possible apart from it. If the meaning of mutual support is clear, we need not labor the point of mutual enhancement and mutual meaning. For these are but the intensified constructive forms of mutual support. When the activities become so favorably related that their functioning together not only supports, but enhances one another, then the degree of value has been enormously increased. And when, as in the lives of two who are beloved, this coordination of desire of function is so complete and ultimate, their activities mean one another. “For me to live is Christ.” “I and the Father are One.” “Were he to suffer, I too would be torn with pain.” Put in the form of an ideal, this view affirms a faith in the possibility of approximating that degree of social living in which the organized functions of society do mutually support one another, in which the activities and interests of producer, distributer, and consumer function in a way that makes for a healthful social enterprise, in which the connections of human relations tend to weave an organic web of social life as coordinated as any functioning organism. This view holds that the human body is a miniature social enterprise whose pattern of community activities conceivably might become the pattern of social and even common life.

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This is a dream, too fantastic to be taken seriously as a near event. Yet, as a concept of what would yield what is supremely valuable, or even more significantly for the present, as an intimation of what sound living should tend toward, and what we should strive to attain, this fantastic dream is an imperative vision. IV. But God as ideal alone does not sufficiently focus God as a functioning reality. These ideal possibilities are highly important. They provide a scope of quality to our envisagement which gives lifting power and persuasion. But there have been many worshipers who have lavished sentiment upon an ideal, many whom a dream hath possessed, who have given no heed to the tramping—no real attention to the near events that determine the March of Destinies. Thus we come back to our earlier observation which the most imperative need of our time is to discern God in human life—to be alive to attitudes, plans, movements, decisions, and organized endeavor, which, taken as a total working in these human scenes, reveal this growth of connections in our midst, making for organic unity. Stirred by the lure of its high possibilities, this vision of the Great Society, we may embrace them as our attitudes, our plans and efforts. If men could catch this vision of the Silent Process that has made us what we are, and that is now shaping us into what we shall become, could envisage it working in history, not alone in human civilization, but long before man came upon these scenes, actively shaping the raw inorganic elements into structures that in turn reared higher orders of relations; if men in their creative moods, could but imagine the noble dream of human possibility, should this Silent Force of growth toward organic unity capture the devotion of all mankind, we should have a religious vision, the magnetic lure of which no man could resist. I am not overlooking the evil in our midst. I am not calling us to be Mystic Dreamers of a Noble Ideal, the reach of which transcends our present striving. I am urging that we see the vision of our possibilities in relation to the operating forces in our midst that point to the route of our fulfillment, that restore our individual lives to those organic connections which give us health and possibilities of growth, and that release within our social relations, the leavening power to make us one. The evil that obstructs and at times frustrates this growth of good among us hangs as a pall upon our hope. There is no escaping its tragic and perilous reality. We must be unyielding in our drive to stem its tide, to rescue the agencies of our commonwealth from the grip of greed, injustice, and warped intelligence. But conquering evil is not the whole of our cause.

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We are crusaders for a greater devotion. We strike at evil because we are creators of the good. And to serve this cause, we need to be more than sensitive to the sins of our day. We need to be alive to the holy Cause for which we confess our sins and fight the evil. This then, is the religious vision for our times:—the growth of good is in our midst—the age-old growth of connections and communications is silently but surely at work among us, shaping us toward high possibilities of human fulfillment and value beyond our kind, where right devotion persists. This is our cause, above which there is none higher, before which we yield, to be shaped and fulfilled, and in devotion to which we may become co-creators of the “Great Society.” To know God in terms of the operations that aid and fulfill this creative advance toward novel events of value in the form of personalities, communities, and culture, is to envisage God in human life. V. The question arises in considering this concept of God in the new theism whether God is simply process or a personal reality with whom man at worship can commune. The late Irving Babbitt once made the observation that two problems can never be made the subject of inquiry: immortality and belief in a personal God. For answers to these matters he said, one must turn to the revelation of the traditional religion. Perhaps this is the wisest utterance that can be made on these matters. Babbitt was not affirming the truth of traditional beliefs in putting it this way. He was evidently suggesting that the outreach toward a new start with life and the concern for a personal God are issues that ride out of man’s religious yearning rather than from his search for truth. Consequently they are not matters which religious men are willing to submit to objective scrutiny unless there is some assurance that the outcome will affirm those beliefs. The fact that most of the treaties, aiming to give intellectual meaning to these religious assertions, have taken the apologetic turn, seeking to show the necessity or the reasonableness of such beliefs, suggests, I think, that the inquiries into these problems are less concerned with understanding how these beliefs may be true than with the conviction that they are true. This being the case has made thoughtful reflection upon the problems hazardous, and for the most part unrewarding. I think the crux of the conflict that has arisen in recent times over the issue of a personal God is a practical consideration, rather than a theoretical one. Many of our contemporaries, particularly those concerned for the future of organized religion, are persuaded that unless the theologians can say “There is a personal God,” the churches will have to

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close up. And theologians, fearful lest what they say will not aid the continuance of religion among common men, feel that somehow this fact must be affirmed; God is a personal being. I have not felt that modern thinkers have been able to break through this strained state of affairs to view this problem with care and clear-sightedness. The very suspicion that one is uncertain about this affirmation tends to place him outside the pale of those who are to be taken seriously as religious thinkers. What is the status of this issue? Is it a matter, as Mr. Babbitt has said, that can only be referred to as an authoritative revelation, or may it be pursued with the aid of reason and empirical inquiry? This, I think, must be recognized. If Mr. Babbitt’s remark is valid, then commitment to this belief involves commitment to revelation as an authentic phenomenon. And all attempts to rationalize the belief are but supplementary efforts to bolster one’s confidence in the revealed truth. Then we are compelled to accept one of two alternatives: either we shall be content to remain agnostic about the issue, or we shall be impelled to search out the meaning of this issue, which religious yearning imposes, in such terms as empirical inquiry and reason permit. As we have already observed, many of our contemporaries feel that to transgress these bounds of the unknown is to act arrogantly. There it stands—Mystery! Acknowledge it, accept it, and let any overtures that may occur have their authorship in the Great Beyond. If one chooses to pursue the problem further, within bounds of human understanding, some attempt will have to be made to grasp the meaning of the term personal in relation to the concept of God defined in contemporary thought. What do we mean when we apply the term personal to God? A vast number doubtless mean what the charming folk of Green Pastures meant: God is a comforting old gentleman who walks in the garden in the cool of the day. I should hesitate to give assurance that any sober-eyed philosopher or theologian would affirm that as a defensible proposition. Yet if God cannot be thought of as personal in this vivid sense, every construction of the personality of God that is attempted will seem to many religious people to be but a vacuous, denatured deity. God may as well be impersonal. For certain others of a more discriminating turn of mind, the content of the personal nature of God is irrelevant. On this point they are agreeable to simply acknowledging the mystery if, in some way, they can affirm God as personal. For them the assurance that mind or personality are fundamental structures of the universe seems sufficient. There have been important philosophical writings in recent literature, reestablishing these bases for belief in a personal God.48 Naturalistic philosophies of religion

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have either evaded this issue or have been content to disavow belief in a personal God. Philosophically, their course is simplified and made more authentic by either of these procedures. The problem of understanding the phenomena of human personality is so baffling that any suggestion that empirical theists turn their attention to divine personality is all but overwhelming. This ambiguity regarding the concept of personality has been a major barrier to the empirical pursuit of this problem. Furthermore, the point of view of deity that has begun to emerge in contemporary naturalistic thought has been such as to suggest that any attempt to read personality into divine reality is to reduce God to man’s image. We must realize, they insist, that God is more than we can think. Yet from this assertion the religious man, unaccustomed to this naturalistic language gets the impression that the philosopher is really saying God is not a God who thinks, and this troubles him, for then the solace and purposiveness of religion, as he has understood it, becomes unthinkable. Our difficulty here is that the modern philosopher, who is just becoming adjusted to the new perspective in religious thought, is too absorbed in the new vision of reality to heed the objections of religious men. “If they could but see this reality operating in their midst,” one hears them say, “…they wouldn’t be asking such piffling questions or demanding such artificial restrictions upon the God of the universe—that he appear in personality!” But the vision is not apparent to the many. And were it crystal clear, and they had eyes to see, unless their hearts could respond to the envisagement of the divine reality, they could hardly do more than to look longingly for “Him that cometh” in a more personal manifestation. The religious man of today seems incapable of feeling religiously toward any reality except it have the marks of personality upon it. Until such transitions have occurred in the heart life of men and women, to give rise to capacity for devotion to significant realities that sustain life and shape human destiny, the theological task of translating these concepts into realities to which the human heart can respond, will remain imperative. In so brief a space, as these pages afford, one can hardly do more than record suggestions. I doubt, in fact, if any one person can adequately do what needs to be done. My concern here will be to point out the implications of the new naturalistic theism that bear upon the issue which rises out of men’s religious yearning—to know God as one in whom they can put their trust. The vision of God in natural theism discloses a personal relationship between man and the divine reality—not in the forensic or formal sense

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implied in the creeds, but in an organic sense, since they very nature implies implication in the larger configuration in which both men and God operate. In this form of thought, the assertion that “I and the Father are one” comes to apply to all men—not as in absolute idealism or spiritual monism—as an inevitable fact of being, but as a potential truth. Mutuality of men may bring them into operations that coordinate their system of relations with the larger organic unity. The vision of God in the natural theism points to the personal relationship between the human and the divine again, in the sense that the growing mutuality between men and God depends upon the volition of men. Men are not automatically caught up in the tide of the growing good. Neither are they mechanically involved in it. They may exist within the configuration without availing themselves of its fulfilling force. Their self-sufficiency may shut them off from their environing resources. Under these conditions relations with reality will in fact become the reverse of beneficence and take on ominous proportions, as had happened in western culture where “self-sufficient finitude” has prevailed. The fulfillment of life through relations with the reality of God thus is seen to be a virtue of choice; while the impairment of life, through lack of volitional acceptance of this condition of fulfillment, follows as an automatic consequence of mal-relationship. This as an age-old doctrine: “God is at all times available to man, but that gift of his reality awaits acceptance. Yet no one ignores that reality with immunity.” This, I say, is an old doctrine, but it takes on more pertinent meaning in the biological setting of the new theism. The personal relationship becomes apparent also in the religious outreach. I use the phrase “religious outreach” rather than prayer because it suggests a larger operational content. Prayer, understood as conversation between man and God, is both a simple and a complex concept. In its simple content it implies a mythical phenomenon which has been prominent in the cultures from early times. In its complex character, however, it remains a profoundly real operation that varies in articulation and significance according as men are earnest and adept in their practice of prayer. The most obvious fact of conversation is articulate language employing word symbols. In so far as articulate language implies understandable rapport between two realities, it has significance; but it is important to note that experience with conversation in our human discourse discloses that the most articulate conversation, i.e. the most wordy conversations, is many times the least meaningful in the sense of implying deep understanding and rapport. Casual talk is more verbal than the conversation of friends. There is as Edgar Lee Masters has said, “the

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silence of a man and a maid;” “There is the silence of a spiritual crisis through which your soul, exquisitely tortured, comes with visions not to be uttered into a realm of higher life. And the silence of the gods who understand each other without speech.” There is also, of course, “the silence of an embittered friendship” and of the indifferent heart that feels no impulsion toward men or God. But the outreach of man, either toward God or other men, is clearly not dependent upon articulate language for its genuineness and its consequent results. Whether words are present or absent, the individual with the volition to reach toward reality participates in an operation of mutual interaction in which God fulfills and man is fulfilled. How this can be, can be answered only as we are able to answer how all things are. For it is an operation that becomes intelligible only when the very nature of man and his environing world become intelligible. For this reason, prayer, as an organic interaction between man and the sustaining reality can never be fully understood. Yet it may be made sufficiently intelligible to realize its personal involvements and its possible procedures since we are able to know the nature of man and his environment to a partial degree. That minimum of awareness of man’s operations in environment makes clear that this religious outreach in prayer involves personal relationship with reality in the sense of a mutual rapport. The logical problem underlying a belief in a personal God of the common sense assertion concerning the personality of God seems to me to be secondary (for the religious man) to the realization that the condition of reality, involving men and God, is such that men are fulfilled when they respond to reality in personal ways, and impaired, even frustrated, when they live indifferently to its reality. Not everyone who affirms belief in a personal God enters into communion and mutual rapport with sustaining reality; but only they who live profoundly in adjustment with and commitment to the God in our midst.

Religion Rooted in Nature Throughout the lifetime of the race on this planet there have been periods when the acceptance of life prevailed as a determining cultural influence, affecting both the mood and the outreach of the people. Primitive peoples reflect it. All that we can learn of the Vedic Indians through the early Vedic hymns and poems manifest it. Our own American Indians reveal it, even in the midst of their conflict with the western white man. One senses it, too, among the ancient Egyptians and even among the ancient Hebrews. The religious culture of China is rooted in this natural acceptance of life. More than any other people, the Chinese have found the meaning of life in the living of it. Their two native religions, Confucianism and Taoism, are earth-centered, not only in structure of thought, but in ideals of life. The one seeks the refinement of the human spirit through the principle of the Golden Mean; the other is content to awaken in men and women the sense of wonder and praise in the simple life. Buddhism, in Mahayana form, brought to China the strange and sobering mood of contemplation, directed toward mystical ends. Yet even in Chinese Buddhism one catches the spell of earth scenes and the praise of life which they evoke. These lines from a nineteenth century Buddhist poet suggest its natural temper: Beyond the distant mountains drops the sun, and the smoky mists of evening darken into dusk From ten thousand chasms and a thousand cliffs The Holy lamps leap out; Truly these are manifestations of the Supreme Light’s pristine colours— Shadows—layer on layer of the Lotus World.

Again these lines: I have heard that the Crystal Waters give rise to holy men; And so by the dusty world these waters are undefiled. Why comes the sudden western wind blowing the trees till the leaves fall down? The depths of myriad mountains awaken within me the primal source of my being.49

In Greek culture this affirmation of life developed to singular heights. For the Greeks, over a long period of time, were able to maintain a

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reasonable and reasoned attachment to the life of earth. This mood, more than any other single influence, shaped the genius of the Greek spirit. Wherever cultures have felt the oppressiveness and struggle of conscious life in excess of its rewards and enjoyments, however, a failure of nerve has begun working as a cancerous growth within the thought-centers and psyche of the people. Anyone who thoughtfully reflects upon the changing course of human events in the various cultures cannot fail to note this up and down awing in the cultural mood. Greece did not escape it, as the mystery cults give evidence. Christianity arose in an era when the Mediterranean world was peculiarly gripped by the disintegrating mood of despair. The Christian religion brought a certain element of hope into the situation for vast numbers of people, as did the mystery cults; but not through a genuine re-orientation in the world of life. Rather, it provided a promise of release from the social reality, in a manner comparable to that of the mystery religions and the mystical religions of India. A similar turn in the cultural mood occurred in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, particularly in the culture of India. A people who had once lived by a worship of praise and joyous acceptance of life, fell under the gathering shadows of pessimistic lament. The religion of the Rig-Veda, bright and lyrical with its hymns to the Dawn and its romance of earth and sky, faded into obscurity as the dismal fog of Brahman mysteries, and later the philosophies of the Upanishads, rolled in over India. Release from life then became the pervading motif in the religious outreach of India.50 Whenever this yearning for detachment has infected the earth, the praise of life has receded. Buddhism became the carrier of the germ to China and Japan, and to the smaller islands of the Far East. Christian super-naturalism spread beyond the Mediterranean shores into the continent of Europe and ultimately into every culture of the globe. The whole of our western culture has been infected by this religion of sublimation, transmuting the despair of earth life into a praise of transcendent otherworldliness. That religious culture could become so completely committed to this otherworldly mood, is evidence of the strength of its appeal and of the pervasiveness of the tragic sense of life. In contrast to this religious yearning for release, the robust cultural spirit of the people of ancient Hellas, Egypt, China, Japan, early India, and the American Indian, looms as a touch of dawn from a golden day when this human venture was in health and vigorously alive to the sensuous joys of earth life. The fateful renouncement of life and its culture by religious movements must be understood as an outgrowth of developments within the social process. To assume, as some have suggested, that otherworldliness was the invention of a professional priesthood, or of theologians, is,

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of course, superficial. No development of such consequence has ever occurred in that way. The emergence of otherworldliness in the Mediterranean world, shaping the ideology of the mystery cults, Judaism, Christianity, as well as the many esoteric cults of that region, was a phenomenon traceable, in part, to definite social conditions of the time,51 the most significant being the degradation of the lower classes to such a plight that possibility of attaining satisfaction from earthly existence seemed too remote to be interesting. When it is recalled that these rising religious cultures were movements among peoples who had felt the pressure of a palling social experience, at times to the point of despair, this response to leadership that pointed to satisfactions beyond earthly scenes becomes understandable. Religion became otherworldly because the world’s life, as these religious men and women experienced it, offered no incentive to praise and devotion. In this sense, it was not religion that uprooted life, but the conditions within life that left the religious outreach rootless, except as it turned to other environings. But once this tragic dissolution had taken place, religion continued to function as an uprooting influence, even in social environments that justified men’s attachment and devotion. This was possible because the mood, born of the first century social experience, became dramatized in ritual, articulated in creeds, and justified in the developing dogma with the decline of Roman culture, a new era emerged that was to turn the religious mind of the west with renewed impulse toward a spiritual world beyond the secular scene. Here concession to human nature entered in to adapt the strenuous outlook of an ascetic faith to the impulsive demands of a robust people. This has been the saving solution of Catholicism wherever it has developed. It is this genius of holding to the severest from of asceticism as a world-view while at the same time accommodating it to ordinary men and women with a flood attack of many cultural currents. Yet this dualism has always served to insulate the religious mind from the normal events of social culture, leaving that culture, on the one hand, to drift its own course, and, on the other hand, enabling institutional religion to provide only for the redemption of individuals. It is no mere accident that attack upon religious cultures in recent times has been occurring with marked consistency in cultures where the otherworldly temper and pattern in organized religion has been dominant. This is the aspect of the Russian, Turkish, German, Mexican, and Italian political revolts against religion which has been too cavalierly ignored. However one may view the social and political turns of events in these countries, he cannot escape the fact that organized religion is being uprooted and cast out in these cultures because, through all these centuries, religion itself has been functioning as an uprooting force in

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society. And because of its social impotence, it has formed a continuing formidable resistance to creative change within the social process. Otherworldliness has done this to the culture of the west. The mills of the gods have been slowly grinding. The day of reckoning seems to be at hand. It is, in fact, sobering to observe that in cultures where a renascent spirit has been released, impelling new social organization and experimental ventures toward more abundant living among the masses of men, religion has been cast out, or forced into the role of opposing these creative efforts. If the tensions between culture and religion, so much in evidence today, are ever to be constructively resolved, there will have to be a realistic appraisal of the role which religion has played in society in relation to the basic functions of human living, as well as a searching effort to discover how the functions of religious institutions can be adapted to serve the common life in constructive and creative ways. Investigation of institutional attitudes and practices in traditional Christianity with regard to such fundamental human interests as industry, government, recreation, vocation, family problems and sex would reveal, I believe, a rather consistent policy of repression. Not until liberalism in the nineteenth century developed an ethical idealism, did the Christian religion offer any positive aid to the practice of moral living in this human venture. I am not saying that there has been no attempt to regulate these functions, or to make known the position of the church upon issues of human conduct. But regulation and pronouncement of position are far from the kind of guidance that enhances these functions of the common life, or stimulates their creative development toward higher human possibilities. With all of their grossness and limitations, the Life Religions of ancient times seem to have come nearer to serving the deep-driven needs of the natural man. This fact is incidental to the more pertinent one that modern religions, if they are to be anything more than surviving remnants of faiths that have become culturally dead, must recover some of the robust quality of these Life Religions that will enable them to enter vitally and constructively into the life of men and society. They must deal forthrightly and positively with the vital functions of the human organism and of human society, instead of simply standing in judgment of them. In saying this, I am only repeating what is accepted doctrine to many liberally minded men and women, inside as well as outside the church. But my thesis goes beyond these adaptations to current problems. What I am really urging is that religion re-orient its outlook and practice to the extent of affirming life and its functions, and of developing techniques and disciplines for releasing, as well as directing, its vital energies. Some of

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the steps whereby this transmutation may be achieved are these: 1. Modern religions must take more seriously than they now do the biological origin of man and avail themselves of insight that comes from explorations into the human implications of this biological rooting: for example, the physical foundations of human personality, of human attitudes, of human decisions, desires, and actions. 2. Modern religions must pursue this basic search into the biological foundations of personality to discover its bearing upon man’s volitional and mental life, not confining the inquiry to the individual aspects of the psycho-physical organism, but extending the exploration to the social phases of the self. 3. Modern religions must seek to determine, in the light of this scientific understanding of the human organism and of the social reality, just what the meaning of the abundant life is. Efforts already made in this direction are opening up a field of human problems which promised to transform these ministries of religion from an art of talk and ritual into a practical science of religious living. Where such insight is invading the churches, through the stimulus of psychiatry and social studies, a more direct dealing with human problems is in evidence. What the Catholic Church sought to accomplish through the confessional, is but a beginning compared to what promised to be possible when religious institutions develop competent clinics to deal with spiritual ills as efficiently and consistently as hospitals and medical centers now attend to man’s physical ills. But the dangers of the tendency loom the moment one begins to reflect upon what such procedures might lead to, what, in fact, they have already led to, where zeal has outrun insight and competency. Cults of religion long ago entered the field of treating men’s spiritual ills, and some have presumed to absorb the physiological field as well. What has not been attempted with any degree of careful planning and preparation is a community service center, equipped with a competent, scientifically trained staff, to guide the spiritual lives of men and women, old and young: to give consultation concerning family problems, to provide competent counsel for youth, caught up in sex conflicts and other forms of social frustrations, or broken in spirit because of intellectual perplexities. This psychiatric side of the religious ministry is familiar enough to religious leaders and laymen who have come in contract with new methods in theological training; but efforts to implement these methods in the working institutions of religion, in any manner comparable to medical practice, are not so common, except as the minister, himself, undertakes to deal with these matters, in his own way, as a phase of his pastoral work. Were the institutions of religion to take this point of view seriously, much

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of the present emphasis upon the holding of meetings and of promoting evangelical activity would give way to earnest organization of facilities for the scientific practice of the spiritual ministry. I am not suggesting here that the church replace worship and educational activity with the clinic. Worship and education have their distinctive functions, and will always be indispensable phases of institutional religion. I am urging that this fundamental work of personality adjustment and the aiding of human growth be incorporated seriously into the program of organized religion, as a regular phase of the enterprise, so that men’s outreach through worship and education might have greater possibility of actual fulfillment. I come back to this basic matter: It is the point of view in religion that determines the character of emphasis in its ministry. However responsive religious leaders and laymen might seem to the new outlook, their procedures are only mildly oriented to its demands. Much of the mediation of spiritual aid, intended as the extension of psychological insight, continues in the pattern of evangelical methods. A Christian outlook, oriented to the common life, while it would not lose the spiritual perspective of living beyond existence, would frankly acknowledge the significance of existence, realizing that the will to live for the Supremely Worthful is conditioned, and in some cases precluded, by circumstances and malconditions in the common life and in the lives of the average individuals. Modern religions must inquire into conditions that make for fulfillment of that creaturehood as well as into conditions that impair or frustrate growth. This may constitute its most stubborn problem, partly because man cannot be adequately dealt with as an individual; yet any effort to explore the corporate connections or forces that shape his life lead into areas of reflection that are exceedingly problematic. Here religions will need the expert counsel of the social scientist. Yet, to really profit by the wealth of social insight and fact already available, organized religions will have to move beyond one dogma that has raised a barrier between religions and the world of scholarship. That is the dogma of a revealed norm by which religion may accept or reject the findings of scholarship. This opens into an issue of enormous scope, but it may be summarily stated as the tension between the sacred and the secular realms. One need not dispose of this contrast, so long as he understands it to mean the tension between forces and organization of life that impair or frustrate the growth of value, and that order of living that promotes and enhances value. But unless the theory of value which provides the norm for selection of data is inclusive of such elements and ends as liberal arts scholarship, socialized technology, and civic enterprises might promote, this disparity

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between the sacred and the secular makes the religious choice of such data too restricted to be of any significance. The theological basis of this dualism between the world of spirit and the world of cultural life has never been adequately confronted to be reconstructed. Such philosophies as absolute idealism and spiritual monism served to heal the breach between the so-called natural and the supernatural, but the resolution of tensions here created, on the one hand, were too complete a reconciliation; and on the other hand, failed to bring about a genuine integration of the two sides of life. It over-did the reconciliation by demolishing all tension, thus destroying awareness of the dualism that is inherent in existence where value and disvalue are in conflict. It stopped short of integrating religious culture genuinely in the world of life because, despite its monistic view, it never quite removed the film of the Absolute reality from the finite forms of spirit. Consequently the spiritual in man existed in the world of nature much as a rubber ball floats upon the water. It is a striking fact than none of the prominent forms of idealistic philosophy, such as transcendentalism in the form in which Emerson presented it, the Absolute Idealism of Josiah Royce, the Spiritual Monism of Rufus Jones, or the philosophies of Personalism, have taken the physical or the social sciences seriously as sources of factual knowledge, bearing upon the philosophical or theological outlook. The philosophies of organism, rising out of the biological conception of existence, give promise of new orientation. Yet even here, where the habit of mind imposed by philosophical idealism invades contemporary thinking, this organismic thought tends to create an artificial barrier between the realm of spirit and the world of life. The task of orienting religious thinking genuinely in the world of life with which the sciences and liberal arts scholarship deal is, to my mind, the most imperative theological task confronting the religious mind today. For until this is accomplished, there can be no clear conception of the spiritual life in the world of culture. Neither can there be any significant use made of the vast body of contemporary insight from the fields of scholarship in pursuing the perplexing problems of the human spirit in terms of the religious relationship. The concern to relate religion to the natural order of life is not a recent notion. It is, in fact, a very old effort. We have already noted its prevalence throughout ancient cultures of the Far East and in certain areas of the Mediterranean world. Its systematic formulation first appears in the philosophies of the Greeks. Western thought took hold of it when the schoolmen, particularly Thomas Aquinas, undertook to weave the thought strands of Aristotle into the medieval Christian fabric of faith. Ever since

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his time, the Christian religion has had its natural theologians. To be sure, natural theology was not a forthright attempt to naturalize the fundamentals of the Christian religion. It was, rather, an effort to amplify the reasonableness of revealed truths by showing their counterpart in natural knowledge. Nevertheless it clearly acknowledged the propriety of correlating religious reality with the natural order. This process was interrupted, as Emil Brunner has recently reminded us,52 by the Protestant reformers who undertook to check the gradual identification of the divine with the natural by returning to the “pure” dualism of early Christian theology. Despite the reformers’ ardent efforts, however, natural theology persisted; and in succeeding three centuries, attained its greatest momentum. Meanwhile the scientific movement, developing independently of religious influence, was making rapid gains and was to become the determining stimulus in modern philosophy. Partly as a reaction against extreme efforts to establish philosophy upon the exact sciences, and also to bridge the yawning gap opening between traditional faith and the modern outlook, the idealistic venture in philosophy was launched. The total effect of this concerted effort to re-fashion the western world-view in terms of natural reality was obviously to compel religious thought to seek similar orientation. The philosophers of the German Romanticists, including that of Schleiermacher, the Positivism of the French school, as well as the Transcendentalist thought of New England, were some of the impressive results. Yet none of these philosophies were ever more than beginnings in the direction of naturalism. Actually the trend toward naturalism was arrested by a sort of impasse that developed in the nineteenth century between the partial compromise with a this-worldly outlook and the outright acceptance of physical theories, resulting in materialism. The effect of this impasse upon recent religious thought has been exceedingly significant. It has set up barriers to an acceptable naturalizing of religion that are well-nigh insurmountable. No word has accumulated more emotional overtone, evoking hostile reaction among religious people, than the word naturalism. And this fact has been influential in turning philosophers and theologians away from the effort to orient religious thought to the natural world-view. Why stigmatize one’s thoughts with so unpopular a label? cautious minds have countered. Liberal theology escaped being embarrassingly involved in this dilemma by following the lead of the Ritschlians in theology and the pragmatists in philosophy. It steered clear of the metaphysical problem. By becoming preoccupied with the social gospel, liberal theologians succeeded in giving a practical orientation to the Christian religion without really severing the historical bond with supernatural Christianity. This has

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been both a strength and a weakness. It has been a strength in that it kept liberal Christianity implemented in the institutional faith. It has been a weakness in that it shunted off the basic theological problem of reconstruction, leaving movements less adapted to functional Christianity, to push ahead with the precarious task of re-interpretation. Religious humanism, in one sense, is liberal theology made more daring. It manifests a forthright concern to see this thing through with no turning back to linger or to lament. Yet religious humanism, with all its forthrightness, has never seemed to escape the deep shadows of supernaturalism. There is a haunting sadness in its creed that leaves one with the feeling that they are brave, but sad, men, walking valiantly indifferent to the lingering sentiments of men’s hearts. Earlier humanism manifested a marked negation of supernatural theology.53 Fuller identification with the religious sciences, arising from the historical study of religious cultures, has given it more affirming tones.54 Yet there remains in its thought the chilling touch of disillusionment, arising, I believe, from the fact that it contains in the perspective of those rebel reactions against supernaturalism. I doubt that religious humanism will ever lose the stamp of this reactionary mood. The task of interpreting the spiritual life in terms of the natural order of existence remains a compelling problem. So long as we conceive it as a negation of supernatural tenets, we shall be hampered in our efforts. The most profitable course would be to let go of the supernatural in such a way that we shall be able to embrace its contentions naturalistically. This is not the same as translating supernatural theology into natural theology. Nor is it identical with sloughing off the superstructure or supernaturalism. It is that kind of complete acceptance of the natural order that envisages a fullorbed universe in which historical reaches and the eternal aspect take on new meaning and significance. One is led, not to deny the vivid other world of the traditional faith, but to see it in less mythical terms—to see it, that is, with the kind of open imagination and sensitiveness that relates the observable, existent, measurable world to the world of memory, on the one hand, and to the growing, emerging world of infinite possibilities on the other. All these precious overtones of spiritual surplusage become, not supernatural realities, but the historic horizon and the impinging frontiers of that “obscurely given occurrent” that is ever related and vitally related to the “realm of the clearly given.” With this more substantial understanding of the over-plus of existence, the emotional outreach in religion, employing fictional and poetic symbols, becomes the legitimate expression of acknowledging the surplusage of mystery in life, and of relating man feelingly to its qualitative richness.

When Religion Uproots Life All religions have addressed themselves in one way or another to the problem of aiding man to achieve a sense of union with the larger world of reality. None of them has adequately met its issues for none has been able to penetrate the psychical or even the physical mystery of man’s life. Early man’s absorption in sexual rites was his way of answering this deep call for union. All the religions of nature and the fertility cults were badly managed attempts to secure what was organically needed if life was to fulfill itself. Certain culture religions advanced beyond this primitive praise of life to achieve partial spiritual orientation in the universe. The culture religions of the west did not aid this quest when they routed this pagan dissipation of emotion to replace it with repression and the ascetic life. Much that has gone by the name of religion has not served the basic religious craving of man. It has merely sublimated that craving through hypnoses that detoured men from their legitimate path of creature fulfillment. The psychological results of this world-fleeing gospel have been disastrous. When religious conversion has taken the form of turning one’s back upon the world, it has often impaired life irreparably. I. The means by which religion has uprooted life have been many and varies. The desire for martyrdom early in Christianity led to this end. The passion for deliverance from the world among the early Christians and devotees of the mystery cults arose, in part at least, from social circumstances within the Mediterranean world, which left the lower classes destitute of hope for any profitable participation in the normal affairs of society.55 This despair of their earthly experience accentuated their longing for heaven, and gave rise to conscious designs to terminate existence in order that the glories of eternal life might be hastened and assured. Their eagerness for martyrdom is understandable when these motives are made clear; yet their martyrdom is none the less lamentable. The ascetic search for spiritual perfection through monasticism and mysticism became the most prevalent means of uprooting life in medieval Europe. Even after the age of St. Francis and the rise of the great cathedral, when religion sought to free itself from this seclusion and to recreate itself as a folk movement, the effects of the cloister continued as an influence to alienate men from the affairs of life. To become religious was to be set apart. Impassioned preaching upon sin and the depraved condition of natural

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man, leading to the conclusion that the old life must be set aside in deference to the newly found faith, has been another violent means of uprooting life, since this period of the Great Awakening. The literature of conversions is haunting with account after account of sick souls, crying out of their desperate loneliness and despair, like Bunyan’s man in the iron cage. Bunyan’s own confessions are even more pointed and revealing: My original and inward pollution was my plague and my affliction. By reason of that, I was more, loathsome in my own eyes than was a toad; and I thought I was so in God’s eyes too. Sin and corruption, I said, would as naturally bubble out of my heart as water would bubble out of a fountain, I could have changed heart with anybody. I thought none but the Devil himself could equal me for inward wickedness and pollution of mind. Sure, thought I, I am forsaken of God; and thus I continued a long while, even for some years together...Nay, and thought I saw this, felt this, and was broken to pieces with it, yet that which added to my sorrow was, that I could not find with all my soul that I did desire deliverance. My heart was at times exceedingly hard. If I would have given a thousand pounds for a tear, I could not shed one: no, nor sometimes scarce desire to shed one. I was both a burthen and a terror to myself; nor did I ever so know, as now, what it was to be weary of my life, and yet afraid to die. How gladly would I have been anything but myself! Anything but a man! and in any condition but my own.

From The Life and Journal of a Canadian evangelist comes this painful account of the uprooting of life, following his awareness of sin: Everything I saw seemed to be a burden to me; the earth seemed accursed for my sake: all trees, plants, rocks, hills, and vales seemed to be dressed in mourning and groaning, under the weight of the curse, and everything around me seemed to be conspiring my ruin. My sins seemed to be laid open; so that I thought that everyone I saw knew them, and sometimes I was almost ready to acknowledge many things, which I thought they knew: yea sometimes it seemed to me as if everyone was pointing me out as the most guilty wretch upon earth. I had now so great a sense of the vanity and emptiness of all things here below, that I knew the whole world could not possibly make me happy, no, nor the whole system of creation.56

Some years ago a college instructor revealed to me the torments of his own thoughts as a child, resulting from his mother’s bed-time stories about the sinful soul in hell. “Night after night,” he said, “she would stand over my bed and tell me, in words that burned vividly into my memory, about the torments I would suffer, were I to grow up to be a bad boy and continue in sin. When she had gone,” he continued, “I would pull the covers over my head and tremble until midnight, or what seemed like

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midnight with its stillness of terror.” His recovery from this gruesome experience of youth has been only partial. He has outgrown the fears of impending torment and his mother’s pictorial theology, but his mind has been seared by its burning memories. Here the uprooting of life took the common course of turning into a desert wasteland, the very areas of experience that might otherwise have aided the imaginative life. Through all his days, this man will fight clear of experiences or impressions that go beyond the matter of fact world. He has found refuge in a caustic, critical adherence to hard facts, and takes delight in puncturing any and every bubble of imagination. This impassioned preaching upon sin and its proposals for redemption has, without exception, so far as I am able to discover, wrenched the individual from his normal pursuit of life’s functions when it has taken effect. Something happens to the person who gets religion in this emotionalized sense that causes him to turn his back utterly upon the old life as if it were totally evil, totally irreligious, totally sinful. I have noted this result again and again where one or two members of a family have been overwhelmed by the evangelical spell. The family circle is broken because there are no bridges to the old life which connect with sentiments once mutually cherished and shared. The evil effects of this extrication have been somewhat mitigated and even transmuted in historic religions, particularly in evangelical Protestantism, where emotional conversion has assumed the form of massphenomenon, by the belief in a transcendent order to which one could become committed after separation from the world. While this has brought solace and a degree of unification to the dislocated personalities, it nevertheless has left them uprooted so far as the common life is concerned. When one considers the havoc that such experiences of religious conversion have wrought among sensitive personalities, he is led to feel that without doubt the sublimation of religious conversion by religious growth was one of the most significant achievements of the liberal theology, initiated in this country by Horace Bushnell and William Newton Clarke. Their native dependence upon an idealized conception of evolutionary change led many liberals to a fatal Pollyannaism which was to be the undoing of their creed. For growth to a religious maturity, as we now well known, is not a smooth unfolding of capacities, but a series of critical changes, at times tumultuous and imperiling. Nevertheless, there is a continuing process of carrying over persistent elements which the concept of growth takes account of and which the conversion technique ignored. This factor is what makes all the difference in the two procedures,

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bearing upon the normal routine of life and the psychological attachment of the common life. II. The sense of alienation that results from these uprooting experiences, arising out of religious maladjustment, is traceable again, to an excessive optimism that has breathed through religious faiths, particularly where their theologies have undertaken to resolve the whole metaphysical problem by a few creedal statements. One fact that has not always stood out clearly is that religions, themselves, have helped to create the dilemmas for which their creeds and rituals have provided the antidote. Most of the conventional case studies of religious experiences seem to assume that some situation in society has brought on a spiritual crisis, or even a condition of spiritual desuetude, which religious conversion in turn counteracts and heals. What has not been clearly recognized is that the doctrine of original sin, which has been at the bottom of much religious melancholy, is itself an excessively morbid statement of belief that was fashioned by thinkers within the church and communicated to believers by its preachers. Only as one stands within the tradition of belief himself, does this situation of crisis seem to arise from without the ministries of religion. Objective observation of such crises, however, discloses the role of religion to be both cause and cure. I am not overlooking the condition of real maladjustment which this doctrine sought to designate; I am referring now to its excessive statement which, as is evident in the cases recorded above, brought on an abnormal sense of guilt and consequent frustration. The same observation holds for cases in which the personality has become frustrated or disintegrated through religious perplexity, arising out of unanswerable questions like “Why?” “Wherefore?” “What for?” Tolstoy’s account of the overwhelming sense of meaninglessness of life which he experienced at the age of fifty is illuminating on this point: I felt that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my life had stopped. An invincible force impelled me to get rid of my existence, in one way or another. It cannot be said exactly that I wished to kill myself, for the force which drew me away from life was fuller, more powerful, more general than any mere desire. It was a force like my old aspiration to live, only it impelled me in the opposite direction. It was an aspiration of my whole being to get out of life... I did not know what I wanted. I was afraid of life; I was driven to leave it; and in spite of that I still hoped something from it...All this took place at a time when so far as all my outer circumstances went, I ought to have

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Meland’s Unpublished Papers been completely happy… And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my life...What will be the outcomes of what I do today? Of what I shall do tomorrow? What will be the outcome of all my life? Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does not undo and destroy? These questions are the simplest in the world. From the stupid child to the wisest old man, they are in the soul of every human being. Without an answer to them, it is impossible, as I experienced, for life to go on. “But perhaps,” I often said to myself, “there may be something I have failed to notice or to comprehend. It is not possible that this condition of despair should be natural to mankind.” I sought for an explanation in all the branches of knowledge acquired by men. I questioned painfully and protractedly and with no idle curiosity. I sought, not with indolence, but laboriously and obstinately for days and nights together. I sought like a man who is lost and seeks to save himself,—and I found nothing. I became convinced, moreover, that all those who before me had sought for an answer in the sciences have also found nothing. And not only this, but that they have recognized that the very thing which was leading me to despair the meaningless absurdity of life—is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.57

Tolstoy’s experience, though peculiar, in its intensities, to his own temperament, is not unfamiliar to many who have encountered moments of disillusionment precisely on this ground: “What’s it all about?” While it is more likely to be manifest among the twenty-year olds and those of middle life, when life wanes at forty, this form of melancholy may be appropriate to any age or period where crises arise to confront one with fleetingness and pointlessness of this succession of moments. Life proceeds in a normal, healthy mood as long as the centers of interest which evoke men’s enthusiasm and efforts continue intact. Let something happen there - the death of a son, or of a wife, the failure of a cause, ill-health, disappointment in love, failure to find a job, the discovery that jobs are scarce and that no place may open after college, or the prospect of having to drop out of a job that has rooted ones interests for a quarter of a century—and the purposiveness of life itself begins to fade. No such experience should be regarded simply as the issue of intellectual perplexity. Actually, as the psychologists have come to discover, metaphysical explosions, especially among youth, are frequently but the vocal side of more deep-seated difficulties, affecting the emotions and the psyche. Yet, back of all such disillusionment are processes of thought, moving either toward clarification and adjustment, or toward confusion and frustration. Now these processes of thought are precisely the operations within the personality that either give control to developing situations, or accelerate the rising crisis. Where a steady process of mental

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adjustment has become natural to the personality, critical situations simply call into operation the faculties of problem-solving. The will to work it out outweighs the impulse to despair. But this facility to cope with crises is not just a gift of temperament or of nervous organization; although I would not overlook the importance of this physiological conditioning. It is at this point that James’ explanation in terms of the “healthy-minded” and the “sick-soul” types seems to me inadequate. It is more than a matter of types or of temperaments. It is equally as much an achievement of organic reaction, resulting from a social conditioning of the mind and its accompanying responses during formative years. And this is where the role of religion plays a vital part in the shaping of crises long before the critical tensions begin to appear. Religious conditioning can either prepare young minds to meet the crises of mental growth creatively, or it can, through indoctrination, condition them to resist all change. A striking illustration of the latter, which is all too common among the churches, was reported a few years ago in an article which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly under the title, “What College Did to my Religion.” This story could have come from any one of the thousands of undergraduates or graduates who pass through the college or university experience. The youth relates that he grew up in a typical middle-class American home just after the turn of the century. His family being good Presbyterians, predestination played an important role in his early life. Very early in life he came to think of the God whose presence was so imminently felt in every department of daily life, as one of his most intimate acquaintances. He was the head of the world as his father was the head of the household. By the time he came to the age of reason, the account goes on to say, the system under which the boy had grown up had implanted in his mind certain clear ideas about the universe and his place in it. The world was created by God as a laboratory for testing human beings. In the Bible He had revealed His commandments, which were distinct, direct, and admitted of no arguments. Obedience to these injunctions was virtue, disobedience sin. To his young mind, this God was not only a moralist, but an engineer as well. He had set the world going in the beginning, and, like a good mechanic, had been tinkering with it ever since. Thus He was in direct control of all that happened in this world. If he could save men from their sins, He could also protect them against accidents, diseases, and enemies. Thus, before he went to college, he was thoroughly at home in a universe which revolved about the central figure of an omnipotent Deity. In college he was suddenly plunged into another world. He found himself breathing an entirely different atmosphere. His teachers spoke a new language. Naturally, in the course of time, the impact of this new

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atmosphere, as it was experienced especially in the classroom and laboratory of the sciences, wrought havoc with his earlier ideas. Here he learned something about the laws of nature. His scientific concepts gave to his mind a wholly new pattern into which his religious beliefs refused to fit. In so orderly a universe, there seemed to be no place for a wonderworking God. “The bottom dropped out of my world,” he wrote, “and I wrestled with myself in a futile attempt to patch it up.” In 1928 he took his degree. Four years after graduation, his ideas, he said, had undergone no important modification. Subsequent studies had confirmed him in the point of view which his college experience had brought him. Thus, in his judgment, he remained irretrievably lost to religion. His account of his disillusioning experience concludes with the comment: “It will appear from my little history that we members of the skeptical younger generation are a problem. It is an inevitable consequence of America’s generous passion for education. Thousands of young men and women go to college each year form homes more or less like mine, to return changed beyond recognition in all their ideas. And a few thoughtful appraisers of our social trends...seem to agree with clergymen and the more devout parents in thinking that the transformation is not always a change for the better.”58 Here again, the inference is made by the writer of the article that influences outside of religion brought about the dissolution of religious faith. This time it is the university that has presumably dissipated confidence in religion. And in the author’s opinion, “It is an inevitable consequence of America’s generous passion for education.” That there may be a problem of curriculum and pedagogy involved in the case recorded here, any one, who is close to the college situation, will readily acknowledge. My impression is, however, that colleges and universities are more aware of their relation to the difficulty here than either parents or religious leaders. What is particularly disturbing is the irresponsible assumption that the sole source of the difficulty is the college classroom. This clearly reveals an insensitivity to psychological factors which point to the casual role of religion and early conditioning, effecting this uprooting of faith in life among young people. Religious influence, when it comes into contact with the growing mind during formative years, through family or church instruction, tends to condition it for accepting or rejecting positive ideas about basic issues. Thus the young mind, instead of remaining flexible and open to growth through observation and reflection, comes to think about metaphysical matters in such a way that only two possible alternatives suggest themselves: either the world is wholly controlled by the Omnipotent power of a perfect God who gives

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purpose to life; or it is utterly devoid of divinity and therefore empty of purpose. This rigidity of mind, with its accompanying emotional reactions, tends either to close the mind or to insulate it from observations, fact, and meanings, making for discrimination and measured insights. Consequently, minds that have been conditioned in this way tend to react negatively to any process of reflective inquiry, aiming at evaluation or at proper restraint in religious thinking. This very incapacity to respond openly to measured insights in matters of religious thought, keeps the mind restricted to the outlook of childhood, with but one possibility of change: that being to swing to the opposite extreme. Where once one affirmed God and faith with excessive optimism, he may now denounce all faith. Or, if he is not resentful in his reaction, he will suffer intensely from religious melancholy. The enormity of the psychical defeat that has come to the human mind and the human spirit through the centuries as a result of this kind of conditioning, imbuing young minds with perfectionist and absolutist theories about man and the divine order, is beyond all measurement and conception. So long as traditional dogma was persuasive to men, its evil effects were mitigated. But with the emerging dominance of scientific influence and its rationalistic impact upon the thought of the schools, ill effects of absolutism and perfectionism have mounted high. Especially damaging has this conditioning been where young minds, leaving the counsel of home and church, have sought to find their way through the factual, discriminating, and inquiring environment of college and university. Having been made mentally rigid in regard to religious truths, the individual does not have the sensitivity or outreach to respond to suggestive data, pointing to a valid conception of the spiritual life. I have noted again and again, during my teaching of religion in college, an appalling lack of capacity in students to recognize, to say nothing of grasping, significant facts that bear vitally upon the meaning of man’s existence in relation to his wider environment. So glutted have their minds and feelings become through earlier religious experiences, or simply experiences with religious stimulus, that they remain insensible to discriminative insight, or data that might lead to such insight. The problem of orienting the young mind to the spiritual demands and expression of life is exceedingly difficult. As a statement of general principle, I am in agreement with Dean Sperry’s judicious suggestions: 1) Never teach a child as being religiously true any proposition which you know he will have to unlearn in later life. 2) Be willing to say “I don’t know.” 3) Prepare the child to be sensitive to life’s mysteries.59

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III. The sense of attachment to life is disrupted, again, through suffering and tragic struggle, creating conditions, either real or imaginary, which thrust the individual into restless yearning for peace through release from present bondage. When this happens, religious attachment, if sought or attained, may cease to be a normal and natural rooting in reality and become, instead, irrational commitment to whatever seems to give promise of deliverance. This effortful and rather artificially projected religious behavior is apt to accompany or follow severe illness wherein the established routine that once gave order and purpose to living is routed, leaving one incapable of taking up the threads. The following anonymous account60 of one who faced the grim reality of incurable illness, and then struggled through to a new sense of freedom, presents a sobering illustration of this kind of uprooting. It should be clear that the intention is not to decry this kind of adjustment; certainly not to minimize its importance, or the sort of value it achieves. Rather, it is to point out one further way in which the normal attachment to life is abandoned; not through choice, but through circumstances which close the doors to normal fulfillment. These excerpts disclose the process of abandonment and the climb to new adjustment: Yesterday will always be a marked day in my memory. For yesterday I found out. Now there will be no more uncertainty. Yesterday was like the clanging of a dreadful gate, shutting me out from all sweet, hopeful, changeful, misty uncertainties. Yesterday brought me out alone into a place so narrow, so small, so terribly enclosed that there is not room left for uncertainty... There is no fog between me and the reality I face. The laws that govern experience do not seem to me merciful, but dark and cruel. July 2—How can one live these days of futile suffering, fallen spirit, broken soul? To live in the midst of a lost kingdom that yet is not withdrawn, but rises around one like a phantom city, offering no entrance, nor any shelter, how can one meet the days? If I might go back but for one hour and know the days again as once I knew them, and give to that miracle of experience the worship that is its meed, then I think I could come back and be where now I am and endure and not repine. And yet, it could not be. Never is life lived as vision sees it, across the gulf of final renunciation. Sacrifice has burned away all the rebellion, all the doubt. The joy of it runs through the earth like the breath of God. August 20—Life flamed in me today, a fever that would not be stilled. It was an intoxication to be poised on the brink of danger. It was a thrilling adventure to snatch an hour’s excitement from that perilous denial that has engulfed so much. So when afternoon came, bringing great heat and kindly pleas on loving voices, I got up and dressed in one of the pretty pale dresses I chose with such reckless hope in early summer, and went down,

When Religion Uproots Life (1938) into the sunshine, to the chair upon the lawn… How can I have said that life was far away? It is so near that it is a wound. It pierces through defenses that are no longer potent against it, and reaches a remoteness in me that receives it in pain and cries out against it, and yet cannot pluck it out and cast it away. It is August, and all the thoughts that belong to August are stabbing me. And August is hurrying past me, leaving me none of its treasures. Pictures of the heather rise up before me—the pungent, mysterious banks of purple heather—the little brilliant bells of the ling that I see always wearing the raindrops. Pictures of the brown streams, breaking into golden foam against wet boulders, come to me, and the music of the running water sings and moans in my ears, so that I feel if I could hear it once again I should understand it forever and be consoled... August 21—Summer is over now... Today it is autumn. It is a curious sharpening—like a warning, and yet it is an enchantment. And all this I knew again to-day, in a sudden moment of freedom and response. Then the door closed once more upon all the exquisite, inexplicable, piercing impressions the pageant of this earth can so wonderfully make upon us. This alternation between recovered ecstasy and deep lament, rebellious at times, reaches its darkest mood in the next utterances and is followed by a steady disenchantment with life as it was formerly experienced, after which the movement toward new adjustment is rapid. November 12—I have looked into a region of horror. With inner eyes I have seen, and with every fibre of my being I have felt, a world where there is nothing but an unutterably dreadful, mechanical pulsing, that beats on forever without mind, without purpose, without response to our hearts and minds, with no relationship whatever to those things we perpetually crave. Hope, beauty, wisdom, renewal, expression, love, effort, aspiration, the intertwining of our spirit with them all—these are life itself. But I had entered upon an agonized existence where not one of them was, where they were made to seem but some foolish, unreal, mocking mist that sometimes fell in illusory consolation, and hid that relentless permanence. I longed to struggle against it, but I could only suffer in terror. No appeal could enter it. It was law, but it had no knowledge. It ruled, but without intent. It was cruelty, but without malice. I knew myself and every living thing to be entangled in it. It convinced me utterly, and under it, helpless, how I suffered.”

The ascent of spiritual adjustment follows: December 8—For a month I have dwelt in a region of shadows and silence—dwelt, a rejected guest, between heaven and earth...It is an inward world that is mine now, where I lie alone and ponder this ineffable, piteous mystery of suffering. What did I see—that strange and terrible night that filled my vision

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Meland’s Unpublished Papers with undreamt-of darkness? What strange and awful law separated me from every desire? Was the earth cursed for our sake? Did I fall deeper into the forbidden laws that clutch and hold us against all that within us loves and remembers and desires a different destiny? Did I see a vision of life as it would be, did it remain forever unpierced by Spirit? To Spirit, then, belong all the divine, sweet, lovely things that fill the days with joy and nameless sweetness and wonderful fears. To Spirit belongs all that we call life.

Disenchantment with earth scenes is complete now: Once the summer mornings, blue with the haze of coming heat, woke passionate desires, and the poignant thrill of pleasure. Once the mild spring winds, carrying the scents of the earth when it is broken by the upward push of growing things, full of the nameless lure of the earth’s renewing life, met me with bewildering magic and called my pulses to a splendid beat. The snow in sunlight had its own ridiculous merriment, the snow at night its cold, mystic enchantment. But now the eyes carry no message to the slumbering senses. They gaze out of my high window and they see the rain and the sun, the snow, the blue sky and the wandering city smoke, but they bring none of these things to me... The frame of quivering nerves and hidden senses that I call myself, now is tuned to a different tension. It is strung to a changed key.” I think I can never again desire anything so much as to gaze upon knowledge in the revealing rapture of that greater knowledge… The kindly gloom fills my room, my flowers shine in it—little ghostly presences. But not the night, nor the flowers, not the silencing voices, nor relief of solitude have called this deep stillness into my spirit. It is deeper stillness than any night can bring. Thoughts shine in its shadows as pale flowers shine in dusky woods. Gone is the agony of separation - the fire of desire—the frustration of love and memory. The gathering darkness, the brooding stillness brings me life and union again. To all for whom the summer day has held the fullness of its joy, as for me—night comes—with separating touch—with imperious stillness. For all, whom life endows and claims and gladdens, the greater night, that closes life itself with purpling shadows, waits—the great detachment—the transcending silence.

These piercing utterances make clearer than any discussion could possible accomplish the manner in which religious solace enters experience to uproot the human consciousness and its sensory response from a functioning relationship with the events of life. Not until despair becomes complete, does the religious response of solace begin to assert itself. So long as one is capable of rebelliousness, he may be said to have

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attachment to life, in its normal sense, at least in its minimum experience—a sort of clinging to its joys by way of lament and reluctance to acknowledge their passing. Renunciation, with firm and final resolve, opens the way to new compensatory adjustment through what is recognized as the consoling Presence of Spirit. When this vision takes hold, the disenchantment with life is complete and irrevocable. Only a musing wonder, as to how life could have held such charm, remains to remind one that life once did hold enchantment. Whether this documents a typical progression toward illusion, or the achievement of spiritual triumph through release from sensory bondage, we may not say on evidence here examined. The claim of all mystics who through preference have consciously sought this detachment from sensory life, has come repeatedly that Spirit does increase when the flesh recedes. But only the mystic and the “sick soul” have gone this way and returned with confirming testimony. To try to conclude on this point would be to open up the whole problem of mystical experience. Our intention has not been to do that; but, rather to make clear the condition of uprooting that attends the mystical path, when pursued in response to tragedy and suffering. It becomes an uprooting that is healing - a completion of the dissolvent process which tragedy had initiated, but left fragmented. It is uprooting that marks transition between religion as robust adjustment and religion as solace. IV. In all these conditions, where attachment to life is dissolved; social disintegration leading to otherworldliness; religious melancholy resulting from an excessive sense of guilt; disillusionment following upon insoluble perplexities; and the disenchantment with life through suffering; religious commitment, when it occurs, is rather deliberately irrational in emphasis, in contrast to religious devotion grounded upon discernment and rational decision. This marks the distinction between what has been called Life Religion, or religious relation that is attachment to life, and Redemption Religion, or religious deliverance from life and its evils. It is important to keep these two contrasting forms of the religious response clearly distinguished. Redemption religion presupposes disenchantment with life. Life religion seeks to provide the unifying and coordinating force of life. It does not stand out in contrast to other interests and activities; its motivation leavens action within those areas. The religious relationship becomes the blood stream of culture, and thus vitalizes it through its enervating connections. Man, under these normal circumstances, is hardly conscious of his religious commitment to reality. Reality has become so native to him as to be part of this living organism. His life reaches out to

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embrace its sustaining connections as tree roots channel through to deeper orientation. He does not continually extol that relationship; nor does he fret about it unduly—any more than the tree digs itself up to see if it is being well-rooted. This religious relationship does not obtrude into the foreground. No more would the religious man think of making it his constant conversation than he would make physical health or sickness his table talk. Like the creatures of earth for whom growth and fulfillment are natural and normal processes, he responds faithfully and appreciatively to these silent, sustaining forces. He gives himself to this earth-reality as the sunflower opens its face to the sun. So living he knows the meaning of the religious relationship because he experiences it daily in this fulfilling attachment to life. If this emphasis upon religion as devotion to the sustaining forces of life seems strange, it is because the note of solace, rather than adjustment, has been dominant in western religion. Traditional Christianity, both in Catholic and Protestant forms, has not served the religious adjustment in the sense of restoring people’s faith in life and commitment to its demands. Rather it has sublimated the diseased state of the irreligious spirit through projecting human hopes beyond the earthly experience. One might even go so far as to say that neither traditional Christianity nor postVedic Hinduism can be considered religious solutions to life in a positive sense. They sublimated irreligion, as we have said, but they also shunted off the religious outreach that might have released in human beings creative aspiration for coping with their world and pursuing the creatural ends open to their species. In doing so, they built into their religious traditions elements that were to insulate them from interchange with the growing social experience in their respective environments. It is this impasse between cultus and culture that has alienated large sections of the commonwealth in various modern countries from the Christian church, even giving rise in some cultures to an uprooting of religion.

1939 Mysticism in Modern Terms Mysticism in its conventional form stands for a well-defined outlook. It is a theory of knowledge. Mysticism holds that knowledge of the divine reality comes to one who is properly attuned, in moments of heightened awareness. The mind is illumined with light. Reason, it contends, cannot find this path to truth. It is a metaphysics: The Hindu doctrine, “That and Thou art one” appears with varying emphases in most of the mystical philosophies. Monism is the preferred theory of reality of mystics— It is a theory of human Conduct: Mysticism always seeks to transform the individual to accord with divine demands. The humanistic tendency of the sciences, especially of the social sciences, to accommodate the environment to man’s needs is alien to the mystic. The mystic says man must bend. He must discipline himself. I. The pattern of thought common to mysticism should be noted: In all the conventional form of mysticism, the imagery of the apparent and the real appears in contrast. The apparent world is seen against a background of the Vastly More Real world. The common sense world is continuously bathed in this larger ocean of reality. In fact, such reality as the common sense world has given to it by this deeper environment which supervenes upon it, and, on occasions, breaks through or shines through the thin veil that separates the two realms. Contact with this deeper environment comes, not by arduous effort of thinking one’s way toward it, or of breaking down the One into experienceable events, but by a subtle process of adjusting the mind’s eye so that where once was blind to this hidden reality, now he is able to see. It is like waiting for the darkness to subside when one first enters a tunnel or a cave. Or it is like moving out of deep night into the dawn. The illumination of the spirit comes upon one as the soft light of morning. Now the mystic who holds to some conventional form of mysticism generally contends that this capacity to be illumined, that is to see with mystical vision, is a peculiar gift of those who have been prepared for such vision. I remind you that in the background of his mind is this view of the world that places the common sense world against a super sensuous world, and separates the two by a thin veil of spirit. Usually the way to attain the capacity for illumination and for piercing the veil takes some form of minimizing sensory responses and appetites. It

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is assumed that as the human senses decrease, the spiritual capacities increase. All mystics down to the day of William James envisaged events in this pattern of thought. You will recall James’ version of this view in the Conclusion of his Varieties of Religious Experience. Take this pertinent passage: The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner ‘state’ in which the thinking comes to pass. What we think of may be enormous—the cosmic times and spaces, for example—whereas the inner state may be the most fugitive and paltry activity of mind. Yet the cosmic objects, so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess but only point at outwardly, while the inner state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our experience are one. (498–99)

Having thus characterized the two poles of experience, James goes on to say in his conclusion: Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side, the ‘more’ with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life. Starting thus with a recognized psychological fact as our basis, we seem to preserve a contact with “science” which the ordinary theologian lacks. At the same time the theologian’s contention that the religious man is moved by an external power is vindicated, for it is one of the peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious region to take an objective appearances, and to suggest to the Subject an external control. In the religious life the control is felt as “higher;” but since in our hypothesis it is primarily the higher faculties of our own hidden mind which are controlling, the sense of union with the power beyond us is a sense of something, not merely apparently, but literally true. This doorway into the subjective seems to me the best one for a science of religion… Here the over-beliefs begin: here mysticism and transcendental idealism bring in their monistic interpretations and tell us that the finite self rejoins the absolute self. . Disregarding the over-beliefs, and confining ourselves to what is common and generic, we have in the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come, a positive content of religious experience which, it seems to me, is literally and objectively true as far as it goes. (512–15)

I have always felt that one of the great services which Wieman

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rendered to religious thinking was his clarification of this mystical pattern of thought which William James here describes. He does this particularly well in that section of Religious Experience and Scientific Method where he is analyzing James’ hypothesis of the More.61 I have already referred to this in an earlier chapter.62 Here Wieman points out that in his religious thinking, and especially in his thinking upon mysticism, James never got beyond the early framework of supernaturalism. Philosophically he did go beyond it. In his later years he developed a view of radical empiricism which provided the key, as Wieman says, for understanding this More, this larger reality, in natural terms with all the fullness and amplitude that had once been felt in the supernatural expression of it. In James’ radical empiricism reality ceased to be bifurcated, or truncated, or delimited by any artificial barriers. It is a stream, or shall we say, a living tissue that catches up all visible and invisible events, all that is actual and potential. The world of reality, says James, is as we see it to be, providing we see it in this context of living, growing, dynamic events. Here mysticism turns from the language of the apparent and the real, of shadows and actual things, and speaks simply of amplitude. Mysticism becomes a word connoting wider awareness of this stream, or this living tissue of events. The More, which earlier mystics viewed as something different from the common sense reality, turns out to be this experienceable world seen in the fullness of its meaning. Modern mysticism, then, has but one dogma: see things in their relations, in their amplitude. Now this is more difficult than one might imagine. It is difficult first, because our whole procedure of understanding things and events, as developed by the sciences, and appropriated by most of the fields of inquiry, is analytical. To know is to break down, to tear apart. How does the chemist know the nature of elements? How does the psychologist know the nature of human behavior? How does the sociologist know the behavior of crowds or of groups? How does the literary analyst know the meaning of a poem? How does the musicologist understand a symphony? The answer is the same in every case. It is by isolating these phenomena from their context, and analyzing them, taking the total event apart. Now we are all agreed that this procedure yields a kind of understanding. It is, however, a very limited kind of knowledge that is thus derived. It is partknowledge. And part-knowledge is what one gets when the organism or event is temporarily wrested from the living scene, when the process is stopped, as it were. The kind of knowledge that the mystic, as we are interpreting him, would have is of an opposite sort. He concerns himself with discovering and knowing people, things, and events in context, in their relations within the pattern. He seeks relational knowledge.

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II. This concern for relational knowledge becomes all the more significant as one regards the turn of thought that has taken hold of our recent mentality. Two decades ago this concern about seeing things in relation would not have impressed thinkers. For we were then under the spell of the analyst. A whole new climate of thought has settled upon us since that time, as we have pointed out in the previous chapter. Now it is my contention that empirical philosophy of religion, having passed out of the restricted, individualistic, analytical era of two decades ago, into a climate of thought where relational meanings have become primary in importance, can no longer adhere with satisfaction or profit to the dogma that knowledge is what we get when we analyze an event. At best that is partknowledge—an understanding of parts and of part-workings. Relational knowledge and understanding of the working of the pattern comes, not through what we have generally implied by scientific method, i.e., observation and reason carried on in analytical fashion but through such envisagement of related happenings and meanings as give us glimpses of the larger pattern of workings. Now the seeing of these larger events seems to me to be a kind of envisaging which mystics of all times have presumed to accomplish, and which the modern poet, in one way or another approaches. It has come to me with growing conviction that poetic perception is to the empiricist in philosophy of religion and theology what revelation was to the dogmatic theologian, or what intuition has always been to the conventional mystic—the threshold, as it were, to these vaster meanings. This leads me to say that empiricism is entering upon a new stage of development. For almost a half century now, since the early days of James and Peirce, empiricism has labored with the problem of relating religion and philosophy the scientific side of life. Edward Scribner Ames, John Dewey, George Coe, Edwin Starbuck, Gerald Birney Smith, Shailer Mathews, and Henry Nelson Wieman have all contributed significantly to our understanding of problems within this area of thought. James, Ames, Coe, and Starbuck were concerned primarily with exploring the psychological issues in this field of problems. Smith and Wieman have dealt with the epistemological issue, relating science and religious knowledge. The time has now come when empiricism must explore a new area. It is the relation between religion and the field of aesthetic and poetic meanings. I have felt for some time that these fields are closer together in the character of their interests than most of us have admitted. In Modern Man’s Worship I tried to defend the thesis that religion in its basic form is

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an appreciative reaction, or an anesthetic response, to the cosmic reality. Perhaps it can be stated differently, but this seems to express the matter to me. We need to make the relationship more clear, however, so as to avoid the common notion that then readily follows that we must therefore turn our attention to making worship more artistic, etc. It does imply a deepening of the experience of worship with all the aids that art and drama can provide; but it means much more than that. It means understanding this human response to life’s meanings which the genuinely poetic and aesthetic person reveal with a view to discerning just what that kind of human response can convey of these deeper meanings that lie about us in everyday living like a haze, or a mist, confounding our vision because we do not have eyes to see what is so full of radiance and wonder. It means a contemplative grasp of what we live with, instead of sheer utility, or scrutiny. Here the modern mystic can help to restore to us in our religious thinking what the poet and artist have provided for aesthetic thinking. III. Seeing things in relation has a specific connotation when applied to our creature relations with the earth, with our planetary life, and with all the vast-exterior that extends beyond our immediate living space. Mysticism in modern terms consists in the spiritual exploration of this creaturekinship with this wider nature environing man. In one sense, mysticism viewed in this way is not different in theory from any of the conventional forms of mysticism. For, as Havelock Ellis has said in The Dance of Life, mysticism, which is religion in its quintessential core, is the adventure of finding our emotional relationship with the world conceived as a whole. One who wakens from his preoccupation with the affairs of his own ego to look with expectancy and wonder upon the sea of reality that flows beyond him, and to ponder his relation to that reality, takes the first step toward a mystical rapport with his world. But only in the bare outlines of its theory is modern mysticism akin to conventional mysticism. Back of all conventional mysticism, we have seen, is a theory of reality that assumes a bifurcation of the natural and the spiritual, either in terms of two opposing realms, as in supernaturalism; or in terms of two different orders of reality, as in monistic idealism, leaving the natural order something to be triumphed over or eradicated. Thus mysticism becomes a technique for the conquest of the natural order through spiritual means. Modern mysticism assumes no such bifurcation of nature and spirit. For it proceeds from the premise of a radical empiricism that views the spiritual life as a qualitative functioning of the natural life such as we know in ourselves and in the world of experience about us. To be mystical in this sense is not to abandon our natural roots, but to

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bring these roots, with their rising stalks, to flowering and fruition. Rather than being a technique for triumphing over the natural, sensory existence, the mystical life in this context seeks to attain fulfillment of man’s creature possibilities. The meaning of life becomes more illumined when we frankly acknowledge man, in all his parts, to be of the earth, to be planted in its soil and in its environing atmosphere, just as surely as are the pines, the cedars, and the mighty redwoods. In that setting, mystical awareness means, not penetrating a world apart from this flux of experience, but of exploring this stream in its wider and less obvious areas, thereby giving to each living event and moment, greater amplitude. This conviction that man is at one with earthlife, that he is at home in these natural scenes, transforms his psychical life at its core. He finds the essence of the spiritual life, not in denying life and in transcending its sensory experiences; but in affirming life, in strengthening each attachment to it, in channeling these natural energies so as to bring them to high and significant realization, in the fulfillment of his creature capacities. On its practical side, then, the mystical quest, in modern terms, becomes a search for significance as an earth creature, the concern to fulfill life through the natural process of growth, and to attain amplitude of understanding and experience within this human life.

The Controlling Concept of Our Times An Excerpt From In Praise of Life VII by Bernard Meland Cultures and civilizations, men and trees, all yield to the silent processes of growth. The conditions effecting the change are never wholly contemporary, nor wholly within the control of contemporary forces. The processes that humbled Rome had been gathering momentum before the Christian era. The elements of decay and new growth that burst their bonds in the sixteenth century had been working prior to the tenth. We today see the fruition of accumulative and pent-up forces that have been moving as a tidal wave toward this hour of crisis. For these reasons, no situation of drastic change lends itself to ready control by intelligent forces at work of impassioned zeal, long overdue, which, when released, overwhelms the new era with irrational force. There is not harnessing of this belated zeal until the tensions of distemper have been relaxed. And there is always the impending danger that the demonic zeal will gain full control or that the resistant elements will succeed in completely stemming the tide - for the time being. Both conditions have been reached in certain contemporary cultures, and in both cases, new growth has been retarded, if not permanently impaired. The obvious tensions in society rarely reveal the areas of new growth in a crisis. They reveal, rather, the situations most keenly affected by the movement of growth. And while the achievements in those situations of conflict from a part of the emerging order of things, they represent, after all, a minimum phase, though the more violent phase, of the groundswell that is bursting present forms and bringing new forms into being. It is this groundswell that marks the course of the emergence of the dominant character of the new emergent in process. Where there are eyes to see, evidence seems to be piling high to suggest that an overwhelming tide is carrying us into an era in which words like community and mutuality and organic unity are to yield formative insights. Just as the concept of evolution shaped the ideology of nineteenth century thought, so the concept of organic unity seems destined to dominate the vocabulary and thought climate of our immediate era. Evidence of this newly emerging controlling concept may be found by examining the developments within any major field of human endeavor; for no area has escaped its impact. And instances of the application of this new concept to religious thinking are seen in the literature of all the western faiths. The changing perspective in Protestantism during recent

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years is one of the telling indications that one era has ended and another is beginning to emerge. The era that has just ended was launched a century ago when Horace Bushnell and other liberal minded thinkers of the period were impregnating American life with fragmented thoughts from the European enlightenment. The years between the thirties of the nineteenth and the thirties of the twentieth centuries may best be characterized as the period of clarification in American Protestantism, reflecting a prevailing tendency to reduce religious truths to simple and practical statements. What theological liberalism did for American religion; pragmatism accomplished for American philosophy. The two tendencies are not unrelated. And while at present the pragmatic movement in philosophy seems to have cast its lot with religious humanism, its earlier affinities with theological liberalism should not be overlooked. The combined, at times integrated influences of theological liberalism and pragmatism brought clarity of meaning and intention to western thought which can hardly be paralleled in preceding periods. We seem now to have come to an end of that era of clarity. The neat and simplified systems are giving way to a new complexity. The clear outlines of a luminous faith are being submerged behind invading horizons, fuzzy with mystery. This emerging mystical mood is not a religious phenomenon merely; it is wider. Its source, in fact, is beyond the religious sphere. New developments in the physical and social sciences have contributed the foundations. And the protracted disturbances as well as the daring ventures both in the economic and political fields have created situations impelling this departure. There is, in fact, no area of our modern life that has not, by the very impetuousness of the times, been forced out of the quiescent mood of liberalism. It is as if we had been suddenly driven from a sheltered forest—opening into a bustling highway, turbulent and menacing with unpredictable hazards. The clarity that once cooled our thoughts has become routed by the flush and flood of emotion, leaving us stirred and straining, and with no opening vista toward which to project a new perspective. Yet this mystical mood that is upon us is more than reaction and distraction. If this were all, we would need only to wait for the cooling aftermath and settle again in the confident knowledge that method is all we need. But these reactionary currents are but the backwash of a deeper undercutting. Not frustration alone, but new discovery and insight, are pressing us beyond the familiar places. This puts the matter in a different light. We cannot wait the flood out. For then we should be on strange shores with even less to plan our course. A closer scrutiny of the forces

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and tendencies of thought making for this change therefore seems imperative. Only recently have the tendencies, impelling this changing perspective in religion, been converging sufficiently to become articulate as a general trend. The variety of sources from which this new emphasis issues, is itself striking. The mention of them together will doubtless evoke mirth, and bestir uncomfortable shrugs on the part of those involved. Yet, because they are contributing to a common outlook and to a common basis of analysis, revealing the source of our present plight, they may be regarded properly as sympathetic developments. Among these sources include the new physics; the new metaphysics known as organismic philosophy; Gestalt psychology and the “we-psychology” recently made popular by the German psychologist, Kunkel; with qualifying observations, the social psychology of the late George Mead; the empirical forms of philosophy of religion represented by Whitehead and Wieman, the neo-Thomist revival in modern Catholicism, even the Continental theology of the Barthians in some of their emphasis. The list could continue to include comparable developments in ethics, art, architecture, literature, music and practically every phase of human culture. The new physics advanced the first and, perhaps, the most fundamental change making for the new perspective in disclosing that the basic unit of reality was unitary; that the most intimate penetration of atomic structure revealed electrons existing in a relation of mutuality, behaving, not as independent particles, but as selves in a system—a merry-go-round in miniature. This significant discovery has led to a growing recognition of the primacy of organization in inorganic as well as in organic structure, and to an increasing awareness of the fact of organic unity. Almost simultaneous with the emergence of this new vision in science a new metaphysics has been developing, emphasizing the significance of organism. In philosophical circles the view has been designated “organismic” philosophy and is associated with the names of S. Alexander, C. Lloyd Morgan, Jan Smuts, Alfred North Whitehead, J. E. Boodin, and others. These philosophies undertake the ambitious task of creating in contemporary terms a metaphysical synthesis of the operational realities that will account for the order and integrative activity observed there. The movement known as Gestalt psychology, initiated by Wertheimer about a decade ago, has also contributed to this changing perspective. The Gestalt psychologists went beyond the introspectionist and behavioristic psychologies, insisting that the whole pattern of activity involved in the organism’s response to environment must be considered if human

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behavior is to be interpreted adequately. “Instead of reaction to local stimuli by local and mutually independent events,” wrote Wolfgang Köhler in 1929, “the organism reacts to an actual constellation of stimuli by a total process which, as a functional whole, is its response to the whole situation.”63 The effect of this way of viewing human activity has been to extend the sphere of psychological inquiry beyond the self, as viewed by introspective psychologists, and, at the same time, to retain the unitary form of the human personality, thereby correcting the behaviorist’s mechanistic tendencies. Indirectly, Gestalt psychology has restored awareness of the objective reality that bears upon human life, and has revived interest in the relation of the part and the whole. The “we-psychology” of Kunkel is a further development of the emphasis upon pattern, observed in Gestalt psychology. Kunkel, however, relates this insight more directly to the religious interest. The health of the individual requires that the “I” become integrated in the “we” situation, says Kunkel. Thus he who loses his life actually finds it through spiritual maturation in the larger pattern of reality. II. By a strange concatenation of seemingly unrelated developments, there has loomed in our midst a background of new insight, impelling us toward new affirmations, if not a new world-view. What is the important insight that emerges from these converging lines of thought? It is the realization that things and people exist in relations and that apart from these relationships they cannot be adequately known or evaluated. From this the conclusion seems to follow that in the development of personality the end to be sought is the integration of the individual in the pattern of life, rather than an autonomous individuality whose chief virtues are self-reliance and independence. One hesitates to go beyond these observations lest the suggestions seem fantastic; yet other areas, more remote it would seem, reflect similar tendencies. The pioneer architecture which began with Sullivan and is being expressed in the structures of Frank Lloyd Wright reveal this concern for organic unity.64 Tendencies in modern art arising from the work of Cézanne and Van Gogh are said to be expressive of this emphasis. The novels of Franz Werfel and Sigrid Undset suggest this turning. The revival of the folk dance and the liturgical dance, the prevalence of choral reading and the trend toward cooperative, rather than competitive, thinking in public speech work, all seem further symptoms of this development. Not long ago I was listening to a guest at dinner discussing present methods in the teaching of piano. “The current method, more common in London than in this country,” she remarked, “places emphasis upon arm

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movement rather than finger action. Piano playing is now seen to be an event of action involving an instrument and a human person, and in the teaching of piano we must be aware of this total pattern.” One hardly needs to mention the turn of events in the political and economic world manifesting this trend toward organic unity. Certainly the evidence is clear that the condition of interdependence that is upon us - the result of accumulative happenings within the economic life of the western world since the advent of the capitalistic economy and, subsequently, the industrial revolution—is forcing us out of the world of free, competitive individualism such as has existed for the past four hundred years. Consequently we are being compelled to reshape our political philosophies to give adequate direction to our institutional life. Our alternatives are not between individualism and collectivism, but between forms of communal living which offer different degrees of flexibility and value for individual fulfillment and corporate security. We should not overlook the fact that the most articulate manifestation of the communal emphasis in the political and economic life of current cultures issues from an ideology that is essentially nineteenth century in character and point of view. Conditions have been too tense to permit anything approaching adequate experimentation on any representative scale which might implement insights now emerging. And the constant threat in free countries of an impending totalitarianism impels some of our most sensitive minds to combat the whole drift toward collectivism and to launch frantic efforts to salvage our individualism and our liberties. Although this reactionary stand may seem important for the present crisis, it clearly detours thinking from the larger task that is upon us, which is: How to manage ourselves and our corporate action to permit the processes of growth now operative to come to some sort of fulfillment, to move us toward that order of living that may make for mutuality on something like an enduring basis? This emphasis upon organic connectedness is perhaps the most formative insight in present-day thought, and gives the key to the meaning of value now emerging in philosophies of religion. How this insight is beginning to illumine our understanding of religious concepts may now be described.

The Nature of Man The insight that things exist in relations has compelled us to conceive the nature of man in new perspective. Half a century ago the mere fact of man’s physical origin implied unqualified materialism. Psychical life was considered epiphenomenal. Mind was looked upon as an incidental secretion of human flesh. Back of this way of reasoning was the analytical premise that things are what they turn out to be when reduced to their simplest equation. The turn of thought in the physical sciences that has made for the changed perspective in naturalistic thinking today reverses this dictum. Since the emergence of dynamic and operational concepts in physical thought, the rise of organismic philosophy and Gestalt psychology, modern thought has become impregnated with the ruling idea that things are what they become through the process of establishing relations. Unity, rather than entity, has become the basic concept of reality. I. The implications of this important change in thought for the conception of man [have] been impressive. From this point of view, to speak of the nature of man is to speak, in a sense, of society and the whole of planetary life. Man has never been an entity in the autonomous sense. The child’s coming into existence is the birth of an organism—a unity—in the midst of an environing order of dynamic connections. From the very first moment that his heart begins to pulsate and his organism to vibrate with life, he is interacting within a larger organism: the cosmic community, the near aspect of which is social environment.65 The growth of his life is dependent upon two aspects of a singular phenomenon, commonly referred to as heredity and environment. When we penetrate the meaning of these inherited factors, however, we see that they are aspects of a continuous socio-physical environment. They are the inherited influences and impulses carried over from previous generations, more particularly the two most immediate generations preceding, through the medium of the protoplasm. This is the social environment of the past, persisting in the individual, [and] taking up a live relationship with the social environment of each succeeding specious present. Thus man never exists in isolation. His most solitary moments are lived in relation to a vital past and in the midst of an enveloping present. The inarticulate character of the interaction, due to lack of symbols and the inadequacy of existing symbols of communication, make his solitariness seem more solitary than it actually is. This then is the sphere of enveloping relations into which the child is

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born. Yet this focuses only the social environment that is empirically apparent. Careful, and necessarily more abstract, reflection upon the matter, employing pertinent insights which physics, psychology, and metaphysics disclose, enables us to envisage faintly the cosmic extension of this social environment in terms of sustaining relations that involve the whole of existent reality, in so far as it makes for an interesting system of mutual connections. The full character of this larger reality we may not expect to discern; nevertheless, the growing insight of the sciences and disciplined reflection, building upon the wisdom of the centuries, continues to yield valuable knowledge concerning its operations, bearing upon human life. So impressive is the total functioning of this sustaining reality, that thoughtful men, reflecting upon its operations, have been impelled to designate it with terms that evoke our most reverent emotions. When the terms are abstract, only metaphysicians feel the sacredness of their meaning; but when they are cast in poetic terms, imparting their personal meaning, the man of simple thoughts may feel their significance and lure. I have used the term Creative Order to catch up in visible form, the total system of these connections, operating in the universe in ways that sustain human life and value, bringing their ideal possibilities to fulfillment. Creative Order will not evoke the warmth of feeling and devotion which this reality normally would stir in one, were he to understand its meaning and implications for all life and value; consequently one must draw upon the language of the ages. Cast in this language, this silent working in our midst, making for our good and the growth of all good, is God. The concept man, then, stretches to unimaginable proportions. Man, so far as we touch him in daily intercourse, is simply the physical body that manifests its life in personal ways. He is this personality that I call “Dick” or “Howard.” But that is the immediate, tangible, envisageable reality of man. The totality of man we never see, though we approach a greater fullness of his being when we ponder him in relation to all that has entered into his created life, all that now comes to focus in his visible person, and all that inheres in his personality by reason of its possibilities. Friends, mothers, and lovers see more of the personality than strangers, employers, and fellow citizens. For their grasp of his person includes a greater wealth of this extended reality that enters into relationship with his visible, operating life and being. Man, then, is a vital, personal manifestation of a dynamic configuration. A religious formulation of this fact would read: man is the individual expression of a community of being, involving God and other men. Man exists in relations with God and other men. This is the central insight, depicting the nature of man. Where man is viewed in

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isolation as an entity, detached from other relationships, he takes on an autonomous character that falsifies his real self. The self is social and cosmic. This is the important religious truth concerning man. II. This fact of inter-relation has significant bearing upon a further aspect of his nature. Man not only exists; he grows. He moves toward a destiny. What he becomes depends upon many factors. What he might become may be vastly more significant and inclusive than what he actually becomes. The basic factor affecting his growth fulfillment is his orientation, determining the degree to which he embraces and embodies in his personal existence, the vital good of his social and cosmic environment. Growth, and the quality of growth, become significant factors in the nature of man. For man is always a creature-in-process-of-becoming. Man’s growth toward his destiny depends in large measure upon the orientation of his life. The orientation which gives promise of fulfillment is that which acknowledges the mutuality of existence—the cosmic Gestalt involving God, man, and other men. Acknowledging the fact of this relationship of mutuality between God, man, and other men means living with the sense of community. In the language of Christianity, this is generally stated as living in the fellowship of love. Where “love” is understood to mean a disciplined affection, rising out of the realization of interdependence and inter-relationship, the accepted Christian statement will seem clear. For the social relationship the phrase fellow-feeling seems more suggestive and less weighted with vague emotionalism than the term “love.” It conveys the meaning of personal warmth, yet gives direction and discrimination to the personalized feeling. It implies awareness of the felt interests and needs of one’s fellows involved in a situation and a concern to resolve situations in ways that will mutually enhance and mean those severally related interests and values. This sharpens up the realistic implications of the “fellowship of love,” making clear that it implies living, not only in loyalty to the responsibility man shares as a God-related creature, but living in a way that will make for economy and blessedness in human relations because such responsible action centers those relations in the larger context of reality. It is, in short, at once divine and socially intelligent living. Although men exist in this socio-spiritual configuration whether they are aware of it or not, their failure to live in loyalty to it makes for maladjustment and limited growth. Men are not equally, nor continuously, aware of this imperative relationship; hence the ineffectiveness and frustration of individual life and the deplorable demonic character of social chaos. This situation focuses the problem of sin in relation to human

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nature. Sin, in its abstract meaning, refers to a general orientation. Christian thought, when it has undertaken to designate the fundamental fact of sin, has generally depicted it as estrangement from God, or blindness to the reality that relates man and God. Viewed in the light of organismic thought, sin might be defined as man’s denial of the sustaining configuration God-man-men, and his consequent tendency to live as an autonomous self. His insensibility to the realities that give him existence and that promote his growth, leads to a generalized state of estrangement from this sustaining reality. Even where there is awareness and acknowledgment of this reality, estrangement and insensibility may develop. Why this estrangement and insensibility? The normal routine of living makes it so. Man is peculiarly aware of his acts, his wishes, his plans and decisions. The intensity of his own ego in even the slightest physical act makes this inevitable. When he remains continuously in that routine of self-conscious activity, his life tends toward a condition of autonomy. The divine fact of the God-man-men-relationship is obscured, and tends to fade from view. Loyalty wanes, and responsible action becomes less and less. Man then presumes to live unto himself. The importance of the stimulus of worship is thus apparent: to rouse men to this divine fact and to impel them to become reality-centered in their living. Our modern predicament argues strongly for a renewed emphasis upon the altar and the communion table, or some similar symbol which will enable us periodically to envisage the life of One who lived in constant awareness of that divine fact, and whose living thus manifested loyalty and the sense of responsibility in relation to interests beyond the ego. Contemplating this relationship in perspective and living for the good may help us to become and to remain sufficiently aware of the fact of the social-divine relationship to prevent our falling into an habituated rut of autonomous living. Contemplation by itself, however, will not construct the habits and patterns of living, essential to implementing this stimulus. Consequently, making decisions and initiating action in the light of this relationship are equally imperative. III. Sin, in the sense of autonomous living, is never a matter solely of the individual life or a single generation. For autonomous living has an institutional extension, making for impersonal operations that endure beyond the individual span of life, the effects of which become accumulative from generation to generation. Thus sin tends to take on an immortal character, comparable to that of the protoplasm. If individual sin is not hereditary, social sin definitely tends to be. And since men are born into an institutionalized social culture, and are shaped by its forces and

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demands, each generation tends to embody the inherited off-center mode of living. The clearest illustration of this fact is the condition of current human nature, due to the formative factors that have been dominant especially in western culture during the past four centuries. In view of this social extension of the maladjustments in man’s nature, we can never be content with changing simply the individual aspect through evangelical or mystical means, or even through psychiatric measures. These procedures are useful, but limited. The very nature of man demands methods of salvation and processes of fulfillment that will deal with the total pattern of human existence. The changing of lives must go hand in hand with the changing of social unities that constitute the impersonal and corporate extension of human nature, involved in the human-divine configuration.

1944 My Baccalaureate In a paper which I read to you earlier in the semester, by way of defining our basic task in this course, I said: Our purpose is to answer this question: How is the modern person to achieve spiritual poise whereby he may enjoy this creature-experience, and acquire the unfailing capacity to confront whatever tragedy or frustration she must encounter? We are here, I continued, to develop reflective powers, to widen the imagination, to inform our minds so as to sharpen our insights into what bears significantly upon our daily lives; but more particularly upon experiences that may come to us in our solitariness when we feel the most urgent issues of life pressing in upon us. How has our semester’s work contributed to such insight? I get the impression from some of your comments that our intention this semester has been to shop around among current philosophies to see if there is anything on the counter that we might like. I can understand how you might view it that way. The very form of the book, American Philosophies of Religion, suggests it, I think. One reviewer, after reading it, said: “I found myself to be something of a supernatural idealist who likes romanticism and has leanings toward some forms of naturalism.” This probably describes many of us in our more popular responses to religious ideas. To the degree that we seek to tighten up and systemize our ideas, however, we would find ourselves moving toward one form or another as the center of our philosophy. And that is about all you can say of any of these men whose ideas we have considered this semester. For example: Hocking has his center in Absolute Idealism; but his thought clearly shows the marks of the mystic; and his idealism has been greatly influenced by pragmatism. Hartley Burr Alexander is essentially an artist in philosophy and thus finds his center in aesthetic naturalism; yet he could go along with the Personalist, and be at home with the mystic; and a great deal that he preached in his classes was pure Platonic idealism. Whitehead, we have said, is a Naturalist; yet in making aesthetic order the primary form of reality, he could have affinities with aesthetic naturalism. And the sublime reaches of his concept of the consequent nature of God bring out the strains of mathematical idealism in his naturalism. If I may join this distinguished company, I would put myself down as a naturalist on the grounds that I feel so strongly that we know what we

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know through sense perception; and the imaginative life that builds out from that empirical base, Yet, I am clearly a Romanticist. And I’ll shoot anybody who thinks he can take this romanticism out of me. But I have my moments when the, rigor of rational thought comes as-, cleansing to me, I counter poetry and the intuitive response with as tough an attempt at analysis as I am capable of. Compare Chapters II and XIV in Modern Man’s Worship, and you will see what I mean. Then when I have my fill of this naturalism romanticism, rationalism systematic living, with its primness and propriety, I go out to Lucy and John’s. Oh! I have a swell time living and thinking. I do that in music, too; as no doubt you do. I swing from Mozart end Bach to Brahma and Franck; then back again. And always with fresh enjoyment arising either from bursting out of the formal strictures of form into the tempestuous open (and then I am playing Brahms); or from the relief from confusion, the return to form, to prim and precise phrases, and a moderate expenditure of emotion. Then I am playing Mozart. (And many times it will be the C-Minor Concerto.) Now this brings us to this observation: The creative and comprehensive mind will probably not be contained in any one channel. Philosophy, even when it is disciplined, if it is fertile, responds to the call of our deeper moods. Philosophy follows the blood stream, said William James. (We might add, eat vitamins and change your philosophy.) That is a way of saying that our emotional preferences which determine to a considerable extent our selectiveness in ideas, are not stable; certainly not static; unless we are anemic enough not to have fresh impulsions from these vital organs. I heard a lady say that it is common knowledge that in our youth we prefer Cesar Franck, or Tchaikovsky, and Brahms; but as we mature, we turn to Mozart. Well, now, there’s a certain amount of truth in that observation. The moods of Franck, Tchaikovsky and Brahma are restless, turbulent, emotional. They stir the emotions, if one is capable of emotion; if the glands are up to a sudden spurt of fresh energy. And I suppose it takes youth to respond continually to this kind of stirring. The old folks can’t keep up the pace. The glands won’t sustain them. So they prefer Mozart, so they say. His works have mature beauty, free from emotionalism. But listen now! Mozart was a young man when he wrote his music. He died at thirty-five. Tchaikovsky was an old man when he wrote his most emotional symphonies. (Pathetique was his last.) Brahma was a mature man, much older than the average symphony writer, when he composed his First. No! It isn’t accurate as an analysis. It has only partial truth in it. It reveals more the dimensions of personalities, and the degree of

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flexibility in them: the expanding and contracting capacities in people. I should like to make a study of Brahms’ music to see if one could detect an alternation between his symphonies and his lieder. Think back on Phyllis’ program of Brahms’ lieder; then recall the opening phrases of the Second Symphony, or the B-flat Major Concerto (No.2). Of course the alternation is within the symphony itself. Brahms cannot be excelled in creating openness—swift moving openness in music. You start with a phrase and immediately you have pushed the spaces apart. The world is wide open. Yet Brahms is a master of the quiet mood as well. Think only of the third movement of the Concerto just I mentioned. Well, where does this take us? It suggests, I think, that systematization of thought or response is difficult in proportion as a mind is creative, farreaching, explorative, expansive. It is more possible in proportion as the mind is static, compressed, unyielding, contractive. This places the creative mind and the undisciplined mind together. They are not the same thing; yet they do have affinities. Despite what we have said, it is well, I think, to achieve as much discipline and systematization of one’s thought as possible, within the limits of one’s temperament. You do so, however, not by pushing your rollicking, zestful ideas into a strait-jacket; much less by building a mosaic of philosophical patches, snatched from this system and that. You achieve it by finding your center; by discovering what reaches you persuasively and holds in your mind as truth through all your changing moods, and in the face of conflicting ideas. That unwavering certitude, that inescapable fact becomes as a corner stone; and the structure rises from it. Back of this sense of certitude are doubtless psychological and environmental influences which give you this leaning rather than that. Perhaps a new set of experiences will tend to change that center; but it is not likely if that center is really integral with your personality. For then it would require a complete transformation of the organization of impulses which make up your personality to alter your outlook that drastically. I am talking now about a religious outlook which is the outgrowth of first-hand experience. Second-hand philosophies present another matter. All of us start with some such organization of ideas. We grow up in a certain thought-climate. We take in the current ideas as our own—not in a reflective way, necessarily; but more habitually, as one breathes in atmosphere, or eats his cereal, or vegetables. It’s what is served. And we take it for granted. The Roman Catholic Church has said, “Give me a child until he is eight, and I don’t care who has him after that. He will remain a Catholic.” Now that is so largely true psychologically that it can pass as a general truth. It is not air-tight, however. It depends on how complete the

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indoctrination has been, how persistent. But the degree to which probable responses have been developed is usually very great. And if one swings away from this center, he is apt to swing completely away from it. Reaction is violent, rarely moderate. The opposite of a Catholic convert is usually the atheist, rarely the discriminating liberal. All early indoctrination has some effect upon our life-long venture in thought. How much we cannot know. The influences are subtle, inarticulate. Often others can detect them in us better than we can ourselves. For we attend to what we affirm, what we embrace, what we gather into ourselves. But we are defined equally by what we do not select, by what we avoid, or negate. This, others are more apt to discern in us. Now whether or not we turn to something vastly different from what we have been brought up with, when we become mature, depends, I think, on how mature this second-hand form of religion has been, and how wisely it has been communicated to us. Coming into a first-hand faith need not mean abandoning the group faith for an individual religion. It may simply mean embracing this undergirding tradition more understandingly, more sensitively, more confidently. This rarely is possible, however, unless our early religious life has been adequate and discriminating. In the achievement of this kind of religious nurture, our civilization has been woefully inadequate. That is why so many of us come into mature life, emptied of what has heretofore provided us with basic beliefs. Whether we like it or not, we are compelled to grapple with problems of faith as individuals if we are to achieve some satisfying and fulfilling religious orientation. We need not grapple alone. We are not stranded. We are not altogether solitary. Only part of our task is solitary. We may, in feet, achieve a considerable measure of rapport with some great religious tradition that is continuous with our youth. We may also find companionship with congenial minds whose perceptions and recognitions of value strikingly concur with our own. One of the joys of such a venture as a college influence is that we may discover companions of mind, spiritual companions, as it were, who bring reinforcement and enlargement to our own faith. What are some of the lines of thinking which give direction to a growing faith today? I speak for myself here, but I think I deal with facts and insights that are part of our common experience as people of today— almost as a common heritage. I begin by saying, You start philosophizing in one of two ways: either you start from premises, or as George Thomas puts it, from primary intuitions of the Christian faith, and work toward a resolution of present

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perplexities in the light of them; (and a great many of our contemporaries choose to do just that) or you begin (not denouveau, but with certain collections with an inherited tradition) with present experience, affected more persuasively by pressing experiences and insights concerning yourself arising out of relations with the natural world. And you fashion your certitudes out of the interplay of this inherited social experience and the fresh insights that come to you as you deal creatively with the living moment. I confess I have been able to think satisfactorily to myself only as I have started from where I am. A boy beside a growing tree Is in itself philosophy; For what they tell of earth and man Narrates the tale since earth began.

I start with this boy beside a growing tree, and gradually his tale since earth began begins to relate itself. I’ll tell you one thing that starts me philosophizing. I, if I can be the boy for a while, stand breathing beside this tree. The tree, in its way, stands breathing beside me. We pulsate, back and forth, back and forth, interacting with this ocean of atmosphere that has conveniently clothed the earth. We live in a medium, the tree and I. A very sustaining medium. It holds me rooted here. And so long as I remain rooted, I grow. I am even conceited enough to think that I come to flower: in what I love, in what I think, in what I communicate to my friends, in what I share with my friends of spirit, of beauty, of ideas, of perceptions of goodness. All this is glorious foliage out of which something spiritual emerges, strikingly as a rose breaks into bloom. I am different from the tree and the rose, only in what is peculiar to my species. The form, the processes, the laws, or intelligence governing my fulfillment—all these are of a kind. We are, all of us, earth creatures. But the earth is only a word for designating this fullness of being and environment that sustains me. In my mystical moments, earth is enough to call upon; though I find it just as easy to say God. And there are times when I hardly make a distinction; though I know, in more -reflective and critical moments, they are not identical. Yet either term calls up this wealth of sustaining relations, evoking in me the inevitable response of the creature—what Schleiermacher called the sense of dependence; and what the psalmists expressed in their psalms of praise. I, too, can write psalms: O God! We have seen how the April earth is waking with new life. Seeds that have lain dormant beneath the winter’s frost have felt the warm

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When we stand before this beneficent earth in the mood of praise, we are as one who relives all the magnificent moments of creature awareness. The sensitive seers and people of the ages become one with us, and their long forgotten words come trooping up to us: Ikhnaton’s Hymn to the Sun, the lovely hymns to the Dawn of Vedic lore, the Ninetieth Psalm, St. Francis’ Canticle to the Sun, and a thousand more lines like these. Many a morning, standing upon the quad, looking at Baldy after a rain, I have thought of Jesus, not much over twenty, standing in one of his favorite spots, looking up at the Galilean hills. Two people who have looked that way at hills are forever kinsmen in their hearts. For they have perceived something that never dies in them. I don’t know how thoroughly I should agree with ideas that Jesus held. I haven’t a very clear conception of his thought; for it is obscured behind a haze of tradition that lies between his days on earth and the writing of the books that report his words. But I think I know what moved him to live as he did; and what finally kept him true to his course, even though it led to the cross. For I have felt the compulsion of this eternal good, looking at hills as he did. I hope this does not sound like sheer sentiment. I know it is sentiment; but sentiment that is sound, as the perception of beauty is sound, as the perception of good is sound. And it has been a peculiarity of sensitive men and women of every age that they have come to a sure realization of this perception of beauty and of good, looking into nature. Nature mysticism is not the whole of religion; but I submit it is the ground upon which all genuine, first-hand religious affirmation rests. And it contains the perennial springs where faith is perpetually renewed. But one looks selectively upon nature when he views it as the psalmist did, or as Jesus looked at hills. He sees what is enduring and good. There are other aspects also: There is ruthless power, the savagery of appetite, and angered passion. There is a nature that is that is terror-ridden. The world of men is like that, too—the society in which we live. Whoever responds religiously to these scenes takes them in selectively. But that is the whole meaning of the spiritual life. It issues from the capacity to see

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God—to perceive what is intrinsic and enduring in the very midst of what is clearly not God. These mystical moments that open up the spiritual resources of the earth to us are the beginning of faith. They do not exhaust it. In conveying to us our oneness with it, they make clear to us our dependence upon it, and the way by which we, as creatures, may find our fulfillment. This opens into a long story; but briefly I may say this: It has always seemed to me that the whole point of our scientific explorations is, or should be, for the purpose of enabling us to live more soundly and enjoyably upon this planet. We got off to a bad stark in our conception of science; for the scientific movement arose out of demands that developed in the Italian industries in the Renaissance period. The practical technicians initiated the researches, and we have been influenced by their motivation, which was to gain control over the natural forces for the purpose of running industries. We have never gotten over this conditioning. We still define science as the specialized methods of observing natural forces and phenomena for the purpose of controlling its processes for the benefit of man. The religious motivation is absent here. Man sets himself to harnessing nature’s powers to his engines; of bringing its electrical current down into his motors to enslave nature for his ends. But the researches of the sciences serve a more reverent end. They disclose the operations of this environing medium that sustains us. They define the laws of our being. They mark out the route to our fulfillment. And were we to apply this method of inquiry with care and sensitiveness, we would approximate a controlled observation of the working of God in our midst. For the operations of good, like the operations of evil, are discernible. In our reflective moments, after we have come down from the mount of transfiguration, we may become attentive to the events and evidences of spirit that become manifest in persons like ourselves, in the corporate goodness of people who have learned to live significantly together, in a family, in a community, in a college; in intimate experiences of friendship that spring up among us, like desert flowers after a season of rain. We develop our powers of perception of the good as we become attentive to these ever present evidences of spirit in our associations. Once we become aware of these operations of good, these markings of God in our environings, we come to live for them. We seek these things. We ally ourselves with them. We nurture them. We fight for them when they seem threatened. We cherish them as we cherish God. For they are God incarnate in the processes of the world that shape events toward enduring good. You would see this Greatness incarnate in one another, in so far as

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each of you cherished this working of the spirit. I have seen it in you. It has come among us in the heat of discussion, where, as intellects, we pursued the clarity of meanings. It has come among us in friendly conversation, where a kind of sympathetic rapport has opened us up to each other as persons. This communication of spirit with spirit which happens between us as we live sympathetically together, mutually exploring one another, seeking understanding and appreciation of one another, is the creative interaction in which God fashions good in the world. In these episodes of friendship and camaraderie, spirit rises among us like a flame burning. And so long as there is communication between us, in person or in memory, that living flame endures. One who comes upon this kind of religious vision, wherein good, the markings of God, become evident before their eyes, lives for this Greatness incarnate, serves it, cherishes it, becomes like it. And this is what it is to hunger and thirst after righteousness. And to live this way is to become pure in heart, and thus more completely to see God. They who live this way achieve an orientation in their in life which steadies them for accepting whatever comes in life: the great moments as well as the tragic ones. It enables one as readily to accept death. Death is a curious intrusion upon life. Men and women have never accustomed themselves to it. It is still the most shocking news that can come to us. It is so final! It is so unknown. Here is a barrier we may not cross. We have no knowledge of it. We have hopes. We have dreams. We have expectations; but it is still the horizon receding. Yet it is a horizon that may be no more menacing than the ocean’s skyline or the summit of a high hill. It is country unexplored: perhaps the other side of the hill of existence; perhaps a new venture for which we have now no clear powers of perception, and to which imagination cannot attain. Now we view it as culmination. Filled with the zest to live it is unwelcome culmination. No one can deny that. It is so in contemplating our own death. It is more so, contemplating the death of companions that seem indispensable to us. The religious orientation tempers this tragic sense of life; it does not rout it completely. It cannot do so, so long as we respond to the perceptions of our senses which create in us the will to live and zest in living. There have been those who have dispelled this sense of tragedy by stilling this life of sense. They have achieved their transmutation of tragedy by relinquishing the will to live. This is a costly conquest. I think there is another way by which religious awareness may lift us above the fear of death—a way less fraught with illusion and with flights

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to the abnormal. It is to live as best we can in commitment to these perceptions of good, as events of enduring worth beyond anything else we may cherish. To grow in this objectification of our selves, rather, this identification of ourselves with the growth of good in our midst is to achieve steadily, with ever more sureness, a commitment to the working of God that disciplines desire, so that we are less and less dependent upon satisfactions that are purely egoistic. Something of a tempering and controlling of desire combines with a growing confidence in the durability of the good, to which the pure in heart is committed. In this growth of spiritual maturity, there emerge perceptual powers that help us to see what we have not seen before our faces had turned toward the light. Meanwhile, we live for these near manifestations of spirit which scintillate with evidence of enduring meanings, as the luminescent field of stars above us at night give hint of the far planetary life. Bernard Eugene Meland April 17, 1944

The Confessions of a Frustrated Theologian Externally, my life is rather commonplace. I have never lived among monks in a monastery, as did Henry Lantz; nor have I lived on intimate terms with any of the world’s great figures, as did Galen Fisher; nor, for that matter, have I been confronted with any great decisions as to places to live or work. The most momentous decision I have had to make in this regard was whether I should accept an editorial post on The Christian Century or come to Pomona College. I suppose I could make something of that, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t impress this group. Commonplace as I am, however, I have lived an exciting life; but the source of the excitement has been more internal than external. And that, in itself, carries the story of my life. Under ordinary circumstances the tale would read: boy goes to college, finds girl and philosophy, goes to graduate school, gets degree and a job teaching others to get a degree, and thus lives stolidly ever after. But the story runs a bit different in my case; for the mental distance between my pre-college experience and that of post college days and the life ever after is so vast that I can hardly hope to convey its significance here. I shall, however, try to hint at it. All my people are Norwegian. My father was born in Haugasund, a sea port town on the southeastern coast of Norway; my mother, in Bergen. Both of them came to America when they were quite young. I tried to record this phase of the story in verse at one time, but it did not go too well. This is part of it: I. Out of the North land Have my people come! Of Viking fame, And midnight sun; And they have lived with mountains With a hundred fjords That wind as crevices Into the land. Bleak Is the coastline; somber As the autumn when the trees Are shorn. Here I have stood, Not as a native son, but as one Once removed, with water in my veins My father carried from this stormy stand,

The Confessions of a Frustrated Theologian (1944) And sighings of the wind my mother learned As children gather tunes. Here I have stood where waves have washed The shores since sea kings ruled the north; And in their lashing heard the full lament Of all my people. I remembered What my father said: How, in a storm at sea, When they were crossing with their dead, His father fell the prey of winds That hurled his ship into an early grave. His mother wept, without a tear betraying How she grieved; and in a week he heard That she was dead. Thus he, a boy Only a year before, was now a man Whom these same waves had washed ashore. II. My father was a lad, only sixteen, when By a stroke of fortune, people said, He fell the heir to ocean passage That had been another’s, until she Had died. And with a grim reluctance He accepted what was given, wishing It had been another way. He looked at Norway Through a mist, like one bereft Of all that he had loved. The ship Was all he knew as home, Now that the land had faded from his view. “I sat upon the deck,” my father said, “And watched the water fall away Like furrowed earth before the bow. If I had looked away, or looked within Myself, I should have known what bitter waters were below.” But there are healing winds at sea; And salt that gathers on the lips, When you are facing free, Will be as sweetened tears that we have shed. How is the land washed from our eyes When we have held it there since we Have learned to see? Yet this, I heard My father say, is how the heart is healed.

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Meland’s Unpublished Papers And with the vision cleansed by gales Blowing on our face, the eyes repare to see another place. “I think it was like this,” my father said, “That I was glad to see another land. I stood, as others all around me stood, As if we drew our feet toward hallowed ground.”

Coming to America, as he did, before his schooling was completed, and having to support himself by his own labor immediately upon arrival, my father really stepped backward in the economic and social scale when he arrived in this country. This was true of a number of his associates who migrated about the same time. This conviction came upon me with considerable persuasion some years ago when I visited Norway, where I met many of my father’s boyhood acquaintances. My father’s contemporaries who remained in Norway completed their education and went into professional and artistic callings. Some became educators, others bookdealers; some were owners of fisheries, (e.g. The Maeland Cannery in Stavanger); some owned and managed shipping industries. One cousin, Friedrich Kolstø, achieved considerable eminence as a Norwegian landscape painter, and was the founder of a school of painting in Oslo where, I was told by Dr. Koht, the former Norwegian foreign minister, Kolstø had had a decided influence upon modern Norwegian painting. The Melands of my father’s generation who came to this country, on the other hand, were for the most part workmen in factories; a few of them were farmers. All lived within meager circumstances—much more so than their relatives in Norway. My family’s experience, therefore, goes somewhat counter to the common assumption that, for immigrants, America is the land of opportunity. For them, at least, it has meant a setback economically and culturally from which most of them have never recovered. My earliest childhood memories are associated with the city streets of Chicago’s suburb, Pullman and Kensington; the Norwegian Lutheran Church, and visits to my grandfather’s farm in Allegan, Michigan. I have always felt that there was something of the city bum in my nature, complicated by a love of nature, and Lutheran piety. Perhaps it is the unfoldment of these three contradictory tendencies that accounts for my frustration; for how can you fulfill those three impulses in one person? That’s a new kind of trinity which defies theological resolution. It would be fair to say that my boyhood was spent in an atmosphere of privation and labor. We were people on the margin. By the severest kind of economy we could manage to keep out of debt for a time; but the

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worker’s pay in those days was meager in comparison with costs. And the constant intrusion of illness and other unexpected demands kept the family at the straining point. It went without saying that the children in our family, of which there were six, would work whenever the opportunity came. I began working on farms in summers at the age of ten, and continued every summer throughout my high school period. During high school years, we lived in a semi-rural region south of Chicago. My daily routine consisted in rising at 5:30 a.m., milking two cows and getting them to pasture, delivering milk to half a dozen customers on the way to the train, which was a mile from our house, and riding four miles to school. On my return in the late afternoon, I would work in the field, husking corn, or haying, or digging potatoes until chore time; and then the routine would repeat itself at evening. I do not recall ever resenting this confinement, except during football season. In midwinter also it was strenuous, for the mornings were bitter cold, and the snowfall often heavy, filling the roads to a depth of three feet, and more where the snow had drifted. Trudging a mile through the snow (there were no sidewalks), against a west wind that met no resistance in that open country, trying to manage a sack of six bottles of milk and school books, was labor of the first order. Even this had its compensations, however; for life narrowed down to this one pressing question: “Will I make it?” And the strange thing about it was, I always did. A curious class attitude took hold of me in my youth as a result of this immersion in work. I came to look upon myself as essentially a manual person. And when in school I was encouraged to go on in my studies, I felt restrained by a compulsion that seemed to counsel me to keep on working with my hands. I remember stopping in the field one day and looking at my hands, which were large for a boy’s, and saying to myself, quite earnestly, almost as a confession, “You are made for manual labor; everything about your body indicates that; it would be foolish to try anything else.” Early association with the out-of-doors developed in me a quiet love of nature. It was a companion to me—this vast expanse of earth. And I became its child without a protest. These two facts: the conviction that I was made to labor, and a love of nature, led me to a dramatic decision: I decided to become a forest ranger, and forthwith made application to enter the Michigan Agricultural College. War in 1917 interrupted these plans. Three months at the University of Illinois in the S.A.T.C. turned me in another direction. Yet I never completely outgrew that decision. So strongly has it persisted that as late as the spring of 1943, I wrote to the Department of Agriculture to

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inquire whether one in his early forties would be able to undertake the work of a forest ranger. It has always seemed to me that the philosophy which I came to embrace as my own, with its mystical elaboration of nature appreciation, revel as this sublimated forest ranger. I went to Park College in 1920, after having worked in the office of an automobile manufacturer for the better part of four years, first as stenographer, then bookkeeper, and finally chief clerk. Business, too, had its lure; for I found myself making steady progress in this field. Later, on hearing of my intention of becoming a teacher, my former employer strongly counseled me against it. “You will be sacrificing yourself to associating with immature minds for the rest of your life!” he said with considerable feeling. Business, he felt, was the proper place for me. College was an ambiguous experience so far as its influence upon my thinking was concerned. During the first year and a half I remained fairly insulated from critical winds of doctrine, and consequently continued in a modified form of evangelical fundamentalism. Almost imperceptibly, however, this evangelical enthusiasm underwent transformation by way of transference, I think, from piety to a social passion engendered by a study of sociology. Sociology in those days was largely an ethical study of society and social institutions. The seers in the field were Albion [Alsworth] Ross, author of Sin and Society; Hayes, Small, Henderson, and others. In the course of writing term papers in this field I was introduced to such modern prophets as Walter Rauschenbusch, Shailer Mathews, Francis Greenwood Peabody, Norman Thomas, Scott Nearing, and Harry F. Ward. The fervor that once had found expression in pious testimony now became channeled into a social gospel. Whenever I was called on to preach or speak, my topic would usually be something like “Toward A Christian Social Order,” or “War is Sin.” A deeper philosophical interest was developing however. At the University of Illinois in 1923, while assisting in the University Presbyterian Church, and pursuing graduate study, I was first introduced to William James and Josiah Royce. With my incurable evangelical turn of mind, naturally Royce, rather than James, appealed to me. And a reading of his Religious Aspect of Philosophy, gave a substantial grounding in metaphysics for a time, sufficient at least to ease away doubts and misgivings that had crept into the corners of my mind. It was during the late twenties that the semblance of an American youth movement began to take form. Clearly it was a post-way manifestation. We were out to save the world and to remake the church. Youth revolts were breaking out in most of the major denominations. It fell my lot to help organize a National Association of Presbyterian

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Students and to become its first president. Luther had nothing on me in his feeling as a crusader. Naturally I had frequent occasions to proclaim my cause and to decry the state of things. This I did with such devastating effect over a national broadcast, designed to stir the Presbyterian youth of the country into action, that a speech which I was to have given before the Presbyterian Club at the University of Chicago was canceled. This is a little hard to imagine now that the glands, responsible for such spirited oratory, seem spent; but it is literally true that in my own way, as a boy orator, I wowed them! Or so it seemed to me at the time. This siege of barnstorming in the name of Presbyterian youth was to have come to a grand climax when, as President of the National Association, I was invited to address the meeting of the General Assembly in the spring of 1925. But the Lord saw the folly of all this. So, while I was enroute to New York to confer with Presbyterian bigwigs in preparation for the onslaught He struck me down with a violent case of blood poisoning. The infection settled in my heel. I came so close to suffering Achilles’ fate that on one memorable night, the family gathered around my bedside with the kind of somber expectancy that attends final events. It was a fitting climax to my year of crusading. While I was convalescing, having outwitted the Lord’s intent by getting well, my speech, written in bed at feverish heat, was read by proxy before the thousands that gathered at the General Assembly. You can see why I have been living a life of anti-climax ever since. As I look back upon those years, I understand now that my intensity as a critic of society and the church was, in part, the normal reaction of sensitive youth to fixed, and not altogether heroic patterns of life, imposed by an adult world; but it was also the effervescence of a superficial mind. A distaste for this shallow exhibitionism had been gathering momentum in me for some time. It reached high tide while listening to a speech by one of my colleagues at the Interdenominational Conference in Evanston in 1928. This colleague, by the way, has since become a trained sociologist of considerable promise, and has produced some published works of solid scholarship. His speech that night, however, was of the Huey Long variety. My rejection of the role of critic was complete. I announced to my associates that I was going to quit barking and give myself a chance to know what I was talking about. Some months later I was standing on the bridge, leading to the Union Station in Chicago, talking with Stanley High, who had been one of the moving spirits among us. “I wish I could dissuade you from your choice, Bernard,” he was saying; “for I think philosophy or theology is a retreat into ambiguity when what we need is clarification and communication.” Perhaps he was right. At any rate, he has gone on into an eminent

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career of clarification and communication, with its rich rewards; while I have submerged myself in philosophy and theology and am becoming more and more ambiguous and incommunicable. The next years at the University of Chicago were the best years of my life up to that time. My reaction from the crusading experience of previous years was so intense that I am inclined to feel, in retrospect, that I swung too far in the opposite direction. I had entered a monastery. The walls of Goodspeed Hall separated me from the outside world just as completely as any stony structure of medieval France or Italy. And here the world of history opened up to me. I was ravenous for the nourishment of books. I read everything that was given out on reading lists, and then browsed long hours in the library discovering new things to read. The most single influence upon my thinking during graduate school days was Gerald Birney Smith. My devotion to him was so complete that for years after his death, I thought of my own work and writing as being a continuation of his labors, which had been cut off so untimely. The tragedy of Gerald Birney Smith’s death was exaggerated in my mind for it meant incalculable loss to me, not only in personal friendship, but in professional growth as well. Without his counsel and encouragement, I felt strangely lost for a time. This was particularly evident in my doctoral examination, which came within a week after his death. I had just returned from Germany early in March of 1929, and on a Friday afternoon, had submitted my thesis for Dr. Smith’s approval. The thesis was accepted. “I shall be going on a short trip,” he told me; “on my return next week we will set the date for your examination.” Four days later he was dead. I am quite convinced that no graduate student should be identified with any single professor to the extent that I was in this instance. His going meant the collapse of something in me that was not easily restored. I felt at the time that my professional career, not yet begun, had actually ended. I think it did in one sense. The men who gathered with Shailer Mathews in the Dean’s office in Swift Hall to carry on the examination included Eustace Haydon and Wieman; and I remember Cush McGiffert was there. He will agree that it was a rather uncertain affair; but out of consideration for my plight, they let me by, and I emerged a doctor of philosophy. I think Mr. Wieman sensed my predicament more clearly than anyone else, and he showed me many considerations. My devotion to him dates from that time. I returned to Europe that spring to complete the year of study at Marburg, which I had begun the preceding fall. The most memorable

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figure of my student days at Marburg was Rudolf Otto. I shall not easily forget my first glimpse of him. It was my first Sunday in Marburg. I called at his house on Bergonstrasse. The maid, having managed to make out my garbled request, said one word, “Augenblick,” and went away to bring Otto to me. I never actually heard Otto come. He just seemed to arrive, an invasion of hushed austerity. He said two words: “Bitte, herein,” Wearing a blue dressing robe that came to his shoes, with a posture that was shockingly erect, his height was exaggerated. His towering Prussian figure, crowned with white hair that bristled upward, as if he were perennially frightened, made you withdraw a little. Here was a presence. The great Das Heilige was all that you had expected him to be. During this year of 1928–29, during which I was attending the University of Marburg as an American-German Exchange student, German communities were holding mass meetings on Sunday mornings in the market-platz of many of their major cities and in some of the villages, denouncing the Treaty of Versailles and its judgment of German war-guilt. Many a Sunday morning I found myself standing in the midst of such a gathering, singing “Deutschland, Deutschland Ober alles, Ober alles in der welt.” It was in the midst of this intense nationalist uprising, in Germany, that my own sense of devotion to the American experience emerged as a deep, spiritual commitment. I lived in a dormitory high on the Schloss hill, overlooking the River Lahn and the village of Marburg that nestled below. I was far enough away from America to see it clearly. You have no idea how clearly the American scene looms from that hill in Marburg. I had never envisaged America at the water’s edge before. I had never looked out upon it before, feeling my feet being drawn steadily from its soil, as the ship moves oceanward. This I was contemplating upon that hill in Marburg. I thought upon it many, many days during that year. Meanwhile I turned my attention to events close at hand. Germany, even as it was preparing itself for a diabolical conflict, was in the midst of a liturgical renaissance. Friedrich Heiler had recently come over to Lutheranism from Roman Catholicism, and was drawing large crowds of students in his classroom to hear him expound the mysteries of his deserted faith. I sat among them. I followed them when they went on a Saturday evening to a little chapel on an obscure knoll in the very heart of the village across from the Elizabeth Kirche, to listen to Heiler conduct an informal Protestant service in the mood of a former Catholic. Rudolf Otto was attracting great numbers in his classes, too. Many knew him to be the foremost theologian and mystic of Germany. He had visited India and had learned much from their habits of silence. He had been in America, also, where, according to his own statement, he had learned even more about

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worship sitting in a Quaker meeting in Boston. Otto talked a great deal about silence. The villagers, in their simple way, thought him a bit touched. Being a philosopher myself, I don’t know that I am in a position to judge between them. What many did not know was that he, too, was busying himself each week with a little church group in an adjoining village, experimenting with new patterns of worship, writing a Choregebete, fresh litanies and prayers, for the new gottesdienst. My year in Germany found expression in the book, Modern Man’s Worship, which Harpers published in 1934, recording the observations which I had made, trailing around after Heiler and Otto, and others who led in this renaissance of worship. But the book contained more than these observations. It contained also the reflections which had come to me on that hill in Marburg, looking out across an imagined sea, to the water’s edge of America. Modern Man’s Worship was essentially an American book, expressing the renascent mood of worship within the American experience. I have proof of this. For I am told that when the book was placed on the reserve shelf for a class in philosophy of religion at Occidental College, the students referred to it as that “American Indian book on religion.” I accept that as a compliment. While breakfasting one delightful mid-morning in Marburg, there came a knock at our door. When I opened it, I was taken aback by the sight of a friend whom I had not seen since college days. It was John Moore. I had not even known that he was on the continent. The young fellow with him, standing back a little shyly, was introduced to me as John Bennett. This was my first glimpse of John. Bennett and Moore, having just arrived in Marburg, were looking for quarters. They had no idea that any Americans were living there when they knocked. Someone had given them the address as the home of an elderly English woman who had some years earlier married an officer in the German army, and had lived in Germany over forty years. We were so delighted to see Bennett and Moore that we relinquished one of our rooms to enable them to stay. The two Johns had just taken their degree at Union. Bennett had been in England for some months before coming to Germany. The two of them hoped to pick up enough of the German language during the summer months to feel a comfortable acquaintance with it, should they later venture on a doctorate. I shall never forget the systematic way in which they set to work to master German—one on either side of the table, laboriously pouring over a German grammar. I suggested that if that was all they intended to do, they might as well have stayed in New York and I urged them to come with me into the village to try out their vocabulary on the storekeepers. They were reluctant, however, preferring to do it the

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academic way. John Bennett did get around to trying out his German on the little peasant maid who worked in the house. She thought John’s German was the funniest thing she had ever heard, and would go into hysterics of laughter whenever John would speak to her. And John would just beam. They seemed to me a perfect match. The only word that John mastered as a result of their acquaintance, however, was the one she repeatedly said whenever he tried to speak to her: “Schrechlich!” I have often thought of our conversations together in that German cottage, overlooking the valley of the Lahn. Bennett and Moore were then steeped in Union and Columbia lore. John Moore was greatly impressed by the young Columbia philosopher, John Randall who, only two years before, at the age of twenty-seven, had written the book, The Making of the Modern Mind. Bennett, of course, was the theologian with evident loyalty to William Adams Brown. My doctoral thesis having been A Critical Analysis of Christocentric Theology had prepared me to say all the wrong things for this Union-Columbia-Chicago conversation. I remember how John Bennett would pounce upon me, completely disgusted with what I would say. And John Moore would aid him with a rapid fire of logic that seemed overwhelming at the time. It was completely one-sided. My only chance was to quote some German to them which I had picked up in Otto’s class. Not knowing what I was saying it seemed to counter them in a substantial way, even when the words confirmed their arguments, which, of course, Otto’s words were apt to do. One morning a cable arrived from Shailer Mathews, saying that he had a position for me at Central College in Fayette, Missouri, as professor of religion and philosophy, and recommended that I accept it. I wired back, “I accept.” Thus I started my teaching career. My seven years at Central College were really very happy ones, though they were stormy from the beginning. I didn’t have sense enough to pull my punches, theologically. There was no strategy in me, and less pedagogy. But in my own defense, I will say there was integrity. And this, I think, did disarm those who stood ready to throw me out at the end of the first year. And it served to gather around me a company of young fellows who to this day continue to honor me with their loyalty and friendship. So far as I could tell, from conversations I would have with the president from time to time, I was either being examined, or discussed, or denounced by committees from the Board of Trustees, or from the Southern Methodist Conference of Missouri. Yet I was reappointed year after year. And the spring before I began to look toward California, I was given permanent tenure. They may have known how safe they were in doing this.

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It was in this exciting atmosphere that I wrote Modern Man’s Worship. I have never enjoyed writing anything more. These years at Central College were years of growth for me. As I say, I didn’t have sense enough to know I was sitting on a keg of dynamite most of the time. Oblivious to the scheming Southern Methodists all around me, I read and wrote and pondered. I steeped myself in the richest diet of reading and aesthetic stimulus I have ever known. The harvest of European travel and study were about me in our modest apartment. Mrs. Meland’s field of interest having been art appreciation and interior decoration, had been greatly stimulated by Europe, too. Together we relived what we had experienced. Through her eyes the world of beauty became a living and alluring world to me. During these years I was reading Plato and Aristotle with fresh eyes. It was a time, too, when I discovered modern poetry, first through post-war European poetry; then through the verse of modern American writers. I plunged into this literature with the same famished sense with which I had initiated my graduate work at Chicago. Art and poetry and philosophy were my new loves. In part this was in reaction to the impoverishment I had felt on finishing the Divinity School; in part it was the European experience arousing new depths in me. I should explain the reference to my Chicago impoverishment. I think anyone who has gone through graduate study for a degree will understand what I mean. Yet I’m sure my feeling was more intense. I had yielded to the scientific asceticism of the period more completely than had most of my colleagues. John Knox, for example, was in my suite in Goodspeed Hall most of those years. John Knox lived above it, or outside of it; and at times resisted it. At the time we teased him about spending more time taking tea with the young artists in Lorado Taft’s studio across the Midway than in pursuing the historical method. John was never at home at Chicago. I, on the other hand, was completely at home—zealously at home! And in giving all to this empirical quest for truth, I was stripped bare of much, of which the pragmatic faith is unaware. I can say quite truthfully that these fifteen years since I left the Divinity School have been years of continual exploration and growth in new fields which have carried me more and more into profounder orientation of religion, more mystical in quality, more sensitive and wistful before ideas that reach us through the Christian tradition, an outlook which, while faithful to the rigorous searching of the scientific spirit, is shot through with shafts of light from literature, art, and philosophy. It was in the years that followed my work at Chicago and while I was teaching in Fayette, that I came to have closer association with Mr. Wieman. I cannot properly say that I was a student of Wieman; for he

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came to Chicago just as I was finishing my course work. My first acquaintance with him was through Gerald Birney Smith, who had a great enthusiasm for him about the time of the publication of Wieman’s Religious Experience and Scientific Method. I think I was attracted to Wieman’s thought as a fruitful answer to stubborn questions of religious knowledge which had arisen in G. B. Smith’s seminars. For quite some time I was not aware of Wieman’s influence upon me. For example, I was not aware that my Modern Man’s Worship was particularly akin to Wieman’s thought until Bill Pauck pointed this out to me. In fact I had thought of myself as critical of Wieman, veering at the time rather, in the direction of G. B. Smith and Ames. My relations with Wieman began in earnest in the summer of 1934 when by chance, as we were watching a tennis game between Alonzo Stagg and his son, we discovered that we were working along common lines in trying to interpret current philosophies of religion to our students. American Philosophies of Religion was born of this conversation. I have always wanted to be a theologian. In fact throughout my serious years of study, I have always thought of myself as developing in that direction. It is becoming increasingly apparent, however, that no one else has thought of the idea. Perhaps they cannot quite see how so denatured and diversified a mind could possibly find a focus in Christian theology. Yet, strange to say, I am confident that my bent is there. And in time, I may find my way into that narrow path. For the yearning for fuller knowledge and faith in God goes back to my earliest memories when as a child I wrote down my boyhood aspirations in a journal which has since been lost. Later preoccupations diverted me somewhat, as I have said. Yet I left college an English major, committed in my mind to search out the issues of religious faith. I have been at it a long time. And now the concern for clarification and simplification in thought and effort, for sharper focus, for concentration, for realization of the long-range expectation, drives me ever stronger toward that end. I seem to recall that Schleiermacher reached his goal as theologian in a round-about way after a life of diverse preoccupations; although it took a new conception of theology to gather him in. I confess that I should like nothing better than to emulate him in some respects. But now the romanticist in me is out; and this confession of frustration seems to be running to illusions of grandeur. I know it is time to stop. Bernard Eugene Meland 1944

1946 Art, Religion and the Cultural Mood By Bernard E. Meland Professor of Christian Theology in the Federated Theological Faculty University of Chicago It is a commentary upon the culture of our time that one feels he must justify religion to society, even asking the question: “Does Civilization Need Religion?” It is a commentary upon the religion of our time that one feels he must justify art to religion, even asking the question, “Does Religion Need Art?” Both of these limitations of outlook are part of the same deficiency in our cultural mood, and acknowledge our spiritual need as a people. For only when art and religion are as natural to the human craving as water and bread is the cultural mood sound. I. Art, religion, and science are simply words expressing various ways of looking at the world and its life. Science is the more immediate and direct in that its concern is utility. It is the pursuit of knowledge which will yield power with which to control the forces of environment. Invention and industry are the normal consequences of the sciences; for these bring knowledge that is power into the direct service of human needs, saving men from hard labor, yet extending their accomplishments in the production of things and usable goods. Science views man as a working animal who would like to work less, yet receive more in return for his labor. To the end of achieving this miracle of abundance without effort, science has dedicated its services. Its goal is practical and immediate; its procedure, direct and analytical; its language, descriptive. Art is the counterpart of science in that it seeks to enhance utility with an imaginative quality that creates beauty. It appeals to what is elemental in man in that it seeks to elicit joy and wonder and praise in the human spirit by creating, out of the common stuff of experience, unexpected meaning which is always more than what it appears to be. Art has been justified in many ways. It has been represented by Santayana in his Sense of Beauty as the means by which we are delivered through imagination from the disillusioning drabness of existence; and by Max Schoen, in his Art and Beauty as “a release from the practical demands of living.” Art is transformative in both of these senses; but it is more than a mood of escape, as is so generally assorted. It is one of the

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basic dimensions of living by which experience is constantly recreated. It is discernment of a sort. It is a selective way of looking at objects and events, gathering into one’s vision, such relationships as express beauty through effects of mass, position, or line. Art is not something we turn to when we turn away from life; art is experience, as John Dewey has said, in certain of its aspects. It is experience elevated and clarified by this peculiar kind of discernment which a sensitive imagination can give. Art, whether it expresses itself through music, poetry, painting, or architecture, presents the common stuff of experience in uncommon ways, made possible by the genius of a sensitive imagination. Thus art, rather than being simply a release from the practical demands of living, a retreat from the business of living, is itself a creative enterprise, giving meaning to life which science and industry cannot in themselves achieve. Art is living with imagination and the disciplines of the creative sense. Religion is a third dimension which goes beyond art and science in that it relates living to issues of existence that are cosmic in extent. Havelock Ellis has defined religion, in its quintessential core, as the art of finding our emotional relationship to the world conceived as a whole. It has occurred to me at times to state this meaning somewhat similarly by saying that religion is the aesthetic attitude extended to cosmic concerns. Religion is like art in that it humbles man with a sense of wonder and appreciation. It is unlike it, however, in that it introduces into our awareness of ourselves and existence a kind of concern about destiny that leaps beyond all visible objects, and infuses the living moment with a significance both joyous and tragic which we find difficult to comprehend. I can state this more adequately if I can quote a passage from my Modern Man’s Worship: The religious response, in its pure form, is the aesthetic attitude projected to cosmic ends. It is the deep, elemental, appreciative response of creatures toward vast and mysterious environings, out of which their world of life has arisen and is sustained. Man at worship is man responding praisingly, gratefully, fearfully, yet devotedly to the great sources of life that promote his being. And in responding emotionally to reality in these ways, man, the prosaic workman, scientist, or scholar, becomes man, the artist, the poet, and the singer. For the man at worship feels the emotion of the artist, speaks the language of the poet, and lifts his voice with the song of the Psalmist. This mystical rapport between man and reality, which is worship, is the core of religion. Thus religion in its essential nature is an aesthetic experience of profound proportion, Its meaning and value, therefore, will best be understood and cherished when it is taken with the arts to be an appreciative response to reality; when its concepts are viewed as aesthetic forms, not as science; its words, poetry, not prose; its chief end

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appreciation and devotion, not inquiry, industry, or control, This does not mean that religion has no relation to science, labor, or morality, On the contrary, it is inseparable from these phases of culture. And like the arts, its values enhance and increase the function of those utility phases of life. But like science, labor, morality, and all other special functions of life, religion has its distinctive dimension. And that distinctive dimension is appreciative. Religion is a fine art with cosmic content. The conduct of life is made safe, efficient, and endurable through science, labor, and morality. It is made good and enjoyable through worship, literature, and the arts.

Art and religion, then, when they are distinctly themselves, speak a common language. It is the language of spirit. Now is an ambiguous term; but it conveys that qualitative surplusage in experience which rises to intensity in events of great beauty, or of tragedy; in friendship that goes deep; in gratitude that is profoundly felt; in moments of wonder, in humility and remorse, in times of penitence or when forgiveness is what gives depth to feeling; what puts space and distance in our thoughts, stretching the mind to a wide awareness. Spirit is a revelation of meaning that intrudes from without or that rises from within our consciousness. It is the subtle interplay of a kingdom without and a kingdom within which is ever rising to consciousness; only to fade again from conscious awareness. It is the concern of religion that this kingdom of greater meaning shall be continually communicated to man and made constituent with his daily node of living; and that its gentle intrusions shall permeate the common experience with glimpses of its own significance. It is the function of art to accomplish this communication. For art is the language of indirect discourse adapted to the subtle task of conveying these things of spirit that work on most hiddenly among us. Art as a language which communicates meaning peculiar to its function can be stated in this way: Poetry is never just versification with rhyme and meter; it is a moment of revelation, wresting from the flow of experience, fresh insight which only a sensitive perception could seize, and only the indirect word of the poet could convey. Much may accompany this seizure of insight in the form of words, elaborating the moment of perception; but the poetry is the disclosure of what hitherto had remained hidden to prosaic eyes. All verse is not poetry, as William Rose Binot once remarked. Poetry is the luminous utterance that occasionally gleams forth out of a multitude of lines. What is thus conveyed in poetry, however, may never rise to definitive idea; it is meaning that resists communication and is thus suffused in emotion. Often it is vague feeling, pressing for utterance without achieving luminosity. “Poetry begins,” says Robert Frost, “with a lump in the throat,

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a homesickness or a lovesickness. It is a reaching out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words.”66 But fulfillment of the reaching in poetry in which emotion finds its thought, and though its words, is not communicated meaning as we commonly understand it. Poetry reveals without defining. It conveys without clarifying. It is like the wind bearing fragrance—an unexplained commission of grace. Poetry, then, nay not inform; but it quickens the receptive mind with a sense of knowing, Thus in quotation, it can voice a summation of thought, following upon a labored discourse, which will give to definitive words their finality. Music, likewise, is a language that lifts inarticulate feeling into communicable meaning. “It speaks to our feelings and imaginations, as it were by suggestion;” writes Walter Spalding, “reaching for this very reason depths of our being quite beyond the power of mere words.”67 What it communicates will depend, not only upon the gifts and the temperament of the composer, but upon the ability of the listener to hear musical sound. What Spalding has in mind, undoubtedly, is preeminently communication of musical meaning made possible by a competence in responding to the unfolding structure of rhythm and tone; but he means also the disclosure of spirit animating the creation of musical structure, and the response of the sensitive listener, attuned to its spiritual discourse. Speaking of folk-songs, for example, he writes: They are like wild flowers blooming unheeded by the wayside, the product of the race rather than the individual, and for centuries were only slightly known to cultivated musicians. It should be understood that words and music were inextricably bound together and that, with both, dancing was naturally associated; the very essence of a people’s life being expressed by this repartee activity.68

Music is a language that speaks to People’s feelings and imaginations, not only in the technical way by which the trained ear attends to its discourse, but in the more commonplace way by which a people attend to their folk-songs and whatever is gathered into their listening of comparable character. Often the symphony, when it is well-known and established among a people as expressing recognizable emotional meanings, becomes as folk-music and thus serves as a spiritual medium of communication in this sense. The analysis of Cesar Franck and Beethoven by J. Seely Bixler is interesting in this connection. He writes: During the last war the people of Paris turned in particular to two composers—Cesar Franck and Beethoven. Why should they have chosen these

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two? I think it may have been because one represents the instinctive unconscious blessing of the deep, the other the more formal blessings of heaven,69 and that in time of war people find themselves needing both. Cesar Franck seems to me to be a composer with a restless romantic spirit. Even when he reaches a mood of serenity he points beyond it suggesting that it is bound to be transient. Franck is the composer of transition and change and in this way is a composer for the emotions. He deals not with the sequence of ideas but with the rapidly changing almost evanescent mood which slides imperceptibly into its successor and which can be felt but not talked about or described in words. With Beethoven the case is different. We take the rhythmic succession of dots in the Fifth Symphony, for example, as a sign of victory. Beethoven develops this rhythm in the course of the symphony and it is noteworthy that as he does so he leaves the bowed instruments behind and calls on the instruments of percussion. With their help he can beat out a figure that all of us are able to see. It is objective and external like a reasonable idea, a form we can talk about and share. We do not have to retreat into the recesses of our own individuality in order to feel it. Beethoven hammers out his climaxes for us as if he were working in bronze or showing us how to make a pattern by putting atomistic bits together into a mosaic. Cesar Franck reveals to us the beauty and tragedy of the life within. Beethoven shows us the continuousness of the life within and the world without, pointing to the reasonable form that corrects our inner emotions and sets them free.”70

Because religion, by its very nature, expressing a relationship that reaches indefinitely beyond man’s creature existence, is discourse forever struggling to articulate incommunicable feeling, and to bring to the social world of clear and direct discourse intuitions of its farther range, it is compelled to avail itself of these subtler forms of communication which music and poetry provide. The dependence of religion upon the arts, and we may say upon poetry and music in particular, is therefore inescapable. Without their aid, religion cannot plumb its depths, nor communicate its most cherished insights. Without art, and the medium of imagination for conveying art, religion ceases to rise above the level of moral discourse. Science, art, and religion, then, are three ways of looking at the world; three ways of responding to its events; three dimensions of living which can nevertheless, be lived simultaneously in one personality, in one culture. Now it has been characteristic of cultures, when the cultural mood has been sound, to be attentive to the demands of all three of these dimensions. From what we have been able to glean from existent records through archaeological research, we are led to believe that the societies of

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primitive peoples fused these concerns into a continuous ritual. The hunt was a necessity of the tribe which proceeded along lines established by precedents that were gauged to meet the demands of the mysterious force, “Mana,” or its equivalent in the tribal tongue. This procedure was an intermixture of science and religion, as primitives were able to employ these concerns. And whether successful or otherwise, the hunt culminated in song and dance and dramatic narrative around the evening campfire, just as it had begun by these processes. Among later peoples, the season’s sowing was likewise an interplay of these diverse interests—diverse to us, but to them, alternating facets or moods or rhythms of the one event of living. We get glimpses of the interrelation of art, religion, and other cultural activities in more advanced societies where the functions of the common life are dominated by the sovereign interests, either of an agricultural, or a civic faith. The two are generally seen in conflict in the historic literatures, as in early Hebrew times described in the Books of Samuel, Kings and the prophets; or among the early Egyptians when the cults of the delta encountered influences from the rising states of the Upper Nile; or among the early Greeks, as related in Hesiod’s Works and Days in contrast to Homer’s Iliad, and among the Romans, described in Walter Pater’s plaintive tale of Marius, the Epicurean. Each of these stages of religious culture presents a complete pattern of life with a dominant motif appearing in the myth, or controlling doctrine which justifies the conduct of life. And the conduct of life, whether viewed in the family circle around the hearth, or in the market place or civic center, appears to be a well-ordered drama, rehearsed through many years of living and re-enacted again and again, if not for themselves, for the cloud of witnesses that gathered out of their traditional past, or from the hills of the gods who had come to make holiday with them. In these life-dramas, made consistent with the soil and moon and stars that environed the social group, and with the compelling needs that arose out of the particular mode of living, there was little occasion for the separate functions, science, art, religion, or industry, to get out of pattern; tho it happened, But when it did happen, it was like having stage hands come on the stage to interrupt the play with the complaint, “We can’t pull the curtain; the rope’s broke!” Or the director intruding in a climactic moment with a despairing outcry, “Now: That isn’t the way to make love!” We have become accustomed to these intrusions in our age. Stage hands, directors, anyone else who feels the whim, wanders on and off stage, breaks into the script, starts an argument with the leading man, or runs off with the feminine lead if the mood strikes him. In fact, the sense

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of function, the dramatic form of living within a cultural pattern, has become so dispelled that we accept all these intrusions as part of the act. All our days consist of rehearsals. We never get on with the play. Medieval society, culminating in the thirteenth century, is generally pointed to as a time when such a cultural synthesis was clearly evident. Much can be said to counter this interpretation; but the observation is substantially sound. Thanks to the folk-movement, arising from the influence of St. Francis, which culminated in the religious community of towns and became symbolized in the great Gothic cathedrals, a genuine integration of aspiration and communal artisanry were achieved. The intellectual crisis within the university threatening dissolution was sufficiently resolved by the labors of Thomas Aquinas to preserve the semblance of a church-controlled culture in which art, science, and phi1osophy served the religious end. Dante’s Divine Comedy is the dramatic symbol of this cultural unity. Now the point most frequently emphasized in reviewing the medieval situation is that theology and the church dominated culture. And present antipathies to theology lead some to decry this situation as being authoritarian. What is really important here is the communal sense of function which grew out of a common sense of values. Art served ends beyond itself, as did scholarship, masonry, and the many kindred pursuits. And because the services of each were recognized as contributive to the common life, each was effective in its own way in shaping the cultural experience. One can recognize immediately in handling the ideas or the creations that survive this period that art was an indispensable ingredient of its culture, just as religion was indispensable. And they stand mutually related and interdependent. The story of the rise of the modern world is the story of the dissolution of this relationship between art, religion, and culture. One can pick up the evidence of disintegration at many different points. It appears wherever some one function of the social organization intrudes itself as autonomous or as a rival form of sovereign value. In the early stages of the Renaissance, the humanistic arts appear in this role. At another stage, following upon the stimulus of the Italian industries, science in the service of invention asserts its claims. The Reformation initiated a three-fold wedge that was to pry the medieval synthesis apart: nationalism as a political concept; capitalism as an economic theory; and individual autonomy in the realm of faith. In each of these areas: in humanistic scholarship, including the arts; in science, and its rising world of industry; in politics, economics, and in religion, a new sense of freedom emerged—a freedom, one might say, that is the freedom of the irresponsible. I put it this way to emphasize

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what was really barbarian in this new world outlook. A certain amount of organic unity prevailed throughout these periods of cultural rebellion through sheer inertia; but the tendencies were at work that were eventually to dissolve the cultural fabric that had given corporate meaning to all human effort, whatever the field. The result of this growing sense of autonomy in the various fields was the progressive loss of the sense of function among all fields; especially in scholarship and the arts. This development has been admirably traced in Gerald Birney Smith’s Social Idealism and the Changing Theology, and, in Paul Tillich’s The Religious Situation. I am not concurring with the Roman Catholic’s Thomistic analysis of this development, which appraises the results as all folly. From one point of view this period can be looked upon as an age of growing up, when each of these several fields became authentic in its own right, and thus creative in a mature sense. Certainly the refinements of philosophic thought, the advances in literature, and the astounding accomplishments in science, invention, and industry, point to results of this modern period which can only be described as achievements; and achievements of a high order. What I am concerned to point out is that they have been achievements at a price—at a price to religion, to art, and more particularly, to culture itself. For culture in the modern world has lost the pervasive influence of art; just as it has lost the pervasive influence of religion. Those have become individual enterprises in the new era of irresponsible freedom. The concerns of the commonwealth have not been the chief end of art, or of religion, or of philosophy. And contrariwise, the concerns of art, of religion, and of philosophy, have become progressively remote from the active concerns of culture. There has followed as a result of the growing autonomy among these various fields a specialization of function which has insulated each from the other. Religion, in Protestant form, has accentuated literal and moral concerns to the exclusion of other interests. This applies to orthodox Protestantism and Liberal Protestantism alike. Consequently, Protestantism has created a mentality and a cultural feeling in the churches which spontaneously sets art and the moral sense in conflict; and. resists the imaginative sense in favor of a literal pursuit of truth. Art, as expressed in modern music, painting, and poetry, has pursued its esoteric ends, unrelated to other concerns. Consequently it has tended to identify the imaginative sonic, not with a creative force that renews the human spirit in living; but with a cult of the unconventional temperament that delights in its alien ways. Philosophy, too, has abdicated its cultural concern, as Albert Schweitzer has pointed out in his Philosophy of

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Civilization, through its specialization, first in problems of epistemology and now in its concern with semantics. Industry has been slowly emerging from its specialization in the pursuit of profit for individual enterprises; but an industrial consciousness dedicated to the common good is yet to be achieved. The sciences, because of their strategic importance to an ever increasing industrial civilization, have been less able to lapse into private pursuits; yet they, too, have had difficulty expressing a sense of function in any purposeful way that would serve broad, cultural ends. They have been at the service of the largest bidder, which is perfectly ethical in the prevailing sense, for it is in accord with the mores of our time. And the largest bidders have been industrialists; consequently, scientists have become the resource men of industry. In these exaggerated strokes, sketching the tendencies of western culture since the Renaissance, I have tried to indicate the perspective in which cultural values, and particularly the values of art, have come to be envisaged. The sketching is not complete; for I have yet to relate the story of art in the American experience, which I shall try to do presently. Thus far I have said that our modern culture, prior to the developments of the past few years, has been characterized by prevailing tendencies toward autonomy and specialization which have progressively dissolved the sense of function that once gave cohesion and purpose to the arts beyond their own specialized interests. And the dissolution of the interrelation between art, religion, and culture has rendered art a luxury to the common life, giving it a peripheral, rather than a central, place in culture. That we are in process of correcting this distorted perspective makes such an analysis a proper introduction to a study of art and religion. For it helps to explain the limitations in our cultural mood which have placed both art and religion in an apologetic role; and it enables us to see what present reconstructive efforts are about in their concern to restore a responsible feeling for art and religion in the cultural life of our time. II. Wallace Nutting, in his massive work on furniture,71 says that before 1840 it would have been difficult to find bad architecture in America; after that date, it was practically impossible to find good architecture in America. Whether we agree with that judgment or not, the statement serves to emphasize the point that the decades just preceding the Civil War and following it spans a time of cultural retrogression of a sort in this country. The New Englander who shares the antipathies of Henry Adams72 will have a ready answer for it; he will say it was the time when men with the hoe and with unshaved faces, like Jackson, Lincoln, and Grant, were

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coming out of the Midwest to take over the reins of government. And the Virginian will see it as the fading of the Old South when more ruthless and money-eyed planters of Mississippi and Alabama intruded upon its gentle life with the violent hands of money changers. There are many explanations. These factors that we have cited are not unrelated. A barbarian invasion was in process. Rome was falling again—a cultural synthesis which had given a crystalline glow to eighteenth century court life and to the festive days at Mt. Vernon, Concord, and Boston was breaking up under a pressure head of less genteel forces of which Jackson, Lincoln and Grant were symbols. One can call it a barbaric invasion, or one can say, speaking in another figure, new logs were being thrown upon the fire—the crystalline glow was erupting with ugly smoke and sputtering sparks. Nevertheless, a decisive change was occurring in our national life. Life in America was moving away from something of profound importance to the human spirit, the outcome of which we, who are contemporary Americans, were to feel. One can get hold of this transformation of the cultural mood in America by noting certain clearly discernible changes that came into view during this period. Lewis Mumford puts it vividly by saying that we became time-conscious in a new way at that juncture of our life.73 What was happening? Industry had come upon us like a flood. The factory had emerged. Men and their families were leaving farms and crowding the cities. A new metropolitan culture was in the making—a culture that moved around the time clock. Men punching time clocks were then the most contemporary figures about.74 Now in this cultural setting, time became regimented. The use of time was a consideration. Time used veil was time that produced things, or that contributed to production. Labor, management, the scientific work of the laboratories, invention, especially that of invention factories such as Edison established, transportation, banking and finance, these could be counted on to use time properly. Art? Hardly—unless it could produce buildings to house business and industry—the skyscraper, perhaps. Education? Well, that depends. What do you teach? History? History is bunk! Philosophy? Good Lord! Physics and chemistry? Well, now you’re getting somewhere. Make education practical: put the churches on a business basis; commercialize art, if you want these things to last! So we did. The turnings that give character to a culture are very subtle. A frown on the face of important people may eliminate a whole strand of art or music or literature from a period of culture. The approved and the unapproved, these mark the turning points. In the late nineteenth century much of America turned its back upon the contemplative concerns of

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human living because the industrial mind considered these concerns to be impractical. Industry had set us upon a new course. Activism was more to our liking. Direct talk as in business and science suited us more. The indirect discourse of art was too subtle. Imagination was a waste of time. Beauty was all right in its place, but you could lose a lot of time creating it and more time looking at it. Be precise! Make it quick: Steer clear of ambiguities. This was the formula that was to shape the mood of the twentieth century just then looming upon the horizon. In this new cultural mood scientism was destined to prosper. And any field of learning, creative art included, that considered its future turned to science, the new intimate aid of the patrons of economy. I say the shifts in cultural moods are subtle; but they are far-reaching. Let a new concept, a new interest, become sovereign in men’s thoughts and it becomes the luminous center of all life. All lights cast their beam upon it. All trends move it-ward. So in the age that became industrially centered and time-conscious, an age dependent upon scientific discovery and invention, science lifted its head above all other enterprises of thought. Consequently the gravitation of thought toward scientific standards has been the characteristic tendency in all of the major fields of scholarship, including the arts, during the past century. This has been apiece with the era of clarification, of economy following upon industrialization. Contemplation, mysticism, metaphysics, imagination, appreciation, these have been as refugees in our age of science. Yet there is always room for a refuge of a genteel nature, that is, if she is a nice refuge, one who will be good to you, and do as you command. But then art becomes a kept luxury, unrelated to the cultural pattern, and as such, it becomes, itself, a degrading influence, a form of indulgence, or even a source of barbarism, superimposing alien values and introducing false gods. The nouveau riche following Grant’s administration made trips to Europe, collected museum pieces and articles of reputation, even uprooting monasteries and castles and carrying them block by block across the Atlantic to erect them somewhere near a summer home. And the plans of famous structures were to be copied and their likeness reconstructed. So, in unexpected places throughout America—in New Jersey, in Maryland, New York, Ohio, even in Chicago, Greece was to rise again, and Rome, and Gothic France, and Norman England. Italian opera was to spring full blown upon unsuspecting American towns. Patrons of industry were to call it good. Culture was on the hum. Now there is a problem here that cannot be passed over lightly. How much is Art the shared experience of beauty and creativeness; how much is it creativity within one’s self? Within a culture? My remarks are not to

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be taken as a swift dismissal of all alien art, which would deprive us of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Frank; of Shakespeare, Goethe, Keats, and Shelley, and many more. I am simply calling attention to the superficial and sentimental excess of a gaudy fashion in art that fell upon us in an age of little discrimination and without the artistic sense to recognize genuine impulses of artistic creation in its own culture because of their lack of credentials, all of which has had the effect of discrediting art among us in more ways than we can recount. But I am concerned to get at a more fundamental point. We have spoken of scientism that absorbed the modern mind following upon industrialization. Without meaning to decry science or to set it aside—(as if so fundamental concern of the human enterprise could be disposed of in that manner) and without intending a plea for irrationalism to counter this era of clarification, I must insist that we, as moderns, have achieved our orientation in a scientific age at considerable cost. The price has been the shrinkage of our imagination and of our ability to conceive our human destiny on a scale commensurate with the great epics that have thrilled the race. The scope of our human venture has been drastically reduced, and this, in turn, has lessened our inclination toward the artistic and the dramatic sense. Shakespeare, writing in the seventeenth century, could say, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”75 This was not fantasy; it was fact; for it expressed precisely the conception of human life as people had conceived it since men were able to contemplate their destiny.76 Early men lived amid an environment of unseen powers. The civilizations that emerged out of these primitive beginnings sustained an even vaster conception of man’s life, creating a company of gods who did battle against evil powers in his behalf when they wore beneficent; or lifting his struggle with life to a grand-and tragic level when the gods were inclined to be against him.77 The epics of Dante78 and Milton79 are the two outstanding dramatizations of man’s destiny that have come out of western civilization, rivaling these epics of earlier times. And the tragedies of Shakespeare, though more mundane in setting, nevertheless give to men’s transactions, choices, and decisions the scope of the Iliad and of Genesis, Samuel, Kings, and the prophetic literature. In sharp contrast to this Shakespearean world view is the one voiced by the modern mind. Tormented by the vastness that engulfs him and the ignominy of his own plight, he jeeringly observes, “The world is an immense wheel, forever turning, and man is like a fly sitting upon one of its spokes, imagining that the wheel turns for his benefit.”

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This voice is in the extreme, but it is not unfamiliar to us.80 And if its skepticism is not affirmed by many, it nevertheless tends to corrode what affirmations modern men are able to venture. Little by little the scientific study of man and his behavior has created a picture of the human life-span that has progressively reduced it from a cosmic drama in which a battle between heaven and hell was waged to determine man’s destiny to a commonplace succession of moments. “An age which could really ‘appreciate’ Shakespeare or Sophocles,” writes Joseph Wood Krutch, “would have something comparable to put beside them—something like them, not necessarily in form, or spirit, but at least in magnitude—some vision of life which would be, however different, equally ample and passionate. But when we move to put a modern masterpiece beside them, when we seek to compare them with, let us say, a Ghosts or a Weavers, we shrink as from the impulse to commit some folly and we feel as though we were about to superimpose Bowling Green upon the Great Prairies in order to ascertain which is the larger. The question, we see, is not primarily one of art but of two worlds which two minds inhabited. No increased powers of expression, no greater gift for words could have transformed Ibsen into Shakespeare, The materials out of which the latter created his works—his conception of human dignity, his sense of the importance of human passions, his vision of the amplitude of human life—simply did not and could not exist for Ibsen, as they did not and could not exist for his contemporaries. God and Man and Nature had all somehow dwindled in the course of the intervening centuries, not because the realistic creed of modern art led us to seek out mean people, but because this meanness of human life was somehow thrust upon us by the operation of that same process which led to the development of realistic theories of art by which our vision could be justified.”81

I cite this shrinkage of the dimensions of man, this reduction of the scope of his destiny, as a very important factor in accounting for the fact that art and religion have ceased to be pervasive as an influence in the cultural mood of modern times. Life writ large as a cosmic drama is itself a dramatic conception and elicits both a religious and an aesthetic response. Life writ small loses its dramatic effect and thus inspires neither religious nor aesthetic emotion. Now the answer of the modern mind to all of this is simply that we have outgrown this child’s play which seems to have concerned ancient men. Science has given us mature concepts and a method by which a reliable understanding of the processes of the world is made possible to us. We know now that this talk about the gods and the cosmic drama over man’s choices and decisions is pure myth. Man is what he is—just folk like you and me; and this life is just what it is—getting up in the morning,

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going to work (or class, it’s the same thing) having fun at night (perhaps) and going to bed before the night is too far gone. Happy is the man who wakes up fresh from sound sleep, A song in his heart, vigorously rising and bathing himself, Ardent with thirst for vivid life, Laughing that his eyes do not open on some other planet, But that they open here, and he finds himself at home on the old Earth, And meets again the people he knows, The woman he loves, his children, his enterprises, And goes to his work throbbing with the news of the world, And loves his work—the machinery, the puzzling problems— And comes home at night for his silence among books, Or his vibrant speech among familiar friends, Or the mystery of union with the woman.82

Life, in other words, is a succession of moments. But this reduction of the scope of human destiny to a few observable facts about the day’s routine with its corresponding emphasis upon the practical side of experience is also mythical, if by the team mythical we mean unreal. Happier is the man that he is an in-goer as well as an out-goer, If he is a traveler and explorer in the interior life of man, At home with all visions, the processions of the stars and of the ages, The daring and defiant intuitions of the soul…83

What we need to see in this time of rethinking our cultural situation is that factualism is not an assurance of reality. And certitude gained at the expense of shutting out large areas of meaning from our investigations and our concerns is an illusory kind of confidence, not unlike that which comes from burying one’s head in the sand. Pragmatic experience, unless it is attended by wistfulness and wonder, amounts to a head-in-the-sand procedure; for it buries all interest in the social experience and reduces all concerns to their pragmatic dimension. What I am saying here is that our procedure, in education, in scholarship, in religious education, in industry, in all living, in fact, during these recent years of clarification, of reducing the scone of inquiry and concern to scientific proportions has served to eliminate from thought, from feeling, from our cultural mood, that very dimension of imagination which generates a capacity for great art as well as a capacity for great faith. I contend that great faith and great art go hand in hand. The periods of great artistic creativeness have been ages of faith, by which I mean people who have been sensitive to their creature limitations and aware of vast meaning beyond themselves, and restlessly reaching out toward this larger

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world that enveloped them. This gesture of faith breeds reverence of a proper sort which issues in wonder. And with Plato we may say, “We are saved by wonder.” If faith is of an elemental sort, not given to deception or circumvention, it will issue in a tragic sense, capable of discerning the real depths of living,84 For a full envisagement of the life-process against a full background of being reveals our human situation to be one of tragic import as well as one of great possibility. This tragic aspect of our being the practical emphasis of our culture obscures. It is designed to do so. It seeks to eliminate from consciousness that which impairs the bland optimism that assures success. Accentuating the practical interest above the contemplative values also obscures our real situation as creatures, and gives us a false sense of control and sufficiency because of the power we achieve within this restricted area of social experience over which the sciences can reign. And this breeds a sophistication that is hostile to the genuine mood of faith and hope, the sources of all great art. We can develop a technical art in music, poetry, and painting that accords with this sophisticated cultural mood. We have, in fact, done just that during our century. For the arts, like philosophy and the sciences, in seeking a modern orientation, have, more often than not, relinquished the great venture of human aspiration and have become particularized pursuits within intellectual or aesthetic areas that could concern only the specialized craftsman. Baker Brownell has expressed this well, saying: The new formulations of music are unquestionably creative. It is nevertheless, more of a scientist’s or technician’s creativeness than that of a great artist. It elaborates new and interesting patterns, but it does not identify those patterns mystically with living value and reality. It is good scientific creation, but it lacks the essential magic of great art.85

Poetry, beginning with the Imagists, of-whom Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound are representative, underwent a similar metamorphism. Speaking of their method of poetry in contrast to that of William Vaughn Moody, Robert Morse Lovett writes: The Imagists defined their aesthetic of poetry as the presentation of a visual situation in the fewest possible concrete words, free from adjectives and conventional phrasing, unhampered by moralizing or speculation upon the philosophical significance of the visual idea—the form and rhythm developing out of the subject, not imposed upon it; the rhyme and meter determined by the judgment of the author… he (Moody) would never have been satisfied with the visible world as a spectacle merely, with no curiosity as to its meaning.86

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To find the same specialized tendency in painting one would go to the art of Picasso of whom Thomas Craven wrote: …he has no interest in life; he is interested only in art—in the mechanical formation of pictures, He has used his nimble intelligence to complete the withdrawal of art into the inorganic world; like the monastic logicians he lives in the cells of method, His art is perfect because it offers nothing; pure because it is purged of human content; classic because it is dead. By converting the personality into a process, Picasso has become the leader of the methodists.87

It must be said, however, that a new yearning has become evident in more recent art. Much of modern music, modern poetry, and modern painting reveals a new depth, and with it, a wistfulness that gives promise of a return to more elemental concerns of the human spirit. In saying this I am thinking of the symphonies and concertos of Rachmaninoff, the music of Jean Sibelius, Vaughn Williams, and Howard Hanson; of the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers, of Stephen Vincent Benet and William Rose Benet, Archibald MacLeish, the poetic prose works of Thomas Wolfe and of other poets of the region; I am thinking of the paintings of post-impressionists like Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. It has seemed to me, thinking upon this situation, more or less as a layman (although I have brooded over these matters for quite some time) that our basic need as artists, philosophers, preachers, or just as modern folk, is the recovery of stature—both in ourselves and in our art. And this implies becoming aware of ourselves in the religious sense. The religious perspective differs from all other perspectives in that it takes account of man’s creatural relations with whatever in the living process creates and sustains his being. When this perspective is maintained, man is made more humble in the sense that he is less likely to develop illusions of omnipotence. And he is not apt to fall victim of the egocentricity that soon gathers about the autonomous individual. But man is also made more noble as a figure in his own right; for as creature he stands in cosmic relation to the Creator. He is one of the concretions of this gentle working in nature, the artist hand of a thousand ages that stands over this ceaseless flow of creativity, the perpetual coming into being and perishing, pressing it here, shaping it there, bringing out of an otherwise chaotic flood of process the creation that His infinitely sensitive Nature within nature is able to fashion. To keep the perspective essential to an adequate understanding of the life-process, we should say to ourselves again and again, Creation is an art,

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the great cosmic art that is ever bringing into being such creatures as man, and much more. And God is one who works the artist’s way—an infinitely patient and sensitive way, to which we can be responsive in so far as we develop sensitive natures, capable of discerning, acknowledging, perhaps, creating, in any case, cherishing, these qualities of spirit which intrude upon our path wherever great beauty, or goodness is revealed. Such a perspective, in which the sensitive side of our nature will be lifted up, nurtured, cultivated, and the rich fullness of our world discerned, will restore to our impoverished modern life capacity for imagination— imagination that will give stature to our lives as it gave stature to men of other ages when great faith and real tragedy were understood because they were lived. I have spoken frequently of the importance of imagination. What is imagination? Without imagination there is no art, no artistic sense, and no genuine religious orientation of life. What, then, is imagination? Hartley Burr Alexander, in a book on Poetry and the Individual, which he wrote at the age of 29, clarified the meaning of imagination in a way which I have always regarded adequate, both for philosophy and aesthetic understanding, I quote an excerpt from it: The mental life is not to be conceived merely on the analogy of a receiving house,—a taking in of goods delivered to it, an assorting and rating of them; rather it has enterprise of its own, a power of reaching out and taking what lies beyond its initial bounds. This is the power of active comprehension and is as near the vital principle as we are like to come. Sometimes the activity is willed, sometimes it is involuntary and spontaneous, but always its essential nature is attainment of new insight and conquest of new dominion. And since this attainment is not by grant from without, but by dint of individual effort, we call it creation, meaning thereby a widened comprehension of the world’s possibilities. The energy of the mind or of the soul—for it welds all psychical activities—which is the agent of our world-winnings and the procreator of our growing life, we term imagination. It is distinguished from perception by its relative freedom from the dictation of sense; it is distinguished from memory by its power to acquire,—memory only retains; it is distinguished from emotion in being a force rather than a motive; from the understanding in being an assimilator rather than the mere wielder of what is set before it; from the will, because the will is but the wielder of the reins,—the will is but the charioteer, the imagination is the Pharaoh in command. It is distinguished from all these, yet it includes them all, for it is the full functioning of the whole mind and in the total activity drives all mental faculties to its one supreme end—the widening of the world wherein we dwell. Through beauty the world grows, and it is the business of the imagination to create the beautiful. The imagination synthesizes, humaniz-

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The agent of our world-winnings and the procreation of our growing life, providing us with a widened comprehension of the world’s possibilities—this is imagination says Alexander. Now it is precisely this orientation of mind and spirit which imagination provides in which our cultural mood is most deficient. Our concern for definitiveness, for exactness, and for practical power has turned our efforts as a civilization in the direction of exploiting our environment in the interest of enhancing our social experience. We come back to this point again and again in analyzing the climate of thought that has engulfed our modern world. Our culture is defined by this scientific effort to bond the environment to man’s usage and to provide him with wellbeing, quite independently of any concern to inquire into the qualitative meaning of man or of the aspirational life of man which might direct him to values beyond himself and give scope to his experience and destiny. This ignoring of the qualitative outreach, which I think we can say has been characteristic among those enterprises that have determined the direction of our cultural élan—industry, the scientific laboratories, the press, the radio, the movies, public education in the large, political organizations, and the churches to a degree larger than we like to think, this ignoring of the qualitative outreach, the search for significance beyond sheer wellbeing, is what basically explains the predicament of modern man, and gives a clue as to why religion and art do not seem more relevant to the human enterprise in our time. Such a perspective in which imagination is made active, interpreting the life-process with religious meaning and appreciation of beauty, will give amplitude in another direction by opening up to us the real import of suffering as a world’s fact. The lack of amplitude in this direction of the tragic sense is one of the obvious limitations of our modern cultural mood. Suffering is a common experience to millions today; but suffering in its inescapable aspects as a principle of living significantly, such as the great religious seers and the writers of tragedy envisaged it, is relatively unknown to the modern mind. It is unknown because this is a cosmic truth; and our methods of thinking and our common, sense inclinations plumb only depths of our social experience. Yet we could see this truth even within our religious empiricism if our conception of the life-process

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were profound enough. For if one analyzes the most commonplace experiences in living, say the transitions in growth which every child encounters, or the later stages of growth when the boy becomes a man, he cannot avoid the conclusion that living is indeed a succession of dramatic events, which under one aspect at least, reveal suffering and often tragedy as a major theme. Life is not a lilting melody that unfolds with variations, only to be resolved in a familiar chord; it is more like the complex interweaving of themes in a symphony in which the advancing mood of fate is ever pressing hard upon the opposing mood of triumph. There is no sympathy of any depth or vigor that is without its tragic sense. No, and there is no human life of any depth or vigor that is without its tragic sense. The more significantly we live, the more acute becomes our awareness of suffering. Insensitiveness to meaning, to consequences of choice, to opportunities, insulates the human being from the pain of his decisions, from the anguish that accompanies all transitions as he moves from stage to stage in living. The greater our awareness of good and of the possibility of its realization in the midst of frustration and failure, the greater is our anguish. This very fact impels us to a decision: either we choose the better part, we make of living a search for significance, in which we encounter suffering, and, possibly, transcend it through our own spiritual triumph over existence; or we abandon significance as a value in living and remain content with mediocrity and sheer wellbeing, in which case we may remain also insulated from the tragic sense, even though the process works on to our own dissolution. It is not difficult to see which has been the course of modern culture. Only the artist, one is inclined to say, has consistently understood suffering. The poet, the dramatist, the creative musician, especially the creator of symphonies, these are the seers of the spirit who have looked deeply into the life-process and discovered this surd in experience which will not be resolved. Philosophers, many times, and theologians more often, will circumvent the fact of suffering even though it stares them starkly in the face in the form of a man on the cross. It is a cheaper way out to deny this fact of suffering; and the philosophy sells better. There is greater demand for it. The sunny aide is more to people’s liking, so the movies also cater to it, as do the popular novels. Religious cults multiply with but one form of ritual—which is the act of placing rose-colored glasses upon their devotees. It is to the glory of art, I should say in all of its forms, that it has shown unprecedented fidelity to truth and reality in articulating this elemental fact about life. It is vigorously acclaimed in the sacred classics of the world’s religions (which are the works of literary artists with a spiritual passion); it

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is the theme of all the great tragedies from Sophocles to Robinson Jeffers; it is always the counter theme of our greatest symphonies; and it is of the essence of opera. It is also to the glory of great art that, in confronting the tragic sense, it has possessed the kind of faith that provided transcendence, if not triumph, over tragedy. Transcending tragedy is quite different from circumventing it or supinely ignoring it as if it were nonexistent. In transcendence there is full acknowledgment or fact that is followed by a creative relationship with that fact to the end that the suffering or the evil is transmuted by the spiritual force of human genius. It is this quality of human creativity, giving forthrightness to our dealing with the issues of existence, yet capacity to rise above its most desperate circumstances, that brings stature to the human being. Where the individual life displays it, it can be said to be religiously oriented. Where the cultural mood conveys it, that culture can be said to be a spiritual culture. And when the art of poetry, drama, or music is commensurate with such faith, and creative of such transcendence, it can be designated great art, by which we mean art that has stature and which is a spiritual force.

Towers of the Mind My thinking began to take theological form in a rediscovery of the meaning of creation and in the realization that the drama of redemption, as it is exemplified in Christian imagery, is a renewal of this creative act in summit form. The delineation of this creative act, both as creation and as redemption, has been given in poetic form in the myth of our culture, beginning with the creation story that opens the Hebrew-Christian scriptures, and culminating in the life, crucifixion, and resurrection of the Christ. These tales held a charm for me in my childhood, as they undoubtedly have done for many children through the long years of the race; but like many, who passed from a state of wonder and innocence to a reflective and inquiring mood, I found these tales becoming more and more of an enigma. At first the uncertain state of mind in this time of transition precipitated a perplexity of mind that could only be resolved by some form of sublimation, or by yielding to despair. Had I been given to despair, or to the dramatic encounter with despair, I should probably have resolved this perplexity in one of two ways: I should have gone the way of Nietzsche, or I should have followed Luther. My Norwegian Lutheran background through at least eight years of my life might have persuaded me in the later direction; but this did not happen. Had I gone the way of Nietzsche, instead, I would have inevitably found my way toward Santayana; for while despair and the tragic sense are real to me, the poetic sense of wonder would have been too strong in me to resist a transmutation such as Santayana has managed in his long battle against materialism and disillusionment. To my chagrin, however, and to the offence of my aesthetic sensibilities, I am forced to admit that in the hour when disillusionment threatened, sociology saved me. Of all sad thoughts! Just when I was on the brink of intellectual disaster, ready to plunge into a sequence of dramatic transformations, possibly to emerge as a sensitive spirit, seared and scarred by the tragic adventure, possibly to become a poet of our time, I fell victim to the persuasions of sociology. Thus the first sublimation which resolved my perplexity in this time of transition was the social gospel. Christianizing the Social Order after the manner of Rauschenbusch, Peabody, Shailer Mathews, and Harry F. Ward, proved an absorbing alternative to the world of wonder which now had become denied to me. The second level of sublimation to which I attained was Absolute Idealism. Josiah Royce’s book, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, will

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always be a special kind of book to me because it opened my mind to a deeper contemplation of the religious problem- more particularly to the problem of God, at a time when sociology had begun to wear thin. However, this was the wrong kind of book to read just before coming to the Divinity School at the University of Chicago; for it spelled out all the arguments against which this school was then in revolt. Imagine my embarrassment in finding that I had been on the side of the enemy! Chicago, in my earlier years as a graduate student, returned me to the shallower stream of sociology; though in becoming more definitive in sociological method, I was able to take on airs as an assured empiricist. But a transformation of a more subtle character was going on in me at the same time. Something in the air that we breathed made pragmatists of us all. Pragmatism at the University of Chicago, especially within the Divinity School, had undergone two distinct stages: the first, which had given rise to the socio-historical method under Mathews and Case, and which had been elaborated with individual differences in other areas by Edward Scribner Ames, A. Eustace Haydon, and Gerald Birney Smith; and the second, which was initiated by Wieman’s coming to Chicago. Shailer Mathews, both in his interpretation of the history of doctrine and in his constructive writings, revealed an affinity with functional psychology, which had informed the methodology of Pragmatism, and with the Neo-Kantian practice of conceptualism. His procedure amounted to a rejection of philosophical inquiry into religious problems on the grounds that religious attitudes and religious problems had been formulated, not in the schools, but in conventions and other public religious gatherings where issues involved the psychological and social tensions of people who argued them. However much the philosophers may have been in the background as resource men, the real decisions of history, shaping the Christian community, Mathews contended, were not made by philosophers, but by practical men, charged with the responsibility of running institutions and of regulating the affairs of the community. Truth in doctrine, then, was not a logical or metaphysical issue, but a practical one: relating to the life-decisions of an ongoing movement. In applying this approach to contemporary problems of religious thought, Mathews appropriated the Kantian perspective more explicitly, saying, for example, that what God is, or is like, we cannot know; but we can set up personal relations with Him, which is what we do when we pray to God as Father. And we can go one step beyond this practical effort to visualize God conceptually since we know that whatever else the word “God” implies, it is a term we use to designate those personality-producing

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activities within the universe which create and shape our lives and with which we must come to terms. Edward Scribner Ames, in his famous figure of Alma Mater, followed a similar course, insisting that just as the notion of the soul has ceased to designate any spatialized content within the human body and has become a word for connoting the quality of man’s life which emerges under certain circumstances, so the word God is to be conceived functionally. A spatialized deity, he argued, belongs to an era of thought that has passed. Wieman’s coming to Chicago intruded an alien note into this discussion. While bearing marked affinity, both with Ames and Mathews, he quite obviously traveled a different course; one in which the notion of a spatialized deity was clearly to be retained, though reformulated. Wieman’s way of dealing with this problem was to say that if God is to be conceived as the creator and sustainer of our good, Something of a concrete nature, a behavior, a specific pattern of inter-related happenings, a structure of events, should be evident enough so that one might point to this datum and thus be able to say with certainty—yes, with scientific certainty, “There is God!” There can be no doubt but that Wieman’s formulation of a new approach to the meaning of God came as a singular contribution at a time when the discussion of theism had all but reached an impasse. The problem of God was the most pressing religious issue during the twenties. One might say that during those years, theological liberalism had approached a watershed where theists and humanists were sharply distinguishing themselves from one another. Numerous people were writing on “My idea of God;” and an equal number were declaring “Why I am a Humanist.” Naturally, the discussion of this issue permeated our student quarters as well as faculty sessions. I recall with what fervor some of my student colleagues in Goodspeed Hall pressed the humanist’s cause. They had some of the sharpest minds among them; and they had been critically fortified by the patient logic of Professor Haydon who was himself a stalwart humanist of genuine passion. Prior to Wieman’s coming, the line between theism and humanism at the Divinity School seemed a relatively thin one. Mathews shared the sentiment of theists, but he made the issue over God’s nature and existence largely one of language. What he designated God could be equated with what Haydon described as the cosmic environment which reaches us through our social environment. Professor Ames, likewise, treated the issue of theism with relative indifference, though he spoke frequently upon the problem, since the nub of the issue had become fairly clear to him. God, he observed, is the religious term for what philosopher speaks of as the cosmos, and for

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what science calls the universe. Thus he would say that there is no point in denying that there is a reality beyond man upon which his higher life depends; but the nature of that reality, he argued, is not to be so sharply distinguished from man, himself, as to subject man slavishly to it. The best way of conceiving it, he suggested, is to say that God is our social values idealized. That is to say, what appears as the social overtone rising from man’s highest aspirations, beckoning him toward more responsible living and sustaining him in his higher, ethical efforts as a member of the group, is a social reality which can well be regarded as the supreme object of devotion. If we tend to particularize it as a Group Spirit, we know only too well that it is of deeper import than our human setting. It is cosmic in scope. It gathers in the whole of our lives and the total life of mankind in relation to nature; though we can best grasp its relevant meaning as a boon and support of our human venture by seeing it as our social values idealized. In all of these formulations one will see that the term God was a matter of symbolism. The reality of God was not designatible except in the most general sense of the cosmic support of human values. Mathews, in speaking of God as “personality-producing activities,” did seem at times to be designating a datum which inclined him more in the direction of Wieman than of Ames or Haydon. I recall Mathews saying on one occasion that he and Wieman were very close in their positions and possibly could be found to be saying the same thing. The fact, however, that Mathews was not concerned to specify the datum of God’s reality beyond the conceptual designation which he so frequently gave would indicate that his thought moved within a different orbit than that of Wieman’s. Mathews shared the agnosticism of the neo-Kantian and thus recoiled from a definitive, intellectual designation of God’s reality; but again, like the Kantian, he felt justified in “setting up personal and practical relations” with this reality that remained obscure and remote on the grounds that within the functional sphere our relations were intimate and real. Gerald Birney Smith’s attitude toward this situation always appeared to me to be one of watchful waiting. He had expressed himself quite decisively against capitulating to humanism in an article, “Is Theism Essential to Religion?” (Journal of Religion) in which he argued for pursuing a mystical experiment to determine, as far as is humanly possible, just what support and companionship man could discover in the natural environment. Professor Smith was not content with simply a conceptualist doctrine of God; nor was he satisfied to leave it where Ames and Haydon had resolved the problem. He had great respect for their

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solutions; but they were quite obviously not his solution. It was this restiveness in trying to get beyond conceptualism and pragmatic absolutes that accounted for Smith’s early enthusiasm for the initial work of Professor Wieman. I well recall his attitude at that time for I was in several of his courses and seminars during the months following the publication of Wieman’s first book, Religious Experience and Scientific Method, when negotiations were being made to bring Wieman to Chicago. For six months, prior to Wieman’s arrival, we studied and discussed Wieman’s approach to the problem of God and his proposed theory of religious knowledge for pursuing a science of God. Smith’s own expectations regarding the promise of Wieman’s position stimulated us, who sat in his seminars, to read Wieman from cover to cover. Here was some intellectual meat to put our teeth into; and since it had been so heartily approved by one whose judgment we regarded well-nigh infallible, we lost no time in devouring it. Smith’s talents were definitely critical rather than constructive. I do not recall any major course under him in which a constructive line of analysis was attempted. His ability to enter into another man’s position and to interpret the constructive turns of thought upon which the particular author under consideration had ventured was remarkable. His incisive mind and his economy of language enabled him to delineate a point of view with simplicity and sharpness that made it immediately available to the students’ minds. Then with a slyness that seemed at first harmless and which seemed to make his remarks almost incidental, he would drive his spears of criticism into the point of view under analysis. Whenever I recall his courses on Christian Theology and Modern Philosophical Ideals, or Types of Modern Theology, I think of a biological laboratory with butterflies pinned to the wall. To be sure, critical mindedness was at a premium in those days. The ideal of the university was criticism. No one, it seemed, considered the art of affirmation a worthy pursuit for the intellectually awakened student or scholar. To be able to cut through homiletic or apologetic defenses; or to detect false premises or circular reasoning in an otherwise appealing position was the mark of astute scholarship. G. B. Smith was our ideal because he was an undisputed master in this art of analysis. Yet, it would be unfair to his memory and inaccurate as well, to give the impression that he was simply negative in intention and in his influence. G. B. Smith was an exceedingly earnest person, with a mind incapable of the slightest degree of deception. His integrity could be almost painful, so concerned was he to avoid both sham and illusion. Thus his relentless criticism was motivated by a desperate concern to lay bare

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any pretense that might be lurking in a man’s rhetoric, or any wishful thinking that might obscure the logic of his position. Smith had a sense of humor that was infectious; but I never felt that he was really a happy man. Something that he could not communicate, or that he would not do so, seemed to hover about, giving an overtone of sadness to whatever conclusions he might come. I never completely understood this state of mind in him. At times I felt it might have been a sense of tragedy which persisted in him because the depth of his concern and outreach aggravated the painful thrust of his critical mind. Smith never gave you the impression that he enjoyed being critical. On the contrary, he evinced a yearning for some persuasive constructive formulation of the Christian faith, against which his incisive criticisms might have no effect. To my knowledge, he never really encountered such a position, after having parted from the Ritschlian influence of Wilhelm Hermann, until the work of Professor Wieman came to his attention. I do not mean to give the impression that he accepted Wieman in entirety, or that he had no criticisms to make of Wieman’s thought. On the contrary, he weighed and analyzed every page of Wieman’s book. But the direction of Wieman’s investigation seemed to him sound as an empirical inquiry, and promising as a constructive effort to illumine the mystical experiment upon which his whole mind and heart were bent. Smith’s ability to enter into the mind of another person was further enhanced by his capacity to feel into another person’s situation. In this respect he was one of the most sensitive individuals I have known. When a discussion was going on, or when informal talk was being bantered about, he seemed to be aware of the effect of these chance remarks upon other minds present, and quick to pick up intimations of offence or misunderstanding. When such offence or misunderstanding occurred, he would take it upon himself personally to adjust the matter so as to assure a sound meeting of minds. I do not mean to suggest that he sought to soften the effect of criticism or to sentimentalize our relationships. Quite the contrary! Smith’s robust realism was the most characteristic mark of the man. But realism for him implied the elimination of emotional barriers that blocked misunderstanding and camaraderie as well as the removal of false sentiment or idealizations that blurred the facts. His concern to feel into another’s situation was exemplified in the way in which he entered into a student’s mental processes preceding an oral examination. The night before I was to take my orals for the B.D. degree, Professor Smith called me by telephone and invited me to come to the Quadrangle Club to play pool with him. “I think you’ll do better in the morning,” he said, “if you get your mind away from theological matters

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this evening.” This personable quality, combined with a clear, critical mind, made G. B. Smith both a counselor and friend in an unforgettable way to many of us who studied under him. For years following the completion of their work at the university, a group of Divinity School graduates invited G. B. Smith to meet with them each year in a sort of refresher retreat to renew his friendship and stimulus. My response to Wieman’s early writings during my student days was one of immediate enthusiasm, though it was to become somewhat more mixed in the immediate years ahead. I shared G. B. Smith’s eagerness regarding them as a new and fruitful line of inquiry into the meaning of God and into the nature of religion. Wieman’s language was exciting. His concepts and illustrations were fresh and colorful. Words like “undefined awareness,” “rich fullness,” “concrete abundance,” “human fulfillment,” “immediate experience,” “the flow of experience,” “religion of illusion and religion of adaptation,” seemed to roll from his lips with an authority of their own. I think one would have to say that it was a “loaded” language. Despite Wieman’s insistence that the language of religious inquiry should be emptied of emotive coloring and reduced to cold, abstract terms in the interest of precision, his vocabulary seemed to me to effervesce with fascinating intimations bubbling up from hidden depths. His words were biological and mystical terms, fused into philosophical formulations. Being somewhat susceptible to language, I found myself emulating his novel vocabulary out of sheer linguistic satisfaction. But I struggled, as well, with the meaning and truth of his ideas. When a person is under the spell of another man’s thought and language, often he is unaware of the degree to which he appropriates these as his own. In the encounter he is conscious of wrestling with the ideas, more often in critical than in appreciative ways; yet in a later mood, when he is struggling to affirm what has become constructive out of the encounter, he is apt to draw heavily upon the insights which he had formerly handled critically. The words then appear to be his own; at least they are set in a context that is of his own making and thus seem to be authentically his. I found myself responding in this way to Wieman’s philosophy of religion repeatedly as a student. The extent to which Wieman had begun to shape my constructive ideas was indicated by the fact that when I came to formulate my statement of theology for the ordination examination before the Chicago Presbytery the sentences which I used were heavily weighted with his words. The effect of this statement upon the examiners and the sequence of events that followed appear amusing now; but on that occasion it was a sobering experience. I had originally begun my

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theological studies in McCormick Theological Seminary; but at the end of the first year, transferred to the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. When, in the spring of 1928, I received the Bachelor of Divinity degree from the University, I returned to McCormick Seminary to appear before the Ordination Board of the Chicago Presbytery along with the members of the class to which I had once belonged. The men who had remained at McCormick had been carefully prepared in expression and formulation so that the liberal doctrine, in falling upon conservative ears, might not disastrously burst the ear-drums. I, on the other hand, having been at Chicago during the intervening years, came to this examination wholly unprepared for such sensibilities of expression. I was more innocent than the lamb led to slaughter. At first I listened to the statements of my colleagues with wonderment which grew into resentment at the thought that three years of theological study had not wrested them from such formalistic utterances; but as statement after statement followed in a similar pattern, my thoughts fixed upon the paper which I was nervously clutching in my hand. How could I read such a paper after these statements of faith? But before I could reconnoiter, the calling of Candidate Bernard Meland to the stand was resounding in my ears. I steered an unsteady course down the main aisle of the auditorium and managed to reach the pulpit before simulating a complete collapse. The audience before me seemed a vast, faceless mass, made peculiarly ominous by the realization that words, not meant for such an occasion, were about to proceed from my lips. Had I been of a heroic makeup, I feel sure that the memory of Martin Luther before the Diet of Worms would have come to mind, and I should have straightened with a martyr’s courage to pronounce the unassailable words, “Here I stand! God help me, I can do no other!” But my church history failed me. This historic precedence simply did not occur to me. Nevertheless I found that the moment I began to read these utterly alien words, the very solidity of the silence that met them bolstered my courage; and I completed the paper with a sense of having said something decisive. And apparently I had. As soon as the reading of papers had ended, the session was opened for questioning the candidates. A gentleman in the front of the auditorium arose in a state of tension exceeding my own and asserted, “I should like to ask Mr. Meland if he believes in the Virgin Birth?” I was asked to rise and to answer the gentleman’s question. Again my heroic nature failed me, for the moment, and I began to maneuver “so as to see this problem in the context of the situation in which this concept had arisen.” But the gentleman, being of a more direct mind, shouted above my socio-historical demur “I am asking a straightforward question! Does

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Mr. Meland, or does he not, believe in the Virgin Birth?” Being pressed back to elemental ground, my heroic nature finally asserted itself; and I replied with utmost candor, “No! In the sense in which the gentleman conceives the matter, I do not.” The gentleman sat down. Further questioning of a more restrained nature followed, addressed to various candidates. Then as the examination was about to proceed to another stage, the gentleman arose and moved that Mr. Meland be denied further examination. The proposal was lost for lack of a second. In the closed session that followed the conclusion of the examination, I was told, the gentleman made two additional motions to the effect that I be denied ordination; but each time the motion was lost for lack of a second. Thus my ordination went through on the hush of the assembly. I have always been grateful to my Presbyterian friends for saving me from a martyr’s complex at the beginning of my career; but I fear I have never lived down the impression of that hour. My one saving act seemed to be the sermon I preached as part of the examination, which apparently had moved some of the examiners to feel that if I could get so much zeal out of that kind of theological jargon, there was some hope of my emerging a creditable minister of the gospel, once my theology had straightened out. What impressed me most in Wieman’s constructive position at this time, and which I used with considerable elaboration in my statement of theology, was the immediacy of the datum to which the meaning of God was given. I first encountered this point in reading the chapter on “Awareness and Scientific Discovery,” in Religious Experience and Scientific Method, and later heard Wieman expound this notion in an address on “A New Kind of Mysticism,” which was to appear in modified form in his Methods of Private Religious Living. No doubt it was the mystical quality of this idea, set in a context of natural experience, that made its appeal to me; for I was responsive to this element wherever I encountered it—in Schleiermacher, in Rufus Jones, in Rudolf Otto, as well as in G. B. Smith. Mysticism in conventional form, unrelated to the world of science, always gave me trouble. Some rooting in the world of nature seemed to me essential to the sanity of such experience. Wieman’s formulation of the datum of God seemed to me to establish religious awareness on as sound a basis as one might wish. To be sure, the content of the datum, that is, its nature, was as yet meagerly given; but Wieman had, in my judgment, isolated the datum in an objective way that opened up the possibility of fuller elaboration. I think the fact that, in Wieman’s view, the reality of God took on specific, operational meaning

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in man’s experience, such that there could be immediate awareness of his working, gave me assurance that I was coming upon solid religious ground. I had not felt this same degree of religious appeal in the conceptualist formulations of Mathews and Ames. God as symbol or as conceptual object might satisfy as an intellectual formulation; but the remoteness of the reality precluded such immediate awareness. I was to withdraw somewhat from this earlier enthusiasm for Wieman’s view, however, as I began to ponder his second work, The Wrestle of Religion with Truth; for here, it seemed to me, Wieman’s effort to elaborate this datum in terms of some specific behavior, as he called it, threw him back upon ground which was no more specifiable than that with which Mathews and Ames were dealing. I left the Divinity School, still greatly indebted to Wieman and very much affected by the mood of his thought; but I was to find that the weight of my earlier studies had inclined me more than I realized toward a conceptualist view of God. As I continued to confront Wieman’s attempt to elaborate the meaning of God as a “benevolent behavior in the universe upon which our lives depend,” my constructive position became more and more defined along lines which Professor Ames had staked out. I recall spending a Christmas vacation in 1931, trying to come to terms with Wieman’s part of the discussion which was then running in The Christian Century on “Is There A God?” in which Wieman, D. C. Macintosh, and M. C. Otto were participating. I was clearly in the role of Wieman’s critic. In a paper which I submitted to The Christian Century, and which they printed under the title, “Is God One or Many?” I advanced the view that one had to distinguish between two different approaches to the datum of God (which I felt Wieman did not do)—the one which is normal to worship, an appreciative response, in which one fuses the many activities in the universe beyond us, upon which our lives depend, in the same way that a person responds to the many functions of a college or university in ceremonial celebrations when he envisages the many as one object of appreciation or devotion; the other which is normal to critical inquiry or to practical action, of to any specific effort to come to terms with what, in fact, is being attended to. As in the school, which would require attending to some specific function within the institution, some office, some department, some particular individual, so in any such approach to the reality of God, one would cease to unify the many into one, and deal with the many in its several aspects. When I wrote Modern Man’s Worship I was still committed to a conceptualist view of God similar to that of Ames. God seemed to me to designate, not a Something in the singular sense, but a Community of activities too vast and complex and subtle in its inter-workings to be

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isolated in the way in which Wieman had sought to do; but which nevertheless sustained and brought both beneficence and judgment to our lives. God as object was thus possible only to the human imagination. His reality could never be taken as Object in any concrete, experimental undertaking to isolate his nature as a single datum. Wieman took considerable pains to point out to me the folly of my conceptualism, saying that to speak of unities or unifications as being simply the work of the imagination was to overlook actualities in their corporate form. His argument impressed me, as I recall, sufficiently to rouse me from my rather complacent conceptualism. I re-read Whitehead with this point particularly in mind, and thus came to struggle more insistently with the creative factor in the universe which, in time, I came to speak of as the Creative Order.89 As I see this issue that was then dividing Wieman and me from a present vantage ground, I realize that it was a metaphysical issue between Kantianism and Radical Empiricism. Without knowing it, I was asserting a Neo-Kantian perspective which had been appropriated, perhaps quite unwittingly, by the whole Chicago School. Pragmatism in its earlier stages, I should say, was quite thoroughly impregnated with Kantian imagery, as a reading of some of James’ earlier writings will reveal. And the affinities between certain New-Kantian philosophers like Albert Lange,90 or the literary exponent of Neo-Kantianism, Matthew Arnold,91 and the conceptualist positions of Ames and Mathews is striking. The radical empiricism of James’ later works92 more thoroughly implemented the concept of relations for which he was contending in his Psychology than the chapters against Kantianism in this earlier volume did themselves. Whitehead’s empiricism, stressing the structure of events, becomes more illuminating when he is read in the light of James’ radical empiricism. Although in some respects Wieman seems to me to be holding to a modified version of the Kantian theory of knowledge, he was, in this issue over relations, definitely within the metaphysical framework of radical empiricism wherein relations and structures are seen to be, not functions of the mind, but realities in experience which are, in fact, real data to be envisaged and described. Meanwhile, Wieman and I began to write our American Philosophies of Religion together. Immediately we were plunged into a prolonged period of the most intimate interchange of ideas. We were discussing the views of other men for the most part; but this entailed a constant exchange of personal views and judgments. Almost every man whose work we sought to interpret became the center of extended discussion. Our procedure was to agree upon a tentative division of labor and then to

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prepare papers on the specific men upon whom each had agreed to write. We would later read our respective papers and then launch upon discussions which literally took days to complete. I would come to Wieman’s study in his home on Kimbark Avenue, in Chicago, about nine o’clock in the morning and often remain there (with only time out for meals) until one or two the following morning. We followed this program for one full summer and repeated it the next summer, having written extensively during the intervening months. It was inevitable that I should emerge from this experience with a sense of genuine rapport with Wieman’s thinking. It was not so much that we agreed on specific issues; for it was apparent that in some instances these divided us. For example, Wieman was never sure about the validity or the wisdom of my own aesthetic bent. His aversion to Santayana’s earlier writings led him to suspect all dependence upon art or poetry as a relinquishment of the will to think out a problem, relying instead, upon the appeal of imagery or sentiment, however disciplined these might be. I resisted this criticism, believing that it issued from an over-compensation in Wieman, himself, as evidenced in his exaggerated concern to combat the use of evocative words in religious inquiry; or from indifference to an area of stimulus which had no genuine, concrete meaning for him. I recall my resentment at finding that he had classified my thought, among others, under the caption, “Aesthetes in Religion.” I made no apologies for my aesthetic interests and inclinations; but to be called an aesthete in religion was enough to arouse my fighting, Nordic blood. I, in turn, felt at odds with what seemed to me to be an overstress upon criteria in Wieman’s thought. These divergences were to gather force in later years and to widen the breach between our minds; yet in those years when we were working so closely together there was a marked readiness on the part of each of us to feel into the thinking of the other. We understood what each one intended; thus we understood better what each one meant. This convergence continued, I think, until the publication of Wieman’s Growth of Religion (with W. M. Horton). Undoubtedly, the distance between our labors, which now had increased with my going to California, accounted in part for the separation of our minds. I do not mean to say that we openly disagreed in any fundamental way; only the rapport which had once given each the assurance that he understood the thinking of the other began to be dissipated. Wieman was moving on to new concerns; I, in turn, was pursuing a venture in developing facilities for worship in the college chapel with which he could have only partial sympathy. Although my field of concentration during graduate study had been Christian Theology and Ethics, I soon began to give a major emphasis to

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the history and philosophy of religion in my teaching and research. The shift was, in part; a reflection of what was happening in the seminaries themselves. The psychological and philosophical approach to religion had so completely invaded the theological field that a collapse of interest in systematic theology seemed quite generally evident. My own interest in the history of religion particularly, however, was dictated by the turn which my investigations began to take following the publication of Modern Man’s Worship. The focal inquiry for me became the nature of the religious response. I was concerned to get at this problem in as fundamental a way as possible. The current psychologies of religion, and, to some degree, philosophical studies, as well, had a great deal to say upon the problem. It was curious, however, how consistently these studies viewed the nature of religion within the rather restricted range of the author’s particular bias. If sociology or the social process was one’s passion, religion was shown to be a phenomenon of the group spirit. If mysticism was one’s preoccupation, religion was interpreted to be a rather singular, solitary venture of a heightened sort. If ethics absorbed one, religion was pointed up as a matter of decision and conscience in regard to human relations. If the new interest in mental health had become persuasive, religion was seen to be an aid to healthful living, or some form of therapy for the sick soul. Then, of course, there were the conventional conceptions of religion having to do with correct doctrinal beliefs or liturgical practices. My concern was to dig beneath this potpourri of definitions and, if possible, to seize upon the basic nature of the religious outreach as a psychical energy, in the hope that religion as a creatural response might be isolated. Invariably, it seemed to me, religion understood at any of these other levels turned out to be a result of social conditioning which could be easily dismissed by the critical mind, unaffected by any of these persuasions. They might be adequate as perspectives upon its meaning; but they were inadequate as a definition or as a comprehensive, working theory of religion. Could it be show, I kept asking myself, that the religious response is as elemental and basic as breathing, or as any of the organic responses which are indispensable to the human creature? I was not trying to press religion down into a biological function, for the philosophy of emergence had made clear to me that the human consciousness and the human spirit were genuine instances of novel structures beyond the physiological or even the psychical structures. Yet, one could speak of an elemental human function as a creatural response. My inquiries took me into many varied fields. It was natural for me to begin with the study of human origins, for this was a live interest at the time. The work that I had done with Professor Haydon, though brief, had

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resulted in a fundamental orientation in the literature of the history of religions bearing upon religious origins such that I was able to pursue further study rather readily. There was hardly a book in the field, dealing with the emergence and development of the religious response that I did not read. The anthropologists who impressed me most at the time were Crawley, Marrett, and later Malinowski. Boas, I read, and of course, Tylor Durkheim, Frazer, Goldenweiser, Rivers, and others. Frazer, I found fascinating, as anyone would; but I always felt uneasy in reading him. I felt sure that it was Frazer’s own mental picture that was being conveyed rather than the psychical responses of the native cultures which he was seeking to interpret. Some years later, on reading Hartley Burr Alexander’s extensive volume on the American Indian in the series on Mythologies of All Races, I was reassured in my reaction to Frazer by Alexander’s astute criticism of the rationally conditioned scientist who invades the strange old world of primitive cultures, expecting to elicit by his direct methods of inquiry, an understanding of these opaque minds whose world of discourse is so utterly different and removed from that of civilized man. Durkheim’s work on The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life likewise left me skeptical; for it seemed to me to be bent on simply naturalizing supernatural phenomena by accounting for their rise within the social experience of the group. Incidentally, the work of Leuba in the field of psychology of religion and of mysticism in particular, seemed to manifest the same bias. What impressed me in the work of R. R. Marrett (especially his Threshold of Religion and Faith, Hope, and Charity in Primitive Religion) and again in Malinowski (Cf. Myth in Primitive Psychology), as well as in the various psychological studies of James B. Pratt (especially Religious Consciousness) was what seemed to me to be a genuine concern to enter into the aspirational life of these simple people and to get at this psychical energy that breeds faith, hope, and love in human acts and in human relations. Havelock Ellis helped me also, for he, too, had a knack of getting inside of the motives of people. His Dance of Life is a cursory work, but in many ways it is a fundamental one because of the penetration that he occasionally achieves, and the insight he is able to distill from bringing many seemingly diverse aspects of a situation into a common perspective. Later, in developing a series of courses in the history of religion at Pomona College I had occasion to steep myself in the sacred literature of the world’s religions. The Vedas and the Upanishads were my daily reading for months at a time; and later the writings of some of the minor Hindu sects absorbed me. The Tao-te-King of LaoTzu, the Analects of Confucius, the Buddhist Dhammapada, the Koran, and other sacred

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writings I read with considerable care. I never developed sufficient proficiency in this field, however, to feel secure as an interpreter. It was too vast and bewildering; and, lacking the basic tools such as language and training in anthropology, I was always dependent upon other minds to a degree that precluded my feeling that I had an authentic grasp of the data. Nevertheless, years of reading and of pondering in this field contributed to a mind-set in regard to religious thinking which has remained permanently with me. I am probably incapable of thinking exclusively within the range of Christian history. Christianity remains one of the religious cultures of the world, set in a vast drama of human striving and aspiration. Christianity is the religious culture that embraces my being in intimate ways and thus is my religious faith, personally. I have no inclination to sample other faiths; or to follow the dilettante pattern of the so-called cosmopolitan mind. This has always impressed me as superficial and as utterly lacking in a discriminating understanding of the religious response as a facet of the structure of experience that shapes the human psyche. The way to enter understandingly into other faiths is, I am confident, to become profoundly and genuinely orientated in one’s own religious culture and, from that center, to reach out with sympathy and with discriminating appreciation toward other cultural faiths. Such rapport, resting upon a self-conscious appropriation of the valuations of one’s own culture, braces one for a more discerning judgment of fundamental differences that are encountered; and for sensing the deep-lying creatural sentiments that are actually unifying at the common level of human beings. One is then impelled to live in character; that is, to live with integrity in relation to the formative myth of one’s culture that carries the deeply laid sensibilities of one’s own structure of experience, yet with an awareness of their limiting as well as their supporting effect. Such discernment tempers the dogmatic passion that tends to impel one where a tradition is held in insulation as the sole carrier of truth; but it tends to deepen one’s appreciation for the genuine good that inheres in one’s own structure of experience, for this, too, is embraced discriminatingly and with a mature sentiment of devotion, being clarified and purposively held. What emerged from this prolonged preoccupation with the history of religions was a growing understanding of religion as an aspirational outreach. In this sense, religion loomed as an ambiguous good—capable of impelling men toward the level of spirit, but capable also of degrading them through undisciplined passion and misdirected zeal. The nurture of aspiration, including the disciplining of affections and desires, appeared to me more and more an imperative. Religions varied, normatively, I concluded, according to the degree of discrimination and discipline that

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entered into its life of aspiration, dedication, and social participation. Man’s aspirational outreach, including his affections, faith, hope, and dedications, seemed to me to root down in a psychical condition of the human organism which I came to designate the attachment to life. This, perhaps, was not a happy phrase since it seemed to suggest a clinging to life. The phrase, praise of life, which I employed on occasions, was equally unsatisfactory in that it seemed to suggest an indulgent attitude toward the life-process that might even be thought of as an irrational concern with the vitalities. Morris Cohen undoubtedly had this kind of vitalism in mind when he wrote his essay, “In Dispraise of Life.” My concern was to lift up what might be thought of as the most elemental, even universal condition of the human psyche at the creatural level of existence which determined the energies that issued in the religious response. My language might seem to betray my western bias; for one immediately thinks of the motivation of non-western cultures as being a detachment from or a release from life. My concern, here, however, was not simply to arrive at a least common denominator that would apply equally to all religions; but to find a clue to understanding man as creature in these most diversified cultural contexts. The criterion seemed to go beyond these cultural motifs to a creatural condition that might even judge these religious cultures, either as paths to human fulfillment, or as cultural routines that dissipated the human vitalities and frustrated or distorted its outreach. It would have been an easy matter, had I wished to press my western bias, to make a quick case for saying that oriental religious cultures, being essentially world-denying in motive, are perverted forms of the religious response; and that Christianity, Judaism, as well as Mohammedanism, in so far as they have been world-affirming, represent religion in a state of health. This was too easy a generalization; and however much it might have to commend it, there are implications that are patently false. When Albert Schweitzer’s book, Indian Religion: Its Origin and Development, appeared, I was startled to find how closely my own fumbling efforts had paralleled his in the attempt to isolate the elemental expression of the religious response. His phrase, “reverence for life,” seemed to me to carry implications which I had meant to convey in my use of the phrases, attachment to life, and praise of life. I had not yet seen the second volume of his Philosophy of Civilization: Ethics and Civilization; hence the full content of his reverence for life was not altogether apparent to me; but the intention of his inquiry and the apparent results seemed to me strikingly confirming of my own efforts. I have sometimes been impressed by the continuity of diverse interests

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which I had pursued at various times over a considerable period; though at the time, each one seemed quite unrelated to the other. I recall waking up with a start one night with the realization of how several of these seemingly singular strands of interests were converging. The unification of these strands gave me a sense of integration. It was as if a consciousness not my own had impelled me in various directions in preparation for a fuller grasp of the problem at which I was working. Quite involuntarily the words seemed to form in my mind, “I have found my voice!” Such an outburst would have made nonsense to anyone listening, had I uttered the words verbally. I think I did say them in something of a half-whispered tone; but it was more in the nature of a gasp, expressing surprise at this fresh insight into myself. What had seemed to converge were at least three lines of inquiry: 1) my concern with the religious outreach as evidenced in the study of worship and in the poetic literature of ancient people through the study of the history of religions; 2) a preoccupation with modern poetry, not so much in their literary or aesthetic aspects, but as the sensitive utterances of people speaking out of a disturbed, even distraught cultural situation, an interest that extended over a period of ten years; 3) a study of the American experience—not as a historian might pursue it, but as an inquiry into cultural motifs and, again, into the aspirations of a people cut loose from a sustaining tradition. The mere tabulating of these interests does not convey the unity of effort which became conscious to me at that time, for it was mostly the content of meanings with which I was dealing and the accumulative insight which was accruing to shape my peculiar approach to the problem of religion as aspiration, dedication, and human fulfillment. These furnishings of the mind remain to give permanent character to the mental processes of a person long after they have ceased to be a preoccupation. Much as we may strive to come to a common mind with other persons in our efforts at cooperative inquiry, the insistent effect of these concerns, now buried in memory, obtrude to color or, in some sense to preclude an understanding of one another’s articulated thoughts. Thus cooperative inquiry is never a simple matter of conversation or discussion, as if meanings were explicit and clear. At its best, it is a brooding upon the lives of other men and upon the interweaving of events that have shaped their conscious concerns. One venture in my years of undergraduate teaching looms in my mind as having peculiar significance for me because it was something I did rather than something I thought. I recall John Erskine once making the point that we are ultimately fulfilled by what we can do, rather than by what we simply know. The point can be argued; but there is certainly truth

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in the observation that doing something over a considerable period of time develops skills and a fund of unfailing perceptions which generate a form of power which sheer knowledge cannot provide. The venture to which I refer was the chapel experiment at Pomona College. I had hoped that I might someday write a book on this experiment, if for no other reason than to gather together in one volume the wealth of resources that were uncovered as a stimulus to reflection and the nurture of religious sensibilities. The task has seemed so forbidding, for it would be difficult to convey thorough the printed word what this venture actually meant to those of us who participated in it. As a consequence, I have never found the time or the courage to undertake it. Furthermore, having moved on to new and absorbing tasks, it is difficult to go back and recapture these events. If I ever succeed in writing the account, the title of the volume will be Meditations for the Morning. Perhaps simply recording the title will serve as a stimulus to getting the job done. The chapel experiment as I conceived it might be called educational in motive. That is, I conceived of it as a rhythm within the educational experience of the college; not as a special religious event on the side, as it were. But the conception of the religious outreach to which I had come as involving the discipline of aspiration, affections, and sensibilities, was at the center of this experiment; thus, in my mind, it was distinctly a religious undertaking. The conviction had grown upon me that the only kind of religious stimulus and study that was relevant to the liberal arts college was that which could be made an integral part of the educational experience. My point of view here is, of course, open to criticism. It may seem to insulate the religious program of the college from religious activities that are normal to the community. This is a danger; but not a necessary consequence. The alternatives of conceiving religious activity as a lobbying pressure at the edge of the campus, or as a Trojan Horse affair that intrudes its influence and program in ignorance of the educational objectives and with a corresponding indifference toward them has impressed me as being as irrelevant as it is ineffective. The problem here is not unlike the problem of relating religion and culture in the more general sense: how to incorporate both incentive and criticism in any effort to bring to bear upon community life, the witness of the faith. The chapel experiment had been initiated as a phase of a large effort to discover ways of lifting up a unifying vision in education which would not only enhance the educational experience within separate departments or fields, but help to articulate and affirm the valuations of our religious culture as the spiritual outreach of the college community. I took the position that the whole college curriculum was a potential resource for

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awakening those of us who participated in its experience to a deeper view of man’s destiny. There were limits to the way in which this kind of reflection could be elicited in the normal classroom program; but some attention to it, even if only in the form of quickening the reflective spirit in any act of inquiry might seem relevant. What was implicit in the classroom experience, I argued, could be made explicit in regularly established meditative periods, set up for that purpose. The experiment was initiated in the fall of 1937 and continued through the eight succeeding years that I remained on the faculty. In my judgment, the experiment justified itself. Quite apart from the experience that was gleaned and its educational results, I was persuaded that the steady impact of this kind of meditative period, prepared with infinite care and conducted with competence, discrimination, and sensitiveness by young people who felt the undertaking deeply, affected the life of the college in profound ways which were apparent to any of us who observed the situation over a period of time. This was the judgment, not only of myself, but of others of the faculty, including the deans of the college and the president, who had been in touch with the experiment. The most devoted and enthusiastic witnesses to its effectiveness were the students themselves, particularly those who had had an active part in carrying forward its responsibilities. If there is any truth to Whitehead’s statement that “religion is the art and theory of the internal life of man in so far as it depends upon man, himself, and upon what is ultimate in the nature of things,” then the nurture of the feeling responses and of discrimination in thought and sentiment in relation to fundamental themes, vividly presented in these periods of reflection, contributed substantially and permanently to the religious culture of the campus; and to individuals, faculty and students alike. I am aware that this is a partial view of religion and of the responsibility of religion; and that the periods of worship and reflection in this chapel venture were limited in what they effected in much the same way. But what was accomplished was, I am persuaded, exceedingly precious. And there is reassurance in the realization that students who were intimately associated with the venture have given evidence that their own capacities, the spirit of their living, the perceptions, their judgments, and the commitments to which they have since given themselves, actively and otherwise, have been permanently shaped by the experiences which we mutually shared. In the initial stages of the experiment we were more venturesome than wise. My concern was not to create just another series of religious services or to recreate the college chapel in whatever way might attract the crowds. We worked from a principle and from a conception of the religious

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response in relation to the educational experience of the college. We needed to discover some things through experience; and we needed to establish some basic principles through reflecting upon what we had experienced. The material most immediately available to us was, of course, the poetic literature, both ancient and modern, including the biblical writings; significant selections from philosophical and theological writings, from addresses, essays, and other forms of direct discourse which nevertheless conveyed insight in imaginative and sensitive form; significant drama, music, both choral and symphonic; and speakers who might be expected to give an address of a reflective sort. Since we were drawing upon facilities that involved the competence of the entire college, we enlisted the counsel and active participation of various departments that were especially relevant. In this way we avoided depending upon our own meager resources and capabilities and were able to appropriate the best that was available in the college community. Since we were concerned to bring the classroom experience in all its diverse aspects to its most sensitive and impelling expression through such periods, we reached wide and far into literary resources of the liberal arts college. We did not depend upon formal books of services for obviously these were suited to a different kind of situation. A strenuous period of creating material or of assembling it, suitable for the end we had in mind, followed. Recounting one of our significant failures may help to suggest the extent of our venturesomeness and possibly bring out both its merits and its risks. I shall relate also some of an opposite experience so as to balance the account. I had been something of a devotee of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poetry. Not only had he written modern verse of a genuinely musical character, I thought; but he had employed his art to effect a significant and penetrating criticism of the modern scene. Robinson, in my judgment, was something of a major prophet among American poets who had mastered both the poet’s craft and the philosophical art of the sage. His poetry was subtle, but not in any esoteric sense sophisticated; thus he spoke with direct, prophetic attack upon issues or situations, yet with unforgettable beauty at times. He was, in my judgment, one of the few literary figures of our generation who sensed the coming debacle in our time; and gave an arresting forecast of it in his final work, King Jasper. The work which I chose as the basis for one of these reflective periods was his Man Against the Sky. This, I thought, was familiar enough to risk an interpretation; and it contained highly suggestive passages of the sort that met our purposes. I pondered over the possibility of presenting this poem or a significant portion of it within a twenty-minute period. Finally it

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occurred to me that by combining several mediums, say the graphic arts with the spoken word, we might succeed in communicating the mood of the poem as well as its implication of criticism and inquiry, even if all the lines did not carry. On my way home from classes, I met the head of the art department. I asked him if he was familiar with Robinson’s Man Against the Sky. He said he was not, but appeared intrigued by the title. I asked him if he would read it to see if it would lend itself to graphic representation. He agreed to do so. Later he saw me and said he felt sure it could be done. He had a class of about twelve students in Representation and Design. Each of the members of the class was asked to read the poem and to create a portrayal of the man against the sky as they envisaged him. This was done and the painting which we thought to be most effective was selected for the stage set. A crew of stage hands then built the set in accordance with the painting, except for the figure of the man. This was to be enacted by the live figure of a man, who was carefully coached by the director of dramatics. Lighting was provided, which cast a variety of tones to accord with the mood and meaning as the reading of the verse progressed. I recall that at the summit of the poem, the sky against which the figure of the man was silhouetted was illumined with a flaming red. All of this was accompanied by the reading of the poem by a member of the dramatic staff. Six hundred people gathered in the chapel to witness this spectacle. And a spectacle it was! From any angle of performance or, for that matter, of conception, one would have to say it was both competently and strikingly done; but it was neither a service of worship nor a period of reflection. It was an amazing creation of which Hollywood, itself, might well have been proud. I still wake up occasionally at nights and confront the bewildered faces of people moving out through the doors of the chapel. They might well have wondered what it was they had observed. Another striking chapel period was built around Alfred Noyes’ Watchers of the Sky, relating scenes from the life of Galileo in his battle against the Vatican. The poem makes it quite possible to construct a series of episodes for much of it is in the form of letters written by friends of Galileo, describing the plight that had befallen him, or interpreting his state of mind. One of the letters is by Galileo’s daughter, another by a faithful friend of the family, and one by Galileo’s accuser. We had people representing each of these characters seated at desks in various parts of the stage, blacked out until the time for the reading of their letter. With the use of a spotlight, we brought each one successively to the fore. They would simply read their letter from behind their desk as if they had just written it and were going over it for a final look. A narrator wove the several scenes

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together, leading up to the trial itself. Here we dipped into Hollywood antics again. I had not thought of including this aspect of it at first; and, in retrospect, we would have done better to have kept it within a more simple mode of dialogue; but three of the boys who had become enthusiastic about the dramatic possibilities of the story as preparations progressed, arranged on the side, unbeknown to me or to anyone else, to have the scene of the trial—the speeches of the prosecuting attorney and Galileo’s replies—recorded; two of the boys taking the respective roles. I must admit that the scene was very realistically re-enacted. The men were firstclass performers and the third student, who directed the recording of the speeches, had ambitions to become a movie director. Whether or not he succeeded in this effort, I have never known; but his talents for such a career were evident on that occasion. In the background of the courtyard, where much of the story was laid, recorded music by Palestrina was playing. The atmosphere was complete. From every angle of performance the production was a success. My objection was that it became a production rather than the kind of reflective period which we were concerned to create. Just where the line is to be drawn between such a reflective experience and an evident performance is not always easily determined in advance; but the event itself generally leaves one in no doubt as to which of them has occurred. Another period was built around selections from Plato’s Phaedo. This was a dramatic sketch written so as to provide an occasion for reading pointed selections from the Phaedo. The scene was laid in the men’s dormitory. Seated informally on the stage, the men carried on a running conversation (from script) commenting upon and discussing Plato’s ideas. The simplicity of this period, its directness and the naturalness of the men who participated, made it a memorable occasion. It perhaps came as near effecting the kind of reflection toward which we were reaching as anything that was done. T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral proved to be another effective chapel period. A verse choir, trained by the instructor in rhythmics to effect the movements of the congregation of women, recited the lines of the women. They had been carefully coached by the director of speech. The setting, almost a replica of an English cathedral gave realism to the entrance of the Archbishop as he mounted the pulpit to deliver the Christmas sermon. The chapel periods varied from week to week, ranging from very simple periods in which prayers and verses were read, alternating with appropriate music; to the more impressive dramatic sketches and religious dramas. Our distinction between the dramatic sketch and the religious

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drama was one of preparation, largely. We attempted only a few religious dramas during a semester; and to these, considerable time in preparation and in the working out of details, was given. The dramas were always of a high order, carefully selected for the occasion, and competently coached by the director of dramatics or her staff. The dramatic sketches were more casual, the careful work went into their preparation. Yet there was no attempt at memorizing lines or of effecting stage action. The stage setting was created, and then students, in the simplest of garb, sometimes simply in academic gown, would sit about a table, or informally in different parts of the stage, and read the lines of the play, or of some other script. This kind of period could be prepared in a fairly short time; yet it proved highly effective for our purpose. Some of the more successful dramatic sketches in addition to those already mentioned were developed from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s, Conversation at Midnight, Robert Sherwood, There Shall be No Night, Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, Antoine de Saint Exupery, Wind, Sand, and Stars, and a sketch locally written entitled, Troubled Voices, relating the life of the men in an army camp to the life of the college campus. As we developed experience in planning these chapel periods we tended more and more toward the simpler form of meditative periods, using one reader with a choir and organ, or recorded symphonic music. Bach chorales were most effectively used as musical interludes; though we drew upon most of the symphonic literature, especially that of Franck, Brahms, Beethoven, and Wagner. The reading of scripture was found to be especially effective in the form of meditative periods. Usually we would select long, sustained portions and give a major emphasis to the reading of them. It is surprising what a difference this kind of emphasis can make in the effectiveness of scripture reading. Brief passages, read perfunctorily, seem but an incidental part of the liturgy. Sustained portions, well read and given an ample setting, create a mood of reflection of the strongest kind. We drew upon the devotional literature of the Christian classics of all periods—the early church fathers, theologians and mystics, poets and essayists, philosophers and statesmen of ancient and modern times. A cataloguing of the materials would list almost the full range of the stimulating and sensitive portions of the art and literature of the liberal arts college in so far as these focused upon a concern for human destiny. Under the stimulus of this venture in which a fresh attack upon the problem of religion in the liberal arts college was being undertaken, I gave considerable attention to educational issues, especially as these related to the philosophy of higher education. It is my hope that a book of my essays

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on Higher Education and the Human Spirit, gathering up the educational papers of this period, will soon be published. I shall not, therefore, give an extensive account of this interest. I felt the stimulus of Chancellor Hutchins’ crusade when I first read his arresting article in the Yale Review on “University Education.”93 I wrote a reply to this article under the title, “Toward First Principles in University Education,” which appeared in School and Society.94 Although I did not share his philosophical presuppositions, I found myself in accord with his discontent with prevailing practices and notions in higher education. The search for a center in education, as in the culture at large, seemed to me an imperative of our age. Having been steeped in the philosophy of radical empiricism, I recognized the importance of the word discovery in the liberal doctrine that then permeated the schools. I would still insist that if time makes a difference, in the Bergsonian sense, openness to the passage of events, looking toward the new emergent, remains an obligation for any responsible educator. But an empiricism that relinquishes all concern with basic notions that can provide some kind of controlling ideas is simply capitulating to the notion of novelty without regard for qualitative attainment. In this respect, the concern for first principles is not only sound, but exceeding urgent in our time. I have not been able to concur with Mr. Hutchins’ ready assumption that these first principles are available and that they need only to be clarified and acknowledged. The problem has seemed more complex than that. What is given in the tradition of higher learning, in which first principles were acknowledged, is certainly relevant since the perspective that is there offered is to some extent a corrective of the views which have been held in our time and which are responsible in part for our plight; but I should regard them only as a corrective in the sense of arousing us to a more reflective concern with basic notions. Those basic notions must in some sense be arrived at through cooperative inquiry, which involves both a concern with discovery and with reflective analysis. Much of my writing on educational problems during this period focused upon religion in higher education; though I conceived of this problem in relation to the central concern of achieving a unifying vision in higher education; thus it was addressed to the philosophy of education even when it was discussing this special phase. There are various ways by which a unifying vision can be attained in higher education. One is to pursue the problem of first principles in education as a metaphysical inquiry. Another is to lift up the reflective interest as it bears upon ultimate questions concerning man in every area of the curriculum such that a process is begun whereby a convergence of insight and concern gradually

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develops. This, to be sure, has metaphysical significance and can be dealt with in this way among those for whom such inquiry has intelligibility; but in the nature of the case, consideration of this interest cannot be exclusively metaphysical for the simple reason that this would exclude those who are without the technical ability to grapple with the metaphysical issue. One can, of course, remake his faculty so as to get philosophically grounded teachers of language, science, and the arts; but there is a less costly alternative: it is to be content with some transitional course. Preoccupation with the reflective interest in ways that any sensitive and responsible educator might approach the human problem will develop an increasing ability within a faculty to think more basically upon educational issues. And the educational experience of any college or university in which its faculty members have been awakened to this deeper level of the curriculum will markedly improve in quality and in depth. This takes time, to be sure; and time is at a premium. Yet, I suggest that such a procedure is a live alternative to the more direct attack upon the problem; and the casualties will be measurably less. A third alternative is to project the educational experience toward a common end which is in itself large enough in implication, bearing upon the concern with human fulfillment, to direct the educational experience away from fragmented purposes and toward a fundamental center. I tried to elaborate this idea in the Journal of Higher Education in an article on “Humanize the University.”95 The term humanize undoubtedly had an ambiguous meaning in this context; but my concern was to suggest a shift from an emphasis upon serving institutions to a preoccupation with people in the interest of relating education to the spiritual end of human fulfillment. Graduate schools, I argued, had conventionally conceived their task as that of preparing leaders of institutions: teachers for schools, ministers for churches, lawyers for the courts, executives for business, etc. The net effect of this policy is one of dispersion—separating the members of the university at the source through departmentalization and further dividing the educated people of the community by conditioning them to work independently in the community through their respective professional connections. To be sure, competence in professional skills is a necessity and must be provided through some specialized means; but competence in relating one’s self and one’s profession to other people and to the community interest as a whole is, I contended, a social goal of great spiritual importance. The problem of understanding the community and of creating within it resources for the culture of the human spirit is thus a concern that properly belongs at the center of graduate study, I felt, whatever the nature of its professional study. The pursuit of this problem

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could be the point at which the several different schools might find common ground. This approach to a unifying center is most readily adapted to study in the social sciences; and in certain of the universities, programs similar in intention have been developing. The level at which such an effort is made may vary. The force of it as a unifying vision in education is increased in proportion as the objective is envisaged as a spiritual concern with human fulfillment. Simply to let the idea degenerate into a series of community activities is to lose the vision and to further the miscellaneity of effort already diversified. But to accept the problem of human fulfillment within local communities as a prior, social goal in education is to discover within the several diversified areas of study the underlying human concern that will deepen their course and provide, as well, an organizing center that is integral to each of them. I would not be disturbed by the fact that various schools pursue the problem of integrated effort along several lines. For some time, at least, this may be the soundest procedure. The important task is to counter the disease of miscellaneity that has seized education generally and to provide some measure of unity among the parts out of which purposiveness and a sense of direction can emerge. My concern with regionalism developed simultaneously with an awakening interest in the spiritual problem of higher education. I had known of the Agrarian Movement among the southern poets and men of letters and of the Community movement to which Arthur Morgan has given spirited leadership. I was also aware of the developments in Michigan communities under the auspices of adult education projects of the University of Michigan. But the idea of regionalism became a live issue to me on theoretical grounds on reading Stuart Chapin’s book, Social Change in which he makes the point that the development of transmissible power removed the technical necessity of the city as a concentration of industrial facilities at the waterways. Chapin was concerned chiefly with the possibility of reversing the trend toward the city and of developing, instead, self-sufficient communities with a population of not more than 50,000. With transmissible power available, he argued, all the essential industries and the desirable cultural resources could be established in communities of this size. My concern with this proposal was, of course, related to the interest which had motivated my efforts all along—namely, the culture of the human spirit in broad and profound dimensions. It was not so much that transmissible power made cities technically unnecessary, but that it opened the way for bringing resources, which hitherto could be available only in

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centers of such concentration, to the smallest communities—to the hinterlands as well as to the foremost cosmopolitan areas. No child, no grown person would need to be isolated from the nurture of the structure of experience in its deeper aspects in which the heritage of the race is communicated. Conversely, no person would need to desert the community to avail himself of the dubious rewards of city life. The problem, as I have now come to view it, is more complicated than I had first imagined. The abundance of resources essential to the nurture of the human spirit does not automatically spring up in local communities simply because they have been made available. There are human barriers as well as mechanical ones. And the barriers which exist in the minds and habits of a people are not as readily removed as these technical obstructions. The problem is not an impossible one; but the process of overcoming it is markedly slower. Furthermore, the culture of the human spirit does not automatically follow upon the extension of transmissible power and the increase in human resources. There is a certain logic in the growth of populations and in the emergence of cultural resources; but these do not follow inevitably as a logical consequence of material conditions. A more realistic conception of man has led me to see the deeper issues that tug at the root of this problem. Nevertheless, the effort that has gone into the regional movement and which continues to be expended in this direction is, I am persuaded, soundly invested. It is not a sure solution to our human paucity; nor is it, in itself, the whole answer; but it proceeds from a sound core of truth about man which must eventually bear fruit. The degree to which human fulfillment as a spiritual goal occupied my interests during the decade prior to the war years is some measure of my confidence in the liberal doctrine of man throughout that period. I have not abandoned the liberal front with the passing of time; but I have been sobered and chastened by intervening circumstances to such an extent that many of my earlier expectations seem over-sanguine and facile. I am much less inclined, for example, to speak glibly of the social process as the bearer of our future good, knowing that sheer process without the redemptive activity may be but ambiguous force bent upon evil rather than good. Social process, as we often use the term, is little more than the corporate activity of people working through institutions; and these are ambiguous goods. The sheer concept of person or of personality no longer holds a spell over me as an assured good or as being in, itself, the criterion of value. For the person is an ambiguous value, in need of clarification and transformation which, in the final analysis, involves the mysterious work of grace. The realism which asserts itself here requires a more rigorous

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scrutiny of our human dreams than, as liberals, we have been prone to recognize. Confronting the fact of human evil or the ambiguity of human good is apt to compel one to relinquish his social hopes and to forfeit his expectations for the human spirit. The loss of this margin of human enterprise is so grave; it seems to me, that to forfeit it easily without thought of its theological consequence, to say nothing of its social results, is to act irresponsibly. The impulse that seizes one under the emotion of such newly acquired realism is well-nigh overwhelming. The easiest course would seem to be to reverse one’s position and to disown all the sanguine hopes and ideas of one’s former days. A right-about face is an enspiriting experience; but it is like running the rails to keep in balance. You must keep on running at top tension; there is no relaxing or looking about, no reconsidering of the way you have come. This, to my mind, has elements of a pathological adjustment which makes too high demands upon one’s sanity. There is always ground for reconception, for compelling a reorientation of mental habits and outlook in the light of grave discoveries. And this involves some degree of repentance. But the mind does not disown its history in the act of conversion, however much it may succumb to the heroics of such a crisis. The valuations of the personality-structure are there. They may be re-ordered; but they must be retained. Every liberal who has been stabbed awake to the folly of his inheritance and who has confronted the demand for decision in reappraising his course, must come to terms with this fact. I am aware that however much I press the demands of this new realism which has engulfed me regarding man’s nature and his hopes, I must do so within the perspective of a reconstructed liberal. The road back is not available to me. This is not to say that I take my stand as an unrepentant liberal. I cannot claim that degree of resistance. On the contrary, I have been aware for some time of a marked shift in my thinking as I have tried to come to terms with conditions and influences which have been pressing hard upon our minds during recent years. One of these influences has been the growing literature of theological reaction. It may not be too much to say that one has not gone through the fire and flood of theological reconstruction in our time until he has braved the onslaught of the dialectical theology—by which I mean, suffering a little mental anguish, not only from it, but with it. Simply peering out of complacent eyes upon its upheaval, as from the other side, or from what one deems to be a rationally superior position, is apt to leave one with a false sense of religious security; and with an illusory confidence in one’s own superior sanity. For

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I think it must be acknowledged that this theology of crisis has taken into itself the burden of anguish and of dislocation, which has plagued the contemporary mind, to a greater degree than any other single theology. This is its chief merit; and its chief source of stimulus. One should read Barth and Niebuhr in the way one reads the social prophets of the eighth century: to be stabbed awake to the compelling issues to which the critical and constructive intellect in theology is to be addressed. The story of my own relation to this movement of thought is not one that particularly enhances me as a contemporary theological thinker; for it reveals how fixed and complacent I was, along with other Midwestern and far-western liberals, in the grooves of an unreconstructed liberalism long after the deluge of disillusionment had begun to envelop our thinking. Coming out of the pragmatic atmosphere of the so-called Chicago School of the nineteen twenties, I began my theological career with very little capacity to enter into the mood of the crisis theology; and with no taste for it. I went to Germany in 1928 when this movement was gathering momentum in the theological schools; but felt no compulsion or interest to seek out Karl Barth or Emil Brunner; or even Paul Tillich. My interest, instead, was in Rudolf Otto and Friedrich Heiler. I left Germany without having had the slightest stimulus toward understanding Barth or toward grappling with the issues which he had posed. I was critical of the Christocentric liberalism of Hermann and Harnack and others; but for different reasons than those which motivated Barth’s attack. I began my teaching in Central College as a fairly well insulated liberal; but I was more susceptible to the mood of continental thought than I then imagined, having reacted quite radically to the complacent scientism of my student days. As I look back upon it now, Reinhold Niebuhr had broken through my defenses in subtle ways which I had not really recognized. It was not, however, Niebuhr, the dialectical theologian who had influenced me; but Niebuhr the social critic and realist. I had read his Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic in which he records his own pilgrimage, year by year, as a young minister in Detroit. It was the anxious mind of an emerging prophet, restively resisting the demands of a seemingly complacent American ministry. Niebuhr had forged his own tools of reaction; but a year in Europe at a crucial period when the casualties of war were taking their toll, turned him decisively in a direction that was to make his thinking antithetical to liberalism. I wrote an article in the Homiletic Review at that time on “Why Are Young Minister’s Minds Troubled?” which was followed by another on “Must Young Minister’s Minds be Disillusioned?” Niebuhr’s Leaves from his Notebook furnished some of the data with which I was sympathetically concerned.

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Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society appeared in 1931. I used this book as a text in a course in social ethics. This book is generally regarded as Niebuhr’s transitional book. It holds to a semi-liberal view of individual man, recognizing the religious resources of individual man, recognizing the religious resources of individual moral man; but points up with his usual ruthless logic, the illusion of supposing that many moral men make a moral society. The ethical sensitivity of individual people, susceptible to the sensibilities of faith or morals, Niebuhr argued, becomes obscured or even obliterated by a dull indifference or even a ruthless, impersonal force that seizes men in corporate action. This was, at least, a half-way house toward a reconception of the doctrine of man. Still I had not met Niebuhr in a radical dimension. He was to me the sharp-tongued, disgruntled liberal I had first encountered in a student conference at Evanston in 1925; but still a liberal. My personal confrontation with Niebuhr’s more radical criticism of the liberal mind came to me at first through men who had studied with Niebuhr, or who, in some way, had come more intimately than I under his influence. Such were men like Arndt of Eden Theological Seminary, who probably would not recall the incident I have in mind; and the late Ted Hume who, before his untimely death, had been minister of The Claremont Church in California while I was on the faculty of Pomona College. I do not recall any occasion when Hume and I argued out any of the issues which clearly divided us. Our relations were always those of sympathetic colleagues; yet each of us knew that the other held to persuasions with which he could not concur. Something in the way in which each communicated his respective persuasion elicited the other’s respect. I had great respect for Ted Hume’s critical capacities as well as for the artistry with which he could apply these critical powers in a sermon. And although I knew that a certain Romanticist streak in my nature aroused these critical powers in Hume to a mild degree of repudiation at times, I always felt that he gave me credit for advancing my dubious views with discrimination. Hume was by no means an uncritical follower of Niebuhr. His affinities, in fact, gathered in various contemporary influences, including the Thomistic scholar, Jacques Maritain. But the focal point of Hume’s theological thinking, in so far as it assumed a sharp, Protestant bent, found its center in Niebuhr’s thought. I do not recall that Hume influenced me in any constructive way on any specific issue; yet, as our friendship matured, I found myself formulating my view on various issues in a way that consciously or unconsciously took account of his incisive objections. If we did not argue

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in the open, a dialogue over our differences occurred in the solitariness of my own reflections. Meeting men like James Muilenburg at frequent intervals in meetings of our Pacific Coast Theological Group also made its sober impression upon me and prepared my mind for a more receptive response to this current of thinking. Muilenburg had his own independent attack upon these problems; but the stimulus of his mind, within the theological area, at least, was in the direction of Niebuhr’s thrust. My first, personal encounter with Reinhold Niebuhr occurred in the winter of 1945 when he came to the west coast to deliver a series of lectures under the joint auspices of Occidental College and the Associated Colleges at Claremont. I purposely opened my mind as receptively as possible to him, not simply because I was one of his hosts; but because I wanted genuinely to come to terms with his vigorous attack upon the liberal position. I had been influenced in this direction in part by Wilhelm Pauck who, in the fall of the same year, had spent several weeks with me in Claremont. Pauck was as ardent in his criticisms of the dialectical theology as any of its interpreters; yet he took the position, quite properly, I thought, that resistance to this turn of thought without attempting to come to terms with the issues that it raised was simply evasion or blind acquiescence to one’s own private opinions. Pauck’s insistence that theological liberalism could achieve vitality, and, in fact, respect, only as it joined in conversation with those who vehemently attacked its premises increasingly impressed me. I was really ripe for such persuasion, having met the problem previously in various ways through reading the new translations of Kierkegaard which were then appearing, as well as the current books of Barth, Brunner, and Niebuhr; but Pauck’s way of stating the matter made it urgent as a professional responsibility. I not only read Niebuhr with fresh eyes, but I listened to him with a new attentiveness. What I discovered regarding Niebuhr in this new frame of mind had more to do with a method of thinking than with specific insights upon theological issues. I came to see that the dialectical method had subtleties that I had not hitherto detected. It was not mere negation of liberal doctrines; but a reorientation of the Christian mind in relation to issues with which the Christian faith was concerned. The reaction which I had previously experienced against literal mindedness, as I had met it in those who sought to apply scientific method to religious thought, was renewed and fortified in a way quite different from that which had previously persuaded me. Yet the grounds were somewhat the same; and the results were, in part, consonant with one another. Implicitly, I came to believe, Niebuhr was setting the issues of human destiny in a perspective which

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required the full play of imaginative insight. In a way, he was discussing the problem of man on a plane that was only partially conversant with the factual data, say of the sciences or of logical analysis. You could not move directly from these sources of knowledge about man to the issues with which Niebuhr was dealing. He had cast off, not only Positivism, but the whole legacy of rational analysis which builds solely upon the accumulations of a scholarly tradition. Niebuhr, instead, was calling this linear approach to man’s meaning to judgment, insisting that the dimension of man’s being was of such complexity and, when considered within the frame of the Christian drama of redemption, of such scope, that these piecemeal attempts to interpret man’s nature and meaning were bound to be, not only fragmentary, to a disillusioning degree, but actually deceptive; since the really important facet of man’s being—that which envisaged him as a creature of God, was apt to be wholly neglected in this linear view. Whether it was Niebuhr’s own philosophical predilection, not clearly acknowledged, or a theological precedent of long standing which influenced him to cast his critical perspective in the particular framework of transcendence which he embraces, I need not try to determine here. The important fact is that Niebuhr, by the use of the imagery of transcendence, sought to re-examine the Christian criticism of man as a method of grasping the dimension of man’s being that could be attended to only through some effort at indirection. Whether Niebuhr is speaking of this dimension in terms of the height of man’s spirit, or of a demonic depth, to use Tillich’s phrase, he is reaching beyond the linear method of scientific or logical analysis to seize upon relevant factors that illumine the meaning of man as creature, and as, in some sense, both creator and bearer of spirit. My own philosophical predilections had prepared me to reject the framework in which Niebuhr sought to interpret this dialectical approach to an understanding of man; but the insight into man’s complex nature, the scope and subtlety of human existence and of human nature, to which Niebuhr was trying to give graphic reinterpretation, I could not but appropriate as a significant and constructive suggestion for a theological understanding of man. I began reviewing Brunner’s works when his Word and the World appeared in English in 1931. I must confess that in Brunner’s earlier works I sensed a prophetic ring which had an unfailing appeal to me. I seemed always to add, as if in parenthesis, that his constructive theology would not be difficult to criticize; but that the insight that impelled his constructive efforts were of immense importance. Prior to the Oxford Conference of 1937, papers preparatory to conference discussion were circulated among a number of men. Among others, I read a paper by Brunner on the

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Christian understanding of man as well as papers commenting upon his position. My statement, giving my reaction to his paper began as follows: After reading Professor Brunner’s paper on the Christian doctrine of man, and the critical comments by other readers, I am inclined to believe that much of the opposition to his statement arises from what he negates rather than from what he affirms. His underlying philosophy of religion, positing a gulf between God and his creation, impels him to sharpen the antithesis between man, the God-centered being; and man, the rational creature. From this dualism issue numerous deductions which seem unjustified to those why do not accept his starting premise. Nevertheless, I find his analysis, the outlines of a common faith concerning the nature of man: one that accords, not only with the broad lines of the traditional Christian conception, but, in its affirming aspects, seems to me to focus the salient emphases of both the new continental thought and the realistic theology taking form in America. I feel that it is more important at this time to search out these basic affirmations, than to scrutinize too meticulously, the step by step arguments which presume to justify the assertions.

I then enumerated the elements of common faith that seemed articulate to me as I read Brunner’s paper. I concluded the statement saying that I felt impelled to endorse the essential emphasis which Professor Brunner’s paper had set forth, realizing, of course, that the philosophical tenets that divide us impose differences in our respective presentations and expositions. But is it too much to say, I concluded, that we share a common faith which impels us to voice common hopes and common imperatives? I recall that my state of mind at the time was dominantly irenic in mood. I was influenced in this direction by the promise of the Oxford Conference which was to be held in the summer of 1937. I had participated in a World Student Conference at Oakland, California in the summer of 1936 in which I underwent what was for me a baffling experience. The dominance of Continental theology among the leaders and delegates of this conference was marked. Visser t’Hooft and Francis P. Miller seemed obviously to be the moving spirits. Walter Marshall Horton was there, but his was more of a mediating voice than an assertive influence in any certain direction. The delegates from Germany, Australia, and New Zealand all exemplified an ardent Barthian point of view. In my way I thought I should be counted upon to bolster the ranks of the liberals; but a strange reversal of affairs took place. The conference was divided into sections according to areas to be discussed. I joined the group that was concerned with the problem of formulating a statement of faith. For ten intensive days we battled over issues of every sort pertaining to such a

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formulation. What baffled me in this encounter; in fact I may say what distressed me, was that I found myself repeatedly being more impressed by what these Continentalists were saying than by the counter-attacks or the constructive efforts of the liberal spokesmen who were supposed to be reinforcing my mind. The liberals’ remarks seemed to me dated, often irrelevant, and utterly lacking in penetration. It may be that we were a poor lot representing the liberal’s cause. I did not vocally desert the liberal stand in that encounter, but something of a sobering nature was obviously happening to me. That I knew. At the conclusion of the ten day period of discussion, each member of the group was commissioned to write a tentative statement of common faith. We were to give the entire closing session to considering these several statements and to adopt one, or some modified version of all, as the report of the group to the Conference. To my surprise, and I must say, to my chagrin as well, my statement was adopted and became the basis of common faith. I had actually formulated a statement of faith to which a Barthian could give assent; and in which I could find my own affirmations as well. And yet the avowed liberals among us had voiced no complaints, except to offer reservations. My thinking was thrown into perspective, however, in the Conference meeting when the report was read; for a group of more assertive liberals, headed by Harry Seaman of Oregon, vehemently denounced this lapse into creedalism, and scored the statement of faith which we had offered. I hovered about this stubborn group of liberals later, hoping to acquire by direct spark or by association, some resuscitation of my liberal flame. They did not know that I had written this damnable statement; and much as I recoiled from telling them, I finally mustered courage to mutter a confession. Seaman’s blood pressure had been so thoroughly aroused, however, that he brushed my remarks aside as being just more unbelievable irrationality. This statement, I made the basis of an article on “Toward a Common Christian Faith,” which was published in Christendom during the opening week of the Oxford Conference. I attended the Oxford Conference as an Associate Delegate. Being outside of the committee sessions in which the real business of the Conference was done, I had only a superficial impression of what was being accomplished such as attendance at the public meetings could afford. Nevertheless, I had frequent opportunity to see the interworking of Christian minds in discussion and debate over issues that had been raised in the various addresses. The Conference “mind” was divided between various Christian groups, including the Greek and Russian Orthodox faith, Continentalist groups from various countries except Germany (the Nazis had detained them); the Swedish theologians, the Church of England

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delegation, which stood as a rock for a mediating, moralistic theology; Free church representatives of several denominations, and the American representatives of various churches. Set in a situation so alien to American Christianity, the American Christian mind seemed suddenly to jell into a character distinctly its own. Henry Pitt Van Dusen was the most characteristic spokesman for us and addressed himself specifically to interpreting the American mind to our European colleagues; but, as I recall, Georgia Harkness, and Reinhold Niebuhr, who also addressed the conference, seemed strikingly American in contrast to the European mind. Theology took on more of a cultural character in my thinking as a result of this experience than it had in any previous period. T. S. Eliot made an address at one of the sessions of the Conference which seemed to me to be one of the most discerning words spoken. He was aware that the phrase common faith was to the fore in the conference. It had been on the lips of delegates despite the spirited expressions of disagreements. And the services of prayer each morning had visibly celebrated this will toward union. But a common faith, said Eliot, can exist only where there is a common experience. You have not lived together as yet, he cautioned; nor have you thought together sufficiently to create conditions that would justify your assuming that you could have a common mind. The will to be one is a proper pious sentiment, he argued; but this cannot become a reality until a unifying body of experience weaves these sentiments into a structure of living tissue. These, of course, are my words and give only a garbled account of Eliot’s address as I now recall it; but the impression that his remarks made upon me fixed his words indelibly upon my memory. I left the Oxford Conference, as did many others, feeling sure, with a stronger sentiment for Christian union and for a common faith; but with an even clearer impression of the stubborn obstacles to such common ground. Attaining common ground seemed more than ever to me to require making concessions to the conservative mind. This is what had occurred over and over again in the sessions I had observed. The mind for whom the Christian faith implied dogmatic passion stood fixed and unyielding; while the liberal mind, eager to feel his way into this alien context of thought and to come to terms with it, yielded again and again until there was no affirming ground except the one offered by the mind that had remained unmoved. I should not wish to imply a wholly skeptical attitude toward this movement in our Christian life which carries such significance for all of us; but I feel I must record a genuine conviction that took hold of me at the conclusion of this memorable experience. I am willing to admit that the difficulty lies in the liberal’s own lack of a rigorously defined

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theological structure of thought; and this poses our present imperative; but I am equally aware that once a theology assumes the finality of dogma in its formulated statements, the opportunity for cooperative inquiry has vanished. There can only be concessions to its demands. But to return to my relations with the dialectical theology: I was impressed, even during this earlier period with the fact that a curious rapport and resistance played between the crisis theology and realistic forms of theological thought within American groups that sought other means of going beyond liberalism. This has become increasingly true as conversations between these groups have proceeded. It is not likely that their ranks will coalesce. There are basic metaphysical differences that divide them as well as cultural commitments that compel each to pursue the relevance and truth of the Christian faith in different ways. But enough of a common mind upon current theological issues has been reached in some quarters, at least, to make an interchange of thought fruitful and informing even when the differences remain unaltered, and their positions remain essentially unchanged.96 A fuller reading of Brunner’s works in recent years, especially his Man in Revolt, The Mediator, and The Divine Imperative,97 has led me to a sharper sense of my divergence from his thinking as well as to a more defined appreciation of the value of his work as a criticism of liberalism. Brunner, more than any other theologian of the dialectical school, has worked systematically at the task of examining the foundations of liberal theology and of reconstructing Christian theology upon bases which he considers more defensibly biblical. The clarity with which he envisages the implications of his own framework of thinking make his writing exceedingly instructive and plausible. The points at which I find myself repeatedly defiant toward Brunner are those in which the turn of thought is dictated by his particular philosophical framework; yet advanced with homiletic fervor as the Christian way of conceiving the matter on the grounds that it can be squared with the biblical witness. His antipathy toward mysticism is a case in point. Brunner is quite convinced that mysticism in all its forms is a denial of the tension that properly exists between God and man. Mysticism, he believes, invariably presupposes identification in some sense of the human consciousness with the divine consciousness, enabling man to find the authority of God’s revelation in the witness of one’s own inner life. Mysticism, in other words, blurs the distinction between God as person and man as person. It does away, not only with the tension, of which we have spoken, but with conditions that give meaning to the personal encounter between God and man. Now with the line of analysis which Brunner pursues, I have little

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quarrel, except as he pushes this point to the degree of repudiating the witness of the mystic altogether. Certainly the criticisms which he advances, pointing up the subjective tendency in mystical experience, are sound and astutely stated. But now what is the conceptual source of Brunner’s analysis that impels him to pursue this line of analysis and which enables him to state his case so clearly? It is not wholly his clarified grasp of the Christian witness; but his reconstructed neo-Kantian world view which heightens his aversion to any naturalizing of man’s knowledge of God such that it obscures the meaning of revelation; and which impels him to define the content of the divine-human encounter in sharply ethical terms that safeguard the integrity of man as person and the whollyotherness of God as person. To be sure, it is not enough to say that Brunner’s theology is just a neoKantian version of the Christian faith. This states nothing of significance beyond identifying his frame of reference. It is more than a particular philosophical formulation of faith; it is his own peculiar grasp of the Christian witness in the radically Protestant sense, illumined and extended conceptually by the aid of intellectual tools which have been sharpened by his awareness of Kant’s Critical Philosophy, and some measure of commitment to it. But our philosophical frameworks limit our vision as well as extending it. They lead us to make assumptions which in themselves are defining of every subsequent concept we employ. And they impel us to infer negations which indirectly shunt off affirmations into which we might otherwise inquire and which we might quite possibly consider. One who reads Brunner critically with these hidden assumptions in mind can readily detect the formal schematization which Kant employed, separating the realm of experience which is susceptible of empirical analysis, and thus available to scientific inquiry; and the realm that transcends such knowledge. The dichotomy between knowledge derived through pure reason and the overbeliefs that are afforded by the practical reason in Kant’s philosophy is retained by Brunner; only Brunner prefers to bend this distinction more in the direction of Reformation thought, insisting upon the appeal to faith where Kant had been content with postulates. Kant, while continuing in the tradition of the Reformers, nevertheless drew his inspiration more directly from the Enlightenment. The problem of religious understanding thus remained for him a rational problem. Brunner has cast off the spell of the Enlightenment and has thus parted company with the rationalistic effort to establish the grounds of faith. Nevertheless, the conceptual imagery which informed Kant’s critical rationalism continues to inform Brunner’s appeal to faith. Reason, Brunner can say, has its legitimate use as a form of inquiry into the meaning of

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nature and the natural history of man, including the account of organic evolution. This is the Kantian characterization of the empirical use of pure reason. Where the question of man’s ultimate destiny or his relation to God, is raised, another plane of discourse intruded. Here empirical inquiry (pure reason) has no relevance. A line of advance, having its source in the revelation of God in history, a Voice from the other side, from beyond natural history (transcending it, as the moral enterprise of Kant transcended natural knowledge) thus intersects the historical sphere of existence. In so far as Brunner is seeking to escape the rather rigid, one plane logic of Positivism, he like Niebuhr, is, in my judgment, pursuing a fruitful line of inquiry. He is contributing to the effort to achieve an effective discourse of indirection in which subtle meanings, unavailable to direct forms of analysis, or meanings for which our conscious experience has as yet no ready conceptual tools, can be somehow grasped. This effort, to be sure, can have no significance to one who prefers to be restricted to the realm of direct discourse. In fact, anyone for whom the Enlightenment, and the whole tradition of philosophical and religious inquiry following from Bacon and Hume, continue to be the one valid approach to truth, will see in this effort nothing more than a return to mythology. Here is the issue, I think, between those who feel the persuasion of some kind of appeal to indirection and those who remain content with direct discourse. The latter remain within the Enlightenment and within the theological tradition that sought to reduce religious knowledge to its simplest, rationalistic expression. The former, however diversified their procedure, however varied their philosophical predilections, sense the limiting effect of the Enlightenment and recognize its denaturing effect upon religious discourse; and thus seek to go beyond the methodology which deistic and later rationalistic procedures established. The one holds to the claim that religious meanings affecting man’s destiny can be brought wholly within the bounds of our human comprehension. The religious issue, within this perspective, can be rationally clarified and pragmatically simplified in the sense that liberalism sought to accomplish it. The other has become persuaded that in addition to these experienceable meanings which can be comprehended there are meanings relevant to our destiny, even affecting us vitally in our daily living which are beyond our comprehension to which we need to be sensible. How can we speak of meanings beyond our human comprehension? Meanings to whom? Here I am speaking operationally rather than conceptually. If by meanings one understands only data available to some consciousness, then the statement is obviously nonsense. But if by

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meanings one understands happenings or relationships operating in a context in which events are creatively shaped one way or another, then their availability to some consciousness is not the test of actuality. Their test of actuality is an operational one. Many a person lives in the midst of happenings which mean a great deal to his existence, though they rarely, if ever, reach his consciousness. Much that is meaningful, yet outside of conscious experience, is of a rather trivial sort; but there are such meanings of great import; and conceivably the range of such meanings may be vast indeed. Now the acceptance of this premise may lead to a variety of elaborations. My acceptance of it leads to a different kind of theological elaboration than that of Brunner’s. I find myself in accord with his concern to go beyond a sheer rationalism or a restricted empiricism that ignores this reach toward what is beyond comprehension; but while he seeks to give a theological variation of the Kantian appeal to practical reason, employing faith as an organizing principle for transcending natural knowledge; I work within a philosophy of radical empiricism that takes the import of our human emergence seriously as both a limiting as well as a releasing condition of our consciousness. As structures of consciousness at the human or personal level, we have been released from the mechanisms of lower selves to the extent that our total selves can control or direct the parts; nevertheless, our emergence has not given us omniscience nor omnipotence. If we are the summit of the evolutionary process as we know it, we are not, by any necessary logic, the end of the process. We exist within a structure that is itself defining of the bounds within which we live, move, and have our being. Just as surely as any physical structure reaches a stop in the very conditions that characterize and distinguish its structure, so we as personal forms of consciousness, have our creatural bounds. Our very intelligence is a form of intelligence made possible by the cortical mechanism which we bear. The range of human knowledge made possible to such conscious experience as we have is great, indeed. The mere tabulating of intellectual achievements which stand to the credit of the human consciousness—man’s inventiveness, his enterprises of thought, his intricate and subtle creations of beauty, his immense organizations of energy and complex patterns of political and economic activity, issuing in both good and evil, cannot but impress the most cynical among us. Yet our vast intellectual achievement does not obscure the fact that we are creatures operating within structural limitations. We do not possess the ultimate in structures. Our saying that we do does not make it so. The fact that it appears to us that we have attained the ultimate in creative emergence does not make the point

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decisive. Our plight is one of ignorance on this issue. Now we can take a decisive step at this point, either toward a confirmed humanism, in which case we presume to have more knowledge than we have in insisting that man is the end of the process, and therefore the measure of it; or toward some position beyond humanism, perhaps a tentative theism, in which case we supplement our ignorance with wonder, looking to the creative process itself as possessing in some sense, intimation of meaning that transcends our own restricted structure of meaning. My thinking has been lured toward this latter course. I am quite sure that the effort to understand our experience with all the definiteness possible to our limited conceptual tools is not only legitimate, but a duty laid upon us as respectable intelligent beings; but I am equally sure that our much seeking after such knowledge is hounded at every step by an incurable ignorance which we cannot transcend because it is an ignorance that rises from our limitations as human creatures. Despite our inability to cope with this ignorance, or to cast it off, we are obligated to be everlastingly sensible of it. Our every effort at knowing is to be qualified, restrained, yet informed, by the wonder and wistfulness that properly rises from consciousness in the mood of a spiritual outreach. While nothing constructive can be expected to issue from this readiness to front the farther range of our being in the form of a higher knowledge, the quality of our human knowledge will most certainly give evidence of greater subtlety, depth, and imaginative range. One is never the best judge or interpreter of events that happen to one to change or to deepen his vision. In my case it was not the war, solely, that effected such change; though when it came, it affected me profoundly, as I have confessed in The Reawakening of Christian Faith. In part it was a deepening of experience through my work with the Pomona College chapel, which I previously described. In part the transformation in vision came from the intimations of tragedy that began to gather in my own experience, circumstances into which I need not go here. The nature of the demands upon us, often determine the depth and reach of our efforts. And the years of the nineteen forties were such as to press me ever more earnestly into a line of inquiry, out of which my present formulations have come. I give this personal account, not by way of exhibiting myself, but to convey something of the burden of effort and even anguish that has gone into the formulation of these tentative affirmations; and also to make clear the affinity between those of us who must struggle through the desert wastes of an intellectual experience to conquer the dissipating effects of our sophistication.

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Constructive theology, understood as the act of declaring one’s orientation of faith, involves a process of self-emergence and clarification. The meanings that we handle or appropriate are, to be sure, objective as a structure of events. And many of the arguments to which we must attend, have force, quite independently of our subjective natures and of our private experiences. The art of theology, as in any discipline, requires that degree of deliverance from subjectivity which will permit of sober, rational inquiry and decision. In this sense, theology must aspire to a proper detachment from these private concerns. But thought is always deeply set in an emotional context. And where the issues are of import, even beyond our ability to assess them; or where they awaken concerns that cannot readily be resolved by simple rational decisions; or, where rational decisions simply are not available in the situation in which we confront these matters, the subjective orientation of thought and faith cannot be canceled out or ignored. The reach of the mind toward and awareness of these objective meanings is determined in large part by the circumstances that underlie this subjective orientation. The meanings are there; but we may remain blind to their existence or their appeal; or to their relevance, until such time as we are capable of being receptive to them. I return, then, to the statement with which I began this autobiographical account, namely, that my theology as it now takes form began in a rediscovery of the meaning of creation and in the realization that redemption is the renewal of the creative act of God. In part, this discovery was the result of a more sensitive grasp of these elemental meanings of the myth because of my own growth in what might be called poetic perception. In part, it was a fresh preoccupation with a metaphysics that provided cognitive understanding of what was here given in poetic form. Basically, it was a welling up of life itself in creative form and in stark dissolution which demanded recourse to sources of illumination beyond my own limited vision. It is possible that some may find the formulation of the myth persuasive on faith, as they say. It is also possible that others would find the metaphysical analysis of creative event sufficient in itself to justify remaining within a rationalism that is not complicated or confused by poetic elaboration. It is my peculiarity that requires that poet and metaphysician be brought together in a common witness, as it were, to the basic good of existence that shapes our every moment of life. Because creative experience confronted me within life both as a lure toward meaning and significance in living and as a redemptive power of incalculable import where defeat and tragedy had struck, I came to look

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upon this mode of experience wherever it occurred as the most vivid exemplification of the living God. This conviction turned my attention back to the poet of Genesis and I recaptured both the beauty and the force of this elemental characterization of the creative work of God. I tried my hand at retelling this epic event in the poem, God and the Morning, which ran to some forty pages, a brief excerpt of which appears in Seeds of Redemption. My concern with this more sensitive grasp of the meaning of creativity led me to a more ardent effort to recover the stimulus of Whitehead. Following my reawakening in the early nineteen forties, the wisdom and depth of perception in Whitehead impressed me anew. I literally rediscovered the Bible and Whitehead at the same time; and, I think, for the same reason. Reflection upon the way in which creative experience had come to focus the whole meaning of faith and redemption for me, led me to reflect further upon the significance of creativeness or creativity as an organizing concept, a controlling concept for our particular period of thought. It thus became formative for me in a most pervasive sense. Increasingly I find myself centering upon the problem of faith and myth and their relation to reason as a crucial area of concern for the contemporary theologian. The reason I think it is crucial is that the issue here seems to me to hold the key to an evaluation of the whole liberal movement in theology and to whatever reconstructive effort may ensue. Much has been said in recent years which take the import of the myth and the primacy of faith for granted. Little, however, has been done to meet the issue that separates Christian ideology prior to Deism and the Enlightenment from the whole movement of religious thought that follows this rationalistic era. Deism and the Enlightenment have behind them the critical writings of Francis Bacon and Descartes. However much these men may differ, they converge upon the issue that inaugurated the period of the autonomous reason in matters pertaining to the Christian faith. The one can be said to be the fountain stream of modern rationalism; the other of scientific empiricism; but since both streams led away from the age of faith they constitute in effect the one watershed separating the modern mind from historic resources that in any way nurtured an understanding of the force of myth and the appeal to faith. It is difficult for any of us modern individuals to discuss this question with any degree of clearheadedness or perspective; because the mental processes of the contemporary mind have been so thoroughly fixed by presuppositions and habits that have come out of the Enlightenment and subsequent periods, that every effort to have recourse to a mode of thinking or apprehension that goes beyond its

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methods seems forced, if not dubiously motivated. It has become a growing conviction with me, however, that serious work must be done on this problem, issuing in a result as momentous in its import as John Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy, wherein he interprets and assesses the transformed perspective in philosophy that came out of the scientific movement. The new epic work will revise and, in basic respects, reverse Dewey’s conclusions; for the net effect of his Reconstruction was to consolidate the gains of the emancipated mind and to release philosophic and religious thought from the burden of so-called mythical inquiries. I am convinced that the emptying of Christian concepts of their mythical meaning, as in Deism and the Enlightenment, or the outright casting out of such meaning, as in Positivism and in subsequent sciencecentered thought, has made for a cultural loss that impoverishes every phase of modern life wherein sensibilities, imagination, and feeling are involved. In the interest of recovering both depth and stature in our thinking, I would argue for restoring this dimension to theological inquiry. I do not mean to play fast and loose with responsible thought. Simply to encourage a lapse into vagaries or into affirmations for which there is no substantial ground, is not my intention. I mean only to suggest that a time of reckoning is at hand for reappraising the course of inquiry which has issued in our modern estimate of man and of the values that concern him. If liberalism has failed to give us an adequate grasp of man and of the problem of his destiny, how are we to go beyond liberalism in reconstructing our thought? That is the question that needs to be probed in these immediate years ahead.

1950 Kantian Influences in Christian Thought Behind our inquiries into Kant and James, there is the persisting concern to resolve an issue in imagery—the imagery of “the divine-human encounter” and the imagery of “creative interaction” or creative experience. The one will be seen to be the imagery of Barth and Brunner; the other, the imagery of Whitehead, Wieman, and others. I. Kant constitutes a starting point because he initiated that critical method of thinking which set modern forms of dualism based on mind and things apart from the traditional dualism of spirit and matter. Kant introduced meta-phantism which came to be known as mentalism, separating the subjective play of the mind from the objective datum of reality with a finality that permanently isolated the thing in itself from the knowing mind. The background of this critical turn, initiating Kantian thought, is much too extensive to be related here; but we can indicate enough of these earlier stages to show what set the problem for Kant and what dictated or prompted the course of his solution. Descartes is generally taken to be the watershed, dividing ancient and modern philosophy. He is the point of separation between the earlier western thought informed by Aristotelian conceptions and the subsequent eras chiefly in that the individual ego, the subjective, knowing self is made the starting point philosophical inquiry. This focusing upon the lone, thinking self was at once a direct response to a felt need and a striking symbol of all subsequent philosophy. The need was the situation of meaninglessness that followed upon the collapse of cultural supports which had given a certain organic unity to thinking since the days of the Greeks. Man, the individual thinker, thus displaced the corporate tradition of thought. This characterization of Descartes, setting him apart from ancient thought, is somewhat misleading; for in point of fact, the problem to which his philosophy gives a solution was set by the notions and circumstances that derived from the ancient perspective. Descartes persisted in separating mind and nature as earlier philosophic thought of the Christian era had done, even intensifying the dichotomy by his manner of regarding nature or the external world in geometric terms as

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a mechanized object, while he conceived of mind as “the substance which thinks.” “In this way,” writes Charles Morris, “Descartes leaves as his heritage an ‘ivory tower’ view of mind, a conception of mind different in essence from the world which in some miraculous manner it is supposed to know. To the problem of the relation of pure thought to the rest of given reality has been added in an acute form a dualism between mind and nature. What is given for observation is merely a set of cues useful for the preservation of the organism, and not genuine aspects of the physical world.” “Cartesianism in its dual aspect of idealism and mechanism,” to quote Lovejoy’s phrase, was thus firmly established in the philosophical thought of the West, and was to dominate it through more than two centuries of the modern era. Descartes’ mechanism of nature was nothing more nor less than the Newtonian world-machine to which physics and mathematics alike made its appeal. It was this separation of mind and nature which led to the skepticism of Hume’s generation. Hume retained the Descartes-Newtonian mechanism of nature, but relinquished the notion of substance. Material objects working through the senses, he argued, produce impressions in the mind. From these impressions arise ideas which when associated, give rise to knowledge. With Locke, then, he held that “with the senses as ‘little openings’ to the outside world,” the mind derives its fugitive glimpse of this outer reality; but on this slim access to nature, they held, neither a science of nature nor a philosophy of meaning could be attained. II. Kant addressed himself to the empirical skepticism of Hume. With Hume, he asserted that knowledge begins with sensory experience. What is not possible as a sensory stimulus cannot, therefore, be known. With one fell swoop, he thus eliminated the whole line of speculative thought that had proceeded on the basis of mind as being an independent thinking substance. Mind apart from sensory stimulus is incapable of producing knowledge. Such speculation as it pursues in such an isolated state, Kant says, is sheer transcendental illusion. But contrary to Hume, Kant contended that a science of nature is possible. It is possible, not only because the objects of nature can reach the mind through the senses (Hume had acknowledged this much); but because the mind, in turn, on receiving the stimulus of the senses, can cognize this act of stimulation. This was Kant’s contribution—that mind is not simply receptive, but active in imposing upon the data of sense, the forms of space and time. This suggestion that the mind imposes its forms upon sense data, as a

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prism refracts a beam of light, seemed to Kant a reversal of all previous thinking upon this problem. So significant did he regard the change that he called it his Copernican revolution. Besides the forms of sensibility, space and time, Kant found synthetic forms of the understanding which he called categories—twelve in number. All that we perceive of the data of sense, he argued, is in turn apprehended and interpreted within the frame of spatio-temporal patterns. Given the categories of the understanding, the scientist is able to explore in the vast structure of nature so communicated, to discover its prevailing character and its essential laws. The world thus disclosed, by reason and observation of the sciences, Kant argued, is to be understood as the phenomenal world, that is, the world of appearances, or the world subjectively apprehended through the senses, and the categories of understanding. This did not mean for Kant an illusory world. On the contrary, its sensory communication assured him of its objectivity; and the categories of the mind provided for its logical validation. What was implied, however, is that knowledge of the world so apprehended was not to be taken as the sole or total meaning of the world or of man’s existence. The objective meaning, i.e., meaning apart from the human perspective— what Kant called meaning of the think-in-itself—was not to be had by any sensory grasp of events or by any process of knowledge that arose from sensory stimulus. This led Kant to pursue his second problem. How is man to apprehend meaning other than knowledge derived through sense and concept? How is man to go beyond the scientific understanding of the world of man? How is one to penetrate the noumenal world or to grasp its meaning in any measure or in any intelligible respect? The word intelligible is the keyword in this effort. By an elaborate analysis, Kant establishes his belief in a transcendent order that is timeless and beyond the bounds of space and time but which nevertheless conditions the sensible world. The two worlds are separable, and are to be kept separable in all matters of inquiry; yet it must be made clear that they are, in every sense of the word, intersecting worlds, or interpenetrating worlds. Man’s nature is a clear index to this mystery; he is a physical being, subject to all the laws governing physical things, and knowable as a physical object; he is also a free being, responsive to the claims and commands of this transcendent, timeless order. The transcendent order, while not knowable in the sense that the sciences can know the phenomenal world, can be apprehended in an intelligible way. That is, one can come to an understanding of its intent and of its bearing upon the world of sense and thus avail oneself of its

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regulative ideas. Regulative ideas! What is meant by Ideas and in what sense are they regarded regulative? At this point Kant distinguishes between the ideas of reason and the categories of the understanding. The latter, he insists, are cognitions of another order, of different origin, and for a different use. Cognitions of the understanding, as we have seen, are given in experience. They can be confirmed by experience. In is way they assure the possibility of observation and reason that can result in a body of science. The ideas of reason, on the other hand, Kant says, are transcendent cognitions. They are neither given in experience; nor can they be confirmed by consulting experience. This would mean that ideas are subject to error without possibility of check, except as reason itself can detect them—a situation which obviously leaves them highly subjective. To pursue these ideas in a speculative manner would therefore open the way for the compounding of illusion; thus metaphysics along this path, Kant concluded, is impossible in any valid sense. Furthermore, he made clear that these ideas cannot be said to denote some objects which lie outside of the field of experience. They are, rather, simply instruments of the mind for extending the range of understanding in the sense of completing it. Here Kant was narrowing the function of the idea as a metaphysical tool. Such completeness, Kant warned can only be a completeness of principles. That is, they cannot provide an enlargement of the empirical world in terms of content, a building of domes and spires in the sense of a transcendental elaboration of what is given in experience. This would be to fall back into speculation. Kant reached for a more selective use of ideas on the basis of necessity to sustain rationality itself. Thus Kant wrote, …when the Reason, which cannot be completely satisfied with an empirical use of the rules of the understanding, requires the completion of this chain of conditions, the understanding is driven out of its own sphere, partly to present objects of experience in a series extended so far that no experience can grasp it, and partly (in order to complete this series) to search for nounema, wholly outside the same, to which it may attach the above chain, and thereby, being at last independent of experience, render its attitude once for all complete. These are the transcendental ideas, which, in accordance with the true but hidden ends of the natural determination of our Reason, are designed not for extravagant conceptions, but merely for the unlimited extension of empirical use; but which, however, by an unavoidable illusion seduce the understanding into a transcendent use, that although deceitful, cannot be kept within the bounds of experience by any resolution, but can only be restricted within due limits with pains, and by means of scientific instruction.

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Kant moved toward a grasp of these regulative ideas by establishing the ground upon which affirmations concerning the noumenal realm can be made. Such affirmations are not in the form of knowledge or of understanding reached through discursive reason. They are postulated that complete, as it were, the architecture of thought and experience by giving to the latter the full range of meaning that is inclusive of ultimate ends and the ultimate reach of all empirical concerns. These postulates or regulative ideas are three in number: Freedom, God, and Immortality. Kant established these postulates in three different ways: first, in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) on the basis of the antinomies; second in The Critique of Practical Reason (1788) on the grounds determined by the summum bonum; and third in The Critique of Judgment (1790) wherein the mechanical and teleological principles are reconciled, and the moral worth of the person is established as an ultimate end. In all three instances, the conclusion was reached that these regulative ideas are necessary postulates if rationality is to be retained in any sphere of human discourse. To live by these ends and for these ends is thus rational and morally imperative. The core of Kant’s religious philosophy is the moral law. Conscience spoke to Kant with the force of the revealed word. Thus moral intuition, as much a mystery as sensory experience, itself, is no less incontrovertible. It is the moral fact. It lays a claim upon one to do his duty. Duty in Kant’s judgment is reducible to two imperatives: universalize conduct, i.e., so act, that what you do could be made binding for all men in such a situation; and deal with all persons as ends, not means. So, to act is to observe the moral law. But to act in accordance with the moral law, said Kant, requires that man be free. Obligation implies freedom. But to be free, man must be more than a phenomenon of nature where causality denies all freedom. This, for Kant, argued that there must be a noumenal order and that man in his moral nature must be of it just as, in his physical nature, he is of the phenomenal order. This makes of freedom, said Kant, a moral certainty. Though it is not directly intuited, as is the sense of duty, it follows as a direct inference, and therefore is just as certain. Of the three postulates, then, God, freedom, and immortality, freedom is the most important and the most sure. He even asserted that while God and immortality can remain postulates to explain certain difficulties, freedom must be affirmed as a moral absolute. Kant’s system thus is crowned with moral faith. This is the summit of rational existence; and it is the organizing principle for all that is to follow

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as a religious affirmation. Two lines of influence proceeded from Kant to shape the thinking of subsequent philosophy of religion and theology. The one centered about Kant’s conception of knowledge and understanding in relation to the practical reason; the other about his use of moral faith as a regulative principle. From the former there issues a) Hegelianism; b) various expressions of Neo-Kantianism (in the earlier sense) such as the philosophy of religion of Fries, from whom stems the thought of Rudolf Otto; c) Schleiermacher’s theology in so far as it is to be related to Kant; d) the intuitionism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; e) Kierkegaard, and with qualifications, certain elements in the dialectical theology of Barth and Brunner. From the second line of Kantian influence developed a) the theology of moral faith beginning with Albrecht Ritschl and including Wilhelm Hermann, Adolf von Harnack, Kaftan, and the Americans, A. C. McGiffert, and Henry Churchill King; b) the conception of religion as “morality touched with emotion” by Matthew Arnold as well as the appeal to moral faith in the poetry of Emerson; c) the volitional method of establishing religious faith as in William James’ will-to-believe. To this, phase might be added the theological appropriation of the method of the practical reason for establishing faith as a regulative idea in the dialectical theology of Barth and Brunner. III. 1. Schleiermacher Schleiermacher by temperament was more akin to minds like that of Plato and Spinoza and the German poet-philosopher, Herder than to Kant. One can see that Schleiermacher was greatly influenced by this NeoSpinoza movement. Nevertheless, he adopted the starting point of the Critical Philosophy of which Kant had initiated: i.e., its empirical base and its critical stand regarding speculative metaphysics. Having adopted this starting point, he proceeded to modify Kantianism along the lines of Spinoza. He held, with the followers of Spinoza, that one is able to derive true knowledge of objective reality by way of experience. The thing-initself (noumenal world) became in Schleiermacher the unconditioned whole, the Infinite. Kant’s dualism was thus translated into an immanent doctrine. Schleiermacher viewed this Infinite Spirit as a reality that was continuous with man’s spirit. In this he differed from Kant. But Schleiermacher would have regarded this difference as one of structural imagery. Kant moved in the mechanical imagery of Deism; Schleiermacher had a more dynamic conception of nature. Schleiermacher thus approached the problem of faith in a manner vastly different from that of Kant.

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a) He objected strongly to Kant’s identification of religion with the moral life. To be sure, religion without an ethical concern, Schleiermacher acknowledged, is irresponsible; but the two are not to be equated. Religion, he held, has a distinctive character and serves a distinctive function which deepens the ethical consciousness through feeling. b) He rejected Kant’s arguments for God and Immortality as well as his views of Individuality and Freedom as ontological categories. All this pole-vaulting, or erecting of an overpass, providing a super-highway for religion above the realm of science impressed Schleiermacher as artificial. The distinctions between religion and science were to be made, in the way that scientific knowledge and intuition were to be differentiated; but the effort, Schleiermacher felt, could be direct and more empirical. Schleiermacher’s thought, then, can be regarded as Kantianism shorn of its superstructure; but amplified at its sensory level by the realistic supposition that man encounters the Infinite Spirit through feeling which provides intuitions that can be cognitively interpreted. 2. Hegel Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, whole philosophies form “three phases of one and the same teaching,” seized upon a side suggestion of Kant’s to release the speculative mind from the shackles which Kant had imposed upon it, and thus set about to re-establish metaphysics in its older form upon the new basis of criticism. Kant had intimated that “the mysterious unknown, concealed behind the phenomenon of sense, might possibly be identical with the unknown in ourselves.” Although Kant neglected to carry out the implication of this seed idea, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were to make it the basis for their impressive systems of thought. Here the human ego became the key to understanding the Absolute Ego. In Fichte and Schelling the Absolute was still transcendent; but in Hegel, deity became completely immanent. It was the appeal to reason as it developed out of the thought of Hegel that gave rise to an explicit doctrine of divine immanence. This doctrine represented the divine consciousness and the human consciousness as being intimate and interrelated. Man and God, rather than being separated by an impassable barrier, dividing the two orders, are of one world. This view developed out of the Kantian premise that it is the human consciousness that provides the norms in which knowledge of the sensory world is presented to us. Hegel took this fact as a clue to a larger generalization which Kant had refused to pursue. From the Kantian philosophy, Hegel had said, “A great new creative movement is to grow, and the central idea of this new movement will be the doctrine of the absolute and infinite self, whose constructive processes

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shall explain the fundamental laws of the world.” If it is our understanding that creates the order of nature for us, then the problem “How shall I comprehend the world?” becomes the problem, “How shall I understand myself?” The Romanticists had concerned themselves with this question, and in doing so, were led to an exploration of the inner life. Hegel made the ingenious suggestion that we understand ourselves, by being known,—by coming into communication with other minds. The solitary self, shrinking from communication with other minds, ever working deeper into his own subjectiveness, does not find his deeper self—he discovers instead that left to himself, he is a nobody. His real self has to be won by communication, conflict, and exchange of criticism with other minds. It is a dialectical process of reason. All consciousness is an appeal to other consciousness. The inner life is an outer life. Spirituality is intercourse, the communion of spirits. Now the process by which the self is individuated, namely the dialectic of countering the opposites, the contradictions, the paradoxes which we encounter in this traffic with other minds, is the very process that leads us into a conception of Infinite Mind,—an all-embracing mind in which these opposites and contradictions are wholly resolved. This Infinite Mind contains our minds, as a Unity embraces all relationships. The relationships between our minds and other minds, and between all finite minds and the Absolute Mind, are rational relations to be explored and explained in rational terms. Theology in this view, became wholly a rational enterprise, seeking to explain Christian doctrine—revelation, the trinity, the God-man, redemption—not in the terms of the older theology that sets man apart from God; but in the terms of immanence, the indwelling God. God is in Jesus Christ. He is in each man, too. The God-man in Jesus admittedly is greater than in ordinary man, but not different. Theological method thus became a rational method of expounding familiar Christian doctrines in a new philosophical context—a philosophical context in which the concept of immanence is regulative and sovereign. Hegelianism in American theology is represented in the writings of Josiah Royce, George A. Gordon, W. E. Hocking, Rufus M. Jones, and R. J. Campbell. Of this group, Josiah Royce is perhaps the most distinctive. The Hegelian influence, when it reached American thinkers, tended to fuse with other tendencies. Thus in Royce and Hocking there is a marked pragmatic influence, due, no doubt, to their proximity to James and to the temper of argument with which they had to come to terms in their defense

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of the Absolute. Royce also bears the marks of personal idealism which he derived, in part, from his study with LoTzu. His World and the Individual, while clearly his most Hegelian work, nevertheless reveals his resistance to the tendency, so evident in Hegelians, to allow the human ego to be absorbed in the Absolute. Royce had a strong sense for the integrity of the individual as person. And, in working out the relation between finite minds and the Infinite mind, he struggles to hold together the monistic notion and the pluralism of persons. He accomplished his solution in part through his conception of the internal and external meaning of ideas. The world can be viewed, in Royce’s terms, as a network of conscious wills—purposes projected—which is the inner aspect of reality. The outer aspect consists of these purposes seen in relation to outer facts. It would perhaps be saying too much to suggest that Royce makes a transition between Hegelian absolute idealism and Personalism, but something in this claim is justified. It was laterally the case in his influence upon Howison, who consciously continued tendencies found in Royce such as the emphasis upon the individual. In Howison, this emphasis took the form of an attack upon monism, both in its Hegelianism and in its naturalistic form, and an assertion of the significance of selfhood, with regard to the meaning of God and of man. Ultimately, Howison moved toward LoTzu in emphasizing the substantive reality of persons, as known immediately in self-consciousness. The one who initiated Personalism as a theological movement in America was B. P. Bowne, a student of Lao-Tzu who set to work to reinterpret the Christian doctrines in terms of a spiritualistic metaphysics by which he meant “a world of persons with a supreme person at the head.” 3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge Aside from his literary importance, Coleridge looms as a significant figure in modern religious thought because of his influence upon English theology, particularly among the liturgists and the Christian Socialists, and upon the American theologian, Horace Bushnell. Coleridge was concerned to establish the function of imagination as an intuitive tool of religious thought. It was Lovejoy’s belief that this imaginative faculty, as Coleridge sought to isolate it, was “the moral sense interpreted in terms of the Kantian moral will,” though a “romanticized version of Kant’s practical reason.” There is considerable discussion among the literary critics as to how Kantian Coleridge really was. It is pointed out that, by Temperament,

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Coleridge was a Neo-Platonist. This was his first love; and in his essential outlook, so it is claimed, he never really altered his view. Yet a reading of some of his later poems, more particularly, his Aids to Reflection, and a posthumous publication, Essay on Faith (sometimes included in the later edition of the Aids to Reflection) will convince one that Coleridge had tried to come to terms with the Kantian metaphysics, and believed that it offered critical tools with which to sharpen his concepts. Yet, Coleridge was less concerned with the theoretical outcome of this sharpening than with its practical import. Being a person of acute sensibilities, he was unwilling to apply himself to practical concerns without first being attentive to the discipline of thought and feeling. Nevertheless, one sees his thought moving toward a resolution of all complex theories or doctrines by wresting from their issue what he preferred to call their living truth. One recognizes in this quality of mind the tendency which was to characterize much of later liberal theology wherein the living truth or the meaning of truth for life was to take precedent over all theoretical analysis for its own sake. In no one does this mode of thinking become better exemplified in theological method than in Horace Bushnell. And one can believe that it was this feature of Coleridge’s thought that he found exciting and reassuring. Coleridge’s procedure, when dealing with theological doctrine, was to regard it with reverence as a venerable symbol, bearing valuable historical meaning; and then to employ it as a stimulus to feeling and conduct, which meant, in effect, wresting from the historic institution or belief such illumination of the sensibilities as its deep wisdom might impart without shackling the mind with its alien theoretical meanings. There was always a living meaning to be extracted; and this, too, might be sought in moderation. A. K. Rogers: “Coleridge’s philosophy, in its most general terms, maybe defined as an attempt to put life into the dry bones of the political, religious, and literary orthodoxy of his day, to internalize accepted truth, and translate it back into the personal experience out of which it arose.” Here one will see the particular formulation of the appeal to experience which became for Horace Bushnell, and for others within the liberal tradition following him, the organizing principle defining their theological method. Rogers “For Coleridge, the test of truth is not authority or miracle, but the ability to find men, and affect their conduct and emotions.” Bushnell was to elaborate his Christocentric principle on the basis of his theory of language, insisting like Kant that speculative dogma followed from an unwarranted assertion of reason in a literal sense in a sphere

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where it was misleading; and like Coleridge, that the symbolic meaning of scripture and inherited belief was the only form in which its truth was available to the constructive theologian. Like Kant and Coleridge, Bushnell followed his critique of literal truth in religion with an emphasis upon the practical issues of the religious life. While his method would seem to lend itself to an aesthetic transliteration of dogma, replacing dogma with ritual, Bushnell had no concern to follow this path. The political issues of the state, the education of the young, the spiritual enhancement of the commonwealth—these seemed the ends to which his theology led. One suspects that his poeticizing of dogma was a method of liberation from its rigid meaning, freeing him to employ his informed and sensitive mind in ways that might accord with the opportunities of the contemporary mind; yet in accordance with the spirit of the Christian inheritance. In this tendency, one will recognize a prevalent mood of theological liberalism. Its common formulation is that religion is a life, not a matter of belief or doctrine. It is to be remembered that there followed from Coleridge’s influence in England two quite different religious movements: the one including men like F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley, who believing with Coleridge, that religion is a life, rather than a matter either of historical or of logical evidence, became founders of Christian Socialism in England; the other, impressed by Coleridge’s elevation of doctrine as a symbol, informing of feeling and conduct, were inspired to a renewed emphasis upon liturgy and form. Thus in both instances, while the consequences for religious effort are radically different, the position with regard to the theoretical aspect of religion is much the same. Here liberalism in two different aspects is shorn of the preoccupation with belief as a theoretical matter. Now the inspiration for this development in Coleridge’s thought is to be found in his application of Kant’s practical reason. (Note Aids, pp. 129–30; 344–45. 10th ed., London: Maxon, 1863). 4. Between Hegel and the revival of Kant in the movement sometimes called Neo-Kantianism is the philosophy of Positivism, to which belong the names of Feuerback, Comte, J. S. Mill, and Herbert Spencer. Feuerback claimed to be returning to Kant’s original insight which limited knowledge to the sciences. He accused Kant of being untrue to this insight, restoring the metaphysical bridge with his two later Critiques which he had set out to destroy in the critique of Pure Reason. Religion, he contended, even when justified, as Kant had sought to do, is an illusion of man’s hopes and of wishful projections. The only course of thought and action, he argued, is the one indicated by knowledge which the sciences

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provide. Such knowledge offers us no evidence of an objective deity; but, on the contrary, points us to a reappraisal of man in which we are led to see that what is valued as divine, is in the last analysis, really human. One sees in this formulation a shrewd inversion of both Kant and Hegel. Instead of the Absolute swallowing up the infinite ego as was attributed to Hegel, the subjective mind of man absorbs the Absolute reality as its own experience and valuation. And the estimation of worth, by which Kant built a bridge to objective and ultimate meaning, is interpreted by Feuerback to be the transition to illusion byway of which the subjective valuations take on objective meaning for man. The early phase of Neo-Kantianism has sometimes been referred to as “Half-Kantianism” for, like Positivism, it accepted only part of Kant’s philosophy. It accepted the empirical and skeptical emphasis and rejected the rationalistic element by which Kant carried through his critical metaphysics and his religion based upon moral faith. The theologians in the Kantian tradition were likewise dubious of Kant’s rational element. They rejected speculation and stressed the practical side of Christianity. Their practical emphasis, as Pfleiderer points out, resulted from an adaptation of Kant’s appeal to moral faith. In Kant, this appeal rested upon his a priori rational method; but the theologians did not follow him there. Instead, their appeal to moral faith is supported by a corresponding appeal to religious experience which ultimately rests back upon feeling. Here, no doubt, they were uniting one phase of Kant’s emphasis with that of Schleiermacher. This would characterize particularly the theology of Wilhelm Hermann and to some extent, Albracht Ritschl. We shall return to a discussion of the theological representatives of Kantianism; but first we shall note the further ramifications of the NeoKantian tendency in philosophy and philosophy of religion. 5. The philosopher of religion who did most to transmit the psychological side of Kantian influence was Jakob Friefrich Fries. Fries’ thought will be recognized as the philosophical antecedent of the aesthetic naturalism of Santayana and the ethico-mysticism of Rudolf Otto… In the case of Rudolf Otto, the situation is different. His Philosophy of Religion is acknowledgedly based upon Kant and Fries. Fries centered upon the empirical element in Kant and proceeded to exaggerate the dualism which Kant’s theory of knowledge implied… Rudolf Otto suggests, in his Idea of the Holy, that Fries was employing the Kantian notion of judgment as developed in the Critique of Judgment, pressing this idea to mean a kind of divination, or presentiment by which objective reality was discerned as an immediate intuition. Schleiermacher’s notion of intuition, he feels, is directly related to that of Fries…

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Fries’ analysis led him to identify religion with the aesthetic view of the world—a view which has nothing to do with the world as it is, except to judge it in the light of what it should be. The one who was to press this emphasis even farther, identifying religion with the sphere of practical ideals, was Albert Lange… Unlike Feuerbach, Lange regarded the function of idealization in religion as a feature of great value. IV. 1. Closely allied with the aesthetic naturalism of Albert Lange is the moral idealism of Matthew Arnold… Like other Neo-Kantians, Arnold was concerned to free religion from involvement in metaphysics, and to establish it firmly upon the ground of moral experience. One will recognize in this formulation by Arnold, as well as in the statements by Albert Lange, the antecedents of that mode of conceptualism that was to be employed in varying ways by Edward Scribner Ames and Shailer Matthews. In the latter, some particular influences from social psychology were to give these theories their peculiar emphases; but the view of religion as idealization and of God as a force or reality idealized or personified, is clearly in accordance with these Neo-Kantian tendencies. 2. We may now speak more specifically of the Kantian influence upon liberal theology as it developed through Ritschl, Hermann, and Harnack. Kant’s way of looking at the universe (critical view) had indirect importance for religion. Ritschl contended, “in that it secures that a man shall pass upon himself the same moral judgment as is presupposed as the normal estimate of self by Christianity in its Protestant form.” This advance in epistemological method, said Ritschl, has at the same time the significance of a practical restoration of Protestantism. Ritschl’s theology is an ambiguous embodiment of Kantianism, for it contains within it other elements (e.g., from Schleiermacher and LoTzu) which diverge from the mainstream of Kant’s analysis. Ritschl seized most avidly upon Kant’s practical reason and upon its primacy for establishing the moral freedom of man. To this he added LoTzu’s view of knowledge, from which he derived his insistence upon avoiding metaphysical or mystical inquiries, convinced that any attempt to go beyond “simple representations of faith” toward Idea or being can only issue in metaphysical fiction. Ritschl held with Kant that we cannot know the thing in itself. However, he disagreed with Kant when the latter found no reality in phenomena to which alone understanding is directed. The “world of phenomena,” he argued, “can be posited as the object of knowledge only if in them something real—to wit, the thing in itself—appears to us or is the cause of

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our sensation or perception.” Reality in other words meets us in experience. We may not be able to know it in a theoretical sense; but apprehending it, we may evaluate it; may affirm its meaning for us. Ritschl thus looks for reality in the world of sense rather than in the world of ideas. He looked for the thing in its signs and effects, and did not go beyond them. On this account Ritschl has been called a forerunner of the whole modern pragmatic psychological movement in his exaltation of feeling and willing above the intellect. The Kantian practical reason provided Ritschl with a working tool by which he could justify asserting the moral faith of man as an organizing principle in theology. The Kantian view of judgment as developed in the Critique of Judgment, gave to Ritschl, as to Fries, the technical basis for asserting the right of making value-judgments, in the realm of moral ends where the facts of science could have no relevance. Ritschl, like Fries, accentuated the Kantian dualism, setting the world of moral faith apart from the world of science. This was, in fact, one reason for the appeal of Ritschlianism at the time of its greatest popularity. The idea of value-judgment was, in part, a moral and in part, an aesthetic notion… But this judgment of value of the good will is akin to aesthetic experience, if, in fact it is not, itself, aesthetic. It is the discernment of a quality of experience that elicits meaning in the way in which one discerns meaning of a qualitative sort in a symphony or in a poem. The judgment here is not based upon proof, but upon the apprehension of a quality that is recognized and appreciated in its immediacy. The object of a value judgment has to do with the feeling and willing, rather than the intellectual side, of our personality, and the importance we attach to value-judging will vary in proportion to the value we attach to the feeling and willing side of our nature. 3. Ritschl’s Theology. Wilhelm Hermann reasserted the Ritschlian distinction between the world of nature and the realm of moral experience, and found in the latter the basis for affirming the religious end of both man and nature. Rationally, Hermann claimed, there is no way of proving that religion is not an illusion, for it does not have to do with intellectual propositions; its only demonstration can be in the response of the moral spirit of man. Where it meets the demands of his moral needs it can be seen to be justified morally. Wilhelm Hermann reasserted the Ritschlian distinction between the world of nature and the realm of moral experience, and found in the latter the basis for affirming the religious end of both man and nature.

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Rationally, Hermann claimed, there is no way of proving that religion is not an illusion, for it does not have to do with intellectual propositions; its only demonstration can be in the response of the moral spirit of man. Where it meets the demands of his moral needs it can be seen to be justified morally. 4. The sense in which Kierkegaard has been considered Neo-Kantian may seem a bit strained from our present reading… Kierkegaard, he (Pfleiderer) observed, “sets out like the Neo-Kantians from the position that truth is not a matter of objective thought at all, since such thought has for its contents some form or other of being and hence is quite inadequate for the existing, which is not a being but a becoming. Christianity, in particular, is not a truth which could ever be the subject of scientific knowledge, whether called philosophical or theological or historical. It is rather a relation of existence, which can only be the subject of personal experience, of passionate, infinitely interested appropriation. The truth of it consists entirely in the subjective inwardness and passionateness of personal appropriation of and absorption in the absolute relation of existences on which salvation or its opposite depends. Kierkegaard then indicates that there are “stages along life’s way” leading to the divine life… While the constructive analysis and solution goes beyond Kantianism, it is clear that Kierkegaard’s analysis builds upon the Kantian metaphysics at two points: a) in his differentiation of Christian truth from objective thought, which implies the separation of the realm of faith from the world of science; and b) in his designation of the fulfillment of duty as the condition of absolute freedom through which man can pursue the higher life. In our day, the Kantian influence in theology is seen as an implicit frame of reference in the dialectical theology of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner. Barth amplifies his Kantian leanings in ways strikingly similar to those of Kierkegaard—namely in his appeal to conscience as the voice declaring the “righteousness of God” as over against man’s righteousness implied in religious experience, moral ideals, or human reason; and in his acknowledgement of the Kantian postulates as convincing formulations except that one must go beyond them as postulates and affirm them through faith. Brunner’s dependence upon the Kantian metaphysics is no less marked though in some instances it is subtly veiled, or seemingly rejected when, in point of fact, it provides the only intelligible structure… Brunner makes direct use of Kant’s critical philosophy in at least three ways. First, it is evident that the concepts which define his conception of

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transcendence partake of the Kantian imagery. Not entirely, for Brunner modifies his use of it with what he draws from the biblical view. Like Kant, he holds to an ontological monism; i.e., God and the world are of one order; yet, again like Kant, he insists upon an epistomological dualism. God is hidden as the thing in itself is hidden. There is no direct way to God. Reason cannot attain unto him. The world of experience and of scientific observation, rational inquiry—all are shut out from knowledge of God. Like an oblique ray of the sun, another dimension seems to intrude upon these earth scenes, bringing to the world of history—the linear world of evolutionary history—the light of another realm—the realm that transcends natural causation, being the realm of origins in God’s intentions before temporal causation had begun… More explicit is Brunner’s appropriation of the Kantian notion of radical evil… A third way in which Brunner appropriates the Kantian Critique is in his use of faith as a regulative principle. This is more difficult to establish, for it requires an adequate orientation in the perspective of Brunner’s thinking to see how this usage comes about. Behind this procedure, one sees the Kantian practical reason—issuing not in the same concept, to be sure, but in its correlative faith, operating in a similar manner. Where the practical reason in Kant provided a rational basis for appealing to moral faith as a means of transcending the world of science, of objective thought, a similar analysis establishes faith as an existential alternative to reason and inquiry. By faith one transcends the practices of reason and experience and is made receptive to the divine initiative. 5. The affinities between W. James’ will-to-believe and the Kantian practical reason immediately suggest themselves. Seeley Blither, in his Religion in the Philosophy of William James, has said that the affinities are certainly there and undoubtedly have some relation to each other. The resistance of James to the formal, a priori method of Kant no doubt obscures whatever dependence was real. It is well known that James read the French Kantian, Renouvier with avidity and with considerable agreement. The burden of Reneuvois’s thought was remarkably akin to that of James. Yet Perry insists that James was influenced by Renouvier only at points where the latter rejected Kant. This would seem decisive in the matter of the theory of knowledge where it is clear from James’ Psychology that he regarded it his empirical duty to undo the abstract formalism of Kantianism. On James’ volitional side, the argument is not so convincing. Again, the rigid, rational manner in which Kant reached his emphasis upon the primacy of the practical reason seems alien, even offensive to James. With James, the will to believe was less the product of

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rational analysis, and more of a compounding of the will. James, in describing the process underlying the will to believe as he meant it, said, “The inner process is a succession of ‘synthetic judgments.’ (This term cropping out of James’ vocabulary is interesting). What is so good, may be, ought to be, must be, and shall be,—so far as I am concerned, I won’t admit the opposite.” The difference here from the Kantian analysis is apparent, though a relationship with the refrain “I must, therefore, I can” is there. To satisfy oneself on this matter would require a careful reading of Renouvier and of James’ correspondence with Renouvier at the time when James was feeling his way through the moral problem of faith. No doubt, one would find that the Kantian mode of reasoning permeated, despite the rejections, like a faint overtone of dissonance that nevertheless accompanies and characterizes the melody of the bells. One senses this on reading James; for Kant will appear as a ghost in a phrase as when he writes, “Would God I had never thought of that unhappy title (will-to-believe) for my essay, but called it a Critique of Pure Faith.” V. Kantianism maybe described as the effort to consolidate the gains of rationalism, based upon a Newtonian science, which had been attained by the age of the enlightenment. In this use it was an ally of science; or rather, it was science assuming a reflective role in the interest of responsible and reliable analysis. Yet its responsible interest extended to a concern for the consequences of such scientific certainly for religion, understood as a moral interest. Assured by his own analysis that science is possible, while on the same grounds, metaphysics is not, Kant felt the obligation to press the analysis to determine the sense in which religious affirmation can be sustained. The fact that Kant appealed to the practical reason, lifting up the moral imperative as the criterion for faith, is not to be interpreted as a deviation from the rational method. Rather, it is an accommodation of the rational method to a discrimination in meaning, which, in Kant’s view, differentiated the realms of knowledge and value. Kantianism remained a critical or revised version of rationalism. Absolute Idealism further advanced the appeal to rationality which had been made basic in enlightenment doctrine, giving to it, in fact, a new rationale. It served to entrench conscious experience in its objective form as a ruling force both in thought and in public life. Hegel was really responsible for this turn because it was his particular concern to achieve this degree of objectivity. It was he who suggested that rational analysis, attending only to objective factors, cut traversable paths through the

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wilderness of subjective experience. Such analysis thus enabled one to steer clear of temperamental differences and subjective ambiguities. There is something Hegelian about every subsequent effort to be objective in religion and in public affairs, whether it appears in Dewey’s instrumentalism or in Wieman’s insistence upon the use of scientific method and rational criteria. The ultimate effect of this Hegelian effort to corral experience into paths of rationality was an overemphasis upon rationality and upon conscious experience. The whole of existence was taken to be rational throughout; or in some sense reducible to rational meaning. There was illusion lurking in this assumption; nevertheless the assumption grew in proportions until the whole of Liberalism became infected by it. James and Bergson were among the first to be restive under this excessive assumption of rationality on the grounds mostly that the intellect becomes a barrier to understanding when it proceeds to enclose the mind within rigid, rational defenses. They were aware of the psychic depths that moved with ambiguous impact beneath the surface of conscious experience, and which were left wholly uncalculated by this preoccupation with rational analysis. The dykes of conscious experience were to break wide open in subsequent years, releasing a turbulent flood of irrational force which was to leave the reasonable liberal and idealist gaping in utter bewilderment. The problem of our time is not how to repair the dykes; but how to come to terms with the terrifying fact that reason and unreason ride together in a swift stream of troubled waters. The impact of Bergson and James in this situation is obvious. They initiated the attempt to break through the supercilious mood of Idealism and to grasp with realistic understanding the actualities of the living experience. Meanwhile depth psychology has been making strides. Existentialism has appeared in desperate guise. Dialectical theology with its statements and counterstatements, its yeas and nays, struggles to voice an intelligible word upon what is potently affirmed to be unintelligible. The threat of irrationality that darkens the horizon of our time is the demonic aftermath of an era of excessive and oversimplified clarification. The complexities of the total range of existence have broken in upon us with the force of their pent-up fury. The question that sobers all inquiry is, Can the existential demands of an ever-pressing reality be reconciled with the persisting demand for rationality?—and vice versa? This was the question of James and Bergson; and the question is still with us—only in more urgent form.

1951 Radical Empiricism I have always insisted that it is practically impossible to understand a philosopher or a theologian in what he affirms or asserts until you succeed in finding his standing ground and then look at what he proposes to discuss from that point of orientation. In the comments that follow I have tried to assume William James’ stance and from this vantage point to offer some guidance for grasping his view of the knowing process within a metaphysics of Radical Empiricism. 1. The best clue I have come upon to orient one’s thinking for grasping James’ discussion of Radical Empiricism is a statement on page 230 of the volume, Essays in Radical Empiricism in which he writes: In Professor Høffding’s massive little article in The Journal of Philosophy, “Psychology and Scientific Methods” (Vol. II, 1905, pp.75–92), he quotes a saying of Kierkegaard’s to the effect that we live forward, but we understand backwards.98 Understanding backwards is, it must be confessed, a very frequent weakness of philosophers, both of the rationalistic and of the ordinary empiricist type. Radical empiricism alone insists on understanding forward also, and refuses to substitute static concepts of the understanding for transitions in our moving life.

2. Now this effort to understand forward, turning the process of knowing in the direction of living, or of treating the act of knowing as a process occurring simultaneously with the act of living, is a form of existentialist thinking. It is thinking out of a situation of existing; or of letting the existent moment assume a sharpened, attentive focus without losing its context, or departing from it; and without shifting direction through some conceptual or imaginative means. 3. Both the withdrawal from a context and the shifting of direction away from the life-process become acts of transcending the living situation, either in the form of rising above it to a fixed point of observation, or of reversing direction, thus seeing what is moving forward from a suspended vantage point, or from a head-on encounter in flight. The effect of the latter is to cancel out movement, thus holding observation to fixed points. 4.These fixed points, in turn, become the sensory stimulus, arousing the cognitive machinery to action as a camera might capture the passing image in action with the imagery of static concepts. Radical Empiricism,

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repeating James’ words quoted earlier, “refuses to substitute static concepts of the understanding for transitions in our moving life.” 5. From this vantage ground of understanding forward with the movement of living, James sees these “transitions in our moving life” to be the existential counterpart of “self-transcendency in knowledge.” For these transitions constitute a going beyond the present moment of self to a More of reality. But, whereas self-transcendency in the purely conceptual act extricates the mind from its bodily feelings and from the living flow of experience, the participation in transitions, as a knowing act, brings one a feeling of transitions and enables one to recognize the relations thus given as being given in experience. 6. Such feelings of transition provide an existential depth to the mind’s functioning such that it takes on awareness of the occurrence and of objects encountered within the occurrence. In its most undifferentiated state such awareness approaches pure experience, pure experience being the cognitive term for this moment of life, or what I have sometimes called “the creative passage.” Sheer absorption in activity with a minimum of reflection upon its transitions, its course, direction, or ends, gives one his clearest sense of pure experience; though this must be taken as an approximation to its meaning rather than a definition or even an analogy. 7.Absorption in activity yields a sense of knowing which is what James has described as “knowledge by acquaintance,” a kind of bodily communication in which the total organism collaborates to report its encounter with experience as a confession of orientation. The inner character of this kind of knowing does not close it off from communicable experience altogether; for the orientation breaks through to the level of “knowledge about” in two ways: a) It forms the primal depth of propositions or comments which are made upon observed relations, the relations being simply the observable structural counterpart of felt transitions. The sharpened knowledge for communicable purposes with its public symbols and ordered discourse, designed to give wider assimilation of meaning, rests back, in each instance of knowing, upon this complex of feeling that informs the mind bodily. However opaque this deeper context of meaning may be to other minds engaged in the conversation, the feeling of context appears in some form, even if only in the form of an obstacle to assimilation. b) This deeper orientation breaks through again to the level of “knowledge about” in so far as people of common experiences within a given community, for example, speak out of a common fund of felt experiences. The silences or spaces between uttered words then become communicable, serving to give emphasis and weight to what is expressively shared. Disengagement from these depths by studied attention to

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observable relations only, as in abstract inquiry, places the full burden of communication upon definition of terms or upon verification in measurement or experimentation. 8. Yet, for the radical empiricist, the truth of disciplined inquiry must also rest back ultimately upon the norm of experience and remain within the bounds of experience. This is a way of saying that within radical empiricism generalizations are most truly adequate when they are simply the concrete meanings fully elaborated. 9. Understanding forward implies that in encountering anything one’s thought moves with the object toward its goal. Thus one’s thought and the physical activity or process form a configuration of movement and find their common center in the end sought. The thought is one path of differentiation within experience; the thing, or object, taken with its transitions, another path. The one path may be identified or traced conceptually as a movement of mind having neurological consequences and bodily feelings; the other path may be identified externally as relations which, being dynamic, form into a pattern of events or structure and can therefore be observed, measured, or in other ways made subject to verification. Thus thing and thought in any instance of cognition are to be seen as simultaneous acts of differentiation, pursuing, as it were, independent yet concomitant courses toward the end of verification or completion. 10. The cognitive act is not simply a direct encounter between subject and object. This is to strip the event bare and to accentuate the role of attention, even taking it exclusively to be the act of consciousness. What James’ radical empiricism sought to do was to seize the total phenomenon of differentiation which shocked the immediate or pure experience out of its passivity or neutrality into intentional, purposeful acts. 11. The configuration of conscious activity thus thrust up embraces not only thought and thing, but the depth of undifferentiated experience which adumbrates both thought and thing; or, to use James’ language, which presents both of them “fringed.” So viewed the deeper stratum of the knowing process, according to James, is not the subject-object relationship, which after all appears to be relatively superficial, but the threshold of immediate experience which initially is given in perception and, at the attentive moment of consciousness, persists as a fringe of undefined awareness. 12. Consciousness thus appears to be an instant of focused activity within pure experience precipitated by some stimulus or interest which, in turn, elicits a dual response: one on the plane of reflection which is thought, another on the plane of physical action, which is thing. Because it

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is a manifold, structured by the interacting parts according to a logic of creativity within pure experience, any instance of consciousness can be interpreted from any one of its various facets. From one point it can be taken quite subjectively as being dominantly a mental event, involving bodily feelings and having outward physical or environmental consequences. From another point, conceivably, it can be taken objectively to be a pattern of dynamic relations which may be openly observed or abstracted for closer scrutiny. From still another point both subjective and objective dimensions can be taken simultaneously as a total event involving a depth of orientation which neither dimension taken separately can assimilate as its own. Here we have indicated the privately personal, the scientific or communicative, and the metaphysical standpoints from which consciousness may be viewed, interpreted, or judged. 13. Consciousness, then, instead of being an underlying stuff waiting to be roused into action, or issuing in specific experiences, appears to be an emergent from pure experience under circumstances precipitated by attention and act motivated by interest, will, or intention. 14. The notion which slips in and out of James’ discussion of consciousness is “pure experience.” Since this term is so basic to James’ thought we should try to grasp its meaning as fully as possible. It is important, too, because it is along the line of clarifying and elaborating this notion that we come upon the empirical ground of Whitehead and Wieman. The simplest equivalent of the notion “pure experience” is immediate experience. In taking the term at this simplified level we sharpen up the difference between Kant and James; for Kant, to quote Professor Thilly, “was dubious about approaching anything by way of immediate experience. The closer we come to immediacy,” he felt, “the nearer we are to chaos and the farther from truth” (History of Philosophy, p. 432). Pure experience, understood as immediate experience, constituted the basis of Ernst Mach’s theory of knowledge. Mach, a contemporary of James, was a German positivist and something of a forerunner of the new realism which, like pragmatism and radical empiricism, was in reaction against Absolute Idealism as well as against the Cartesian-Newtonian world view. Charles Morris, in Six Theories of Mind, points out that the realists were influenced mainly by mathematical and physical sciences in their revolt against idealism; the pragmatists, by the biological, psychological, and social sciences. Another positivist, Avenarius, professor of philosophy at Zurich, SwiTzurland, also employed the term “pure experience” in the sense of immediate experience. He held that “Pure experience is the experience common to all possible individual experiences… Originally, he

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believed, all men had the same notion of the world; but by ‘introjecting’ into experience thought, feeling, and will, by splitting it up into outer and inner experience, into subject and object, reality was falsified. By eliminating ‘introjection’ Avenarius concluded we restore the original natural view of the world: pure experience” (Thilly, p. 566). James was working at this problem with these various conceptions in mind, but his formulation of it came out this way: “Pure experience is the name which I give to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories” (Radical Empiricism, p. 93). As James developed this notion, it appeared to be his way of designating the primal, undifferentiated flux in which each individual experience or selfhood has its beginning, derives its content as an individuated self, and to which self-experience periodically returns as the critical or egoistic focus lapses into a wider identity. Is this not an attempt at an empirical designation of the undifferentiated ground of self-experience? 15. Ralph Barton Perry writes, “James and Bergson agreed, as against Peirce and Dewey, in assigning a cognitive role both to concepts and to immediate experience. They were unwilling to deny immediacy the title of knowledge because, although it can reveal only the flowing and qualitative aspect of things, this is an aspect of things to which there is no mode of access save by immediacy” (The Thought and Character of William James, Vol. II, p. 602). Process philosophers and theologians ever since have divided among themselves on this issue. It is, in fact, the sharpest point at which I find my own thought diverging from that of Wieman’s. It is not difficult to determine, I think, who is on which side. Bernard E. Meland

1952 The Pathology of Form and Symbol The reluctance to recognize the fallibility of our human forms and symbols in addressing ultimate issues is by no means limited to our modern modes of discourse. It has been at the root of much of the folly and vainglory of our religious history in the West. It has been evident throughout Christian history in the formulation of dogmas believed to be authoritative for the faith, and in the prescription of rites and practices deemed essential to adherence to the faith. At times disregard of the fact of human fallibility in perception and expression has assumed pathological proportions, leading to arrogant, even violent means of empowering the letter of dogma. One of the follies of Christian history has been the correlating of faith with belief, formulated as doctrine and elevated to the status of dogma, for the equating of these terms has obscured, if not routed, the more wistful, sensitive, and deeply reverent connotation of the religious outreach of man expressed in the elemental themes of the faith. The defining and formative motif of the Christian perspective upon the experiences of man, as this tends to emerge in the Christian mythos, is expressed in the redemptive theme; a theme that mounts in proportion and detail until finally it is represented as a fully elaborated drama of redemption. This motif has empirical roots in certain historical events of Hebraic-Christian history in which apprehensions of God’s efficacy are said to have been recorded, as elemental folk will take note of such things. These apprehensions came to be celebrated in folksong and folklore as a commonly shared “wisdom of the people,” to use Dorothy Emmet’s phrase.99 But more than that, they were later given articulate, sophisticated expression in the prophetic sermons and poetry of exceptional seers who saw critical implications of judgment and hope in these events beyond the common celebrations of them. Folklore, prophetic sermons and poetry, then the Law! The Law was not contrary to these sensitive apprehensions; it was the systematic codification of them. Yet, the Law, expressing the accumulative and integrated wisdom of generations of tradition, was as the root and stalk of the flowering that was to break forth as a revelatory disclosure in the person of a Jewish villager, Jesus, who was to be called the Christ. In that person and in events continuous with Him, there appeared to emerge a

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new kind of wisdom, at once more simple and penetrating, correlating judgment and grace, which had spontaneity of meaning that could not be contained in law or in any similarly measured wisdom. It was “gospel as over against the law,” some were moved to say; a creative word as over against a created word; seemingly the Word of God as over against words which men, in collaboration with one another, had fashioned into Law or into moral directives. Yet this overstates the contrast; for, as has been noted, the Law, itself, had emerged out of sensitive apprehensions distilled from generations of living; and the gospel, for all its forbearance and openness to the spontaneous and innovating good subsumed within its gracious acts the integrity of the law as a witness to the role of judgment. Nevertheless, the gospel stood apart, elevating to the stature of God, Himself, Him to whom the new wisdom, the new Word, had been attributed. Hero-worship was undoubtedly present here, but that does not obscure, nor need it detract from, the critical fact that the reality of a new consciousness, “a new creation,” did come into history, giving rise to a “revelation in act,” to use Whitehead’s phrase, what had been “divined in theory.”100 “The revelation in act” through the person of Jesus who was to be called the Christ, gave rise to “the gospel,” then the community of witnesses, out of which emerged the reality of the Church. The community of witness was to the Church what the apprehensions of faith had been to the drama of redemption: formative beginnings of .a holistic movement that was to assume integration and articulate structure. This community of witness was more than a simple response among people to the person of the Christ and to the gospel. It was a bodying forth of that revelatory act, or event, lifting to communal relationship what had been as a new creation of individuated consciousness and intention. The subtle process by which the sensitive core of an individuated spirit is insinuated into a corporate movement of faith is one of the mysterious occurrences of human history. And the forming of the communal witness, giving to this nucleus of revelatory being and act carrying power, cultural actuality, and persistence beyond its initial, individuated form, is one of the remarkable instances of that subtle process. The Church as the body of Christ has almost a literal connotation when seen in this contextual imagery. The passage from the seminal state of a communal witness to the status of a fully organized Christendom is an exceedingly complex phenomenon of Western history. We need to note here only that, in assuming more definitive structure, this communal witness underwent much of the folly of all created events; though it partook of their glory as well. The claim of the informal sects and denominations that the history of the Christian Church

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after New Testament times is a history of corrupting developments through instances of idolatry has some point to it. Such point as it has, however, reflects upon the emergence of the informal sects and denominations as well as upon the forming of more formal institutions of Christianity. There is formal idolatry, and there is informal idolatry. The formal fashioning of idols, of creating God in the human image, has generally been carried out on a grand scale; heavy doctrines resonant with man’s ponderous reason, charting the course of God’s ways among men; fixed liturgical acts, held together by the intoning of man’s voice, declaring the route by which God has come to man, and prescribing the way man may come to God; works of religious art, sculptured facades of great cathedrals, the immense ornamentation of places of worship—these, it would appear, bear loud testimony to man’s idolatrous acts, gathering up impressions of deity into the form of man’s own handiwork. But informal idolatry, though less pretentious, less disciplined, less carefully conceived, less objective, thus less visible, is just as surely man’s act of presuming to command God to appear in man’s image. The overweening sentiment of the revival, improvised modes of worship, flaunting disdain for disciplined expression in shabby tunes and scandalous prayers; the restricted moral vision and ideals of the chaste Protestant zealot, or the vaunting of religious ideals and values, these, too, bend the vast reality of God’s holiness and goodness to the measure of man’s forms and symbols, and to the measure of meaning they express. Idolatry, however, is not to be accounted sheer evil or blasphemy. For the making of God in man’s image can be simply the human act of articulating man’s apprehensions of God in the way that the artist hand portrays the inconceivable with subtlety and indirection; or as the child in man projects his own image in ideal form. Since God in his all-wisdom must have a sense of humor, He cannot but be amused at such child-play, emulating his handiwork, though reversing the principle of creation, in making God in the image of man. For this is what all symbolic response to actuality really comes to: setting up prescribed forms and acts for approaching the deity, either in providing a literature of prayer, or in relying on spontaneous utterances; formulating doctrines and elevating them to the status of dogma; designating a body of clergy as God’s special emissaries, giving to them the power of the keys, establishing within this human hierarchy the semblance of God’s realm. This is a sort of playacting which must amuse, rather than infuriate, the Holy One. There would be no evil in it, so it would seem, if men were not to take these idolatrous acts of theirs so seriously; if, in establishing the “proper” worship of God within a liturgy of prayer and song, they could acknowledge them as being

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expressive of their own abilities and sensibilities and could, as it were, look over their shoulders to the deity and say, “Father, forgive our audacity and these pitiable efforts to provide in our witness the propriety and earnestness your holiness and goodness deserve.” Likewise, in the erecting of church buildings, the chiseling out of creedal statements, doctrines, or the forming of canon law; these could be done humbly, in good humor, and with great art, employing the best of men’s creative genius to express and to elaborate what, in the nature of the case, any sane man, not to mention a reverent one, must know cannot be expressed, cannot be adequately grasped with mind or imagination. But man has gone the second mile in his idolatry. What he has created with his own hands, what he has fashioned with his mind, what he has come upon in his reflections as decisions of expediency or of judgment as being acceptable belief or conduct he has set the hand and seal of God’s name. And this is to compel the deity to speak with finality through these frail, fallible and meager structures of our own creation. It is sad enough that God must work through the limited structures of his creation. Well, not altogether sad. There is a glory in it, too, expressing the Almighty genius through limited materials. Any artist or creative person can appreciate that predicament; yet admit its satisfaction and challenge as well. But to have these fallible forms assume the audacity and authority of deity, itself, and through this usurpation of power, effect a rule of tyranny, oppression, even bloodshed, this is no innocent playacting. This is idolatry with a vengeance: an exhibition of man trying to be God, which even a gracious deity cannot take lightly or in good humor. It is to turn the sense of the sacred into a sacrilege. Nowhere is this sacrilege more evident than in the transposition of the gospel witness into legal directives for exercising power through church law. Whitehead was pointing to such an instance of pathology in that memorable passage in Process and Reality where he wrote: When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered; and the received text of Western theology was edited by his lawyers. The code of Justinian and the theology of Justinian are two volumes expressing one movement of the human spirit. The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly. In the official formulation of religion it has assumed the trivial form of a mere attribution to the Jews that they cherished a misconception about their Messiah. But the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar. (pp. 513–20).

The intensity of these words betrays some bitterness and possibly a lack of

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proportion; yet they point up the truth of the folly our history has wrought. We should deride this overplaying of the human hand in assuming the role of the sovereign God through our man-made forms and institutions; but we should do so, I am inclined to think, with restrained ridicule that gives evidence of some understandings of our human fallibility; and, at the same time, some sympathy for the genuinely important task to which all earnest theologians and churchmen stand committed. For the creeds and the historic doctrines form a legitimate part of this continuing Christian witness. They represent a different level of witnessing than do the more eloquent and often elemental testimonies of biblical sages and poets. In their best efforts they represent what might be called the apologetic voice of the church, speaking out against what they consider to be a more blatant form of idolatry; at times against an alien, religious zeal; at times against a particular philosophical tradition, and even against philosophers themselves when they would seek to translate the Christian gospel into philosophy. Sterling P. Lamprecht, as philosopher, addressed this issue when he wrote: Historians of the Church were once prone to say that the formulation of the creeds marked the victory of philosophy over religion. Exactly the opposite is the case. The heretics were the philosophical minds who tried in one way or another to rationalize Christian beliefs and to make the beliefs lucid to the human mind. They always gained lucidity however—in so far as they gained it at all—by pursuing some selected principle to a logical outcome, thus purchasing simplicity at the price of neglect of other interests which were primary to other Christians. The Church has never deliberately wished to be the enemy of philosophy. But in becoming Catholic the Church maintained that it possessed a body of religious truth which had authority antecedent to the emergence of philosophical speculation and had validity independently of the varying results of those speculations. When the Church triumphed over the heretics, religion won a victory over philosophy. Philosophy might come and philosophy might go, but religion remained permanently in possession of a body of beliefs which depended on no human defense for their right to common assent. As an ecumenical council had the function of enlightening the meandering enthusiasms and vacillating sensitivities of human impulses, so the creeds had the function of correcting the doctrinaire bias and speculative imaginations of human minds.101

This is over-generous toward the theologians; but some generosity is appropriate here in trying to understand what theologians were about. One who fails to see in these arduous labors of creed building some genuine continuity with the persisting, ongoing Christian witness simply overlooks an intellectual dimension of Christian faith to which these Catholic-

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minded forebears bequeathed to the act of witnessing a discipline wholly on par with that of the moral discipline for which the Protestant Christians have shown such concern. It was a discipline in several ways. It had some of the discipline of the philosophic mind, for it required considerable discussion with and against philosophers; and often some editing of philosophies. But in addition it manifested the discipline that is peculiar to the responsible theologian who is concerned, not to pursue the easy course of simply adapting religion to philosophy or of absorbing religious insight wholly and completely into a philosophical system; but of confronting each with claims appropriate to their respective modes of disciplined inquiry. One can say all this in full sympathy with the creed-builders and system-makers in theology, however, and still insist upon the strictures enunciated earlier in challenging the theologians’ use of our fallible human forms and symbols. There was idolatry in these efforts to erect a theological citadel; the kind of idolatry that inheres in every creative act of man. To act creatively is man’s vocation in highest form. Yet, to act creatively in thought or in art is to insinuate into the divine image fallible human forms. No mortal man escapes this dilemma because it is of a piece with his limitations as creature to intrude his structure of consciousness, his spirit, upon whatever he handles seriously. Yet the seriousness of his idolatry is magnified in proportion to his lack of humility, proportion, and humor in his creation. Humility impels the creative mind to acknowledge the impulse toward human projection in all one’s creative effort. Proportion provides a safeguard against bigotry and its narrowing zeal. And humor may evoke a stance of healthy self-criticism, enabling one to sec the shocking limitations of one’s own utterances, even as he holds to them as being the best he can offer in expressing clarification, commitment, and dedication. The lack of either breeds arrogance in thought and action, turning doctrines and dogmas into tools of tyranny and repression. III. It would not be amiss to say that historically, Catholicism, both Eastern and Western, brought to the Christian witness facilities for giving it visible, tangible form, possibly enabling it to reach its most sophisticated, profound, and disciplined expression both as a liturgical and a cultural art. And, in Western culture, Catholicism cradled the arts. This Gives substance to the claim that, when persons of literate or cultivated taste have turned to the Christian religion, they have turned to Catholicism or to one of its moderate reforms such as the Anglican or Episcopal communion. It may explain too why many Protestants, chafing under an impassioned, but intellectually deprived, zeal in evangelical sects, have

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looked half enviously upon the more structured Catholic legacy. In this respect, the comment by the Roman Catholic theologian, Gustave Weigel, concerning the late Paul Tillich is interesting. Said Father Weigel: Tillich is not anti-Catholic and at one time of his life he considered entering the Church. He thinks that the substance of the Christian revelation is better preserved in Catholicism than in Protestantism. He merely objects to the strong tendency of absolutizing the Church, its dogmas, its morality, and its sacraments. He denies vigorously any ex opere operate power in those things, though they can be legitimate as existentialist symbols.102

In view of Tillich’s severe strictures upon these heteronomous characteristics of Catholicism, to say that Tillich “merely objected” to them radically understates Tillich’s position. Wilhelm Pauck has characterized Tillich’s view more accurately in saying that he was highly appreciative of the theonomous interims of Catholicism notably exemplified in the twelfth (Bernard of Clairvaux) and thirteenth (Bonaventura) centuries.103 Catholicism, then, following in the path of a Graeco-Latin ethos, was bent on a self-conscious idolatry, giving form and stricture to the Christian witness, even establishing an authoritative institution of the Christian faith presuming to represent God on earth. Protestant Christianity, by contrast, following more closely the Hebraic ethos, became self-consciously the foe of idolatry, notably in its utterances, and thus an enemy of formalism in expressing the Christian witness. Professor Tillich spoke of this stance as “ the Protestant principle.” This principle, stemming from the Reformers’ belief in Justification by grace through faith, affirms trust in the goodness of God, which, by implication, places every human good under judgment. The negative way of expressing this principle is to say that Protestant Christianity protests against every structure or form which presumes to be in the image of God or to embody his righteousness. Strictly applied, Protestant Christianity can assume only a prophetic function, a voice of judgment against all pretensions to emulate or to represent the goodness of God in culture; and against all tendencies to arrest the dynamic of spirit in concrete or institutional embodiment. In its negative expression, therefore, the Protestant principle has moved toward iconoclasm and cultural asceticism, countering both the Catholic and the humanistic ideal of culture. In extreme, negative form, it has countenanced anti-intellectualism along with its anti-aesthetic and anti_cultural expressions. Thus the Protestant can become self-consciously and self-righteously illiterate in taste and understanding. And many Protestants have prided themselves in having achieved that goal, and in promoting their self-conscious

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commitment to illiteracy as being expressive of their biblical faith, immune to the depravities of cultural values and experiences. But the pursuit of this negative conception of the Protestant principle has always led to a caricature of Protestantism, and to a perversion of its premise, “The just shall live by faith.” For that premise is essentially a doctrine of affirmation. It implies acceptance of the sinner by a righteous God, even as both sin and sinner stand under the judgment of His grace and forgiveness. In like manner, it implies acceptance of cultural goods and cultural forms, even as every human form, from intellectual propositions to creative art, and every other form of culture, came under the judgment of the creative act of God. In the introduction to his book, The Protestant Era, Tillich recorded a moving account of his own early experiences in relation to this point. Recalling his former teacher; Professor Martin Kähler, as “a man who, in his personality and theology, combined traditions of Renaissance humanism and German classicism with a profound understanding of the Reformation and with strong elements of the religious awakening of the mid-nineteenth century,” Tillich wrote: Kähler’s central idea was justification through faith, the idea that separated Protestantism from Catholicism and that became the so-called “material” principle of the Protestant churches. He was able not only to unite this idea with his own classical education but also to interpret it with great religious power for generations of humanistically educated students. Under his influence a group of advanced students and younger professors developed the new understanding of the Protestant principle in different ways. The step I myself made in these years was the insight that the principle of justification through faith refers not only to the religious-ethical, but also to the religious-intellectual life. Not only he who is in sin, but also he who is in doubt is justified through faith. The situation of doubt, even of doubt about God, need not separate us from God. There is faith in every serious doubt, namely, the faith in the truth as such, even if the only truth we can express is our lack of truth. But if this is experienced in its depth and as an ultimate concern, the divine is present; and he who doubts in such an attitude is ‘justified’ in his thinking. So the paradox got hold of me that he who seriously denies God affirms him. Without it I could not have remained a theologian. There is, I soon realized, no place beside the divine, there is no possible atheism, there is no wall between the religious and the non-religious. The holy embraces both itself and the secular. Being religious is being unconditionally concerned, whether this concern express itself in secular or (in the narrower sense) religious forms. The personal and theological consequences of these ideas for me were immense. Personally, they gave me at the time of their discovery, and always since then, a strong feeling of relief. You cannot reach God by the work of right

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thinking or by a sacrifice of the intellect or by a submission to strange authorities, such as the doctrines of the church and the Bible. You cannot, and you are not even asked to try it. Neither works of piety nor works of morality nor works of the intellect establish unity with God. They follow from this unity, but they do not make it. They even prevent it if you try, to reach it through them. But just as you are justified as a sinner (though unjust, you are just), so in the status of doubt you are in the status of truth. And if all this comes together and you are desperate about the meaning of life, the seriousness of your despair is the expression of the meaning in which you still are living. This unconditional seriousness is the expression of the presence of the divine in the experience of utter separation from it. It is this radical and universal interpretation of the doctrine of justification through faith which has made me a conscious Protestant.104

What stature this gives to the Protestant stance! The principle of protest, then, is against absolutizing these human forms, and against depending upon them as indispensable and infallible paths to God, against employing them as alternatives to the act of faith. They are to become, instead, expressions of faith in various modes, and in that sense the fruition of faith, even of the faith that is half despair, or the faith that rises from despair. On these grounds, engaging in intellectual inquiry, appreciating beauty, responding to disciplined expression in taste, achieving skills, pursuing creative imagination, investing one’s talents, engaging responsibly and with zest in one’s work, reclaiming the waste places in city or open country, rehabilitating society, or but one human life—these are fulfillments of the human spirit, thereby fulfilling God’s creative act in man. They are ends to be served, having intrinsic value in and of themselves, as expressions of man forming and reforming the culture. The act of faith, though in no sense dependent upon these “works,” Protestantism has insisted, may be materially altered, even enhanced, deepened, and disciplined by them. For the act of faith is not one thing, nor one kind of thing, but a sequence of many acts and stages in possessing and repossessing the truth of God as a correlation, even a fusion, of vision and trust. The faith grasped in the moment of despair may deepen with the realization of one’s being accepted and forgiven. And the growth of understanding, of sensitivity in perception and judgment may enlarge the scope and reach of one’s faith. Thus the life of the mind can be brought within the orbit of faith to the fulfillment of each. Likewise the truth of God that is implicit in the experience of doubt can be lived for and sought after in the act of inquiry, in which case the doubt may persist, even as knowledge is attained. Yet the doubt, and such assurance as knowledge can bring, combine to create a new level of apprehension and inquiry. The

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truth and the object of truth are not at the end of our inquiry, but present in it, accepting us for whatever measure of doubt persists, as well as for whatever measure of understanding we may have as we continue to look and to probe, as through a glass darkly. Protestant Christianity has in its grasp acute insight into the meaning of faith for the life of despair; into the meaning of faith for the life of the mind; and into the meaning of faith for the life of the human spirit within culture. The stark, historical fact is, however, that Protestant Christianity has persisted far below the level of such insight. For the most part, one must admit with sadness, it has followed an indolent course in ignoring the Protestant principle, thus becoming as entrenched within rigid religious forms of doctrine and liturgy, or in cultural mores, as Catholicism ever did; or it has followed an extreme course in observing the Protestant principle negatively, engaging in excesses of iconoclasm, protest, and illtempered reform to the neglect of the creative life of the culture. Thus, instead of availing itself of the major role of repossessing and reaffirming the Christian witness in the light of its Reformation insight into the act of faith, Protestantism has been content with trivializing, even brutalizing that witness of faith. And, instead of providing a discipline of culture consonant with its doctrine of faith, it has in numerous instances been content to decry all cultural form and structure, even rejecting the intellectual life as being irrelevant to the life of faith. This irresponsibility in Protestantism toward structure and form has worked havoc in the life of Western culture wherever Protestantism has been in dominance. It has undoubtedly been the source of much disillusionment among the youth of Protestant communities during their growing years in which they have been brought simultaneously under the tutelage of a cultural heritage and a repressive attitude toward that heritage. If the idolatrous impulse in Roman Catholicism tends to confuse man’s creations with the creativity of God, the iconoclasm of the Protestant ethos through the years has tended to disvalue and even to deny the import of the doctrine of Creation, namely, that man, in the image of God, is a creator; and that in the act of creative labor and imagination he is most expressively participating in the creative acts of God. The pathology of idolatry in man lies, not in such creative acts themselves, but in the pretensions and arrogance with which he makes of them the prescribed channels of God’s work of grace and his vehicle of judgment. The intent of this essay has been to affirm the salient thrust of both the Catholic and the Protestant traditions; yet to point up a pathology that inheres in each of them in giving expression to themes of the holy within human forms and symbols. Catholicism has exercised freedom in the

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creative and imaginative use of such symbols and forms. Protestantism, on the other hand, has insisted upon a sensibility of restraint in such usage, even precluding such expressiveness altogether. Human expressiveness, however, can occur in no other way than through man’s fallible forms. Thus, when either mode of expressiveness, whether through creative imagination, or through the denial of it, is made anything more than a sensibility of thought or feeling appropriate to religious expressiveness, it takes on pathological characteristics of insolence and pride, turning what would otherwise be simply modes of expressiveness within the Christian witness, into forms or procedures made binding upon the Word of God, or set forth in His Name as being binding upon the consciences and practices of men. Either way, the idolatry inherent in all human expressiveness when addressing divinity is thereby rendered pathological.

1955 The Roots of Religious Naturalism Neo-naturalism is that movement of thought in modern theology and philosophy which defines the basic unit of reality as dynamic event and which sees all events in an organic context. The contemporary names generally associated with this movement of thought would include the organismic philosophers of Great Britain such as C. Lloyd Morgan,105 S. Alexander,106 Jan Smuts,107 (and to some extent, the theologian William Temple108); as well as the American religious thinkers and philosophers Alfred North Whitehead,109 Henry Nelson Wieman110 and, to some extent, Charles Hartshorne.111 The philosopher Harry Overstreet,112 and the theologian, Justin Wroe Nixon,113 give evidence also of having come under its influence. The name of Gerald Birney Smith might properly be identified with this stream of thought; though his writings give no clear indication of this affinity, it was evident to me, during the last years of his life that his mind was moving constructively in the direction of the organismic philosophers, especially Jan Smuts. His enthusiasm for Wieman was due in large part to the fact that his writings seemed to give answer to troublesome questions which the organismic philosophers were posing for him. A younger group, representing varying emphases, but explicit in their identification with this orientation, arc Gregory Vlastos,114 Harold Bosley,115 Edwin Walker,116 Bernard M. Loomer,117 and, to a modified degree, Daniel D. Williams.118 And I should add myself.119 To this more luminous center of confirmed naturalists, should be added what might be called naturalists on the fringe. This would include eclectic minds like John Dennett120 and Walter Marshall Horton,121 both of whom have acknowledged affinities with Mr. Wieman. It, at one time, included Charles Clayton Morrison,122 though his relations to it now are ambiguous. It might include Robert I. Calhoun123 as a sort of second cousin, or better, as a step-brother. In a more remote way still, it would include Nels Ferré,124 but this would simply mean that Ferré could be conversant with the brothers. Ferré is not one of the brothers. In similar fashion, the philosopher, Paul Weiss,125 and possibly Dan Williams at Harvard, should be included. Dorothy Emmet,126 of England, once a disciple of Whitehead, now veers in another direction; though she still bears affinities with the group. Likewise the philosopher Conger, whose book Ideologies of

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Religion contains a discussion of the modern naturalists. So also does Wieman’s Growth of Religion and, of course, our American Philosophies of Religion. The company of second cousins should certainly have to include also John Dewey,127 George Herbert Mead,128 and more recently Stephen Pepper, author of Aesthetic Quality and World Perspectives; and the physicists, Jeans129 and Eddington.130 The beginnings of this form of thought can be specified. a) Its Antecedents would of course include the British empiricists, Locke and Hume, and the biologists, Lamark and Charles Darwin. But it might be claimed that these are important to this movement only as formative influences in the thought of William James and Bergson. b) The beginnings of the new naturalism on their philosophical side are James and Bergson—particularly Bergson’s book, Creative Evolution (1911) and James’ two essays, “Some Observations in Introspective Psychology,” which later appeared as Chapter IX, “The Stream of Thought,” in his Psychology; and “Does Consciousness Exist?” which first appeared in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, and later was included as the opening chapter in Essays in Radical Empiricism. Whitehead in his Science and the Modern World, attributes to William James the inauguration of the new stage in philosophy in the publication of his essay “Does Consciousness Exist?” which first appeared in 1904 in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods. In this essay, James denied that the word “consciousness” stands for an entity and insisted that it connotes a function. In so doing, says Whitehead, James was challenging a conception of the mind which had been initiated by Descartes in his Discourse on Method, published in 1637, thus bringing to an end a philosophical period which had undergirded scientific materialism for two hundred and fifty years. The full import of this decisive step away from materialistic naturalism becomes clearer when one realizes that with James, philosophy moved beyond the habit of thinking in terms of physical notions and entered upon an era in which physiology was to provide its basic language. While James must be credited with initiating the method of thinking that was to create the new naturalism, the introduction of the physiological language into philosophy must be attributed to Bergson, whose memorable volume Creative Evolution, published in 1911, stands as the pioneer work in evolutionary naturalism. How close James and Bergson were in their pioneering thrusts in this direction can be appreciated best by perusing their exchange of letters. Bergson and James both reacted against the mathematical view of the world in favor of a philosophy drawn from

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concrete experience. Their differences doubtless arose, as Professor Perry has suggested in his The Thought and Character of William James, from the fact that James took Darwin as his scientific guide, while Bergson preferred to follow Lamarck. Bergson chose Lamarck rather than Darwin on the grounds that the former’s view of evolution provided an explanation of the adaptation of organisms, enabling different parts and different combinations of causes to effect similar results. The explanation of this convergence of effects he found in an inner directing principle which the Lamarckian interpretation admitted, and which the Darwinian view did not. This no doubt accounts for the more subjective and mystical character of Bergson’s thought, as compared with James’ radical empiricism.131 Both James and Bergson broke with the intellectualism implicit in philosophical idealism and in the earlier critical thought of Kant. Each did it in his own way—James by elaborating his view of the stream of thought, showing that both the intellectualist and the sensationalist had overlooked the transitive elements in thought, fixing only upon the substantive elements; Bergson by a direct attack upon intellect, insisting that the mathematical mind, which to him was the clearest exemplification of the logical intellect, operated mechanically, putting motion (or the living, dynamic movement) of thought, into a logical definition, thus conceiving it as occupying “serially successive instants of time.”132 Intellect operating as a mechanism, Bergson insisted, is incapable of inquiring into internal meaning—into reality on the inside; it can only do what a camera does, (or better yet what a moving picture camera can do)—record the past by way of a series of static shots. This criticism really involved a new conception of mind, founded upon biology rather than upon mathematical structure. With James, mind ceased to involve any static entity such as inert idea, and became a function of experience. (It is out of this notion of consciousness as function that the pragmatic concept of idea as activity derives.) Bergson dismisses conceptual and discursive thinking as a superficial kind of knowing—a jumping about over life instead of wading through, to use James’ colorful language. Knowing that wades through experience is for Bergson, intuition. In both instances, thinking in the form of abstraction is relinquished for the kind of feeling into life which retains the living context. To my knowledge, the full import of this experiential view of thinking, as over against the conceptualism of logical thought, for subsequent philosophy of religion, has never been assessed. James’ association of thinking with practical activity was taken up by

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Dewey and developed into an instrumentalist form of Pragmatism. Bergson intuitionism had a curious history. It was seized upon by T. E. Hulme,133 the neoclassicist, who became the metaphysical counsel for the Free Verse Movement in poetry and thus actually provided the cognitive key for the Imagist poets like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H. D., Amy Lowell, and John G. Fletcher. In the long run it became a powerful instrument for combating scientific thinking and created a new vogue in mysticism. Yet the force of this anti-intellectualism of James and Bergson was not lost to the naturalist movement. It will be found informing the spiritual direction of the psychical thrust in the organismic philosophy of Lloyd Morgan and Jan Smuts, and providing Wieman with a mystical orientation of thinking in his concept of immediate awareness. We cannot go into this matter fully at this point, but Wieman’s usage of this experiential basis of thought is an interesting illustration of the problem we are grappling with. Wieman will be found repudiating Bergson roundly in his Religious Experience and Scientific Method for his interpretation of the intellect and intuition: We do not agree with Bergson in saying that instinct gives us an awareness of the unanalyzed and unselected mass of experience. Instinct is simply the operation of certain automatic mechanisms of behavior. These mechanisms do, of course, determine the objects of our attention. But they are just the opposite of what Bergson says they are in this respect. They are highly selective. They do not render us responsive to, sensitive to, or conscious of, the unanalyzed flow of experience. On the contrary they are the first steps which the organism takes in selecting from the mass of stimuli which assails it, those particular elements which are of practical importance. If intellect deals with experience in the interests of practice, certainly instinct does so no less. Our second point of difference has to do with identifying what Bergson calls intuition with knowledge. We are never fully aware of the unanalyzed and unselected mass of experience in its original continuous flow. But we believe Bergson is right in saying that we may have various degrees of awareness of it. We have tried to show some of the situations which give rise to this awareness. But where Bergson makes his mistake, we believe, is in identifying this immediate awareness of experience with knowledge, and treating it as a peculiar kind of knowledge different from intellectual cognition and designated by the term intuition. This only leads to confusion. Our awareness of the continuous flow of experience is not different in kind from our immediate awareness of a touch or a sound, except that in the former the work of analysis and selection of data has not been carried so far as in the latter.

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Our third point of difference has to do with metaphysics. Because of his initial error of confusing immediate experience with knowledge, Bergson is led to the conclusion that through our awareness of the continuous flow of experience we have intuitive knowledge of ultimate reality and that this ultimate reality is a continuous stream of experience without thought and without purpose, but which is ever evolving into something further, the something further being wholly undetermined and unknown until actually achieved. In contradistinction to this we have maintained that our immediate experience of God is merely a datum, and taken by itself alone gives us no knowledge concerning the character of God. Because this datum is a continuous, unsegmented flow of experience, we cannot immediately jump to the conclusion that God is a universal, unthinking, unpurposing flow of experience, any more than we can conclude that a chair is a disembodied pressure because our immediate experience of chair is that of pressure. The experience of God by itself alone does not constitute religion. One must interpret that experience before he has a religion. And from time immemorial man has given some interpretation to his experience of God. This interpretation has been just as crude, grotesque and diverse as his interpretation of other experiences. He is subject to the same errors in the interpretation of this datum as in any other attempts to understand that which befalls him. He can hope to correct these errors only as he subjects his interpretation to the only methods we have for detecting error and revealing truth. (pp. 43–45)

Whitehead undoubtedly would likewise have to repudiate Bergson’s singular dismissal of abstractionism; for he goes beyond Wieman in reemploying the philosophical method to describe the structure of events and to designate the basic categories; yet even Whitehead is won over to an emphasis upon the adumbrations of events, defying exact intellectual characterization. II. James and Bergson would have to be regarded formative in the history of religious naturalism again, because of their insistence upon thought as a bodily event. This was a normal emphasis for both James and Bergson for they both drew upon biological sources for their imagery and for their analogies. James had studied physiology and more particularly neurology before he had taken up psychology and philosophy, so he was forever noting the neurological track in the brain which the thought process had recorded. Bergson’s intuitionism was always body-centered—the sensory organism feeling its way into the flux of events. As one moves through the literature of organismic philosophy, stemming from Bergson’s influence, one sees this bodily basis of thought and

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spirit being more fully described and documented; the clearest and most persuasive of them being the biogenetic account by Jan Smuts in Holism and Evolution. Morgan had spoken of the physical and psychical existing as concomitant aspects in the organism. Smuts proceeded to analyze structure by structure to show how psychic life emerged from inorganic structures and continued as a thrust toward greater sensitivity as the psychical element became dominant and wholemaking. At the lowest level, the inorganic level, he pointed out; matter exists as a physical mechanism. 1. Physical mechanism: Here the material elements are in active physical relation to each other and this relation affects the characters of the combination or system. Yet the parts do not lose their identity. An electric dynamo or any common piece of machinery illustrates this relation for us. 2. Physico-chemical mechanism: Here a synthesis takes place, the outcome of which is a “substance new and different from the component parts.” In a sense this type of mechanism marks the borderline between the type of system which is dominantly mechanistic on the one hand, and the system which is increasingly and dominantly holistic, on the other. 3. Bio-chemical wholes: This is the level of life. The bio-chemical mechanism is quite different from the preceding types, Smuts observes. It involves more of the holistic activity than of the mechanistic. This is the case,” he says, “where the cell takes in food, which it transforms into its own system according to a metabolism which differs in material respects from the ordinary mechanical phenomena of physics and chemistry.” Here we have an obvious mixture of mechanism and holism. 4. Psycho-physical whole: The new entity arising under (3) as a mixed mechanistic-holistic type enters into combination with a new factor of an immaterial Psychic character, called land; and this, the human type, effects a complete merger of the biological and psychic elements, with an interaction so close and intimate that the psychic element can only be properly looked upon as an outgrowth or development of the “biological characters.” Here we have a still further approximation toward “the full holistic type.” From this outline, Smuts wishes to make clear two points: First, that in this scale of up-grading, mechanism is a matter of degree. It occurs throughout all of nature with varying degrees of prominence. And second, that holism is likewise a matter of degree. It occurs in the earlier types of relations in only the slightest degree. In the course of the upgrading, however, the tendency is to minimize and subordinate mechanism, and to accentuate holism. Now in this “synthetic grading-up of the mechanisticholistic Process of Evolution, the lower unit always becomes the basis of

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the next higher unit, becomes as it were, the stepping-stone to the next stage:” the atom for the molecule; the molecule for the crystal; the complex of molecules for the cell; the complex of cells for the higher organism, etc. This does not imply merely a mechanistic grading-up; rather, Smuts insists, the process is essentially creative; at each stage something new arises from the mixture, inter action and fusion of the component elements. This process we have said occurs throughout all of nature. But the two great stages in the process where something utterly new and different arose were the stages at which life and mind emerged. Here we have mechanism and holism in a relation which has confounded both science and philosophy. Science has attempted to explain these new emergences by reference solely to the mechanisms of lower stages. The outcome of its reasoning has been to characterize life and mind as epiphenomena: emergences which occurred adventitiously along the path of evolution, and which bear no testimony of evidence as to the nature of that process. Quite another kind of explanation came from those who shared the Vitalist notion. They introduced the hypothesis of vital and mental-forces which constituted a reality of a different sort. The only explanation of the relations of life-mind and matter that Vitalism could offer was that they existed together in a sort of symbiosis. But mind and life were extra entities foreign to physical matter. The difficulties with these explanations, Smuts suggests, are obvious: Mechanistic science overlooked the holistic tendency, and thus exaggerated the importance of mechanism; Vitalism, on the other hand, misconceived the vital or psychic elements, and thus failed to recognize their organic relation with the mechanistic elements. Body and mind are not two separate substances, but represent instead, the inseparable activity of mechanistic and holistic factors. In order to explain this relationship, Smuts returns to consider the phenomenon of selectiveness, which he contends, is the fundamental property of matter, and continuous throughout all the higher stages of structures. Hence it is likewise the fundamental property of all organism; it is indeed, he asserts, “the most primitive property of life.” Now selectiveness assumes a very definite tendency in all types of structures; namely, the tendency toward equilibrium, or inner stability. This tendency toward equilibrium, inner stability, Smuts regards as an indication of the inner holistic character even of physico-chemical structures. “There is an internal balance which preserves the type, a pushon when the structure is endangered from one quarter, a pull-up when it is endangered from another. These inner pushes and pulls represent the inner

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holistic nature even of natural physical things in their total makeup.” … “I envisage the physico-chemical structures of Nature as the beginnings and earlier phases of Holism, and “life” as a more developed phase of the same inner activity. Life then, is not a new something from without the process: it is itself a structure based on the lower structures of the physico-chemical order; and the control it introduces is nothing but an extension and development of the natural physical control which… is already in operation in the lower structures for the maintenance of inner stability. What then is Mind? Mind, he says, is a further, and more complex development of selectiveness, which, as we observed earlier, occurs in the very lowest of material structures. In the life-structure, there arises a regulative function, a director of selectiveness. This is Mind. If life is but a continuation on a higher plane of the sort of structure which matter is on a lower plane, does this mean that Mechanism is final? Is life only a more refined mechanism? This question betrays a misunderstanding of Smuts’ insistent doctrine that neither Mechanism nor Holism are final: they are inseparable first and last. The structures on the lowest plane are not mechanisms pure and simple: they are structures dominantly mechanistic, to be sure, but containing the tendencies which shall later give rise to the persistent trend, holism. Life is a structure at once both mechanistic and holistic, but it occupies that place in the “march of structures” where holistic action is dominant. Both Wieman and Whitehead stand within this biological tradition, if we may speak of it so. How Whitehead came to move in this direction is not altogether clear to me as yet. He himself says that some came into the dynamic conception of Philosophy through biology and psychology; then by way of the new physics. He, he says, found his way into it by way of the concept of fields in modern physics. The mathematical and physical aspect is clearly impressed upon his philosophy. Nevertheless, one sees the organic emphasis in his insistence upon feeling as the basic category. A close study of his Principles of Natural Knowledge and his Function of Reason would throw some light upon this organic side. Wieman tells of an address which Whitehead made in Bond Chapel some years ago. Wieman had written so much about Whitehead that the latter had come to notice his name. And when he met him in the Chapel he took him in, as it were, with full and long look. In the course of his lecture, he came to the discussion of the sensory context of thought. With a crisp British accent he said, “We think with our bodies!” Then, said Wieman, he turned toward me and riveted his eye upon me and repeated as if for my special benefit, “We think with our bodies!”

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Wieman didn’t say so, but one can imagine him saying in liturgical tones, “Yes, Lord, we think with our bodies!” This warning is very appropriate in Wieman’s case. For Wieman, more than any empiricist of recent times, has had a brooding fear of the mystical import of these words. That is, he has feared the sensory life with a caution worthy of his Calvinistic ancestry. A full account of Wieman’s thought would bring this out, I believe, as a major motif. He turned to Bergson; on leaving Park College, with a sense of, relief having been innocently caught in the Roycean absolute Idealism of his teacher. Bergson had the key, he thought, to the new philosophy. But, as we have observed, the anti-intellectualism of Bergson frightened him. To immerse yourself in the stream of life and know life in this intuitive way at once fascinated Wieman and scared him to death. Dewey gave him a crutch, an instrumental device for holding himself above the liquid-élan vital and to be borne along on the swift current of experience on the raft of scientific method. But the only point we wish to make is that Wieman, while clearly committed to the conception of thought as a bodily event has battled desperately against its implicit Dionysian mysticism. The almost anxious stress upon criteria in Wieman’s thought, in contrast say, to the more serene exposition of Whitehead, or the abandon of James and Bergson, is indeed marked. These men, in every case, looked to sensibility to chasten and order, aesthetically as Whitehead puts it, what Wieman sought to assure, rather arbitrarily, at times, by an anneal to criteria and the test of scientific method. Our problem, then, in this course is to explore more fully these beginnings or formative factors in James, and possibly Bergson, which widened and deepened into the contemporary current of naturalism. III. Since I have begun this analysis of the roots of naturalism, or I should say the sources of naturalism, I might add another page or two on some corollaries of its biological beginnings. One important one, of course, is the new physics which dates from the last decade of the 19th century. This, as we said before, is a major source of Whitehead’s naturalism; or more particularly, of his basic notion of dynamic relations. You can get some account of it in Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, Ch. VI, and a fuller account in Boodin’s Three Interpretations of the Universe, Ch. 4. I have made several attempts to describe the insight of the new Physics which was so formative— “The Mystic Returns,” The New Language in Religion, and lately, in Seeds of Redemption.

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I am quite sure that Whitehead’s Process and Reality is essentially a philosophical elaboration of this notion, informed and vastly enriched, of course, by his own fertile and artistic imagination; and by his wide acquaintance with the biological and psychological phase of the new naturalism which we have just described. Accompanying the development of this emergent and dynamic conception of reality in the new physics, is the so-called new biology, stemming from James and Bergson which, by the way, followed its own destructive route after the manner of C. Judson Herrick, Lull, Lille and others. (See Boodin’s Three Interpretations of the Universe, Ch. V; also see the Gestalt psychology of Wertheimer, Kantor, Miler and Kafka.) Gestalt psychology clearly has some roots in William James as we may see in the chapter on “The Stream of Thought” in his Psychology, Vol. I, Ch. IX. Roback in his book William James writes, “His rejection of mental

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atomism in favor of a configurational principle proves him to be a forerunner of Gestalt psychology.” (p. 312) It would be safe to say that Gestalt psychology and the social psychology of George Herbert Mead expounded in his books, Mind, Self and Society, The Self, The Philosophy of the Act, and the Philosophy of the Present, constitute the Psychological sources of the constructive insights of the new naturalism. Wieman has exp1icitly acknowledged his indebtedness to Gestalt psychology. I should have to acknowledge my affinities with both the Gestalt psychology and George H. Mead, though the strange thing is that I have read very little of either of them. I have apparently absorbed their thought by osmosis. These, then, may serve to indicate the major strands of thought within the several sciences which have converged toward a common outlook in philosophy and religion loosely designated by the term, the new naturalism. The basic notions, as you can see, are: 1. The dynamic nature of experience: life is in flux, élan vital, ongoingness. 2. Relations are primary; configuration, mutuality of events. 3. Emergence: concretion, creativity.

1956 The New Realism in Religious Inquiry It would be surprising, indeed, if the pervasive concern with questions of human destiny in our cultures giving a theological character to our age were not reflected in religious inquiry, itself. Actually the change here cannot be said to be a reflection merely. The shift in orientation and objective go far back of the present upsurge of faith, antedating in some instances the First World War. The most explosive and widely heralded declaration of the new age in contemporary theology, radically altering the direction of its inquiry, came with the publication of Karl Barth’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans135 and the subsequent series of addresses under the title, The Word of God and the Word of Man.136 Paul Tillich’s comment upon Karl Barth in The Protestant Era should be carefully pondered by every student in modern theology. Tillich wrote, The prophetic power of Protestantism has been proclaimed in recent years by Karl Barth and his friends with such power and out of such depth that the attention not only of world Protestantism but also of large groups outside the churches has been aroused. Perhaps one is justified in saying that the radical character of this protest—the impressive and convincing form in which it was directed against both religion and culture—has saved contemporary Protestantism from sectarian seclusion, on the one hand, and from secularism and insignificance, on the other hand. It is not surprising that the impetus of the protest prevented those who pronounced it from raising the question of the Gestalt out of which the protest came. This is not surprising in view of the fact that protest is not only an essential element in Protestantism at all times but is also very urgently needed in our time. Neither the church nor society has given heed to it as they should. Theology still has no more important task than to express the Protestant protest radically and penetratingly in its own doctrinal work and in its dealing with every aspect of contemporary life… A theology that has not passed through the shattering effect of the ‘theology of crisis’ but has dismissed its prophetic ‘No’ with a polite bow or with an easy criticism of its method and form, cannot be taken very seriously. For a long time to come—and in some way always—the Protestant protest must have priority.137

There is a significant sentence in this passage. It reads: “It is not surprising that the impetus of the protest prevented those who pronounced it from raising the question of the Gestalt out of which the protest came.”

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This Gestalt out of which Barth’s prophetic utterances issued include, of course, the immediate cultural situation in which continental Europe was then moving; but it gathers in vastly more. Looked at within the specifically theological-philosophical context, it includes all antecedent currents of protest against Hegelian idealism from Schleiermacher and Schelling, and more particularly Kierkegaard, through Nietzsche and the modern existentialists. What is not commonly recognized is that the Gestalt widens beyond this continental lineage to include other currents of pretest against philosophical idealism such as James and Bergson, who together form another source of existentialism thinking138 which was to develop principally in Britain and in America, first as a radical empiricism, then as organismic philosophy, and later as emergent theory, out of which the current notion of field theory has, in part, issued. Thus the line of protest and inquiry, extending from Barth to Whitehead forms a new frontier of realism, breaking free of the enclosure of mentalism which was imposed upon Christian thinking for more than three hundred years and which had shaped the imagery of theological liberalism since the time of Kant. There are marked differences of theological opinion along this new frontier; but after all the differences have been taken into account, the situation implied philosophically in this widespread reaction against the over-reaching rationality of the Enlightenment and modern idealism and of the liberal-modernist theology which presupposed its epistemology, may be compared to the break through Scholasticism in the sixteenth century with the rediscovery of the sensus numinis among the Reformers. It is time that we establish the true character of this New Reformation of recent years with its realism, its openness to otherness, and its conception of the dynamic character of judgment and grace, as being a new and vigorous stage in Christian history. Unless we assess the turn of recent theological and philosophical developments in this bold and comprehensive manner we shall overlook the magnitude of what has been happening. Once we perceive this line of protest and inquiry, forming the new frontier of realism in Christian thought, we will see also that the significant issue in theological study today is not between liberalism and neo-orthodoxy, as this is commonly conceived. That was a false issue from the start. For it assumed, on the one hand, that participating in the protest of the new realism in theology meant the relinquishment of the disciplines of liberal scholarship when; actually, it implied becoming self-critical within that heritage. It assumed, on the other hand; that liberalism in its present state of health was to be identified with the defensive and resistant turn of mind that saw no need for a change in a time when the most

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decisive changes within the liberal inheritance were occurring. Unaware of the creative currents at work within the new realism, this defensive stand among many contemporary liberals took what was actually innovation to be wholly reactionary and accordingly sought to stem its tide. Does this sound like the liberal heritage at its height? Actually, these islands of defensive resistance to the self-critical process within liberalism give the clearest evidence that the enclosure within idealistic and rationalistic premises had led liberalism into a series of dead ends. The disciplines of liberal scholarship had all but spent themselves; and would have done so had it not been for the vitality of the new Reformation which, in subtle ways as well as with the bold iconoclasm of a crisis theology, worked to restore zest to inquiry in biblical study, in the history of Christian thought, in the nature of the Christian church, in Christian ethics, in the nature and destiny of man) in problems of faith and culture, in the meaning of history, in the nature and depth of immediacy as present event) in the significance of causal efficacy and of internal relations as they bear upon the claims of tradition and upon the creative role of protest in any cultural experience. In ways too many to enumerate the disciplines of liberal scholarship were routed from a lethargy that had settled upon them in a period of complacency. It is a mistake to assume that the disciplines of liberal scholarship were deserted in this new creative energy of inquiry following from the decisive protest. On the contrary, as we have observed: it was liberalism becoming self-critical. The reaction against liberal presuppositions and methods was an internal conflict in which penitence and protest mingled. Every scholar and clergyman who has participated in this widespread reaction knows this to be true. If we must use the terms “right” and “left” in speaking of theologians, it is a grievous error to ascribe the term rightist to these, who, having taken the crisis of thought and culture seriously, stand on this new frontier of Christian realism; and to designate leftist the spokesmen for a defensive liberalism that has remained impervious to cultural change. Any sensible comparison of these two stands would have to conclude that they who presume to speak for liberalism in a defensive role reflect the temper of a closed orthodoxy, and in fact turn the liberal heritage into an orthodoxy; while the restive and liberating dynamic of Protestantism that once spoke through historic liberalism speaks now through this innovating, at times reactionary, voice of pretest, even though it seeks a new vantage ground beyond the historic site of liberal-modernist theology to cope with the issue of man in the face of new evidence, new intellectual resources, and new cultural responsibilities. There is an issue between right and left that does have significance for

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modern Protestant theology; but it is between theologians who stand in a common orientation along this new frontier of Christian realism; yet who see the meaning of this reorientation differently. Within the prophetic stage of protest and reaction, they form a consensus in modern Protestantism. It is when each one turns to the constructive task of dogmatics or doctrinal interpretation that differences among them emerge, turning one toward a restatement of Christian doctrine in an orthodox pattern, and another to a reconception of liberal Christianity wherein a repossession of the full Christian witness is sought within the disciplines of liberal scholarship. The issue here turns upon the way in which each one conceives the imago-dei with its consequent estimate of the resources of man. Of this I shall have more to say later. Once one breaks free of the mentalism and psychologism which the older liberalism imposed, one is able to confront the actualities of spirit to which the Christian faith bears witness. Here the word encounter is seen to be a more realistic and more adequate term than the word experience. To be sure, experience continues to be pertinent, but it is used in a way that recognizes that all experience participates in a context which involves more than the human response. Encounter as a word has become current in theology only recently; yet it is certainly important to the meaning of the Holy Spirit in early Christian thought as well as in Reformation theology. I would argue, too, in opposition to Brunner and others, that it is important to an understanding of Schleiermacher’s sense of absolute dependence. In this situation of inquiry where the apprehension of otherness is not only possible, but inescapable, many of the old wards of Christian faith come trooping back with startling new imagery and insistent meaning: spirit, grace, judgment, sin, redemption, and many more. For these are the transcendent meanings which were lost to the Christian vocabulary, both consciously and inadvertently, through the psychologizing of theological concepts. The repossession of these Christian words in contemporary theology has proven to be a stumbling block to many people of our time standing within the liberal tradition. They have no ether word for it than “neo-orthodoxy.” But one should see that this is simply “guilt by association.” Having known these words in one’s youth or in one’s former years in association with fundamentalist doctrine, or on hearing them come from the lips of contemporary fundamentalists, they ascribe to them the meaning of fundamentalist doctrine. But these are Christian words of great power and stature. Why should they be relinquished to any single doctrinal group? Why should they be given up by critical minds when they convey essential and pertinent meaning within one’s disciplined witness to faith? The answer is that they should not be relinquished! The critical

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liberal, or however the new realist in Christian thought is to be characterized must repossess them, else he has no valid vocabulary with which to bear witness to the powerful and innovating proclamations of the gospels that a new creation, a new life is given in Jesus Christ. And it is the reality of this good news that has become so vivid and compelling on the new horizon of inquiry of Lich we have been speaking. In carrying forward the disciplines of liberal scholarship to new conquests and discoveries in understanding the Christian faith, they who pursue this more realistic course must be acknowledged the precursors of a new frontier of liberal learning in religious thought. Where liberalism clings defensively to former, but now discredited premises, or to judgments demonstrated to be in error concerning the nature and the resources of man, it must be seen for what it is: a recalcitrant orthodoxy that mistakes its own intellectual fixation for faithfulness to the liberal ideal of disciplined judgment. It is obvious, too, however, that the repossession of historical doctrines of Christian faith within a new and fresh imagery has, in some instances, encouraged an overzealous reaction to liberal disciplines and thus has led to irresponsible defiance of all structured meaning in the name of a biblical faith. A neo-orthodoxy of a partisan and bigoted spirit threatens whenever the disciplines of thought are treated lightly or ignored. It is for this reason that the soundest, critical scholars among the new Christian realists remain attuned to the whole of Christian scholarship, including its classical, Reformation, and Liberal periods. Their acquaintance with St. Paul, Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, Schleiermacher, Ritschl, or Harnack, not to mention other stalwarts is perennially renewed. It behooves the present era of theologians to be particularly faithful in reviewing their own negations and criticisms of liberal doctrine, lest they be deceived into mistaking an impulsive iconoclasm for critical or prophetic judgment. In this respect, Karl Barth’s caution to some of his followers to look again at Schleiermacher is judicious counsel. And the practice of contemporary scholars who have earnestly engaged themselves in the theology of crisis to re-examine the work of Harnack and Troeltsch, even to the extent of re-reading their critical works in their entirety, is certainly to be commended as serious and conscientious scholarship in the best liberal tradition.139 It becomes important for the contemporary student of theology to see, on the one hand, that the reaction against liberal theology, in whatever area of the new Christian realism this may be pursued, cannot be intelligibly and critically participated in apart from some genuine encounter with liberal scholarship, itself, in one or more of its historic forms. It is important, on the other hand, to see that the re-examining or repossessing

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of liberal doctrine apart from serious engagement with some form of the new Christian realism, whether it be the theology of crisis or one of the more philosophical modes of reaction, cannot be considered adequate or thorough-going. Insistence upon these two directives of study will go far towards keeping the discipline of liberal scholarship intact in contemporary theology. IV. We need now to give closer attention to the nature of the realistic orientation in present-day theological thought which we have defined as a new frontier extending from Barth to Whitehead. Some of the most helpful discussion of the new realism which has been altering the orientation of theological inquiry in recent years appears in Tillich’s The Protestant Era where he is analyzing the various kinds of realism which have appeared in Christian history and the forms in which it now appears. Generally speaking, he observes, realism tends to concern itself simply with the really real in any concrete situation without pressing beyond the historical or even the empirical data, as in Positivism or even Historical Realism. But, adds Tillich, …the really real is not reached until the unconditioned ground of everything real, or the unconditioned power of being is reached. Historical realism remains on a, comparatively unrealistic level if it does not grasp that depth of reality in which its divine foundation and meaning become visible.140

Tillich’s own preference is for what he calls “belief-ful realism” or “selftranscending realism.” In these terms he means to combine two elements which he believes are generally wide apart—namely, “a realistic and a belief-ful attitude.”141 This, I think, adequately expresses the dimension of the new realism as it appears on this frontier of religious inquiry—a concern with the reality of the immediate, concrete event or situation accompanied by the transcending power of faith. What is decisive here, as over against the idealism that underlies liberal-modernist theology,142 is its clear sense of otherness beyond the human world. One could speak of this movement of mind as a concerted effort to break free of the enclosure of mentalism or of self-experience by which idealism circumscribed every meaning, including the meaning of God. Barth voiced this new freedom from enclosure within human categories for theology in his bold declaration of contrasts between the Word of God and the word of man between God’s righteousness and man’s ideals. In more abstract terms, the newer realism in metaphysics

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announced the creativity of God as over against the ideals and values of man. One will get a vivid impression of the affinity between these two wings of the new realism by reading Barth’s The Word of God and the Word of Man along with Wieman’s first book, Religious Experience and Scientific Method, particularly the section where he is distilling from Whitehead’s earlier, scientific work, The Concept of Nature,143 the sense of God’s otherness as an experienceable datum,144 as well as those chapters in which man’s ideals are sharply differentiated from the good which is of God.145 It is true that Wieman’s language in isolating the datum of the sovereign God is nearer to that of Schleiermacher than that of Barth; yet the insistence upon God’s otherness as standing in judgment of man’s good, his ideals and values, clearly partakes of the newer realism and its protest. Barth’s emphasis is the more decisive and radical, repossessing the rigor of Calvin. In Wieman’s later distinction between creative good and created goods, however, something of the same decisiveness and Calvinistic rigor appears. In a similar manner, one should compare Reinhold Niebuhr’s Does Civilization Need Religion146 with Wieman’s Religious Experience and Scientific Method. Both books will reveal a transitional character—a transition from an idealistic imagery and valuation to a realism concerning man and God. Niebuhr’s concern in this earlier book will be seen to have more affinity with liberal valuations than Wieman’s initial book. For there still persisted in Niebuhr at this time some semblance of his Kantian and Ritschlian moorings, as reflected in his ardent concern for personal value, despite his critique of liberalism. And this implied also a certain devaluation of nature and of natural structures in so far as they constituted a threat to personal values. Hence the skepticism which was to seize him, once he became convinced of the relativity of cultural values, impelled Niebuhr to a swift formulation of a theory of an absolute beyond history with its corollary of self-transcendence.147 Wieman, on the other hand, partaking of a radical empiricism, initiated by James and Bergson and modified by Dewey and Whitehead, retained more of an immanent metaphysics even though he had come to a decisive critique of the human structure, itself. Wieman’s thought was moving toward a “functional transcendence,” as he later termed it, which envisaged discontinuities within the continuity of experience. The sharpest discontinuity to which he was to give emphasis was the contrast between the work that God did, the values He created, as over against the work man did and the values he tended to affirm and to cherish. Here Wieman definitely departed from the liberal-modernist milieu and joined with the challenge of the new Reformation then dawning. It could be said, perhaps, that Wieman has

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remained ambivalent in his affinities. In the prophetic aspect of his thought, wherein he has openly protested against the idolatry of human values and ideals, he has clearly participated in the new age; but by persisting within the categories of a sharply delineated religious naturalism he has chosen to hold, conceptually at least, to a modernist base. But then one is led to wonder, is Wieman’s religious naturalism so different, after all, from Tillich’s “ecstatic naturalism?” To be sure, there is an ontology implied in Tillich’s language with which Wieman will have no part. But how much more is this language of ontology than a symbolic reference to denote a dimension of depth in speaking of concrete events? Wieman, too, speaks of such depth in empirical events; which is why Dewey was unable to see any similarity between Wieman’s empiricism and his own thought even though Wieman assumed that there was.148 It could be argued that Wieman, too, is pressing for a “belief-ful realism,” pointing to an ultimate reference within the passage of concrete events, insisting that one cannot be realistic in attending to such events except as one takes this dimension of ultimacy into account. In this respect his religious naturalism appears to be reaching for the same dimension of realism that Tillich describes as being self-transcending. Differences appear, of course, when Wieman presses for some definitive criteria by which the dimension of depth can, in some measure, be made descriptively articulate. It is not that Wieman expects to lift the whole of this dimension to the level of empirical description; but only a minimum degree of it in order to acknowledge that, to some extent, it is perceptible in experience and thus empirically verifiable. Here, I would say, there is disclosed a radical difference between Wieman and Tillich in their doctrine of God. And this difference implies other differences which cannot be reconciled, notably in their sensibilities of method. Wieman’s method within Tillich’s understanding of the nature of God, clearly appears to be an improper over-reaching of human inquiry. It is instructive, again, to compare the imagery which one finds in Bultmann’s recent writing, especially in his discussion of demythologizing the New Testament, with that of William James, Whitehead, or Wieman. Bultmann’s key phrase, when he is attempting to point up the meaning of faith or the nature of the imperative which the gospels lay upon every man is “openness to the future,” “freedom of the future,” to which he ascribes the Christian understanding of forgiveness. Following is representative of such expressions: The Life of Faith The authentic life… would be a life based on unseen, intangible realities. Such a life means the abandonment of all self-contrived security. This

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is what the New Testament means by ‘life after the Spirit,’ or ‘life in faith?’ For this life we must have faith in the grace of God. It means faith that the unseen, intangible reality actually confronts us as love, opening up our future and signifying not death but life. The grace of God means the forgiveness of sin, and brings deliverance from the bondage of the past. The old quest for visible security, the hankering after tangible realities, and the clinging to transitory objects, is sin, for by it we shut out invisible reality from our lives and refuse God’s future which comes to us as a gift. But once we open our hearts to the grace of God, our sins are forgiven; we are released from the past. This is what is meant by ‘faith’: to open ourselves freely to the future. But at the same time faith involves obedience, for faith means turning our backs on self and abandoning all security. It means giving up every attempt to carve out a niche in life for ourselves, surrendering all our self-confidence, and resolving to trust in God alone, in the God who raises the dead (2 Cor. 1:9) and who calls the things that are not into being (Rom. 4:17). It means radical self-commitment to God in the expectation that everything will come from him and nothing from ourselves. Such a life spells deliverance from all worldly, tangible objects, leading to complete detachment from the world and thus to freedom.149

Now this is setting the New Testament injunction, “Have no thought of the morrow” specifically in a context of living forward, not with reckless, romantic abandon, as is often the interpretation given, but with trust in God who fashions the creative opportunities for new life. Here Bultmann is adding the reassurance of Christian faith to the existentialist analysis of the human situation that sees man shorn of the supports of the pastor of any other structured value, save his own courage as a human being. Through this promise, Bultmann sees the existentialist act of courage transmuted into an act of faith; or perhaps we should say that he declares that the Christian existentialist is inspired with the kind of courage that can assume the character of faith. When one places this existentialist view of “openness to the future” alongside of the notion of living and understanding forward, as both Bergson and James developed it,150 one sees both similarities and differences, to be sure; but the affinity in orientation and outlook is unmistakable. Bultmann is concerned here with the redemptive act in selfunderstanding, while Bergson and James concern themselves with transformations that come into the epistemological problem in such a reorientation of mind and experience; but the same kind of existential decisions are present in both instances. The same mood of living and understanding forward permeates Whitehead’s thought, though with a difference that seems to make him

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less existential than Bergson, James, or Bultmann. It is the organismic quality of Whitehead’s philosophy which brings to his trust in the future a certain increment of value and support out of past attainment which comes into the present and passes into future events as a qualifying good, providing both limitation and opportunity. In the final analysis, Whitehead is no less insistent upon openness to the future than the others. His conviction concerning how the future is made, how the creativity of God is faithful in a measure to the structured experience of past occurrences, leads him to define his trust in God as being, not simply a faith in the One who maketh all things new, but One who, in making things new, gathers the achieved values of the past into the creative matrix out of which novelty occurs, thus offering a certain immortality of meaning to every passing event and to the burden of past values which it carries.151 Bultmann’s formulation of the Christian existentialist’s faith is nearer to Wieman’s philosophy of the Creative Event, after certain differences in method and concern have been taken into account. In fact, the affinities between these two formulations makes clear, it seems to me, how marked the convergence of the two strands of new realism can be when relinquishment of past supports in each instance is merged with a faith that leaps beyond the despair created by its iconoclasm to a trust in the creative venture of God, as being simultaneously a creative act and an act of forgiveness. Compare, for example, the following passage from Wieman’s Source of Human Good with the statement quoted from Bultmann earlier: Despair is the state of mind ensuing when the good to which one clings as source and sustainer of all other good has been taken away. When that to which one clings is not truly the source and sustainer, its removal and the consequent despair open the way for the real source to enter. The real source, however, does not always enter when despair opens the way. But in the case of the disciples it did with the Resurrection, because at that time the creative interchange, held subject to the Hebrew hope while Jesus lived and seeming to disappear with the Hebrew hope when Jesus was crucified, rose from the dead. This creative power could now dominate over all else as it could not before and could penetrate beneath every obstruction raised against it in the persons of the disciples, because there was nothing else to which they clung for security that was more important than it.152

Wieman then relates this commitment to the Creative good, as did Bultmann, to the forgiveness of sins: This domination over and penetration beneath every obstruction in the life of a man constitute forgiveness of sin. Sin is anything and everything in one’s personality which is obstructive to creative transformation, so far as one is responsible for the obstruction. Forgiveness of sin is accom-

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plished by the creative power itself when it dominates over and penetrates beneath the obstructions to its own working within the personality concerned… But this forgiveness and consequent radical transformation cannot occur without despair if by despair is meant the removal of every other good to which one clings as ultimate source and sustainer. If one clings to something as though it were the source of all good when it is not, then the true source cannot dominate and penetrate and so cannot do what is called “the forgiveness of sin”… Without difficulty, dangers and loss a man will scarcely seek his security in the true source of human Good. Always he will seek it in some created goody if not the Hebrew Law, then American democracy or scientific method or his health and popularity or his past record or whatever else it may be. These other grounds of security must be seriously threatened or taken away before any man will seek and find his strength, his hope, and his courage in the creative power which generates all value. In this sense, perhaps, despair and recurrent despair alone can open the passage into the ways of forgiveness and salvation.153

In pointing up these affinities between the two wings of new realism in theology and philosophy of religion, I have no intention of urging that we work toward a syncretism or even an eclecticism of comparable notions among them, except as this comes about naturally in one’s response to the full range of new insight which this realism affords. What I am concerned to bring about is the recognition of a common, contemporary mind in Protestant theology that has gone through liberalism and beyond it. Despite all their diversities and special preoccupations, they who have broken free of the conceptual bounds which the era of liberalism imposed move in a common imagery of dynamic meaning and creative event. Within this imagery the biblical language of revelation, crisis, judgment, grace, forgiveness and redemption becomes at once both natural and insistent. It literally presents us with a new age of Reformation in which to repossess the vitality and realism of Christian faith as a living word and witness. In this open world of concreteness, mystery, and revelations words like “new creation,” “new being,” “spirit,” “spontaneity,” “immediacy,” “happening,” “event or dynamic event,” “witnessing,” “pointing,” “proclaiming,” and many more tumble forth as a fresh and suggestive language of faith. The scope of the change in theological climate indicated by these new terms is sobering. To gather in the full force of its meaning one has to realize that what has occurred within the past three or four decades in which the new realism has been emerging has been a turning back upon throe centuries of theological development in the West. Between Descartes

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and Barth, one might say, the drama of Christian thought passed through three stages: the first stage, through the years of the Enlightenment, the new appreciation of the power and role of reason brought into question the meaning and relevance of the notion of revelation. Typical of the period was the statement attributed to Spinoza: If man’s clear intuition of truth is trustworthy in its disclosure, his competence is equal to that of a divine intuition; if it is not trustworthy, than it is just as likely to be mistaken in believing that there exists a superhuman intelligence able and willing to supplement his apprehensions as it is in any other of its beliefs. In the former case it will need no supplementation; in the latter it can draw no conclusions whatever, even about God, with any confidence.154

In this turn of mind one might say theology saw the displacement of the notion of revelation by reason. The second stage came with Kant’s elevation of moral faith to a dominance that was to continue throughout the remaining years of the liberal period. And in this development, theology was to see the nation of redemption displaced by the pursuit of religious and moral ideals. The third and final stage of the liberalmodernist era came about with the emphasis upon experience as a controlling concept in all modes of inquiry. Though there are antecedent developments in this direction going back to Schleiermacher, I should place the serious beginning of this stage in 1860 with the publication of Tylor’s Primitive Culture wherein, one might say, anthropology laid the ground for a new approach to an understanding of religion. Here impetus was given to the .psychological study of religion and the translation of conventional theological doctrines into their psychological meaning. A tendency already begun in philosophical idealism was thereby stepped up to a concerted movement among religious scholars, displacing the normativeness of the Bible in theology with an appeal to experience. The relinquishment of biblical authority in theology gave rise to various alternative norms such as religious experience, psychologically interpreted;155 self-experience, philosophically elaborated;156 and social experience, historically and sociologically interpreted.157 The arresting fact is that in the present re-direction of religious inquiry every one of these turns of thought has been reversed: revelation, redemption, and biblical faith have each been reinstated as formative notions in theology. It is understandable; therefore, that many interpret these recent developments to be a return to orthodoxy and a complete relinquishment of the liberal heritage. It is my considered opinion that this is a superficial and short-sighted judgment. Rather than being a return to

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orthodoxy or a relinquishment of the liberal heritage, it is a reconception of the liberal interpretation of Christian faith at a level of inquiry that enables it to correct and to overcome the iconoclasm of the Enlightenment and of the Modernist era and thus to repossess within the disciplines of liberal scholarship the full range of Christian doctrine conveying the gospel of Jesus Christ as the revelation of God, reconciling the world to himself. Bernard E. Meland

1958 Glimpses of India’s Faith and Culture A Report to The Committee on The Haskell-Barrows Lectures and The Federated Theological Faculty By Bernard E. Meland Whatever is said about India today must be taken as a tentative observation; for the scene is changing rapidly and, in some respects, radically. The image of a turbulent stream comes to mind the moment one’s eyes fall upon this country, say in descending from a plane in New Delhi, Madras, or Calcutta; or in waiting at a railway station, hoping that a train will come. The scene is everywhere the same: masses of mankind moving about, some busying themselves with routine tasks, as they would appear to be doing in any congested city, others loitering and looking on, some stretched full length, or curled up under a blanket on the ground or on a railway platform. On the highways or at railroad stations, literally thousands of people with their worldly goods in hand, refugees on the move, present an endless panorama of pilgrims going somewhere or nowhere. Masses of people! That is the initial impression of Indian life. The culture, too, is in ferment. Its customs, traditions, legal, educational, and religious structures, seem everywhere to be in transition. At every point, despite the human lethargy that pervades it, (and this is formidable, indeed) Indian society today is mobile. You sense it in so many ways: in eager young men talking of the Second Five-year Plan, nationalist leaders and lesser government officials trying to interpret the meaning of a free and independent India to their countrymen, in literary conclaves and art exhibitions, reveling in the new humanism; in educators and religious leaders, pondering or lamenting this rising secularism. The movement of Indian life is two-way: a surging forward in response to expectations for the new India, and a reaching backward to hold to a mode of life that appears to be rapidly receding. The issue between these counter currents is made articulate in religious and educational centers where problems are openly discussed; but they are implicit even in the way that townspeople and villagers respond to national edicts, or to changes that occur in the local school system. The decision to industrialize India and to accelerate the study of the

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physical sciences in the schools took a decisive turn when Nehru took the helm about a decade ago and made up his mind that India must seriously assume its role in the community of nations as a contender among world powers. The ambitions of this new nation are impressive. They are symbolized as well as embodied in this shrewd, suave, highly civilized person, Nehru who, as Prime Minister, continues to weave a magic spell over India’s millions, despite open opposition and the appearance of candid criticism in the press. As we talked with taxi drivers and shopkeepers in New Delhi we got the impression, however, that many of his countrymen, especially within the vicinity of the capital, do not take this man seriously as a national leader. Even the local journals were outspoken in their criticisms of what they called “the Nehru myth.” “The government is run by a bunch of petty politicians,” said one taxi driver to us. “Nehru doesn’t know what is going on. He’s off in a dream world of international affairs. He gets back in town occasionally to listen to complaints, or to lower the boom on some of his underlings, and to get off more of his ideal talk; but he doesn’t run the government. These *!!* blankety-blank So and Sos do that. And they do it for what they can get out of it for themselves.” We were dismayed at how much of this kind of talk we heard in New Delhi under the shadow of the new and impressive government buildings. Some of it, we discovered, to be coming from Indian Christians who had prospered under British rule. Their fathers had been employed by the Colonial Government. “We lived well when my father worked for the British,” said a taxi driver. Other government workers’ families did, too. Now many of them are unemployed, or employed at menial tasks.” His resentment for the new Indian government was matched only by his nostalgia for the good old days of Colonial Rule. Nowhere else in India did we meet with such vocal criticism of the government, or of the person of Nehru; though it was common knowledge that in South India open revolt was being staged again and again, principally against bills passed by the Congress having to do, either with Caste, or with the language controversy. What impressed me most about Nehru during our visit there was the response he elicited from the masses and from the general run of university students and other youth. For the one he remains the father-image, the one in whom the faith of the nation is invested; for the other, he is the voice of the Indian conscience and of its ideal aspirations. The frequency with which I hoard young men in business and in the schools assert, “I am a Nehru man” led me to believe that, despite existing cynicism and rebelliousness, Nehru still points the way for the vast number of sensitive and conscientious Indians: particularly among

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intellectual and middle class groups, as well as among the masses of villagers.158 And this means that a sizable section of the nation looks in the direction of the new India and of India as a nation among the nations of the . world. The isolationists are strong also. Their propaganda takes the form of elevating the state or region, of denouncing centralized government, as well as international programs. At the moment this conflict is dramatized in the controversy provoked by the Congressional act of designating Hindi the national language. The lifting up of Hindi as the national language has been taken as an affront to every other state or section of India. The feeling is most bitter in South India where Tamil is the native language. By way of countering Hindi partisans, South Indians, especially in the vicinity of Madras, have put forth English as a national language, or at least as a common tongue for government and schools. English, it is pointed out, already functions in this role and has the further advantage of enabling Indians to participate readily and easily in International affairs. As the traditional language of education and diplomacy in India, English appears to offer no threat to the regional language in the way that Hindi does. To the casual visitor traveling through central or south India, the force of these regional enthusiasms is impressive. Much has been said about nationalist forces in India and in South-east Asia. Not enough attention has been given to these formidable centers of reaction and of traditional sentiments and loyalties resisting the nationalizing of India’s life. The impression grows, as one lives in these areas for a time, that resistance to whatever measures threaten or radically modify the mores of the regional culture is so strong that what appears as a national program is relatively superficial—a proposal on paper, as it were. The realities are still in the region. The outlawing of the Caste System is a case in point. The Language Issue is another. The problem here is the age-old one of sectionalism versus federalism, states’ rights versus the nation. In India at the moment, however, this struggle has the further complication of being the breeding ground of alien and partisan interests, chief among which is Communism. India as a national government, and as a people, is, in my judgment, clearly not pro-Communist. The Communist party is a relatively small and un-influential body. The neutralism of Nehru is in no sense to be interpreted as a vacillating point of view, or a policy of indifferentism. It bespeaks a clear-headed conviction that a road in between Western democracy and Communism is possible and eminently desirable. Unfortunately in Asia Western democracy still carries the stigma of

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Colonialism; and very little that is reported in the Indian Press concerning affairs in the United States helps to alter this image of American democracy. In my conversations with Indian people I sensed a rather sharp insistence that “India will never go Communist.” But they would usually follow this remark, as if veering away from our American side, with the comment, “Of course, we think we have our own path of destiny.” Yet, despite these protestations that “India will never go Communist” a pattern of action has been forming out of sectional disputes and revolts, along with their resistance to nationalization, which appears ominous, to say the least. For the Communists, so it is said, have been especially helpful and conciliatory in regional disputes, and Soviet consultants and technicians have been ever-present. What is feared, by some at least, is a grass root Communism that will form out of this regional hostility to the national Congress and to legislative acts curbing regional loyalties and customs. In time such a metamorphosis could assume an effective block in the national electorate. Nationalism in India has set in motion a number of subsidiary developments and movements. Pierce Beaver, in his report to the faculty and to the Barrows Committee, spoke of the renaissance of religions, especially among Buddhists and Hindus. There can be no doubt but that this is occurring: though one can easily overrate its national importance, and possibly misread its significance for religion, itself. Actually, Hinduism is threatened as well as enhanced by the nationalist renaissance. For the new nation envisages cultural reforms which strike at the heart of the Hindu faith. The outlawing of the Caste system is one case in point. On the books, Caste is obsolete in India. In actual fact, however, like our segregation, it persists, head up with much of its ancient pride and arrogance. From a cursory reading of letters which appeared regularly in the Calcutta papers, I could see that Hindus, themselves, are divided in their response to this new social legislation and in their ways of meeting its demands. There are many Hindu apologists for the Caste system who look upon present governmental efforts to abolish it as being wholly unrealistic, as well as secular. It means to them the destruction of the whole cultural fabric of India with its guarded system of vocational alignments, educational standards, cultural sensibilities, and religious disciplines. Caste is, for them, the unspoken voice of tradition, directing its people into channels appropriate to their human capacities and status. It is what sorts out the millions of its population into workable units and consigns them to their role as an act of destiny. To abandon this age-old custom, and thus to lose its restraining sensibilities, is to these Hindu apologists, to invite chaos in every aspect of the culture’s life. It means

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also the loss of standard throughout the culture, or a succumbing to a materializing standard in which cultural and spiritual sensibilities can count for nothing. In other words, Caste for them is itself a spiritual ordering of human life and society. And the abandonment of it can only mean the secularizing of life. I read a number of letters in the Calcutta papers pleading the cause of Caste in this manner. If some defend it, others simply adhere to it with the same tenacity and defiance with which they oppose the national Congress in other respects. Yet, there are Hindus, too, who embrace the legislation against Caste as a necessary reform, not only in modern India, but in the New Hinduism, as well. This leads me to say that, if one is to speak of a renaissance in Hinduism, it would be more appropriate to identify the awakening with what is commonly called the New Hinduism, which is not unlike liberal reforms we have known in Western Judaism and Christianity. The new Hinduism appears to be in accord with projected national social and economic developments, as well as with the current revival in literary activities and the cultural arts of India. Members of the national Congress are openly members of the new Hinduism. And the Vice President of India, Radhakrishnan, is perhaps its most eminent and frequent spokesman. This new Hinduism can be interpreted in two ways: on the one handy it is a conscious effort to adapt the Hindu faith to the new industrial and scientific outlook of India. It means to keep abreast of modern developments; and, if possible, to be known as the spiritual voice of the new India. On the other hand, it clearly means to keep this cultural renaissance within the stream of the Hindu tradition, however modified. It is a bit too early to say just how it views the symptoms of secularization which are appearing throughout India, even in remote centers, and which is expected to gain momentum in Indian life and letters as industrialization continues. There is flexibility in the Hindu world-view that enables it to embrace seemingly conflicting tendencies, and.to absorb them into their own cultural and spiritual outlook. For example, one might assume that the present, humanistic bent of mind in current Indian literature, which openly announces its relinquishment of India’s religious tradition and belief in the gods, would be regarded as hostile, or at least alien, to this new Hindu mind. Here is an avowed expression of disaffection for the religious imagery and basic beliefs which Hindus have historically affirmed and lived by. Yet, one can see in the current writing of Radhakrishnan, where he is addressing himself to just this kind of an issue, a veiled, and at times not so veiled, apologetic for the merging of this literary humanism and Hindu spiritualism; or for assimilating it to the broader, national idealism to which the now Hinduism aspires. Even so blatant a secular force as

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Marxism, apparently, can be gathered into this new apologetic. For example, in an address by Radhakrishnan in Calcutta, which was recorded in the Calcutta Statesman, he pointed out a possible line of affinity between Marxism and the new Hinduism. Said Radhakrishnan, in effect, Marxism refuses to set any deity above man; but Hinduism also has traditionally opposed any effort to put anything between man and divinity. The implication here would seem to be that an immanent doctrine of divinity in which man is ideally understood to be divine, can readily be squared with any philosophy of man which idealizes human powers. Under close analysis this assertion will not stand up; nor, in my judgment, will this kind of reading of Marxism find support among modern Marxists. Nevertheless, one can see in the effort to equate the two, an apologetic turn of mind that would absorb all seemingly benevolent concerns with human welfare into the new national, Hindu faith. Hinduism has considerable faith in its powers of assimilation to transform rival or alien currents into subterranean strands of its own idealism. In this sense it is not given to open resistance to forces which oppose it, but rather to an overpowering of them through absorption. At a more practical level, the most evident symptom of renewal in Hinduism is the active program of social service by the Ramakrishna Mission. This phase of modern Hinduism has won the approval, and even the support: of diverse groups among modern Indians. Hindu laymen among business and professional groups have long been active in its affairs. It is becoming increasingly common, I learned, to find socially minded Christian groups responding to their mode of service and cooperating with them in local efforts. The Ramakrishna Missions have encouraged Christian participation in some of their programs, even providing occasions for Christian speakers to interpret to them, the character and mission of Jesus. Members of Christian theological faculties have accepted these invitations and, in some instances, have built up continuing alliances between their own group and these Hindu missions. Some Christian leaders, I found, look upon the Ramakrishna Mission as one of the natural meeting points between Christianity and Hinduism, chiefly on the grounds of their mutual interest in social service. But there appears to be something more than simply a common bond drawing these two groups together. Christian clergy and theologians who told me of this affinity spoke feelingly of these men in the Ramakrishna Mission as being responsible and dedicated servants of the people. One Christian educator said, in effect, that, in his judgment, these men were really carrying the burden of ministering to the needy of modern India. I speak of this primarily to suggest that the resurgence of modern

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Hinduism is more than doctrinal or ideological. Doctrinally or ideologically I cannot see very much change or reform. Although in academic centers, attempt is being made to bring Hindu thinking into accord with a scientific and industrialized civilization; little evidence of such reconception is present among these missions. It is a movement of saints rather than of scholars. And the stimulus to service comes chiefly from their age old conception of man as being possessed of a divinity that must be awakened and released and made expressive in daily living. Their modern twist to this doctrine is in their insistence that fallen men and women, however broken or defeated, possess this legacy of the spirit, and can be awakened to their true selfhood. And the national program of social and economic renewal in India, placing an emphasis upon raising the standard of living, reducing illiteracy, and improving the lot of every person, opens up a nation-wide opportunity for this Mission to carry out its work. That it has been recognized as one of the strategic agencies of social reform and upbuilding, is evidenced by the fact that it has received general government support. Theologically, I had difficulty responding to these people. And I must confess that I found little or no meeting ground in the conversations we had together. Yet, I had to admit, along with other Christians, that here was a major redemptive force in modern India that had awakened simultaneously to the opportunity which cultural circumstances offered, and to the vital resources of faith in meeting these opportunities. I found evidence, too, that Popular Hinduism (that is, the Hinduism of the people in the villages and in the city temples) shared in this sense of revival and of new opportunity in modern India. I had opportunity to watch some of these situations close at hand in the town of Serampore, where I lectured for two and one-half months. Numerous shrines, chiefly to the goddess Kali, dotted the roadside along the River Hoogli and throughout the business area. Tom-toms awakened us daily at six a.m., and, on occasions, at four o’clock in the morning, announcing processions to the river where the devotees would bathe in the holy water. At evening the rhythmic clanging began again and processions followed. All through the evening, sometimes until ten o’clock and later, raucous music poured forth out of public address systems, flooding the town with its supposedly festive tunes. The noise from the loudspeaker at night was so disturbing that we asked local people at the college why this could not be reported, or why they could not speak directly to the people in charge of the Hindu shrines. They replied, “Oh, No! There is nothing anyone can do about it. This is their way of assorting themselves as Hindus in a neighborhood of Christians. We were on top before under British rule; now they are on top.

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And they are making it plain to us that they know they are on top.” “But,” I asked, “How about the village authorities? Can’t they see that this is a serious disturbance of the peace?” “No,” came the answer again. “They are undoubtedly urging the worshippers on in their demonstration. To them, Hinduism is India; and India is at liberty to express itself today. Adolescent, you say. Yes, I suppose it is. But much of Indian independence today is at the adolescent stage.” This Hindu assertiveness in Serampere was never outwardly menacing. It always took the form of a public nuisance or irritation—sometimes with a slight air of defiance, but more often with a good natured shrug of the shoulder as if to say, “What can you do about it?” Elsewhere in India, however, this Hindu ascendancy among village worshippers took on more serious and menacing proportions, as in one of the northern cities where a Christian Mission was burned to the ground. One is not to assume from this that Hinduism has been given official priority in the new national government. The freedom of worship has been written into the Indian constitution. On paper, at least, Christianity, along with Mohammedanism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, has recognized status. Indian Christians proudly recalled to us that the Prime Minister had gone out of his way to point out that Christianity is not an alien religion in India. On the contrary, he was quoted as saying, “It has a long history here, and belongs to this culture. Yet all this official recognition does not alter the fact that Christianity is a minority faith in India, and in some villages is an alien one. Their memories still recall the special status that Christians enjoyed under the protection and sponsorship of British governors. The rise of an independent India therefore means to these partisan Hindus a preferred status for Hinduism and a corresponding curbing of Christian privileges. Public utterances and documents may seem to put forth an official policy of impartiality toward all religions; but native Indians who worship at Hindu shrines and temples feel in their hearts that their day has come. And no Christian group that I encountered had any notion of contesting this claim. The attitude of Hindu university educators toward this renewal of Hinduism in India was of particular interest to me. I had occasion to speak with several of them during my visit. Some of them were skeptical about it and thought it should not be taken seriously as expressing anything of significance modern Indian life. This was the attitude of a professor of history at Serampore College. “You must realize, Professor Meland,” he said to me when I questioned him about it, “that India is a very complex culture. What appears

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outwardly to be the case is not really so. And this revival of Hinduism is such a complexity. What you see as a revival of Hinduism is not religion at all, but nationalism.” I assured him that this kind of complexity is not peculiar to India or to the religion of Hinduism. For the moment our conversation turned away from the religious situation as such as we talked of nationalism in India and the changes it was bringing. In his judgment, the most evident signs of change in Indian life today point to a growing secularization of its life. The schools, he observed, arc having to bow to the demands of new industrial needs. “We have to train technicians in practically all phases of our industrial economy,” he went on. “We need mostly engineers; but basically we need scientists. This is new in India, and the pressure is on to begin early in the village schools developing these people of a practical and scientific bent of mind. And because it is now it awakens the interest of students as nothing else does in our schools. Besides,” he continued, “all schools are getting more and more government support, and the government wants scientists, engineers, and industrialists. This makes it impossible to keep any balance between technical and cultural studies. Already we are feeling the effects of this trend in the colleges. The students come to us wanting to take scientific studies. And if we resist them in any way by encouraging them to give attention to cultural studies other than the sciences they think we are out of step with the times. To be sure,” he said, “the pressure is less here at Serampore than in universities like Calcutta; but oven so the problem is acute enough with us.” I could see that he was speaking with considerable feeling about this matter, possibly out of personal frustration; so I countered him somewhat by saying that my brief observations of the life at Serampore College didn’t give me the impression that the sciences and technical studios were running away with the place. True, the laboratories in chemistry and physics wore crowded much of the time. And on special college occasions, these laboratories were the show places, with students proudly demonstrating their experiments. In this respect I could see that he was right in assessing their enthusiasm for the sciences. But I added that I had noted also that students gathered weekly in the auditorium in considerable numbers to read poems, plays, and short stories which they had written. And the applause, following each rendition, at times reaching a pitch of hilarity, would indicate that literature is very much alive in this place. I could testify to this because the auditorium was but a stone’s throw from our apartment, and we had witnessed several such occasions. “Yes,” he said, “that is true. But this is mostly an enthusiasm among the girls. You must remember that this is the State of Bengal. And

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Tagore’s university is less than a hundred miles away. This region is still under his spell. Young people, especially, like to sit and dream up tales and verses, imagining themselves part of a great literary heritage which the poet, Tagore bequeathed to them.” I said, “You will admit, then, that this is not peculiar to the Indian girls or women students in Bengal. A good many of the men in this college have this literary and dramatic flair, too,” “Yes,” he replied, “This is the Bengali temperament. They would rather sit and write poetry than do a day’s work. But in this respect they do not represent India as a whole. Youth in India are caught up in the technical mood of the times. That is the more representative state of mind.” “But,” I pressed him, “You said earlier that this reflects a secularizing of Indian life. In what way is this true?” The professor squirmed a bit, and then replied, “Who can say? It may mean much more than we can surmise. All we know is that things begin to feel differently in India where this new zest for technical and scientific studies prevails. India, as you know, has had a certain pride in its sense of a historic past, its creative arts and crafts, its veneration of poets and seers, and mystics. It has had a strong religious sense. This is true in whatever region of India you visit. All of this has its roots in the family life of India. The family hearth is the seat of India’s religion and culture. As an Indian, you are born into this life of faith and sentiment, and you grow up in it, become part of it. It informs your moods and actions throughout your lifetime. You cannot escape it. It runs very deep in your nature and temperament.” I could see that something had touched a sensitive vein in his thinking. He began opening up more freely, so I sat back and listened. “The nurture of the family hearth,” he continued, “feeds upon an intangible thread of meaning that weaves itself about everything we do in the home. You cannot say it is an intellectual heritage, for it doesn’t reach us in those terms. In fact, the members of the family who embody it most vividly and who convey it to the younger members of the household might even be called illiterate by common standard of the educational community. Usually it is a favorite woman of the family, a grandmother, or an aunt. In my case it was a great aunt. She holds the status of a goddess in my memories, and was precisely that to me in the household when I was a boy. She was the embodiment of Indian sensibilities and virtues, and of the graces that generate appreciations which impelled me to explore the tradition for myself as I grew up.” “Now this intimate connection between family life and religion and the

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creative tradition of India is what has given to our culture its spiritual tone. I do not deny the influence of the temple worship, but this would not be anything apart from this filial nurture. Hinduism is a religion of the hearth. I could mention many educated Hindus who have nothing to do with the temples or public shrines; yet who are conscientious in regard to these filial attachments. That, in part, describes my own condition.” “Your point, then,” I ventured to interrupt, “is that this filial nurture in faith, as you call it and in cultural values is in danger of disappearing in the new India that is turning toward technology and science?” “It is not only in danger of doing so,” he countered; “it is already receding. And in a generation or so, it may virtually disappear. For what have these technical studies to do with this heritage of feeling and appreciation? There is no connection between them and most of our Indian homes. History, philosophy, literature, and the arts as one finds them in the schools become just a continuation and deepening of much that one has met with in his earlier nurture at home. They may offer occasion for developing critical judgments about what one has learned in childhood; naturally they intrude sophistications that alter the tone of one’s reflective and appreciative interests. “But there is a connection there. They are of a piece, as it were.” “But you see no connection between this nurture of faith and tradition and these technical studies,” I asked, playing the straight man. “Absolutely none!” he said. “In fact, they introduce an alien note and generate alternative enthusiasms… Furthermore, what they lead to vocationally means the uprooting of the young people from their families and communities. When a young man becomes an engineer or a technician in some capacity, he must immediately move to the city. That is where his job is. There is nothing in the village or town that can give him employment. His kind of knowledge and work can be used only in some factory or center of business. This is the trend in India today—a movement of our educated young people of the villages and towns, establishing themselves independently as single individuals or as husband and wife in the city. This is a far cry from family life as India has known it and as it exists today where the filial pattern has continued intact. You need grandmothers and grandfathers, mothers and fathers, along with the young husband and wife and their growing children to keep the nurture of India’s spiritual tradition alive. The cities are becoming less and less India,” he said with a noticeable rising inflexion. “What reaches these young people through other stimuli and resources is a cosmopolitan culture that is only tinged with Indian characteristics. For the most part it is a culture devoid of any life of faith or tradition. This is what I see as a secularizing force

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arising out of this technological trend in our schools and society.” I have compressed here the essence of several conversations which I had with this professor of history, but what I have reported is, I believe, faithful to what was said. In a striking way a conversation which I had later with a university administrator, the Vice Chancellor of Banaras University confirmed much that was said by this professor from Serampore. My conversation with the Vice Chancellor took a fascinating turn. I made an appointment with him primarily to sound out his attitude toward a possible exchange between Banaras and the University of Chicago on the assumption that the HaskellBarrows Committee might wish to experiment with bringing the Barrows Lectures to this university center, as well as to other such centers, at some future time. I was acting unofficially, but I felt with some propriety since the policy of the Barrows Lectureship in India is obviously in transition at the moment, and I was charged with the responsibility of exploring ways in which present arrangements might work effectively. I was so impressed by the inefficiency of the present effort to work through an all-India Barrows Committee, that I felt compelled to look into other possibilities on my own, knowing that they could eventuate only in a recommendation to the Barrows Committee at the University of Chicago, I have reported to the Barrows Committee the general spirit of openness, even eagerness, on the part of these university centers in India which I visited to enter into such an exchange, or simply to bring the Barrows Lectures to their campus from year to year. This may be only one way in which to find proper auspices for the Lectureship; but it is, I think, a significant one which should be seriously considered. My conversation with the Vice-Chancellor opened by my remarking about the new Hindu temple that was being built on the Banaras campus. We had visited it the day before and found that it was nearing completion. It is an impressive structure, and seems, in itself, to be symptomatic, if not symbolic, of the revival of Hinduism in India. I found myself making the observation (to myself, I should add) while viewing the temple, that even the universities are falling in line with the march of faith. This must really be getting serious! (No cynicism intended.) But to my surprise, the Vice Chancellor was visibly embarrassed by my mentioning the temple and its location on the Banaras campus. “That,” he said, “is a source of great concern to me. It did not seem much of a problem while the building was going up. The project was proposed by some enthusiastic Hindu patron of the university, and they provided all the funds—a sizable amount. I have not spent one rupee for it out of university funds, and I do not intend to do so. But now that the

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temple building is nearing completion, Hindu worshippers and sightseers are beginning to come to the campus in increasing numbers. Soon it will be filled with people and a going temple on university grounds. That may create difficulties.” “But,” I interjected, simulating some naiveté, “You are a Hindu university, are you not?” “No! On the contrary:” he protested. “We are a national university that recognizes all faiths.” “But,” I said, “the inscription over the gate through which we entered read, BANARIS HINDU UNIVERSITY.” “That,” he said with some feeling, “is a misnomer. We are not a Hindu university, and we do not claim to sponsor Hinduism. It is true that we have a Hindu School of Theology on campus which trains men for the temple priesthood. But that is not really representative of the University. We consider the department of Religion and Philosophy, of which Professor Murti is Chairman, more representative of the University’s studies in religion. You should see Professor Murti. He is a famous scholar in Buddhistic studies: though he, himself, is a modern Hindu. You will find that our library houses books by Christian, Mohammedan, and Buddhist authors as well as by Hindu writers,” And he was right. I had visited the library the day before and had perused the shelves on religion and philosophy. All the familiar names were there: Tillich, Niebuhr, Barth, and Brunner along with James, Bergson, Whitehead, Dewey, Russell: and other Western authors—not just a few of their representative titles, but their complete works in most instances. “You would not say, then,” I continued, trying not to seem unduly persistent, that the building of this Hindu temple on this University campus is any indication of a revived or growing interest in Hinduism?” To this his reply was more guarded. “I don’t think it says anything in particular about Banaras University,” he began. And then added, “But there are signs of a new interest in Hinduism in the country at large. And in Buddhism, too. I don’t know what this means, exactly. It is part of our national self-consciousness which is asserting itself today. Certainly this is part of it. I doubt that it has much to do with temple worship, or with what goes on down at the river. That would continue no matter what happens in our political life. The new interest, if it is new, appears to be largely of an intellectual, or possibly of a symbolic nature. Indians, when they become self-conscious nationalists, feel impelled to declare their interest in Indian tradition as well. And this has given Hinduism an obvious advantage over other religions in the country. Though, of course, Buddhism, too, has had

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its share of modern enthusiasts.” I wanted to pick up this reference to Buddhism in relation to the nationalist movement, but instead, I continued to probe the Hindu revival and its significance for modern India. I was to learn the next day, while talking with Professor Murti, that a familiar emphasis upon Indian scholars, at least, is to treat Buddhism as a long-neglected reform within Hinduism that might well be examined and reconsidered as a part of the heritage appropriate to the new Hinduism. “If this revival of interest in Hinduism is closely allied with the national movement, and is occurring chiefly among the more literate groups,” I asked, “do you look for any significant changes in Hinduism itself as a result of this new interest?” “Well,” he remarked, “Intellectuals have their own way of embracing a religion. They don’t have much to do with what goes on in the temples. Oh, some of our professors go to them, out of habit, or possibly out of some compulsion. But mainly it’s a philosophic outlook or a sense of values that they emphasize. The ritual, itself, doesn’t mean much to them, except, of course, as a historic drama.” How familiar this all sounded, though I made no mention of this fact. Instead, I went on, “I have heard a good deal since coming to India about the secularizing of the schools, even in the villages, as a result of an increasing emphasis upon the sciences and upon technical studies. Is this likely to have any radical effects upon popular Hinduism?” “How do you mean?” he asked. “Well,” I said, “Mrs. Meland and I took a ride down the river yesterday morning and watched the people bathing in the Holy Ganges. It was not just people bathing in a river; it was a ceremonial washing. They seemed oblivious to the condition of the water, which, to our eyes, sensitive to the perils of infection, seemed quite terrifying. We also visited the “Monkey Temple,” and came away with similar feelings of distress. What will happen to young people in the villages who become schooled in the sciences and begin to acquire these same apprehensions? Will they be able to continue with those river and temple ceremonials? Or will they revolt against the whole conception of religion as practiced in popular Hinduism? I should think that much of what goes by the name of Hinduism would crumble away under the impact these radical changes in Indian life, especially for those young people coming out of the villages.” “Mr. Meland,” he said very reflectively, “Hinduism will never die out, if that is what you are thinking. This was somewhat tangential to my point, but I was too concerned to hear him out to interrupt him. For now the Vice Chancellor assumed a wholly different attitude toward the historic faith of

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India. Instead of the embarrassed liberal administrator, keeping at arm’s length from the faith, he suddenly became a devotee, almost luminescent in the simplicity of his faith. “I said we intellectuals have a different way of embracing religion,” he began. “Well, that is only partially true. Deep down we are as simple and sentimental in our Hindu faith as any of those people whom you and Mrs. Meland saw bathing in the river, We may not join in the public ceremonials, though some of us may do even that; but we have inside of us something that draws us to what they are worshipping, something that holds us in focus as devout Hindus. It may have only the tangible evidence of a filial tie with some one person in our family background, the memory of a beautiful, saintly woman—a grandmother, or aunt. In my case it was an aunt—a beautiful, simple soul who could not read a word, but who could recite by the hour from the Sacred Gita. Where did she learn it? From the lips of her own grandmother originally, and later from poets and seers who visited her village. I was educated in Indian lore and legend by this saintly woman long before I could read a formal word of history or literature. She was a goddess to me who embodied in her sensibilities and outlook upon life that she convoyed as a sacred heritage of our culture.” Here was the same witness being borne to the filial nurture in faith which I had heard from the professor at Serampore, almost in the same words. The Vice Chancellor continued, “This heritage lives on in me as a mature person with a vividness which she gave it as a living person. I am unable to separate this legacy from her person, or to dissociate it from the memory of her. Thus, however sophisticated we become, however much educated, we may be in the intellectual disciplines of the sciences and philosophies, and we have this lodestar shining through our memories that keeps us in the Hindu path. Call it inner experience, mysticism, or what you will; it is vitally alive in each of us.” I was touched by the way this highly sophisticated Hindu educator opened up to me, laying bare, as it were, the story of his life as a devout, yet disengaged Hindu. It would have been easier to have made my goodbyes at this point, for discussion seemed a bit alien to the mood into which we had come. But: instead, I waited a moment for the situation to right itself, and then put a further question. In retrospect, I decided later, this was the more sensitive thing to have done, for it enabled the Vice Chancellor to regain his aplomb as a sophisticate, befitting his role. After a moment’s pause I said, “But you speak of your generation. What if this filial nurture subsides in India? What if family life, itself, changes radically, as I understand it is doing even now as scientifically

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and technically trained young people move into the cities. Can the temples sustain this inner nurture of which you speak?” “This may be our problem,” he said sadly. “I have, been speaking entirely out of my own experience. That is true. The Indian youth of today find it wholly different in many places throughout India. And, as you say, tomorrow it may be even more so. Somehow, however, as a Hindu, I feel Hinduism, as we have known it, will not die out.” Through the personal efforts of the Vice Chancellor, arrangements were made for me to visit with Professor Murti in his home. At the outset we talked mostly of the Barrows Lectures, for I had learned from the Vice Chancellor that any arrangements to bring the Barrows Lectures to Banaras would normally come through Professor Murti’s department. Professor Murti had lectured at Oxford University and in America and thus was very open to pursuing such a project. It would be well, he said, to have one of your men come to Banaras for at least one semester and give a course of lectures in our department, during which time he would also give the Barrows Lectures to the wider university community. He should also be free to lecture elsewhere in India, or possibly go to another school for a second semester on a similar basis assuming he is able to spend that much time with us in India. I indicated that this was the pattern we followed in presenting the Haskell Lectures at the University of Chicago, and that it is possible that the Committee in Chicago might be interested in such an arrangement for the Barrows Lectures as well. On the surface it would seem that such an arrangement, allying it so closely with the department of religion and philosophy, might restrict the number from our faculty who would fit into such a setting. This would have to be investigated, but my impression is that it is not as restrictive as it appears. For almost any critical approach to the study of Christian faith or the Christian religion would seem to be appropriate to their offerings. This is a point that would have to be weighed, no doubt. Early in our conversation, Professor Murti said to me, “I have been told by a friend of mine in New York that in some of my metaphysical notions I seem very close to your man, Charles Hartshorne. My friend has been trying to bring us together, but I do not know that anything will come of it.” We talked about Hartshorne, and I had to tell him that he is no longer with us at Chicago. Our conversation took off thereafter in a metaphysical direction as we discussed questions which grew out of the affinity between these two men. Although engaged in Buddhistic studies, Professor Murti considers himself part of the neo-Hindu movement. He was a student of Radhakrish-

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nan when the latter was on the Banaras faculty, and is his successor as head of the department of Religion and Philosophy. Murti’s approach to Buddhism is to consider it a reform path within Hinduism. Historically, of course, this is accurate, so far as Hinayana Buddhism is concerned; but in view of the long lapse of Buddhist interest in India and its subsequent developments outside of the place of its birth, it would seem that one could make this point only as an abstract issue in logic, which, of course, is the way Murti pursues it. He has published a book presenting his method under the title, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism. The current renewal of interest in Buddhism among Indians makes this a normal apologetic procedure, and no doubt is dictated in part by this timely circumstance. One can say that Murti is building a bridge on which traffic can be encouraged between Buddhism and the new Hinduism. I cannot say that he has this specifically in mind, but one can easily see how he may. I told Professor Murti that it seemed to me that the times were ripe, particularly here in India, for open and critical discussion between Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian scholars. He agreed that this was so. But I added that such a discussion should go beyond the usual kind of exchange between religious faiths where agreement is stressed beyond everything else, or some quick path to a world religion is being sought. “And here,” I said, “I disagree with what your Vice President Radhakrishnan seems to be about.” He broke in spontaneously with the remark, “I agree with you entirely; and I have told Radhakrishnan so. He was my professor, and I am his successor; but we see this matter of relating religious faiths quite differently. We must respect the integrity of religions, and let each of them speak out of its own genuine center. There can be conversation between them, helpful conversation; but we do not need to rush into an eclecticism, or be embarrassed by our differences.” We were so much in agreement on the general approach to religious studies that I could not help wishing that I might have met him earlier in my visit in India, and possibly might have given the Barrows Lectures at Banaras University. It is, of course, an old trick of academics to agree thoroughly with one another that they should differ. The test comes in the act of differing and in discussing the issues. We had enough of an encounter to lead me to believe that conversation in this place would prove to be a profitable experience. I had been warned before going to Banaras that I would find here a highly self-conscious center of Hinduism. The implication seemed to be that I would meet with an aggressive, partisan spirit that might make me feel uncomfortable, if not unwelcome, as a Christian. Our experience,

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however, was quite the opposite. At the university, especially, we met with the most cordial, open and enlightened response. They seemed to regret that our time was limited and tried to persuade us to remain over, which, unfortunately, we could not do. I got the impression of a lively, scholarly center, attuned to diverse currents of interest and inquiry, world-wide in its reach and outlook; yet with a core of judgment and conviction. On another venture I met with quite a different, though equally cordial and fascinating response from Hindu educators. This was my visit to the famous Indian university founded by Rabindranath Tagore. I had long looked forward to this experience. Periodically during our visit at Serampore we would be asked by some of our Indian friends, “Are you going to Santiniketan?” We could tell from the insistence in their way of asking the question that this was a must for anyone trying to see into the life and dreams of modern India. Santiniketan, though only ninety miles from Serampore, was a full six hours ride by train. We arrived in the evening, just as darkness had fallen. A cool, steady breeze was blowing, which was somewhat reminiscent of the California and Arizona deserts in January. In many ways the country around Santiniketan reminded one of desert country. The spaces between settlements were wide. Paved roads were few and far between, and in going from one center to another, say from university buildings to the Guest House or from Tagore’s residence to the far side of the campus, you would have to walk along dusty paths and across fields covered largely with scrubby growths, crying out for rain. The desert is my kind of country. It may have been this that set the tone for me on reaching Santiniketan, and that wove the spell which held me in its grip for the ensuing days. We climbed into a rickshaw after leaving the train, and rode two miles through the cool air to the guest house where we were to stay during our visit. Within the span of those two miles a major catastrophe befell me: I lost my voice. What a predicament this is, I thought to myself; I have come all this way to talk with these people and now I can’t speak a word. I could whisper, but that was the extent of it. Even before we had sat down to dinner, I was told by my host that a professor Dutt, of the philosophy department, was waiting to see me. He was making a trip to Calcutta early the next morning and would be unable to visit with me along with other faculty people, so he had come that evening. The embarrassment of being voiceless was soon over as Professor Dutt took the initiative, grasping my situation immediately. Our conversation centered chiefly around philosophical personalities of America and Europe. I learned from him that Richard McKeon had been at

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the university the year before and that they had enjoyed the stimulus of his visit. What surprised me in listening to Professor Dutt was his complete familiarity with Western philosophy and especially his knowledge of American philosophers. As far as one could tell, he, an Indian philosopher seemed wholly absorbed in the problems of Western philosophy. This was not what I had expected to find at Santiniketan; for my understanding of the founding of this university, far off in this idyllic spot away from the turmoil of masses and machines, led me to think of it as a place to recapture the Indian soul. Tagore, impatient with the way other universities in India were emulating Western education and scholarship, set out to establish a mode of education that would be distinctly Indian. Here at Santiniketan, the Abode of Peace, as Tagore translated it, students and scholars were to drink at the fountains of Indian learning, engage in its arts and crafts, write and sing its songs, create and perform its dances and dramas, and partake of its solitude and its silences under the banyan trees, or in the rich conversation of people steeped in India’s ancient lore. But this first conversation opened none of these doors or vistas. I attributed this largely at the time to my own infirmity. I could not, or did not, ask the right questions. And my guest, or host, (which was which was hard to tell) who was doing all the talking, except for my whispered interludes, bent his mind to meet my area of knowledge. I was to learn later, however, that the university founded by Tagore at Santiniketan was not intended to be a center of Indian education in the narrow, national sense of the term. True, Tagore was countering the English system of reading for examinations which, in India, under the British, had degenerated into “the training of government clerks,” as Tagore put it. The Indian heritage had opened up to Tagore a more discerning outreach of the spirit of man toward truth and beauty which he now sought to make the primary ends of the educational quest. And, in this sense, Tagore meant to create what he conceived to be a distinctively Eastern university. But the outreach of the mind was to be world-wide in its curiosity and in its sympathies. Students and faculty on coming to this place were to engage the seers and poets of every nation and people, in solitary reflection and in conversation with others. Hence the insignia adopted as being descriptive of its life and intent read, WHERE THE WORLD MAKES ITS HOME IN A SINGLE NEST. So Professor Dutt was not being out of character after all in being attuned, as an Easterner, to the minds and thoughts of our Western seers. The next morning, with fear and trembling, knowing how ill-equipped I was without voice to pursue any conversation, to say nothing of directing or of eliciting one, I called upon Professor Bhattacharyi, head of the

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department of philosophy. My concern in seeking out conversations in universities that we visited was to meet with people on the faculty who were alert to problems or conditions affecting religion and culture in India. In most instances these turned out to be people in the department of philosophy, or in a department of religion and philosophy. Some weeks earlier at Osmania University in Hyderabad, a city just northeast of Madras, I came upon a sign on the entrance to a seminar room which read RELIGION AND CULTURE. My eyes lighted up: thinking I had found just the group I was looking for. But there was no evidence of life anywhere about. Later when I was speaking with the Vice Chancellor of Osmania University, I asked him about this department of Religion and Culture, particularly as to what they undertook to do in a department of religion and culture, knowing that it was dominantly a Moslem university. He looked at me in a bewildered way and said, “I didn’t know we had such a department or that we offered such a course.” In fairness to him I should say that he had only recently taken office, and had no more than entered his office when the students went out on strike against his administration. He asked me what such a department should be doing in a university like Osmania. I should have known better, but the temptation was great; so I spent half an hour, giving him an enthusiastic prospectus for such an offering. I thought I was making real headway in setting up a new course of studies in this Moslem center in India, when he dropped the remark, “You know, I have never been very successful in setting up any interreligious program here at Osmania. I have no difficulty with Moslems and Protestants, or even Hindus. They are ready to cooperate on anything. It’s the Roman Catholics who are the stumbling blocks. We can’t even pray when they are present.” I knew then that I had better let the matter drop. But to return to Santiniketan. I had learned before coming to Santiniketan that the men in the department of philosophy were the nearest I could find to a group interested in problems with which I was concerned. Being still without voice, I despaired of getting anywhere in conversation; but Professor Bhattacharyi solved my problem by suggesting that he call all the men together so that I would not have to struggle through several arduous conversations. “You can whisper your questions,” he said, “and we will do the talking.” I could see that they were ready to do just that. So we gathered around in one of the offices. Actually this proved to be one of the most rewarding conversations I had in all of India. What began as a fairly mild exchange of greetings and tepid ideas developed into a heated and vigorous discussion, despite my inability to talk above a whisper during the opening

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moments. Somehow the questions I put to them seemed to elicit a spontaneous and concerted response; and their intensive, almost declamatory expositions fired up in me a burning enthusiasm which wellnigh cured my voiceless throat. At the close of the conversation I had actually regained normal voice. One of the interesting clashes came when Professor Bhattacharyi let loose a volume of oratory on the failings of Christian missionaries and the plight of Indian Christians who had succumbed to their evangelism. His point here was that Christians had never encountered Indian thought and culture; and that Indians who had become Christian, coming as they did out of illiterate village communities, were not really Indian in the full cultural, or intellectual sense of its tradition. This makes Christianity, in India, he said, wholly alien to our people, unable to enter seriously into any vital issue of modern Indian life. They speak outside of all the important issues and just ring the changes on a simple, homiletic tale out of the New Testament that can interest only the most simple-minded Hindu. Much that he was saying was familiar enough to me, for I had read similar analyses in the Rethinking Missions volumes some twenty or more years ago; and Christians in India, I found, were discussing this point among themselves, intent on taking their native culture and its problems more seriously as Christians. Having met some impressive Indian Christians during my travels through India only a few weeks before; I had some difficulty with the implication that they could be dismissed as illiterate Indians. The zeal with which some of the theological centers are turning to Indian cultural studies, particularly the religious traditions of India, as a phase of their own preparation for taking up their task in the new India, would indicate that they would not regard the indictment altogether false, nor would they necessarily resent it. At best, however, it was a caricature of what discerning Indian Christians among the younger clergy were saying among themselves. “Why do the Christians fear us Hindus?” Bhattacharyi continued. Why do they not confront us straight out? Actually we would welcome them. We have a lot in common with the Christians. We wouldn’t need to argue about our differences; we could get together on our agreements.” “Wait a minute!” I interrupted in my most assertive whisper, “You Hindus are altogether too cordial. That is precisely why the Indian Christians keep their distance from you. I have talked with them on this very point. They know how gluttonous you can be when it comes to swallowing up other religions.” I think I shocked them somewhat with this thrust, even though it did

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come out in half-whispered phrases. But we had reached a sense of mutual respect where plain-speaking seemed invited. “The truth of the matter is,” I continued, “there are real differences between Hinduism and Christianity which people like you and me should openly discuss; and Hindu and Christian scholars in India should discuss. Concealing differences and pussyfooting around to find points of agreement can simply lead to a superficial sense of common ground, and to a loss of any real or vital commitment or conviction. If Hindus and Christians are to meet with one another (I am talking now of an encounter at the university level) they should meet one another at their points of strength. I don’t know that it is so important, at this level, that Hindus and Christians agree in basic matters of faith. The likelihood of their doing so with integrity and full understanding may be quite remote. They certainly need to know how to live together with their differences; but these differences may need to be sustained, clarified, even sharpened into clear alternative centers of witness to what is most profound and arresting in our historic experiences. For a considerable time, at least, I would think that Hindus and Christians should not be in a hurry to simulate agreement when the differences that set them apart are so crucial to the way they understand the problems of human life and to the way they try to grapple with them. Professor Bhattachari’s question, “What are some of the differences between us?” launched us into a more searching exchange concerning the Hindu and Christian view of man, and the issue between our two cultures. Here the old bugaboo of the materialistic West versus the spiritualistic East came in for an airing, on which each of us had a good deal to say, both pro and con. I have not done justice to this conversation for I have not been able to convey the intense interchange that did occur, building more and more toward a sense of mutual understanding with regard to one another’s position and problem. The morning had ended before we had exhausted these questions. I felt that I had not alienated them in the least by my frank comments; for the conversation, while candid and, at times, sharp, remained respectful throughout. On the contrary, they spoke as if their interest had been whetted for more such talk between Hindus and Christians. And they hoped that an opportunity might develop, possibly through the Barrows Lectureship, for a prolonged and continuous exchange between one another along lines which we had opened up in our limited conversation. As we looked about the college grounds at Santiniketan that afternoon and visited the farm and craft center in a village nearby the following

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morning, I came to have more insight into the Indian conception of spirituality than I had been able to glean through previous observations of Indian life or through study of their philosophical writings. For one thing, Tagore’s conception of the human spirit and its responsibilities within the cultural life took on added dimensions as I visited those places and as I discussed the educational and religious philosophy which had motivated Tagore. We were fortunate in having as our guide through the university grounds, the man who had been Tagore’s personal secretary for the 1ast twenty-five years of Tagore’s life. Conceiving of Tagore simply as a lyrical poet or as a literary figure, I found to be quite inaccurate, or at least inadequate. This, I must admit, had been my own conception of him prior to this visit. And I am unaware of any Western literature about him that would suggest any other conception, except, of course, the few writings that point up his interest in education and his universal vision centering in the “Religion of Man.” His poetry and essays form the bulk of his legacy within the West, so far as I am aware. But clearly this Western image of the man is a truncated one. He was a personal confidant of Gandhi, and shared Gandhi’s concern with village reclamation. In fact Tagore had initiated some of these experiments before Gandhi came upon the Indian scene in the role of crusader and prophet. I discovered that Tagore came into his program of village reclamation and, later, educational work, by way of his role as a tax collector. His father was a wealthy landowner, and Tagore was his agent. One has to know something about the traditional role of the village tax collector in India to appreciate what a hurdle this could be to one whose sympathies and interests were humanitarian. The latest movie on Mother India, following the literary stereotype of this character, presents him as the Indian Shylock who, through his moneylending, involves one villager after another in a series of major mishaps, often culminating in tragedy. Tagore, as a young tax collector, apparently reversed this role. The plight of the villagers oppressed him and made his role as tax collector difficult for him. While he felt responsible to his father, he also felt responsible to those people as human beings, and found ways to help them through various small beneficent acts, much of which took the form of being a sympathetic counselor and friend. His close contact with the villagers and their growing dependence upon his counsel, led him, in his role as tax collector, to work out serious proposals and experiments in village reorganization and in rural methods of production and marketing. This venture led to what has now become a dual experiment in higher education in relation to rural and village life, including arts and crafts. Gandhi came to Santiniketan after leaving South Africa. He was introduced to Tagore by the American missionary, C. F.

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Andrews. For a number of years, Gandhi helped with the agricultural reconstruction projects and its crafts, and, as I understand it, assumed charge of these projects for a time before becoming nationally active. Throughout Gandhi’s later life he kept in close contact with Tagore and with the experiments at Santiniketan; and in turn, Tagore followed Gandhi’s ventures both as critic and as a sympathetic friend. For the men were radically different in certain respects, despite these common sympathies. Tagore was always the aristocrat; Gandhi, the commoner. Knowing the range of India’s culture, extending from poverty to riches, this meeting of extremes in the association between these two men seemed both appropriate and salutary. The university at Santiniketan goes by the name VISVA-BHARATI. The name suggests an Indian center of learning with a world outlook, as indicated in its motto: “Where the world makes its home in a single nest.” Following Tagore’s own conception of learning, the university tries to adhere to the ancient Indian tradition of the seer expounding his wisdom to his followers, an Indian version of “Hopkins on one end of the log and a student on the other.” Only here the professor will squat down under a banyan tree or in the center of an open field with a circle of students around him. (It seems to me I have seen this on our own quadrangle when weather permits.) Much that goes on here might strike some as being a bit “precious.” However, after looking on at several sessions, it would be my judgment that the interchange is of a high order of discerning and critical discussion, particularly where it bears upon the fine arts (painting, sculpture, music, and the dance), literature, philosophy, religion, and related cultural studies. The pattern was originally developed around the personality of Tagore, and undoubtedly worked remarkably well under his stimulus. Since Tagore’s death the school has suffered the usual decline, or at least a reputation of decline, following the demise of its giant personalities. Since 1951 Visva-Bharati has been a national university, one of four universities in India to be so designated. (Bananas Hindu University and New Delhi University are two of the remaining three. The fourth one escapes my memory.) The Prime Minister, Nehru, is its Chancellor. This, of course, is an honorary appointment, as is true of the Chancellorship in all Indian universities. The Vice-Chancellor is the administrator in residence and is actually the one in charge. The nationalizing of Visva-Bharati has meant the intrusion of systematic grading and various other statistical measures which tend to interrupt the free and informal mode of learning which Tagore sought to foster. Nevertheless, much of the former emphasis persists, according to those who are on the grounds. I did not stay here long enough to get adequate

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insight into the problem which these two conflicting modes of education in juxtaposition present. Neither was I able to come to a judgment as to the real worth of this total educational undertaking at Santiniketan which I could defend as being critical and well-grounded. Nevertheless, I must say that the experience of this place left a profound impression upon me; as profound, I think, as anything I saw in India. What it did for now was to give me a concrete perception of what the Indian means by his “spiritual tradition.” I must confess that, up to the time that I visited Santiniketan, I was seriously skeptical as to what this could mean so far as India was concerned. And as time went on I think I became a bit cynical, insisting on occasion that this spirituality of Indian culture has been highly overrated. Much of this judgment rested upon what I had seen and heard among popular culture groups, or what I had read in reports of mass gatherings: as in the recent World Parliament of Religions in New Delhi. This kind of thinking seemed to me altogether too uncritical and sentimental to be taken seriously. Furthermore, I had encountered such distressing and depressing evidence of human degradation, eloquently attesting to the culture’s neglect of its human beings, and, along with it, an arrogant and disdainful evasion of honest labor, or repudiation of it, among many Indians, thus seeming to separate the life of the intellectual and the life of labor wide apart, that I had begun to cringe, and even to cry out in impatience against this facile claim to spiritual superiority in Indian culture. I found myself saying to myself, “They have the kind of spirituality which has brought about this state of human degradation. And they have the level of livelihood which these poor, illiterate creatures whom they have rejected as human beings, can provide for them. Hordes of faithful handymen, but not a skilled workman among them!” I recall one spirited conversation I had with a professor of political science in Osmania University in Hyderabad, a city just northwest of Madras, in which this issue came up. His rather glib and superficial characterization of the West, and particularly of America, as being materialistic in contrast to their own spiritual bent of mind, provoked me into saying to him that I thought that the spirituality of Indian culture had been highly overrated. He was the kind of person who elicited straight talk; and I had wanted to talk this issue out with someone who felt about the matter exactly as he did. In many ways, I said, unless I have been seeing the wrong things in my travels through India, you seem to be every bit as material-minded as we are, and more aggressively so. I am thinking, I said, not of the Fiveyear Plans you are inaugurating, but of your markets, the tenacity with which your salespeople pursue possible buyers, the enormous traffic in begging which, I understand, is quite carefully organized and developed in

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all of your major cities, the accumulations of wealth, [more] highly concentrated here, so I am told, than in any other place in the world. I have in mind, too, I said, the reputation of Indian-controlled industries which have been taken over from British owners. Your own people tell me that in almost every instance the owners cut down employment, lengthened the working hours, and reduced wages, thereby increasing profits beyond anything that the British were able to make out of the same plants. This, I was told, was something of a pattern where industries were becoming indigenous in India. In northern India a common explanation for the deterioration of villages and towns was the importation of cheap labor and a consequent lowering of standards of living. I lived for several months in a town that literally lay prostrated economically and culturally as a consequence of such occurrences in the jute mills. And the people were continually bemoaning their fate. Now all this, I said, sounds strangely like the greed and exploitation of our materialistic West, against which we are continually fighting. I realized I was letting him have it, both barrels, in fact; but, as I said, he asked for it. And I must say he took it very well, just as he had given it. But it did sober him a bit. He leaned back in his rocker and looked at me with a rather far-away look and said, “You know, I never actually thought of it in this way before. We are quite materialistic at that, aren’t we?” I agreed. “And if I read the signs of the times in your country,” I continued, “this physical factor promises to loom even larger in the years ahead, though possibly with more direction and control. In so far as spiritualism has justified the neglect of the body-life and has delayed the measures of reform and rebuilding which now loom so significantly in your culture, I think it has proven a serious barrier to the realization of human good in your society. So, in my judgment, both spiritualism and materialism can be a source of human evil in a culture, though they seem to be evils in reverse.” Well, all this was before Santiniketan. The stubborn facts which I had recounted, both to myself many times, and to this professor of political science, remained unchanged and unanswered in my mind. In this place, however, I glimpsed, almost for the first time during my visit to India, what Indians in their most sensitive and realistic moments had grasped, and, in some quarters, still cherish, if they do not actually possess it. It is the culture of the human spirit in all its dimensions of vocation and avocation. I call it realistic because it has just that quality about it. It is not a dreamy mode of idealization, but a disciplined art of seeing, of perceiving and apprehending qualities and depths of spirit in common events, in commonplace acts of performing one’s duty, in carrying through

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routine jobs: in creating something of beauty with one’s hands, with pen or brush in hand, or simply dancing out one’s moods in measured rhythms. The sensibilities of spirit shape the form of events and give them meaning and zest beyond their casual measure. This one catches in the mood of the place. It was not just an aesthetic overtone applied to classroom activities. I could see that it had been carried into rural experiments and beyond them, into the village life of nearby communities. Somehow the depth and grace of the spirit was discernible in the most commonplace acts of labor and casual association. To be sure, this could not be taken as being representative of Indian culture, nor applicable to it in any sizable form. But it was a genuine flowering of the human spirit in one place that gave body and substance to the Indian’s claim of spirituality, even to their claim that divinity is in man, or can be awakened to empower his gifts and capacities. As a Christian theologian I might wish to argue with this view of human nature. As a sensitive human being, responsive to this human fruition in acts of joy, in goodness and beauty, in faithfulness and kindness among people serving one another, I can only bow in humble recognition of the fact that a work of grace, human or divine, has occurred in this place. We were greatly amused and informed by the guide who showed us about Santiniketan. As I mentioned earlier, he had been Tagore’s personal secretary for many years. We could not resist prodding him to tell us something of his life with Tagore, and of Tagore, himself. In doing so we thought we might be opening ourselves to a flood of reminiscences and, possibly, to a sentimental eulogy of a man lost under the halo of greatness. But we should have known better, having been with the guide all morning. This man really had his foot on the ground, however much he may have moved among the clouds of Tagore’s own thoughts and sentiments. His first words in response to our request were, “Tagore was a hard man to live with. He was especially hard for me. I told the Master that many times. A poet is difficult enough; but a poet concerned with education! Now there you have something!” He then went on to tell us of the confusion he would try to struggle through when Tagore was busying himself with some new project or plan in the early days of the university. “A poet, you know,” he began, “is very round about in his way of thinking. When he says something, say to a commoner like me, you have to think a while to make out what he has said. And then when he talked of education in this vein, this could be a noman’s land. Well, the Master didn’t like it when I could not understand him. He was an impatient man. He would put forth those ideas and expect me to get it right off, and to comment about them. But I couldn’t do it.

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How could I? At that moment nothing that he had said was clear to me. And I would try to think about what he said to myself, so I would say nothing. Then the Master would get very severe with me. He was a hard man to live with. For me he was very difficult.” And then he added reflectively, and, I thought, a bit sadly, “But he was a great man. He was a very great man. You knew that, too, even when he was being severe with you. We have no one like him now.” Santiniketan is not so much evidence of a conscious awakening of India’s national culture (though the nationalizing of it, and the frequent mention of it in the public press is) as the persistence of its ancient legacy amidst an ever-widening expanse of technical and industrial pursuits; an oasis in what nostalgic Hindus regard as an expanding wasteland. This gap may be more apparent than real. For, as I have indicated, Santiniketan has its roots in village reclamation; and its initial goal is not unlike that of the national five-year plans. Furthermore, industrialization, at this stage, is accompanied by a conscious concern among national leaders to carry into the new India responsibility for cultivation of the arts in correlation with an inevitable stress upon the sciences. The Vice President, Radhakrishnan has been particularly active in promoting art congresses and exhibitions as well as encouraging discussion of India’s philosophical heritage among cultural societies. In fact, one gets the impression that his role as Vice President of the Congress is principally that of interpreting and promoting the cultural arts as a phase of the national renaissance. But the prime minister has also given considerable support to these projects, apparently as part of a national strategy to give proportion to the five-year plan of reconstruction which, inevitably, must emphasize technical developments. In the eyes of many Indians, including the Vice President, all of these developments of reclamation in the arts and thought of India are expressive of the neo-Hindu spirit and arc taken to be continuous with its revival. I would have to say that such evidence of a Hindu revival as I found in moving about India did seem to identify it closely with the awakened nationalist mood. And in the university centers, this took the form of sharpening the focus of the Hindu intellectual and cultural heritage and of its present role in the nation. Yet it took the form also of stimulating interest in relating Hinduism to other religious groups, and of pursuing studies bearing upon this problem. How much effort this rarified level of scholarly concern with Hinduism can have on the popular level, I am not able to say. I do know that the contrast between the two, as I observed those areas of self-conscious Hindu zeal, is striking. The one is temperate, conciliatory, exploratory, conscious of a new opportunity for going

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beyond historic barriers in the understanding of other religions which now form part of the Indian community. The other is assertive, possessive, assuming the role of one who has come into his own with a new sense of power. The government is exercising a cautious, yet restraining influence, particularly in areas where tension between religious groups has been in evidence. The tragedy of mass murder and fighting between Hindus and Moslems, following Independence, is still a vivid memory among many of them. As one sees Hindus and Moslems and people of other religions intermingling now in cities and villages, in colleges and universities, on trains and busses, one feels reasonably assured that the worst of this struggle is definitely over; but of this one can never be certain. The fact that Christianity is a minority faith in India leaves it less open to attack and suspicion. Yet, the very fact that only yesterday it held a privileged place in the nation’s life by reason of British rule, keeps it from being wholly removed from the front line of attack. In the areas in which we lived and visited, no visible signs of serious strain between Hindus and Christians were in evidence. I have mentioned the nuisance acts in Serampore, which, of course, wore common elsewhere as well; but these, to my knowledge, never got beyond that stage. The areas in which tension was at the breaking point, and, on occasion actually broke into violence, were cities or villages in which reform issues, such as caste, were in a sensitive balance. Where caste was deeply entrenched, and revolt against Congressional legislation was frequent, instability in relationships between religious groups could be expected. One of the striking developments among Indian Christians is their concern to take Hinduism seriously and to give careful attention to the study of it in theological schools. The more liberal theological schools in India all along have included outline courses in Hinduism and other religions; but the present effort goes far beyond this cursory effort in its plans. At the United Theological College at Bangalore, for example, under the stimulus of one of its faculty members, Dr. Paul Dovanandan, the study of Hinduism has assumed an explicitly apologetic turn. The basis of this effort is not only a concern to reach Hindus with the Christian message, but to orientate the preaching of the Christian message more soundly and relevantly within Indian culture. A related project, though not directly a part of the theological school’s program, is a long-range study being undertaken by Dr. Samuels in Bangalore, with support and encouragement, I understand, from our own Missions Center at Chicago. I had a long visit with Dr. V. C. Samuels and learned a good deal about his hopes and expectations. He is aware that he is treading upon new ground in this undertaking, so far as Christian missions is concerned, and is

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increasingly aware of how little prepared even their own Indian Christians are for venturing upon such an effort. As I understand his project, it is less explicitly an apologetic strategy and more geared to move toward prolonged and continuous conversations with Hindu scholars and leaders. The nature of these conversations, and even what they hope to accomplish through them, is still a somewhat open matter. I sensed that the Indian Christians who have now come into control of the churches and theological schools are deeply conscious of their own limited acquaintance with the culture in which they have lived; and with rival religious groups against which they have preached the Christian gospel. “Christianity in India has been a religion of the compound,” is the way one Indian Christian put it in talking with me. “We have moved out of the compound,” he continued; “or rather the compound has been removed from us. We are now in competition with the full range of alternative ideas and social forces as bonafide members of the Indian community. We have to know our way around.” But I also sensed something even more human and native underneath this outreach toward the wider, Indian community. It was an inner release of themselves as Indians. There was almost an experience of new birth in some of the young Indian instructors and clergy with whom I talked. Christianity had been a hot house growth in India. They, too, had shared the artificiality of being housed under a protective covering, and nurtured by specially prepared formulae, imported from distributors abroad. They had been kept aloof from the Indian mind and its cultural responsibilities because these were regarded as being outside of, and alien to, the things of the Christian gospel. I am paraphrasing here, words that wore spoken to me by a young theological instructor. Almost in a tone of bitterness at times some anti-Western sentiment would escape him, and be quickly recalled, suggesting that he was suppressing an inner conflict, or in process of resolving it. Indian Christians of this bent of mind were not numerous, but they were in strategic posts where their influence could be felt. And it may very well be that they were in such posts precisely because they provided the Indian churches with a cutting edge at the point of contact where this was needed. One cannot be sure, but the impression grew on me as I moved about India that Indian Christians, especially among the younger people, are in the process of reclaiming their cultural heritage and of becoming selfconscious Indians along with the rest of their countrymen. The reason I say one cannot be sure is that a surprising number of theological students, clergy, and lay Christians whom I met still reflected the mentality of the mission compound. The vast awakening in India’s national life, teeming

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with new problems, seemed to be passing them by, leaving hardly a ripple in the routine of their accustomed piety. The one national act of legislation that had reached their ears was the one granting freedom of worship. This seemed to assure them that Christianity had status under the national Indian government. What did they have to worry about? This may be a bit unfair, but this is precisely what they seemed to convoy to me in what they said. The fact that the Christian church might confront new demands and opportunities in the villages or cities, now that Indians had been put upon their own resources; or that new problems for religion, itself, intruded with an awakened industrial zeal, and the technical emphasis that followed, seemed not to be upon their horizon of thinking. The gospel for many of them is a biblical message which can be reiterated over and over again in the biblical idiom. It requires nothing more than reiteration. And for this purpose, pathetic gatherings of Christians, numbering twenty or thirty, convene Sunday after Sunday in an age-old Mission Church to engage in worship, witnessing to the Christian faith. This is the straggling evangelism that is half in and half out of the mission compound; though in vision and purpose, it remains more in than out. Not even a glimmer of the new day that is swirling about them appears to disturb them. By contrast, the discontented young Indian Christians who sense the new occasions, and their own frightening inadequacies to meet them, were refreshing and encouraging. At least in them one can see some signs of vigor and purposeful dedication emerging, which can give stature to the Christian witness in India. A vast amount of what goes under the name of “evangelism” is sorely lacking in just that. Along with this sense of coming of age within one’s own culture, I discovered among Indian Christians a restlessness to adapt Christian theology and church practices to Indian forms and customs. They speak of it as “Indianizing theology.” As I moved through theological centers, especially in South India, I found this problem assuming more and more prominence. Even in the Synod meeting of the Church of South India it was very much to the fore in discussions. I found this to be an arresting topic, for, of course, it is at the center of the problem of faith and culture. I took advantage of every opportunity that came to me to discuss it. Often I sought out or created such occasions on my own. I must not give the impression that I encouraged the Indianizing of theology in all its forms. Some of it is little more than a superficial environmentalism that assumes that a church must take on the coloring of its culture. The critical problems involved here appear to have no place in such thinking. With this kind of thinking I took issue on a number of occasions.

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While at the Synod meeting of the Church of South India in Nagercoil, I had the good fortune of meeting with Bishop Appasamy, who has long been identified with concern for the indigenous church. He presented me with a copy of his book, The Gospel and India’s Heritage, which is one of the pioneer efforts at indigenization, and has been very influential. It is interesting to note on the reverse of the title page that, “This book has been written at the request of the National Christian Council in India with a view to translation into the chief Indian languages.” Earlier works by Bishop Appasamy, looking in the same direction, include: Christianity as Bhakti Marga, What is Moksha (published in England under the title, The Johannine Doctrine of Life) Temple Bells, Christ in the Indian Church, and The Zadhu. Later, on my visit at Leonard College in Jabalpur, I had an extensive interview with Professor Rajappan D. Immanuel, who had requested me to call at his home, following one of my public lectures in the college on “Religion and a Culture in Ferment.” Professor Immanuel teaches ‘Philosophy of Religion’ and ‘New Testament Interpretation’ in the theological college. For a number of years, Professor Immanuel has been a vigorous advocate of extending the use of native Indian forms and symbols in Christian ceremonials, and of assimilating Hindu festivals into the Christian year of the Indian Church. His book Hindu Influence on Indian Christians (which was also presented to me), as well as several articles by him deal specifically with this theme. In addition he has tried his hand at creative writing, adapting the Christian theme to the Indian ethos in dramatic form. Although there is some skepticism among church leaders in India as to how far they can go in appropriating Hindu customs and practices for Christian purposes, one form of Indianization seems thoroughly accepted. That is the using of Indian music in the services of worship. In some instances Indian art has been employed as well. I noted, on listening to the report on “The Evolution of the New Pattern for the Church” at the Synod meeting of the Church of South India (which I attended as visitor at their invitation) that this topic at least came in for mention. One spirited paper, written and read by the Rt. Rev. Chellapa, Bishop of Madras, entitled, “Towards an Indian Church” stated a point of view which, on hearing, I would have judged to be a rather extreme statement; but the wholehearted response to it on the part of the clergy and delegates present led me to feel that it was more representative than I had assumed. Chellapa covered more than the Indianizing of worship. He addressed himself critically to the training of ministers, to excess dependence on overseas support, to the conduct of the churches by Indians in addition to speaking about the

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Indian services of worship. Concerning theological education, he said, quoting another bishop: “The categories of our theology are Western categories;” and “the thought forms are sprung from Greece and Rome, not from India,” and hence largely irrelevant. The text-books used assume a different and unreal background, not that of Hinduism or Islam, nor that of the Indian village or town, nor that of the Asian Continent where India belongs. The bishops’ remarks are so expressive of a point of view which I frequently heard voiced that I am impelled to quote him at length. He continues, “These assumptions are particularly evident in the fields of Church History, Theology and Worship. Church History text-books take for granted Christendom, not the non-Christian setting of India, which is why perhaps early Church History, with its pagan background, is more intelligible to us than medieval or modern Church History. (Incidentally, if there is one omnibus book on Indian Church History, I have not heard of it.) “And so with Theology. The Indian Church has not yet produced a single original heresy. Such heresies as it throws up from time to time are as old as the hills, only, as they are never linked up with the historical heresies; our ministers are unable to refute them, as they arise. We are, too, so afraid of the danger of syncretism—a very real danger since the advent of Basic Education—that we hesitate to assist in the coming into being of a theology that is at once Indian and Christian. The pioneer attempts made about a generation ago by scholars like Dr. Appasamy still remain pioneer attempts. Our theological students are better versed in Kierkegaard and Barth and the Existentialists.” Regarding church architecture, the bishop went on to say, “Notwithstanding the remarkable experiments at Dornakal, Tirupattur, Erode, and Jaflna, besides chapels like that of the Women’s Christian Collage, church buildings continue to be built in bastard Gothic and in a deliberately and aggressively foreign style of architecture, such as Moslem mosques always are, and inviting the same resentment, even contempt. If there has been a difference since 1947, it is probably for the worse, especially where decisions have rested with Indian Christians, as those native Christian gentlemen are often more British and American than the British and the Americans themselves! (Bishop Chellapa is, himself, a native Indian Christian.) Recently, an Indian Revivalist went to conduct a Retreat at an Ashram, and he sniffed at the beautiful Dravidian Christian temple there, obviously Dravidian, yet look natural in its setting, and yet equally obviously Christian, with a large cross surmounting the gopuram and devoid of idols and of all heathen symbolism. But all that the Revivalist

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brother could do was to roundly accuse the brethren of trying to please the Hindus and not the Lord Jesus. To the poor, ignorant, misguided man, the style of architecture known as Gothic (which means ‘pagan’) was apparently more Christian, because forsooth! it came from the West, from whence was imported his brand of Christianity, and particularly his Fundamentalism.” Bishop Chellapa then turns to the music of the Indian Church with even sharper criticism: “The music in our Churches, too, continues to be Western and shabby. When I hear many town choirs and some village choirs, formerly Anglican, attempting to render Cathedral chants, in a procrustean attempt to fit Tamil words into tunes which were never meant for them, I am reminded of the famous saying of Dr. Johnson, in another context; “Sir, it is like a dog standing on its hind-legs; it is not done well, but you are surprised it is done at all!’” “The position is no better with regard to so-called hymns which are dignified with the Tamil word (this is in Tamil script so I am unable to reproduce the word) a more accurate description would be because, as poetry, they are doggerel, and as Christian sentiment, they are gibberish. Whoever quotes a Tamil hymn, as we do Tamil lyrics? And yet, my people love to have it so.” “Many town congregations and a few village ones as well—who have not enough humor to see themselves as others see them—deem it beneath their dignity to sing Tamil lyrics. In particular, I have in mind a City Church where they always have four Tamil hymns on a Sunday morning. A rickshawallah, waiting outside, was asked by a passer-by as to when the Service would be over. The answer was: “Sir, there are usually four noises. So far there have been three noises. There is one more noise to follow, and then they will all troop out, making a lot of bustle., This is the impression made on a simple Hindu by the highfalutin hymn singing of this sophisticated and pretentious city congregation.” “Sporadic experiments in Indian music and in Indian forms of worship have been conducted from time to time, here and there; and Summer Schools of Music have been held. They impress visitors, but Indian music has not yet become the order of the day. To use Scriptural language, ‘the dog always returns to its vomit.’ This is partly because many Churches apparently exist for the sake of that musical monstrosity, the harmonium, for the Organist, who can play only English tunes, and for the choir, in ragged and dirty cassocks and surplices, exhibiting neckties and bars, unwashen legs, or flashy socks and shoes or sandals who will not sing Tamil lyrics. Any Indianisation is in imitation of catchy cinema-hits which Hindus may sing but never in their places of Worship.”

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“Our people are naturally sacramental, but our present system gives them a fair amount of the Word, true, in somewhat dilute or muddy doses, but little of the Sacrament, which is occasionally and somewhat casually doled out by the peripatetic presbyter in one of his infrequent, lightning visits. As long as we depend exclusively on the present system of recruiting, training, posting and paying our clergy, this unnatural divorce between the Word and the Sacrament is bound to continue, and to keep our village congregations in a ‘spiritually anemic state’. We are in fact, putting asunder what God hath joined together.” “Our people, too, are naturally reverent, but the unimaginative Protestant Missionary has well-nigh destroyed their innate bhakti by teaching them to pray, not standing, or prostrating, or kneeling, but sitting, even sprawling—not in silence, but always jabbering—and by dispersing immediately after the last ‘Amen,’ without so much as a ‘Thank You’ to God. Such pernicious and irreverent habits have helped to develop pride in a people, naturally humble, and made the Almighty unduly familiar to them, not as one who is both Transcendent and Immanent, or as One who is Love, yet is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity.” “We all believe in Indian worship, but we practice foreign worship somewhat like the early Samaritans who ‘feared the Lord, and served their own gods’.” This is strong language! And it is possibly fed from below by a deep and persistent stream of Indian pride and resentment; but it voices quite precisely a feeling that pervades a large number of Indian Christians. Not all go along with encouraging rapprochement between Christians and Hindus, or with assimilating Hindu customs and festivals into the Indian Christian Church; but they are intent on recapturing their Indian character. In pursuing this end, they have all the marks of a child pushed out of character by an overbearing paternalism. They yearn to be themselves, to be freely and wholly Indian. One gets the impression from some Indian Christians that they have less fear of emulating Hindus than they have of persisting in Western Christian dress. This, I think, is clearly revealed in Bishop Chellap’s address. Most of the young Indian Christians with whom I spoke, however, makes a distinction between the Indian character and the Hindu faith. Even where practices or attitudes are known to be historically associated with Hinduism and characteristically Hindu, they point out that this is not exclusively Hindu, but a sensibility expressing the Indian temperament. They make the point that Indian culture provides a mode or habit of living out of which various religious groups have sprung and in which many can participate. The Indian heritage is thus, for them, a deeper strata of feeling and thinking than any single cultus exemplifies, and one

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in which all Indians can share. This is clearly a sharp reversal of the mentality of the mission compound that sought to isolate the Indian Christian from the pagan or secular influences of his native culture, even to uproot him from the village life. Thus Indianization, in its preliminary stages at least, is bound to betray a marked anti-western bias, and a sense of abandon with regard to the “dangers of syncretism.” I did sense a more critical point of view among some theological students. And, on returning to Chicago this spring, I found the same discriminating turn of mind in a young Indian Christian, an Indian Lutheran, who was in my class in Problems of Faith and Culture. He has since returned to India to take up the duties of a student religious worker on a college campus in north India. The view these theological students expressed interested me particularly because it had striking affinities with the one that I, myself had expounded on a number of occasions in various places throughout India, partly as a way of countering what seemed to me to be a rather superficial form of environmentalism, lapsing back into the Indian idiom by way of simply translating Christian doctrine into Indian thought forms, or of adapting Christian practice to local customs. These theological students were also intent upon being freely Indian in character and eager to participate fully and responsibly in the present-day culture of India. This, they regard as being normal for Christians and neo-Christians in India alike. In this respect the abandonment of the mission compound mentality is as complete with them as with the other Indian Christians about whom I have spoken. Yet, participation in the culture means for them, not so much an assimilation of environmental characteristics (though this may occur), as a responsible attitude toward issues that have now become alive in the new India, following independence, industrialization, and the increasing scientific and technical bent of mind and interest. The culture presents problems and a challenge to every religious orientation, they assert. As an Indian Christian, one is under obligation to bring to these issues and problems, the criticism, judgment, and insight which the Christian gospel can provide as a perspective upon the human situation in India. Acting responsibly within the Indian culture, with a positive concern for its welfare and possibilities, as well as for the integrity of one’s own Christian commitment, appears to them to be the most natural and acceptable way for an Indian Christian to take his culture and his faith seriously. In dealing with those questions and interests, with the concern of an Indian, one cannot escape expressing oneself through the Indian temperament and character. Indianization of theology, church practice, and program will thus come about as a by-product of performing

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one’s task responsibly and wholeheartedly as an Indian Christian. Criticism is sometimes made of the self-conscious effort to Indianize theology and Christian worship on the grounds that it tends to be artificial and imitative. And that it commits the fallacy of making the culture regulative of Christian faith instead of availing oneself of the critical judgment and directive of faith. I am afraid I have stated here a position which more nearly expresses a point of view which I hold, and which I presented on various occasions when this issue of Indianization was raised. However, as I said earlier, it concurs with the essential emphases which I later found certain theological students in India expressing. I spoke frequently along this line in various theological groups, but I had more occasions to do so at Leonard College in Jabalpur, where discussion of this question was particularly alive and insistent. Here, in addition to my public lectures, I met with classes in theology and in philosophy of religion. And on the final evening of our visit, Mrs. Meland and I met with the entire faculty in the president’s home to discuss this problem. And it turned out to be a very spirited and absorbing evening. I felt that the creative effort to repossess the Indian sensitivity and response in worship and in ceremonial acts was wholly justified—more natural and rewarding, both religiously and aesthetically, than much of the use of imported Western stereotypes that passed as Kosher Christianity. And my own experience in services of Christian worship where the native character was freely in evidence, as in the long silence before the service began, with Indian students and faculty squatting cross-legged on the floor, the singing of Indian music, or the singing of Western hymns in the Indian manner, i.e., in unison, (harmonization is alien to Indian music) and the sustained silence following prayer, and even after the benediction, impressed upon me that native customs can enhance and deepen the act of faith under certain circumstances. By contrast, certain services in mission churches that adhered rigidly to the Western pattern and forms seemed utterly out of place, with much of the triviality and artificiality that Bishop Chellapa ascribed to them. Where this kind of Indianization of Christian practices proceeds with genuineness and with the freedom to be oneself in the native setting, it can have a significant effect upon Christian worship. Yet, to stress this modification of form in worship, and of category in thought, without seeing the more demanding occasions for turning the light of the Christian witness upon crucial ethical and cultural problems, in which important, national decisions are being made, seems to be making of Indianization a superficial changing of spots and coloring. I raised the question, too, with some of my Indian friends, whether this

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zest for Indianization did not partake of a nationalistic mood which could well shrink down their sense of the larger Christian community. The Church of South India presumes to be a venture in ecumenical Christianity; and is recognized throughout Western Christendom as being a courageous and impressive achievement toward this end. But does it hold to an ecumenical vision when, in working so ardently to focus its sights upon the national character, it is ready to reject all semblance of participation in the larger universal heritage of Christian faith? In making this point, I had in mind not only the anti-Western feelings expressed in their demands for Indianization, much of which I could agree with, but comments frequently made in my presence to the effect that Indian Christianity, in looking to its historical dimension, could well afford to concentrate its attention upon the early centuries of the Christian church, since Christianity was then, like modern Indian Christianity, a minority faith contending against a pagan community. For some Indian church historians and theologians, this apparently meant that the Indian church need give little or no attention to Reformation Christianity or to modern liberal Protestantism in as much as the issues raised by these movements were largely relevant to European Christendom and thus were local in character. I heard this thesis explicitly advanced by only one teacher of Church history in India, but I was given the impression that it was not an uncommon position. The address by Bishop Chellapa at the Synod Meeting of the Church of South India, quoted earlier, would tend to confirm that impression. I was further confirmed in this impression by the fact that a surprising number of Indian members of theological faculties, who had studied either in England or in America, wrote their thesis on second or third century Church Fathers. This may have been a coincidence, but it struck me as being somewhat significant when I first came upon it. It should be said that the theological curriculum, as now defined by Serampore College, which is normative for all theological colleges affiliated with Serampore, provides for the study of the history of Christianity and Christian thought as it is normally pursued in Western schools. Such modifications as I have mentioned, eliminating certain periods, or condensing them, are proposals that are being made in the interest of emphasizing the Indian context of Christian history and theology. No one would deny the point that early Christianity presents a situation strikingly similar to the apologetic task of the Indian Church in one respect: that is the situation of a minority faith in a culture essentially alien to its witness. But there the analogy ends. In other respects, the apologetic as well as the constructive task of Reformation Protestantism and of later,

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liberal Protestant Christianity is much more akin to the task now confronting the Christian Church in India than that of any other period of Christian history. For what promises to raise issues for the Indian Church in the years ahead is not simply a pagan or alien setting; in some ways this falsifies the situation. For the Indian Congress has granted freedom of worship and has shown itself ready to assure Christians, along with people of other faiths, the constitutional status that this legislation implies. And while other religions are in dominance, one can hardly say that the problems most acutely facing the Indian Church come from this source. On the other hand, it can be argued that Indian Christians, feeling their way toward an indigenous church, after having been subservient to Overseas control for a century or more, have certain affinities with Reformation Protestants of the sixteenth century, striking out independently, either as nationalist churches, or as free churches. But more pertinent, still, is the fact that Christianity in India, along with other religions, faces cultural developments in modern India expressive of the modern consciousness comparable to those of Western Europe and America when science and industrialization radically altered the sensibilities and cultural objectives of the West. It is, in my judgment, precisely because a surprisingly large section of the Indian Church today has as yet not taken a full and realistic measure of the task confronting it in this culture in ferment that it is able to make so much of this early Christian analogy. To a considerable degree, so far as I could tell, the churches of India have hardly awakened to what is transpiring in the culture around them. Consequently their form of witnessing can still assume a fairly restrictive and pietistic character. In this respect, educators, especially in colleges and universities, the Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A., Literary and Cultural organizations, along with the Press appear more realistic and more sharply attuned to the situation which all contemporary Indians are facing. There doubtless are many reasons why this is so, and why one should expect it to be so. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it seriously affects the judgment of churchmen and theologians in India as to what is relevant to the churches task. There are exceptions to this characterization. I have already mentioned faculty members of theological schools and church leaders who have been addressing themselves to the current situation. One will find instances of specific church groups, too, who have actively participated in projects of cultural renewal, some of them even in advance of government planning. For example, while in Madras I learned that the Lutheran churches in South India were actively engaged in village reclamation programs long before the government had begun its projects. And the Presbyterian

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missions in Allahabad have been far in the lead in giving guidance to rural developments. We visited the famous Higgenbottom Experimental Farm in Allahabad. While it appears to be in full swing, its future seems somewhat in question; for in recent years the national government has set up similar experimental farms in considerable numbers throughout India, modeled after the Higgenbottom station. It is thus felt by some that the purpose of this pioneer project has been realized. If it must close down for lack of funds, its dissolution will not be complete; for its progeny are legion. Important as those practical projects are in relating the churches to India’s cultural renaissance, they cannot be considered expressive of a Christian outlook that is alive to the issues of faith and culture as these are shaping up in modern India. On this point, the churches as well as the theological schools, as I observed them, leave much to be desired. Our longest period of stay in any one place was in Serampore, West Bengal, a town of 86,000 people on the banks of the Hoogly River, about fifteen miles from Calcutta. Serampore is a fairly old river port about which much could be written because it has a colorful and, according to native opinion, a rather glorious past. Chief among these historic notes is the fact that it was here that William Carey came in 1818 to found the first Christian Protestant mission under the auspices of the English Baptists. William Carey built Serampore College. The sheer physical effort of erecting its massive buildings must have proved an undertaking requiring the energy and enterprise of a William Rainey Harper. And I must confess that, on listening to the local acclaim of William Carey, I was constantly reminded of accounts heard on this campus of President Harper, even to accounts of his feats as a linguist. The Serampore of today is a rather shabby replica of the town about which they tell with nostalgia. Stately buildings still exist, recalling earlier days of affluence; but the impression that dominates is the sight of decadent dwellings, inhabited by disheveled men and women and naked children, bespeaking great poverty, cows and water buffaloes sauntering along the roadway, or lying leisurely in the middle of the road, streams of rickshaws, propelled by young boys or elderly men on bicycles. One struggles to rise above this impression or to elude it, knowing there is a way of life here that has held families together in this community for generations; but the impact of this initial mood is not easily dispelled. The grounds of Serampore College are impressive—huge, massive buildings with classic pillars, set back several hundred feet from the road along the river front, surrounded by extensive lawns and banyan trees, all of which are enclosed in a high, stately, iron-grill fence. This description is

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precise but deceptive; for despite the beauty and serenity that is really there, it is again the feeling of decadence that dominates. For one thing, the buildings are sorely in need of repair and reclamation. Their very size defies any regular schedule of upkeep. And the budget, barely adequate to keep the college open, can hardly manage anything beyond the most meager and demanding maintenance. To pay off indebtedness that had accumulated the college found it necessary to sell some of its buildings and grounds to a jute factory. And this set in motion a series of events which gradually altered the face of the community including the college grounds. Serampore was among the first of the communities to feel the defacing effects of industrialization, without gaining materially, or in any other way, from the presence of industry. Large numbers of workers and their families were brought in, sadly depressing the level of living conditions. I record this description of Serampore, not to defame it; certainly not to speak unkindly of Serampore College, for which we have much affection, but to make available impressions that may be of use to my colleagues, should any of them be asked to go there in connection with future lectures in India. Had we been given some preparation of this kind, or some insight into what we might expect in the way of living conditions, I think our adjustment to conditions there might have been easier. Serampore College will always be important as a theological center to visit because of the role it plays in Indian theological education. And the quality and cordiality of its faculty make it an inviting place, despite all I have said about its surroundings. Serampore College was begun as a Christian institution. It was intended at the outset that it should be conducted as a college in the full academic sense; but it was not until 1910 that it set itself seriously to carrying out this intention, at which time it formally became an arts and science college along with its theological faculty. As an arts and science college it became affiliated with Calcutta University and has remained so ever since. Degrees in these branches of study are granted through Calcutta University. The theological degrees, however, are given by Serampore College, acting under a charter granted by the King of Denmark in 1827, when the Danes occupied and controlled this part of India. To this day, the theological faculty and its Christian board of governors control the educational policies of the school, though some of the arts and science faculty, who is Hindu, are represented on its Senate. While the student body numbers about 1,000 students, less than 10% are Christian. The theological student enrollment numbered only 30 this past year. The

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arts and science college is co-educational, though the woman are very much in the minority. Serampore College faces a serious financial problem by virtue of its mixed constituency. Being a college in arts and science, catering largely to Hindu students and faculty, it receives some government support; yet not full support since it is under Christian auspices. Being under Christian auspices, it receives support also from Christian funds, yet not full support since it is so largely Hindu, and because it is a college of arts and science in addition to being a theological college. So it falls between its pillars of support. The plight of this school is of serious concern for theological education in India, for it is the one institution legally authorized to grant graduate theological degrees. Each year, students graduating from one of the affiliated theological colleges, along with representative faculty and administrators, make their pilgrimage to Serampore for the annual convocation. This has been occurring for as long as Christian theological education has existed in India. In this respect, Serampore College is strategic, both as a symbol of theological education in India, and as a formative force; since it convenes the ruling body of theological educators, the Serampore Senate, on which representatives from all affiliated theological colleges sit, with the principal of Serampore College acting as Convener and President. In being Visiting Lecturer at Serampore College; therefore, I was located at what might be considered the strategic center of theological education in India. I would agree that, in certain important respects, this was so. In certain other respects, however, I was remote from important developments. And in being confined to this one place for so long a period of my visit, I was prevented from exploring areas which deserved attention. The entire group of thirty theological students attended my lectures regularly with members of the faculty and staff attending as they could. Some faculty was present throughout the course of twenty lectures. I found a live interest in the material I had to present, but the problem of communication was immediately made apparent. This necessitated my giving considerable time to revising, even rewriting, several of the lectures. As a result, I think I gave more time and work to delivering this course of twenty lectures than one could justify. This is a predicament that invariably arises in that kind of a situation, I believe, especially when one has barriers both of language and background of study with which to contend. My experience of lecturing to this group of Indian students over a

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sustained period, however, was one that affected me very deeply. As human beings we got on with one another from the start. They seemed intent on hearing what I had to say, and showed remarkable patience with me as I struggled through weeks of class periods to reach their minds. I had no idea that the distance between people within a common discipline could be so great. But, the interesting thing is that, despite ideological and language differences (their Indian version of Oxford English and my midWestern American speech) together with whatever one can say about contrasts in the modes of thought between East and West, we did come to a point of understanding where we were able to discuss many things together, privately and in groups of threes and fours. On the day of my final lecture: the entire faculty convened with the students; and, at the close of the lecture, an impressive ceremonial took place in which the principal, a member of the faculty, and a student interpreted what the course of lectures had meant to them. There was, of course, the customary amount of formal acknowledgment and appreciation; but the student’s comments convinced me that I had come through to them at subtle points relating to Christian faith and culture where I had had no hope of succeeding. It was a gratifying moment to me. And Mrs. Meland and I, both laden with gifts of the occasion, returned to our apartment considerably cheered. Some weeks later, when Mrs. Meland and I were leaving Serampore to make a tour of other colleges, and to attend the synod meeting of the Church of South India, the entire group of theological students gathered around our car to see us off. The sight of this group, standing about in silence as we drove away, left me strangely helpless in my thoughts. So much was said and felt in this act that was reassuring; yet it spoke with a finality of separation that was disturbing. Our life at Serampore consisted of a great deal more than preparing and delivering lectures. We found ourselves among a most congenial and cordial group of people who seemed to respond to us wholeheartedly, as we did to them. This personal relationship with faculty people and students greatly relieved the burden of getting on in other respects, due to physical inconveniences which, on occasions, brought moments of considerable distress. The entire non-Indian faculty and staff were European, all British except one Irishman. The Britishers were Oxford trained, and of English Baptist background. This tradition seemed to dominate the religious life of the school and to influence the theological curriculum in large measure. The missionaries from outlying village stations, who came to the college for special instruction periods and conferences, were also British and

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Baptist in background. The Indian members of the theological faculty were of the Episcopal tradition, two of them, including Dr. Abraham, the principal, being of the Syrian Church of South India. There was a bit of rivalry and tension between the two traditions, but it amounted to little more than an occasional post-mortem of irritations following some formal service, or a conflict of opinions or judgments preparing for one. Daily morning prayers were held at 7:15 a.m. As part of our Spartan effort, Mrs. Meland and I made a point of attending daily. However, in the course of weeks, we came to feel their force and significance; and, in our own distress, found help in these brief, early moments of silence, song, and prayer. Everyone removed his shoes on entering the chapel. Except for the few of us whose limbs would not bend easily, all the worshipers sat cross-legged on straw mats spread on the floor. The service was attended regularly by the entire Christian community of the college. The service was exceedingly simple, consisting of a long period of silence on entering, followed by a hymn and scripture reading, and then a ten-minute period of prayers. There was no concluding music—just another stretch of silence as we sauntered out and put on our shoes. The service had a consistency and realism about it which gave it stature and force. We had occasion to participate in a number of functions of the college, sometimes on our own initiative, other times on invitation from college authorities or from student groups. The Indian student is friendly and exceedingly gracious once the initial reserve is broken through; but it takes a bit of doing to accomplish that. Our associations were mainly with the theological students, yet we did have occasion to meet and to mingle with a number of the students in the arts and sciences as well. This occurred mainly at rugby and basketball games, at special student dinners to which we were invited, and at which we sat on the floor and ate curry and rice off of a banana leaf; at assembly programs, and at student plays. Serampore draws mainly from the state of Bengal, and the Bengalese are notoriously addicted to dramatics. As the principal remarked to us, “They are practically finished actors and actresses when they come to college; for their entire life in the family consists in play-acting.” This was certainly borne out by what we saw in these student plays. We never missed an opportunity to attend these occasions if we could help it; for they gave us vivid and choice impressions of Bengali life. There is practically no intermingling between men and women on campus, though we noted some evidence to suggest that the mores in this respect were beginning to break down. For example, toward the end of our stay, we saw possibly three or four instances of couples walking along on campus. This, however, was most unusual. The more common sight was to

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see women students sitting about in a circle on the lawn, and similar groups of men congregating on the stairways, or in hallways, or squatting on the lawn. When college plays were given, the men attended en masse to see an entire male cast in action. No women students were allowed to attend. And, conversely, when a feminine cast assumed the roles, only women attended. Exceptions were made for faculty people and their families, so Mrs. Meland and I attended all of the plays. I witnessed one radical exception to all of this. I looked out of our kitchen window one late afternoon upon an outdoor basketball court, and there the women’s basketball team (dressed in saris, by the way) was scrimmaging against five men, including a faculty man, a Britisher, who was also the coach. How they managed this, or rationalized it with such evident segregation of the sexes, I was unable to find out. When I mentioned it to some of the faculty people, they smiled and remarked casually, “Oh, there’s no explaining it. Officially they are kept apart; unofficially, other things can happen. The custom is breaking down.” Unofficially other things were happening, so we heard; but of this I have no first hand evidence to report. The situation at Serampore seemed to me to bristle with opportunity. In many ways it is unique, both among Christian institutions of learning, and among Indian schools. For it is the one institution that combines a college of arts and science with a theological college; and it is the only Christian theological college which is in the context of a university attended by both Hindus and Christians, and being predominantly Hindu both in faculty and student. In the present situation in India, and with the emerging interest in fostering more realistic understanding between Christians and Hindus, Serampore seems to be a natural for undertaking pioneer educational and religious projects in this direction. The likelihood of this being done, however, is somewhat remote under present circumstances. The administration of the college under a dominantly Christian senate, mainly of the theological faculty, and answerable to a board made up entirely of outside Christian laymen and clergy, has brought about considerable feeling of tension among the Hindu faculty which, in turn, is communicated to the Hindu students. Surprisingly little overt reaction, and almost no open revolt, is in evidence; nevertheless, a smoldering discontent is there, and Hindu faculty people called my attention to it. This tends to nullify whatever might be latent as a creative opportunity in Indian education. After one has said this, however, one is reminded of the fact that, with surprising cohesion and apparent camaraderie, this educational community of Hindus and Christians carries on in negotiating the most intimate and delicate relationships essential to running a college of 1,000 or more

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members. This, in itself, is a remarkable achievement in a society where tensions between racial and religious groups run high. Christian missions in India are in a continual state of transition, at the present time; and doubtless will remain so until the situation in the Indian church has been resolved. This has many aspects and ramifications. The primary factor affecting the present situation is indigenization, accentuated by national independence. Nationalization has hastened and coerced what was already in process as a voluntary act. Formally speaking, the mission compound as such, with a foreign missionary in charge, representing a European or American Board of Missions, has disappeared. The degree to which Foreign Boards have turned over property and control to the Indian churches varies with denominations; but the pattern of local autonomy is steadily emerging, and the pressure is on to accelerate this process. The one serious blockage seems to be the continuing necessity for “overseas” support of the churches of India. Foreign Boards of Missions still continue to call the tune in many instances, according to Indian clergy. Said one bishop: “The treasurer of a diocese, who is generally non-Indian, often has more actual authority than the bishop in residence.” This situation is even more true of the theological schools in India; for there is a dearth of competently trained Indians qualified to teach on a theological faculty. As a result, the schools must still look to the Mission Boards abroad to send them personnel. Staff as well as financial support is in demand. The theological schools cannot depend upon lay help in the way that the village churches can. It is obvious that this situation continues to wrankle and to aggravate the tensions that naturally exist between Indian and non-Indian teachers and church workers. The financial picture of the Indian church remains a baffling one. This applies, not simply to the matter of raising sufficient funds for the support of their churches (this would be understandable in view of the vast poverty that plagues the nation); but to the handling of funds as they are raised or received. I must confess that the so-called “mishandling of finances” among Indian Christians, which appears to be fairly prevalent, was difficult for me to understand. I had noted instance after instance where the treasurer or bursar of a church or a Christian school was a non-Indian; but I thought it to be coincidental, or simply due to the fact that dealing in figures in exact amounts was probably a preoccupation of Western moneychangers. But reference to Indian unreliability in money-matters kept cropping up again and again. An evangelist from South India, who had studied in one of the conservative schools on the north side of Chicago, called at our apartment one evening (possibly because he learned we were

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from Chicago), and we spent the entire evening listening to his fascinating account of his work as evangelist to the Indian intellectuals, as he called it. Off hand, so it appeared, an Indian Schleiermacher, preaching to the cultured despisers of religion. He reported that this work was flourishing, that Hindus from upper-class vocations in South India were turning to Christianity in large numbers. He said he had thirty itinerant preachers working under him, and that the mission among intellectuals was the fastest growing enterprise in the Indian church today. I had hoped to find out more about this activity, for at the time I had considerable misgivings about the picture he was portraying. I had not heard about any such activity from other church leaders who seemed to have a fairly wide grasp of the Indian situation. I tried to draw out from him his conception of an Indian intellectual. I rather suspected that it was simply someone who could read and write, as contrasted with illiterate villagers. And from his vague reply, I think I was confirmed in my suspicion. In defense of my own skepticism, I should say that my Indian friend awakened one’s skeptical queries instinctively. He was a zealot of the first order; and I dare say he had been given an extra push in this direction through his study in the seminary on the north side of Chicago. He was the fastest talking Indian I have ever listened to; and that’s fast talking. Well, the point of my story is that, in the course of our conversation, he dropped the remark, “Of course, my real problem is finance. Not the difficulty of getting it, but of holding on to it, or accounting for it. I can’t trust any of my Christian ministers with money; and I can’t undertake to handle it myself. We are negotiating with the church for an outside treasurer, but at present our situation is difficult.” I pressed him to explain this to me, being somewhat reluctant or unable, to believe what he was telling me. “You mean they are not competent in handling funds?” I asked. “No,” he replied, with a knowing smile. “I mean I just can’t trust them to handle money.” Still, I thought, this could mean the same thing. This topic came up again for discussion sometime later when Mrs. Meland and I were in Hyderabad, staying at the home of a British clergyman and his wife, who was in charge of missions in that entire area under the Church of South India. They were much more guarded in their comments, and tended to defend the Indian Christians against any suspicion of dishonesty. Their explanation was that the Indian villager, especially, is unused to the kind of individual reckoning of funds, such as we practiced in the keeping of accounts. His life is more communal in character, it was said. And there is little distinction between types of needs

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for which money can be spent, if it is available. Should members of one’s own household, or close friends, need funds; or even if some needy stranger should appear, the one in charge of funds is unable to see why they do not have a claim upon the common funds. This seemed plausible enough; still, I wasn’t wholly convinced. At the synod meeting of the Church of South India in Nagercoil, the problem was laid out in cold, unguarded language by the outspoken Bishop Chellapa, whose report I have already quoted. In effect, he said, “This matter of mishandling of funds in our churches has been called by various names, implying varying degrees of moral turpitude. I will call it by its right name: Embezzlement!” He then went on to say, “I would, however, hesitate to plead for more general Indian leadership, especially where finances are concerned, until it can be proved, at least in the Church, if not in the State, that the average Indian leader is as honest and conscientious in the application of public funds as the non-national. When I call to mind the too frequent cases of embezzlement reported from different Dioceses, involving thousands, even lakhs of rupees (a lakh is 100,000 rupees) and that they mostly go unpunished, largely because an effective public opinion does not exist and the national—non-national bogey is raised on such occasions, I am aghast! I hang my head in shame, as an Indian.” It appears, then, that, however tenuous the role of Western missionaries may be in the present turn of affairs in India, that of the Western bursar or treasurer in Indian Christian churches and schools is fairly well assured for some time to come. One cannot avoid the judgment that this problem has more dimensions than I have been able to ferret out. I can’t quite swallow the evangelist’s or the bishop’s blunt analyses; any more than I can that of the sympathetic, British prelate in Hyderabad, who laid it to the Indian villagers’ communal bent of mind. This is a project to which our Ethics and Society colleagues might give close scrutiny, if they can feel their way into the subtleties of the Asiatic mind. With a little comparative study between this and the Protestant ethic, they might come up with an explanation that would acquit our Indian friends of personal dishonor. I have thought of a line they might follow. (If the Chancellor and Pat Harrison are listening in or looking on, they will kindly close their eyes and ears to this bit of theological casuistry.) They could say, this close, individual reckoning of what’s yours and what’s mine, chiefly what is mine, is an arduous distinction which Western capitalism has pursued with avidity as a concern peculiar to its own sensibilities, being nations of Imperialists and Colonialists. They might even make the case that our Protestant Calvinist, turned Capitalist,

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carried this to an extreme in scruples, identifying “honesty as the best policy,” especially in finance, with the righteousness of God, thus bringing the resources of the Almighty into his employ as a formidable defense against queasy bookkeepers, of whom there were legion. Thus the conscience of clerks, standing in fear of their Maker, served as a convenient safeguard against the exploitation of otherwise helpless men of wealth, dependent upon their legion of clerks. This business of honesty in the handling of funds, our colleagues might conclude, may be a Western sensibility which appears wholly alien to the Indian who has been unexposed to Western Protestant Capitalism and to the fears of the Wealthy Capitalists, trembling over their heap of gold. There you have the solution to a problem that has been puzzling me all these months. (Incidentally, I should say to Henry Sams, I have kept close to my own Calvinistic heritage in figuring my expense account for this trip.) A problem which young Indian churchmen and theological instructors brought up in conversation from time to time is that of the relationship between veteran Western missionaries and Indian workers. “The situation is such, they would say, that only the closest cooperation as between equals can resolve the tensions. But missionaries who have been on the ground twenty-or thirty years simply cannot treat us as colleagues, they would say. We are still their helpers, even their underlings. They have to direct things. If they can’t direct, they can’t do anything; because they aren’t accustomed to talking things over, least of all with an Indian helper. We won’t get anywhere in our own development of Indian leadership until this type of missionary has been removed from the scene.” Then they would add, “I don’t mean that all missionaries who have been in India for a long period of time are uncooperative or inflexible. Some have been saintly Christian men and women who have elicited deep affection and loyalty. They are no problem in that respect. In fact, the problem with them is in reverse: Our dependence upon them is too deepseated. And of course this boils up into something of the same situation. We can’t treat them as equals, or as colleagues; for obviously they are a great deal more than that to us. So again we are frustrated.” This matter of Indian leadership and initiative in churches and schools looms as a formidable problem in the present period of transition; but the nature and intensity of the problem varies according to the personalities involved. I heard a good deal about there being such a problem. Actually, I saw very little of it, if any, in the situations in India that I observed. The only serious instance that I can recall was a mission center in Burma, far

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up in the interior along the Irrawaddy River, where the missionary and his wife literally smothered the native Christian leaders and people alike with a flood of comment, alternating between indulgent flattery and censorship. To them, these native people, whatever their age, were just children who had to be coddled, scolded, or manipulated. There was no occasion for any of them to express themselves, so long as these two dominant and domineering missionaries were present. One could readily see that the kind of native initiative, or cooperative program for which the young Indian Christian was pleading, could never occur in this Burmese village. How typical this kind of paternalism is, either in Burma or India, I am unable to say. Presumably it would be more likely in the villages; and I saw less of this kind of mission than ones located in cities and towns, or among educational centers. The mission boards have alleviated this problem of relations between Indian and non-Indian religious workers by establishing a policy of sending mission workers for only a three year period at a time. There is a possibility of reappointment, but, under present circumstances in Asiatic countries this is not always assured. I must say, parenthetically, that one of the most heartening experiences we had in all our travels throughout India and in South-east Asia as well as in Japan, was our meeting with young missionaries who were just beginning, or who had only recently begun, their period of service. On the basis of our experience, the mission boards, both in Europe and in America, are to be commended on the type of young person they are selecting for this difficult role in what will continue for some time to be an exceedingly delicate situation. These American and European young people impressed us with their competence and knowhow; but even more with their depth and sensitivity of spirit in dealing with people, whether native or foreign-born, whether VIP, or simple villager. They could not fail to be perceptive of conditions and feelings to which the young Indian Christian was referring in citing the problem between native Christians and missionaries of long standing. And this was borne out by comments made by various young Indian Christians with whom I talked. They found the problem of adjustment between the younger missionaries and native leaders much less difficult. Usually, they said, the young missionaries who are coming to us are whole-souled human beings, eager to do a job, and ready to accept people from other countries on a common ground with themselves. This concurred with what we found in one situation after another. Mrs. Meland and I commented about it to each other many times. Often they were the ones who took the initiative in guiding us about the places we were visiting. The readiness and imagination with which they undertook this task never ceased to

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evoke our admiration and pride. I know of no better emissaries of the Christian life and of our Western democracy than these young people who have come to India and to other parts of Asia to help in the work of native churches and colleges. And we saw a good deal of many of them at close range in India, Burma, Thailand, and Japan. So I knew what these Indian Christians meant when they said that the younger mission workers from abroad were making a good adjustment to the present situation. I would say they were doing more than that. They are assuming a major role in initiating the new age of missions. Some of the younger missionaries who had been in India for five or six years, looked upon their role as being specifically that of preparing a native Christian to assume their jobs. Under the present state of affairs, of course, looking ahead to a lifetime of missionary work is unrealistic. Whether such would be possible or not, their point is that no Westerner should consider himself needed beyond the time it takes to replace himself in the work he is doing. I was told that this attitude is shared rather widely among young married missionaries, though it is regarded by older missionaries as being wholly irregular and unworthy of the missionary spirit. Here, I think, one sees an understandable issue between young and old on the mission field. There is much more to say, but not time at this moment to say it. I have not said anything specifically about the Barrows Lectures as such, or about theological education in India. I hope to have something to report on both of these topics in another statement, if time permits. I have already made a brief, oral report to the Committee on the Barrows Lectures, touching some of the problems with which they are immediately concerned. Our trip to India, returning by way of the Far East was, by all odds, the most rewarding and fascinating adventure we have ever undertaken; and possibly the most exciting year we have lived. For all this, Mrs. Meland and I are deeply grateful to the Committee on the Barrows Lectures and to the University for making this experience possible for us. I am grateful; also, to Pierce Beaver for the part he played initially in shaping up plans for our visit in India, particularly in arranging to have me lecture at Serampore College. And finally I am grateful to Dean Brauer and to those of my colleagues who had to assume extra burdens because of my absence from the university. We feel we have been greatly blessed through all these favors and by what they have brought forth. Bernard E. Meland

1959 The Christian Encounter with the Faiths of Men Bernard E. Meland Professor of Constructive Theology Federated Theological Faculty The spirited and decisive manner in which directives are being offered on how Christians are to encounter people of other faiths is an indication that the problem has become an urgent one. As one listens to these crosscurrents of counsel, ranging from an ardent universal appeal to an insistent particularism laying claim to a biblical realism, only to be countered occasionally by restraining voices looking toward a reconciliation between them, one has the feeling that one is being caught in an unrelenting dialectic. Does the truth of our situation lie with any of them, or even in the tension between them? Or is there a way beyond the terms of this dialectic? My concern in this paper is to search out clues which might help to find an answer to this question. I. It might be well to consider first how real the issue is, and how complex and invidious one’s thinking upon it can become. I recall that during the Second World War considerable attention was given by the military to the study of Asiatic religions as part of its program of orientation. As a member of the faculty of a college on the West Coast during that time I had occasion to see something of this strange mode of preparation taking place. It was an ironic acknowledgment of the fact that religion and culture are inseparable and that men are more than physical objects. But it was a shock to see how alien designs, such as preparation for war, could lead to a concern with the faiths of men. I have often been reminded of this calculating concern with the study of Asiatic religions as I have listened to proposals and strategies for communicating the Gospel of Jesus Christ to non-Christian peoples. The objective, in a way, is different; but the process seems remarkably the same. Study to conquer! This can become a curious blend of motives and ends. If the reports from certain quarters in India and Burma are correct, we can look for a vigorous campaign by Hindus and Buddhists to confront the “decadent Christian West” with the zeal of their awakened faiths. And here, too, the method seems to be that of studying to conquer. While in

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Burma, I came upon a story which may be familiar to many of you. A Buddhist monk called upon a Protestant clergyman in Rangoon and asked to borrow a book on Christianity, The Protestant minister was delighted and said, “Of course! Here are three of them. Take them along and keep them as long as you need them.” And the Buddhist monk did. But after a few weeks the monk was back with the three books and asked if he might have more. The minister was a bit taken back at this, so ventured to ask, “Tell me, why are you, a Buddhist, so eager to read books on Christianity?” “Oh,” said the monk, “haven’t you heard? They tell us the lights are going out in Europe and America, so we are preparing to send missionaries to those darkened continents.” And then he added sardonically, “We feel we should know something about the religion of the natives.” But within the enlightened centers of awakened and independent nations of the East the encounter between Christians and people of other faiths appears to be entering a new stage of seriousness. This is occurring, as I see it, chiefly as a result of the new role which Asian Christians are playing as leaders and participants in Christian churches, and because of new circumstances which bring them directly into contact with their countrymen of other faiths. This was brought to my attention rather dramatically last year during my visit in India. I was talking with a young Indian instructor in a theological school who had grown up in a mission compound in North India. He had since graduated from a university and a theological college in India and had spent a year abroad studying in an American theological seminary. In addition to his work in the theological college he was active in guiding the work of evangelism by churches in the villages. “We are no longer aware of ourselves as just Christians,” he said. “We are Indians as well.” Not being familiar with what was back of this statement at the moment, I was not prepared for the intensity with which he made this statement. But he went on to inform me on Christian missions in India as he, a convert, recalled their impact upon him. The gist of his remarks was to the effect that the mission compound had been a world to itself. To enter into its community had been tantamount to being uprooted from the culture into which one had been born. One took on the ways of the compound and learned to suspect whatever was native to Indian culture. The Hindu faith and its practices were the chief adversaries, but one learned that everything in Indian society had been tainted or infected with their influence. He was, of course, speaking out of his own early experiences. “We have moved out of the compound, or rather, the compound has been removed from us,” he continued. “We are now in competition with the full range of alternative ideas and social forces of our culture as members of the Indian community. We have to know our way

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around.” But I also sensed something even more human and native underneath this outreach toward the wider Indian community. It was an inner release of themselves as Indians. There seemed to be almost an experience of new birth evident in some of the young Indian instructors and clergy with whom I talked. Everywhere the story was the same, although it had various versions. Prior to national independence Christianity had been a hot-house growth in India. They, too, had shared the artificiality of being housed under a protective covering and nurtured by specially-prepared formulae imported from distributors abroad. They had been kept aloof from the Indian mind and its cultural responsibilities because these things had been regarded as being outside of, even alien to, the things of the Christian Gospel. I am paraphrasing here words that were spoken to me by several young Indian Christians. Indian Christians of this bent of mind were not numerous, but they were in strategic posts where their influence could be felt. And it may very well be that they were in such posts precisely because they provided the Indian churches with a cutting edge at the point of contact where this was needed. One cannot be sure, but the impression grew on me as I moved about India that Indian Christians, especially among the younger people, are in the process of reclaiming their cultural heritage and of becoming selfconscious Indians along with the rest of their countrymen. The reason I say one cannot be sure is that a surprising number of theological students as well as clergy and lay Christians whom I met still reflected the mentality of the mission compound. The vast awakening of India’s national life, teeming with new problems, seemed to be passing them by, leaving hardly a ripple in the routine of their accustomed piety. However, I also discovered evidence of more aggressive thinking among older Indian Christians, urging their fellow churchmen to put aside their fear of syncretism and to take the Indian culture more seriously as a medium through which to express their Christian faith. This same aggressive spirit was evident among younger theologians, as I have indicated. Among theological students, however, I found a decided reticence, even apprehension, about what the Christian encounter with Hinduism could mean for them. Many of them seemed to welcome the fact that they would be sent to the villages, following graduation, where such direct encounter with the more aggressive Hindu or Buddhist minds would not present a serious problem. Their reticence seemed to arise more from a sense of uneasiness in the presence of non-Christian Indians of their own cultural level, than from any firm conviction about issues which should or might arise in such an encounter. In one group of theological students, where faculty people had made this problem something of a live issue over

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a considerable period of time, I detected more readiness to engage their contemporaries in an open discussion, not only of questions bearing upon their respective faiths, but of issues that were before the nation and other cultural problems in which all of them, Hindu and Christian alike, as modern Indians would have a concern. As one young Indian put it, “Our Christian witness would declare itself in the very way in which we address ourselves to these questions.” This seemed to me to be a heartening indication that a genuine kind of encounter between Christians and nonChristians might be under way in India. As I listened to one discussion after another, however, I could not get away from the feeling that in this critical situation, so explosive, yet promising, the absence of a sense of direction or of any clear directives in contemplating such engagements was a bit frightening. My sympathies were with the more audacious ones who were looking to their responsible role as Christians in the new life of modern India; but I understood, too, how the other young men felt who preferred to seek out more remote areas for preaching the Gospel in their fashion. The irony of it all is, of course, that concentration upon village, reclamation is bringing this same new cultural force to these remote areas as well. These young men will soon find that there is no hiding place there either. You can see that my experience with this problem is exceedingly limited and impressionistic, but I venture to say that these few Indian experiences are of the stuff that world-wide events and dreams are made of. The Christian encounter with the faiths of men has assumed a new and realistic turn that is sobering beyond anything we can comprehend or imagine. After my responsibilities of lecturing in various Indian colleges were completed, I visited several Indian universities, mostly Hindu, with a definite view of engaging Indian educators in discussion on various problems of religion and culture. As it turned out, the people who were most attentive to such questions were the philosophers. Sometimes I found myself confronting an entire philosophy department which, in some instances, meant five or six members of the staff. The conversation ranged from a very cordial and gentlemanly discussion to an excited, rapid-fire exchange of deeply-felt emotions and sentiments. The circumstances under which we met may have been especially favorable and therefore not altogether representative. Nevertheless, I came away from these visits feeling very much heartened by their possibilities. I purposely steered them away from points of agreement on the assumption that, as scholars and educators, we should be able to deal with differences in a profitable and exploratory way. And I think we succeeded in doing so. These Hindu

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philosophers seemed eager to discuss matters with Christians. I found one could be quite candid with them; they, in turn, were equally forthright. II. In this newly-awakened world situation, what are the guidelines to the Christian encounter with the faiths of men? Let me review some that are now in evidence and that are making themselves felt. Despite the disillusioning turn of events in recent years and the insistent attack upon universalism and idealism, utopian dreams of a syncretistic world faith seem to be very much alive. Although I was unable to attend the World Parliament of Religions which met in New Delhi during my visit in India a year ago, I did have an opportunity to read many of the speeches and pronouncements that were made there. So far as one could tell, the some sanguine expectations that were voiced with such eloquence and fervor at the initial World Parliament of Religions in Chicago two generations ago were fully intact and were being given additional motivation by a review of the plight of the world, calling upon all faiths to suppress differences and to join forces in a common attack upon the world’s evils. One may not, of course, dismiss this concern as being wholly utopian; for in the present mood of affairs, with Communism showing itself more and more aggressive in its purpose to out-maneuver all competing cultural forces and, if necessary, to subdue them, including religious forces wherever resistant, the relevance of such a consolidation of religious protest may not be overlooked. The critical situation created in Tibet has even elicited apprehension among some Chinese Communists, it is reported, so that a holy war against its cause could be in the making. At present this is but a conjecture which, at best, could be advanced only as an expedient justification of a world front in religion; it could bring about unimaginable chaos and tragedy in its wake. Nevertheless, it has a formidable, common sense appeal to all who think superficially about the function of religion in culture, and to millions of more secularly-minded people of the world who see in such a universalization of faith a way of civilizing what appears to them to be vestigial remains of inane and irrational barbarisms, obstructing the scientific advance of civilization. From within any of the major faiths, with the possible exception of Hinduism, which is syncretistic by nature, it would seem that this universal hope as it is commonly conceived, misses or eludes the central thrust of its witness. For the significance of each witness lies precisely in the area of differences. Where these are ignored, or set aside in a concern to accentuate agreements between faiths, the incisive meaning of itself as a faith is obscured by marginal concerns writ large. It is for this reason that they who have been grasped by the essential insight or revelatory word of

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a religious community see in syncretism the denial, and even the dissipation of, faith itself; while they who are least involved in any specific religious community, and who cherish religion in general as an objective, cultural interest, tend to argue most zealously for a universal faith. There are exceptions, to be sure. Two bishops in the Church of South India come to mind: Bishop Appasamy in Coimbatore and Bishop Chellap in Madras. It might be well to point out that universalism as it is conceived and advocated within Western thinking, whether in religion or in other areas of experience, presupposes a certain imagery which took form in the period of the Enlightenment under the stimulus of Newtonian science. World order, which was the cosmic counterpart of natural order, took on the proportions and sanctions of ultimate truth. That which could be demonstrated to be universally true or universally applicable thereby took on the finality of truth itself. Thus Voltaire, who was a popular exponent of Newtonian philosophy, demonstrated to his satisfaction that no religion could be called universally true or valid because no one religious creed or dogma could be found to be universally affirmed or made universally applicable. Universality in this sense of an ultimate measure has ceased to be an accepted notion in the major disciplines. With the decline of Newtonian mechanism as an adequate imagery of natural structures, and the inception of relativity, the rationale which once gave ontological support to a utopian universalism can no longer be counted on to bolster its hopes. The hope, if pursued, must rest solely upon the appeal of purely pragmatic or common sense grounds. Much as I honor the sensibilities of the men who persist in advocating a universal faith as a solution to our problem, I am persuaded that it is essentially a superficial solution, and that it grossly underestimates the distinctive thrust of the religious witness wherever it exists. In sharp contrast to this universal and syncretistic mode of thought, we are seeing today a vigorous reassertion of the particularistic version of biblical faith. Hendrik Kraemer’s important work, The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World, and his later volume, Religion and the Christian Faith, present a formidable argument for this interpretation of the Christian task. More recently a younger scholar, Edmund Perry, has put forth this thesis with even sharper insistence in his book, The Gospel in Dispute. In this work Perry undertakes to trace the lineage of the Gospel faith from the giving of the Covenant to Abraham to the appearance of Jesus Christ as the Gospel Person who was promised. What he succeeds in isolating is the particularistic strand that runs through the whole of the

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biblical literature, setting Israel apart from every other people, and accentuating the theme of the jealous God as being the criterion for determining the Christian approach to the faiths of other people. This analysis comes into sharpened focus when it undertakes to offer its rationale for the study of religions as a way of preparing for the Christian encounter with other religions. Thus Perry, in The Gospel in Dispute, writes: The norm and motive of our study is the Gospel itself; therefore the first step of our method for studying the religions is to acknowledge our involvement in Gospel faith. We believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and participate in the community of Gospel faith, the Church. Thus committed we cannot be neutral observers of other religions. In the first place, the Gospel of Jesus Christ comes to us with a built-in prejudgment of all other faiths so that we know in advance of our study what we must ultimately conclude about them. They give meanings to life apart from that which God has given in the biblical story culminating in Jesus Christ, and they organize life outside the covenant community of Jesus Christ. Therefore, devoid of this saving knowledge and power of God, these faiths not only are unable to bring men to God, they actually lead men away from God and hold them captive from God.

Perry then proceeds to define the motive for studying other religions in preparation for the task of missions, saying: We undertake the study of religions in order to convert their adherents to faith in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We are not impelled to this study by anything so casual as our own private and personal intellectual curiosity, nor yet by anything so crucial as our existential concern to find ultimate Truth for ourselves. But because missionary preaching of the Gospel is integral to the Gospel itself, the study of religions is of primary significance for the Gospel cannot be preached to mankind on masse but only to this or that people in the actualities peculiar to their existence as a people. Knowledge of a people’s religion is therefore necessary in order to facilitate our communication of the Gospel to them in the realities of their existence. Because as Christians we are under mandate to proclaim the Gospel to and make disciples of all peoples, we readily confess that our motive for studying their religion is ulterior or missionary.

The intention here, one will see, is to distill from the Scriptural account a distinctive Gospel faith in the manner which Kraemer formulates his biblical realism. This depiction of Gospel faith within a biblical realism is, of course, the reverse of the exegetical procedure of a generation ago when it was the theological fashion to see this particularistic element in biblical history as the pathology of the Hebraic religion which had persisted

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through Judaic, and oven into New Testament history. The release from this introversion, issuing in a universal outlook, was thus advanced by liberal interpreters as being the enlightened biblical faith, defining the anticipation of the Christian Gospel. Now I cite this version of biblical faith not by way of saying that this idealistic strand rather than the “realistic” one is the Gospel faith, but to argue, on the contrary, that any effort to isolate a Gospel faith as a norm or directive for the Christian encounter with the faiths of men can be a hazardous undertaking, and possible utterly misleading. For in separating out these strands, one is dealing not with the revelatory act itself, but with the human response to it—one might say with a particular cultural response to it. This means centering upon religion, the setting up of human formulations and institutions for expressing or conveying the saving Word of truth as given. As such, what is delineated as biblical faith or Gospel faith, whether in the lineage of a universal bent of mind or of a particularistic traditions, constitutes a human response that is itself under the judgment of the saving act of God. Neither of these, in my judgment, may be set forth as being defining of the Christian encounter with the faiths of men, for each in its own way bears the limiting, even perverting, characteristics of the human situation. Seeing these two strands in tension with one another, and thus as mutually corrective of the pathology implicit in each of them, one would come nearer to a judicious distillation of a guide-line within the biblical witness; but even this procedure could become arbitrary and deceptive in its very will to moderation. For the truth of reality, in which God’s ways judge and recreate man’s ways, are often in the decisive and radical act, not in the measured judgment. What it comes down to is this: that God’s ways and thoughts, not being man’s ways and thoughts, are not readily apprehended in any systematic delineation of the Gospel faith where such delineation takes the words of men, even in Scripture, as the definitive Word of God. Such arbitrary efforts to establish a biblical norm for giving precise injunctions or directives can only result in an over-simplification of the Christian response to the revelatory act. And the procedure belies the claim that it is God’s act in history, not man’s finite and often perverse word about God’s act that commands us. We are familiar, no doubt, with various attempts to mediate between the universal and the particularistic methods of defining the Christian encounter with the faiths of men on the basis of what the history of religions can teach us. Nathan Söderblom was among the first to attempt this procedure in his book, The Nature of Revelation, in which he pointed out that “each religion, inasmuch as it is real, stands under an uncondi-

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tioned obligation” and thus is expressive of a sense of holiness and obligation. These, he claimed, “are the surest criteria of genuine religion.” In this, as Joachim Waal observes, Söderblom anticipated Rudolf Otto’s book, The Idea of the Holy. Certainly Rudolf Otto, one may say, moved within this mediating path in his explorative inquiries into Christian and non-Christian forms of mysticism and devotion, as did his faithful student and admirer, Joachim Wach. (See Otto’s Mysticism East and West, Christianity and the Indian Religion of Grace, and The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man.) The following quotation from Wach’s Types of Religious Experience, Christian and Non-Christian, succinctly expresses this reconciling or mediating view. After differentiating himself from Barth and Kraemer and indicating his relationship, with distinctions, to Söderblom, Hocking and Wenger, Wach writes: The primary concern of the Christian theologian is the hearing, understanding, and promulgating of the gospel of God’s redemption of man, the culmination of which he understands to be the work of Christ Jesus. His sources are God’s continuous disclosure in nature, in history, in his world, and in the community of those he had drawn to himself. All that proves helpful towards the consummation of this task of interpretation and communication can be judged to belong within the sphere of theology. The theologian cannot but be aware that, in his infinite love and mercy, God has at no time left himself without witness. It is not in the theologian’s competence to delimit for past, present, or future, the self-revealing activity of God. He is deeply aware of the inadequacy and the provisional character of all apprehension of divine revelation, including his own. To the divine self-disclosure and call through the ages corresponds the seeking and thirsting of man’s heart and mind after God and his righteousness, part of which is recorded in the history of the religions of mankind. The theologian, though conscious of his special task to illuminate the content of the divine message… cannot but utilize for this purpose, drawing from the sum total of man’s religious experience, the insights ‘revealed’ to men of God everywhere… It is the task of the theologian to determine the depth of insight into divine truth manifest in non-Christian religious expression, from his awareness of the love and grace of God, revealed in Christ and in the manifestations of his will in nature, in history, in the community, and in the soul of man, while remaining conscious of the limitations of this apprehension. It is precisely the concept of the Holy Spirit of God, unduly neglected by modern theologians, which should be the guide in all attempts at the determination of the ‘germs of truth,’ inasmuch as it represents the only legitimate criterion by which to judge where God speaks and is present.

Wach leans heavily upon a view of Christian revelation developed by

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Professor E. Leslie Wenger of Serampore College in an essay, “The Problem of Truth in Religion: Prolegomenon to an Indian Christian Theology,” in Studies in History and Religion, edited by E. A. Payne. In the closing pages of my own Faith and Culture, I expressed what might be considered further variation of this mediating position. I have since felt, however, that we would do better to try to extricate ourselves altogether from this dialectic between universal and particularistic emphases and confront the problem afresh if this is possible. Let me try to do so by first presenting several observations: 1. The freedom of God would seem to argue that no human speech or formulation can adequately or accurately convey the reality of God’s saving act in history. 2. That Jesus Christ, in his person and work, brought the good news of this saving act to a remnant within Judaic history and thereby initiated a new humanity, is the claim of our Christian faith. This faith is itself a human response to what, in God’s grace, was given in Jesus Christ. 3. Now if, in our critical judgment, we accept what New Testament scholarship is at pains to make clear to us, that we cannot go back of the picture of Jesus, portrayed by the witnessing community, what we have in the New Testament gospels is that which points us to the reality of this new creation. We have a faithful witnessing to the reality of God that was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself. But it is an act of witness with which we are dealing here. 4. This witness that is borne to the new creation in Christ must be taken with utmost seriousness as opening up to us a depth of spirit and saving grace which can reach us and do exceeding abundantly above all that we can ask or think, despite our limitations as human creatures, our sin, and our idolatrous tendencies to fashion this life that is of God into our human image, despite our almost inevitable impulsion to assert this human Christian image as the authority of God over all men. But the impulsion to take this humanly formed word as the authority, as the defining criterion, is great. 5. The freedom of God would argue that God has to do with all men, all cultures, all stages of human history, in His way, in His time. The depth and scope of this Infinite dealing with men of all ages and all races is a mystery which no one human mind can apprehend and no one culture may engineer or supervise. God deals with the structures of history, works through them, recreates and redeems them as the sensitivity and ripeness of occasions permit and demand. 6. Each culture has its own access to what, in its own history, has been wrought to convey the saving grace of what, in our Christian witness, we

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know to be the new creation in Christ. That Christ and the new creation is very God would lead us who make this claim to assume that this would be so. At what depth, in what form, through what media, of this we cannot be sure. For our cultural forms, our sensibilities and structures of meaning, while they lend intelligibility to our discourse within the context of our history, become barriers between us and the peoples of other histories. And it is these barriers that shut us out from the depth of sensitive meaning and grace which appears in forms other than our own, and which cause us to attribute meaning to their religious acts or to judge them in negative ways. That there is gross idolatry, vanity, pretention, pride and evil in many forms in the religions of these other cultures, we may well assume, for they are human creations. They bear the marks of human depravity. We know this, not by contrasting what they have with what we have as Christians, but by observing that what we have as Christians, our Christian forms and symbols, our categories, doctrines, and practices, all betray our idolatrous ways. God help us, we can do no other as men and women who presume to arrest the freedom and dynamic spirit of God by seeming to capture and to incarnate His reality in our limited form and speech. This, our very best of human effort, our human creativity, is our idolatry. And we know every other human community to be susceptible to the same human failing and pathology. Thus, I say, our very best of human effort, our religion, is our idolatry. But our very worst presents yet another aspect of our sin and our perversity; and this we share with all men. 7. As between religions then, Christianity and other faiths, there are grounds for saying that no one of them may stand in judgment of the other, or presume to have the sole criteria by which all other faiths may be condemned. Each may have access to the Source of judgment, some more explicitly and definitively than others. That is, their very act of witness, what they are able to convey in declaring what God has wrought, what in the light of their witness God demands, can serve to evoke in others a sense of being judged. The goodness and greatness incarnate in the Word that is spoken, the proclamation, can be as the rays of the sun that fall upon the just and the unjust, not with the explicit intention of judging, but simply in the act of proclaiming the good news that has been given to a people. 8. The gift that each man of faith may bear as his distinctive witness maybe offered, though it may not be received. Yet the offering of the gift of grace to people of another faith becomes a command, even a compulsion to one who, in joy and fullness of heart, has the good news to proclaim. That men are to be vessels of the Most High, bearing forth the water of life to all men, this is a deduction which may be safely made.

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That any one of them is to be designing and manipulating of other men’s lives and circumstances and the judge of their faith, is surely a misguided and pretentious claim. 9. I would question whether anyone outside of another faith can really trust his own judgments regarding another’s faith. Arrogance, bias, ignorance, estrangement, along with confirmed sensibilities inherent in one’s own cultural and religious situation, contrive to alienate one from such a faith, And where one has the will to overcome these barriers, there usually follows an over-indulgent sense of identification and tolerance that both falsifies and sentimentalizes the factors involved. Any notion that one can by-pass or transcend these human barriers in any simple or theoretical way is to ignore a fundamental reality in any such encounter. 10. One could say that the revelation attested to within any one faith can have specific meaning only to one who has lived within the cultural ethos through which the witness is borne. This ideological or theological aspect one does not seek to transmit beyond the community of witness or the cultural experience to which it is integral. Yet each revelatory event speaks out of a human situation to a human situation, bearing upon inquiries which men as men recognize and, in their own terms, understand. Self-giving in behalf of another person is a human act. Concern with another person’s well-being is also a human act. The expression of joy or sorrow conveys elementally-shared emotions. These provide a threshold through which the human community speaks across differences and divisions. The Christian encounter with the faiths of men is to be guided, not only by what Christian faith through its own distinctive witness knows of the redemptive act of God in its own history, but by what all men can know and experience of the creative act of God through their own humanity. Men have access to one another as human beings in ways that transcend all cultural and historical barriers. To make this point I shall lift out a page from one of Karl Barth’s formidable volumes on Church Dogmatics (Vol. III, Part 2). The “new Barth,” as Emil Brunner has called him, has been saying some surprising things in recent years, as contrasted with what came from his pen during the earliest years of his writing, or with what continues to come forth from the lips of those who call themselves Barthians. And in this third volume Barth has voiced what can only be described as a striking and stirring depiction of our humanity. Barth starts with the God-Man as depicting the internal relations of God’s own Being made actual within existence, thereby becoming the ground of Man’s being. Man knows his relation with God as creature through the Man, Jesus Christ, and participates in that relation through

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Him because Christ is this ground in existence (the new Creation). There is no way by which we understand our full meaning as creatures in relation to God, Barth asserts, except through this vision of Jesus Christ as our creative ground. There are, however, the phenomena of Humanity. This is the vision we get of ourselves as man in relation to man. Barth insists that the full meaning of this Humanity cannot be had apart from Jesus Christ; nevertheless man’s humanity is visible apart from a knowledge of Christ. What is our humanity? This Barth tries to explain under three points. First, “the Humanity of each man consists of the determination of his Being as being-together-with the other man.” Secondly, “Humanity, as beingtogether-with the other man is to be distinguished from Jesus’ Being-forman.” This is Barth’s way of distinguishing men’s humanity as a relationship with man from its ontological relationship, the human encounter from the divine ground. Thirdly, Barth stresses that our humanity is to be understood primarily as “our being-together-with one other man,” not simply in the context of other men. This implies that our humanity is not our communal character as such, but our encounter with another person. (At times he speaks of it “as man in relationship to the woman,” or “woman in relation to the man.”) The point being emphasized here is that our humanity is in this I-Thou encounter between persons, and that we cannot possess or convey our humanity except as we express ourselves in this way—as a person in relation with a person. Thus, Barth says, man cannot say “I am human” as if to say he is human out of himself and in terms of himself, but he must say “I am human in the encounter.” Not everything that man does is to be accounted his humanity simply because he as a human being does then. Eating, drinking, working, constitute the neutral field in which man exercises his faculties. But in the exercise of these faculties man can be inhuman as well. Thus Barth gives four marks of man’s humanity, each one presupposing the other: 1. Openness to one another as human beings, letting ourselves be seen as human; 2. Talking to one another and listening to one another. This Barth speaks of as “self-revelation,” helping the other to come to me, not holding him off, not appearing defensive toward him, or concealing myself from him. But I must also listen to the other person. I must let him declare himself to me. And I must do so in a trustful manner; I must not hold him off as if assuming that the other wants to commend himself to me. 3. Readiness to assist another, being there for another. In being human man cries for help and is asked for help. 4. Doing all this joyfully. (For some of this report on Barth’s depiction

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of Humanity I have followed Gerhard Spiegler’s translation in an unpublished paper.) When humanity is described in this way, says Barth (and he adds, this is the only way to describe it), it is good unequivocally. Barth then adds this telling statement: “We have therefore not followed the frequent practice of theology of debasing human nature as much as possible in order to impress upon man more forcefully what may become of him through God’s grace.” Human nature as expressed through our humanity, then, is “good human nature.” Now, Barth continues, this humanity which we have thus described is common to all men. And it can be known by men other than Christians. Knowledge of our humanity is not a special privilege of Christians. In fact, non-Christians can even be more human than Christians, he says. Through sin, of course, this humanity becomes sick; but this is so among Christians as well. This remarkable analysis of the phenomena of humanity gives me the courage to say what, for many years, I have wanted to say, namely: that the Christian’s encounter with men of other faiths is not initially, and possibly not ever, in terms of his most distinctive and self-conscious witness, certainly not in terms of theological doctrine or preaching that conveys such symbolic meaning. Rather, it is initially and, in many instances, continuously at the level of man’s encountering man, people encountering people, at the level of their humanity. To define this term again, I use Barth’s four points: 1) openness to one another as human beings; 2) letting the other person understand me by talking to him and listening to him; 3) being ready to assist another, being there for another; 4) doing all this joyfully. Unwittingly, I should say, many valiant souls who have served their Lord on the mission field have taken this path in their encounter with the faiths of men. We have often spoken of this way as being incidental to the main business at hand. And if one has emphasized it, one has been inclined to trivialize it through an over-sentimental treatment of it. Is it not possible that this is our point of encounter and at certain stages of our existence, possibly for all of our present history, there is no other point of encounter save through this threshold of creation which relates us with all men as human beings? There is no assurance that in being together at the level of our creation (our humanity), we shall come together at the level of our witness to redemption in Christ. The distinctiveness of our several witnesses may persist. Our differences may persist—probably should persist—and engage us frequently as people of many cultures. There may be no hope of a world faith at the end of this trail, yet the barriers that arise from differences at

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the level of our most serious witness may be transcended through the phenomena of our humanity. In such an encounter we can live together with our differences, yet more than this may follow; for out of this encounter, where we live up to the promise of our creation, where we are open to another as a human being, whatever else may ensue, the miracle of a higher encounter may follow. In this higher encounter, that which has been closed to us as people of our several cultures may be opened to us, not on any basis that we contrive, but on the basis of a new creation that can thus occur, disclosing our common ground of being which, in Barth’s language, constitutes “the divine Other of every man, even Jesus Christ.” What we do in this humble way of being open to another person, being there for him, may be the human act by which the reality of spirit, conveying the reality of grace as a New Creation, will be made vivid to another man, thereby disclosing to him his “divine Other.” “There is no way,” says Barth, “by which we understand our full meaning as creatures in relation to God except through this vision of Jesus Christ as our creative ground in existence.” Let me add to this that there may be no way by which this vision of Jesus Christ, this New Creation, our creative ground, can be made vivid to one of another faith except through this threshold of our humanity—being open to another, being there for him. There are ways by which Christian and non-Christian people within a common discipline can cut across barriers of culture and religion and engage one another in a most profitable exchange of meaning and mutual criticism. This can have important consequences, even for our understanding of Christian faith. But the encounter between men is not solely an exchange of symbols. In deeper ways it is a confrontation of realities— realities which, at elemental levels of our humanity, speak for themselves and thereby summon us to what is saving beyond our humanity.

The Liberal Evangel As History Illumines It The topic which was given to me to discuss, as you will see on the program, is The History of Religious Thought in the Liberal Movement since Schleiermacher. Obviously this topic is in a class with such titles as “Man and His General Condition.” When one is assigned such a topic he must assume that he is to be selective, or at least imaginative enough, to speak out of the orientation designated, rather than to discuss the topic literally as given. Were I to take this assignment literally, I shudder to think how long we should be delayed here in Putnam. I could almost imagine that whoever conceived our agenda had some acquaintance with an oral tradition that once hovered about the person of Wilhelm Pauck, whose paper on Liberalism was discussed last night. When Professor Pauck was on our faculty at Chicago, it was generally assumed that whenever he discussed the history of Christian thought he would, in all probability, begin and end with Luther. The students knew this and so did the faculty. It was one of the givens of theological education, as we knew it, that this would be so. One day, at the close of spring quarter, so it is reported, Pauck began his lecture, with the words, “Luther died.” The students rose to their feet and burst into applause. This was an admission so unusual and so unexpected from the lips of Professor Pauck that it literally seemed prescient of a new awakening in theological education, and in the theology of Wilhelm Pauck, And this may very well have been so. Yet it was reported on one occasion thereafter that Pauck was on his way to discussing the theology of Schleiermacher, and would have reached it in his course, except for the fact that something along the way recalled to him that Liberalism is essentially Protestant in character and means to affirm or to reaffirm what was basic in the Reformation. This was enough to reverse Pauck’s steps; and when last heard from he was on his way back to resurrect Luther. The paper which we discussed last evening is evidence enough that this account is apocryphal. For the names that are most frequently upon the lips of Professor Pauck these days are those of Harnack and Troeltsch. And if a new day of Liberalism does arise in the very near future, which I am confident will occur; it will be due in no small measure to Professor Pauck’s insistent plea to listen again to these prophetic liberal voices. In any case, my topic, following as it does upon the discussion of Professor Pauck’s paper, presupposes that he did, finally reach Schleiermacher; and

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thus it commands me to carry the discussion forward beyond that heroic day. I have chosen, not to give a serial account of Christian thought since Schleiermacher, but to employ our knowledge of the history of that period to throw light upon the drama of liberal Christian thought in the modern world, including our own time, and thereby try to come to an over-all understanding of what Liberalism in Christian thought really means. I may have overstepped my bounds in doing this if my role is that of an outsider who was asked to speak to you in a more objective capacity; but you see I took the inside track as a member of the Federated Theological Faculty, which is one of your faculties. And that gives me leave to speak with more audacity and concern on the assumption that we are in this thing together. I should confess to you, since you do not have my paper before you, that I have entitled my paper The Liberal Evangel, as History Illumines It; meaning, of course, not only past history, but present history as well. But that word evangel may stick in our throats. Is this not a contradiction in terms, like saying liberal-orthodoxy? Can one speak of a liberal evangel? According to the American College Dictionary, evangel means “the good tidings of the redemption of the world through Jesus Christ.” Webster states it more modestly, leaving out methodology, saying simply, “The message or news of the Christian dispensation and the redemption of mankind,” “the good news.” Now this question alone could be the subject of a paper. Does Liberalism have an evangel? Is that its role? Does it concern itself with the good news? Or does it have only bad news about the good news, namely, that “It ain’t necessarily so?” I do not discuss that issue in this paper. I merely assume that Liberalism, for all its prophetic zeal and its constant need of critically assessing the claims of Christian faith in the light of modern knowledge, and of the modern man’s situation, is not mere negation; that it, too, proclaims the good news, granting that it does so “in its fashion.” I mention this now so that you will not be taken by surprise in what I am about to unfold; or needlessly lured into the trap which I shall stealthily prepare for you. In a recent gathering of our faculty at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, one of my colleagues, commenting on a critique which I had just made of another colleague’s paper on Schleiermacher, paid me the dubious compliment of being sneaky. Well, he didn’t put it that bluntly. What he said was that “Meland has a way of taking his listeners in by sheer lure in the way he will weave a web of words about them, forming, as it were a canopy of floating cloud above them. And then with subtlety, in the turn of a phrase, he causes a gentle mist to fall upon them, enveloping them in fog. The fog

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always lifts,” he said; “but when it has lifted, all the furniture has been rearranged.” This was a more orthodox mind than mine, resisting my liberalism. This morning, it maybe your liberal minds resisting my seeming orthodoxy, which I parade under the banner of neo-liberalism. I. But now let us get down to the business at hand. Keeping in mind the full range of liberal history in the modern period, how are we to understand the meaning of Liberalism? Liberalism, one often hears, is a spirit of mind; not a method, or a structure of thought. I have never been quite sure what one is to do with this characterization. What does it mean to say that Liberalism connotes a quality without reference to content or to specifiable distinctions in mode of thinking? The late Edwin Aubrey, who frequently characterized Liberalism as a spirit of mind, rather than a method, did write in his book, Present Theological Tendencies, that “Liberalism may be defined as respect for the worth of the individual,” (p. 36) and refers to the neo-Thomist philosopher, Jacques Maritain, as one who characteristically defines Liberalism in this way. I would agree that this fixes upon a central concern of all liberals. But this, I would say, conveys a specific orientation of thought with implicit or explicit presuppositions, dictating a procedure, or alternating procedures, consonant with that orientation. Let me see if I can be more specific about this? As one moves through the wide range of writings generally associated with the liberal period, the judgment gradually takes hold of one that liberal and liberation are closely related terms. The liberal, in whatever context or period one may find him, is one who aspires to be a liberated man, in reaction to some enclosure of mind, or oppressive institutional authority. And the efforts he pursues or the theses he formulates will be directed toward accomplishing that end in the particular historical situation in which he lives. As a corollary, one will find, too, that, in most instances, liberation, when it comes, whether it be liberation from the authority of an institution, from the sovereign rule of a monarch, or from the normative claim of a Book, is generally followed by a close check upon individual resources. It is no accident that the primacy of the person became a battle cry beginning with the 18th century, for, in a very real sense, the will to liberation had stripped the liberal down to the authenticity of his own personhood, and to resources which these powers might provide or create. Each of these tendencies, you can see, could have both good and bad consequences, even developing their own pathologies. The story of Liberalism is pretty much an account of such ambiguous mixtures of motives and ends.

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I begin this discussion, then, by suggesting that a defining trait in the liberal character is its will to liberation from external controls and a consequent concern with inner motivation. In putting the matter this way, one realizes how Protestant Liberalism is. Liter allowing that thought to sink in, one is impelled to see, too, that both Liberalism and Reformation Protestantism have had affinities with the prophetic tradition in its resistance to coercive demands and its concern with inner integrity. It is not enough to say; however, that Protestantism, in its initial impetus, was a recurrence of prophetic zeal; or that Liberalism is simply the Protestant dynamic asserting itself in modern times. The continuity is there in each instance, to be sure; yet new occasions and varying circumstances have made for quite different results. The Liberal character, therefore, is to be seen as a distinctive expression of the will to liberation resulting in one period an insistent appeal to reason; at another time an appeal to inner experience, and in yet another period, a concern with the freedom of the existential self; in each case the cherished resource being defined by circumstances, and possibly decisions, peculiar to the period. But in the formation of the liberal character and objective, something of the earlier Protestant history persists; something that reveals that Protestantism and Liberalism alike are complex and many sided, even though they seem to body forth this distinctive character and intent. If Liberalism has continuity with certain individualizing strains of Reformation thought, it has clear affinities as well with the Renaissance. Some have insisted that the Renaissance is the essential source of the liberal spirit in modern culture. I think this cannot be said without making clear what it is in the Renaissance that gives impetus to the liberal spirit. For clearly there were elements in the Renaissance against which Reformation Protestantism as a liberating force contended. It will be found, for example, that representative Renaissance thinkers made no issue of Scholasticism. They assumed it as a necessary mode of thought pointing to a realm of ultimate meaning which one could acknowledge, but which one need not investigate or justify. Herschl Baker, in The Dignity of Man, makes the point that the Renaissance really had two foci: the metaphysical order of Scholasticism, which it assumed but did not emphasize; and the natural order which it explored diligently as a new frontier of man’s meaning. What appears to imply dual loyalties was not regarded so by Renaissance thinkers. They spoke of man as being made both in the image of God and in the image of nature: imago-dei and imago-natura. It did not take much doing to establish this on the imaginative level, (the level at which most of them worked) as being a depiction of man’s spirit, on the one hand, and man’s body-life on the

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other. From Renaissance curiosity about natural man, and its zeal for inquiring into what this could mean for an understanding or an appreciation of the human spirit, one can, of course, find a basis for deriving the liberal impetus. On the appreciative side it was certainly there: a lifting up of the individual man or woman as an object to enjoy, and as a creature to fulfill. But if liberation is a defining trait in the liberal character, then one must say that the liberal temper was the exception, rather than the characteristic expression of Renaissance thinking. For in men like Erasmus and Sir Thomas More; or, say Michelangelo, one sees a conforming temper of mind, however creative and innovating their talents might be. Even in a Leonardo da Vinci, who was, in many ways, the first modern man, the liberal quality of which we are speaking was not pronounced; though it was more in evidence in him than in Michelangelo and in other of his contemporaries. The will to liberation in the interest of asserting the worth of the individual is a clear note in Reformation thinking, however much it may have been compromised and qualified by the doctrine of original sin and the doctrine of depravity that followed. With fierce logic the Reformers lifted up the freedom of individual man to sin and to assert his rebellious will; and the freedom of God through the Holy Spirit to recall man from his sin. The authenticity of a real selfhood is given to the individual in this Reformation view of man, despite the fact that the notion of depravity seemed to deprive man’s goodness of ontological or ultimate significance, save as it was redeemed through God’s grace. The ground for a liberal reconception of the imago-dei was laid in this Reformation view in that the imagery of the Covenant as a negotiation between free persons with the maturity of decision was re-established. Liberalism, in developing its doctrine of immanence, was to reject the doctrine of depravity, and, except for Kant’s notion of radical evil, was to remove the tension between man’s good and God’s good, treating them as synonymous and inseparable; and, to this extent, it abolished the imagery of the covenant which had formed the mythical ground for noting that man’s ways are not God’s ways. As a result of this coalescence of divine and human good, the goodness of personality, human or divine, took on the connotation of divinity; and thus the way was opened for an unrestrained idealization of the human equation. I mention this simply by way of recording that the liberal concern with the worth of the individual, and its consequent concern with freedom of decision, is not to be equated with the idealization of man or of human goodness. Hence any assertion about the ambiguity of human goodness or

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about man’s sinfulness does not, as such, strike at this fundamental liberal doctrine. What is sought in present reconceptions of the Christian doctrine of man is a re-establishment of the liberal view of human worth and freedom within the context of a genuine covenant relationship in which man’s goodness and man’s evil are known for what they are: the responses of the human structure, which is a structure in relationship with God, with the divine ground; but not, in itself, divinity. So much, then, for pointing up antecedent liberal traits in Reformation and Renaissance thinking. Liberal traits, as we have seen, are to be found throughout Christian and Hebraic history. Liberalism, however, connotes a movement of thought and Christian history which is self-conscious and concerted in asserting the worth of the individual person. The peak or summit of this particular liberating movement of thought in Christian history was reached during the second half of the eighteenth century. Some of the decisive events marking this summit were: The publication of Rousseau’s Social Contract in 1762, the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Rights of Man bill in-the French Assembly, the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Practical Reason, and Judgment, in 1731, 1788, and 1790, respectively, and Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion to its Cultured Despisers in 1799. The tendency to identify Liberalism exclusively with this summit period of its history has equated it with Romanticism. When this is done, however, one gives a truncated view of Liberalism, and dissociates too sharply from the era of Rationalism or Enlightenment preceding this summit, and from the period of Modernism following it. Thus Shailer Mathews, who was an ardent Modernist, objected to being called a liberal; for, to him, Liberalism meant a romanticized concern with feeling and religious experience. And he, being a Yankee from the state of Maine, would have none of that. Schleiermacher, on the other hand, had rejected Rationalism; and, no doubt, would have dissociated himself from Modernism as Mathews conceived it, had this been available to him. These remarks would seem to justify the tendency to equate Liberalism with Romanticism. But I think we must make a distinction between allowing these men to define the bounds of their own thinking, and allowing their thinking to restrict the bounds of Liberalism. Even if Liberalism is closely identified with Romanticism, it has antecedents in Rationalism and the Enlightenment that cannot be dissociated from it historically or organically. They are of a piece with respect to the basic concern for individual human worth, despite the differences that divide them; and this concern for human worth implies as well the freedom to assert the authenticity of the individual person, however much this

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freedom may be qualified by the fact of relationships. It is very interesting to see how Romanticists like Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, and Schleiermacher discuss this matter of human freedom. The gist of their argument in each instance is that in discovering my freedom I recognize that other men are free, too. In fact, my freedom and the freedom of other men are inseparable. I cannot have the one without the other. Hence the Social Contract, providing for the “general will.” And Kant’s moral imperative, pointing to the moral law, can be said to be a variation on this theme of the general will, lifting it from the status of a social compromise to that of an ontological principle. These romanticist devices for correlating the rights of men as free persons can be seen as fulfillments of the sentiments of reasonableness and toleration expressed among rationalists of the seventeenth century such as the Latitudinarians, John Locke, and Samuel Clarke, making explicit provision for turning this sentiment into a social and spiritual force. It may seem odd to be saying that the romanticists gave form and structure to what rationalists had held as sentiment; yet this is precisely what occurred; which indicates that all romanticists were not as formless and shapeless as their reputation suggests. In a similar way one must see that Liberalism, understood as a will to liberation and as an affirmation of the worth of individual persons, persists among the modernists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even as they recoil from the appeal to feeling or to inner experience as a means of justifying liberation or human worth. The maturing of biology, psychology, and the social sciences during this period put into their hands scientific methods and resources which enabled them to pursue these ends more objectively and descriptively, so they thought. The fact of the matter is, the full stature and diversity of the liberal era of Christianity and of Western history is missed, or denied to it, when Liberalism is identified exclusively with the Romanticist phase, even though this was the peak of its power as a cultural force. What gave it decisiveness as a practical energy may not, in fact, convey its most characteristic traits. It may, instead, present it in an extreme and exaggerated expression which may, in time, prove its undoing. From our present vantage point, this is precisely what appears to have been the case. The most glaring excesses in liberal thinking, carrying the will to liberation to extremes of irresponsible individuality and anarchy, and lifting the notion of human worth to an exaggerated level of human idealization, do appear in the Romanticist phase of Liberalism. This was occurring even as the principles of social restraint like “the general will” and the “moral imperative” were being formulated. If we are to conceive of Liberalism adequately as an historical move-

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ment, then, we should think of Rationalism, Romanticism, and Modernism as constituting three distinct phases of the Liberal era prior to our own period. The rationalist phase is marked by a rediscovery of reason as an ontological norm, and by a consequent squaring of all experience, tradition, custom and belief with its demands. Descartes is the towering figure here, philosophically; although without the application of the measure of reason through mathematics, particularly calculus, which was Newton’s distinctive contribution (with apologies to Leibniz), it is unlikely that Rationalism could have had the sweeping effect that it had in shaping the modern consciousness. This period, I would say, begins with the work of Galileo early in the 17th century and extends through part of the 18th century, reaching a terminal point in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1751). Theologically the dominant figures are the Cambridge Platonists, especially Cudworth and More; John Tillotson, John Locke, and Samuel Clarke; and the later Deists, especially Mathew Tindal, and John Toland. The Romanticist phase, which includes essentially the latter decades of the 18th century and the first half of the nineteenth century, is marked by a discovery of the uniqueness of the individual and of access to this unique, concrete reality in individual experience. Each individual person was as a threshold opening into the Infinite variety of Reality. To the notion of universal order, so dominant among the rationalists following Newton, was thus added the exciting notions of individuality and diversity. The uniqueness of the person and the consequent significance of individual experience as a source of infinite meaning placed a premium upon the individual and upon individual creativity that exceeded every other value. The release of the individual person from every form of coercion, save the coercion of his own will and reason, or from enslavement, thus loomed as a prior, spiritual event. Rousseau was a key figure in this phase of Liberalism, and the American and French revolutions were its most dramatic symbols. Any list of the dominant voices, along with that of Rousseau’s, would include Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, and Schleiermacher. Prominent British voices were Coleridge, Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Matthew Arnold. In America the significant voices during this period expressive of this form of Liberalism were Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Horace Greeley, William Ellery Charming, Horace Bushnell, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Later exponents of this phase of Liberalism, whose thought was to persist throughout the modernist period and to interact with it, were Albrecht Ritschl, Wilhelm Hermann, Adolf von Harnack, John and Edward Caird, Josiah Royce, William Newton Clarke and Walter Rauschenbusch.

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The modernist phase of Liberalism, which can-be dated from the midnineteenth century through the nineteen twenties, is marked by the discovery of the significance of historical time and its emphasis upon the notion of progress. The decisive events shaping these concepts were the industrial revolution and the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859). Science and industry as a closely coordinated enterprise, introduced into Western culture, particularly in America, a new and formidable drive toward modernization. This gave impetus to the movement of thought which stressed the primacy of the present, both as a matter of expediency (as in business) and as a matter of verifying truth and meaning (as in the study of the origin and development of structures). It was during this period that philosophy and the sciences assumed new importance in the defining of theological method and progressively changed the character of theology. From the study of Christian doctrine it was transformed into the psychological study of religious experience, the sociological study of religion and the philosophical inquiry into religious knowledge and value. Some of the men who helped to shape this modernizing phase of the liberal era are: Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, E. B. Tylor, William Graham Sumner, G. Stanley Hall, William James, John Fiske, John Dewey, Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, R. H. Tawney, John Locke, Edward Scribner Ames, George Coe, Shailer Mathews, and Harry Emerson Fosdick. The present phase of Liberalism, say from the nineteen twenties onward, is yet to be given a suitable name. If Existentialism could be made flexible enough in meaning to gather in, say, current efforts in Radical and Rational Empiricism, or process thinking, and the whole strand of organic thought in the physical and social sciences having to do with the sciences of man, this period might be called the Existentialist phase of Liberalism. Existentialism would then imply full concentration upon ultimate demands in the immediacies of the living situation, emphasizing the dynamic and spontaneous character of reality as living event, or as the moment of encounter. This is immediacy seen with the urgency of ultimacy, The towering historical figures in defining this period would include Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, James, Bergson, Husserl and Freud. Contemporary exponents would include Heidegger, Scheler, Jaspers, Berdyaev and Buber; Rudolf Otto, Albert Schweitzer, Karl Barth, Bultmann, Tillich, Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr; Whitehead, Wieman, Hartshorne, Williams, and at least two of us, possible more, of the present Chicago School. What a motley crew! I don’t wonder that some of you are now knitting your brow in puzzlement, while others of you openly grimace or smirk. It is apparent that the historical honeymoon is over. We are now

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entering upon the grim realities of the present. End here we may expect weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. If our Chairman is intent upon maintaining peace and quiet or on sustaining a conciliatory mood, he probably should adjourn the meeting now. But I hope he will not; for I would then suffer untold repression and frustration. As a chastened Liberal I have a mission to perform. So, as the teller of stories would say, “Now comes the interesting part.” II. I shall begin this constructive phase of my presentation by making explicit the dramatic schema which underlies this analysis of liberalism, disclosing the rhythms of Liberal religious thought in the modern period. Let me put it this way: If one were to stand back and view the whole of the modern period which we have just surveyed from the seventeenth century to the present time, one would see its lines of development and reaction forming a single drama of Christian thought. Four cycles of change and reconception would become apparent, three of them defining liberal Protestant thought through the nineteenth century and a few decades beyond; the final one describing the new Protestantism now emerging. The first cycle marks the triumph of reason in religion, following Descartes and Newton, and a gradual relinquishment of the doctrine of revelation. In brief, one could say, reason displaces revelation. The second cycle marks transitions in theological thought stemming from Kant’s influence giving rise to a stress upon moral idealism. Here the religion of ideals displaces the doctrine of redemption. The third cycle marks developments when the authority of the Bible in theology waned and the appeal to scripture in theology virtually disappeared as philosophy and the various sciences assumed ascendancy in the interpretation of the Christian religion. Philosophical and scientific norms thus displace the authority of the Bible. The fourth cycle marks a renewal of concern with the major themes of the Christian faith, following from a critique of certain historical liberal presuppositions and theological methods. And in this cycle now in process, one sees such notions as revelation, redemption and biblical faith being repossessed and reinstated as formative notions in Protestant theology. Considering the nature of this reconception in theological thinking in the New Protestantism, and its direct, even intimate relation to historical developments of the liberal era, and to issues raised by them, I regard it inaccurate to speak of this fourth cycle as a return to orthodoxy or even a neo-orthodoxy. It may better be described as a new dimension of liberal faith which has found its way back to the depths of the Christian message within the disciplines of liberal scholarship and within the ethos of liberal

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Christianity. The liberation sought in this current state of reaction is a release from the monolithic order of rationality or mentalism which the liberal era, itself, created in its zeal to elevate and to exploit the powers of reason and the preferred status of the human consciousness. Hegelian philosophy is a kind of symbol of this aberration of Liberalism, and is, in fact, a vivid exemplification of it. The tides of thought most expressive of the current reaction are clearly anti-Hegelian tendencies. Antecedents of the current reaction are to be seen in Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Thus, in its initial stage, this reaction manifested itself as undercurrents of dissolution, protesting the Hegelian synthesis at the very time that it was in process of forming. It was out of this smoldering discontent with abstract idealism that resources for modern Existentialism were to emerge. And from these resources, in turn, theologies of reaction in the present period were to arise to vent their protest, not only against Hegel, but, of all people, Schleiermacher as well. What was opposed in this revolt against Schleiermacher was his preoccupation with the religious consciousness and with what appeared to be his subjectivism. Yet, one who reads Schleiermacher with an eye to what he, himself, was contending against, cannot fail to be impressed by the remarkable subtlety and stubborn persistence with which he sought to counter the very rationalistic, moralistic, and humanistic aberrations against which modern existentialists and existentialist theologians, themselves, do battle. Schleiermacher, in fact, along with Schelling, both of whom openly opposed their contemporary, Hegel, are in the lineage of Existentialism; not as decisively as was Kierkegaard, to be sure, but in ways that show real affinity with its concern. But now another stream of reaction against Hegelianism and against the monolithic order of rationality is to be seen in the writings of Henri Bergson and William James, both of whom are now counted among the existentialists or as thinkers having affinities with modern Existentialism. This tangle of thought is too involved to try to delineate or analyze here, but I should like to say, after puzzling over it for some time, that the coalition of William James and Bergson during the early years of this century provided a timely resistance to the Hegelian and later Idealistic tide that was to engulf American minds after 1880. Besides effectively countering Hegelian idealism, they initiated a mode of what I would call “relational empiricism;” that is, an empiricism in which relations loom prominently in what is experienced, giving to it an organic, or holistic, character. Bergson’s influence spread to England among the empiricists and gave rise to what has been called organismic

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philosophy. The emergent philosophers and scientists, S. Alexander, C. Lloyd Morgan, Jan Smuts, and Alfred North Whitehead were the most productive of this group. The radical empirical strand of William James’ thought was well-nigh dissipated in the American experience due, in part, to his readiness to be absorbed into the pragmatic movement as its most popular exponent and spokesman. To this day he is rated by contemporary philosophers as the lesser of the American empirical voices, Peirce, Dewey, and George Herbert Mead being regarded the more seminal minds. But this, I am confident, can be said only if the pragmatic emphasis is made the point of the thrust. I have tried to argue that James, in coalition with Bergson, was ploughing a deeper furrow in his metaphysical writings which he liked to describe as Radical Empiricism. It was this mode of Empiricism which Whitehead took up and brought to completion, as he, himself, has acknowledged in his Process and Reality. It is interesting to note, by the way, that S. Alexander, the philosopher regarded Whitehead’s Process and Reality as a completion of his own labors which he had begun in the two volumes, Space, Time, and Deity. He has been quoted as saying that he had contemplated a third volume to complete his system, but that he found Whitehead’s work so expressive of what he would have written that he was content to let it stand as his third volume. Thus Whitehead is a kind of confluence of British and American empiricism stressing emergent and relational aspects of concrete experience. It is for this reason that Whitehead stands as the contemporary summit of Summa of radical empirical thought, actually carrying forward the existentialist thrust of James and Bergson, and of the whole organismic school stemming from Bergson. And he is the fount, from which various process theologians from Wieman to Williams have drunk. Out of these two streams of existentialist thinking in the West, (the term existentialist being interpreted now in the grand manner) have come two different statements of the human problem, following from the critique of Idealism. The one, carrying forward the epistemological inhibitions of Kant, has pursued the meaning of truth as subjectivity, thereby making acute the theological issue between man’s selfhood and the ultimate ground of his existence. In this context, the act of faith is employed to affirm a transcendent norm. The strategy of thought here appears to be wholly Kantian, translating the postulates more boldly into specific acts of faith to affirm, not simply the necessary ideas of Freedom, God, and Immortality, but the more explicitly Christian witness to the new life of God in Christ. The other stream, or trail, moving out from James’ radical empiricism into a metaphysics of internal relations, has come upon a vision of man in his relationships, in which the image of the individual in

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community, the self and its communal ground, has become controlling. In this new stage of rational and radical empiricism, experience takes on the connotation of the living situation; an event, not so much observed, as lived in, and lived with. Empiricism pursued in this way becomes, itself, an existential stance, a situation of encounter and participation, rather than that of subject-object observation or analysis. Yet, Existentialism reached by this route of thinking and feeling will always stand over against the Existentialism stemming from Kierkegaard and Kant precisely on the grounds that relations and structures of meaning are given in the living situation, and thus impel one, in taking account of its stream of events, its commands and decisions, to give fuller weight to the life of reason in relation to the act of faith. Tillich, who grapples with problems of context, relations, Gestalts of meaning or grace, in the face of the dynamics of faith, moves in between these two existentialist paths, simulating the organic and dynamic imagery of process thought through a method of symbolism, by which he is able to correlate his philosophy of existence with the mythos of Christian faith. By using an ontology of being, structured after the model of Schelling’s mythological Idealism, yet absorbing the imagery and insight of depth psychology and the correctives of Existentialism, he arrives at a synthesis which has the scope and stature of a metaphysics of relations, symbolically interpreted, which, nevertheless preserves in its procedure a concern for the concreteness of events. In its general effect as a mode of thought, it is an amazing counterpart of process metaphysics, arduously structured out of a reconstructed Idealism, and fructified by an agonizing identification with Existentialism. When one considers the fact that Tillich has been tinkering with a model-T metaphysics for well over thirty years and has kept it running with power, at the moment outstripping the organismic boys by several lengths, one can only say that miracles do happen in this twentieth century; provided one has Charisma, Kairos, and a symbolic method. I am persuaded that the contemporary theological issues that are crucial to the Christian understanding of man and of our human existence arise out of the interplay between these three paths of existential inquiry. And, accordingly, the opportunity and task of a relevant liberal theology are to be found within the orientation of anyone or in the encounter between these several paths of existential thinking, embracing process theology, Tillich’s symbolic ontology, and the dialectical theology of Barth and Niebuhr. If put to it, I think I could demonstrate that, for all their semblance of orthodoxy and traditionalism, Barth and the Niebuhrs are inescapably

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liberal, caught in the heritage which they have so eloquently disavowed. I don’t think it is worth the try; nor do I have much heart for it; for I am persuaded that their prophetic, as well as their iconoclastic work in this era is, in large measure, done. I could write a eulogy in praise of them; chiefly for what they have accomplished in blasting complacent liberals out of their complacency. Constructively, I see no future for liberal theology along their Way, any more than does Wilhelm Pauck. Nevertheless, they remain still, in my judgment, the most skillful, the most daring, the most imaginative and the most free intellects at work in Christian theology today. As creative iconoclasts they have no equal on the current scene. They lay to ruins, not only the half-hearted formulations of other men’s minds, but the swiftly wrought formulations of their own earlier years as well. This is because they are more intent upon the life of the spirit than the letter; more attentive to the realities of the immediate situation than to doctrine or to categories of thought which have been formulated to deal with them. The liberal is always a contemporary man. That is, he is alive to the critical issues in the contemporary scene of action; and is aware of the resources of thought and insight that can deal with those issues forthrightly, imaginatively. Now I make a distinction between those who are really alive to the issues and they who are merely activistic, full of zeal and energy, but with inadequate resources of thought or insight. The liberal who is sharpened for the occasion has a sense for what Tillich calls the Kairos, the fullness of time that is at hand, calling for thought and action that is responsive to its demands as well as its needs, and thus creative of new understanding which is literally born of the occasion. The liberal, in this sense, literally thinks forward as he lives forward, to recall James’ words, which, by the way he took from Kierkegaard. He is in the stream of events, feeling the urgency, the crisis, as well as the forward flow of the creative occurrence, and is thus more responsive to the flux and forming of meaning than to the forms which meanings have already taken. In a word, the liberal is attentive to the living situation. This would describe many of the stalwart figures of the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries, and of the current period as well. But now a further characterization needs to be made. Such a liberal is at once expressive of the heritage of the past, yet free from its compulsions. This says two things: first, that thinking and living forward is not a nude affair, nor infantile in the sense that history is denied to such a one. Modernity as a vacuous orgy in contemporaneity is something else again. Whatever else it is, it is not Liberalism. The liberal bent on liberation and the affirmation of human worth is always highly self-conscious in regard

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to historic attainments as well as to present grievances or corruptions; of the summit visions of former generations, and of their iconoclasms. He is therefore simultaneously in reaction against specific grievances in the past which now present obstacles to the present, and responsive to what, in good faith, he can repossess of the past and make his own, even as a way of countering what the past has become. One could document this characterization in recalling several of the great liberals of the modern period such as Newton, Locke, Kant, Schleiermacher, Emerson, William James, and Whitehead. The one thing the liberal cannot do and retain his liberality, his freedom to respond openly to new demands and occasions, is to carry inherited notions, methods, doctrines, or convictions unreconstructed into the current scene of action. Such importation of past facilities or resources into the present, even when they come out of historical periods of Liberalism, itself, is clearly the mark of orthodoxy. And, my friends, let us be clear about this: Liberalism is as susceptible to the virus of orthodoxy as is any other “ism” of history. For liberals, too, can become permanently enamored of some notion or method which has served well in some historic occasion; and can lift it up as a banner phrase, a flag to fly over any critical situation; and, in the name of Liberalism, demand that this flag and no other be honored. The appeal to reason, for example, can become an aggressive Rationalism that will tolerate nothing except obeisance to its logical demands. If one wishes to document this observation, one need only to read the literature of the later Deists, following upon the time of Descartes, Newton, Locke, and Samuel Clarke. What began as a serious and reasonable act of liberation through the appeal to reason became a rigid and intolerant declaration of the rationalists’ manifesto. One can, of course, make precisely the same observations in more recent history. Whenever rationalists make reason a cause, they reenact all the vices of dogmatism. So it is with the appeal to experience, or the primacy of the personal. These were valued methods and emphases in the history of Liberalism; tools for the occasion, as it were, which were used with effect and decisiveness in the situation then current, precisely because they were pertinent, specifically evoked by existing demands. And in that situation they were tools sharpened for the task at hand. But liberals have a way of clinging nostalgically to these venerated tools, even after their cutting edge has become dulled, and they bear no direct relation, either to the task at hand, or to the circumstances in which the task has emerged. Words and phrases are lifted out of their historical context and made into idols. If something in the current situation sounds like a threat to these venerated notions or methods, the nostalgic liberal becomes defensive, and thus his

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liberalism becomes orthodoxy, Shailer Mathews had a vivid phrase which he applied to everyone who insisted upon intruding outmoded notions into the contemporary scene without reconstructing or reconceiving their meaning. He called them “contemporary ancestors.” We are literally deluged with contemporary ancestors in the liberal churches and theological seminaries today who imagine that, by standing pat on the use of reason, or on the philosophy of Personalism, or on the social gospel, or on some other elevated plateau of historic Liberalism, that the line is being held against the mounting tide of reaction. The defensive liberal is a strange, yet pathetic specter in the history of Liberalism: strange because, in the nature of the case, his stand is alien to the liberal stance, an anachronism in any era; pathetic, because he imagines that he is fighting the cause of Liberalism, yet the liberal tides of creativity and reconception have swept over him, or have passed by him. I might as well quit pussy-footing around and say what I mean. I mean to say that much of what parades under the banner of Liberalism today is not liberal at all in any historical sense; but a nostalgia for what was once liberal in the time of history when it was relevant to a creative occasion. But the creative occasions of our time demand something more than these banner phrases of a former day, or the nostalgia for a liberal gospel that well deserves to be retired with full honors as Liberatus Emeritus. III. Whether or not the constructive efforts of men like Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr in their reconception and reformulation of Christian doctrine are to be understood as contributing to a neo-orthodoxy or to a neo-liberalism, their relevance to the liberal’s critical perspective in what they declare concerning the freedom of God and the limitations of our human finitude, may not be denied or profitably ignored. For some time Tillich’s symbolic theology will offer alluring incentive and guidance to the liberal’s reconception of the major themes of Christian faith, if for no other reason than that it presents the only systematic theology of our time which seeks to speak to the vital issues of contemporary existence from within the Christian witness with full acknowledgment of the claim that modern disciplines and the arts of culture have upon our human thought. His symbolic method releases him from a host of troublesome questions, and may enable him to appear more receptive of, or responsive to these resources of thought than he actually is. Nevertheless, as a strategy of meeting the present problem of correlating faith and culture, one must admit that it speaks with power and insight to the human condition. I do not conceal the fact that I see a route of thinking that can be more

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expressive of the liberal ethos in what has only begun to emerge as process theology. As a philosophy of religion this mode of thought has had rather full exposition in the works of Henry Nelson Wieman and in Charles Hartshorne. In their own distinctive ways, each of these men has served to illumine the theological task; but neither of them can be said to have produced full-orbed theological expositions of Christian faith in the sense that Barth’s Dogmatics or Tillich’s Systematic Theology has done. One must even say that the method by which Wieman seeks to go from philosophy of religion to an exposition of Christian faith partakes more of the method of modernism than of the Christian realism; for he seems content with simply translating historic Christian terms into philosophical meanings consonant with his system, rather than enabling the modern mind to come into a live encounter with the Christian witness within an imagery that is intelligible and illumining to the modern mind. My own writings and those of Bernard Loomer provide, at best, a prolegomena to constructive theology expressive of a neo-liberalism. In a manuscript entitled, Spirit, Man, and Culture, which contains the Barrows Lectures that I delivered in India and Burma last year, I go beyond my Faith and Culture in explicitly attempting to formulate a neo-liberal doctrine of spirit, Christology, and the Church and their relation to culture. But these, too, I must admit, are but modest beginnings. From hearing Daniel Day Williams’ Alden-Tuthill Lectures, delivered at a recent gathering of ministers in Chicago, I would judge that he is developing fresh power and courage in his present post as a spokesman for this newer Liberalism within a process theology. The task of the liberal today is to address himself to the circumstances within culture and within present problems of personal existence which have brought about this reversal of historic decisions within Liberalism concerning the major themes of the Christian faith, and to ask the question: What is it in our present experience which awakens so many of us to a concern with the meaning of revelation in relation to human reason; to the redemptive life in relation to moral effort; to biblical faith in relation to philosophy and the sciences? To toss this turn of mind aside as a relapse into Orthodoxy is, in my judgment, the most serious mistake liberal Christians can make. And one must say they are making it. In the first place, the very reappearance of these terms in our Western culture is a cultural event, not just an isolated conversation among theologians. It is a reassertion of elemental feelings of disorientation, anxiety, even despair in the face of growing complexities in human relations, and the mounting distrust in our human powers to deal with them. The proof of this is that the most poignant and expressive outcry for

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dealing with these themes has been coming, not from theological schools, or from church pulpits, but from the creative literature of recent years, echoing the dislocation, the disenchantment, if not the invalidism of the human psyche in our time; from mature, sensitive scientists, distraught over their own fantastic success in extending our human powers which, in turn, have become ominous in their portent beyond imagination; and from young students of the sciences, standing at the crossroad asking, Shall I persist in a scientific education, or get out of this power-ridden race bent on destruction? I have done my share in recent years of steering such intimidated young men out of theology and away from a professional Christian vocation on grounds which, I think, I could justify; though principally because I was convinced that their talents lay in the sciences. Yet, many of them have switched from engineering, physics, biology, zoology, and the social sciences to pursue theological study, either because of their despair in contemplating the future of a scientific civilization, or because they felt the urgency of the problem of faith as it confronts man in his immediate situation. Furthermore, we have witnessed the rather remarkable phenomenon just in the past two or three years of young college instructors taking a year or half a year off to study in the theological school as a way of coming to a deeper orientation in the pursuit of their own vocation and teaching. I have participated in several extended sessions, set up by liberal college faculties, themselves, to which they invited several members of a theological faculty to help them to think through the theological implications of their own disciplines. Such gatherings have included faculty people in literature, philosophy, economics, education, biology, psychology, and physics, as well as the dean of the faculty. One college faculty has set up a series of such sessions at various theological schools. On week-ends, they go to the theological school and sit in session with theologians and theological educators to explore religious dimensions of their task and their responsibility as Christian teachers. I put to one side the widely debated upsurge of faith that seems to be reactivating mass-revival and eliciting from movie queens, pious overtures to “the man upstairs,” as they say. These, no doubt, have their significance; but I am not sure that the liberal mind is up to coping with this conservative and sentimental tide. But with serious inquiring and probing among sensitive and discerning people of our culture we most certainly have a responsibility. In the second places the reappearance of these themes of the Christian faith, having to do with the larger issues of human destiny, is expressive of a cultural awakening of a different sort. It bespeaks a sharper grasp of the

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human situation, disclosing dimensions of our need as human beings which have less to do with the invalidism that has gripped our generation than with new resources of the mind and imagination that have helped us to see ourselves more realistically, more in terms of our limits as a human structure, and more in terms of our relationships as individuals in community, as creatures in a creative nexus. But thirdly, these themes of the Christian faith, reasserting the symbols of our cultural myth that point up the dimensions of depth in existence to which our rational experience is related, bespeak a new vision of man in the modern age, possibly a new stage in the modern consciousness, itself. That is, it is a shift from simplicities to complexities as a disciplined means of clarifying man’s meaning; from a concern with knowledge defined as clear and distinct ideas to a concern with a measure of understanding or of intelligibility that takes account of depths and mysteries that inhere in the relations that form our deeper ground as creatures. One of the most impressive statements of this point was made by one of your own churchmen, E. G. Lee in Mass Man and Religion. These are his words: In his spiritual life mass-man must turn from his factual, spatial simplicities with their correlative myths to learn to live with complexity. It is the complex which is real and not the simple… Man is surrounded by infinities that leap up out of facts; and he is faced by death, the surest fact of all, but one that somehow contains within itself all those other infinities. The infinities are real; the facts are empty and meaningless without them. Indeed it is this very emptiness, this blank, shadow existence without the complete fullness of infinity that cries aloud that something is missing. Man must live with infinities that surround birth, marriage, and death. He must live not only with these, but with unnumbered other infinities also. He must attach himself to this vast complexity, for only this is real, all else without this is but a shadow or a blank. (p. 84)

We take account of these infinities because, though they may not yield to our limited human structures of meaning, they nevertheless affect us and shape us intimately. For they involve us as creatures. In speaking of these matters, I am merely trying to say that this reversal of historic decisions in liberal theology, reasserting the revelatory and redemptive themes of Christian faith, is a cultural event, not simply an outburst of misguided zeal among disoriented or displaced persons on the European continent, or on our Atlantic seacoast. It is not simply a resurgence of doctrine over the religion of life; it is life, itself in our time, demanding a more serious accounting of the demonic depths and this

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reality of spirit and grace that simultaneously invade our existence. What this reversal means, in effect, is that a new kairos is upon us, impelling us to do in our time what Liberalism has historically done at every stage of reaction and reassessment: namely, to break old molds in which liberalism itself has been cast in order, to quote a venerable liberal, that “the living faith of the dead might not become the dead faith of the living.” But to accomplish this with the new kairos that is upon us, we will have to do what historic Liberalism at each of these stages failed to do: namely, to give to the total Christian witness its liberal rendering; to lift up the Christian mythos as a disciplined and imaginative directive of human living in this modern culture. Doesn’t it shame anyone in the Liberal churches that these great themes of the Christian faith, as a total drama of redemption, have been allowed to be pre-empted by orthodox and authoritarian Christians, who have been content to freeze their meaning into formal stereotypes; or to fall so inclusively into the hands of fundamentalist groups who have trivialized their meaning with sentimentality and pious moralisms? Liberals have been the least discerning of the imaginative power of these great concepts and symbols, bearing upon our existence and our ultimate destiny. They have been content, instead, to play along with a select stock of ideas which happen to appeal to their sensibilities, and to what were often essentially barren intellects. The fear of sentiment, the paucity of imagination, the utter impotence of emotional depth or feeling have combined to make of the liberal gospel a repetitious chant in a single key, either to plead in behalf of reason, or to urge social action, or, perchance simply to praise famous men. The intellectual elite could pursue the life of reason; the anti-intellectuals, among liberals found it convenient to bask in the cliché that religion is life, which for many of them was tantamount to relinquishing any serious concern with the critical issues of Christian thought or faith. Why must Liberal Christianity be on the margin of the Christian witness to culture, instead of a dynamic of disciplined imagination reshaping the imagery and cultural directives of the Christian faith? My friends, I have spoken too bluntly this morning; and, no doubt, more belligerently at times than this occasion demands. Do understand that, in speaking this way, I am uttering a cry of despair rather than of invective, pressing toward the hope that the liberal heritage might be realistically assessed in our time, and patiently reconceived to take account of the occasions that need this liberal evangel; and, in my judgment, are ripe to receive it.

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I speak out of a concern to realize in fact, what the late Frederick May Eliot affirmed as a vision of hope, in addressing a Convocation at the Starr King School for the Ministry in 1956. Said Dr. Eliot Out of the troubled confusion of the present, there will gradually emerge a new and much more powerful kind of religious liberalism—new in the sense that it will have to come to terms with the realities of human experience in the twentieth century, for which much of the liberalism of the nineteenth century had left us ill-prepared, but at its core, the same liberalism that has its roots in the great tradition.

Let this be our hope, and the end toward which we work. Bernard Eugene Meland Federated Theological Faculty The University of Chicago. This paper originally presented to a Conference of Unitarian theological educators, ministers, and executives at Putnam, Connecticut in 1959; and, in revised form, at the annual Conference of Michigan Congregational Ministers in South Haven, Michigan in 1960.

1960 Some Concluding Observations Concerning Theological Method Our inquiry this past quarter has made clear, I think, that many prior decisions affect, if in fact they do not determine, one’s theological method. Theological method is thus expressive of one’s own theological history, as well as of one’s understanding of and relation to theological history, itself. Wieman, for example, represents the extreme in contemporaneity, manifesting simultaneously the surviving influences of modernism in theology and logical positivism in philosophy, which causes his method to be radically dissociated from all historical guidance and controls in theology, and from many of the controls in the history of philosophy as well. In so far as Wieman’s method partakes of an historical dimension, it coincides with the scientific bent of mind associated with Francis Bacon which sharply dissociated all disciplined inquiry, whatever the field, from the so-called classical tradition in philosophical and humanistic studies, setting Plato and Aristotle and all their dependents aside as being no longer relevant to a world informed by scientific inquiry. John Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy is a direct descendent of Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and has served as a modern manual, pointing Modern learning, and especially philosophy, away from the classical tradition, and in the direction of scientific inquiry. Wieman ultimately identifies himself with the methodological decisions stemming from Bacon and Dewey, thereby drawing religious as well as philosophical inquiry directly into the orbit of modern science. Wieman’s concern has never been that of reconciling religion and science. Rather it has been to reconceive the realities of the religious concern within the modern idiom established and shaped by modern science. Science represents for Wieman the only reliable way of acquiring knowledge. Much more than science and its form of knowledge is required, he observes, to satisfy the religiously sensitive person; but, except as religious inquiry is anchored in knowledge such as scientific method can provide, he believes there can be no assurance that religion is not illusory. The contrast between Wieman and Tillich in regard to historical guidance in theological method is as radical as one can find. It is much more so than the contrast between Barth and Wieman.

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Tillich is moderately contemporary in what he employs as conceptual tools. For example his system of thought stems almost directly from that of the Romanticist philosopher Schelling, with modifications made possible through Kierkegaard, Bergson, and Heidegger, and supplementary insights from Gestalt psychology and from post-Freudian psychoanalysis. For this reason, Tillich has often been regarded as being distinctly modern and liberal in his orientation. But this characterization will hold only as one sees his liberalexistentialist orientation as a modification of his historical lineage in theology and philosophy which reaches all the way back to Parmenides. As we noted a few weeks ago, philosophy and theology, in Tillich’s thinking, merge at the very outset of the Christian era. Biblical religion in part is a correcting of developments begun in Greek philosophy.159 And the philosophy of Being set forth in Plato and modified by Aristotle, is thus to be understood in its acceptable form in the way that the Gospels and Paul’s Epistles convey it. With this explicit correlation of Greek ontology and the Kerygma it is no wonder, that logos Christology, as it developed through Origen and Clement of Alexandria, should make its appeal to Tillich. Now Tillich has seen fit to wend his way through subsequent historic arguments in theology and philosophy following from first century deliberations, identifying himself with decisions consistent with his initial philosophical conception of the Christian Kerygma. Much of this account he has given in the volume, Interpretation of History. The point I am making, however, is that Tillich’s method is given in the very way he conceives of the Christian Kerygma and what it implies for the relation between theology and philosophy. Philosophy is the initial thrust of reason, opening up the questions of existence, to which only the Vision of Faith can give ultimate answers. But it is also the final, rational court of appeal by which theologians may determine that the reality to which the Vision of Faith directs commitment is really ultimate. The philosophical questions vary from age to age, because the issues of existence undergo change; and the philosophical systems through which a total rational grasp of the problem of Being is attained, rise and fall and rise again. Similarly, the terms and depth of understanding with which the vision of Christian faith is brought to bear upon the existential questions of culture undergo continual revision. But the relation of faith to reason, theology to philosophy as the voice of cultural man, remains constant. Tillich has rejected no one period of Western philosophical and theological history though, like Topsy and Eva crossing the river on floating blocks of ice, he has stepped his way through the stream of

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multiple decisions, selecting this one, rather than that. Thus through Tillich, a single strand of historic thought speaks, synchronizing a series of historic decisions in philosophy and theology. In Wieman, on the other hand, a major cleavage in Western historic thought is made manifest at the outset, separating the modern period from all pre-Enlightenment traditions of thought. Karl Barth, like Tillich, is historically self-conscious within the witness of faith; and his awareness of philosophical decisions, particularly within the modern period stemming from Kant and Hegel is remarkable. Yet the manner in which he conceives of the Word of God as dynamic event occurring in the act of Proclamation gives to his methodology a spontaneity and immediacy that is more akin to that of Wieman than of Tillich. The mode of verification proposed by Barth, as “the act of listening and responding as we tread the path of faith,” has a strikingly empirical ring, though it might be misleading to speak of it in this way in view of the common understanding of empiricism. For the overtones of this procedure are clearly evangelical in the Reformation sense of that term—implying immediate access to the work of the Holy Spirit in a manner similar to the way that Calvin conceived it. If empiricism is conceived radically enough however, conveying, not simply the report of human senses, but the fullness of the event at any given moment of time, all evangelical Protestantism in the strictly Reformation sense (prior to its own form of doctrinal rationalism) can be said to have an empirical (experiential) bent, in contrast to Roman Catholic dependence upon authorized forms in thought, sacrament, and institutional law. The subtle balance in Barth’s method between the negation of human powers or capacities, whether in intellect or feeling, in relation to theological inquiry and the full cultivation of these human powers as a legitimate expression of our humanity should not be overlooked or undervalued. One might take this to be incidental, even accidental, to Barth’s method; or possibly a contradiction in it. But this overlooks an important historical fact in Protestantism itself, namely that, at its inception, Reformation Protestantism struggled to hold humanistic and evangelical emphases together despite the strictures upon reason as scholasticism employed it. The story of Protestantism following the period of pietism and the evangelical awakening is the story of decline in cultural and humanistic sensibilities, becoming in American Protestantism an aggressive anti-intellectualism as well. All of us who have grown up under the influence of this kind of evangelical Protestantism bear the marks of its impoverishment and distortion. One of the indirect symptoms of this

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conditioning is an aggressive concern with rational or scientific control, countering the appeal to faith, tradition, or feeling. Liberal Protestantism is expressive of a reconception of this anti-intellectual tendency, rather than a countering of it. In any case, it may not be considered a cultural recovery in the classical humanistic sense. At its best, therefore, the appeal to Reformation theology can mean a recovery of greater balance in Protestantism between the life of the mind in its humanistic dimensions, and the life of the spirit. But a neo-Reformation emphasis does not automatically bring this about, as our experience with the theology of Barthians in contrast to the theology and humanity of Karl Barth has indicated. Furthermore, a doctrinaire Calvinism in American Protestantism, not to speak of an ingrown Lutheranism of various forms and shades, has created such vivid stereotypes of what Reformation theology purports to be that for many of us the mere mention of the terms neo-Reformation thought can mean only neo-orthodoxy in a derogatory sense. It is important to note, both from the point of view of theology generally, and from that of theological method specifically, that a fresh stirring of this Protestant mix has been occurring in various centers during recent years. The neo-Calvinism of Continental theology is one such reawakening. The American repercussion of the new Luther research represents another. As some of you know, this has given rise to a fresh burst of intellectual zeal among young Lutheran scholars in this country which is itself phenomenal. Neo-Liberalism is yet another development which, up to now, has been barely articulate, but appears to be gathering momentum. And recently through journals like Christianity Today we have been hearing of a neo-evangelicalism, the intellectual and cultural force of which I am less able to assess. The neo-Reformation emphasis, both as Karl Barth expresses it and as it appears in recent manifestations of the Luther renaissance, represents a resurgence of the humanistic scholarly tradition simultaneously with evangelical theological interests. This is a different kind of intellectual emphasis than either the rational, ontological bent of mind represented by scholasticism and later metaphysical inquiry, or the positivistic turn of mind which developed in modernism, employing the sciences synthetically to express a world view. It is a discipline of inquiry that invests full and positive interest in what man as man can explore and achieve; yet retains an acute awareness of the humanness of such inquiry. And this means not mistaking or misconstruing these achievements as being expressive of or valid approaches to the divine reality. Good as it is in its own right as humanistic knowledge and creative art; it cannot be construed as being the

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equivalent of or in any sense of being expressive of the Divine Word. Now the problem here for most of us is to distinguish between saying that our human powers are creative of something good in their own right; and that our human powers are expressive of or transitional to the divine good. It is a mark of theological maturity, I believe, to be able to value our human powers highly for what they are, though we make no high claims for them beyond their human possibilities. And, conversely, it is a mark of theological immaturity not to be able to value these human powers unless we can make ultimate claims for them. The status of our humanity as a structure of creation need not depend on whether or not its reason or sensibilities provide direct access to the reality of God. Nor should the fact that human reason and sensibility are considered unequal to, or unworthy of such an attempt, imply antiintellectualism or a negation of discipline in man’s appreciative capacities. That it has done so in Protestantism is indicative of a depravity in the human structure of personality, itself. It is a depravity which negates the sense of responsibility for fulfilling one’s humanness, save as it contributes to its eternal salvation. Santayana once spoke of this as a deficiency in spirituality. The zest for salvation becomes so strongly egoistic as to displace all immediate demands of creation upon one’s existence. One of the strongest features of Calvin’s theology, in my judgment, is its note of adoration, which in effect would seem to make individual salvation incidental to the glory of God. This can have some serious consequences in literally-minded dogmatists, but as an antidote to salvationitis, if I might coin a word, the egoistic absorption in one’s own salvation, it is significant in what it offers of proportion abandon, and freedom to fulfill one’s humanity under God. Now I think this Reformation note is, in part, what is being recovered in Barth’s methodology; which has the effect of asserting the freedom of God to be what He is, uncompromised by the forms of human imagination, reason and moral ideals; and the freedom of man to be what he is, shorn of the delusions of grandeur which tend to lead him to identify his own words with God’s reality. This disparity between human forms and ultimate reality is not as alien to the modern idiom as one might suppose. In fact, in the field of modern science, I should say it is the latest fashion. One could even assert, I think, that one might come to a corrective of the stance assumed by the Enlightenment and which came to full fruition in Hegel, either by this theological route of recovering a neo-Reformation perspective; or by

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following through on the revolution in the physical sciences in which the root metaphor derived from Newtonian science gives way to relativity and quantum theory, compelling a reassessment of the role of reason and observation in its efforts to apprehend reality. Now I should explain that my intention in speaking this way is not to defend Barth or to proclaim him. He requires neither from my hand. My purpose is to say that, for anyone working at the problem of method, the theology of Barth offers a significant corrective to tendencies most common among Protestants, liberal and orthodox alike. He is, in my judgment, the best exponent among current theologians of the razor-edge balancing between affirming God’s righteousness and affirming man’s humanity. For this reason, defining one’s thought against his theology or in relation to it can be both purgative and invigorating. But once this kind of clarity and freedom is accomplished, the problem begins all over again, even though it may arise at a different level and in a different way. For, important as it is to be clear about the distinction between God and man, it is equally important to try to understand what is involved in the relationships between them. Granting that man is not to be subsumed wholly under the category of a Sovereign God; or that God is to be reduced to the stature of human forms or structures of reason, how are we to understand, or to confront this concrete occurrence in history or in personal experience where, it is assumed, God’s reality reaches us, grasps us, commands us, transforms us. I take it that Barth means to say that even this encounter as event is not conceivable, or apprehendable apart from the God-man, Jesus Christ. For Jesus Christ is the point of mediation. For there is no escape from the closed circle of our humanity except through the God-man, who is at once the point of entry into the depth of man’s being; and the point at which this depth shallows into relationships with the concrete structures of history. The question arises here as to whether Barth in putting it this way has not made of Christology an ontological bottleneck, thus arbitrarily compelling a formal presentation of ourselves to God through Christ; which is not to illumine our humanity within; the historical situation, but to salvage it through an act of protocol. The methodological problem that presses for clarification is this: Given the understanding we have in this period of theological scholarship, of the freedom of God and the freedom of man within his Humanity, (and one might add, given the understanding we have in this period of modern science of the status of human inquiry in its effort to comprehend a reality that, with intermittent exception, continues to elude it), how are we to

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regard this arena of interplay that is history or concrete occurrence in which, presumably, things happen at a profound and ultimate level, despite our inability to comprehend the realities of this relationship? It is interesting to me that both Paul Sponheim and Gerhard Spiegler, in very different ways, addressed themselves to this problem in their statements for the field oral examination. Sponheim got at it through an inquiry into the meaning and validity of individuality in the moment of decision. Spiegler did so by trying to break through the skepticism and agnosticism that follows upon acknowledging the relativity of history. What occurs in history? And how is this expressive of or related to our ultimate faith? If we cannot presuppose a direct and rather naive interaction of God and man, of Holy Spirit and human spirit, such as appears in evangelical Protestantism as well as in the theologies of religious experience (or even in the empirical theology of Wieman), how are we to approach this problem? Despite Tillich’s over-burdened ontological method, I wonder if he has not given us some hint of an approach in his notion, Gestalts of Grace. Tillich speaks so much in symbolic terms that one cannot be sure that one understands the intention of his meaning; but if his doctrine of New Being can be taken to mean a dimension of reality continually with us as the living Christ, giving depth of resource and opportunity to each moment of existence, yet only intermittently reaching us in conscious experience, then Gestalts of Grace would imply those visible moments of history when such relationships are actualized. If Tillich doesn’t mean this, then I would make bold to assert it. Always, as Tillich affirms, our lives are lived under the judgment of Grace, under the judgment of that continuing depth of the living Christ; yet periodically we are sufficiently reclaimed from our ambiguity to know what it is to live in Christ. This notion that history is simultaneously the structure of meaning weaving which men contrive, through decision and action and the intermingling of our human ambiguity with the realities of grace, must qualify our usual understanding of the conception that history is relative. For if the living Christ is a depth in history intermittently emerging as Gestalts of Grace, then relativity and ultimacy traffic together. Ultimacy, in fact, speaks out of the relativities of history. And what is apprehended in these moments of luminous judgment and in the acts of decision or faith that may ensue are not to be taken simply as subjective findings, or as “truth for me,” but as a witness to what is ultimate however ambiguous and restrictive this act in history might be.

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The problem of theological method in its most immediate and urgent aspect, so it would seem to me, is to be able to make this stance intelligible, both as a way of-interpreting history as a situation of depth, and as a way of understanding human existence as being peculiarly a selfexperience, yet a self within an ultimate, communal ground. Without some intelligible grasp of what this can mean, there would seem to be no way by which the reality of spirit can be affirmed, and hence no way by which the idiom of Christian faith can be made expressive to contemporary man. Now if this view of the theological stance can be sustained, what is intended in all three men whom we have studied this quarter would seem to be justified, however, we may judge their presuppositions and procedures. 1) Wieman’s concern for commitment to that which “has the power to transform us as we cannot transform ourselves” is precisely the act of faith that is indicated in such a stance. The procedure which Wieman proposes for getting minimum certainty in assuming this act of faith, however, can have at the most only the status of any scientific venture in which a formula or proposition is formulated in the hope that it might succeed in correlating with the reality being apprehended. The likelihood of this procedure issuing in the precision which Wieman expects, however, seems remote. In this respect, his method strikes me as borrowing from an imagery of scientific method that science, itself, no longer retains. Much that Wieman sets forth in expounding the human situation, in which the act of faith occurs, seems to me highly relevant. The certainty that he sought, however, seems less certain. In fact to be possible at all as an aspect of theological method it would have to be radically reconceived within this idiom of relativity and quantum, or within the neo-Reformation view of our Humanity and the Otherness of God. 2) If our view of the theological stance is sustained, the tenuous trail of “listening and responding to the Word” proposed by Barth as a way of verification takes on new cogency as a formal description of what is involved. What actually occurs in such a procedure may turn out to be something else again. But there is something right and proportionate in what this procedure says concerning the tentativeness of the truth that man, at any stage in history, or at any stage of his venture in faith, is able to apprehend. The venture in faith, itself, and the kind of listening and responding which is afforded man in such a venture of faith, provides a kind of criteria, at least for judging the validity of the venture; and

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possibly the only degree of certainty (mingled with doubt) of which man in history is capable. 3) If our view of the theological stance is sustained, there is much in Tillich’s theology that appears needlessly laborious and over-wrought, (that is elaborated to excess); yet a surprising amount of what he conveys through his symbolic elaboration of ontology is cogent and highly relevant. As we indicated earlier, although Tillich appears to be starting from a coalescence of philosophy and theology in which the identity of thought and being seems to be affirmed, he quickly extricates himself from an unrelieved monism by asserting that “The logos above fate cannot be subjected to the processes of human thinking.” His system of symbolic doctrines, however, enables him to engage fully in this process without violating the letter of his rule, and thus to provide a full-scale rendition of Christian faith within the classical structure, informed by contemporary insights. As we indicated earlier, although Tillich appears to be starting from a coalescence of philosophy and theology in which the identity of thought and being seems to be affirmed, he quickly extricates himself from an unrelieved monism by asserting that “The logos above fate cannot be subjected to the processes of human thinking.” His system of symbolic doctrines, however, enables him to engage fully in this process without violating the letter of his rule, and thus to provide a full-scale rendition of Christian faith within the classical structure, informed by contemporary insights. His presentation of the Protestant principle in modern form as a dynamic protest rooted in a Gestalt of Grace is one of those magical Tillichian turns of thought, almost demonic in its seductiveness, by which he is able to wrest his theology from a Model-T ontology and give it the contemporary force of process philosophy and field theory combined, yet within an idiom that is more familiar to theology and ontology alike. I should like to say a final word now about how we may use the theologies of other theologians in developing our own powers of theological inquiry. In certain religious communions, it is assumed that the task of thinking theologically is a vocation that only a limited group of men are qualified to undertake. It is understood that they will provide the criticism and reconstructive effort essential to the Church’s needs in preaching the gospel. I suppose we must say that wherever the ethos of the free church tends to dominate practice and theological thinking, it is assumed that everyone

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does his own theologizing; just as everyone does his own dying. Now it seems to me we need to be clear as to which of these assumptions is really informing our theological procedure. The former presupposes a Christian Communion that not only is informed by the special vocation of the theologian, but actually serves through its worship and practice of the Christian life to criticize the theology so formulated, and to assess it, as the church undertakes the mission of preaching and of bodying forth the witness. In other words, in such a setting, a theological system is an instrument of clarification and control; it is not the gospel as such. In the latter situation where one undertakes to be his own theologian, dependence upon another theologian’s system or method may tend to be less critical and instrumental. It may, in fact, lead one to assimilate another’s theology whole cloth, not only as one’s own theology, but as the gospel itself. One then preaches theology rather than the gospel. If the assumption is that everyone does his own theologizing, then the burden of one’s own integrity as well as the integrity of the gospel is a responsibility to be assumed by each theologian. Confronting another’s system becomes a way by which theological issues are posed for one. What is available to one as insight or decision must depend upon many things, one important aspect of which is the stage of one’s own inquiry, and the basic decisions one has been able to make up to that stage as to the relevant facilities of thought. What I have been trying to suggest in this circuitous statement is that Wieman, Barth, and Tillich, despite the great differences between them, bring us around to a common problem of method, peculiar to this historical period of theological inquiry, namely, How to define the theological task so as to confront concretely the reality of judgment and grace that is known to us out of Christian history as the living Christ? Each of them has his own way of dealing with this problem; and each one has specific reasons for dealing with it in the way that he does. Not all that accounts for their procedure or decisions in dealing with this problem is necessarily relevant to the task each of us must undertake; but whatever light each one sheds upon it, however they do so, in whatever context or structure of thought, can be of direct help to our respective efforts. How, for example, can one take over Wieman’s method as one’s own except as he has weighed the decision, underlying his method, to invest full confidence in scientific method as a way of knowing, in contrast and in opposition to every prior form of historical or philosophical guidance? One can benefit from the stimulus of his efforts and from the insight and

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critical vision he is able to convey; but his method and system demand that one assume a greater measure of the burden of decision which he, himself, has assumed through the years. Or again, how is one to take Tillich’s method or system seriously as one’s own except as he enter fully into the elaborate and long-suffering encounter with the issue of faith and reason such as is assumed in his philosophy of Being, or with the issue of faith and culture, such as implied in his method of correlation? Or, how is one to take Karl Barth’s system and method seriously apart from assuming the vocational stance of one standing between the Biblical witness and the Church—and of falling in line with the procession of the faithful by which one tests what is formulated through listening and responding to what is proclaimed? Theological method is hard-earned if it is authentic; else it is simply imitative and pretentious, representing one to be in possession of more maturity and clarity of vision than he can actually defend. It is for this reason that I am disposed to counsel you, as a final baccalaureate word, not to be precipitous in dismissing any one of them in your further studies, or to be over-ready to identify yourself prematurely with one rather than another, saying I am of Henry, I am of Karl, or I am of Paulus. Know that it is not simply a system of thought that you seek, nor a rationalization of faith, but understanding of this reality of judgment and grace to which the witness of faith is made, and in which our own lives are cast. Whatever and whoever can aid us, here is an ally of our theological quest. Bernard E. Meland

1961 The Changing Role of Reason & Revelation in Western Thought In the medieval world it is difficult to dissociate the doctrine of revelation from the notion of church authority. By the same token, at the beginning of the modern world it is difficult to dissociate the appeal to reason from the notion of freedom. Thus the issue between revelation and reason in this context is the issue between an authoritarian order of life and the freedom of man. The motive for this concern with freedom varied somewhat with the locale in which it was projected. In a situation like that of France or Italy, where the authority of the one church persisted and thus imposed a situation of tyranny or oppression over non-conforming groups, reason was preeminently an instrument of liberation—and it took the form of transferring authority from the corporate power of church and government to the individual mind. This was the revolution that was implicit in the philosophy of Descartes.160 And this is why the Roman Catholic Church to this day dates the beginning of the modern world and of the modern consciousness from the work of Descartes. His success in giving primacy to the individual mind as substance has appeared to them to have been a usurpation of power and authority which had rightly been vested in the Church. In England, the situation was quite different in certain respects. Here, at the close of the sixteenth century and during the seventeenth, alternating religious groups enjoyed establishment. Thus national control of the culture passed back and forth between Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Puritan regimes. The resulting tyranny, controversy and persecution thus created a climate of bitterness and intolerance which in itself proved oppressive. It was not so much liberation from power or authority as such that was sought, as liberation from an intolerable situation in human relations. It is not easy to say whether the conception of reason employed in this situation was determined by the role it was to play in effecting the kind of freedom or liberation that was being sought; but it is clear that the case for reason in this instance is put not in the form of an autonomous substance, but in the form of an arbiter of social and religious differences. One explanation of this contrast between the French and English

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Enlightenment is to say that the former issues from a theoretical mindset giving rise to a metaphysical route to freedom; the latter from a practical empirical culture, giving rise to an ethical route to freedom. But this is somewhat abstract, if not superficial. The concrete explanation is to be seen in the differing cultural or historical circumstances precipitating a demand for liberation from specific forms of coercion and their consequences. It is interesting to note that Descartes was read and listened to for a time by English non-conformists seeking to evolve a rational theory of life and faith; but he was soon set aside as being less applicable to their problem than they had expected. He was a stimulus but not a solution. Furthermore, the kind of rationalists that emerged in the British situation was expressive of reasonableness, moderation, and virtue in the ethical sense. This correlation of reason and the good life in the British appeal to reason at this time is unmistakable. And it dominates the age of rationalism within the British scene. The coming of science or natural philosophy, with its concern for mathematical description and measurement, introduced a new kind of situation in which reason was employed; and it thereby intruded a new conception of reason. Or perhaps we should say it reintroduced an old form of reason under new auspices and with new defining conditions. There is some cultural continuity between the ethical rationality say of the Cambridge Platonists and the scientific rationality of a mathematical scientist like Newton. For one thing, as Canon Raven has pointed out, the former paved the way for making the latter acceptable in the universities and among certain churchmen.161 For another, as Toynbee has recently noted,162 turning to scientific observation and calculation afforded an inviting escape for many sensitive men of the seventeenth century, young and old, from the intolerable religious-political scene of intrigue and controversy and thus became in itself an object of devotion supplanting the church. The tangible evidence for this observation is the number of young men who started their university course at Cambridge in this period as students of divinity and then switched to mathematics and the science of mechanics. But it would be difficult to establish any other connection between the two forms of rationality. They exist side by side throughout the seventeenth century and reinforce one another’s status and influence. In time, however, they diverge and ultimately they are seen to be antithetical in character and purpose. Ethical rationality in this earlier stage of British rationalism was an internal ordering of the self which sought, not only freedom of decision and act, but virtue in becoming expressive of a universal good. Mathemat-

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ical rationality was an external observing of structure and order in nature which created an aura of mechanism, and determinism. Where ethical rationality emerged as an instrument of liberation, mathematical rationality tended toward a new structural order and authority—the order and authority of a mechanical science. Scientific reason has often been employed in a way that has made it an agency of freedom. Thus its theses or findings have been set over against the authority of dogma, thereby releasing the mind from the coercion of religious belief or authority. The step by step instances of release have given the role of science the appearance of that of freeing the mind until mind so freed, in turn, has been made subservient to the consensus of science, which functioned as an alternative authority. The effect of Newtonian science upon eighteenth and nineteenth century thinking is a case in point. In a similar way, reason as a system of logic, whether empirically inclined or speculatively developed: has created orders of meaning which have made their demands upon those who subscribed to them. This has been another way by which an alternative to both dogma and science as authority has developed; though it has been possible for each system to be expressed as dogmas such as scholasticism; on the other hand, it has been possible for such systems to incorporate the sciences within their structure of knowledge as in Positivism and Pragmatism, and later Process philosophy. There have been instances, however, as in Modern Idealism, in which systems of logical reason have stood apart from both dogma and science, as frames of meaning. Reason understood as the imposition of a frame of meaning in the modern world has meant the reversal of the historic role of reason within the modern period. Instead of freeing the self from some form of coercion or control, it has served to envelope the mind within a restrictive imagery thereby determining the kind of illumination and intelligibility that can be available to it, and on the other hand insulating the mind from meanings not containable or possible of emergence within that imagery. There is a sense therefore in which the rational formulations of any person and of any culture are at once sources of illumination and barriers to understanding. From where we stand in this period, we are made sensible of the extent to which for example, Newtonian science and the philosophies that developed from it as well as over against it erected barriers around modern minds concealing from them realities that had formerly been available to thought and experience, as well as from realities which only recently have come into view. In our time, therefore, the reactions that have occurred in the name of the freedom of the human spirit have employed the notion of

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revelation as an instrument of liberation. There is one outstanding exception to this generalization in the modern period—namely, the work of Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer has openly praised the period of the Enlightenment as the steadying guide for modern civilization on the grounds that in that period of our Western history reason was conceived to be an instrument for guiding and informing the issues of life. Reason as an ethical tool of thought and action was thereby held firmly in focus. And this, says Schweitzer, is what the modern man must seek to recover.163 It will be seen, then, that Schweitzer is in reaction only against eighteenth century romanticism and nineteenth century modernism in which reason had fallen to the status of a technical instrument of adjustment, devoid of any civilizing guidance. For Schweitzer, there is no need to re-instate the issue between revelation and reason which in his judgment the Enlightenment settled for all time. It is simply a matter of deepening the conception of reason to include the ethical dimension of thought and to reformulate this deepened conception to meet the present situation. Schweitzer is very close to these seventeenth century thinkers in that he associates ethical activity with right thinking. One has only to read the Cambridge Platonist, John Smith, to be impressed by this fact. Their metaphysical orientations differ; but their conceptions of the role of reason coincide. Schweitzer is unique in that he has chosen to give himself utterly to the life of ethical activity; but this is because the resources of thought essential to a systematic formulation of such a conception of reason had become dissipated in his time. Schweitzer’s ethical activities are themselves the elemental ground from which such resources are expected to arise afresh in our time. One could argue, too, that the influence of Husserl, whose method was to be appropriated by such divergent groups as theologians concerned with the numinous (Rudolf Otto) and existentialists philosophers employed analogical modes of reasoning to escape the restrictive effects of the categories of thought, thereby returning to an orientation of mind and of the human psyche in which the innovations of reality might reach one. In Otto, this became a device by which the sense of the holy could once more be attained within the modern consciousness. In Existentialism it has taken the form of recovering a sense of authentic selfhood, a self that is really subject—an I or a Thou, and thereby receptive to revelatory encounters. Here, as in the more explicit appeal to the revelatory in experience, one sees the historic roles of reason and revelation being reversed, though in these instances reason is quite specifically equated with the kind of speculative and all-encompassing formalizing of meaning which was

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achieved by Hegel. Much of the revival and reconception of revelation in our time is anti-Hegelianism. Now this has a long story. To hear some of our contemporaries talk Kierkegaard was the only protagonist in the reaction against Hegel; thus Kierkegaard has been given a reputation as innovator which largely obscures the historical movement of reaction against Hegelian reason. I won’t go into this matter now, except to say that Schopenhauer, Schleiermacher, Schelling, Herbert, Feuerbach and Marx all ante-date Kierkegaard (1813–1855) as anti-Hegelian influences; and the names of Hartmann, Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson and William James, form a continuing rivulet of reaction against this enclosing mentalism. This is not to detract from Kierkegaard’s significance in this reaction, but to set his reactions in its context, which must as a consequence relieve him of much of the aura of being unique, distinctive, a lone existential voice crying out in the wilderness of Idealism to be heard only a century later by some dislocated Frenchmen and German existentialists, like Heidegger, Scheler, and Jaspers, and by the German Swiss theologians, Karl Barth and Emil Brunner. The fact that Kierkegaard has been adopted by the current Existentialist movement as precursor and prophet of their revolutionary reaction has tended to sharpen his dissociation from Kant and Hegel and to represent his reaction as being more radical than it actually was in his own mind. In the early works of Barth and Brunner, the acid and gall, which issues from their own spleen in contemplating Hegel was attributed to Kierkegaard as well. But Kierkegaard was much more caught up in the web of Kantian and Hegelian idealism than this more recent theological scenario represents him to be. In this regard, it is useful to read the account of Kierkegaard by his own countryman, Harold Høffding in his History of Modern Philosophy, or the one by Otto Pfleiderer, the Hegelian theologian of a generation ago. These interpretations are much too tame for us, now that we have seen Kierkegaard through the eyes of the existentialist as a Hegel eater with fangs and a fiery tongue; but the contrast can have some stabilizing effects. Actually the reaction against the binding authority of reason and its confirming categories should not be seen as stemming initially from Kierkegaard in his critique of Hegel; but as stemming from Kant in his effort to define the bounds in the use of reason and his concern to redefine the mode of reason applicable and appropriate to religious inquiry. The Enlightenment continued in Kant and speaks through much of his writing; but the sensibility of reaction against it is in evidence on every page of his later works.

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The real iconoclast who brought the age of rationalism to its close was David Hume. Having emulated Locke in conceiving of reason as an act of reflection following upon the stimulus of the senses, he was put to it to hold to its significance for establishing universals, or for supporting such ultimate categories as Final Causes. “Where is there evidence of a sense impression evoking such a universal and ultimate notion?” was his taunting query. After Hume, the easy equation of the appeal to reason with universal absolutes or even with causal connections was done for. Kant’s Critical Philosophy was the re-charting of the course of reason in the light of Hume’s demolition. And one must see in Kant’s distinction between the Pure and the Practical Reason an honest effort to contain the shock of Hume’s iconoclasm and thereby to arrest demolition. The only area of human thought which could possibly meet the demands of Hume’s criterion was, of course, the natural sciences. And Kant was to show the relevance of reason here; but not in its simple Lockean or Humean sense of thought arising from sense experience. Reason begins with this sensory stimulus, said Kant, but only in the sense of a switch being turned, thereby setting in motion the machinery of our unifying apperception and its facility for establishing appropriate categories. In a word, Kant performed a sleight of hand even here in reintroducing into the sensory theory of knowledge of Locke and Hume something of the Platonic increment to which earlier men of the Enlightenment had held. Only in this context it was in the guise of an abstract, transcendental ego which, as such, had a concern only for giving cognitive form to sense experience as this arose in the observation of phenomena; and for establishing necessary Ideas where a demand for Causal Connections intruded even at this level of inquiry. The ethical dimension of reason, so dear to the Cambridge Platonist was to be reserved by Kant for that act of reflection upon ultimate and universal imperatives which directed man toward his final ends. There is something cute about this strategy of thought dissociating pure and practical reason. It shows up Kant as being very much a man of the Enlightenment, concerned about the use of mathematical reason as Newton and Leibnitz had employed it; yet concerned too with the ethical dimension of rationality which spoke more inwardly about ultimate demands and moral truth. These are not set over against one another by Kant; on the contrary they are made parallel and supplementary correlates of one another. Kant even retains the framework of Enlightenment thinking in designating the thing-in-itself, the unavailable mystery into which no direct inquiry can be made. This is a corollary of the deistic God, emeritus—the divine royalty without portfolio.

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But here again Kant proves himself to be a shrewd operator in handling the subtleties of thought. While religious and moral inquiry could not be addressed directly to the thing-in-itself, the practical reason, being an instrument of the moral will, or the will acting responsibly in response to the demands of reason, could be assumed to be participating in the thingin-itself. This was tantamount to giving to the moral act the value of a revelatory event. The ultimate dimension of Freedom, countering the contingencies of determinism, which all natural structures imposed, thus came into human existence through moral activity. We live out the thingin-itself through willing the good and through the ethical action that may thereby follow. Schleiermacher was both akin to and at odds with this reconception of reason. What he could not abide was the fantastic Kantian construction of moral scaffolding and the building of super highways by which religion was able to transcend the tenement areas and city muck of natural phenomena. Schleiermacher, too, is cute in his own way—perhaps the most subtle and sensitive mind in the whole of liberal theology. What is often overlooked in reading Schleiermacher is the persistence of Enlightenment sensibilities and habits of thinking in his more explicit Romanticist reconception of thought. Schleiermacher is first and last an internalist in the Platonic sense of that term. He abhors every artificial form of externality in thought especially when it is applied to religion. This is the basis of his resistance to Kant in certain respects, and to his disdain for Hegel in almost all respects. But he was equally impatient with the British empiricists who made of reason an act of outward observation. But one must not equate this inwardness in Schleiermacher’s method with the subjectiveness of Romanticism. Schleiermacher was no devotee of psychologism, nor the precursor of its later vogue. Something of the Enlightenment preoccupation with Plato persisted in Schleiermacher. This came about quite directly through his own personal conceit with Plato’s writings (he translated the whole of Plato’s works), but it was also mediated through his indirect association with the works of Spinoza. Schleiermacher never acknowledged a personal dependence upon Spinoza, but the creative group with which he was associated all through his early adult years during the writing of The Speeches was quite consciously a neo-Spinoza cult and Schleiermacher shared in their enthusiasm. His notion of ontological unity, of the Infinite, and of immediate encounter with this unity as implying a taste for the Infinite; recall Spinoza’s imagery of thought. Thus the stress upon the sense of Absolute dependence and the God-

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Consciousness in Schleiermacher must be seen, in my judgment, as a reconception of this Enlightenment mode of reason in its earlier Platonic stage. Only in Schleiermacher it broadened out beyond its ethical bounds to gather in the multiple dimensions of the Romanticist use of feeling. Feeling here is not so much psychological as aesthetic. But even this does not say it. The word numinous is more appropriate. It is feeling arising out of a full reflection upon relations with the Infinite in any situation—seeing each thing or event within its infinite scope—within the infinite unity. You will see, then, that in both Kant and Schleiermacher, each in his ohm distinctive way, revelation has been retained within the re-conception of reason; though Schleiermacher expressed a resistance to the rational as if fearing its restrictiveness and externality, a resistance which Kant felt no need to express. What is present here as being potentially or really revelatory in Kant and Schleiermacher, however, is a numinous quality of thought and experience. This must be looked upon as a variation upon the theme of supernaturalism. It is possibly more than this—a transmutation of it, a reconception of it in the context of idealism. But it needs to be distinguished from that form of modern Idealism which arose with Hegel that issued in sheer immanence that is, a vision of reality in which distinctions between divine and human reason, divine and human structures, collapse utterly. Both Kant and Schleiermacher sustained a sense for these distinctions, however, tenuously and subtly they may have argued the matter (Brunner and the early Barth, to the contrary, notwithstanding). Yet there is a difference between an implied notion of the revelatory stemming from a numinous dimension of experience, and revelation as stark concreteness as it appears most dominantly in contemporary reformulations. The numinous is potentially a movement toward mysticism and a resolution of the tension between revelation and reason in the mystical, or possibly in the sacramental category. One sees this most clearly in the thought of Rudolf Otto and in Paul Tillich, each of whom is especially akin to Schleiermacher. I would say that Schleiermacher veers toward mysticism without capitulating to it. This can be said of Tillich also. It cannot be said of Rudolf Otto, who found it possible to merge the numinous and the mystical dimensions of experience, and thus to seek the resolution of theological problems in the study of mysticism. In speaking of a reversal of roles in revelation and reason in the contemporary period, we are simply acknowledging the fact that reason in becoming a speculative tool, in modern Idealism, following Hegel, fashioned an enclosure of mentalism centering in the Absolute which became as oppressive and authoritarian in its effects as medieval dogma.

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The reactions against Hegel have been efforts to break free of these barriers and restrictions so as to experience realities in their concreteness. In Marx this was a partial revolt, more in the order of an inverted Hegelianism. The strategy of the Hegelian dialectic was retained though it was subsumed within the historical process. The absolute persists in Marxism though as an unrelenting dialectic of history, not as a super ego identifiable with the Christian God. In Freud something more radical occurred in discovering a substratum of the unconscious as a reality in its own right, creating its own demands or compulsions and in fashioning its own pathological life history, Yet for Freud, the resolution of all crises thus created by the unconscious consisted in bringing them to the level of consciousness, and there subjecting them to the demands of the rational life. The unconscious was thus not really revelatory or concrete in any radical sense, but simply our rationality gone wrong—our mentalism become morbid and disaffected. Pragmatism, in the fashion that John Dewey pursued it, was a truncated Hegelianism. It rejected the Absolute, but retained most of the optimism regarding reason and the human equation that is native to Absolute Idealism. This was because its simple formula for reconceiving the role of reason was “Reality is as it is experienced.” Experience itself, in its practical day to day transactions, took on the value of ultimate meaning. And man’s ideals and values arising out of these transactions, acquired the significance of being ultimate directives. William James participated in the pragmatic movement and appeared to be its most eloquent spokesman; I have come to see him as being a more radical critic of Hegel and the precursor of a more radical reconception of reason comparable to that of Kierkegaard. In a similar way, Bergson represented a radical return to the concreteness of livingness or the living situation as opposed to the arbitrary world of meaning arising from conceptualization and logical thought. Bergson was to equate this return to concreteness with sheer inwardness comparable to instinctiveness in sub-human creatures. And the term which he employed to express human participation in concreteness was intuition, which in large measure has served to obscure, rather than to illumine his radical empiricism. The corrective which Whitehead has sought to bring to Bergson’s effort, while in a sense fulfilling and completing the work of both James and Bergson, has been along the line of showing that this structure-giving process in existence which Bergson so readily identified with intuition as being wholly internal, has its external counterpart in the structure of events. To some extent then Whitehead appears to be reinstating his own brand of Scholasticism. This will be attributed to him however, only if one

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overlooks the new critical stance which he assumes with regard to the nature and function of reason. This Whitehead has learned from his association with the new physics, which sees all human formulations, whether concepts and categories or scientific formulae, as being tentative and experimental ventures in seizing conceptually what in the nature of the case repeatedly eludes our grasp. At best our conceptual formulations “remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap.”164 While the new imagery of science has been altering our estimate of reason as a tool for discerning or describing the “Order” of nature, the restive efforts of a reactionary theology have been pressing for more serious consideration of the notion of eschatology as a dimension of mystery and ultimacy in the immediacies of history, giving greater depth and complexity to our understanding of historical experience than previous philosophies of history in the modern period have acknowledged. Here the notion of revelation has reappeared, not in its earlier historical understanding as divinely given knowledge supplementing our human reason, but as an incursion of realities other than or deeper and more subtle than the formulated meanings which reason has provided in any given system or logical description of events. Revelation then comes into the human situation as an act of judgment or of innovation compelling our reasoned life to take a fresh or belated account of realities which reason has left uncalculated, or which in its human limitations is unable to grasp. The reappearance of an emphasis upon revelation in our time has by no means routed a concern with reason. It may not even be claimed that the subsiding of speculative reason following the decline of modern idealism is traceable in any direct way to this resurgence of revelational theology. Simultaneous with theological developments leading to a renewed emphasis upon the doctrine of eschatology and revelation and the new estimate of reason in the sciences there has emerged a critical movement in philosophy concerned with the analysis of meaning and language. Logical Positivism and its successor language analysis, insofar as either of them essay a constructive effort, may be said to be bent on establishing a highly technical sphere of intelligibility within modern discourse, especially as it applies to the sciences and possibly as it applies to other cultural disciplines which presume to speak definitively. Reason in this context demands the use of precise terms in designating, defining or describing something specifically experienceable or observable. Reason in the earlier stage of this effort was made to imply the use of tested or verifiable statements. Recently, however, with the recognition that verifiability may not be the sole test of meaning, nor applicable in every instance, language analysis has been content to establish a defensible use

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of terms in any given context. Then applied to religion or theology this tends to mean, as Professor I. T. Ramsey has put it, the effort to distill from what is religiously affirmed, that which is being specifically claimed as an intelligible assertion.165 This use of reason in religion does not necessarily rule out the propriety of a more imaginative and emotional expression of religious faith, but it insists that there can be no intelligible use of religious language where such expressions remain immune to clarification. While the motive and method of this contemporary effort to establish a rational discourse differ from that of seventeenth century rationalists, the net results have something in common. The nemesis against which the earlier rationalists contended were private notions of imagination and “enthusiasms” which generated controversy and mutual persecution. That which prompts current efforts at clarification is the distrust of vagueness in meaning in areas of culture which presume to provide directives for living. There is one basic difference between the two eras of rationalism which-is of importance to the theological effort. Seventeenth century rationalists viewed reason as being itself continuous with or even expressive of an ultimate reality of truth and goodness. There the reasonable distillation from any discussion or document could be accounted its ultimate and universal core of meaning. Present-day advocates of language analysis make no such ultimate claims for reason. Intelligibility is taken to be a human good in its own right, and the concern to live within the bounds of an intelligible discourse is a decision which may or may not have implications beyond their desire to adhere to an intelligible discourse. Even when the limitations of reason are pointed out by science itself indicating that man’s life is cast in a complex occurrence of events, which for the most part elude his observation and intelligible grasp, the modern rationalist may choose to confine himself to the use of intelligible terms rather than to live on the boundary, knowing that to do so is to relinquish all concern with what is designated the “depth” of existing realities. Rationalism in this sense is a willful or at least a self-conscious capitulation to a technical discourse which disavows a concern with ultimate demands. Its demand is for immediate intelligibility within accepted canon of understanding. Bernard E. Meland

1964 Erik Bernhard Meland Erik Bernhard Meland was born in Haugasund, Norway, February 13, 1871, and educated in the public schools of that city. Following two years of service in the Norwegian navy, my father was unexpectedly confronted with the opportunity to join several of his countrymen in filling the quota for migration to the United States. With grim reluctance he acceded to this turn of circumstances, but in reality wished it had been otherwise. So, at the age of sixteen, my father left his homeland. He looked at Norway Through a mist, like one bereft Of all that he had loved. The ship Was all he knew as home, now that The land had faded from his view. He sat alone upon the deck, And watched the water fall away Like furrowed earth before the bow. If he had looked away, or looked within Himself, he would have known what bitter waters were below. But there are healing winds at sea; And salt that gathers on the lips When one is facing free. Will be as sweetened tears that we have shed. How is the land washed from our eyes When we have held it there since We have learned to see? Yet this, He heard the surging waters say, is How the heart is healed. And with. The vision cleansed by gales blowing On our face, the eyes prepare to see another place. “I think it was like this,” my father said, “That I was glad to see another land.” He stood, as others all around him stood, As if they drew their feet toward hallowed ground.

A considerable group of Norwegians, many of them with the name of “Meland,” had come to America earlier, some of them settling in northern Minnesota, others in Iowa, and a few in the vicinity of Pullman and Kensington, Illinois, adjoining the Pullman Car Company. My father, after

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clearing Ellis Island, went directly to Pullman, Illinois to live with his uncle. Coming to America as he did before he had completed his schooling, and having to support himself by his own labor immediately upon arriving, my father, like many of his countrymen, found these early years in America arduous and demanding. He immediately began an apprenticeship in cabinet making in the Pullman Car Works, and was soon to become employed in that capacity. Due to developments during the Pullman strike of 1894, he joined other employees in going to Buffalo, New York, to work in the Wagoner Car Works, an affiliate of the Pullman Company. Here he was to meet Elizabeth Hansen, whom he married in 1897. To this marriage were born eight children, two of whom died in infancy. Surviving are three daughters, Esther (now Mrs. Herbert Campbell), Bernice (Mrs. Walter Craft), and Ruth (Mrs. Rollo Hoest); and three sons, Harold, Howard, and Bernard. Before the turn of the century, he had helped with the building of the Vanderbilt Castle (now known as Biltmore House) in Asheville, North Carolina, doing a major portion of the inside finishing and cabinet work on the interior. With the exception of that brief interim, my father spent his entire working years until 1930 with the Pullman Company as an inside finisher of Pullman cars and cabinet maker. During the last ten years he served as an Inspector in that department. My father was blessed with exceptional physical strength as a youth. Through moderation and discipline in habits, and continuous strenuous labor, he retained his vigor throughout his mature years, even beyond his eightieth birthday. But my father was above all a skilled craftsman in the European tradition. In his own line of cabinet making he had no superior. And this skill remained with him until well past his eighty-fifth birthday. While he made relatively little use of it in commercial employment following retirement, he contributed generously of his skill to projects which members of his family had initiated. As a result, his children have numerous mementos as a cherished legacy. My father was a quiet man who expressed himself best through the work of his hands. Here one detected a person of stature and selfassurance. Occasionally this same quality of chiseled insight and judgment would show through in expressions of political opinion or social criticism; for in these matters, as in his personal outlook, he was realistic and judicious. But for the most part he remained alone with his thoughts. He retained the sober, even serious, temperament of his Norwegian forbears; yet like others among his countrymen, he could break out in quiet humor that was sly and infectious.

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Precision and conscientiousness were his principal traits. These gave to his utterances as well as to his work the mark of quality which could both censor and serve his fellowmen well. In all of his acts he was distinctly himself, devoid of pretense, competent, and faithful to what he deemed appropriate and important. “No man is complete until he is dead,” wrote the ancient Athenian sage and law-giver, Sôlon. In death, Erik Meland looms complete in exemplifying the dignity of labor, and in dignifying all labor that expresses integrity of workmanship as the creative act of man. The strife is oer, the battle done, The life of victory is won; The song of triumph has begun, ALLELUIAH!

PRAYER O God, in whom the days of our years are made eternal; and in whose love our hearts find rest; We come into this hour, seeking solace and release from our sense of loss and grief. Thy grace is sufficient for our need; Help us to receive the grace that is given. Yet even now in contemplating him whom we have loved as children we find solace, Knowing that his life, so full of years, has been fully lived and that his time of relinquishment had come. Give us the zest to enjoy the life that is offered to us each morning; but give us the grace, we pray thee, to know the joy of relinquishment when that time is at hand. And help us to accept the summons that it brings, knowing that in death, as in our waking, our life is in thee. We praise thee for him whom we now lay to rest, for the legacy of his life and workmanship, for the memories we cherish, and for the mementos that remain as a continual reminder of the goodness that came forth from the work of his gifted hands and generous heart. In love we commend his spirit to thy Holy Love, and to thy eternal keeping. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. Bernard E. Meland May 29, 1964

1966 Empirical Theology at Chicago A Lecture in two parts delivered to students of the Chicago Divinity School October 4 and 6, 1966 by Bernard E. Meland. When outsiders have undertaken to characterize the distinctive and continuing note in the theological history of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, they usually seize upon the word “empirical.” And similarly, whenever a member of the Divinity faculty at the University of Chicago (particularly in the theological field) has surveyed the various stages through which this theological history has passed since the Divinity School first emerged, he too, in an effort to focus upon the characteristic bent of mind at work here, has centered upon the word “empirical.” This is not to say that all who have labored within these halls have subscribed to an empirical method. Some of the Divinity School’s most distinguished scholars both early and recent, have taken it upon themselves to counter this emphasis or at least to supplement it by a methodology which they deemed mere adequate or appropriate to theological inquiry, if only to give balance and proportion to what otherwise could become a narrow and restrictive mode of inquiry. This interplay of rival methodologies at Chicago has been more to the fore at certain periods of the Divinity School blistery than at others. At its inception Divinity education at Chicago centered more dramatically in biblical criticism and the historical study of Judaism and early Christianity. While one could argue that, in so far as this discipline was itself scientifically orientated it implied an empirical bent of mind, one might wonder if linguistic scholars such as William Rainey Harper, Edwin Dewitt Benton, and Edgar Goodspeed would have been willing to accept such characterization of their work. Certainly they would not have been disposed to lift up the empirical aspect of their study as a singular concern to emphasize or to promote. In later years; this ease qualification would apply even more to such biblical scholars as John Knox, Ames, Wilder, or Coert Rylaarsdam. Whatever emphasis was given by them to observation of events or concrete occurrences in biblical study was in the centers of an historical interpretation—and the historical interest has a way of taking on dimensions of inquiry and a kind of interest in happenings that diverge

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from or go beyond what is commonly understood to be in focus whenever the empirical method is applied. This difference between empiricists and historicists is itself an interesting problem which perhaps has not been adequately explored. They represent two different ways of countering the abstract philosophical or ontological concern with religions; and they express two different types of inquiry into what is concretely observed. Empiricists have generally been philosophically orientated in their approach, even though they have countered abstract or speculative procedures proceeding from or leading to broad generalizations. Historicists, on the other hand, have persistently sought to avoid even a modicum of philosophical directives or restrictions—on the grounds that they were concerned to let the data of events speak as directly and without bias to the interpreter as possible, given our human fallible liabilities. The crucial issue between the historicist and the empiricist arises precisely here; for the empiricist is wont to challenge any such presentation of bare or un-interpreted data prior to observation or explication. In defense of the historicist, one might say what he has often accepted this judgment of his procedure as being a commentary upon our human fallibility, but nevertheless has felt that the less one allows this presupposition to assume prominence or priority in any form of inquiry, the less likely it is to color all that is observed and the more likely events are to be attended (to) on their own terms. Before inquiring further into various expressions of empirical thinking at Chicago, we should look briefly at the larger picture of the empirical concern in Western thought from which our Chicago experience drew much of its incentive and influence. Empiricism has been so closely identified with the temper and mode of thought that developed among English thinkers following John Locke, and which was to receive further generalization among British evolutionists and scientists as a study of social experience, that one is wont to view it exclusively in these terms. Thus, Schleiermacher is sometimes reported to have eschewed empiricism because of his contempt for this English way of thinking about problems. And the late Paul Tillich, in the first volume of his Systematic Theology was led to ascribe to empiricism (meaning, British empiricism) the disappearance of the word “Spirit” from the English language because of its radical separation of the cognitive function of the mind from emotion and will.” (p. 249) That the empirical method was more rigorously pursued in philosophical and religious studies among British and American thinkers is not to he denied—and it assumed a priority as a form of inquiry that became distinctive among them. But it does not follow from this that an empirical concern in some form and to some degree did

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not appear elsewhere or before the time of Locke and Hume. Wilhelm Windelband finds its beginnings antedating the modern period in the emphasis given by nominalism. Nominalism, he observes, “was directed toward the development of natural science. And during the 14th and 15th Centuries of its development the scholastic method persisted even in this area of inquiry with its bookish authority.” Then he adds, “For all that, Duns Scotus and Occam gave the chief impetus to the movement in which philosophy taking its place beside the metaphysics whose interests had hitherto been essentially religious, made itself again a secular science of concrete actual facts and placed itself with more and more definite consciousness upon the basis of empiricism.” (Vol. I, p. 344.) “This emphasis,” he continues, “developed along lines of psychology, especially among the Arabs, in whom philosophy addressed itself to establishing and arranging the facts of experience.” (Ibid.) Now there is a point to be noted in relating empiricism to the facts of experience. Other modes of thought had recognized the fact that ultimate realities impressed themselves upon the mind and psyche of man; but only as copies of the really real. The truth of reality, detected here was thus to be studied not as “facts of experience” in any concrete sense, but as truths mathematically or rationally discerned. The hint or shadow of their reality reflected in experience awakened and impelled the serious thinker to attend to this reality supervening experience. But Occam was to disavow this kind of close correlation between the human mind and reality whereby “in the knowing process, by means of the cooperation of the soul and of the external, a copy of the latter was to arise.” (325) In so doing he opened the way for distinctions between mind and matter, body and mind—between primary and secondary qualities and thereby introduced the epistemological issue that was to haunt philosophical and religious thought for many centuries thereafter. If modern idealism is to be seen as a persisting effort to re-establish the authority of mind in its human apprehension of reality, empiricism beginning with Francis Bacon’s De Augmentis Scientarium may be taken to be a relentless effort to demonstrate that the same principles employed in observing man’s bodily existence as evidenced in the sciences are to be applied to “the movement of ideas and of activities of the will,” with a view to discerning “their moving forces.” Bacon was not prepared to carry through what he proposed; but he had created a vision of the mind that was more nearly oriented to the vital and physical processes of concrete experience of man and nature than could be acknowledged by scholastics or modern idealists. John Locke has been made the pivotal point around which discussion

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of modern empiricism had revolved. This is due principally to his attack upon innate ideas directed mainly against the Cambridge Platonists. Locke reinstated the role of the senses as the stimulus to reflection, and thus in a way brought body and mind into a working correlation which required attention to the two sides of life. Experience in its sensory aspects was, thus, seen to be productive of ideas—though the further process of reflecting upon them was seen to be formative and fulfilling of their implications. The more careless and superficial empiricist will be inclined to deduce from this Lockean thesis that sense impression is basic to knowledge and thus is to be regarded as the singularly important sphere of inquiry. Much evolutionary and instrumental thinking in the positivistic cases, presuming to be empirical, has proceeded in this way, thus setting up environment and its physical determinants as the real source of man’s knowledge whatever the area of inquiry. Here the balance between the sensory and the reflective process (Which Locke sought to maintain) appears lost, with the result that an environmental empiricism approximating a materialistic determinism follows. (Problem one in this preliminary analysis of modern empiricism therefore may well be to determine what precisely is Locke’s theory of knowledge, or what is involved in this correlation of sensation and reflection as a way of stating the empirical method?) The empirical bent of mind which was thought to have originated with Locke, was to culminate in the skepticism of Hume, wherein causal connections giving hint or intimation of an ultimate reality or Cosmic Order, were deemed wholly subjective—residing in custom or modes of reflection rather than in any objective sphere of reality. Kant’s response to this skeptical view of empiricism issued in a strategy of thought whereby the empirical method was salvaged for scientific inquiry, but rendered unavailable for religious inquiry. Though it remains a question as to how such and in what sense the empirical bent of mind hinges on, or lurks about in the appeal to practical reason. (This may be cited as a second problem for us.) We will need to ask, too, whether the appeal to experience in all its forms is an empirical inquiry. What hinges upon the answer to this question is the relation, not only of Schleiermacher and the so-called modern schools of experiential theology, based upon reports from religious experience, to empiricism, but the several efforts within American Theology and philosophy of religion to relate religious inquiry to a study of religious experiences. Schleiermacher, in attending to the religious consciousness as the area which theology was to find its data and resources, was certainly moving away both from the authoritarian appeal to tradition and from a

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mathematically determined a priori. One could say, as many have said, that Schleiermacher was establishing theology on a new basis in which religious experience was being given its rightful place. The concern to give full import to this innovation has often resulted in subjectifying or psychologizing Schleiermacher’s procedure. In so doing, one dispels what Schleiermacher sought to hold together, namely the tension felt in the juxtaposition of the reality given in the notion of God and the reality experienced in the sense of absolute dependence. For Schleiermacher, no simple psychological reading of the religious consciousness could yield what was essential to the theological task. A certain distance was maintained between what could be observed and what could be inferred from this momentous juxtaposition. Schleiermacher’s way of expressing this same of distance was to say that any language employed to speak about this reality discerned in the religious consciousness could only be symbolic. On these grounds, Rudolf Otto ascribed to Schleiermacher the rediscovery of the numinous in modern theology. Now this is not empiricism as it is commonly understood though it carries with it a kind of appeal to experience. It is akin to the phenomenological method employed by Otto and by Paul Tillich wherein something of the earlier Platonistic notion of reality casting its shadow upon concrete experience is recovered or restated. In no sense can one speak of literal processes of divinity being observed. (Here then, a third problem asserts itself: How is Schleiermacher’s relation to empirical theology to be understood?) The appeal to religious experience more commonly associated with certain nineteenth century forms of liberal theology presents another kind of problem. Here, what was lifted up was more the form of an internal judgment of values experienced, as in Personalism; or of a selective Christian sense, enabling one to discern Christ-like tendencies in thought or action, as in the theology of William Newton Clarke. To speak of this as empiricism would seem to ally it too readily with intuition and feeling simply on the grounds that experience is experience whether inner or outer in form. In this connection it is interesting to note that Shailer Mathews, speaking out of his avowed empirical modernism, always suspected evangelical liberalism of this kind as being but a subjectivization of supernaturalism. I recall his saying in a class in historical theology on one occasion that the appeal to religious experience could probably be identified historically with the Reformers’ notion of the immediate access of the Holy Spirit. This preoccupation with the private subjective encounter of the psyche with transcendent realities, whether in mysticism, Reformation theology, or evangelical liberalism, he found to be suspect,

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and a serious detour from the area of data with which the modern Christian theologian should concern himself. Here was the voice of empiricism speaking as it had developed within the Chicago School. I shall speak mere explicitly of this development in a moment. A variation upon both the appeal to religious experience in the evangelical literal sense and the empiricism of the Chicago School; and in a sense mediation between them is to be found in the theology of Douglas Clyde Macintosh. Macintosh was a graduate of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. When the Dean of the Yale Divinity School was considering inviting Macintosh to join their faculty, he wrote Mathews asking about McIntosh as a theologian and scholar. Mathews spoke highly of Macintosh’s gift as a theological thinker, and ended by saying, “if you don’t hire him we probably will.” Had Macintosh come to Chicago, he would have introduced into the Chicago scene a kind of empirical study of religion that would have added a note of dissonance to Chicago theology. For his concern at that time was not with religion as a social process, but with religious experience as it appeared in the ordinary person or church member. His hope was to create a clinical theology that could be as explicit in guiding the work of the minister among his parishioners as medical science had been able to inform and discipline the work of physicians in their communities. Theology as an empirical science, therefore, (which was the title of one of his early books) was to consist in discovering and formulating the basic laws underlying the religious response together with the principles of behavior applicable is religious experience. In this theology, intuition, observation and reflection were to be given parallel if not equal weight and emphasis. In the kind of psychological studies of religious behavior, such as G. Stanley Hall and his associates at Clark University undertook at the turn of the century, the claim of empirical inquiry can be made more convincingly. Here theological doctrines, claiming to be expressive of objective, revelatory events were translated into their psychologica1 effects as observed in religious behavior. Once this procedure gained ascendancy in religious inquiry, however, the theological or objective reference subsided; and the study of religion became a psychology of religious experience. Edward Scribner Ames was to partake of this mode of religious empiricism giving to it, however, a distinctively social and functional emphasis consistent with anthropological studies that were basic to his interpretation of religion. It is fairly easy and all too common to define empiricism in such a way as to exclude much in western thought that proceeds from motives and correctives that are consonant with the empirical tradition.

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I have argued elsewhere that empiricism in western thinking has to be seen in its variety rather than in terms of any single expression of it. What looms as a determinant of its meaning when looked at in this way, is the scope and nature of experience that is brought into view through observation and reflection. Experience can be taken to mean a highly selective form of sensory data, or a complex of events subtly and ambiguously envisaged. The distinction here turns, not on whether the empiricist is precise and disciplined as against those who are vague and undisciplined in their thinking; but rather on whether the facts of experience are understood to be the kind of data that can be attended to be isolated entities, or must be seen in their context, within relationships, where relationships are deemed experienceable, to use James’ language, Where relations are concerned to be experienceable, as in James, Bergson, and Whitehead, the empirical method becomes a highly complex correlation of what Locke designated sensory and reflective activities. You will see then that exploring the empirical method of inquiry in Western thought is no simple analysis of a straight line of descent from one thinker within a specified orientation of mind. It is a problem of dealing with varieties and variations as these apply to the notion of experience—and to the appeal of experience as a method of inquiry. In a similar manner, we shall see that empirical theology within the history of the Divinity School, presents variety and variation, governed by the data considered to be expressive of experience pertinent to religion, specifically the Christian religion; and by notions scientific or philosophical, which are deemed guides or resources for interpreting such experience. On Thursday I shall continue this introductory statement, surveying the various types of empirical theology that have developed within the Divinity School. Part II. Empiricism as a method of study in the Divinity School became explicit in the rise of the early Chicago School under Shailer Mathews and Shirley Jackson Case. During the early stages of that epoch of theological history, however, there were mild dissenters among them (George Burman Foster, for example, was a troubled Ritschlian, as was Gerald Birney Smith in his early years). And while one can find affinities between the Ritschlian method and that of empiricism, it would be confusing matters to subsume the former under the latter. Ritschlianism was a valuational approach to realities carrying into theology a fusion at Kantian and LoTzuan idealism. While, like empiricism, it rejected speculative procedures common to metaphysical inquiry, it nevertheless retained more

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of the idealizing venture of faith than empiricists were inclined to acknowledge with whom observation and reason in some form held greater sway. Among the early Chicago empiricists, and in fact among pragmatists generally, a similar recourse to valuation in the idealistic mode was evident; but here it was implicit and, if possible, obscured— functioning mainly as a persisting habit of mind from earlier associations rather than as an avowed manner of thinking. Gerald Birney Smith was later to embrace empiricism wholeheartedly, and to participate in the Chicago School as a major exponent of the empirical method in theology. More open and responsive to philosophical currents of thought than either Mathews and Case and to the changing scene within the sciences, he was less committed to the rather singular, sociological procedure implied in their theologies. He was really a bridge or transition between this early phase of empiricist and the one that developed under Wieman. It is illumining, to look at this early stage of Chicago theological empiricism, particularly with respect to the influences that shaped it. For in this context, the nature, of its empiricism it made explicit. As we proceed with an analysis of the empirical tradition in the Divinity School’s history, we shall see that the term empiricism forms a large canopy or umbrella under which are to be found varying presuppositions and procedures. And though the empirical concern for regarding all knowledge as being descriptive of experience persisted through all of them am a common tract or bent of mind, it assumes a variety of formulations and brings together various combinations of disciplines and sensibilities of thought. The empirical effort of the early Chicago School arose out of the stimulus of the study of history, influenced by new studies in sociology and social psychology. It partook also, if only by a process of osmosis, of the philosophy of Pragmatism which, at that time, had come into preeminence in the department of philosophy at the University of Chicago under John Dewey. This pragmatic mode of thought in turn partook of the evolutionary view of man with it strong emphasis upon environmental influence and functional adaptation, and thus assumed a modernistic bent of mind as being inherent in its method, if not, it fact, but another way of naming it. Empiricism in this context was thus a study of the functional aspect of phenomena. A thing or movement was known in terms of the function it revered. Get at the motives behind actions, affirmations, and words, along with the purpose for which they are employed, and you may then unmask the real nature of the event itself. Ceremonials, prayers, beliefs, or doctrines as well as institutional forms of legislation were thought to be expressive of felt-needs, as Shailer Mathews was fond of

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saying. And these needs in turn; were traceable to a particular complex of environmental and social circumstances or forces. Religion and theology in this mode of explication were not so much a concern with ultimate truth or Being as such, as a concern with human behavior in response to what was deemed ultimate and demanding of human adjustment. Questions of truth, in the metaphysical sense, for example, could only detour theological inquiry—Mathews and Case contended—from the real business at hand. That business was done in the convening of Church Councils, or in the commonplace deliberations and preachings as well as homiletic and polemical writings of vitally concerned churchmen and Christians preceding and following such formal church gatherings. Under Mathews and Case, empirical theology thus became church-centered as the means of focusing observation and study upon the community of believers or the practicing congregation. For them the church in this sense was more than a cultus, or some esoteric group set apart from the social environs. It was a social movement among other social movements. It partook of the under-currents of culture, and thus reflected in its aspirations, declarations and formulations, the seed-ideas that had become formative of the language of the culture or period—in the very analogies employed in the preaching and declaration of the councils, and in the social patterns that became expressive of firmly held fixed notions and beliefs. Empirical theology in this form was more concerned with describing religions (thereby hoping to understand them) than with evaluating them. It likewise reflected little interest in establishing any criteria of identification between present-day and any traditional form of Christianity. That there was such identification it readily affirmed. From its point of view this did not need to be established in doctrinal terms. In their way of understanding the history of doctrine, concern with the commonality of belief was not likely to yield much continuing identification. In so far as there was a pivotal point around which Christians of every age formed as participants in the social movement, it was the person of Jesus. But this foca1 point was to be understood more as a rallying point than as a center of inquiry inviting speculative or ontological reflection. Any effort to further designate the nature and implications of this person in the sense of a Christology could only lead away from the continuing thread of historical Christianity, and involved one instead in the divisive and particularistic aspects of its history resulting from ontological speculation.166 One may see, then, from this cursory analysis, that, to the early Chicago school, empirical theology consisted mainly of the historical study of a social movement, and of Christian personalities as participants

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in such an ongoing historical movement. The contemporary task of theology from this point of view was not so much an interpretation of a set of Christian doctrines within the contemporary idiom, as a reassessment of what it meant to be loyal to Jesus—the pivotal center of the faith within the modern community. Shailer Mathews, more than any other member of the Chicago school, worked at specifying that this pivotal core of affirmation was. In the course of his reflection upon this problem, he offered several formulations of its content under the caption “generic Christianity” which functioned much as a protoplasm does in genetic history he said, and which, speaking in the evolutionary language of the day, could always be counted on “to breed true to itself.” The contemporary task of theology from this point of view was not so much an interpretation of a set of Christian doctrines within the contemporary idiom, as a reassessment of what it meant to be loyal to Jesus—the pivotal center of the faith within the modern community. Shailer Mathews, more than any other member of the Chicago school, worked at specifying that this pivotal core of affirmation was. In the course of his reflection upon this problem, he offered several formulations of its content under the caption “generic Christianity” which functioned much as a protoplasm does in genetic history he said, and which, speaking in the evolutionary language of the day, could always be counted on “to breed true to itself.” Part III. With the coming of Henry Nelson Wieman, to the Divinity School faculty, a new stage of empirical theology developed. Wieman was not so much the initiator of this new empiricism as an expression of it. I have traced elsewhere the radical shift in imagery of thought that occurred in the latter part of the twenties in which a new kind of evolutionary and organismic thought emerged following from the earlier stimulus of Henri Bergson and the metaphysical writings of William James.167 This new organismic thought was initially formulated in the writings of Lloyd Morgan, S. Alexander and Jan Smuts, and dramatically presented as a comprehensive world view by Alfred North Whitehead. The role of Whitehead during this period has usually been misinterpreted. His literature is so complete in itself as a summary view of all that preceded his efforts that he is generally taken to have been the instigator, and thus the one seminal voice expressive of this new age of thought. It is truer to say that he was the systematizer and comprehensive formulator of seminal insights furnished by a host of scientific, philosophic and religious thinkers who preceded him. Whitehead himself, acknowledged this fact in

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the opening pages of Process and Reality, but to those who knew Whitehead, and no one else in the development of the new empiricism this acknowledgment is taken to be an understandable assertion of humility appropriate in a scholar of sensibility. But this blurs the facts of the situation. It is true that the thoroughness with which Whitehead pursued the systematic task, analyzing and drawing out explicit implications of the various fundamental notions being affirmed, make his work more than a mere summation of what preceded. It is rather a creative philosophical vision, exemplifying in summary form, the various thrusts of organismic thinking that lay back of his systematic effort. But when one says, “1 don’t need James or Bergson, or S. Alexander—I have Whitehead,” one closes out all the subtle, yet important issues within this new empiricism (which would otherwise introduce into organismic thinking a creative dissonance and breadth of insight that can keep inquiry within this perspective open and fruitful) and in so doing makes or Whitehead’s thought a form of philosophical orthodoxy which overlooks Whitehead’s own tentativeness and responsiveness as alternative emphases. Wieman’s empirical theology within this organismic imagery was at first taken to be consonant with the empirical concern of the early Chicago School. Shailer Mathews, for example, was quite convinced that he and Wieman were after the same things in what they set forth. This judgment referred, no doubt, to their common stress upon cosmic activities which in Mathews’ thought took the form of “personality-producing activities,”168 and in Wieman’s theology, a cosmic behavior or process, upon which “human life is most dependent for its security, welfare and increasing abundance.”169 Yet their modes of thought and their ways of focusing inquiry differed radically at the time when Wieman was first undertaking his theological work. It is possible that his present emphasis upon “creative interchange,” in which the resources of the social sciences loom so dominantly, could be more closely compared with the earlier theology of social experience. But in the twenties, Wieman’s empiricism introduced a different orientation of inquiry—and quite a different understanding of empirical method. In addition to the difference in imagery of thought that underlay Wieman’s efforts, there were other distinctions between him and the earlier Chicago school. His concern at that time was to reformulate religious issues on a philosophical basis, on the assumption that theology and the religious affirmations, to which theologians had adhered themselves, were bankrupt. In his initial writings, Wieman was utterly impatient with all doctrinal or historical inquiry that simply sought to set forth a Christian consensus of belief. Every apologetic for Christian belief,

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or for the perpetuation of Christian thinking was in his judgment suspect. And to persist in such inquiry was simply to ignore or to veer away from the task that had become crucial in the present-day. That task was to undertake to designate in concrete and explicit terms what it is that any religious person, Christian or otherwise, believer or even Jesus Christ himself, means when he employs the word God. Empirical theology here had gone beyond all simple appeals to religious experience, as well as descriptive analyses of the social experience historically identified as a Christian movement, to ask theologically what logical positivists were asking of all modern thought. Wieman at no time, to my knowledge, identified his thinking with that of logical positivism, but I have always considered his earlier views to be a form of logical positivism applied to religious thinking.170 Wieman’s concern with definition of meaning in religions discourse went beyond that of semantics in religious thought, however. His prior and basic concern was security and certainty in matters of religious faith and commitment. The source of the collapse of efficacy in formal Christianity, he believed, and possibly of other forms of religions belief grounded upon sentiment or feeling and the emotive use of words or simply upon an authoritative consensus—lay in their indulgence in illusory notions; untested as to their accuracy or efficacy. Hence, the solution of the modern religious man’s problem, he concluded, lay in the direction of testing whatever conception of religious reality formed the ground and basis of religious faith and commitment. The course of Wieman’s inquiry was, in effect, dictated by his definition of God, or more precisely by the context in which the theistic problem was to be explored. Wieman’s initial interest as a religious thinker, dating at least from his work on his doctoral thesis at Harvard, was that of a philosophy of value.171 Many strands of influence shaped his early thinking on this problem, the significant ones being those of Josiah Royce, Hocking, Bergson and Dewey. Through Royce and Hocking he acquired a vision of an ultimate reality, cosmic in scope which somehow commanded adjustment and in turn provided resources for human growth and fulfillment. Although he turned away from the more explicit form of the idealistic argument for this vision, under the later influence of Bergson and Dewey, he nevertheless retained a haunting sense of this ultimate presence as absolute idealism had formulated it. His hope was to deduce from this vision (or to translate it into) an explicit object of inquiry, concrete enough to invite and warrant direct observation and reason as a “science of God.”172 In this effort, he found the early philosophical writings of Whitehead (especially his Concept of Nature and Principles of Natural Knowledge) highly suggestive. In Wieman’s first book, Religious

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Experience and Scientific Method, there appears a strikingly prophetic passage to the effect that in these early philosophical writings Whitehead had offered tantalizing suggestions for a new metaphysics. Wieman then adds the plaintive words; “If only he would venture more boldly into a metaphysical construction, we would have the vision we need for the work that is before us.” Wieman’s prophecy was fulfilled though in a way that far out-did not only his expectations but his acceptance. The metaphysical vision that Whitehead produced in Process and Reality at once intrigued and repulsed Wieman’s empirical bent of mind.173 Although he retained a deep sense of indebtedness to Whitehead, he was later to part company with him on the grounds that his metaphysical route ultimately carried religious inquiry away from empirical evidence into dubious visionary areas of metaphysical reflection and speculation in which the emotive use of words could be reinstated. Wieman’s empirical theology was thus rigorously functional and instrumental in intention, with as little concern with abstract or speculative ventures in thought as his own abstract vision of reality permitted. But the persistence of this veiled absolute in his thought derived from his earlier idealism, gave to his functional, instrumental empiricism suspicious overtones which were readily detected by pragmatists like Edward Scribner Ames and John Dewey, impelling them to recognize that Wieman’s thought, though having affinities with their own, was of “a different spirit.” Yet Wieman was not content with being dismissed as an unreconstructed idealist, nor was he willing to be gathered into the company of pragmatists who practiced a kind of truncated idealism. …”that reality is—as it is experienced,” as pragmatists had been wont to acclaim, could not, Wieman contended, be equated simply with man’s experience. Whenever this kind of truncation occurs, be argued, there is a forfeiture of an ultimate dimension of experience. To such forfeiture Wieman was not willing to accede. What must be undertaken, he asserted, is an effort to reconceive this that has been envisioned abstractly as the Absolute in terms that are consonant with the texture of lived experience. Here he was intruding the imagery of organistic thought, insisting as James had insisted before him, on a More in experience that was not reducible to man’s acts and decisions. Yet Wieman was not willing to follow James in the direction he had indicated in proposing an experimental supernaturalism.174 Wieman believed that the More that was in every event of experience could become discernible as a mode of happenings in everyday occurrences which “did for man what he cannot do for himself.” There

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were criteria to be had, he insisted, by which such happenings could be designated. The major portion of Wieman’s scholarly work was given over to formulating such criteria. More and more there became a configuration of occurrences, or a coordination of simultaneous happenings, the total impact of which constituted that which is supremely worthful for all mankind, and which rightfully commands man’s absolute commitment of faith. It was always difficult for the empiricist schooled in the philosophy of pragmatism or positivism to recognize Wieman’s thought as empiricism. Its organismic overtones, as they were presented by Wieman, always seemed to partake of a mode of rationalistic surplusage which Wieman himself had found objectionable in Whitehead. Thus while Wieman made much of applying the scientific method to religious meaning (by which he understood observation, reason, and experimentation) what was observed, some of his critics contended, was not experience or the data provided by experience, but a pattern or happenings presumed to be implicit in these concrete occurrences, but discernible only to those who shared his vision of reality. Whitehead would have regarded this procedure an instance of what he called “misplaced concreteness.” The issue here cannot be settled by finding the pragmatic empiricists right and Wieman wrong; or by declaring Wieman right and the earlier empiricists wrong. Wieman was justified in pursuing the the theological effort to enlarge the scope of emprica1 inquiry to embrace what organismic thought and its relational mode of thinking had indicated to be a more adequate conception of concrete experience. His failure to communicate this view, I venture to suggest, lay largely in the restrictiveness of the procedure which he chose to employ, separating out too sharply perhaps, or more sharply than the situation allowed what one logical positivist has termed the obscure concurrent from what is concretely given. Wieman was so fearful of falling into illusions of mystical thinking that he tended to overdo the emphasis upon precision in the use of terms, for purposes of which he insisted upon abstracting conceivable events from immediate experience. The interrelation of what is bodily experienced and that which is perceived—or that which is experienced, perceived, and then conceived—is so complex, subtle and evasive as to defy ready distillation or analysis. Any decisive separation of them is bound to be purely arbitrary, resulting in a forced conceptualization on the one hand and a crude designation of immediate experience on the otherhand—as if it stood apart from what is conceived as a separate and distinct body of data. Any such procedure can only do violence to the concrete event; and give rise to a cognitive form of play-acting that

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presumes to be dealing with tested facts of experience, when as a matter of fact it may only be projecting fallible visions of the mind. This procedure which has been a characteristic phase of Wieman’s empirical method through the years has always impressed me as being a lapse back into the mentalism (commonly practiced by rationalists and idealists) however qualified. And to this degree I think the assumption that his thought is clearly or strictly empirical is seriously open to question. A third phase of the history of empirical theology in the Divinity School is to be found in the direct and conscious appropriation of Whiteheadian Metaphysics in developing a process theology. Its meet self-conscious and consistent rendition is to be found in the theological effort of Bernard M. Loomer who has taken the Whiteheadian metaphysics to be the most adequate and comprehensive categorical statement of present knowledge, and thus the most suitable contemporary framework of meaning in which to conceive and to interpret Christian affirmations. The metaphysics of Whitehead, as Loomer sees it, replaces all antecedent metaphysical ventures, not only in the sense that it corrects them, but in the sense that it subsumes their important insights as well. It becomes a key and critical vision; therefore, of the knowledge of the world that is available to our present understanding, and in this sense, an overall source of criteria for judging what can be meaningful to modern man both as an historical and as a present-day utterance. The procedure by which the theological task is projected, therefore, in process theology, according to Loomer, is to master the basic categories and controlling propositions developed in Whitehead’s system, and to reconceive the historic Christian affirmations within this perspective. At first glance this appears to be a highly arbitrary procedure of translating theological and religious statements into their philosophical counterparts. Ultimately it may be difficult for Loomer to gainsay this claim. His justification for proceeding this way is that all Christian theology has presumed some philosophical framework, explicitly or implicitly. Augustinianism presupposed a Neo-platonic world view. Thomism partook of an Aristotelian structure of thought. Reformation theology, while it appeared to be disavowing all philosophical association, nevertheless, showed preference for presuppositions indirectly drawn from Platonism and from current criticisms of scholasticism. And theologies that have followed within the Reformation tradition (including Schleiermacher) have disclosed such a preference or even habit of mind in formulating Christian doctrine. The argument, then, is that the theologies never escaped some philosophical orientation and since this is true it seems more responsible and realistic to become self-conscious and explicit

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about the philosophical orientation one has embraced. There are rejoinders to be made to this way of stating the matter, but I shall defer discussion of them until a later section. But Loomer’s forthright embracing of process philosophy as a framework of Christian thinking within the contemporary idiom follows from other reasons. In his judgment, the systematic expression of Christian affirmations calls for the most rigorous and thoroughgoing restatement of the logic of Christian faith, not just a delineation of Christian themes and their apologetics. For this purpose it behooves one to avail himself of that philosophy that provides the most adequate and relevant resources for such a task. For Loomer, no philosophy of the contemporary period is comparable in this respect to that of Whitehead. And he would be willing to add as well that no philosophy antecedent to it excels Whitehead’s in doing justice to the subtleties and logical possibilities of the Christian understanding of man and his world. Other expressions of process theology are to be found in the writings of Daniel Day Williams, Bernard E. Meland, Schubert Ogden and John Cobb. Of this group Cobb tends to adhere closely and rather exclusively to the Whiteheadian system, much in the manner of Loomer—though he ventures freely in offering his own interpretation or points not covered or clearly stated by Whitehead. For Williams, Meland, and Ogden, Whitehead’s vision of reality forms a perspective within which theological reflection may be fruitfully pursued but it is informed and supplemented— and often criticized—by other perspectives within the organismic legacy of thought. Williams is the most eclectic in his selection of other sources and perspectives, even at times being ready to reconsider Hegelian insights and other impressive contributions of the liberal era. Meland is a Jamesian at heart with a congenital bias against an all-out commitment to any fatherimage even when it reflects so handsome and venerable a visage as that of Alfred North Whitehead. And there is a good deal of the early Chicago School persisting in his sensibilities of thought despite his protestations to the contrary. His clandestine relations with the History of Religions and cultural anthropology clearly give evidence of this fact. Schubert Ogden, on the other hand has been content to siphon the Whiteheadian waters through a Hartshornian conduit so that what presents itself in his thought as an ontological vision or an argument for such a vision, partakes more of the modal logic of Hartshorne than the process philosophy of Whitehead and his organismic forbearers. There is a strong empirical base lying back of Ogden’s logical analysis; but it is more in the nature of a background resource to which he can periodically retreat for qualifying correctives than a spring from which his own fountain of truth issues. Ogden has the

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merit of having wrestled intimately and strenuously with New Testament issues pertinent to the theological task—particularly as they have been redefined by Bultmann and his critics. He thus brings to his discussion of theology within the process perspective, problems and issues that immediately involve him in theological talk that is alive to theologians abroad who have no concern with his empirical interests. Part IV. That process theology is empirical in method is difficult for some observers to recognize or concede. In contrast to pragmatic and instrumental empiricism it is so obviously concerned with delineating or explicating a total structure of thought or vision of reality that it rarely gets around to asserting any empirical claims or to inquiring into them. Its preoccupation with basic categories and logical structure, as it is said, identify it more readily with rationalistic procedures than with the empirical method. In practice thin criticism may not easily be set aside by process theologians. They may deny it, but they have difficulty making their point when confronted with their own preoccupations. The argument against understanding process thinking as a form of empirical inquiry, however, overlooks the concrete character of the data in which the process thinker concerns himself. On closer scrutiny one will discover that such concern with categories and structure as the process thinker discloses is not in the traditional metaphysical mode of erecting an abstract framework of thought into which the many items of common sense experience are to be fitted; but in the empirical tradition of attending to concrete, individual events to discover the persisting and commonly shared characteristics of concrete experiences whenever they occur. Experienced events are the data of reflection in process philosophy and theology. In this sense it is basically empirical—though empirical with a difference. It becomes a way of generalizing the commonly shared features of concrete experience— thus lifting what might otherwise be an ambiguous flux of occurrences into a working vision of experience as a whole. Whatever the shortcomings of this process way of thinking may be, and there are such to be noted, they do not add up to an absorption in abstractions. On the contrary, the complex interweaving of internal relations giving rise to concrete occurrences, with their light and shade—their coming into being and perishing, their waxing and waning of good and evil, hope and tragedy are vividly in view. In a sense it becomes a way of thinking existentially, only with configurative and communal dimensions of individuality, as contrasted with the drastic solitariness of lonely transcendental ego. The difference her hinges upon the contrasting conceptions of individuality and

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upon the issue as to whether relations are experienced as objective occurrences or impressed upon reality by the sensibilities and demands of the subjective ego. It is easier to see the empirical bent of mind in Bergson and James than it is in S. Alexander or Whitehead for the reason that the former allowed the flux of experience to appear in its undifferentiated pluralism unsorted or structured in terms of its generalities. But these elements and emphases, recognizable in James and Bergson are present in Whiteheadian philosophy as well, and form the base from which speculative ventures take their rise, and to which they return for verification and further stimulus to imaginative effort. Although I shall have occasion to comment more fully on my own concern with the empirical method in a later chapter of the book, I should make some mention here of my relation to the continuing tradition of theological empiricism in the Divinity School at Chicago. My early years as a student under the stimulus of the Chicago School and my later associations and collaborations with Professor Wieman destined me to assume the role of mediator between them, and the critic of each. My theologizing in its formative period took place in an atmosphere of transition when empirical inquiry was moving from a preconception with the historical study of social experience to the ontological vision of concrete events as a total passage of history. The framework of meaning that was to inform my theological efforts was to be the one shaped by organismic thought and process philosophy through historical orientation of empirical study with its conception upon faith in its wider cultural setting I was to relinquish. This juxtaposition of theological study of culture on the one hand, the dimension of depth issuing from the Creative Passage, and on the other hand, intruding into philosophical theology the principle of limitation to which the relativities of history alerted one— cautioning against the idolatries of reason and every human formulation that aspired to universal dimensions or that presumed to be establishing them. As a consequence my theological method could at best be described as a critical empiricism, or empirical realism—implying less confidence in the finality of the empirical method than either the early Chicago pragmatists or later process theologians displayed; yet adhering to the empirical tradition as a check against every uncritical reliance upon mysticism or the appeal to faith, or even upon rationalistic demonstrations of final truth. The empirical concern in my thought has served to summon every imaginative or speculative venture in religious thinking to take adequate account of the limitations of experience, and to insist upon having some basis in experience for projecting such a venture and for formulating its results. Tis full commitment to the demands of an

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ontological or a free-wheeling use of its vision for formulating the claims of faith have been denied to me; even as full confidence in the pragmatic dictum “reality is—as it is experienced” has also been unavailable to me as a working principle for inquiry. I have thus replaced the concern with religious knowledge with the pursuit of intelligibility in religious faith. These quests are related, but are clearly to be distinguished from one another. Intelligibility is a form of knowing that gives full weight and awareness to what is not—and cannot be known of realities that exceed our human limitations. This penumbra or fringe of More that attends every experience of knowing functions as a sense of limitations upon all that can be clearly formulated as religious knowledge, and underlines it with a critical and skeptical query in view of its partial and limited perspective. One has no choice, in my judgment, except to pursue religious inquiry empirically; but he must do so with a constant and continuing sense of being under the judgment and possible correction of realities of spirit that exceed his grasp and his human form of inquiry. One who thinks and works empirically in this way is committed to tentativeness in every theological finding or formulation, and recoils from any presumption of having found a way of understanding God or even human existence with the certainty of tested knowledge. I shall give a more extensive account of this empirical realism in chapter xxx of this volume. It will be seen then, that the scope and character of empirical theology, within the Divinity School of Chicago, as well as in other areas has undergone continual transformation as understanding of the human problem and of the nature of experience itself, has widened and deepened. In our own day the influences of cultural disorders and of the human spirit have radically altered the setting in which religious issues are posed. In the face of the traumas and demonic disclosures that have haunted the human spirit in these latter days, the bland, objective study of religious functions or assured efforts at acquiring religious knowledge hardly seem to get to the heart of the matter. A more probing and relevant form of inquiry into the deeps of human experience, and the strange recalcitrant forms shaping or frustrating human destiny, would seem to be coming from existentialist and phenomenological quarters where a more discerning recognition and grasp of these grim incalculables of existence is in evidence. Phenomenology and existentialism are not unrelated to the empirical concern. Some of the progenitors of the modern process form of empiricism, William James and Henri Bergson have been included among the existentialists. Nevertheless the stance of each with regard to the issues of existence and the pursuit of knowledge concerning them differ materially. Yet it [ … much of this sentence is missing or obscured … ] them could benefit by

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enough conversation to enable each of them to partake of the critical influence and concern of the other. This may, in fact, be a possible next stage in the development of religious inquiry. Empirical thinkers have already been noticeably affected, if not influenced by existentialist and phenomenological thinkers—and it is being rumored that phenomenology such as the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur is re-examining and assessing the work of empiricists like William James. What is clear, I think, is that empirical theology will not persist along lines which it has historically followed, not even along lines of its development within this Divinity School. And I make bold to say that it cannot do so if it is to have any future development of relevance, But my task is not to project the future of empirical theology—but simply to introduce those who will speak directly to this theme. End

1967 Creativity in William James Paper presented to the Western Division of The American Philosophical Association April, 1967 The obvious thing to say about creativity in William James is that, either it is a nonentity, or it is so pervasive and ever-present in his thought that James never thinks to mention it. To anyone who knows the character and direction of James’ thinking, however, the former, suggesting that creativity has no place in his thought, would seem so incredible as to be unthinkable. So on these grounds, if no other, I am impelled to look for the needle of creativity in the Jamesian haystack. And your part is to wish me luck in the venture. You would be quite justified, of course, in asking, “If creativity is so obscure a notion in James’ philosophy, for heaven’s sake why trouble to look for it?” Well, in philosophical circles, as you know, the circumstance of obscurity has never turned the probing mind away from the search. In fact, that very circumstance makes inquiry all the more intriguing, possibly enough to impel one to spend a life-time looking for what appears not to be there. But that is not my justification. The context in which this inquiry takes on significance is process philosophy, beginning with James, Bergson, and Dewey and continuing through Whitehead, Wieman, and Hartshorne. The notion of creativity appears readily and frequently in the writings of all of these men except James. And it is variously interpreted by Bergson, Whitehead, and Wieman; though one could find a basis for relating them to one another. As one undertakes to find such a basis with a view to coming to some understanding of the pertinent turns of thought given to this notion in process thought, one becomes more and more impressed by the silence of James on the subject. James is so fecund a source of this mode of thought that, once you have encountered this silence on a notion which has loomed so prominently in process thinking, you cannot rest until you have broken this silence, or wrested from it as an explicit word whatever is implicit in his writing that is expressive of it. Now to begin with, James is a peculiar kind of process thinker. He is, in fact, a renegade within this mode of thought. One is inclined to take a stand with regard to this innovating stance of his: either one is inclined to

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say that, while James most certainly belongs to this company of philosophers, he is not the most characteristic expression of it, and certainly not a consistent and systematic representative of it; or one will say, as I am inclined to do, James contains in his seminal thrusts of inquiry so many dimensions of process thinking which have only vaguely or inadequately been assimilated to process thinking in its later developments that he continually stands as a challenge to the movement and to individual thinkers in it, summoning them to explore its further aspects. One can, of course, pursue another kind of explanation, prompted by the present tendency among phenomenologists and existentialists, to gather James into their history. Here he is seen to be an existentialist thinker, and a progenitor of phenomenology through his influence upon Husserl and his continuing stimulus to phenomenologists such as MerleauPonty, Paul Ricoeur, and John Wild. One finds them speaking of phenomenology as a radical empiricism, no doubt, in their judgment, the most mature and adequate expression of radical empiricism, and possibly the fulfillment of what William James was about. By reason of the fecundity of his mind and his openness to new possibilities of inquiry, then, James’ thought begins to appear as a fountain source of several sallies into new ways of philosophizing at the turn of the century, all of them marked by a reaction against the abstractness of conceptualism in modern idealism and in intellectualism generally, and by a focus upon concrete existence. Pragmatism, process or organismic thought, phenomenology, and existentialism, all find their beginnings, or some phase of their beginnings, in the radical empiricism of William James. The obvious concern in James’ thought with the feeling of transition, of tendency, of the feeling of relations, both as an epistemological and as a metaphysical corrective of earlier British empiricism; and his virtual indifference toward Husserl, as contrasted with his enthusiasm for Bergson and his respectful attention to Dewey, lead one to the judgment that his own bent of interest lay in the direction of process and organismic thought along with pragmatism, however much his radical empiricism may have fructified other ventures in philosophical inquiry. It is common among more recent process thinkers, committed to the metaphysics of Whitehead, to say that everything of importance in process philosophy that began with James and Bergson has been assimilated by Whitehead and given a more systematic formulation in his thought. I have insisted, on the other hand, that what has not been assimilated by Whiteheadians, is James’ acute sense of the unfinished and unfinishable character of the world. And this radical openness of the reality confronting man in experience, as James envisaged it, stemmed from the seriousness

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with which he took the perceptual flux as the living nexus of what is really real. Concepts played their part in James’ empiricism; but they were instrumental in a limited and controlled sort of way. They served, on the one hand, to extend the vision beyond individual tracks of perceptual experience, relating one track of experience to another, or posing questions which enabled one to probe and contrast these various tracks of experience. And they provided swift and economical ways of surveying experiences in acquiring some generalized view of existence, a view which would be unavailable as concrete knowledge, except as one might live through each and every track of perceptual experience. The latter being unmanageable, conceptual knowledge, which confessedly is abstracted from the perceptual flux, and thus is secondary to it, served in James’ thought an indispensable function, and could be justified on grounds of economy and practical concerns, if on no other basis. What James recoiled from, however, was the assumption that one could extend this abstract conceptual knowledge indefinitely, imaginatively, or speculatively into a total vision of reality, as if this that was encountered in experience could be grasped in so summarily a fashion; or as if a conceptual vision so projected could be considered in any way adequate to or expressive of the total import of this living nexus of events which was ever growing, changing, developing, and erupting in new and unexpected ways. And his restraint shown here was motivated, not just by this radically empirical sense of everything being in a forward-moving flux, too dynamic to be captured in conceptual terms, but by a vivid sense of the mysterious depth that moved out from each individuated experience into associated levels of consciousness, perhaps, Which James felt he must take into account as a dimension of depth or heightening supervening experience, but which he could not attend in any direct mode of inquiry. At most this mysterious depth or heightening functioned in James’ thought as a significantly creative MORE in experience that could take over when human creativity lagged or lapsed; or as a saving energy that could come to the aid of an individual under extreme conditions of need or despair. We, having passed through developments in emergent theories of evolution, gestalt psychology, field theory in modern physics, and many other charges in imagery of thought, are more prepared in our time to see in a technical way what James was acknowledging or reaching toward. James, himself, had only the crudest kinds of imagery as was offered by testimonies of mystical experience, psychic research, and studies in the unconscious. On the basis of these data he resisted alliance with an all-out naturalism, despite his own technical competence in physiology and psychology, choosing rather to pursue what he called an “experimental

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supernaturalism.” James has often been censored or even repudiated because of his preoccupation with bizarre movements and off-beat individuals; but in retrospect one might better see these concerns as being a sensitiveness to dimensions of experience which the liberal, pragmatic ethos of his time prepared most of his contemporaries to ignore or to overlook altogether. To my mind, James still stands out among process thinkers as conveying an exceptional degree of elemental openness to the flow of events and to the creaturely stance which this elemental response evokes. He was almost totally lacking in that stultifying mode of sophistication that settles over the intellectual community like a blight insulating it from the fresh impact of innovating events. The point to draw from this biographical tribute to James is that, however lacking his thought may have been in an explicit doctrine of creativity; James in himself exemplified the creative spirit par excellence. I. Having engaged in what may seem to some of you a filibuster, delaying discussion of the major theme, I shall now address myself more directly to my topic, “Creativity in William James.” I have in mind in using this term its metaphysical connotation, rather than the more familiar aesthetic one; though, strangely enough, because of the way metaphysical discussion, as well as every other form of analysis in James, centers in the notion of “eachness,” the distinction between the metaphysical and the aesthetic rendering of the term “creativity” is less marked. The metaphysical way of conceiving of creativity tends to see it as a generalized notion conveying the dynamic, innovating character of the temporal passage, as in Bergson, S. Alexander, and notably in Whitehead. In James the unity of this temporal occurrence is less in focus if, in fact, it enters into his thought at all. Instead, what is concretely real as a creative happening occurs within each instance of the perceptual flux as activity, and as such, enlists the sensory and volitional facilities of each individual experiencing the activity. The initial presentation of this view appears in his Psychology where he is discussing the role of attention in the stream of thought. Here the locus of creativity is specifically centered in the volitional and valuational activity of the individual mind, wherein choice and decision are made. The freedom of the will was important to James. In fact, one must regard it as a formative notion in his mode of thought. This emphasis must be seen, however, in conjunction with his strong affinity for the Darwinian theory of evolution, which he nevertheless opposed in so far as it stressed the dynamics of environment to the neglect of interest and volition in the

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human organism; and in opposition to Herbert Spencer who, as he said, “regards the creature as absolutely passive clay, upon which experience rains down.” There then follows this telling passage: These writers have… utterly ignored the glaring fact that subjective interest may, by laying its weighty index finger on particular items of experience, so accent them as to give to the least frequent associations far more power to shape our thought than the most frequent ones possess. The interest itself, though its genesis is doubtless perfectly natural, makes experience more than it is made by it.175

Interest evoking attention, then, becomes a selective procedure by which each individual organism turns what would otherwise be sheer flux or a chaotic stream into intentioned events. Now it is true, James adds, that attention has both its passive and voluntary phases. We are seized by the sudden impact of some sound or sight upon our senses, and held under its spell for a season; but we are also capable of active or voluntary attention. It is a feeling which everyone knows, but which most people would call quite indescribable. We get it in the sensorial sphere whenever we seek to catch an impression of extreme faintness, be it of sight, hearing, taste, smell, or touch; we get it whenever we seek to discriminate a sensation merged in a mass of others that are similar; we get it whenever we resist the attractions of more potent stimuli and keep our mind occupied with some object that is naturally unimpressive. We get it in the intellectual sphere under exactly similar conditions: as when we strive to sharpen and make distinct an idea which we but vaguely seem to have; or painfully discriminate a shade of meaning from its similars (sic); or resolutely hold fast to a thought so discordant with our impulses that, if left unaided, it would quickly yield place to images of an exciting and impassioned kind.176

James then gathers up the pros and cons of the argument in his discussion of attention in the rhetorical question, “Is voluntary attention a resultant or a Force? The question ‘which?’ is one of those central psychological mysteries,” he adds, “which part the schools.” Then he answers his own question, saying, When we reflect that the turnings of our attention form the nucleus of our inner self; when we see… that volition is nothing but attention; when we believe that our autonomy in the midst of nature depends on our not being pure effect, but a cause… we must admit that the question whether attention involves such a principle of spiritual activity or not is metaphysical as well as psychological, and is well worthy of all the pains we can bestow on its solution. It is, in fact, the pivotal question of metaphysics, the

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This is a crucial passage in stating James’ orientation of thought with regard to many problems and issues. It was written early in his career, and was to provide the basic stance from which he continued to view subsequent issues. It is, I am persuaded, the stance which gives credence to his widely contested claims for moral decision in The Will to Believe, wherein volition passed from the role of focusing and sustaining attention to projecting or even creating a line of action. And it appears again in his discussion of the energies of men as a lure to prod oneself into utilizing the resources already available to one for creative action. It may be possible to cast James’ entire role as pragmatist into that of a volitionalist, wherein truth is taken to mean, not just the cash value of ideas, but their creative and purposeful import, ideas put to work for a purpose. Creativity in the context in which James discusses it here has a marked existentialist tone, reminiscent of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. And certain contemporary writers have picked up this Jamesian note of authentic subjectivity as a creative force and have found support in it. Likewise, the current emphasis upon intentionality in phenomenologists like Marcel and Ricoeur traces its lineage to these very chapters of James’ Psychology among other influences. Now I would not question the affinity between this phase of James’ radical empiricism and what phenomenologists and existentialists intend, both in that they designate as the lebenswelt, and in what they lift up as the creative role of self-activity. But, if one takes what James developed in his Psychology in isolation from what appears in other works such as The Varieties of Religious Experience and his metaphysical studies, particularly A Pluralistic Universe, one is bound to derive a truncated view of what James intended in his radical empiricism, both with regard to the focal point of lived experience (lebenswelt) and the creative role of the self. That this is true is indicated by James’ tantalizing references to such notions as the fringes of thought, or the horizon of the MORE, as well as the over-beliefs he deduces from them. It is suggested, too, by his frequent mention of the distinction between the religious and the moralistic concern, stemming from differences in mood or mode of personality as suggested in his classification of the healthy-minded and the sick-soul. These many references, taken by themselves, may seem far afield from the problem of creativity in James’ thought; yet when seen as dimensions, or even as resources of personal existence, or variations in the individual’s capacity to avail himself of resources native to his own structured existence, they bear, if

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only obliquely, upon what constitutes the creative activity when volition and decision are not readily forthcoming. II. The philosophical assessment of the religious phase of James’ work has, in my judgment, been grossly inadequate. Since much of James’ own discussion of these aspects occurs in The Varieties of Religious Experience, a work, for all its genius, clearly on the fringe of the philosopher’s concerns, and subject to all kinds of occult usage, these areas of James’ thought have been relegated to the literature of occult groups, or, at best, to some of the more dubious ventures in psychology of religion. But it is pertinent to recall that these references to the MORE and to instances of man’s dependence upon this supervening structure or structure of grace reappear in his technical, metaphysical studies, notably in A Pluralistic Universe. Take, for example, the passage which appears both in The Varieties and in A Pluralistic Universe: The believer finds that the tenderer parts of his personal life are continuous with a more of the same quality which is operative in the universe outside of him and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself, when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck. In a word, the believer is continuous, to his own consciousness, at any rate, with a wider self from which saving experiences flow in.

This is the version that appears in A Pluralistic Universe, which repeats the statement in The Varieties word for word, only amplified. It is true that in both quotations, James represents himself as speaking for the believer, reporting on his empirical findings; but in other statements in A Pluralistic Universe where he is clearly putting forth his own suppositions, the same depiction of the MORE of experience appears, as in these lines: Every bit of us at every moment is part and parcel of a wider self, it quivers along various radii like the wind-rose on a compass, and the actual in it is continuously one with possibles not yet in our present sight. And just as we are co-conscious with our own momentary margin, may not we ourselves form the margin of some more really central self in things which is co-conscious with the whole of us? May not you and I be confluent in a higher, consciousness and confluently active there, though we know it not. (290)

And later these famous lines from A Pluralistic Universe: The drift of all the evidence we have seems to me to sweep us very strongly towards the belief in some form of superhuman life with which we may, unknown to ourselves, be co-conscious. We may be in the universe as

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Meland’s Unpublished Papers dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all. (309)

I speak of the intimations here as tantalizing, for they seem to suggest so much in the way of realities or resources opening up beyond the individual experiences in their “eachness.” And the tone of James’ preachments when he is summoning his listeners to exploit “the energies of men” beyond the usual employment of human powers in activity or effort, or when he is consoling the person defeated by experiences of dissolution or despair by appealing to these resources beyond human effort and conscious activity; gives ample assurance that, to him at least, they are not to be discounted simply on the basis of their being “over-beliefs.” I tend to infer, then, from these references that, while James himself does not incorporate this mysterious depth of relations into a doctrine of creativity which explicitly coordinates the subjective and objective poles of such an occurrence, he clearly infers that this depth is “coterminous and continuous” with the higher, germinal part of each individual human consciousness as he engages in such acts. Thus creativity in James’ thought appears to have its overt expression as volitional, intentional acts in each; with a depth covertly present in such acts. This depth becomes overt as a source of redemptive occurrence in times of human failure and loss. James’ reticence in pointing up this More, and his reticence further about following up with a more substantial structuring of what is being apprehended, stands in sharp contrast to the vigorous assertions by his father, the Calvinist turned Swedenborgian, on the one hand; and by subsequent process ontologists, on the other hand. One may see in this reticence a note of skepticism; but this is not, I think what James meant to convey. It is rather a procedure which simply observed sensibilities of thought consistent with his radical empiricism that required adhering to the experiential datum, impelling him to recoil from any ready appeal to an ontological principle or category. But it expresses, too, his acute sense of reality in the immediacies of experience, evoking a kind of trust in the concrete mystery and depth of that which is lived. Whether one can do more than this to correlate James’ sense of the More with his view of creativity as it occurs in individual acts of volition and decision, I am hesitant to say. In subsequent process thinking, notably that of Whitehead, Wieman, and Hartshorne, we do see the correlation being explicitly made; though not within the concrete imagery offered by James. But to impose this correlation upon James in any full, ontological sense would be to do violence to the empirical reticence that marks his thought at every turn.

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It may be pertinent for me to point out that my own formulation of the concrete nature of God in Faith and Culture as a “matrix of sensitivity and meaning of subtle and vast dimensions, transcending our own, in fact all human structures” partakes of an influence from James’ imagery of thought; as do the chapters on “The Encounter with Spirit” and “The Reality of Spirit” in my Realities of Faith. In both instances I found myself reluctant to use such terms connoting a transcendent happening until I was able to designate the empirical ground for speaking within the theological idiom. Such correlation as James was able to make explicitly between the More and what could be understood as his designation of creativity came by way of his references to “the sick soul.” We should now look at that side of the matter briefly. James has been represented variously, in relating him to his own classification of people. Some have seen in him the ebullient, healthy-minded human being; others who know the more despondent side of James see him in his own characterizations of the sicksoul. James would have accepted both characterizations as applying to himself, the one being more dominant at one time, and the other at other times. I agree with Seelye Bixler’s view, expressed in his Religion of William James, that James considered all men to be plagued with this kind of ambiguity, though some tended to sustain one mode or mood more than the other. And this conception of man as vacillating between sick and healthy-mindedness bears directly upon his view of creativity. For the creative drive of man identified with the active role of attention and volition is, according to James, clearly the dynamics of the healthy-minded or of men in their periods of healthy-mindedness. This is a time when the possibilities of the unfinished world come into view in their allurement and fascination, according to James, beckoning the imaginations of men to dedicated effort and adventure. It is a time, too, when the evil and perplexities posed by a pluralistic universe can be realistically faced and taken in stride, or confronted with a zeal for reform or conquest. In a moving passage at the close of his Introduction to his father’s writings, published under the title, The Literary Remains of Henry James, William James, after recounting the life of action in a mood of healthy-mindedness, writes: But healthy-mindedness is not the whole of life; and the morbid view, as one by contrast may call it, asks for a philosophy, very different from that of absolute moralism. To suggest personal will and effort to one ‘all sicklied o’er,’ with the sense of weakness, of helpless failure, and of fear, is to suggest the most horrible of things to him. What he craves is to be consoled in his very impotence, to feel that the Powers of the Universe

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Then in a shrewd, perceptive response to his own words James added, Well, we are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates.

In identifying healthy-mindedness with the confident, assertive moral will, and the sick soul with the infirmed human spirit, James was not drawing upon the deepest veins of his own pluralism to give credence to the religious spirit. On the contrary, he was justifying religion on the grounds that there are moments when man is a broken reed, and thus needs assurances rather than stimulus to action. Much that is worthy in the history of religious faiths as a source of creativity, stands as a denial of this ready equation of religious faith with the need and search for solace. Many of the saints and the stubborn resisters to the obvious ways of things who have found assurances for living, along with a perennial sense of peace, even intermittent moments of joy in the midst of travail and tragic loss, have been neither unrelenting or buoyant individualists with a will to live and believe; nor have they been sick souls. They have been realistic human beings who, by their very deliverance from self-seeking and willful egoism have, in. their relinquishment, gained peace in the midst of turmoil, and by this very stance been made receptive and responsive to such moments of joy and assurance that have come to them. Fleeting though these instances of reassurance might seem, their accumulative witness generates a rugged, yet unpretentious, will to live forward. James’ own pluralism, I think, offered this kind of healthy-mindedness in low key that would not have been subject to the threat of false optimism implicit in a rugged individualism expressed in the will-to-believe; nor to the assumption of weakness and defeat, acknowledged by the sick soul. By identifying religion so obviously with the sick soul; or, more seriously, by identifying the more sober and sensitive spirit, awakened to the inequities and evils of existence with the sickness of soul, James obscured, if in fact he did not nullify, the religious import of his own highly sensitive spirit in concourse with his spirited will to live forward in the face of irresolute issues. The truth may be that, within the sensibilities and modes of thought then available to James’ generation, the force of his own resiliency and forward-moving psyche did not convey any religious import, not even to himself. In this sense he partook of a supernatural ethos of religious thought, even as his own critical spirit of mind resisted it. It may be pertinent at this point, however, to counter the common reading of James as a supernaturalist. To be sure he designated himself an

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“experimental supernaturalist;” but this must be understood in the context in which he was searching for terms. James, it must be remembered, did his groping toward a more satisfactory empirical orientation of thought in a time when a positivistic naturalism was rampant in scientific circles, and steadily becoming entrenched in academic circles as the new sciences of man gained ascendancy. James’ enthusiasm for Bergson, whom, on his own admission, he only partially understood, was due to the support Bergson gave in countering both mechanism and idealism. The former, in his judgment, dissipated all concern with what was imminent in man as a psychical thrust of the spirit of man; the latter tended to domesticate it within enclosures of the mind, and by attending to it exclusively as a conscious activity, underestimated the depth, both of its beneficence and terror. What James, in his sense of the More, was anticipating was the new reading of natural structures that emergent evolutionists, a decade or so after James’ death, were to give them. But the basis for speaking of the relational ground of emergent structures had been laid by James in the prescience he attributed to relationships and to context. in general in demonstrating that they are experienceable and that they are experienced. Had James had the notion of emergence as a tool of thought at the time he sought to explore the instances of in human experience which vividly transcended the known mechanisms of human behavior, he would, in my judgment, have had a different story to tell about the phenomena of mystical experience, saintliness, conversion, and the traumas of the divided self. He was groping experimentally with the unmanageable dimension of experience, as Professor Wieman intimated in his Religious Experience and Scientific Method, without benefit of critical insights, which his awn experimentations and poignant reflections were to lead. But, to return to the discussion of James’ own treatment of the problem of creativity, we are not to assume that James is saying that heroic creativity and adventure in times of healthy-mindedness transpires without benefit of whatever depths reach us in this perceptual flux. To do so would be to cut away from his thinking this very dimension of the More that underlies the whole of his philosophy. I say this despite the fact that he was reluctant to give to this dimension of depth any overt, conceptual formulation. The best way I know of stating this more inclusive view of James, whereby his “eachness” and the “all” can be simultaneously taken into account is to say that James conceived of each individual stream of experience as participating in a depth of relations which exceeds its conscious experience, except in marginal ways as a horizon of the More. Man’s attentive and active labors participate in this environing or supervening fringe, as the dog and cat, lying at the feet of the men

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conversing in the library, participate in the human level of sensory and conscious experience; and possibly with no more interchange of meaning. Nevertheless it can be supposed, so James assumed, that what transpires beyond man’s attentive and active world, or within it as a depth of good not his own, somehow enters into his attentive and active labors as a resource of grace or judgment; though for James, the articulation of this deeper resource of the human spirit and its creativity, even in these terms, was as denied to man, as was the envisagement of any final end to all men’s labors. The point is that the only creativity that could be overtly known or acknowledged by him was that creativity of the human spirit in its attentive and volitional acts, projected as an adventure in thought and moral action within the exigencies of existence as being purposeful and exploratory, or crucial and necessary, given the option of choice and decision. But these were acts and decisions within a context of felt relations, giving to one’s acts more than the character of one’s singular, subjective drives since, in some measure, they represented the “eachness” of existing events, as subjective occurrences, speaking and acting out of their relational ground. It would not be amiss to ascribe to James, a dictum that has come to express radical empiricism in its present mode, namely, that we live more profoundly than we think, more profoundly than our acts or conscious decisions can convey. In times of failure and stress, then this creativity of the self-encounters odds or dissolutions too great for conquest or resolution; when, as it were the sick soul in man assumes dominance for a season, or for sustained periods of one’s life, a creativity not of man’s own making, yet integral to his existence as being relational to it, will intervene, and, in Professor Wieman’s memorable words, “do for man what he cannot do for himself.” This, too, is a Jamesian theme. III. For William James, every moment of living was an invitation to creativity; because this was what it meant to live. Living, forward in this sense, however, was in itself no achievement; for existence being a stream, each existent event so it would seem, is carried forward with the current of time. In this sense one could identify creativity in James’ thought, at a more neutral level of bodily existence, with the temporal passage; for certainly innovation in this context, is of the essence. And what emerges as a new, present moment of time occurs precisely because of the creative interplay within the temporal passage whereby continuities with the past are carried into the emerging present as remembered occurrences and as a continuing efficacy. But, for James, establishing the empirical basis for this generalized supposition was no easy matter. And in the last analysis, I think we should have to say, he fell short of doing so; although he

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struggled valiantly with the problem, trying to demonstrate the difference between the perceptual and the conceptual view of novelty and causation. The empirical datum in which he sought to discover such a basis for designating the nature of the creative act was, interestingly enough, the experience of activity. His most explicit statements concerning creativity at this most generalized level appear in his presidential address given in December 1904 before The American Psychological Association, which was first printed as an appendix in A Pluralistic Universe. Portions of it appeared later in Some Problems of Philosophy, but the address was reprinted in its entirety as a chapter on “The Experience of Activity” in Essays in Radical Empiricism, published after his death in 1912. The very experience of activity, he seems to be saying, is an encounter with creative experience. If we take an activity situation at its face value, it seems as if we caught in the very act of committing the offence the very power that makes facts come and be. I now am eagerly striving, for example, to get this truth which I seem half to perceive, into words which shall make it show more clearly. If the words come, it will seem as if the striving itself had drawn or pulled them into actuality out from the state of merely possible being in which they were. How is this feat performed? …How do I get my hold on words not yet existent, and when they come, by what means have I made them come? Really it is the problem of creation; for in the end the question is: How do I make them be? Real activities are those that really make things be, without which the things are not, and with which they are there… If there be real creative activities in being, radical empiricism must say the somewhere they must be immediately lived. Somewhere the that of efficacious causing and the what of it must be experienced in one, just as the what and the that of ‘cold’ are one whenever a man has the sensation of cold here and now… And wherever the seat of real causality is, as ultimately known ‘for true’… a philosophy of pure experience can consider the real causation as no other nature of thing than that which even in our most erroneous experiences appears to be at work. Exactly what appears there is what we mean by working, tho we may later come to learn that working was not exactly there. Sustaining, persevering, striving, paying with effort as we go, hanging on, and finally achieving our intention—this is action, this is effectuation in the only shape in which, by a pure experience-philosophy, the whereabouts of it anywhere can be discussed. Here is creation in its first intention, here is causality at work.178

James, in this discussion, will have no ontological principle underlying this creativity of lived experience.

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In the chapter on “Novelty and Causation” in Some problems of Philosophy, James states this point even more vividly, saying: The concrete perceptual flux, taken just as it comes, offers in our oval activity situations perfectly comprehensible instances of causal agency. The transitive causation in them does not; it is true, stick out as a separate piece of fact for conception to fix upon. Rather does a whole subsequent field grow continuously out of a whole antecedent field because it seems to yield new being of the nature called for, while the feeling of causality-atwork flavors the entire concrete sequence as salt flavors the water in which it is dissolved.180

In this same chapter, James toys with the idea that one may take what one finds to be causally efficacious in this human experience as being suggestive of what happens in activity generally throughout nature. If we look at the general mass of things in the midst of which the life of men is passed, he writes, “and ask, ‘How came they here?’ the only broad answer is that man’s desires preceded and produced them. if not allsufficient causes, desire and will were at any rate what John Mills calls unconditional causes, indispensable causes namely, without which the effects could not have come at all. Human causal activity is the only known unconditional antecedent of the works of civilization; so we find… something like a law of nature, the law that a movement from feeling to thought and thence to action, from the world of dreams to the world of things, is everywhere going on.181

This leads James to ask, following the hint of Edward Carpenter in his book, The Art of Creation, whether, Since at each phase of this movement novelties turn up, we may fairly ask whether we are not here witnessing in our own personal experience what is really the essential process of creation. Is not the world really growing in these activities of ours?182

But James is not able to make this generalization. It stands as a conceptual possibility; but empirical evidence is not available to confirm it, so it

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remains for him an open possibility unresolved. It is instructive to turn from this statement of James to Whitehead’s formulation of the notion of creativity in The Adventure of Ideas. The context is much the same in both instances: activity in terms of the temporal passage is being scrutinized in which, as it were, the stream of incessant change is taking on vivid expression of qualitative attainment. Possibilities are being actualized. In Whitehead, too, the word “creativity” expressed the notion that each event is a process issuing in novelty. (p.303). As such, it would seem that creativity is to be understood as being little more than incessant change. And Charles Hartshorne appears to confirm this characterization in speaking of Whitehead’s notion of creativity, saying “it is the common property or generic name for all the doings.” (Whitehead, p. 526). And even Whitehead, himself, leaves one with this impression in saying, “Creativity is another rendering of the Aristotelian matter, and of the modern ‘neutral stuff’,” though not to be conceived in the passive mode, but as “the pure notion of activity conditioned by the objective immortality of the actual world.” “Creativity,” he continues, “is without a character of its own in exactly the same sense in which Aristotelian matter is without a character of its own. It is that ultimate notion of the highest generality at the base of actuality.” (P&R 46–47) Then he adds, “But creativity is always found under conditions, and described as conditioned.” From whence come the conditions and the conditioning? Herein lies the combination or coalescence of causal factors giving rise to the complexity, even the ambiguity, of creative advance. For though Whitehead will speak of God as giving determination to what is otherwise sheer possibility, he is unwilling to leave it as being merely determined by such intervention. For, to quote Hartshorne again, “the internality of the world to God’s concrete or consequent nature has nothing to do with a reduction of all activity or decision. For there are two ways in which activity may be contained in a given actuality, 1) as selfdecided by that actuality, and 2) as contributed by the self-decisions of others. ‘Recipience,’ ‘patience’, tolerant prehension of the activity of others, is essential to concrete being, whether that of God or of anyone else. God has all activity within himself only because he accepts the activity of others as such and enjoys it within his own ‘immediacy.’ God appropriates the actions, the decisions, of others, he does not decide just what they are to be. We are told in the most unequivocal language that God’s influence upon others is not decisive to the last degree of determination.” (pp. 526–7) Seelye Bixler states this point similarly in saying:

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Now in moving from James to Whitehead, or conversely, from Whitehead to James, one must be aware of the basic difference in orientation, compelling the one to speak in terms of “the eachness” of events, even though he is mindful of the horizon of the More that somehow environs and shapes each event; and, the other, to speak explicitly in terms of God as an ultimate principle of conditioning, even though he is mindful of an inherent freedom among the creatures, enabling their decisions and acts to concur with or to counter God’s persuasion toward such perfection as is possible for each occasion. Nevertheless, the distinction between the two on the matter of ultimate causation is sharp and clear. Whitehead imports into the creative activity an ontological principle of causation, thus explicitly doing what James says a radical empiricist will not do. Apart from this radical departure in giving ontological explication to causation, however, there are grounds for saying that Whitehead’s discussion of creativity does provide context and explication to what appears implicitly stated in James. However, in saying that Whitehead makes explicit and extends what James had given hint of in his characterization of the creative power of the active intellect and volitional acts, it must also be recognized that he overstates James implications. It is helpful to see James’ more restrained and subtle anticipation of a possible thesis blown up into its Whiteheadian rendering, and then to recoil again into the more cautious language of James. One could argue, too, that it might be equally helpful to let James’ exposition of the creative act within its venturesome overtones of an experimental Supernaturalism be rendered in more explicitly humanistic terms. But since James was so guarded in his use of such overtones, preferring to speak quite explicitly within the context of “eachness,” fringed with references to a beyond, he was able to accomplish in his own terms what any humanistic rendering of his view would provide. In closing, I must speak of one other subtle turn in James’ thought. By recognizing that every man, in his journey through existence, appears intermittently, if not simultaneously, as heroic and fallible man, James counterpoised his concern with creativity with a redemptive theme, thus providing in his image of man as well as in his vision of the resources of man, a counterpoint of the creative and redemptive themes not to be found readily in Whitehead or other process thinkers. The essentials of this counterpoint, one might say, are to be found in Professor Wieman’s

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conception of creativity, both in his earlier formulation of the notion as creative event, and. in his later version of creative inter-change. But in Wieman’s thought, the distinction between the creative and the redemptive themes is collapsed; for creativity, he interprets to be the work of God, doing for man what he cannot do for himself. Here the freedom of man, or the authenticity of his creative efforts, appears more muted than in either Whitehead or James. Man’s works, when they are creative, tend to become created goods which can be seen as being demonic or as being destructive of good such as creative event provides. Man’s role, in so far as he participates in creativity at all, is limited to providing the conditions through which creativity can occur. In compressing both Whitehead’s and Wieman’s utterances on creativity here I have not done justice to their views; but perhaps what I have said is sufficiently expressive of the thrust of their concerns, respectively, to bring out the point that I see in James’ radical empiricism an appropriate and authentic dissonance with regard to such issues as “the each and the all,” individuality totality, man and God, creativity in man and the re-creativity redemptive power in God, which appears to have been blurred or muted, or possibly transmuted, in subsequent forms of process thinking. James thought in itself is not explicit enough along any of these lines to be adequate as it stands for informing our present concerns. Nevertheless, I find in it a resource of incomparable value in countering the truncation or diminution of dimensions in thought. But even more important, I find it to be a perennial challenge, summoning thought, both to greater realism as to how existence in the stark occurrences of lived experience really is, and to greater vision as to how it can believed. In this, the stimulus of James in itself persists as a creative force. Bernard Eugene Meland The Divinity School, The University of Chicago April 20, 1967

1968 My Response to Jack Sibley’s Thesis The Concept of Depth in Meland’s Thought Jack Sibley’s effort to search out the Sources of the notion of depth which appears in my writings is a valiant one. And, as a result of his pursuit, he does me the honor of associating my thought with that of three venerable philosophic minds of the modern period, each of them a human being of magnitude as well as a thinker fertile in imagination and creative power. These men, James, Rudolf Otto, and Alfred North Whitehead, he finds, are the men who influenced my thinking at crucial points, giving rise to the dimensional point of view I bring to the theological task. My first comment must be one of gratitude for being identified in this way with such a company of men. And I must say further that the specific areas of their thought which Sibley finds basic to my thinking are ones which I have found suggestive and even formative of the general outlook I have come to embrace. I must confess, however, that I do not recognize myself or my procedure very readily-in the way Sibley outlines and explicates these three, sources of influence. First of all, I think no man, if he is himself creatively or constructively impelled, merely assimilates fundamental notions of another man’s thought whole clothed. Even when they play a dominant and persistent role in one’s thinking, the notion as employed by another, is rarely, if ever, taken over quite in the same way that it is employed in the original instance. It becomes rather a suggestive horizon of thought that seems periodically to confirm or to encourage one in his surmise, or in a line of inquiry in which one is presently engaged. Rudolf Otto, for example, was greatly influenced by the philosopher J. F. Fries in the latter’s use of the term “ahundung,” could not be said to have derived his mode of apprehending the numinous from Fries’ notion of “ahndung.” This notion haunted Otto and periodically aided him in giving intelligible expression to the idea he was trying to express and to defend as a way of seeing into events or occurrences conveying the numinous quality. In a similar way, I have responded to Otto’s notion of the numinous, and to James’ concept of the More, or Whitehead’s ideas of prehension and concrescence, I think I could say quite categorically that I did not derive the notion of depth from either of these men; or, for that matter, from any single source. And I dare say that no one of my generation came upon this notion in so singular a fashion. For the notion

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of depth was a piece with a climate of thought that began to take form along in the mid-twenties when a vague complexity, as being the primal basis of our existence and of reality, assumed ascendancy. This was initially brought to my attention in my student days in the way philosophers like Rufus Jones employed theories of the sub-conscious mind. A cursory reading of James’ Varieties of Religious Experience at this time, and other studies in mysticism, further stimulated my thinking about it; though the judicious and critical mind of Gerald Birney Smith, which at the time exerted considerable influence upon me, along with others in the Divinity School at Chicago, induced in me a skeptical attitude toward this obvious exemplification of the dimension of depth. It was about this time that developments were occurring in the sciences and the social sciences that were to offer resources for thinking about this problem to which I readily responded. Bergson’s Creative Evolution was very much to the fore in seminars being given by Gerald Barney Smith at this time, and along with it literature in the emergent evolution by British biologists and psychologists, notably C. Lloyd Morgan, Jan Smuts, Joseph Needham, C. I. Broad, and others. Whitehead, I was to learn later, was a member of this organismic group, tho in a remote sort of way. Most of these British scientists and philosophers came to their organismic and emergent notions by way of probing areas of philosophical inquiry which were being evoked by studies in biology. And some were being directly influenced by the writings of Bergson. Whitehead’s preoccupation, on the other hand, had been mathematics and Physics, and it was through suggestions and intimations coming from the new physics that he was being impelled to formulate what was to become a new cosmology. He was continually urged by certain British associates to give attention to Bergson because of the affinities they detected between them, but Whitehead became impatient with their pleading, insisting that he was too busy at the time with his own reflections to give adequate attention to another’s thoughts. In the end he did read Bergson, found him immensely stimulating, though of a different spirit in certain respects. The stimulus of this organismic group reached us G. B. Smith’s seminars before Whitehead’s thought came upon the scene. Such stimulus as we received initially from Whitehead’s philosophy came by way of Wieman’s classes and writing. His Religious Experience and Scientific Method, for example constituted my first introduction to Whitehead’s thought as it had developed in his Principles of Natural Knowledge and The Concept of Nature, both of which are quoted and discussed in Wieman’s first book. I was to encounter Whitehead’s Religion in the

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Making in the first class Wieman taught in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago in the fall of 1926, I believe it was. This was the book that produced the bombshell in the twenties, and here again, Wieman was the principal interpreter to us in the Divinity School at Chicago, I have recounted this memorable experience in my Realities of Faith. Once the stimulus of organismic thinking and emergent evolution took hold of us, followed by the early writings of Whitehead, other tendencies in thought, more or less consonant with these earlier intimations of dimensional thinking, came to our attention: Gestalt psychology, exploration into the role of sensitivity in cultural evolution, aimed at getting beneath or beyond the more obvious kind of rational observation of historically recorded human behavior, as in R. R. Marett’s The Threshold of Religion, Faith, Hope and Charity, and Gerald Heard’s Sources of Civilization; sociological studies in social behavior such as M. P. Follett’s Creative Experience. Imaginative efforts in probing the nuances of thinking such as Graham Wallas’ The Art of Thought, Gamaliel Bradford’s many literary studies, notably his book, Life and I, stirred my imagination in this direction further. All of these writings, coming as they did from various fields of inquiry, seemed to be obsessed with one basic objective: namely, to get beneath or beyond the commonplaces of scientific and positivistic modes of thinking that were then regnant in academic circles. In a way they were saying there is something more to the life about us and to reality as such than the accepted form of intellectual life are acknowledging. The same discontent with intellectuals about which William James had complained in his day made many of us restive in the twenties. I recall my intensive study of the sciences with ten years of the most absorbing and intensive reading of modern poetry along with the study of primitive myths and legends and aesthetics as applied to painting, music, and architecture—all this in the context of worship. I was intent upon grasping the import of that quality of observation and apprehension as well as discernment that came through the art of poetic imagination and wonder. I would have to say that in this venture, neither James nor Whitehead entered the purview of my thoughts; thought undoubtedly I was thinking thoughts akin to their reflections, and possibly after them. Otto, through his own liturgical reforms, was clearly a stimulus, though not directly formative of my thinking. Rudolf Otto had provided me also with an interim of important stimulus prior to the period I have just described, Otto’s The Idea of the Holy and his Religious Essays were on the horizon of the theological thought at Chicago during my student days, but only, I would say, as a fringe reality. Mathews had known Otto through his ecumenical sojourns

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in Europe, and admired him, but regarded him as one pursuing a mode of theology alien to “our own.” Wieman, too, was aware of Otto, but regarded his numinous theology wrong-headed and misleading. Gerald Birney Smith, though by no means persuaded by him, saw in Otto a new voice in liberal Protestantism that opened the way to attaining a new purchase on this critical form of inquiry into religion. He encouraged my reading Otto, and my going to Marburg, Germany for a year in 1928–29, following my resident work for the doctorate at Chicago, where I would be directly in contact with Rudolf Otto bearing on the liturgical movement that was then in progress in Germany. G. B. Smith seized upon this literature for his own personal reading, which reflected, I thought, his own concern with this mode of thought just before his death in April of that year. I have always considered the influence of Rudolf Otto and Henry Nelson Wieman as being in juxtaposition in my thought. Wieman was fully cognizant of the dimension of reality to which Otto gave the word “numinous.” In his first book, Religions Experience and Scientific Method, this quality of perception and apprehension is vividly stated, even as Wieman presses for a definitive way of speaking about religious experience. But Wieman, the mystic, feared the folly of pursuing the mystical path, thought he had his own mode of mysticism which permeated the whole of his thought. Methodologically he opted for the core manageable mode of inquiry, addressed to instrumental or functional ends. The depth of the unmanageable, however, was never absent from Wieman’s reflections. And I must confess that the lure of his way of expressing this surplusage of experience was one of the fascinating aspects of the religious inquiry of my early years. What Otto apprehended phenomenologically I readily acknowledged to be a dimension of experience that was not to be denied or ignored by critical thought. To the degree that Otto employed this numinous apprehension to extend or to vivify the common observations of experience and events I responded to his lead. Something in my Chicago (or was it my American) experience, however, made me uneasy when he sought further exemplification and justification of his method in historic forms of mysticism within the west and in the mysticism of Eastern religions. I would have to say, however, that Otto remained provocative for me even when I did not follow him into his more mystical inquiries. His stimulus was renewed in me, however, with the publication of his Kingdom of God and Son of Man. Here Otto seemed to be reactivating a tenuous bond with emergent evolutionists, notably with C. Lloyd Morgan,

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which had lain dormant for more than a quarter of a century. In his treatment of eschatology in this work, the numinous dimension of events suddenly appears as an emergent within historical time, giving to immediacy intimations of its own depth pointing beyond present possibilities. I will have to acknowledge a direct influence of this aspect of Otto’s thought upon my own theology, which is evident in my treatment of Christianity and the mystery of time, both as the New Testament conveys it, and as we presently envisage it as the co-inherence of immediacy and ultimacy in every moment of existence. Thus Rudolf Otto has been a restraint upon my empiricism where it has been impelled by Wieman’s instrumentalism and the functionalism of the early Chicago School, but a positive lure in so far as his own numinous phenomenology has stimulated responsiveness to emergent thinking. Jack Sibley, in an unpublished paper, which someone would do well to publish, has made a persuasive case for interpreting Rudolf Otto as an emergent evolutionist, particularly as he presents his numinous method in The Kingdom of God and Son of Man. I persistently opposed Sibley’s interpretation of Otto while he was writing this paper, but Sibley stubbornly pursued his thesis despite my misgivings and protests, and in the end, convinced me and others that he had made his point sufficiently to warrant a re-examination of Otto’s work from the point of view of emergence. Some hint of this, of course, is given in Otto’s own work, Naturalism and Religion in which reference is made rather obliquely to his concern with the work of the British emergent evolutionists as a time when he, himself, was working out his numinous theology, countering, as it were, somewhat in the manner of the emergent thinkers, the mechanistic view of nature and events so common in positivism and other forms of scientism as the time. My interest in William James’ radical empiricism, strange as it may seem, and contrary to what appears to be implied in Sibley’s chronology of my work, came late in the development of my thought. To be sure I had been exposed to James’ works early in my theological study, though mostly in terms of his popularly acclaimed works, The Varieties of Religious Experience and The Will to Believe. It was not until I undertook to read the entire corpus of James’ writings while giving a seminar on James and Christian thought, following a seminar on Kant and Christian thought, that I entered seriously into James’ philosophy. This would have been sometime along in the nineteen fifties. To be sure, in the earlier years as a student in the Divinity School I had encountered the philosophy of Pragmatism, mostly, however, as it had been presented by John Dewey and to a degree by George Herbert Mead. I sat in on Mead’s classes at the

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same time I was in G. B. Smith’s seminars. Only incidentally, as I have said, did I encounter William James at that time. In my seminar on William James and Christian Thought, I took my students through The Principles of Psychology almost word for word, at least chapter by chapter, and then through The Pluralistic Universe and Essays in Radical Empiricism. In addition we combed through the two volume work by Ralph Barton Perry on The Thought and Character of William James. I came to realize as a result of carefully reading these works that, among those who had spoken to my basic concerns, William James was a major influence. His radical empiricism, with its insistence upon the fact that relations are experienceable along with his demonstration of their being experienced, as in transitions, gave to me a vivid, concrete notion of this depth of relationship within the wider context of generalized knowledge which I had not gleaned either from Bergson’s notice of duration and the various explications of emergence, or from Whitehead’s various discussions on the concrete event. As I read on in A Pluralistic Universe and Essays in Radical Empiricism I literally paced the floor to quiet the excitement I was feeling as a result of reading, not new ideas nor intimations of new insight, but unexpected confirmation and illumination of a perspective that had been forming in my own mind over a period of twenty years and which was now gathering momentum. James was thus a belated resource of great power and reinforcement who compelled me, on the one hand, to review all previous reflection upon this notion of depth within this avowed perspective or radical empiricism, and, on the other hand, to sense distinctions within process and organismic thought bearing upon the conceptual formulation of this dimension of depth. Almost simultaneously with this renewed and zealous encounter with James, I began reading Whitehead more seriously than I had ever done before in relation to the task of constructive theology. James and Whitehead appeared to me to be two poles of the organismic mode of thought, the one giving spiritual emphasis to the depth and complexity of perceptual experience; the other giving perception the same degree of primacy, but with more concern with the specific task of envisaging this world of events conceptually as a total perspective conducive to systematic reflection. James had recoiled from this undertaking initially, intimidated, no doubt, by what he regarded as a massive display of folly and arrogance on the part of Hegel in projecting his philosophical idealism, and by what he sensed to be an unwitting pretension in the metaphysical efforts of his colleague Josiah Royce. I shared the misgivings of James in regard to such a total envisagement, a habit of mind I undoubtedly acquired from Gerald Birney Smith; nevertheless, I was persuaded that Whitehead’s own basic

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empirical orientation and his concern to view such conceptual efforts as tentative, analogical experiments in thinking cosmologically, saved him and his work from the kind of folly that had befallen Absolute Idealism, While I continue to hold to this view with regard to Whitehead’s work, I am less sanguine about efforts that have followed from the stimulus of Whitehead’s metaphysics. Whitehead’s notion of prehension, causal efficacy, and his doctrine of internal relations provides me with conceptual tools with which to articulate and to explore further the relational ground of human existence as it was experienced in individual lives and in the communal ventures of human living within various cultures. Whitehead thus enabled me to be more definitive, not only in speaking of the new image of man thus emerging in the new metaphysics, but in dealing with the phenomena of faith and culture wherein the communal expression and witness of faith was vividly in focus. In so far as I have been able to set forth a reconception of immanence in which continuities and discontinuities are recognized and taken into account, I am clearly indebted to Whitehead. For the tension implicit in the formula of individual in community, or in the creative act whereby each event prehends every other event with varying degrees of relevance, yet issues in a sharpened focus of its own individuated aim, is as irresolute as the issue between immediacy and ultimacy itself. Yet the two poles of every instance of creativity issues as well in a structure of experience that is symphonic, rather than mechanistic, in the ordering of its parts into an expressive whole. Whitehead is responsible, too, in large measure for my being able to think explicitly in terms of a continuing structure of experience whereby past valuations enter into or make their bid for entrance into present actualities. Without his formulation of the notion of causal efficacy or of such efficacy assuming a structural line of continuity amidst multiple instances of change and dissolution, the interminable succession of “coming into being and perishing,” there would seem to be little technical ground for contemplating such a notion of ontological and cultural persistence. In the long run, I should have to say that my indebtedness to Whitehead in regard to the notion of depth is more obvious and explicit in terms of the actual formulation of working concepts. Yet, the basic orientation of my thought, implying a dimension of depth, derives from a long chain of developments in organismic and process thinking antedating my acquaintance with Whitehead, and countered as well as challenged by the numinous thought of Rudolf Otto. All of this was to be gathered into a firmly ordered context of perceptual experience reaching toward articulate

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conceptualization in James’ radical empiricism. In many ways James’ work holds a primacy for me that no other source which I can designate holds; for, despite its unfinished, even unformed, character as an ontology or as a cosmology (or possibly because of it), his outreach toward what eludes man in his conceptual efforts remains tentative and open in a way that seems appropriate, if not inescapable, given the limitations of all natural structures, including that of man. Yet, James is no more bent upon giving definitive utterances to what exceeds our powers of apprehension and wonder that he is upon settling for a view of reality fashioned out of our limited conceptual or rational forms. Thus he seems to me to be properly poised between the limits of our definitiveness in rational inquiry, and the limits of human awareness as expressed in our most sensitive moments of apprehension and wonder. Bernard E. Meland June 1968

1969 Reflections on the Chicago School The fact that The Divinity School of Vanderbilt University has chosen to explore “The Chicago School” of theology, following the Schleiermacher conference of a year ago, would appear to be an oblique acknowledgment, at least, that its mode of theology played a distinctive role in shaping American theological history. It would be indelicate of me to concur in this kind of judgment readily; but I must confess that, in this case, I have no hesitancy about being indelicate. One of Shailer Mathews’ famous quips was, “I’d rather be damned than ignored.” It is gratifying to report that his worst fears are to be allayed; for on at least three occasions during the current year, beginning with this conference, the spot light will be upon him and upon several of his colleagues as effort is made to interpret and to assess their theological legacy. So, although a quarter of a century has passed since Shailer Mathews was among us, concern with his thought lives on. I. I have been asked to speak to you on the theme, “Reflections on the Chicago School.” Undoubtedly I was given this assignment because I have cone to be regarded as something of a “contemporary ancestor” within this Chicago tradition. Of course there are a number of us around, some distinguished ones, in fact, in this very audience. On Wednesday evening we listened to one of the more eloquent ones as he spoke out of an oral tradition that took form within the faculty establishment during the nineteen twenties and after. My reflections, in so far as they become reminiscent, can claim no such identity. By the time I came to the Chicago faculty all of the members of the early Chicago School had ascended to their higher rewards, each in his own way. Even President Colwell by that time had made his ascension, albeit to the Limbo of the university’s Central Administration. So my right to reflect on the faculty of the Chicago School derives solely from the fact that I was their student, not their colleague; but I submit that that relationship carries its own distinctive credentials. Reflections need not necessarily be reminiscent; although, to reflect upon a history in which one has himself participated to any degree, invites the kind of reflection that continually borders upon reminiscence and invariably partakes of it.

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Before looking directly at the Chicago School of theology I shall try to suggest in a few swift strokes something of the cultural and intellectual setting in which this mode of theological thinking emerged. The earlier Chicago School of theology arose amidst the ground-breaking for a new and independent university in Midwest America. This new University of Chicago, in turn, began taking form at the turn of the century within a prairie-land culture that was feeling its way into a distinctive mode of the American experience. The rise of the packing industry and related developments in transportation had been major expressions of that new cultural experience throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. Bold innovations in architecture by the young architect, Louis Sullivan, that were to eventuate in the skyscraper, also gave intimations of it. These structures in their way provided the artistic model and symbol for the leviathan culture then emerging, a functional art, a way of expressing beauty, and feeling within the demands and necessities of the work-a-day world. A pragmatic temper of mind, born of necessity, and transmuted into an ideal and a way of life, was aborning in this wide expanse of prairieland which was to be the home of the new university and its Divinity School. This pragmatic temper of mind was to be given formidable expression within the university itself in the person of John Dewey who, in 1894, became Head of the Department of Philosophy, and later of the Department of Pedagogy as well, as the department of Education was then called. Other areas of the university, including the Divinity School, were to assimilate this pragmatic temper of mind, and to make it their own. The contrast between this emboldened spirit of enterprise and innovation that was to fashion this interior American experience, remote from European culture and its re-echoing sensibilities in New England and along the Atlantic seaboard from Massachusetts Bay to Virginia and the Carolinas, was to evoke distrust, then disdain among many Americans, principally those for whom the genteel tradition of long standing had greater appeal. Ralph Waldo Emerson and later, William James, were the exceptions. They never ceased to comment upon this new phase of the American experiment whenever their speaking engagements took them into the Midwest. Both men, themselves innovators of genius, confessed to being stirred and even a bit overwhelmed with new zeal whenever they encountered the audacity of this new mode of American experience. But it was its authenticity that stirred them most. Lewis Mumford has commented upon this break in America’s cultural pattern in two of his earlier books, Sticks and Stones, a commentary upon American architecture, and The Golden Day, in which he spoke of young

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America having finally cut the apron strings that had bound earlier generations of Americans to the European culture and economy in which greater emphasis had been put upon proprieties than upon facts of experience. There is another anecdote that has stayed with me through the years as a commentary upon the cultural milieu of the early Chicago School. The poet William Vaughan Moody had begun his vocation as a teacher of literature in Harvard University, but had been invited to come to Chicago as a member of the new university faculty. To the dismay of his friends, he accepted. Moody at Harvard, it is said, showed no particular promise as a creative-writer. It was only after coming to the Chicago faculty, so the story goes, that William Vaughan Moody came of age as a creative writer and poet. Something in the air of this place, it is said, released in him an authenticity he had not previously known. There is that word: again, “authenticity.” That, perhaps, is the word for it. In academic language this is spoken of as independence of mind. In a more colloquial colloquialism it often comes out in such words as, “I don’t give a damn what others say about it, this is the way I see it!” Independence of mind is a precious gift of the spirit. In and of itself, however, it is not an assured asset. Strangely enough, it can give voice to a rigid adherence to a traditional way of doing things just as readily as to a zealous innovating thrust. As late as, 1960 a heated controversy in Oxford University was being reported daily in the London Times. The issue was whether sociology should be introduced into the curriculum of Oxford University. By way of pleading their case, the advocates of Sociology advanced the argument that, for many years now, sociology had been taught in universities on the continent and in the University of Chicago; to which the opposition replied with classic authenticity, “The fact that sociology is being taught in universities on the Continent and in the University of Chicago is no argument as to why it should be taught in Oxford University. The only question at issue is, “Is sociology a fit subject to he taught in a university?” My heart instantly warmed toward that Oxford establishment. I was ready to admit that Oxford University belonged in the tradition of the University of Chicago as a first-class educational institution. The élan of authenticity was there! But as readily I recognized, too, that this clearly gave evidence that authenticity is not the privileged possession, either of the adventurous or the conservative mind. And when it is made a fetish in either case, authenticity is but another sacred cow that can obstruct creativity, even when it is cherished in the name of the creative spirit.

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II. But now to shift the direction of our reflections: the new University of Chicago was in the business of launching new kinds of study and inquiry. And the Divinity School shared in this venture. What loomed as its distinctive thrust at this time was its concern to advance the critical study of the Bible and of Christian history. In this country at the turn of the century, the critical study of the Bible was never a purely intellectual or academic concern; it was more like a moral crusade. The men who fashioned Divinity School education at Chicago during this time, a number of them from New England, had come from homes and churches where piety had been faithfully and zealously practiced, and where the critical mind in religion was suspect. To a man the younger group of this Chicago School were first-generation modernists. Some of them had awakened to the critical study of the Bible and of Christianity only after leaving seminary. This had been true of Shailer Mathews. In a number of instances this awakening to critical inquiry in religion had come about through a year or two of study in a European university. Prior to the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the critical movement in religious thought, which had reached its summit in Schleiermacher by the middle of the nineteenth century, and which was to have a singularly influential effect through the Ritschlian theology, had affected religious thought in America only slightly. Thus in going to Europe for study during this pre-critical period of our religious history, students and young instructors from our colleges and seminaries in America often found themselves caught up in an exciting new kind of theological study under Ritschlian professors such as Adolf von Harnack and Wilhelm Hermann. Shailer Mathews’ year of study abroad turned out somewhat differently; for he did not study theology or philosophy. His interest was in history and political economy. Although he was a student in the University of Berlin where Harnack was lecturing, Mathews did not attend Harnack’s classes, or concern himself at the time with his theology. Mathews and Harnack were later to become good friends; and when I visited one of Harnack’s classes in Berlin in the winter of 1928 and brought Mathews’ greetings to him, Professor Harnack, grasping my garbled German only partially, cried out, “Herr Professor Shailer Mathews ist hier?” The anti-climax came when I had to tell him, “Nein, Ich bin hier” and that I only brought, him greetings from Shailer Mathews. What Mathews found in his study abroad was more in the tradition of a documentary study focused upon remote and restricted areas of medieval history which contributed only to an already massive accumulation of antiquarian knowledge. Even so, Mathews was to get a publication out of it, his first book, in fact, entitled, Select Medieval

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Documents, published in 1891. Study abroad thus seems to have affected young scholars of this period variously, inspiring some to emulate what they had encountered there, and impelling others to lose interest in the mode of study offered there. As I read the life-histories of Chicago faculty of that time, they appear first to have been enamored of what they found in European religious scholarship, and then to have been disillusioned with it; or at least impelled to intrude their own reconception of it and even to project a distinctive emphasis of their own. In the main, then, I would say that these young scholars of the early Chicago School either abandoned what they had begun in Europe, or turned what they had acquired as a disciplined mode of study to contemporary ends within an idiom native to the American experience. Thus Modernism prevailed in their method of thought; and the kind of settlement they made with history and with historical study could be viewed as a departure from much of the European mode of historicism. The thrust of their inquiry was always toward contemporary issues of faith. Their analysis of historical developments, in fact, were viewed by them as prolegomenal to understanding why modern persons must come to terms with the verities of the faith in their own way, within their own imagery and sensibilities of thought. In the Chicago School this departure was not always explicit; and the romance of historical inquiry relating to the Bible and to early Christianity so heightened the mood of theological study that one could readily be misled into thinking that they were really declaring that history is the thing. But to do so would be to misread their method as well as their intention. On the other hand, it must be said with equal emphasis that historical study, whatever its motivation, was indispensable to understanding the thrust of the modernist’s faith. Once the zest for critical inquiry in religion had been acquired by these young scholars who were to become the architects of the early Chicago School, it became a passion and a cause as intense in its mission as piety and moralism under an earlier Protestantism had ever been. One might even argue that modernism carried over the single-minded zeal of a moralistic piety, transposed to the critical life. These modernists were missionaries on the frontier of an uncritical Bible Belt, an area that extended at least as far north as the Canadian border and south to the Gulf of Mexico; as far East as the Ohio Valley and westward to the Pacific coast. Church people and editors of religious journals of that time who these zealous Knights of Higher Criticism grossly misrepresented them. They saw them as being hostile to Scripture, bent on despoiling it. In the eyes of these Chicago crusaders for criticism, nothing could have been farther

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from the truth. The critical study of the Bible had released them from their earlier hostility to Scripture in the form in which their pietistic forbears had conveyed it to them. Criticism had returned the Bible to them as a living book. I am not speaking now wholly as one giving a second-hand report. I am speaking out of reminiscences of my own; for I was one who literally left the classrooms of Shirley Jackson Case and Edgar Goodspeed transported, having recovered through critical inquiry what had been lost to me through an overweening piety of earlier days. In this I was simply emulating, possibly to a more elated degree, what these critical scholars themselves had experienced in their earlier years. The published writings of the early Chicago School reflect this crusading spirit, some of them actually being in the form of tracts that could be read easily and readily. Many of the books written by the Divinity School faculty of Chicago and published by the University of Chicago Press between the years 1900 and 1930 were in the form of handbooks for church study groups, colleges, and other lay readers who might benefit from acquaintance with the critical approach to Christian faith and history. Through The American Institute of Sacred Literature, which President Harper had founded while on the Yale University faculty and brought to Chicago when he became its president, hundreds of thousands of pamphlets and special studies were distributed throughout the country. The professors of this early Chicago School were literally a peripatetic faculty along with their resident work in the university. This did not always work out as well as President Harper and Dean Mathews had hoped. The chief offender in this respect was the loveable, yet unpredictable George Burman Foster. Harvey Arnold has made a special study of Foster’s sorties into Iowa and other Midwestern communities, and has some delicious tales to tell about them. Even before the publication of Foster’s first major work, The Finality of the Christian Religion in 1906, and the public uprising among the Baptists following that event, Foster had become something of a notorious character among the churches. As a consequence, his appearance as a public speaker was generally awaited either with apprehension or with a certain, amount of demonic glee, anticipating some dire disclosure that might erupt into controversy. And Foster rarely disappointed. In fact, so frequent did his candid utterances become explosive that even so daring an administrator as William Rainey Harper showed anxiety every time he heard that Foster had left town to make a speech. The annals of the Divinity School history recorded in the Papers of Shailer Mathews in Harper Library at the University of Chicago make fascinating reading

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today in what they convey of these two forthright and critically minded educators, William Rainey Harper and Shailer Mathews in conference, apprehensively asking each: other, “What will he say next?” And the sequel always followed, “What can we do about it?” So the clay feet of the establishment were not wholly absent even among these enterprising advocates of the critical life. In their defense it must be said that Foster’s candor bordered on the naive; though a naiveté that belongs only to the pure in heart. For all the furor and disruption that Foster’s sallies into print and public address evoked, President Harper stood by him and protected him against the more cautious of the university community who would have preferred to see Foster more than thirty years later, voice his candor under other auspices. And Shailer Mathews was to write in his autobiography, New Faiths For Old, “Professor Foster was one of the noblest and bravest souls I ever knew.” (p.69) There follows in the next paragraph however; interesting strictures upon the way Professor Foster thought and expressed himself: Professor Foster was a good representative of the movement in thought which was increasingly removed from the perception that Christianity is a religious movement rather than merely a system of truths. The importance of non-church-going religious philosophers is great but their influence is indirect if not negligible so far as operative Christianity is concerned. They find themselves increasingly out of sympathy with Christian groups and tend to dissociate themselves from organized religious work. The choice between such an attitude and that of a continued participation in organized church life sooner or later has to be made. (69–70)

Within the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, Shailer Mathews was the spear-head of this crusade to bring the critical spirit of inquiry to the churches and to people of the outlying communities, much as William Rainey Harper had been before him. When I joined the faculty of Central College in Fayette, Missouri in 1929, I was regaled with stories by Methodist ministers and presiding elders about Shailer Mathews, who lived on in their memory as “the man who had lifted their intellectual sights in the study of the Bible and Christian history.” Then they would relate stores about Shailer Mathews sitting on a cracker barrel in an apple orchard in Moberly, Fulton, or Fayette, talking to them about the historical method in theology. Mathews makes mention of these occasions in his autobiography, and then adds: Thanks to the liberal attitude of the faculty of the School of Theology… of Vanderbilt University, there was a considerable group of ministers in

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As I listened to these many stories about Shailer Mathews sitting on a cracker barrel in the apple orchards of Missouri, my mind flashed back to my student days in Chicago. I knew that Mathews had been missing classes in the Divinity School, and barely making others, especially on Monday morning. His travels of course, did not always take him into Missouri or into the Southland. During the summer months, while teaching a full schedule of courses in the Divinity School and presiding as Dean, he would commute week-ends to Chautauqua, New York where he was Director of the Summer Institute and member of its summer faculty. This role he had assumed along with his work in Chicago for nearly a quarter of a century. The Divinity School of the University of Chicago under Shailer Mathews was, indeed, an enterprise of many mansions. The surprise in all this is that, with so extended an investment of energy, there was any time at all for serious, probing work within the several disciplines. In an impatient mood on one occasion, having been asked whether he had read a certain book, Mathews replied curtly, “We don’t read books, we write them.” There was as much truth as impatience in this retort; for on looking at the output of critical articles in the various journals, some of which the Chicago faculty itself edited, the steady outpouring of books by members of books by members of this Chicago School, in the midst of their ongoing crusade in extending the critical spirit in religion, this retort appears simply to be a statement of fact, though a fact that expresses a half truth. III. But now, finally, to speak more directly of the Chicago School as a theological movement. Harvey Arnold, in his sprightly and fascinating survey of the Chicago School, Near The Edge of Battle (1966), dates the rise of the Chicago School from the publication of George Burman Foster’s book, The Finality of the Christian Religion in 1906. He thus finds Foster to be the primal source of the Chicago School. I, on the other hand, tend to see Shailer Mathews and Shirley Jackson Case as the prime movers in this early Chicago School, and I see Foster as one who had trouble relating to this pragmatic mode of inquiry, and who, when he did, moved as readily beyond, or at least away, from it in response to the haunting Nietzschean cry, “God is dead!” which led him to embrace humanism. This difference in judgment concerning the origins of the Chicago School may be clarified by noting that we are using the terms

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“Chicago School” somewhat differently. Arnold as historian sees the rise of the Chicago School in terms of its becoming a public event; which it did following the controversy over Foster’s first book in 1906. I have been more concerned with the school’s own conception of itself, and to review theological developments more internally as an evolving method of critical study within the faculty. In this context, Shailer Mathews and Shirley Jackson Case were early key figures. The socio-historical method of interpreting Christian history and the rise of Christian doctrine was pre-eminently an environmental approach to religious thought. Back of this method, however, one may see the influence of the developmental principle which emerged among eighteenth century Romanticist liberals in their shift from a concern with the structural description of static Being to a preoccupation with the possibilities of Becoming. For Romanticist liberals, however, the notion of becoming had tended to be viewed along individualistic lines. Some chose to follow the Greek pattern of origins and development, implying the fruition or fulfillment of inherent possibilities indigenous to the individuality of a person. This appears to have been the preference of Schleiermacher and that of Hermann LoTzu. Others chose what C. C. J. Webb has spoken of as the Latin mode, namely, the act of winning or achieving individuality through the dialectic of social encounter, the mode preferred and expounded by Hegel. The Chicago School appropriated something from each of these conceptions of development, though I would say that the fusing of these notions with the environmental theory is more apparent in Mathews than in Case. Mathews always held out for the persisting of some inherent legacy of the individual essence, even as he argued for the shaping of Christian peoples’ thought and belief through their social encounters. Case, on the other hand, was content with being an out and out environmentalist. In the last analysis, however, both Mathews and Case, and other Chicago scholars along with them, were to derive more stimulus from the Darwinian conception of evolution and its pragmatic adaptation through cultural anthropology and social psychology in understanding social and intellectual change than from earlier liberal theories of development. The method of the Chicago School, then, in seeking to understand the rise of religious ideas and beliefs, moved from the social context in which the group-faith had originated, and to understand their corporate expressions of faith as speaking out of that formative context. Mathews made much of the fact that theological interpretation within this method must address itself to the phenomenon of the group in its response to “felt tensions” as they moved out of one social environment into another.

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Individual idiosyncrasies in Christian thought, especially those of lone philosophers who stood apart from the Christian community, were not to be taken as seriously as being formative of Christian thought as churchmen and theologians who participated in the deliberations of the Councils, where critical decisions for the Christian community were made, decisions which gave rise to the formulation of Christian doctrines. Mathews was an avowed churchman. If one misses this point, one misses the baseline from which his theological analysis of Christian history proceeds. Out of the deliberations of church councils, in response to these felt tensions consequent upon encountering the demands of a new social mind, the deliberations of church councils followed. The modernist’s concern with history, then, must be seen as being, in large measure, instrumental. That is, it was a way of looking into the past in order to understand the process of religion or of Christianity as it unfolded through a study of environmental influences, and of the responses of particular groups of Christians to those influences. From the outset the evolutionary imagery of thought and custom dominated the analysis. The disciplines drawn upon for pursuing this mode of study were principally cultural anthropology, sociology and social psychology. The approach here implied a functional way of understanding religious ideas and doctrines; and thus the focus of inquiry was always on the way specific ideas or doctrines arose in response to “felt-tensions” in belief, precipitated by the changing environment of Christian groups. This was as much a study of the social process as of religious ideas or doctrines themselves. Doctrines, for the Chicago School, were but for a season. They were simply the formulations of a particular social mind in response to specifically felt tensions in belief. What survived amidst the changing periods of history, and amidst the changing idioms of thought and speech, according to Mathews, was the Christian community’s loyalty to Jesus. If there is one unifying Christian response holding together varying periods of Christian history in Mathews’ thought, it is this persisting expression of loyalty to Jesus. As depicted by Mathews, Jesus’ creative response to his environment, and what that implied for the fulfilling of personal existence, was what evinced loyalty to him; though Mathews was quick to acknowledge that this was not the way earlier generations of Christians had expressed or accounted for the supremacy of Jesus. Within each distinctive period of the Christian movement, Christians had their own characteristic way of expressing this supremacy. However they worded or justified it, this continuing loyalty to Jesus, Mathews contended, and what it implied as

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discernment of a quality of response in him to what was ultimately commanding, was what had persisted as being expressive of a continuing Christian mind. Gerald Birney Smith, who in many ways concurred with the general thrust of the socio-historical method, often recoiled from the way Mathews used it in restating the Christian faith for contemporary man. Thus, when Mathews asked him to look over the manuscript of his book, A Faith For Modernism, Smith’s opening comment was, “As a starter, I would suggest changing the title to The Faith of a Modernist.” But Shailer Mathews was not in the business of writing his own credo; he was speaking for a social movement, for the people of our time who call themselves Christians. Smith also objected to the way Mathews employed the phrase “loyalty to Jesus” for much the same reason that he had objected as early as 1908 to his appealing to “loyalty to the gospel.” At that time, commenting upon a manuscript which Mathews had sent to him, he wrote: My dear Mr. Mathews: I have read your article with great interest, but my feeling is that its publication at this time would not help the cause and that for two reasons. One is that the surest way to establish the principle of religious liberty is to practice it rather than to be all the time discussing it. The second, which is, of course, a purely personal consideration, is my feeling that the article contains rather more equivocation than is desirable, By that I mean specifically that you substituted for the perfectly definite historical ideal of the authority of the New Testament your undefined and indefinite conception of loyalty to the gospel. If the older position of New Testament authority is to be abandoned at all, it seems to me it should be done frankly and scholarly and not by incidentally substituting a new phrase with a different content in the old formula. At any rate I see no pressing need for the publication of the article just now. It is a very interesting article, however, and I thank: you for the privilege of reading it. Yours very truly, Gerald B. Smith

So you see, the gospel according to Mathews was not in all respects the accepted Word of the Chicago School. And Professor Smith was not the only one among the faculty and students to counter Mathews on various occasions. In this connection I recall a young German scholar who came to the University of Chicago the year I enrolled as a student in 1925. A vivacious, spirited, and confident young theologian in the tradition of Harnack and Troeltsch, he was like a brisk breeze even in that windy city of Chicago. Do I need to tell you his

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name? Wilhelm Pauck was thoroughly at home in the University of Chicago from the moment he arrived in 1925, so it seemed to some of us. And he was received into the university community with a readiness that acknowledged him to be akin to its spirit. But he had his differences too. His differences with Shailer Mathews and his audacity in expressing them were the talk of our dormitory. I have no way of knowing precisely how this was regarded among the faculty at the time, other than the fact that, within a year, Pauck was appointed to the faculty of The Chicago Theological Seminary, then affiliated with the Divinity School. IV. I have spoken of the socio-historical method as being essentially a sociological approach to historical meanings in theology, accompanied by an evolutionary view of society and the church. While this in the main is true, there is implied in this approach a philosophical orientation that is distinctive of the Chicago School. Because of Mathews’ frequent strictures against intruding philosophy into discussions of the development of Christian doctrine, the relation of this method to philosophy has often been misconstrued. Actually, the method of inquiry into the growth of religious ideas as practiced by the Chicago School subtly and often not sensibly presupposes the philosophical orientation of pragmatism with its functional view of truth and ideas. This functional view of truth, in turn, presupposed a cosmic view of reality that did not lend itself to analysis or to further inquiry into the nature of that cosmic background and support of the life of man. One simply assumed it on evolutionary grounds, and, in Mathews’ words, “set up relations with it.” That one could justify using the term “God” to connote this cosmic support of human values, most of the Chicago theologians frankly assumed. G. B. Foster was the first among them to relinquish belief in God and to declare himself a religious humanist. A. Eustace Haydon, Foster’s successor also declared himself a humanist, though he adhered as strongly as did Mathews and Ames as well as G. B. Smith to the cosmic support of human values. Mathews and. Ames embraced what they called a conceptual theism, by which they meant the use of the word “God” as a summary concept to connote “the personality-producing activities in the universe” (Mathews), or “the social and cosmic reality idealized” (Ames). G. B. Smith, while he did not employ the language of either Mathews or Ames nevertheless affirmed a theistic position, believing that humanism implied an unnecessarily negative reading of the cosmic background. During the year 1927, two years before his death, G. B. Smith began moving in a direction in which more direct inquiry into the cosmic support of human values was sought. This implied an advance beyond the

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conceptual theism of Mathews and Ames, though one could not say explicitly that it meant a break with their method in all respects. G. B. Smith’s concern to bring Wieman to Chicago arose from his interest in what Wieman had proposed in some articles in The Journal of Religion in 1925 toward developing what Wieman called “a science of God,” a thesis he was to enlarge upon in his first book, Religious Experience in Scientific Method (1926). Wieman’s concern to specify the behavior or structure within experience that was creative and supportive of human values was considered by Ames to be a relapse into a dubious mode of religious thinking comparable to the way religious people, prior to the sophistication of modern psychology, presumed to be able to locate the soul in a specific organ of the body. Mathews was not that sure about it. At times he thought he and Wieman were concerned with saying the same thing. In retrospect, however, it is clear that their methods were not really compatible. Wieman was concerned with a perceptual reality that was immediately experienced; while Mathews could no more pursue that line of inquiry than could Ames. While Gerald Birney Smith was attracted to Wieman’s proposal of “a science of God,” exploring in more precise terms what it is in the cosmic environment that supports human values, he was to recoil from modeling this religious quest after the procedures in science. Smith, for a number of years, had attended to the procedures of the sciences in the hope of finding a way of incorporating their disciplined form of inquiry for pursuing this cosmic quest in behalf of the religious response. Toward the end of his life, however, he came to the conclusion that the arts held more promise for such an inquiry than the sciences. In one of the very last pieces of writing to come from his pen, Gerald Birney Smith wrote: Speaking as a protestant, believing as I do in the importance of my Protestant heritage, I feel that what is supremely needed, is a group of scholars who know the field and the meaning of the personal emotions and loyalties involved in modern religion as well as the biblical scholars know their field, and who will bring to self-consciousness the socially shared aspirations of those who have burned the bridges of prescientific theology behind them, and who want the meaning of religious living in the modern world to receive its due literary and aesthetic expression… In the last analysis, religion is an art rather than a science. (Religious Education XXIII, 1927: pp. 308–10).

It is easier now than it was then to note the sharp distinctions between the various strands of theological thinking that were developing in the Divinity School in Chicago at the close of the twenties. My own confidence in the socio-historical method, which I had acquired largely in

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the mid-twenties, tended to persist in certain respects even as we were exploring in G. B. Smith’s seminars some of the newer philosophical interpretations that were then gaining attention, centering in emergent evolution and organismic thought. Our acquaintance with the organismic movement of thought in England preceded our interest in Whitehead. In fact we studied Bergson, and the emergent evolutionists, including S. Alexander, without, reading or studying Whitehead. It was not until Wieman joined the faculty of the Divinity School in 1927 that we were to turn, to Whitehead’s thought, and that occurred in a class on the Philosophy of Theism under Wieman, in which we studied sections of Hocking’s, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, and, what was then viewed as a highly provocative work and borderline work, Whitehead’s, Religion in the Making. With the changes in Gerald Birney Smith’s perspective that was then looming with more and more emphasis and the excitement of Wieman’s perspective along with his introduction of Whitehead’s fresh and inquiring though baffling philosophy of organism, as we then called it, the earlier lure of Modernism, though not rejected or dispelled, was in abeyance while we babbled the new adventure of ideas. The years following Wieman’s coming to the faculty of the Divinity School clearly marked a flurry of transition at Chicago. I was aware that I was being lured into a new and exciting area of cosmic inquiry, prompted by the organismic and emergent thinking of British philosophers, and now given a terse but summary rendition in Whitehead’s Religion in the Making. Gerald Birney Smith was the mediating voice between the era of the Chicago School that had dominated Divinity School thinking for more than a quarter of a century, and the mode of re-religious inquiry that was then emerging. A wide range of resources from other disciplines were now referenced ranging from the new physics, Gestalt psychology along with depth psychology, developments toward a new cosmology stemming from Bergson’s Creative Evolution and William James’ radical empiricism in correlation with emergent theories of evolution, these resources impelled a new summary perspective upon human life. This new perspective had the effect of replacing the synthesis of positivism, and of challenging the predominantly pragmatic world view that hitherto had shaped and even directed religious inquiry, not only at Chicago, but in many centers of university thought in America. This was a strange, new world of thought for many of the faculty of the Divinity School at Chicago, as it was for most other centers of theological inquiry. Henry Nelson Wieman’s uniqueness at this point of theological history in America arose from the fact that he was among the barest minority among

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philosophical and religious thinkers, and, to my knowledge, the only one among religious thinkers in America, who appeared to have assimilated the revolution in fundamental notions implicit in these new phases of intellectual inquiry. A decade or more later works by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss were to appear, adding impressively to the literature in philosophical theology and metaphysics, incorporating this new complex of resources. To have this kind of deluge of new insight concerning modes of apprehending the realities of faith just as one was concluding his academic training leading to the doctorate was enough to render one permanently a divided self. Most of my fellow students in the Divinity School at that time seemed to have a clearer mind about these things than I was able to muster. Some of them opted decisively for carrying forward the sociohistorical method including Mathews’ version of modernism. Others promptly relinquished all adherence to the early Chicago School in an allout determination to speak more consistently and effectively within the new idiom of religious language that Wieman had introduced. Others like John Knox seemed to be saying, “A curse on all your houses,” and for reasons which I was later to share! In the wings, ready to rush out simultaneously to confound and to break through this seemingly hopeless impasse, were the religious humanists among us. To say they were in the wings is to over-state their sense of decorum. More often they were in the center of Swift Common Room expounding their cause, or in one of our rooms in Goodspeed Hall, backing us up against the wall, trying to press upon us the stupidity of our sense of dilemma in this maze of options, declaring with an eloquence that at times reached the intensity of bombast, the need for asserting the obvious: namely that to the clear-headed, unencumbered liberal mind, the logic of liberalism, modernism, and even Wiemanism, led to humanism. Like William James, whom I have often acknowledged to be my intellectual mentor, I have had a congenital suspicion of reductionism, and even of clarity, especially when it was put forth as a ready “dispellant” (my own word) of a creative ferment of thought. So I remained unconvinced by the religious humanists, though I continued to argue with them for a decade or more after leaving Chicago; and was in fact, often identified with them. Shortly after I had written Modern Man’s Worship (1934), Douglas Clyde Macintosh, the Yale theologian, speaking at a conference of ministers in Missouri not far from Fayette where I was teaching, remarked in an offhand comment illustrating a point, said, “If you want to see a humanist trying to be religious, read Bernard E. Meland’s new book, Modern Man’s Worship. Fine thing! I was already

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sitting on a time-bomb in Central College while members of the establishment weighed the pros and cons as to whether my ambiguous language spelled for or against the Christian faith. But to return to the Chicago School of the nineteen twenties and earlier: What John Knox had detected in our student days, I was to take with greater seriousness a few years later following a year of study in. Germany, namely, that for all its clarity and facility of interpretation, the pragmatic approach to meaning and the restricted empirical mode of inquiry it employed when addressing historical developments in thought and culture, left much that is relevant to religious inquiry uncalculated if not unnoted. And the modernist temper of mind, centered as it was in its constructive effort upon social reform as a moral crusade, had little concern, if any, with issues of thought or sensibility that go deeper than these immediate, pragmatic issues. The secular theologies of our time, some of which appear to be effecting a return to that earlier pragmatic expression of the Christian ethos, simulate as well the reductionism of that pragmatic, modernist method. Twenty-years after I had finished my work as a student in The Divinity School at Chicago and having by then become a member of the Divinity School faculty, I wrote the following words in an article published- in The Journal of Religion, reflecting upon the Modernism I had known under the Chicago School: Modernism sought clarity of meaning in religion above everything else. In pursuing this effort …it misconstrued the nature of the religious response at its deepest levels dealing with it either as a moralistic or ethical attitude or as an intellectual decision in value… This restricted concern led to defining the bounds of religion within the scope of social experience. There were many reasons for this restrictiveness. In part, it was due to the exceedingly practical …inclinations of those to whom modernism appealed. They were reasonable men. They sought deliverance from extremes in all its forms. Now moderation is a virtue when efficiency and security are all that are sought. It may become a vice of the most arrogant sort when the life of the imagination is at stake. Modernism ranks with scribism and literal Protestant orthodoxy in its paucity of imagination. Its achievements in critical scholarship are so great, and the practical accomplishments of its socially minded efforts are of-such magnitude, that one can never speak lightly of it or be without gratitude for it. Yet, for all its achievements in the liberation of religion from authoritarianism and superstition, the impact of modernism upon the religious spirit has been impoverishing to a degree that can hardly be adequately estimated. The nature of that impoverishment has been many-sided. It is not easy to gather in all the facets; and we become arbitrary in speaking of certain aspects rather than of others; but I select three because of their importance

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to religious faith and to the human spirit. They are: 1) the lack of emotional intensity; 2) the paucity of appreciative awareness; and 3) the neglect of the tragic sense. Perhaps it is inaccurate to say that modernism neglected the tragic sense of life; it is rather that tragedy did not come into its purview in the same stark way that it now looms before us. Modernism was linear in its direction of thought. Its analyses ran in a straight line—attentive to origins, process, historical outcomes, looking neither above nor below the visible dimensions of experience. Its loss of emotional intensity and appreciative awareness rendered it insensitive to meanings of wide emotional range. It was, in fact, fortified against the intrusion of strong feeling of whatever character or source. This must be acknowledged; but it was insulated against the tragic sense for more positive reasons. Modernism shared with the business mind and the current preoccupation with wellbeing a stubborn optimism that brooked no traffic with pessimism. This was not an intellectual preference; it was a temperamental one. It was bolstered by intellectual premises, however, and could be defended by intellectual arguments. For the modernist could appeal to time and history, saying the world is very old; the span of time that lies ahead is vast indeed. Time measured by these few fragile years that we may enjoy or lament is all too brief to be made the final measure of life itself or even a fair indication of its end. Crises will pass. Perplexities will be resolved. The tensions we now feel will be relaxed by the passage of time itself. Time is a healing force that cleanses life of its impurities and rids it of ignorance and pain. Besides, if one believed in evolution, and in the perspective it provided, time was a dynamic force that ascended with the years, approaching the “far-off, divine event toward which all creation moves.” And if one believed in God and in the goodness inherent in our own natures, the ultimate consequence of whatever wears the face of crisis would logically be the victory of the good. However remote this ultimate consequence might be, one could participate in its outcome now by contributing to its coming. Tragedy in an outlook like that was unreal. To dwell upon it, or even to intrude it as an absorbing issue, was, as John Dewey expressed it, “indecent.” (Vol. XXVII, No. 4, October 1947).

These are hard words as I read them now. They are not, I think, disproportionate nor basically unsympathetic; nor are they alien to the Chicago School itself. For to understand the role and relationship of men like George Burman Foster and Gerald Birney Smith to this school and its period, one would have to see them as undercurrents of anguish and discontent within this period of theological history, expressive often of the very criticisms I have offered. They were to the Chicago School what Feuerbach, Marx, and Kierkegaard were to the Hegelian movement in a time when they shared in that orientation of thought; though, as it was to be seen later, as undercurrents of dissolution.

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The legacy of the Chicago School that is enduring, then, is not to be found in the detailed efforts of Shailer Mathews to construct a modernist theology; nor in Shirley Jackson Case’s eloquent depiction of the social environment of early Christianity.

Some Autobiographical Reflections Bearing on Works Preceding Faith and Culture183 When I was invited to come to Union Theological Seminary as a Visiting Professor for a year, Professor Williams suggested that I offer one seminar on my own thought. If you know professors, you will understand that, for some of us, that is what we do most naturally whether it is suggested or not. So I am bold to say that this seminar on Faith and Culture is to be a kind of odyssey through Meland’s thought. I tried to temper the egoism of the venture by prefacing this course with a seminar on Sources of Process Thought; so, in a way, what we shall undertake in this seminar is somewhat of a footnote reference or addendum to that wider inquiry in which some of you participated last semester. I have invited you to look at my theology as expressed in Faith and Culture and in The Realities of Faith as being one serious option within the modes of thought and inquiry which were explored last semester; or, more precisely, one theological expression within that process mode of inquiry. Looking at one man’s thought, however, may not turn out to be the simple task it first appears to be. Although I have specified two of my books as constituting the basic reading for this seminar, along with some additional papers and essays, including Chapters IV and V of The Secularization of Modern Cultures, I am not sure that plunging into these two works and supplementary essays at the outset would be the most fruitful way of getting into the theological point of view and procedure being presented. Each of these two basic works tells its own story, and offers, I would hope, an intelligible proposal concerning issues bearing upon Christian faith, and hopefully, upon other faiths as well, within a post-liberal perspective. Yet these later writings presuppose a considerable amount of groping and agonizing of thought expressed in previous writings. I invite you today to look at some of these earlier efforts in which a more uncertain groping is in evidence, and in which theses more readily embraced in these later works were but in the making; or only possible alternatives to other ways of pursuing the inquiry. I should remark by way of emphasizing the relevance of one’s earlier efforts, that, along with my empirical realism within the tradition of process thought, I have come to share in the stance assumed by scientists such as Michael Polanyi and the phenomenologist philosopher Merleau-Ponty, the former in his insistence upon the significance of personal knowledge, the latter in his way of stating the phenomenon of intentionality, both of which make evident how

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much the past ordering of experience shapes and informs one’s present formulation of ideas and propositions. The temptation of many who write or who create within other media, however, on reaching maturity is to suppress earlier efforts as being embarrassing reminders of immature sallies into intellectual or aesthetic expression. Thus Santayana, when he undertook his mature work on Realms of Being, found his earlier widely read series on The Life of the Mind embarrassing, if not obstructive, to his mature efforts. And Henry Nelson Wieman, once he had formulated the notion of creative interchange in his later writings as being a definitive expression of value, openly repudiated his early writings. I have been tempted to do the same thing; for there is something of a hiatus or shift between my writings published during the nineteen thirties and early forties and those published after nineteen forty-five. Professor Williams has pointed out that The Reawakening of Christian Faith (1949) can be designated the water-shed initiating a line of inquiry that was to come to fruition in Faith and Culture (1953) and in The Realities of Faith (1962). Clear intimations of that shift, however, had appeared in Seeds of Redemption, lectures delivered in 1945–56, but published in 1947. Yet Williams is right in identifying the 1949 publication as being a more explicit shift in theological stance, presaging what was to appear in later writings. What surprised me in Williams’ comments, however, was his saying the Modern Man’s Worship (1934), my first book, was of apiece with the ethos of thought and feeling that now informs my thought. I had retained sentimental feelings about Modern Man’s Worship, not only because of its being my first book, but because it was a kind of first-hand report of the spiritual odyssey through which I had gone while studying at the University of Marburg, Germany in 1928–29, reflecting upon the American scene and upon my theological work as a student in The Divinity School of The University of Chicago in juxtaposition with what I was then experiencing sitting in Rudolf Otto’s class and attending to reforms in worship being initiated by Otto as well as by Friedrich Heiler. In an autobiographical essay written some years ago I wrote: I lived in a dormitory in Marburg high on the Schoss hill, overlooking the River Lahn and the village of Marburg that nestled below. I was far enough away from America to see it clearly. You have no idea how clearly the American skyline looms from that hill in Marburg. You who are now visitors from other lands studying in New York will know of what I was speaking. Modern Man’s Worship was expressive of a new synthesis of feeling and discernment that had taken place in me as a result of my first

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encounter with the two cultures of the West, so intimately and historically related, yet so radically at odds with one another in basic apprehensions, sensibilities, and style of thinking. I refer here not to “the two cultures” noted by C. P. Snow, but to the two cultures represented on the one hand by a mature sense of history and past valuations as expressed in the phrase “the genteel tradition” commonly associated with the prevailing scholarly mode of thought in Western Europe and America’s eastern seaboard from the bay region of Massachusetts to Virginia and the Carolinas, and, on the other hand, that which has been expressive of the Western movement in the American experience, simulating the risk of adventure and innovation in scholarly thought and inquiry. In the latter, as Lewis Mumford observed in The Golden Day, one comes upon a style of life and thought less beholden to historical precedent and nurture than to the impulse to cope with the functional needs or demands of thought. It is no accident that the dominant centers of pragmatic inquiry have been mid-western in origin and influence; although when John Dewey, after having created the school of philosophical pragmatism at The University of Chicago, transferred to Columbia University, that distinction became blurred. But to return to Modern Man’s Worship, I came to see, as a result of Professor Williams’ reminder, that my attachment to Modern Man’s Worship was not simply a matter of sentiment or nostalgia; but followed from something deeply structural and durable out of experiencing the interplay of these contrasting cultural modes and motifs. The lure of “the perilous open” is vividly present in its pages; yet with alluring overtones of an objective mood that reaffirmed the historical dimension of experience in the aesthetic mode. What was implicit in this interplay of contrasting cultural modes in that early work emerged in more explicit form in The Reawakening of Christian Faith as a reaffirmation of Christian faith in the context of a creative working throughout the whole of nature and as being a resource of redemptive energy within the experiences of human living. The orientation of Modern Man’s Worship was unashamedly mystical in tone even as it remained expressive of an empirical method. Undoubtedly I had acquired some of the elan of Otto’s numinous spirit, which did not make matters easy for one steeped in the empirical lore of the early Chicago School. Apparently I had conveyed something of my quandary to Shailer Mathews, Dean of The Divinity School in Chicago; for I have a letter from him written to me while I was in Marburg. Said Mathews: “I have great admiration for Professor Otto. I have spoken with him many times on visits abroad; but he sees theology quite differently than we do.” As I read Mathews’ words I knew that my approach to theology had

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become hopelessly confounded by my response as a Chicago empiricist to the sensus numinis in Otto’s thought. Professor Henry Nelson Wieman, too, questioned the wisdom of my becoming involved in Otto’s thought; for, while Wieman, himself, was impelled at that time by a mysticism of his own making, he was intensely concerned that mysticism should not get out-of-hand, and thus tended to veer from it in deference to do more controlled methods of inquiry. Gerald Birney Smith, on the other hand, who was my principal mentor in my doctoral studies at Chicago, had encouraged me to attend Otto’s course and to become personally acquainted with him. This may have been related to transitions that were then occurring in Professor Smith’s own theological orientation. For in the late twenties he appeared to be veering toward a mystical naturalism for which art forms and symbols seemed to offer promise for a kind of inquiry that might properly and helpfully supplement or even re-direct scientific inquiry. It should be said that, in writing Modern Man’s Worship, I was often conscious of writing somewhat in G. B. Smith’s behalf (who had died in 1929) as well as my own. And when Wieman and I wrote American Philosophies of Religion in 1936, I placed G. B. Smith and myself under the caption of “Mystical Naturalism.” A second piece of writing which marks a turning point in my theological pilgrimage is an article in Christendom (Vol. I, 1937, pp. 388–399), entitled “Toward A Common Christian Faith.” This article relates a strange experience in which I first discovered that I had more in common with what was then referred to as “Continental Theology,” meaning the dialectical theology of Barth, Brunner, and Tillich, than with the kind of liberalism that was being expressed by West Coast religious liberals at that time. The article reports some of the findings of a Conference of The World Student Christian Movement which took place in the Bay Area in 1936. In the theological section of the Conference the attempt was made to draw up a theological statement that would be expressive of the proceedings of the entire Conference. The Conference membership embraced a wide range of theological opinion, though the sharpest divergence was that between those who had been influenced by Barth, Brunner, or Tillich and the religious liberals of the West Coast. This was one of the most painful experiences of theological deliberation I have ever endured. For days we discussed theological issues, seemingly with no profit at all. Yet it was decided that we were to bring to the Conference as a whole at its closing session a theological statement of affirmation that would be expressive of all the points of view represented at the conference. Apparently because of my remarkable gift at double-talk, my statement was selected by the group as being most expressive of a

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consensus of theological opinion as represented by the diverse groups within the conference. What was most disturbing to me at the time was the discovery that I had so much in common with what was being expressed by Continental theologians who had been influenced by Barth; and so little with West Coast liberals who seemed to be mouthing the same cliches we had argued about in The Divinity School at Chicago a decade or more earlier. I look back upon that period between the publication of Modern Man’s Worship (1934) and the year 1945 when I joined the Divinity School faculty of The University of Chicago as a time of incubation. During that time I wrote more poetry, essays, and articles dealing with religion and nature or religion and culture than with theological themes as such. Much of my teaching in Pomona College, Claremont, California during those years was in the area of The History and Philosophy of Religion; an aspect of my interest that was to have a permanent effect upon my mode of theologizing and upon orientating my thinking toward issues concerned with faith and culture. The period of the United States’ involvement in the Second World War (1943–45), however, was to shift the focus of my religious inquiry from that of understanding “man’s religious outreach” in a general sense, as conceived within a mystical naturalism, to a more immediate and concrete concern with human living and dying as these had come into focus during the war years. And the culmination of these war years with the dropping of bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to be followed by disclosures of the heinous crimes of Buchenwald and other concentration camps in Germany, swiftly reset these concrete concerns of human living and dying in a cultural context in ways that heightened the sense of judgment and guilt throughout the whole of Western experience. Chancellor Hutchins’ famous utterance, “We have five years to ponder the good news of damnation” expressed the mood that had settled upon the university campus on which I was to begin my own career as professor of Constructive Theology in 1945. This mood was to persist as a chastening directive of my own theological reflections throughout the following decade and possibly throughout my theological career. I voiced something of my own summary observation of the theological task in these times in an address to the Student Faculty Conference of 1954, entitled “An Age In Between.” “What this means to me theologically,” I said, “is that we are a generation that has been thrust back on the most elemental level of spiritual need. The sophistications of good and evil which, in other generations, have yielded remarkable discriminations of taste, judgment,

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and discernment in liturgy, religious art, doctrine or ethical sensitivity, not to speak of the cultural arts generally, are really not relevant to our age, if in fact they are even available to us. The need that is paramount by reason of this far-reaching dislocation is for forgiveness and judgment, and in that order. The deeps of our nature cry out for release from inescapable guilt, for acceptance over against the rejection we ourselves impose upon ourselves as human beings.” This, to be sure, was more of a mood that pervaded serious reflection upon the human situation during those years than a directive; yet it shaped my own theological thinking in rather substantive ways, partly, no doubt, because of my own temperament and sense of involvement in the stream of events as they had unfolded in that post-war period; but more specifically because my role was that of interpreting or developing a constructive theology in contrast to the systematic or historical interpretation of doctrine. Theology in that context addressed what we termed “the lived experiences.” And these were charged with the poignancy and urgency of the immediacies that assailed us in those years. I would be misjudging my efforts, however, if I were to seem to write off my years of theological inquiry with its sharpened focus upon these acutely existential concerns as being but a theology for a season. For both the long-range, comprehensive vision of human experience and destiny and this heightened existential concern with immediacies have been in focus, with varying degrees of relevance, to be sure, depending upon the task at hand. And the mode of thought with which I have undertaken to reflect upon two poles of the human situation has been concerned to keep both in focus; either by way of envisioning them as two modes of discourse differentiated, yet requiring one another; or as two ways of envisioning the import of what transpires within the human situation when it is taken with full seriousness and with adequate understanding. When adequately pursued, the process approach to this duo-dimensional character of inquiry in constructive theology requires both the abstractive envisagement which an overview provides as “an adventure of ideas,” and the intuitive, perceptive envisagement of the depth of these lived experiences such as a sense of wonder, awareness, and the appreciative mode of imaginative reflection can elicit or evoke. The former directs the constructive theologian to be attentive to philosophical inquiry as it informs the religious vision of human experience; the latter turns one to the constructive import of myth and the poetic idiom of indirection as expressed in various aesthetic modes of disciplined expression. It is here that one begins to see the relevance of such disciplines as the history of religions and cultural anthropology to the task of constructive

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theology. In my own case I did not come to this judgment by way of pursuing the existential task within constructive theology; for I had become aware of the study of myth and religious symbols as conveyed through the history of religions and cultural anthropology before I undertook the task of constructive theology. And this, for me, was a legacy out of my association with the socio-historical method of the early Chicago School as a student in The Divinity School at Chicago. And this was further stimulated by my study with Rudolf Otto in Marburg, whose concern with the history of religions was accented even more than his pursuit of theology or philosophy of religion. But these were only the initial stimulus; for, as I have noted, in my undergraduate teaching before entering upon the career of teaching and writing in constructive theology, I absorbed myself in the literature cultural anthropology and the history of religions, giving specific attention for extended periods of time to the study of myth and poetry, along with ritual and the imaginative expression of the religious outreach in other aesthetic forms. From the point of view of intentionality, as some phenomenologists present it, these early orientations of one’s thought and psyche have a way of persisting, even when one is consciously attending to quite a different area of problems. One of the ways in which I see my own early orientation persisting is the way the word “culture” keeps appearing in my theological speech. I am more apt to speak of religious cultures than of religions. The word “religion” by itself tends to call attention to the “cultus,” to the doctrinal or organizational aspects of thought and experience, as if their meanings and expressions remained apart from the culture; or to a set of beliefs or doctrines, as if the substance of faith lay in these formulations. The mystery and meaning of faith among any people is a more living reality of experience as lived; a pervasive, psychical reality which, though it can be captured and conveyed abstractly in doctrinal or even philosophical form, cannot be adequately identified with any such formulations of meaning or expression. Within the purview of the historical study of religious faiths, the cultus is always a more rigorously defined, often narrowly defined, expression of the mores, sensibilities, expectations, frustrations, and compensatory responses that have become formative of a culture’s history and character than may be found within the lived experiences of its people. This has generally been interpreted to mean that, within the cultic core of a people, faithfulness and a more sharpened concern for the legacy are exercised within the cultus than throughout the culture at large. It should be observed, however, that , in so far as the cultus renders an abstracting, and often an idealizing version of the legacy, it suffers all the failings and

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defects of vision of an overview: it leaves uncalculated the rigors and realities of the lived experiences. The energies of faith are within the experiences as lived; not in any cultic, philosophical, or institutional overview. II. I have mentioned The Reawakening of Christian Faith as being the watershed of my theological odyssey and Seeds of Redemption as having given intimations of a shift in theological stance that was to give rise to that work and others that followed. In Seeds of Redemption I had already begun to define the theological task in explicitly process terms. The substantive chapter of that work, anticipating later theological developments, is Chapter IV, “The Creative God At Work” in which I advanced in a tentative way, my version of a process theism. The Reawakening of Christian Faith that followed presented formative materials that were to become basic to my theological method. In a rather groping way I undertook to state the importance and the outlines of the mythical structure. I was convinced at that time that the more abstract, conceptual or logical approach to understanding Christian faith by itself was fruitless and could be misleading. Faith, I had concluded, was a deeply psychical expression of the human spirit that had to be understood and assessed in terms other than the purely rational or logical measure, which historically had characterized doctrinal interpretation and subsequent philosophical explications, seeking to go beyond doctrine. I had no sure grasp of this mythical motif on which I had latched. I only knew that what was important in the response to this dimension of faith was more aesthetic than logical—that is, it had more to do with sensibilities of feeling and relationships, with intuitive forms of language than with discursive or abstract thinking. My first major effort in advancing this perspective upon the theological task was Faith and Culture (1953). Some of the more technical discussion of the mode of inquiry and language appropriate to that task appears in Higher Education and The Human Spirit, also published in 1953; especially Chapters V, “The Appreciative Consciousness” and IX, “Religious Sensitivity and Discernment.” Faith and Culture resulted from some strenuous probing in a series of seminars at Chicago, seeking to follow through on the earlier hunch about the mythical structure of faith. Myth had now become an accepted term in theological discourse; although some theologians and philosophers of religion, notably my colleague, Henry Nelson Wieman, decried it as being an evasion of disciplined thinking. Emil Brunner and Reinhold Niebuhr had written about the mythical mode as being a contemporary way of

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taking hold of “the truths of the faith” which eluded discursive thinking, but which were basic to Christian affirmations. I did not find Brunner and Niebuhr altogether convincing; but I did concur with their insistence that myth as a mode of discourse offered dimensions of religious apprehension or awareness which analytical or discursive discourse simply did not attend or even apprehend. I was aware that Bergson’s understanding of intuition had been one of the influences at work in Niebuhr’s use of the word myth; and I was conscious of that influence in my own thought as well; though in my case, it was Bergson’s distinction between conceptual knowledge and intuition in the context of William James’ sense of the More as attending every precisely observed event that stimulated my thinking; though I was not content with simply reiterating their theories. I therefore sought on my own to state a theory of myth that seemed to accord with the historical understanding of religions as well as with the psychical response of modern persons to aspects of their experience which, while defying comprehension, nevertheless influenced, or in subtle ways, shaped their mode of thinking: either in the way of intruding sensibilities into their manner of attending inquiries or in their resistance to them. This concern with the mythical response and with the structure of meaning it conveyed, led me to see the crucial difference between earlier liberal theories of religion, specifically of Christianity, and the ones that were presently pressing themselves upon us. Liberal theologians of that period were intent upon dissociating Christian faith from whatever dissipated or compromised ethical sensitivity. In their zeal to keep a sharpened focus upon that area of concern they often repudiated any imaginative or aesthetic rendering of Christian themes such as might occur in liturgy, literature, or any rendering of themes that employed an evocative use of words. Now the point of their concern is clear; and when one knows the context out of which critical thinking in that era emerged, one can see that their point was well taken at the time. Nevertheless it was a continuing form of Protestant iconoclasm that conditioned the human spirit to be indifferent, even hostile, toward sensitive and elusive dimensions of human experience conveyed through the very relational ground with which the modernists, in their passion for ethics, were concerned. I began to realize at this point that, within my own empirical orientation, I had come to share sensibilities of thought upon Christian doctrine which were sympathetic toward those of Barth, Brunner, Niebuhr and Tillich; thought the facilities of thought with which I pursued its range of problems were utterly different from theirs; hence the implications of what

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I proposed differed markedly. My mode of thinking had been informed and shaped by the radical empirical process tradition of thought; while theirs had incubated within a modified Kantian perspective, chastened and redirected by insights from Kierkegaard and Buber as well as by strands of influence from other Existentialist or Phenomenological writers of recent times. Niebuhr had also been attentive to Bergson’s way of interpreting intuition; and this may have influenced him to formulate the appeal to myth as he did. I came to view our various approaches to these problems as being two different paths circling the same mountain; yet having no point of convergence. Perhaps one can only say that our two paths of inquiry are to different ways of countering Hegelian mentalism in the interest of concreteness, and of becoming acutely aware of the disparity between ultimacy and immediacy; yet fully apprised of their interplay and their inescapable inter-relation within the immediacies of experience. In writing Faith and Culture I thought I saw a way of stating this reconception of Christian faith which sharply distinguished it from historical liberalism; yet did not disavow its sensibilities of thought as radically as did Barth and Niebuhr. That book is thus post-liberal only in the sense that it carries historic liberalism to a new stage of the modern consciousness; and in doing so, corrects or reconceives some of its own limitations of vision. While I am designating aspects of my writing antedating Faith and Culture which throw light on what has been said in that work and in others that follow, I should mention two other references: Chapters IV and V of Higher Education and The Human Spirit; and an article that appeared in The Journal of Religion in April 1953, just before Faith and Culture and Higher Education and the Human Spirit were published, under the title, “Interpreting The Christian Faith Within a Philosophical Framework.” I shall comment first on the two chapters in Higher Education and the Human Spirit, “The Ends of Knowledge” and “The Appreciative Consciousness.”: What I meant to do in these two chapters was to advance beyond the models of the rational consciousness and the moral consciousness stemming from Aristotle and Kant respectively, to what I designated the appreciative consciousness, which I associated with a mode of thinking stemming from the influence of William James, Bergson, and Whitehead. These chapters thus became for me a condensed way of speaking about the theory of knowledge that issues from a process mode of thought. Four our purposes they may serve as a swift way of summarizing the results of last semester’s work on Sources of Process Thought in so far as they focus upon the problem of knowledge. The article, “Interpreting The Christian Faith Within A Philosophical

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Framework” may serve two purposes: 1) to make clear the sense in which I am aware of speaking out of a philosophical orientation, not in the sense simply of employing a philosophical orientation, but of recognizing the philosophical orientation that has become meaningful and persuasive to me in setting the stance from which reflection and inquiry might profitably proceed; and, more importantly, which provides a structure of mind and feeling that forms the depth of my conscious experience, and which thus bring to play upon the assimilations of experience insight, and a kind of brooding upon the problems of faith, which together yield the sustained view. A brief passage from that article may help to illumine this stance further: Philosophy, when it did come to assume a major importance (for me), was like a summit view which came upon me quite accidentally and unexpectedly in these mental wanderings. And, being the philosophy that it was, it seemed to open up shafts of sunlight step by step until the whole, vast pilgrimage of faith stood forth against the horizon with vividness and with a scope that was as wide as the mind’s eye could see. I cannot say, therefore, that I reasoned from a philosophical premise to the Christian faith. Nor can I say that my understanding of faith rose out of the philosophical position I had come to assume. Even less can I say that philosophy now forms the framework of my faith. That seems too artificial, to mechanical, too arbitrary. My philosophical orientation is more in the nature of a structure of mind and feeling which forms the depth of my conscious experience and which brings to play upon the accumulations of experience, insight, and brooding upon the problem of faith the full light of day, the sustained view, because the discrepancies, the broken meanings, the fragments of faith, the hit-and-miss turnings of thought which had no connectedness, no order, no symmetry, could now assume a pattern of relationships. (The Journal of Religion, Vol. XXXIII, No. 2, April 1953, p. 90.) Well, as you can see, it has been an uphill climb all the way, if I can presume to regard Faith and Culture and The Realities of Faith in any sense as being a summit view. For me, it represents at least a temporary plateau of inquiry from which to take a longer view of the constructive problem in theology. Intimations of some reconceptions or re-direction of thought, however, are already giving me troublesome thoughts. When I had written The Realities of Faith I said to myself and to my colleagues in Chicago, “That’s it! I am signing off on this problem of faith and culture as a constructive theological inquiry. I’m going to spend retirement basking in historical study and completing my long-range effort at writing A History of Liberalism in Religious Thought.” Seven years have passed

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since that declaration was made, and I find myself plagued anew with agonizing thoughts of reassessment, opening up new lines of inquiry; not wholly antithetical to what I have done in these earlier constructive works, but introducing a note of dissonance of rather far-reaching import in the very conception of our basic human stance as creatures. I gave some hint of this in my Secularization of Modern Cultures (1966) and in an article Credo which appeared a year ago in a Divinity School (Chicago) publication, Criterion. I take a glass of sherry with some regularity trying to still the genie within who keeps plaguing me with new lines of reflecting; but to date the medication seems helpless in routing the élan of inquiry. I enter upon this semester’s work with some fear and trembling, or at least trepidation, having already experienced on the occasion of my retirement in Chicago what agony a post-mortem kind of inquiry into one’s thought can bring. That is why I have urged you to make this seminar an occasion, not just for observing, analyzing, or assessing what I have done, but for probing these issues of faith and culture in your own terms, sparked in part, I would hope, by what I have done or left undone. I suppose the appropriate word in closing is, “Bon Voyage!” I hope it will prove to be an adventure of ideas, as well as of experience. Bernard E. Meland Union Theological Seminary New York, NY, February 1969

The Breaking of Forms in the Interest of Importance (And Other Iconoclastic Reflections) By Bernard E. Meland The invitation of your faculty committee to participate in the Autumn Faculty Conference by presenting the opening paper caught me quite by surprise. All year long I had occupied a ring-side seat in the theological arena of Union Theological Seminary in the privileged position of a Visiting Professor, watching professors and administrators battling against stubborn odds to appease or to cope with a recalcitrant student generation, bent on bringing in a new day in divinity education. The exhausting experience simply contemplating the struggle that was being waged about me daily had left me in somewhat of a professional stupor. If ever there was a time to retire into the quiet of one’s own reminiscences, oblivious of the waking world, this was it! I thanked God I was not as other men, caught in the swirling tide of reaction and radical reform. I visualized the quiet of the north Michigan woods for which I was about to depart. The year at Union had been a stimulating and happy experience, despite its strenuous pace, which I had shared vicariously; but the look ahead to a summer of uninterrupted peace basking in sunlight and shade exceeded even the happy months that were then coming to an end. Then Joe Sittler’s letter arrived. In one fell swoop my cherished death-wish was dispelled. In words calculated to flatter the most lethargic of retirees into action, Joe sparked a resurrective impulse in me. Now I long ago discovered that resurrection is the most painful of creaturely experiences. By comparison, death is release, and at times a welcome respite from struggle. But to be prodded back into life, once the peace of relinquishment has tempted one, is to undergo the most agonizing effort at reconnoitering. In this tongue-in-cheek confession you will detect a reluctance to intrude upon the serious explorations in which you as a faculty are presently engaged; but you can’t miss, along with it, I hope, the oblique sense of satisfaction and gratitude at being invited to do so. I have taken Joe’s admonitions seriously, mingling reminiscences and reflections with as realistic a confrontation with pressing issues as I am capable of mustering. I start my reflections with the acknowledgment that I probably do not know what is really happening to us today. I do so by way of countering an almost instinctive impulse of mind to assume that I know very well what is happening to us. For the affinities between the nineteen sixties and the nineteen twenties, the era in which I grew up

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intellectually and culturally, are striking to the point of being disturbing. In view of these apparent similarities between the two decades, one can understand and even sympathize with the tendency toward making glib comparisons between them. Yet, one must guard against being taken in by them; for, despite obvious similarities, the two eras of cultural revolution are not really comparable. The issues today differ, not only in kind, but in range and complexity, as does the temper and mood of thought and feeling that is expressed in action. The nineteen twenty revolt of youth followed upon a momentary state of disillusionment resulting from World War One. However deeply that mood of disillusionment may have cut into the personal idealism of European communities, the American mind of the period tended to remain impervious to tragedy and defeat, except in the darker veins of American literature. Theologically the sun was still in the heavens. Evolutionary idealism and the pragmatic theory of knowledge were intact. Even Reinhold Niebuhr at the time, who was then a young minister in Detroit, Michigan, clung to the hopes of a personal idealism, as may be inferred from his first book, Does Civilization Need Religion? (1926). His one nemesis, I recall, was Bertrand Russell, whose stark cynicism troubled Niebuhr, probably because it was not readily dispelled even after it had been summarily repudiated. Spengler’s Decline of the West, too, was to cut deeply into his liberal, spiritual reserves. Only Albert Schweitzer, it seemed, momentarily stemmed the tide of Niebuhr’s faltering idealism, for he saw in him a kind of investment of life which, despite all arguments to the contrary, countered “the mind’s allegiance to despair.” In those days, Niebuhr called himself “a tamed cynic;” but the intensity with which he seemed to cling to the liberal doctrine of the supremacy of personality, even as he recoiled from an easy optimism and castigated optimists bespoke a lingering commitment to the liberal, idealistic ethos of thought. Niebuhr, then in his thirties, was our principal spokesman at youth conferences. His troubled spirit of mind echoed our own misgivings, and encouraged us in our own theological iconoclasm. Where he posed the dilemma of the churches as they then constituted themselves, we openly denounced them as being irrelevant to what was currently important. We did not reach a death-of-God paranoia, though, in our judgment, every other aspect of Christian faith and history was expendable; only God and I remained intact. Yet, in good biblical fashion, as long as we had the makings of a new covenant, we were in business. And in His name, we lowered the boom on organized Christianity as being an offense both to God and to us. (Incidentally, “organized Christianity” was the caption at that time that evoked invectives among college and seminary revels). In

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that context, any orderly exposition of Christian doctrine or church history, as seminaries were apt to impart it, was anathema to us. The discontents of church history were our heroes, from Jesus and the prophets to Martin Luther and Reinhold Niebuhr. And we sought to emulate their dissociation from “Churchainity” as it had become known in Western history. As a student in McCormick Theological Seminary in 1924, courses in theology and church history infuriated me because of what seemed to me at the time to be a complacent identification or correlation of present-day Christian commitment with the piety of the past. Interestingly enough, when I transferred to the Divinity School of the University of Chicago in the fall of 1925, my temper of thought changed radically. Instead of a contemporary malcontent, despising history, I found myself caught up in the fascination of studying the history of doctrine and Christianity in a new way. I literally buried myself in Haskell Library, and later in Swift Library, absorbing what was to me a fresh glimpse of Christian history through such works as Shirley Jackson Case’s Social Origins of Christianity (1923) and The Evolution of Early Christianity (1925), along with A Guide to the Study of the Christian Religion (1916) edited by Gerald Birney Smith. Shailer Mathews had heard of my iconoclastic exploits during my “reign” as the first president of the newly organized youth organization, The National Association of Presbyterian Students, and called me into his office in Haskell Hall, shortly after I had enrolled in the Divinity School to commend me. Said Mathews, “I like what you’re doing, Meland,” and urged me to keep up my involvement in the social criticism of the churches. I was embarrassed by his commendation, though I did not disclose it at the time, for at that very moment, under the stimulus of the socio-historical method of inquiry into Christian history, my fangs were drooping; or rather, they were being transformed into a cutting edge with which to explore the dynamics of past history in a new way. Theological study in McCormick Seminary of that day, with its complacent, fencesitting posture as being above the battle, had fired up the radical in me; the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, seemingly in the thick of controversy, yet pioneering in a constructive effort to reinterpret and to reassess the dynamics of Christian history as a social movement, tempered and re-routed the distraught and bombastic state of mind with which I had graduated from Park College, and impelled me into an intensive, disciplined, and highly motivated inquiry into the Christian legacy of the Western world. Now you can see from this sketchy account of early experiences as a rebel with or without a cause, that I might very well identify myself with

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the current student revolt against the theological establishment, saying, “I know what you’re up to, I was one of you once; and then, in an air of condescension, caution them with, “but you’ll get over it, if only you get hold of a method of studying this Christian legacy. (Theological method was the fetish of the early Chicago School, and I confess I have assimilated something of its magic, as a wand to wave over critical issues). Yet, while I see in my own experience of reorientation in theological study as a Divinity School student of the twenties, a way of capturing a penchant for disciplined inquiry, transcending, yet not detouring one from contemporary issues, I recognize that any appeal to such a precedent would be arrogant, and historically unsound. There will be current counterparts of such a reconnoitering, but they will come in their own way, at their own pace, and under stimuli expressive of the new age of inquiry. II. The Broadened Base of Our Humanity The revolt of the mind in the present day is, in fact, so much more extensive and complex than the revolt of youth in the twenties that they partake of different worlds of experience. For one thing, the present cultural revolt is epochal in dimension in that it literally marks the end of an era. We used that phrase, “end of an era” in the twenties and early thirties; but it had provincial meaning, really. The “social gospel,” whether of the Rauschenbusch or Shailer Mathew’s variety, as Bob Handy has pointed out, partook of the manifest destiny thesis which had motivated Western expansion, both economically and religiously. And the social ethos of Modernism, generally, allied itself with the evolutionary optimism of science and industry. We, the people, were the people manifestly in power with our historically achieved Calvinistic, Puritan mode of sensibilities and proprieties, along with our convictions as to what is right and wrong morally. Ethically we were more astute. Personal morals among modernists were in no sense as radical as their social ethics. But even so decisive a rejection of the liberal-modernist complaisance in these matters, as expressed in the early works of Barth and Brunner, Niebuhr, Tillich, and Bultmann, remained within the ethos of a personal idealism that had motivated and structured liberal theology. Their reversal of premises did not remove them from the conceptual context of the Kantian framework of meaning. Hegel was in large measure repudiated; Kant was not. The I-Thou encounter, which was to become so formative of neo-Reformation theology, under the stimulus of Martin Buber’s classic by that title, was s theological variation upon Kantian-Feuerbachian themes of a generation earlier.

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Despite World War One, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the failure of the League of Nations, and even the early stirrings of Adolf Hitler, the cultural context of Western European and American sensibilities remained virtually intact. What stands between that earlier period of cultural and theological innovation and the present one is a radical break in our conception of humanity itself; hence in our way of expressing what might be called our humanizing intentionality. Buchenwald and the atomic bombs were crucial in this break, accentuating a sense of despair over the disclosure of this demonic potentiality in man, and a grim acceptance of its inevitability, which was a shattering blow to our personal idealism of whatever variety. But the events that were to be most telling, in my judgment, not only in altering, Western man’s conception of himself and his culture, but in evoking a conception of humanity as a new reality of dynamic power within modern culture, were the declarations of independence among subjected peoples around the world, beginning with India’s proclamation in 1947 and continuing through the passage of the Civil Rights Act in this country in 1964. If this sequence of events can be appraised objectively without a flood of subjective emotions crowding in on one, I think one would come to see that it is epochal to a degree not matched by any single, social innovation in the life of modern man. Quite apart from specific cultural revolutions that followed from these events or that led up to them, or perhaps more accurately, coherently with them, yet transcending their specific implications, is the stark, inexorable fact that the baseline of humanity was broadened. As a result, more people are now legally established as human beings in our time than in any previous time of human history. One has to stand back and take in this stark, innovating fact of our situation, with all that it implies, before one can sense what is really upon us as a given of our present-day cultural experience, both as a burden in what this implies in social change, and as a promise of what this could imply in human attainment and community. A large number of the pre-thirty-year-olds have taken it in with remarkable perceptiveness, shock, and excitement; which are why they express such disbelief concerning our social institutions and their commonly accepted mores— loosely designated with pejorative overtones as “the establishment.” The ringing declaration of our liberating acclaim of human liberty and the individual pursuit of happiness as initially incorporated in the American Constitution has come home to haunt the American scene in one section of the country after another where the issue of civil rights looms as menacing and disruptive of “orderly life.” “But we didn’t mean by this declaration all people;” one hears a vast number of them saying to themselves and to

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others; to which an inspired and revolting segment of the rising generation haughtily replies, “Well, we do!” This broadened base of our humanity intrudes a new, and possibly a disturbing dimension of what it means to be human. There is an elemental quality that comes alive in the new humanity that puts to rout many of the cherished sensibilities that have given form and style to our cultural history, following from the time of the Renaissance, and which were reactivated to a degree in the Liberal era, with its own modifications. Much of our inherited cultural sensibility and style, particularly during the liberal era, elevated human personality in terms of its individual attainments as being the accepted good, and even the criterion of what is good, and for some, of what is God. Educational theory, aiming toward evoking and nurturing this ideal personality, dominated liberally motivated schools of past generations, equipping individuals with a capacity and personal appeal to make their way in the competitive drive toward private and public enterprise and social acceptance. The elemental thrust of the new mode of humanity that is erupting all about us, distrusts this individualized conception of humanity as being tailor-made to conform to a social establishment of free enterprise made possible by the alliance of science and industry as technical resources and agencies of our capitalistic democracy. Its revolt is not simply an expression of disenchantment with past Western history in the large; among some it is a very personal and partisan impatience with their own upbringing under a permissive and affluent laissez-faire liberalism initially inspired by progressive education, but subsequently distorted into an irresponsible and decadent will-to-live as one’s impulses dictate and one’s resources provide. When the variant forms of discontents are merged with the vast movement of the disinherited recently given franchise, a wholly new quality of mind and spirit inadvertently intrudes to make the mixture of revolt a heady brew indeed. The present upheaval of modern youth however presents a medley of protests and disillusionments. No single characterization will suffice to identify or to describe them. Their unanimity, when it occurs, lies in their avowed resistance to the established order of things, however conceived; but within that common disenchantment there is to be found a vast variety of motives, desires, and intentions. The dominantly unifying note, in so far as it emerges as a positive expression of solidarity, partakes of a folk-hunger, a hunger for relatedness, even unabashed intimacy, and for corporate identity and attainment. On the surface one might interpret this turn of the psyche as the direct inversion of individual enterprise, so regnant in the culture under repudiation. I am convinced that it is more elemental than that, and

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possibly more seriously embraced than sheer rebellion would imply. To some extent, to be sure, it is expressive of a self-consciousness about being in a minority against a powerful establishment, and thus is but the positive expression of its negative reaction. More basically, however, it is either a nostalgia, or a yearning for what can come to people in a community where pride in individual distinctions and accomplishments are permitted to subside. Group effort and group accomplishment place all members on a common footing as participants, and releases in them a fraternizing sense of trust and camaraderie which aspires only to experiencing the vital joy of being together as human beings. There is an abdication of the virtues of individual initiative and enterprise, and thus a loss in the attainment of individuality; but there is relinquishment of its vices as well. In its place there appears to have arisen communal initiative, and a concern to project, even to exploit, the power it affords. Interestingly enough, while the comparative note of rivalry appears to have receded, concern with “doing one’s own thing,” as this can be enjoyed and shared in group activity, persists; but this appears more in the guise of self-expression or creativity, than in competition with one another. What I have presented here so far may appear to many of you as being an optimum reading of what transpires among this generation in revolt and, in fact, it is intended to be just that for the purpose of distilling from the chaos of violence and invective that marks present-day confrontations, the sensitive strand of discerning contemporaries who not only are educable, if only on their terms, but who convey, often quite unwittingly, a kind of perceptiveness and dedication that is itself educative in the judgment and awareness it evokes. III. The Issue of Past and Present Given this decisive sense of having come into a new age of opportunity and promise, as against one that may well pass into oblivion, this recalcitrant generation tends to respond readily to any appeal or urging to forget the past as a resource of the educational experience or of the life of the spirit. In this mood, higher education in all its customary and disciplined modes of inquiry, including divinity education, impresses many of them as being either irrelevant to their current enthusiasms, or suppressive of them in the interest of perpetuating an established mode of life which still persists in defiance of this vivid contemporary fact that the baseline of our humanity legally and culturally has broadened. At Union we were faced with an insistent note of impatience in the classroom with what did not address the immediate issue of power and

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decision directly in terms of precipitating action. Everything boiled down to the power struggle in modern society, particularly within our own society. A small, but highly effective group pressed this issue to the point of saying, “We of this generation have to forego education in the formal sense, and theological seminaries should do likewise.” For them it narrowed down to the biblical witness of the early Christians of being involved in a struggle with “principalities and powers” in which no compromise on any issue is thinkable, even if giving up one’s own life is the price one must pay. For them the span of time had shortened to the point where such terms as past and future had no meaning. The time, they insisted, is now! As we were to discover, a strong line of the Pentecostal witness, which had been in the early background of some of the student leaders, had been reactivated to intensify the fray. Whether or not the situation assumes this degree of traumatic intensity, the placing of higher education under the judgment, if not the directive, of this radically contemporary fact of cultural change, tends, in the minds of many, to foreshorten the range as well as to sharpen the focus of inquiry. This is what seems to me to intrude the telling issues. This change of perspective is then readily translated into an issue between getting knowledge and understanding that is sharply oriented toward social and political action, on the one hand and on the other hand the long-range mode of historical, philosophical, and analytical inquiry bent on viewing the present scene of thought and action within the larger fabric of meaning within cultural history. Considering the aimless and omnibus manner in which historical, philosophical, and literary understanding of our cultural and religious background is often conveyed in higher education, the impatience among many of our younger contemporaries with what is being offered as education within the present cultural crisis is, in a measure, understandable. This is a problem of long-standing; however, it is by no means peculiar to the current upheaval. If students think it is, this would be one argument for reading history to see how much tradition lies back of their recalcitrant state of mind. The issue was vigorously debated in the era of the twenties and immediately before. And if one cared to look into the matter, he would find that educational revolt has been proceeding at a pace ever since the Enlightenment, to limit matters simply to the modern period. It is true that the present era of reaction carries within its ferment and zeal a decisive rejection of historical inquiry as such, on the grounds that the innovations of our time, culturally and scientifically, are such as to initiate a mode of experience and social responsibility that is without precedent in the history of man. But as I write this I am reminded that Francis Bacon (1561–1626) tossed aside the whole of antiquity including

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Plato and Aristotle, especially them, as being mythological rubbish in the light of the scientific outlook then emerging. And in the 17th century, large numbers of divinity students in Cambridge University, England, following Newton’s startling discovery leading to his formulation of the law of gravity, gave up theological study and turned to the study of physics, not just because that was where the action was, but because Newton’s way of describing the role of the Creator in the movement of the planets offered more assurances of a specific nature concerning the necessity of divinity than the tedium of doctrinal study under theologians or the preachments of the clergy. The present conviction among many of the present generation, however, is that what is being offered as education in the conventional mode partakes of the very ethos that antedates the broadening of the base of our humanity, and thus is inescapably suppressive of the creative ferment that provides motivation and lure to the present generation, awakened to the new realities of man. At the risk of becoming an historical bore, I would note that that is precisely what led the separatists of England in John Milton’s time to spurn education for the clergy on the grounds that any transmission of historical knowledge would of necessity entail imparting Romanism. Even Milton shared this misgiving. Now the stance I find necessary to assume as educator toward this critical impasse in higher education is one that is neither acquiescent nor defensive. Acquiescence to this new mode of modernity, whether in education for the modern ministry, or in doctoral programs for preparing teachers and scholars in colleges and universities, represents a gullible acceptance of the plea for relevance, on the one hand, and an uncritical acceptance, on the other hand, of the issue as posed between past and present in the current state of culture reaction. Concern for relevance, I would agree, is indispensable in shaping any present-day curriculum or mode of study; but it is a highly misleading word as well. Given optimum meaning it can mean simply bringing learning into a sharpened focus so as to give intelligence a vocation within the immediacies of experience. In actual application of the word, however, relevance tends to mean being attentive to what is currently in fashion in thought, bearing upon topics being most urgently discussed at the moment. This can be impoverishing to thought and inquiry, and render it short-lived in duration. Relevance in its optimum sense implies, not curtailing inquiry to fit current interest, but a selective use of a vast amount of historical and contemporary resources at hand so as to bring maximum and pointed illumination to bear upon significant issues pressing for consideration. Relevance in this sense need not mean the elimination of historical and

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reflective dimensions of inquiry, but again, a selective handling of the data. To assume that only what is presently being talked about or written can be relevant to a current problem is to abdicate from disciplined scholarship and to capitulate to reliance on the ephemeral discourse of current affairs. Nor is relevant inquiry simply action-centered inquiry in contrast to reflection upon action. Being where the action is, when this is possible, and not only attending to its data, but participating in the visceral realities of the occasion, can yield a mode of insight into the situation, particularly with regard to the feeling-tone of acts and words, which no amount of critical reflection in absentia could anticipate. Certain kinds of projects benefit from this kind of orientation of thought more than others; but all thought to a degree is altered by having access to the complex of lived experience when this is available, and when there is the capacity to participate knowingly and discerningly in the midst of action and swiftly moving events. But here is the rub. We are back now with the problem that William James was to pose, and to which Bertrand Russell spoke incisively; having to do with “knowledge of” and “knowledge about.” As I tried to demonstrate in discussing “The Appreciative Consciousness” in my Higher Education and the Human Spirit, no amount of technical know-how applied objectively to situations quite reaches the degree of apprehension leading to subtle and full comprehension of a situation that may be forthcoming from one who has participated in the events about which judgment is being made. This internal track of meaning which, in some instances, may not have been formed into words until one has been prodded into disclosing it, nevertheless is a resource of understanding that one can come by in no other way than through the lived experience in which the self participates in the event. Now this is especially applicable to associations with events and human relationships over long periods of time; and obviously educational projects designed to bring the student into the scene of action cannot aspire to this kind of existential familiarity. There is a point, however, to what some psychologists are frequently referring, however; namely, that to experience the impact of any occurrence as a bodily event is to have tentacles of awareness provoked into action which could in no sense be present simply reflecting upon what has happened after it has happened. All this argues heartily, I think, for some effort at experiencing events first-hand as a mode of intellectual inquiry. One should, however, be fully aware of the limits and the limitations of this mode of inquiry. James, himself, eager as he was to press into this sphere of inquiry, hedged when he realized how much subjective emotion and opinion entered in to shade or to discolor the occurrence itself, especially among untrained participants. But even so-

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called disciplined anthropologists have been known to have suffered a fullscale “snow job” in their efforts to be “where the action is” among primitive societies. It is commonplace to remark that participation in and of itself does not assure understanding of what is being experienced, beyond that of non-participants, unless the one who sees and hears and feels into the situation is equipped to do these things with some degree of disciplined awareness and response. The hazards here intellectually are great; hence resort to it as an educational procedure should, I think, be undertaken with modest expectations, rather than as a full-fledged venture in understanding to the exclusion of other critical modes of inquiry. What is important about stressing action as a context for learning, I think, is its breaking through the historical fallacy, so common to much of western intellectualism, that thinking is simply an act of cerebration, dissociated from bodily feelings and the human psyche. One of the gravest limitations of historical discussions of doctrine and the Christian life, in my judgment, stem from this dissociation of mind and bodily events; and the concern to arrive at cellophane packages of pure doctrine, insulated from the distortions and impurities of bodily impulses and action, has led to all kinds of absurdities in the effort to formulate antiseptic theologies. And, of course, the counter-attack upon such doctrinal, prissiness could only be an indulgence of sentiment and sentimentality in which thought in Christian faith was sacrificed to strong feeling. “I feel!” cried out one elated convert, “Oh! how I feel!” The appeal to religious experience has never had an adequate hearing on disciplined grounds, in my judgment, because there is a long-standing and unyielding tradition in Christian theology that, in yielding to the appeal to religious experience, one relinquishes the rigor of disciplined thought. I have trouble with my fellow process theologians on this point, who really should know better in view of their allegiance to Whitehead; for it was he who, as Wieman once reported, said in Bond Chapel, in giving some of the lectures that appear in Modes of Thought, “We think with our bodies.” Then, said Wieman, looking straight at me, he repeated in as dramatic a voice as he could muster. “WE THINK WITH OUR BODIES!” Thought, when it is a full-orbed occurrence engages the total psyche and somatic dimensions of man. Thought dissociated from lived experience suffers from abstraction. To be more than idealized cerebration, remote from what is the case; it must be conceived as preparation for involved inquiry, not a superior or more thoroughly cleansed alternative to it. I come back to my initial criticism of the appeal to action-centered inquiry in the name of relevance, however, to say that no student, simply

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because he is in heat over contemporary issues, should be permitted to side-step or evade disciplined inquiry of an historical or analytical nature. Yet, it should be possible, within the kind of curriculum that is formulated, as preparation for the contemporary ministry, to find ways of bringing this more reflective and analytical inquiry to bear directly upon contemporary issues in ways that illumine the present task, instead of causing the student to assume that such inquiry is simply delay action, or even a contrived detour around the critical point at issue. The issue as posed between past and present in the current state of cultural reaction further aggravates the response to a concern for relevance because the very way the issue is posed sets past and present in sharp antithesis to one another. Much of the current reaction among those of the younger generation, as well as among those who readily champion their cause, is in the idealistic and romanticist mode, despite all their concern to be bluntly realistic about the present. For the underlying assumption in their stance of rejection is that, in dispensing with a concern with past history as being irrelevant to immediate, innovating experiences, the past will thereby be removed from the scene of inquiry. This is to view the problem of history purely ideationally, as all idealistic views of man tend to do. The structural persistence of past occurrences, or their stubborn concretions in the face of, or in spite of, such ideational declarations is a stark, often implacable, reality which will not be downed by slogans or invectives or any other conceptual apparatus issuing in protest and violence, aimed at destroying the establishment. It is not the case that the past is the establishment, and the present, the innovating antagonists. For the past is incarnate, not simply in what is established, or, in the words of reactionaries, contrived to sustain its dominance; the past persists in every immediacy of experience as a dimension of the present, contending with, or qualitatively attending and enhancing occasion of revolt and innovation. This structural character of experience, as it persists among all of us, whether we are with or in firm resistance to, social change, must be recognized as a grim fact which makes any easy mode of modernization, pitting present concerns against past modes of experience, illusory and romantic. Thus any ready capitulation to a mode of inquiry that would replace concern with past valuations by an all-out involvement in present demands can only be romanticizing the educational process with indifference to that most realistic fact of our present experience: namely, that the past persists in the contextual interplay of immediate occurrences. Speaking for Merleau-Ponty at the time of the latter’s death, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “He believed perception to be one of the beginnings of beginnings. Through this ambiguous ordeal our body is surrendered to the

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world and the world to our body. It is both the hinge and the anchorage. But the world is also History. Perhaps before anything else, we are historical.” (Situations. New York: George Brazillier, Inc. 1964. p. 160.) The issue that plagues us in our time is stated here, or at least clearly pointed to. The perceptual act that impels us into action within the immediacies of our experience somehow has a way of silhouetting this that is immediately felt and attended to, as if it were singularly ourselves, our world, the world in which we are now involved. But, as MerleauPonty was to discover, no act of perception, however sharply focused or presently informed, is solely an act of immediacy. It carries in its heightened awareness an intentionality that subtly insinuates past experience and valuations into every present act; and it strikes against, or in concert with, forces, situations, human valuations which, like every conscious experience, intrudes into this immediacy the present thrust of a past inheritance. No immediate act is simply a reiteration of past experience; yet it bodies forth within the innovations, the rebellious protests, the glimpses of discovery prompted by present occasions, a whole complex of occurrences which now present themselves out of a past inheritance as a present shaping, qualifying and impelling present experience. Whitehead was to bring to process thinking a similar correlation of past and present in the creative act. The dynamics of Modernism which preceded his formulated philosophy had little in its idiom of thought to illumine this subtle interplay of past and present. This, in fact, was the structural limitation of theological Modernism, causing it to give a primacy to the present which its methodology belied. Much of our present thinking in Divinity education seems to reflect a similar structural limitation, though for different reasons. The Modernist’s adherence to an idealistic mode of evolutionism (its pragmatism must be seen as a truncated idealism) committed it to ongoingness as an assured and inevitably ascending process of existence. In its commitment to ongoingness past history could be illuminating only in retrospect. The past as presently experienced, or as embodied valuation and meaning, qualifying emerging events, was rarely noted. What has come into our present mode of thinking as a consequence of Whitehead’s revised notion of causal efficacy, and the phenomenologist’s notion of intentionality, is a vivid sense of past experience selectively and competitively entering into each moment of present experience as a genuine dimension of its innovation and creativity. This reconception of the past, selectively envisioned, as lived experience casts new light upon historical meaning, and possibly upon the way we may fruitfully attend to history in so far as

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the educators concern with historical data is simply retrospective or encyclopedic, re-enacting antiquity, the present-day disdain for historical inquiry as being irrelevant to lived experience may be justified. Such inquiry may have its own justification as a specialized and erudite preoccupation, but as educational inquiry it may have less to commend it. It is imperative, therefore, that historical inquiry be given closer scrutiny as a discipline capable of presenting the past as a dimension of present motivation and meaning, and that its living presence be assessed, not simply as a resistant to change or as being obstructive to innovating experiences, but in terms of its qualifying and qualitative role within creative occurrences. Much of our evolutionary thinking, particularly that which has informed our various forms of theological and philosophical idealisms, has viewed innovation almost singularly as being a thrust of life that somehow carried in its own forward movement everything that gave promise and hope to present experience. Innovation itself was given the force of qualitative attainment. Now if innovation is adequately conceived, it most certainly will be viewed in relation to qualitative attainment; but not, necessarily, in the sense that the new has replaced the old. Rather it will be viewed in the sense that what is bodied forth as a structure of experience out of past distillations is now summoned and received into new occasions of the creative passage. A past that remains purely nostalgic, or that presumes to preside over the innovations of the Creative Passage, even suppressing or arresting the impulse to think and to live forward, can only be considered obstructive of life itself; but conversely, a present that can conceive itself as an isolated instance of insight and importance has likewise cut away from the nexus of lived experience, and can persist only for the duration of its current enthusiasms in response to its animus toward an immediate past. Neither past nor present are isolated blocks of experience that can be bracketed out at will in the conceptual act or in ethical action for they conjoin in any instant of the temporal passage. What underlies this concern to see past experience as a qualitative ingredient of our immediacies is a dynamic, contextualistic view of lived experience in contrast to an evolutionary dynamism which views innovation solely as an instance of radical change, implying that “new knowledge” is itself dissociated from historical inquiry. This has led me to see the crisis of education, in one of its important aspects at least, as turning upon the issue of an adequate assessment of the role of our understanding of past experience in relation to present immediacies. The issue has been with us a long time, certainly in American education, since the turn of the century when the emergence of the new sciences,

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pragmatism and theological modernism hurled their challenge to what was then loosely designated “the humanities.” But the issue has become more acute and insistent in recent years, following from discoveries in nuclear science and subsequent developments in technology and space exploration; but even more dramatically from cultural revolutions giving rise to what I have termed the broadened base of our humanity. The immediate effect of these innovations is to pronounce all past experience as being either irrelevant to what is presently occurring, or related only in a demonic sense that condemns it as a power to be opposed or destroyed wherever it rears its head. Education that is deemed pertinent in this context is thus envisaged as education for social protest and conflict, centered in inquiry that is projected from “where the action is.” I am not arguing for the neglect of this kind of inquiry. What I as concerned to say in this paper is that attentiveness to its claims need not be construed as capitulation to its vision of man’s existence. At best such action inquiry is a prophetic vision and judgment upon what has occurred within the immediate past of Western history. As a critique of Western experience it can be a potent source of insight, despite its volatile and eruptive character, not only as a conceptual analysis of the social forces that have corrupted the body politic, but as a poignant community witness to a feeling context which all along has persisted as a potentially eruptive undercurrent of western experience. Now that it has erupted and become consciously acknowledged and recognized, it looms as a social force of considerable magnitude that cannot be suppressed or dispelled. It is, in fact, an historic ferment of past experiences that now presses upon our lived experience with unrelenting seriousness of demand and intent. But to think of it simply as an immediate act of protest and revolt is to underestimate its potency and character; for we then see it strictly as a phenomenon of the immediate present, whereas it is actually an historical reality of long duration that has erupted with the fury of pent-up power that has suddenly found release. Now this comes back to what I was saying earlier about the contemporary appeal to action research in contrast to source or historical inquiry. Without an adequate recognition that this that confronts us in immediate action carries within it the pent-up feelings appropriate to the selfunderstanding of the disinherited, one is without the critical perspective to discern or to evaluate what is transpiring before one’s eyes. Instead of providing illumination of the problems involved, the complex of inspired or infuriated action serves to extend a vast toadstool of atomic dust over the explosive area of reaction and revolt.

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IV. Form and the Frustrations of Form Closely allied with this issue of past and present, as these modes of valuation enter into creative experience, is that of form and the disruption of form in the shaping of historical experience. The problem of the relation between form and vitality is one of the puzzling polarities that has plagued my thinking almost from the beginning of my efforts at serious thought. And in our time, this polarity looms as a major issue, posing itself at times with the intensity of a struggle between life and death. And it is not always clear which is on the side of life, and which is on the side of death. For if what appears to be life-giving is a structure of life, an institution, a mode of living, the threat of its dissolution carries with it inevitable intimations of destruction and death. Yet, when structure appears to be coercive and obstructive of the élan vital, its very existence is a sign of death, and its destruction, a promise of new occasions of life. Now there are many observations to make about this polarity of form and vitality, structure and process, many of them commonplace and selfevident. And the philosophers with the help of theologians have thought of them all. “We need both,” it is said. “The problem is one of correlation.” “It is a matter of emphasis, not of alternatives.” “Form expresses maturity in living; the dynamic and formless conveys the restlessness of immature life.” Many of the solutions readily at hand presuppose the perfection of being as the given good, and process as transitional toward this fulfillment of being. Thus the caution of patience is supposed to suffice. But the assumption back of it is that rest, not motion, is the ultimate end, and that incessant striving toward something new and different will in time subside as one achieves the maturity to recognize that acquiescence to what is, is the way to wisdom and peace. This is the striking contrast between certain ancient and modern perspectives which Arthur Lovejoy pointed out so vividly in his book, The Great Chain of Being, a work I pondered daily in my earlier years. No modern philosophy can be said to be the complete antithesis of this dominant, ancient perspective; nor can all ancient views be gathered under the aegis of static being. Heraclitus is the ready exception. Nevertheless, all modern thinking has tried to come to terms with the insight first advanced by Galileo that motion is itself to be taken seriously as bearing intimations of reality that go beyond static being. Process, change, activity thus took on connotations of a living impetus and the promise of life. Structure, form, in this context, was to be deemed expendable in deference to the élan vital, as Bergson was to formulate it. Whatever limitations

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process philosophy may have, and there are many, it has sought to do battle with this issue. To do justice to its history, one must see that the source of its stimulus was not in reaction against static being, as defined by ancient philosophies. That battle had been waged earlier by Romanticist thinkers in forging the notion of development. Hegel is the summa philosophica of that valiant effort. The nemesis against which early process thinkers struggled was mechanism. William James and Bergson were the initial protagonists, and Bergson’s lead was followed vigorously by a group of philosopher-scientists in England who were to be responsible for the era of emergent and organismic thinking early in this century. Whitehead was among this early group, though a loner for the most part and actually had to be pressured into reading Bergson. James, he responded to more readily. Now the issue of form and vitality is at the heart of process thinking, and it poses itself here in ways that seem to me to be especially pertinent to the current situation in which the social struggle over this issue has reached an intensity bordering on paranoia. A common reading of Whitehead is to see him as the one who restored a sense of structure to what had become sheer dynamism under James and Bergson. This reading of Whitehead has tended to gather the notions of process and creativity into a rigid ontology which comes close to reenacting the earlier classicism under new auspices. The vision of the mind over-rides every intimation of experience. True, experience is still the baseline, the source of cogitation and the perennial resource to which the flights of the mind return; but the formulation offers the perfected truth of experience. My reading of Whitehead along with earlier process thinkers has led me to see what I think is a more sensitive and tentative handling of this problem of structure and experience, form and vitality. A wider reading of the Whiteheadian corpus, including his own work on Relativity, Modes of Thought, and Adventure of Ideas, instead of full concentration upon Process and Reality, would heighten the impression that he was not in the business of bringing a closure to the thought of earlier process thinkers by restoring a sense of structure to their formless dynamism; but was, instead, posing the issue between structure and experience with more insistence than they were wont to do. In the present era, of social revolution, form, like the word “establishment,” has become synonymous with what is suppressive of the new life struggling to be born. Hence the disruption of form is looked upon as the initial step toward releasing the creative possibilities of the new era of our broadened humanity. That this is a provincial and commonplace way of

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conceiving of the creative opportunities of the present age can be demonstrated by a perusal of events during any historic revolution. For, as Arnold Toynbee has pointed out, no age of renascence has been simply the dissolution of past structures in deference to a dynamic future. Each such age has been marked by a vitriolic denunciation of the age of history that has immediately preceded it; but by way of bolstering its own rationale for revolutionary acts, it has appealed to a very early period of the cultures’ history in which “purer” motives and motifs of human action have been discerned. These antecedents, standing in judgment of the immediate past, have been looked upon as correlates of the current cultural revolution, and as such, have been given an interpretation that has rendered them consonant with what was presently happening. Progressively, Toynbee has observed, subsequent periods of history will be gathered into the accepted rationale for cultural revolution; and, in time, even the immediate past, which had been wholly rejected, will become selectively repossessed and assimilated as a resource for present energies of reform and reconception. Thus, the pejorative way in which the immediate past of any culture in revolution is conceived is to be taken, in the long range of historical inquiry, as a tentative judgment upon what is being rejected. Nevertheless, it becomes a tactical way of defining the stance of the age in revolution. Form and establishment are taken to mean the structure of thought and performance which immediately guide and control the system of life that is being opposed. In the intensity of revolt, this provisional and tentative character of the rejection of form is difficult to discern, and therefore is generally ignored. Form, itself, is then made to appear as the antithesis of innovation. Form is seen to be the carrier of what is presently established, and this is the bête noire of the generation presently in revolt. Now it is not enough to insist that they who are in revolt be apprised of their provincial assessment of form and structure, as these appear in established institutions and mores. It is important, rather, to recognize that what is being provincially expressed as a revolt against form and structure may, within its limited purview, be a legitimate resistance to what form and structure invariably tend to become in relation to the dynamic thrust of lived experience. Thus, this provincial witness against immediately evolved forms and structures bespeaks an appropriate judgment upon all form and structure that would presume to replace or displace the creativity of life, and thus to frustrate or suppress innovating expressions of the human spirit, bent on promoting new occasions of human expressiveness and valuation. There is a paragraph in Whitehead’s Modes of Thought which states this point with telling power. He writes:

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The essence of life is to be found in the frustrations of established order. The Universe refuses the deadening influence of complete conformity. And yet in its refusal, it passes towards novel orders as a primary requisite for important experience. We have to explain the aim at forms’ of order, and the aim at novelty of order, and the measure of success, and the measure of failure. Apart from some understanding, however dim, of these characteristics of the historic process, we enjoy no rationality of experience. (p. 119)

In The Adventure of Ideas Whitehead was to elaborate upon this notion in more constructive ways by urging recognition of the fact that form is always a tentative stage of consolidating creative effort, and of giving it social or individualized expression; but that where life is in growth, it is always in process of breaking forms in the interest of importance. Importance here has the meaning of a creative reordering of experience and effort in response to presently discerned insight and disciplined effort, looking beyond the immediate toward further goals. Creativity, when it is more than sheer ongoingness, and partakes of a qualitative advance in experience, occurs within individual persons even as it emerges in corporate form as a common vision of possibility, or a restive spirit of reform. The latter, in a way, always exaggerates the potency of the current threat as well as the promise of any corporate expression of such creative advance; for its Spokesmen are generally those who are fully committed, and possibly most integrated with that vision in their own experience, acts, and decisions. On the other hand, the social expressions of such creative advances understates its full “Possibility and threat. It does so precisely because of latent powers of realization and commitment implicit in those many participating individuals who, at any time, may come into full realization of what they had but tacitly and tentatively affirmed. Creativity within any epoch, and one might add, within any community, thus proceeds at various levels of innovation and intention. To suppose that it can readily be more unilateral, or brought into one concerted mode of creative advance as a unified and consistent movement of social reform is to ignore the stubborn fact of structure and form that is implicit in every instance of innovation. For existence itself, at whatever level of attainment, presupposes structured experience; and this imposes limitations of vision as well as possible attainment, even as one strives to reach beyond one’s present level of actualization, or beyond the level of cultural attainment that defines the community. The pluralism of actualization within any community or culture means that creativity transpires within a variety of contexts; hence, creative advance is not to be identified solely with any one singular thrust toward innovation, or new growth, but is to be seen as occurring simultaneously at many levels,

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within many contrasting configurations of effort and intention. In every instance, the breaking free of forms that have become closures upon the creative outreach, rather than the structural means of bodying forth its intentionality, is to be seen as being of apiece with creativity itself as it transpires within any individual experience. The breaking of forms as a total communal act raises other problems. The conflict that generally ensues as a consequence of such planned and pointed iconoclasm may not be described simply in terms of the creative and the uncreative; for the existing forms do not sustain life evenly or equally; and conversely, existing forms or structures do not, categorically, pose a threat to qualitative attainment under all circumstances. Thus, the very focusing of the opposition in social revolt in terms of “the establishment” tends to be misleading; for it then seems to provide the warrant for destroying all form and structure indiscriminately. It also tends to formulate and to focus the thrust of innovation in negative terms as being preeminently an act of dissolution, and to dissipate energy in effecting such dissolution; whereas commitment is not to the death of the old so much as it is to the birth of the new. And this implies a shift in the expenditure of energy in the interest of importance. Importance, in this context, takes on the meaning of one’s vision of destiny, impelling one to assume the burden of opportunity laid upon everyone who chooses life, rather than death. I realize that, for many, who are presently in revolt, there is no possibility of the new until the old has been demolished. It is this thesis which, in part, I am challenging as being a romantic assessment of dynamic change, and a failure to apprehend and to assess potentialities of structure within the so-called “establishment” which, instead of being suppressive of change, stand ready to body it forth as a new occasion of creativity. In order to see more clearly what the constructive dimension of “the frustrations of established order” can mean, we need to give further attention to this word “Importance” in its generic meaning. Whitehead has elevated the notion of Importance above all others, setting it in contrast to “matter of fact,” which is the notion of mere existence. Matter-of-fact, he says, is “tinged with the notion of compulsive determinism… It is the recognition of the goingness of nature in which we, and all things of all types, are immersed. It has its origin in the thought of ourselves as process immersed in process beyond ourselves.” (Modes of Thought, p. 11) The recognition of the goingness of nature readily leads to the assumption of sheer ongoingness as being the inevitable persistence of what is presently occurring. The sense of ‘importance’ is always the leap of the mind and spirit beyond what is presently occurring, a leap beyond, either

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in the mood of impatience with what is, or in expectation of what could be. Importance, says Whitehead, is derived from “the immanence of infinitude in the finite.” In the spirit of Whitehead’s analysis, I would add, it is the restive and impatient, even rebellious, yearning within any period of time and within any single human experience, in the interest of expressing this ultimate vision of possibility within these immediacies that seem otherwise to persist in habitual, almost mechanical, responsiveness to the matter-of-factness of existence itself. Since sheer ongoingness carries within its own monotony of operations the tendency to express and to support life within the species or level of subsistence that has become accommodated, or been accommodated to, its ongoingness, there will always be a large number of casualties who are unaccommodated, and for whom ongoingness is in itself a dread to be endured, hopefully with the possibility of an ultimate release; or for whom ongoingness becomes an evil to resist, and hopefully to change in the interest of a more bearable and fruitful existence. Such eruptions of protest against sheer ongoingness which, as experienced, is menacing to existence, may or not partake of the larger vision of importance; although, as a witness to what is presently deficient in experience, it tends to be consonant with it. Neither does it necessarily stem from any ultimate consideration or concern, having religious or philosophical motivation. More often than not it will be conceived more provincially, or even locally, in terms of entrenched power and the unrelenting processes of life that follow from such entrenched power within established communities. Thus “ongoingness” takes on the meaning of life-as-it-is in this place and time; and “matter-of-fact,” the connotation of the system of social operations that supports and makes life-as-it-is. Importance, too, in this context, carries restricted meaning as a will to break through the impasse of entrenched power by striking at the powers themselves. Confrontation under this vision of existence thus tends to become a power struggle in which unaccommodated levels of the human community pit their uncertain strength against securely entrenched structures of power within the stable community. Given this hard-core encounter between entrenched power and the thrust of communal groups presently empowered by a sense of purpose directed toward destroying the present power structure, what is implicitly significant as an expression of Importance is often obscured, or misread, as being sheer rebelliousness and disorder which can be routed or stemmed only by restoring order. It is imperative to point out, therefore, that, while the hard-core confrontation with existing institutions of repression and matter-of-fact stability appear to be the significant thrust toward innovation, countering the present misuses of structure and power,

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it tends, in resisting this matter-of-fact premise, only to emulate its example, pressing one set of facts expressing “existence mere” against a more formidable set of facts concerned only with “existence mere.” In the background of every such confrontation are the vast number of instances of dissent and dissociation from the matter-of-fact hypothesis, concerned in their own private or restricted ways with the concern for importance that reaches beyond this matter of fact existence, if only as a subjective revolt against what matter-of-factness tends to become. This, too, becomes a dubious resource, either as an ally of consciously rebelling unaccommodated segments of humanity, or as a witness to importance in its larger connotation. Nevertheless, it is not to be dismissed summarily as such; for it remains a mode of expressiveness that is potentially supportive of both. What is needed in any cultural situation, and desperately so in the present one, is a sharpened focusing upon this that transcends, yet, within limits, is inclusive of both the tepid and the violent forms of reaction against matter-of-factness in living, when the latter has become deficient of vision, or even contemptuous of it. This that transcends, but which could mightily motivate such resistance of the human spirit, is, I am proposing, the commitment to Importance as an ontological vision—to a degree, countering, but actually fulfilling our matter-of-fact stance beyond what it, in its limited vision of finitude, is able to attain or envisage. Importance so conceived can be said to be a vision of destiny, affirming life in its creative venture beyond every contrived form of mechanism, institutionalism, and conformism to arrest its vital, or to destroy it. Now this begins to sound simply like an idealization of the human spirit in the face of all contingencies and suppressions; or like an encounter between the life of the spirit as expressed in religion, morals, and the arts, and the prosaic ventures of science, law, and industry. In a way this is not to be denied; if, for no other reason than that these polarities express a distinction in preoccupation which can be roughly differentiated in that way. But I would agree with Whitehead when he writes that “Importance is a generic notion which has been obscured by the overwhelming prominence of a few of its innumerable species.” (Modes of Thought p. 16). And he continues, The terms ‘morality,’ logic,’ ‘religion,’ ‘art,’ have each of them been claimed as exhausting the whole meaning of importance. Each of them denotes a subordinate species. But the genus stretches beyond any finite group of species. There are perspectives of the universe to which morality is irrelevant, to which logic is irrelevant, to which religion is irrelevant, to which art is irrelevant. By this false limitation the activity expressing the

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ultimate aim infused into the process of nature has been trivialized into the guardianship of mores, or rules of thought, or of mystic sentiment, or of aesthetic enjoyment. No one of these specializations exhausts the final unity of purpose in the world. The generic aim of process is the attainment of importance, in that species and to that extent which in that instant is possible. (p. 16)

The final sentence gives the clue as to how the ultimate vision of Importance is made effectual in the immediacies of experience. The attainment of Importance is proportional to the circumstances and to the subjective aims expressed in any given situation— “in that species and to that extent which in that instant is possible.” Within every situation in which the matter-of-fact aspect of sheer ongoingness poses a threat to the elemental will-to-live creatively and expressively, the forms which hold life and which body it forth in that structured existence come under the threat of rejection, and under the judgment of this Infinite measure of Importance. Forms, unless they are the bearers of life, deteriorate into becoming the suppression of it; in which case they become but the debris that follows upon the dissolution of life. The concern I am intent upon pointing up here is that the vision of ultimacy within our immediacies is more than vision, merely; it is inherent as energy within the human spirit and in human communities, expressed in minimum form as a will-to-live, and in various grades of a decision to live creatively toward whatever attainment of Importance that is envisageable and manageable in any given, historical situation—in that species, and to that extent which in that instant is possible! I have discussed this matter of Importance within the idiom of process thought; but it is discernible in many ways, because, being a generic notion, it comes readily into view whether the concern is with intentionality, as in phenomenology, or with destiny, as in neo-phenomenology; or the lure of an ultimate good as many forms of idealism have expressed it. I think you will agree, however, that the way Whitehead has posed the issue between Importance and Matter-of-factness, even as he relates them, gets at the problem as it is presently erupting all about us, and for that reason it speaks directly to our situation as educators, particularly as educators in divinity. Furthermore, as I shall hope to show, what gives any vision of ultimate demand its efficacy is its explicit meaning within the immediacies of experience. Vague talk about ultimacy as an ontological notion or future hope leaves the immediate attack upon problems unilluminated. Whatever resources of thought we may draw upon for explicating, or simply conveying this generic notion of Importance, to be helpful in the present situation must address this vital immediacy in the light of its vision.

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The Aim of Divinity Education The key to discerning the direction which divinity education must take in the present situation would seem to me to be this vision of destiny conveyed in the word Importance, when seen within the historical circumstances of our time; for it sets the whole program of change and innovation in a significant and more defensible context than is customarily contemplated. Instead of following such will-o-the-wisps as “being relevant,” “timely,” “modern,” “insistent,” or “where the action is,” we propose in our educational hearts to address the issues of life in their ultimate demand as they presently present themselves, within the disciplines in which we work, informed and illumined by other disciplines which may be available to us as scholars and teachers. The ultimate vision implied in Importance is no far-flung ideal, merely, no mere future hope; it is a promise of human realization and attainment implicit within the immediacies that now transpire, either to destroy or to redeem man’s situation. What is specifically pertinent to the possibility of man’s redemption in any historical situation is the degree as well as the range of his apprehension in sensing the opportunities visited upon him in that historical period of time, along with the threats of dissolution and failure that attend. In the earlier part of my paper I indicated areas in which new dimensions of opportunity and anxiety have appeared in our time, such as 1) the broadened base of our humanity, 2) the potentially creative interplay between form and vitality, following from our more perceptive understanding of the dynamics of change and innovation in experience as lived, and 3) our break through historical conceptual facades which have concealed the real dynamics of lived experience, thus opening up to us, not only the visceral dynamics of human purpose and action, but the real energies of faith and spirit attending such action, and which are persistently operative in experience. In this more direct and even bodily understanding of structured experience, we have become more readily aware of the selective persistence of past experience in every moment of immediacy expressed in the individual or communal thrust to live forward. These areas of new experience and understanding serve as apertures within what presently envelopes our conscious experience, through which we may be able to see the possibilities of creaturehood afresh in this historic moment of time. In responding to such occasions to glimpse the import of this vision of ultimacy within our immediacies, we act as men awakened to our historic opportunity of creaturehood. This is relevance of the highest order. To fail to act in that way is to relinquish our humanity as creatures, and thus to respond simply as inert entities within the passage of time.

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But here, of course, comes the rub: How to express this commitment to Importance as a vision of destiny in response to these new possibilities of creaturehood? More specifically, How to express it educationally? I have a few ideas as to how this is to be done, as will many of you, once the problem is posed in this way. Let me state them briefly, both in terms of a critical response to what we have been doing, and in terms of constructive measures which may have some promise of effectiveness as responsible action in this era of change. First of all, I think it is imperative that a Divinity School consciously and openly acknowledge its commitment to this concern for Importance expressed as an ultimate demand upon learning, instead of being content with attacking current problems piece-meal with no vision or understanding of what one is ultimately about in these several impetuous attempts at innovation in learning. There should be no hesitancy or duplicity in making this acknowledgement as a commitment of the total Divinity community. Looking back upon our previous history, I am convinced that what gave momentum and zest to divinity education under the early Chicago School was precisely this overall sense of mission and purpose. One often hears it said that what gave the early Chicago School a common sense of purpose was their method of inquiry. Actually, however, the socio-historical method was unifying to a point and among a substantial group of the faculty; but it was also the source of their divisiveness where it occurred. What gathered this method along with others into a common enterprise of divinity education was an overarching commitment to a direction of inquiry, inspired by their concern to pursue with full seriousness, the possibilities of the freshly envisaged cultural outlook which had come to them with a sense of destiny. For the Modernists, this perspective was not simply cultural. In their own terms, given their evolutionary optimism, it was in fact a vision of destiny which had laid upon them an obligation as educators and theologians in that period of history to prepare young men for the new age of Christian ministry and teaching. Subsequent stages of our divinity school history achieved a similar focusing of the community’s vision of inquiry. As one who participated in several of them, I would have to say that these periods were more restricted in their appeal, and gave less of a sense of being caught up in a common, cultural effort, sustained by a total outlook upon man and his history. Although they were never specifically so designated, its participants functioned primarily as a school of thought. For those of us, however, who shared in this school of thought, a similar sense of destiny attended our work to inform and inspire our efforts. For we were able to

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distill from this school of inquiry in which we were engaged something of the sense of Importance of which Whitehead has spoken. The fact, however, that this vision of destiny was so closely identified with the school of thought itself, in terms of which it was to be conceived, imposed barriers to participation for colleagues who stood apart from the method. Despite this fact, however, something of the élan of inquiry that motivated our efforts carried over into their work as well. I have been concerned to say in this paper that, because Importance is a generic term, as Whitehead has said, it is not a notion peculiar to any one school of thought; any more than it is of any one discipline – morality, logic, religion, or art. It thus provides a unifying objective without demanding unity in method or perspective. All methods of inquiry and their perspectives come under the judgment and of its ultimate claim. Diversity within Our Unified Commitment It does not follow, therefore, from the fact that a school embraces a common vision of inquiry that there must be unanimity of thought and procedure in all respects. Diverse disciplines, interests, capacities, perceptions, and concerns within this common vision will give rise to many lines of inquiry and action. To assume that there is but one way to express this total, unifying objective in divinity education is to conceive of community of inquiry unilaterally, which is to dispel its efficacy as a unifying vision, and to evoke coercive decisions within the community, which can only serve to accelerate divisiveness. Once the unifying vision of inquiry has been made explicit as a common directive for designating and focusing upon priorities, a variety of concerns and procedures will assert themselves. These, I would argue, are not to be viewed as being disruptive of the common vision of inquiry; rather, they are to be seen as specific ways within specialized disciplines, concerns, and participations to venture experimentally toward effectually implementing the vision of inquiry as it is now oriented toward the issues of this vital immediacy. Since the task of reorientation is broader in scope than any one field or discipline can effectively address, each field or area of discipline will of necessity select, or project lines of inquiry that are pertinent to its concerns, and which, from within that discipline, appear insistent and crucial to the contemporary task. It will be seen, then, that a common vision of inquiry within the school will be fruitful and effective to the degree that it can genuinely inspire and encourage such a pluralism of method and objectives within the community of scholarship and learning. And to the extent that this occurs, the many ventures in understanding and exploring the possibilities of effectually pursuing the present task in divinity will present, not a threat of jeopardizing or

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frustrating the sense of a common effort, but a vigorous and fruitful means of fulfilling it concretely and responsibly in terms of the disciplines that inform the many tasks. I do not underestimate the problem of sustaining such a vision of common objectives under the pressure of pursuing such tasks concretely. In retrospect, it seems to me that the early Chicago School managed this feat remarkably well. And similarly, within the theological field when I first joined the faculty, so diverse a group of peppery and placid personnel as Wilhelm Pauck, Henry Nelson Wieman, Charles Hartshorne, Bernard M. Loonier, Daniel Day Williams, James, Luther Adams, and Bernard E. Meland, with all the diverse modes of inquiry that their differences implied, succeeded in becoming a team of scholars with a high degree of dedication and personal commitment not matched in my experience anywhere. The only parallel to it, in my limited acquaintance with faculty personnel, was the Harvard group of philosophers at the turn of the century that gathered together such lusty and disputatious inquirers as William James, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, and Hugo Munsterburg. A common sense of dedicated inquiry under circumstances so obviously pluralistic must clearly arise out of a vision of trust. Something more than what specifically motivates and impels each individual scholar unifies their dissonant efforts to produce an experience of a community of inquiry. This is one aspect of it. But there is another factor as well. It is that dissonant endeavors have their own structural contribution to make to the common vision; not through coming to the same thing, or doing basically the same thing, but in bringing forth a multi-dimensional expression or implementation of a common or comparable motivation underlying each of the efforts. I am convinced that one of the basic shifts in sensibility of thought and feeling required of our time is that of being released from a compulsive concern with unity or order, as this was conceived in the nineteenth century and earlier; and of coming to see and to respond to the appeal of a creative dissonance under the lure of a vision of order. Vision of order is a trust in the possible correlation of diverse efforts, which in fact, may very well be enhanced and promoted by these several, diverse efforts. This conception of order stands in sharp contrast to the nineteenth century vision of order; which was mechanistic in origin and thus determining in implication, implying conformity to what is given as natural order. What was exciting about the new physics when its conceptual mode first became known was its radical break from that earlier vision of order, and its recognition of the vast diversity and relativity of situations and perspectives. Any affirmation of order undertaken in an ultimate sense was to become, in Einstein’s words, an act

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of trust, which in turn served as a lure and loadstone for individual acts of scientific inquiry. But the act of inquiring was itself open, tentative, exploratory and thus highly diverse, yet orientated toward a vision of order, taken on trust, which somehow cast its beacon in the immediate acts of discovery and experimentation. I am aware that the spirit of inquiry implied here is not one to gain ready acceptance among many of our contemporaries, either among colleagues in the theological community, or in the arena of political and social conflict. For the spirit of the times, particularly in the latter situations, impels confrontation of differences and the negotiation of demands, or else the coercive routing of differences, designed to crush opposition. There are instances in which this coercive mode of exchange has taken over among faculty groups in some of our major universities, where educators, having become attuned to the logic and method of public confrontation, have become committed to it as acceptable and effective academic procedure. I can only argue that, where confrontation is made the order of the day, educative procedures are suspended, and then destroyed. For that reason I see no viable way of importing revolutionary tactics into the educative procedures themselves without seriously impairing the process of interchange that is crucial to learning. This, I recognize, is a debatable point, and a highly relevant one at the moment; but I have found no way to respond to it other than the one I have just stated. VI. Structural Changes Needed in Divinity Education Now that I have laid the ground for authorizing a legitimate mode of iconoclasm, I shall proceed with some shattering on my own. What I may succeed in shattering, however, is the illusion which your Committee held in assuming that I might have something important to say on the problems before us. For what I say from here on would not necessarily qualify me for ordination. It might not even qualify me for admission to the Divinity School. But I have never been qualified in any ordinary way for either of these distinctions. On entering the Divinity School in 1925 I was provisionally enrolled, pending the taking of certain courses in the university. And in 1928, I was admitted to ordination in the Chicago Presbytery on the Hush of tie assembly, meaning that the motion, which a recalcitrant member of the examining committee made, to deny me ordination was lost for lack of a second. So you see I have made my way by the grace of others. And I appeal to that now in this awesome situation. Before addressing the question of structural changes in the curriculum, it might be helpful to look at our own history and identity. It is quite likely

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that the problems we find erupting about us as a divinity school stem, not simply from the need of coming to terms educationally and theologically with the current demands of a cultural revolution, but from our uneasiness about our own identity as a school, This aspect of the problem is not unrelated to the more general problem of adequacy in meeting the educational demands of the cultural revolution. I should like to comment on what seems to me to be some pertinent aspects of our history as a school, hearing upon this matter of identity. From my student days onward I have always thought that our Divinity School has vacillated between being a seminary and a university divinity school. Of course its very inception as a University Divinity School would seem take that inescapable: for when the University. of Chicago first opened its doors in 1892, it literally transplanted what had been a Baptist Seminary for twenty-five years in organ Park, Illinois on the University campus as its own Divinity School, making its own internal arrangements with the Baptist Theological Union which had been, and continued to be, the seminary’s governing board. And for at least three decades beyond the turn of the century, the Divinity School of the university retained the visible markings of a seminary in its daily routines: Chapel was held daily, that is, four days a week, with the faculty attending in full force, garbed in academic regalia, and marching in procession behind the Dean and the speaker to the front of the chapel where they occupied the first three rows, like the Sanhedrin in solemn assembly. And if my memory serves me accurately, we, the students, filled all the rest of the benches. Classes were opened with prayer by the professor, just as they had been in McCormick Theological Seminary, where I had attended before coming to the University. Although the personnel of the school included students and a few faculty members from other Protestant denominations, the image and presence of the Northern Baptist Convention was full upon it. With Shailer Mathews as dean, it could not have been otherwise. Shailer Mathews, besides having other gifts and propensities, was an ardent churchman, and, specifically, a committed Baptist, though a vigorous leader in ecumenical activities as well. He and a substantial number of the Divinity School faculty were members of the Hyde Park Baptist Church, and attended regularly when they were not out of the city, preaching in some other Baptist Church, or college chapel. In those days it was a requirement of the office that the Dean of the Divinity School be a Baptist. As a rebel Presbyterian student in the Divinity School of that time, I don’t recall that I ever resented or recoiled from this obvious, Baptist presence in the school; but it was there, an unmistakable reality that gave character and thrust to the work of the school. Outside of the university,

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The Divinity School had the reputation of being “that Godless institution,” as a prominent member of the Chicago Presbytery once called it. Inside the grounds, however, the impression was otherwise; for clearly their piety was showing. Secularity in thought did not alter the practices inherited from the school’s years as a seminary. In recent years, I think it can be said, The Divinity School has made no pretense of sustaining its seminary character outwardly. The professors have quit praying (in classes that is), chapel has become like the magician’s slight-of-hand— “Now you see it, now you don’t.” Our B.T.U. hosts, keeping pace with faculty example, have begun serving sherry before the annual dinner. As one member of the Board put it, “The Baptists are drinking in front of each other now.” Arid so the protocol of piety has subsided, (or should we say, has taken on an ecumenical cast?); but it has subsided only in part, for while the Divinity School has emerged from its obvious “confessional” involvements and routines, the structure of its curriculum, with certain notable exceptions, remains remarkably consistent with that of theological seminaries generally. One has the feeling now that the assumption that the Divinity School can be both a seminary and a university divinity school, an assumption that persisted without ambiguity throughout my student days and beyond, is no longer held with the same degree of conviction. As far as I know, the issue has not been to the fore in any startling way. Our identity has gradually changed from that of being a center of self-conscious Protestant Modernists of a predominantly Baptist persuasion, to a more inclusive body of Christian scholars, functioning not so much as churchmen within the university, as university professors with churchmen’s interests and responsibilities, to a degree, or if any. Without a doubt, the interim of The Federated Theological Faculty between 1943–53 had much to do with this change in self-image; though in certain ways that inter-relationship of schools had the effect of accentuating the seminary cast of the divinity program as a whole, and of the Divinity School itself, in so far as it retained any clear identity of its own during those years. Along with the changes in personnel and religious affiliations, both among the students and the faculty, has come, 1 believe, a marked tone of secularity in the performance of our duties. This may reflect more the changing of the times than any substantive shift in the character or community of the school itself, but not wholly so; for with the widening of the scope of the community in its inclusion of religious communions, there invariably follows a narrowing of ground upon which religious solidarity or collaboration is likely. This has proven out in the ecumenical movement time and again. Our secularity thus becomes our point of focus; our

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secularity in thought, that is. Our efforts at common worship prove less viable, possibly for a variety of reasons, less profitable. Now I look upon this change in our stance and communal character, not as deterioration in character as a community, but as a freeing of the school from an historic bondage that was in keeping with a particular set of historical circumstances and obligations. That we have become different as a community of scholars, students and faculty alike, from that of a generation or more ago, stems in large measure from changing historical circumstances of the school itself, including intervening changes in policy and personnel. This is good socio-historical doctrine. Yet, I would argue that we have not really grasped the full import of our freedom to be a university divinity school. This topic in itself would require a full-length paper, which I hope someone else will write. But let me comment on it briefly. How does a university divinity school differ from a seminary? I am not thinking now of differences in the degree of specialization, doctoral programs, scholarly productivity, etc.; these are well-known and commonly recognized. I have in mind, rather, the orbit of its scholarly inquiry, following from inescapable demands, of a constituency for one thing, to which one stands beholden. Due to the generosity of mind at work in the B.T.U., under the helpful guidance of some discerning Baptists now present among us, the Divinity School’s operations have been released from certain compulsive directives which a more provincial conception of its work would require. It has not relinquished the responsibilities inherent in the structure of its governing board; through the Boards reconception of these responsibilities, they have been allocated in a way that does not impose upon the Divinity School the limiting effects of a seminary perspective. Now the question that is to be asked in view of this structural change in the administering of these responsibilities is: How is the Divinity School to take full account of what is now open to it structurally? How is it to take full advantage of this release from a restricting legacy to become a university divinity school in the full sense of those words? The response to this query could very well improve the stance of the school in dealing with the pressing problems of cultural change which, at the moment, appear to be more insistent and crucial than any others. Now I don’t think I am up to speaking adequately to this question. Perhaps no one of us is at the moment. It is a fair question to raise, however, and if it speaks to the realities of our present situation, it should be explored, with several offering their judgments and expectations. In what follows I try to make a marginal beginning, speaking out of concerns that have motivated my own work through the years.

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The fact that we are faced with this problem of pursuing our own identity at the very time that we confront radical demands, growing out of the historical situation itself, is probably all to the good. The two problems are intertwined; and perhaps we cannot clearly resolve the one without giving thought to the other. It is the function of divinity education, I have tried to say, and should now add, within a university, to participate in the historic breaking of forms, not in its vindictive and violent expressions of revolt, but in its creative role, responding to this ferment of revolt sympathetically as being potentially prophetic and life-giving, yet exercising its own disciplines in the present circumstances of history to criticize and to redirect its iconoclasms in the interest of importance. Directing divinity education toward this larger goal of the culture’s iconoclastic efforts is to render it relevant without capitulating over-readily or aimlessly to the demands of immediacy out of motives that may impel educators to forego their disciplines. My first observation in response to the query, How are we to become a university divinity school proportionate to the opportunity and demands that are now upon us, is, not by becoming just another department or school of religion in a university. Something would be lost were we to take that course. We have within our disciplines and our tradition of study what enables us to do more than a descriptive program of religious inquiry. Yet, bringing divinity education into the larger orbit of iconoclastic effort in the interest of Importance, necessarily implies that the mode of inquiry will more and more encompass the full range of data bearing upon the problem of faith and culture as a world phenomenon, to which concerns of the religious legacy native to one’s own immediacy stand related. This suggestion appears particularly promising and insistent when one recalls the broadening of the base of our humanity, which, in itself, poses issues and interests to which the usual offerings in theological study do not readily speak; and to which, in most instances, they are unable to speak. I should like to see the Divinity School of the University of Chicago assume openly and confidently an educational stance that makes explicit acknowledgment of the world context in which issues of faith and culture arise. The sentiment for this perspective already pervades the Divinity School, but the organization of its work is not consonant with this vision of understanding or sensibility. There were oblique attempts at implementing this mode of inquiry in the early Chicago School, as intimated in the opening chapter of A Guide to the Study of the Christian Religion, which was the handbook for orienting us as students in the twenties; but these were muted or relegated to the periphery of our theological inquiry. Even

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the role of courses in the History of Religions in this school gives the impression that the work of this field is in the nature of a generous footnote to the mainline of theological inquiry. The stature of its present personnel would seem to make it indispensable to our operations; the role we envisage for it in divinity education as a whole is not consonant with that impression History of Religions, as I have said, has been an addendum to Divinity School studies, not a formative influence in shaping its vision of -religious studies, or in evoking issues out of their perspective which theologians might expect to confront. To be sure, the shift from a provincially Protestant Christian focus of theological inquiry to one that partakes of the larger vision of faith and culture is a precarious one. University centers of religious studies that have ventured in this direction have generally produced what, from a critical theological point of view and judgment has seemed more or less dilettantish in dealing with basic issues of a critical or constructive nature. Their interests, of course, have been largely descriptive and interpretative; hence critical issues such as the relation between Christianity and other faiths, or problems of their confrontation, the status of the claim of absoluteness in any one of the faiths, or the possible interpenetration of the various witnesses of faith, have rarely, if ever, been raised; or if raised, dealt with in the most desultory fashion. I would say that such issues have intruded upon our own theological inquiry but rarely. Our historians of religion have been content to let the theologians stub their toes if they chose to enter upon such inquiry, and, for the most part, our theologians have steered clear of such indignities to their person. Now I am not arguing for having the History of Religions field take over in directing the course of divinity study. I mean simply to express a concern that the perspective from within which its field of inquiry proceeds become more fully integrated with what we undertake to do in dealing with problems of Christian faith and history, and particularly in areas having to do with issues of faith and culture that present themselves in the present awakening of cultures as world facts. Bringing divinity education into the larger orbit of iconoclastic effort in the interest of Importance implies further, being attentive to the problematics of faith, and, in fact, to the historical account of faith within the total cultural complex; not just within the context of the cultic legacy, as is commonly conveyed through studies in church history, history of doctrine, and systematic theology, The data conveyed through these traditional disciplines are highly pertinent to any such study, particularly in a phenomenological study of the cultic faith; but they represent but one orbit of religious phenomena within the culture. Extending beyond that

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central orbit of the cultus are to be found further, in some instances, finer fruitions of the Christian mythos within the culture, along with a teeming ferment of thought that either openly challenges this cultic heritage, or lives on smugly in disdain of it. Either way, as a cultural extension of the Christian witness, or as a challenge to it, this cultural response to faith is of immediate import to theological inquiry in all phases of divinity education. More attention has been given hitherto, perhaps to the contentious challenges to the Christian witness than to unheralded extensions of the witness through nonconformist expressions in all phases of the cultural history in literature, poetry, and the arts, as well as in critical writings of philosophers and scientists. Though less significant from the point of view of presenting the mainline of any religious witness, these cultural exemplications and imaginative recreations of the formative mythos can be highly significant. Now tepid as these preliminary suggestions may seem, they have some unsettling effects, once they are taken seriously as criteria or directives for reconceiving the task of divinity education in the university; for they alter rather radically the format of theological and historical inquiry. The usual pattern is directed toward delineating what has persisted as the mainline of the Christian witness, with concession only to the more formidable instances of non-conformity which became in their own right major alternative expressions of the cultus. Even the socio-historical method under Shailer Mathews adhered to this customary pattern of inquiry; for he was intent on tracing the successful line of theological decision that had won out in the Councils and in the deliberations of other church bodies, and which thus became the surviving and successful expression of Christianity as a social movement. Undoubtedly there was a tinge of the Darwinian notion of the survival of the fittest in this Modernist doctrine augmenting his allegiance to the customary mode of assessing the formal line of descent within the Christian inheritance. An adequate and pertinent study of the Christian legacy within the scope of inquiry I have suggested cannot continue such an arbitrary and selective practice in delineating the cultural history of the faith. One way of visualizing what such a program of divinity study would involve is to consider the spheres of inquiry in which the various fields would participate from within their respective disciplines. The captions I have given to these spheres are purely arbitrary, though they seem to me to suggest what is involved, both as to the focus and concern of study. The first of these spheres is what I would call CULTURAL THEOLOGY, suggested by the term “cultural anthropology.” This is a mode of inquiry that would search out descriptively the vast historical milieu within

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any cultural orbit of meaning in which the response of faith had emerged, developed, and come to fruition in a pattern or style of life and thought. The problem here would be to understand the phenomenon of this matterof-factness as a response of the human spirit in its religious outreach to a complex of environmental, historical, and social circumstances. But it should be conceived environmentally and socially, not just with the question, How did this response of faith come about in this time and this place, but also with the query, What did occur in this time and place to evoke and to effect a certain ethos of thought and feeling. In short, this is the attempt to understand the mythos in terms of its cultural context. Now I have indicated that this mode of thought is not alien to the History of Religions in its study of world religions. It is true that it is only one phase of this phenomenological inquiry, but a proper one. The thought that the historian of religion methodology might be employed to search through various phases of Christian history in the West to identify structures of the Judaic-Christian mythos, and hopefully to identify the structure of Christian faith in its mythical mode impresses me as being both an exciting and important kind of inquiry. It would helpfully supplement the counter habit of, mind, so prevalent in theological literature, to deal with faith almost exclusively as a conceptual act. History of religions long ago abandoned the notion that religions are to be understood primarily or simply in terms of their ideas or conceptualizations. Theologians seem not to have taken this advance in procedure seriously, or to have come upon it on their own. Along with phenomenological inquiry into these problems, I have ventured to imagine the possibility of reviving the socio-historical method as employed by the early Chicago School, applying it to later periods of Western Christian history. Exciting as the socio-historical method was in disclosing the dynamics of cultural interaction in the development of early Christianity, it seemed to bog down when applied to later periods of Western Christianity. Both Mathews and Case had things to say about this phase of the problem, but, in my judgment, not with the cogency and persuasion that they were able to unveil the earlier dramas of Christian history. Is there a way of employing that method fruitfully, especially in the early modern period as well as in recent times? And can this method in any way be correlated with phenomenological inquiry in addressing these same eras? These are questions I would like to see explored. The contemporary phase of this mode of inquiry would be the kind of ecological studies which Gibson Winter has pursued in his books on the church and suburbia. A second sphere of inquiry is THE THEOLOGY OF CULTURE. I am

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not sure this is the best caption to designate the range of inquiry involved here, or even its distinctive character; for it tends, under that designation, to take a normative stance in the manner of apologetics, and thus its substance is sought, often exclusively, in what the Church has defined as the core of the faith. Culture is then but the form of what is there discerned as substance. This is reminiscent of the notion of reality supervening experience, and of its shadow being reflected in experience. You will detect here an oblique reference to Professor Tillich’s neophenomenology. I see the pertinence of what Professor Tillich sought to delineate in his theology of culture, but I think there is another phase of the story which his analysis did not get at. What I am trying to speak to is the kind of correlation of myth and history with which the historian of religion has been chiefly concerned in so far as he has gone beyond the notion that religious ideas and beliefs are the primary phenomena. Where the historian of religion has delved into the visceral regions of the culture, if you will, its psyche and moral experiences issuing from this deeply formative historical motivation and impulse, he has captured some intimation of the interplay of faith and culture which has often eluded the cultus, beyond individual religious experience even, to convey the underlying mythos of the culture and its history—not as anything selfconscious or overt, but as a persisting, often inarticulate shaping of a people’s mode of experience and expression. This is an area of inquiry to which little attention has been given. And it is peculiarly pertinent to present-day issues. For we are at that juncture of our own cultural history when the cleavage between historical and contemporary modes of thought and motivation is becoming acute. The conviction that we are at the end of the Christian era appears to be accelerating in our culture. This issue is generally discussed as-a conceptual problem, having to do with changing perspectives on life and our imageries of thought. A more serious aspect of the problem, in my judgment, is the deterioration or dissipation of the lure of faith or its efficacy at the level of motivation and sensibility. This problem is right at the center of most aspects of the current cultural crisis, relating both to matters concerning style of living, and to the critical breakdown in human relationships where the only course of action appears to be that of pitting power against power. At what point does the Christian witness intrude in such deadly confrontation? And with what? The issue is not always clear here, even among those who are most zealous to participate responsibly in these critical, human encounters. When we speak of “the realities of faith,” of what are we speaking? In my judgment, these realities exist in their efficacy as energies of faith,

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functioning, if they function at all, in relationships between people. The concern to lift up or in any way to identify this energy in disciplined ways as resources of the culture and of human communities has been striking, lacking in theological discussion, or for that matter in divinity education. Yet here is where the action is so far as the efficacy of the Christian witness has any meaning in this present period of our history. And the understanding, clarifying, and disciplining of this resource in the content of conflict would seem to be an urgent aspect of the concern to prepare people for the modern ministry, or for lust enduring and participating in our present history. Problems such as these would seem to concern the Theology of Culture and Constructive Theology alike. Or at least they would mark a point of their convergence. Along with this direct inquiry into the energy of faith as a cultural resource, there is the critical and interpretative study of its expressiveness in imaginative works of literature, music, and the arts. These provide vivid and compelling instances of human anguish and conflict in the imaginative mode. Literature and the arts have been our nearest approach to achieving what could be called disciplined awareness in the emotional and religious response to human crises and to what can be called lived experience. The fact that the creative artist may not have the phenomenon of the religious response consciously in mind in creating his art does not lessen the vividness and authenticity with which he may convey it. His indirectness, in fact, may be the source of its efficacy. And the fact that it is conveyed in the imaginative mode, lends a transcendence or objective mood that is all the more compelling in evoking an outreach toward what is there conveyed. This is the power of the appreciative response, as compared with the didactic and the moralistic appeal. Much of what is currently explored in the field of Theology and Literature rests precisely in this sphere of inquiry; and there are appreciative dimensions going beyond literary criticism which could be fruitfully explored within this mode. The sphere of CONSTRUCTIVE THEOLOGY might be considered the spearhead of the contemporary thrust of the theological disciplines, and, in fact, of all divinity disciplines, in that it brings into sharpened focus the issues concerning the problematics of faith in the present historical situation. Practically everything that would go on in the other two spheres of inquiry, in so far as it was oriented toward problems of faith and culture would be pertinent to this mode of inquiry in selective ways. For the kinds of issues that would most likely come to the fore within this sphere of inquiry, however, the resources most ready at hand would be philosophical theology, philosophy of religion, historical and systematic theology.

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The fact that Constructive Theology is oriented toward the problematics of faith in the contemporary situation, however, does not mean that its sights are fixed upon the present only. For it confronts the agonizing questions, to which reference was made in the earlier part of the paper, relating our immediacies to an ultimate dimension of Importance, grappling with the troublesome question of seeing past and present in their interrelations; and other, more immediate, and possibly more concrete questions having to do with the human psyche and the human community in their long-range encounter with the realities of faith, as history, in collaboration with current disciplines, can illumine them. These spheres of inquiry are not to be thought of as fields or divisions in the usual academic sense; for, as I mentioned earlier, they represent modes of inquiry that cut across fields and disciplines, and on occasions require the inter-relating of disciplines. By being aware of these spheres of inquiry, encompassing the whole of our program of divinity education, we would be recognizing, both the distinctive provinces and specialized disciplines of each, and at the same time providing access for each of them into areas of inquiry in which other fields are involved and interested. In stressing the distinctiveness of each field in its resources of discipline and mode of inquiry, I mean to dispel the illusion which, I think, has been responsible for our tendency toward pluralism and field autonomy, the assumption being since the organization of the seven fields in 1946, that each is a way of studying and interpreting the Christian faith. It was assumed, from this assumption that in engaging in these several ways of understanding the Christian faith that one would readily discern the correlation between their findings. For the student, however, and possibly for others of us, it was more like Stephen Leacock’s rider, mounting his horse and riding off in all directions. The assumption of this paper is that the structural changes contemplated here in projecting a university pattern of divinity education are manageable within the present organization of fields. What is rejected is the rationale for the fields. What is advocated is a realignment of what we are doing within the fields under a covering perspective that will help us visualize diverse spheres of inquiry in dealing with problems of faith and culture as a world problem.

1970 The Continuing Search for Intelligence in Ministry Some Reflections on Seventy-five Years of Divinity Education It is clear that, in this series of addresses, I have been given the role of the “contemporary ancestor” who can look back upon having participated in several ventures of this divinity community in its continuing search for intelligence in ministry. I take it therefore that my responsibility, at least in this present lecture, is to reflect upon these past efforts which, in effect, we celebrate today. In tomorrow’s lecture I shall address myself more constructively to the problem of intelligence in ministry, first by focusing, again somewhat reminiscently, upon proposals of Professor Ames to go “beyond theology,” and then trying to think beyond his beyond as we move toward the present task. Although in this Anniversary Conference we are reflecting upon these problems as they have been posed by the historical experience of the Disciples Divinity House, we all know that its history was, in intimate and substantive ways, of apiece with that of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. In any event, the only phase on which I am competent to speak is the one that is continuous with the Divinity School’s history. Furthermore, I must acknowledge, that my perspective upon this historical experience of Divinity education is conditioned by the fact that I have observed it from within the theological field, wherein the concerns of the various periods took form in a particular way. Were this story to be told by one who had participated in another field of inquiry within this divinity school experience, conceivably the details and emphases, and even the organization of the address, might be quite different. It is true that, throughout all the years during which I was associated with this place; the theological field assumed the role of interpreter of divinity education on a broad scale encompassing all disciplines, rather than as a field speaking specifically from within its own discipline. Theologians are like that, you know. The earth turns on their axis. They and God understand these matters in a way that other mortals and immortals do not. But in our case, this presumptuousness stemmed from the further fact that, for a considerable proportion of our history, the deans of the Divinity School as well as of this Divinity House were, themselves, members of the theological field; consequently, we had no choice but to yield to a sovereignty complex, to which, as I recall, we took readily and without

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visible protest. It will help us to sharpen the focus upon the distinctive thrust of the periods about which I shall be speaking if we select a term for each of them that points up what I choose to call the over-arching vision of inquiry. For the initial period, stemming from the turn of the century through the mid-nineteen twenties, I proposed the word “Modernism.” For the second period, say from the late twenties to the late forties, I suggest the terms, “the New Naturalism.” For the third period from the late forties through the fifties, with an afterglow continuing into the sixties, I shall use the terms, “process Theology.” And for the fourth stage, I shall use the words “the pluralistic phase,” suggesting a relating or correlating of empirical and phenomenological concerns, with alacrity of other modes of thought providing a shadowy background. I. The Modernist search for intelligence in ministry was motivated by one controlling conviction, namely, that, intellectually and culturally, the West had entered upon a radically new period of human history in which the natural and social sciences bad become normative for religious inquiry as well as for inquiry in other areas of thought. As a consequence, the appeal to the past, either as authority or as a norm, was considered no longer appropriate. The study of history was exceedingly informative for the modernist by way of understanding whence we had come; but it offered no explicit guidelines as to whither we should go. The Modernists who shaped the course of divinity education at Chicago were self-consciously American in outlook, intent upon pursuing the educational task as this appeared to be looming within the American experience. These educators were not uninformed about the European experience, nor indifferent toward it; but they shared the judgment of many who were, namely, that European scholarship epitomized the learning of the past and was thereby inhibited in pursuing the possibilities then opening up to this new generation of religious scholars. Many of these Chicago educators had been imbued with the European tradition of learning, having been born and bred in New England or abroad; others of than were Midwestern. But all of them had come to this “city of big shoulders” to help rise up a center of learning in the new mode, and, through it to lift the sights of this American community within the churches and beyond them. They were peripatetic educators, many of them, for they were on the go much of the time, carrying their critical ministry of learning to people throughout this mid-western, American community and beyond. The modernist was oriented toward the future in a sense that was

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radically new for that period. The basic notion which gave credence to this futuristic motif was, of course, evolutionism, based upon the Darwinian theory of 1859; but altered and idealized in terms of a theistic evolution. Structurally, Modernism should be seen as a confluence of several new disciplines which had arisen shortly after the middle of the nineteenth century. Biblical criticism had been in-full force in certain European university centers from the middle of the eighteenth _century; but it was not to appear with any noticeable effect in American theological seminaries until after 1860. Even Horace Bushnell was relatively unaware of the critical movement in biblical study; yet his own innovating work, Dissertation on Language, which appears as an appendix to God in Christ, published in 1849, was in its way an astute contribution to the discipline. By the time the University of Chicago had become established, along with the Divinity School and the Disciple Divinity House, biblical criticism was in full stride in the major seminaries of this country. And it was to be one of the fronts on which intelligence in ministry at Chicago was to be pursued. It could be argued that, as critical inquiry into the biblical texts and their history advanced, the social or environmental milieu of religious history and biblical language assumed prominence. It was thus of considerable significance that during this very period there was to emerge four major disciplines which were to figure prominently in the new, modernistic method of religious inquiry. I refer to the sciences of cultural anthropology, psychology, social psychology, and sociology. Toward the turn of the century, a philosophy peculiarly attuned to these new disciplines, which was to be called pragmatism, also appeared. In so far as these modernists acknowledged affinity with any philosophical outlook, they embraced pragmatism (mainly of the Dewey School) as being the philosophy that took full account of these new scientific disciplines. But the pragmatism of the Dewey school was no simple, philosophical rendering of the new sciences, or of their functional interpretation of meaning. Before becoming a pragmatist, Dewey, for example, had been associated with the neo-Hegelian movement which had taken rise, of all places, in St. Louis, Missouri, under the leadership of W. T. Harris and the stimulating German immigrant, H. C. Brookmeyer. Dewey’s break with Hegelianism never implied a complete relinquishment of its idealizing ethos. The superstructure of the Absolute had vanished, but concern with the idealizing process within the natural structures of organic life, including man, particularly at the level of man, persisted. Incidentally, it would not be amiss to speak of Marxism as a truncated idealism in much the same sense. Both Marxism and Pragmatism retained the idealizing

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bent of mind. In Marxism, it was applied specifically to a selective group of underprivileged citizens who were projected as the classless society. In pragmatism the idealizing process applied to the doctrine of man itself, possibly more individually, without reference to any doctrinaire or restricted conception of the ideal community. This same ideating process is to be noted in the thinking of Edward Scribner Ames, Herbert L. Willett, Winifred Garrison, Shailer Mathews, Shirley Jackson Case, and others of this Chicago community of modernists. In fact it was this ideal aspect of present realities and its promise as a future realization that gave incentive and direction to modernist theologies. Modernism, then, was a perspective upon religious and Christian history stemming from this confluence of new disciplines, ranging from the new post-Darwinian biology, anthropology, sociology, social and functional psychology, to the new pragmatic movement in philosophy. It is not to be assumed, however, that these Chicago modernists embraced these new disciplines in any concerted way, and thus became singleminded in their pursuit of common ends suddenly or simultaneously. Each in his own probing, and often stumbling, way found access to one or more of the new disciplines, and became enamored of what opened up to him as a way of looking afresh upon religious and Christian history, and the problem of retaining or re-envisaging his inherited faith within the contemporary idiom. For Mathews it was the new disciplines of sociology and social psychology which prompted fresh inquiry, particularly as these were applied to the revolutionary developments of the eighteenth century; notably the French revolution. For Ames, the breaking forth of a new vision of faith came in a course in philosophy, reading Pfleiderer’s, The Philosophy of Religion, specifically the section on “The Historical Development of the Religious Consciousness,” followed by a reading of William James’ Principles of Psychology and John Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding. Ames was to find his way into social psychology and cultural anthropology, and these were to give the decisive turn to his method of studying and interpreting religion. And so one could go on, indicating the various ways in which, in each case, a break with the inherited piety occurred as new vistas of understanding opened up to them through the use of new disciplines and resources of inquiry. In this context, the search for intelligence in ministry took a specific form: On the one hand, it implied a cleansing of religious thought of the illusions and old wives tales inherited from a prescientific past. But it was more than criticism and iconoclasm; it implied as well a fresh envisagement of Christian meanings and doctrines within the idiom of these new disciplines, translating or discovering in psychological, sociological, or

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biological terns what previous generations of Christians and other religious people had expressed in legal, political, or even mythological language. The legacy of faith to which these men had become committed in their youth was thus being summoned to take account of the life of learning and criticism to which they now stood committed in their mature years. Along with this passionate responsiveness to the new disciplines of the sciences and the pragmatic use of such knowledge, modernists related to democracy as being the mode of human relationship best adapted to the use of scientific knowledge, and most likely to assure the use of such knowledge in behalf of all mankind. Thus there is a marked touch of the manifest destiny doctrine implicit in much that the modernist declared in behalf of intelligence in ministry. Science and democracy, Shailer Mathews was to say, are the present-day sources from which analogies and patterns of meaning are to be drawn in rendering Christianity, intelligible and applicable to contemporary society. One finds these two themes informing the notion of intelligibility as well in Gerald Birney Smith’s Social Idealism and the Changing Theology, in Edward Scribner Ames’ The New Orthodoxy, and in Shirley Jackson Case’s Christian Philosophy of History. Specifically, intelligence in ministry for the modernist implied employing the critical facilities of the sciences to discern the functional value of beliefs, Christian or otherwise, as this spoke to contemporary needs. The modernist, in keeping with the style and ethos of his times, was essentially a man of enterprise—concerned with getting things done. His social idealism gave him incentive to pursue these reforms; the sciences provided the resources of thought necessary for the task. His modernist distillation of the Christian legacy gave him theological justification and vision for pursuing it. For some the essential import of the Christian legacy had been given in Locke’s essay on The Essence of Christianity; for others it presented a more agonizing task of defining a generic Christianity and of expressing it within the forms of thought expressive of the contemporary idiom; for an increasing number, one’s own moral idealism, having been implanted and formed during the years of One’s own Christian nurture, gave assurance enough that in expressing oneself, one was deciding and acting out of the sensibilities of one’s inherited faith. Modernists to a man can be spoken of as conceptualists in mode of thought, implying a certain skepticism concerning the possibility or reliability of any ontological designation of realities; yet, nevertheless, expressing full confidence in the persistence of such realities of faith. Thus a conceptual theism, such as “the personality-producing activities of the

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universe,” personally envisaged; or “reality idealized,” as Professor Ames was to speak of it, seemed sufficient guarantors of the faith they embraced. This very dismissal of ontology, or of precise definition of the religious object, freed the modernist to give full attention to the pragmatic tasks at hand, as they arose in the churches, informed by an application of scientific knowledge to religious problems, and supported by a community of values consonant -with their social idealism. Sketching out in skeleton fashion the outlines of Modernism in the way I have done, gives some hint as to its structural identity; however, it hardly conveys to anyone the dynamics of this powerfully motivated search for intelligence in ministry. We who lived through it, shared in its vision and ministry, remember it more as a crusade for honesty and integrity in human living, for justice and the exercise of love in human relationships, a measured confidence in the resources of goodwill which, when appealed to, would bring fresh sanity to situations, and open up new possibilities of human endeavor. Modernism in its larger context as a search for intelligence in ministry was peculiarly identified with and adapted to a particular set of historical and intellectual circumstances, ranging from the mid-nineteenth century through the aftermath of the First World War. The shortcomings of this modernist zeal were already beginning to appear as the nineteen twenties drew to a close. Awareness of such shortcomings was being expressed in the very last papers written by Gerald Birney Smith before his untimely death in 1929, and Professor Ames’ book, Religion, which appeared in the same year. II. In retrospect, it is clear that at that time, the most telling evidence of a new wind blowing was to be found in the first two books by Henry Nelson Wieman, Religious Experience and Scientific Method, and The Wrestle of Religion with Truth. And this brings me to the second phase of the continuing search for intelligence in ministry. Intelligence in ministry for Wieman could mean only one thing: Knowing, that what you are doing as a religious ministry is, in fact, responding faithfully and wholeheartedly to that Something, however defined, which can be designated Supremely Worthful for all mankind. This inquiry was eventually to lead Wieman to his notion of “Creative inter-change;” but in those days a variety of other terms were used. In this formulation of the religious task, Wieman was seeking to direct attention away from all subjective motivation as he sought to generate response to an objective demand upon all human living. Simply responding out of an impulse of piety, or in response to one’s moral idealism, was, for Wieman,

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not enough. The paths of history, he used to say, are strewn with the debris of wreckage and evil-doing, following from the folly and horror perpetrated by religiously-motivated men and women whose piety was uninformed as to what is supremely worthful; or because of men’s commitment to ideals that were little more than a projection of their own wishful or willful thinking. “What, in fact, is supremely worthful?” he insisted on asking: What is worthy of being designated by so awesome and towering a category as “God,” demanding our ultimate commitment? That, he declared, is the all-important reality or objective for any ministry that would be intelligently dedicated. In Wieman’s first book he was particularly concerned to challenge the appeal to human ideals and the method implied in all forms of idealization, insisting that these could be illusory and even deceptive. In a way, he challenged the all-out appeal to the sciences as a method for religion, except as it could be made suitable to its data, on the grounds that religious adjustment embraced something more than a practical or functional solution of our problems. Accordingly, he argued for developing a science of God, suitable to the religious data, claiming that without that kind of disciplined inquiry directed toward the data or datum to which dull devotion and commitment are to be given, we could very well be victims of our own illusions, worshipping some figment of imagination, instead of the structure of value which, in fact, makes for our highest good. “God,” he wrote in the preface to his Wrestle of Religion with Truth, “is a fact, as real as a toothache.” Specific awareness of that fact was for him the prior task in seeking intelligence in ministry. When Wieman first came to the Chicago campus, the impression was commonly held by some that his thought had affinities with Modernism and the theological concerns of the early Chicago school. When his new mode of naturalism was more carefully and critically looked at, however, that initial impression subsided. As Professor Ames had all along insisted, he was clearly of a different spirit. The very way in which Wieman focused the problem of religious inquiry tended to narrow its range, and to intensify its pursuit. All other modes of inquiry, except as they spoke directly to this objective of designating what is supremely worthful for all mankind, and worthy of our ultimate commitment, were considered costly and dissipating detours which served only to obfuscate the religious end. This all-out emphasis upon doing this one thing was at once clarifying and frustrating. It was clarifying in giving direction and precision to religious inquiry, to which many of us as students at the time, sounded a welcome note. We were already so distracted and disassembled from having been pulled in all

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directions by the multiplicity of courses, that for someone of stature to rise up and say, “Do this one thing:” was like receiving manna from heaven. But what about all the other serious and disciplined kinds of inquiry in university and divinity studies? How were we to regard them in our search for intelligence in ministry? To this, Wieman would offer but one reply, and did: His reply was simply, “How do they contribute to this basic inquiry? How do they answer, “What is supremely worthful?” But there was a joker concealed within this plausible answer: To answer that preliminary inquiry, one would have to spend a life-time of inquiry, which in itself would detour one from the one line of inquiry that was basic to all. Meanwhile, our wives would leave us, and we would grow old with the years. Nevertheless, the response to Wieman in those early years at Chicago was electric. His summons to focus inquiry sharply upon the structure of value had the effect of silhouetting the sharp contrast between his new theism and the conceptual theism that had held modernism under its spell for more than a generation. And, for a time, at least, he had the humanists on the run; Which in those days, was something of an achievement; for they were the one element within the Divinity School student body and in the Hyde Park community that had remained smug and self-contained in the theistic struggled among modernist and evangelical liberals, assured that the evidence was all on their side. In retrospect, I can see that we who responded hopefully to Wieman’s incursion upon the modernist ethos of thought were not just taken in by his narrowing the route of religious inquiry to this one thing. What elicited our response to Wieman was the intuitive feeling that by his iconoclastic utterances he was clearing the ground for seeing the problem of intelligence in ministry in a new way, and that he was drawing upon new resources of thought with which to inform and attack the basic problem under inquiry. Modernism, I said earlier, had been informed by the confluence of new disciplines which emerged following the middle of the nineteenth century, and the philosophy of pragmatism which had been consonant with these new sciences. Wieman’s new naturalism was expressive of an even later phase of the scientific revolution, one in which relativity physics, Gestalt psychology, along with other forms of organismic thinking were making their impact upon thought. Intelligence in inquiry in this new phase implied, not just an understanding of function in relation to environment, but a fresh understanding of context, implying relational along with operational factors, which set the problem of knowing in a new organic setting. The Immediacies of experience seen within a depth of concreteness and its relations was to yield a new

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formative imagery of thought. Wieman’s early writings seemed fully immersed in this new, organismic thinking, following from a concern-with emergence and operational data in the new physics. Here his leanings toward Whitehead were clearly evident, to whom he had responded with great respect and with some assent; though it was becoming apparent that Wieman was to relinquish dependence on Whitehead, going his own distinctive way in pursuit of structured meaning within concrete experience. My account of Wieman relates to his years at Chicago. Since leaving Chicago he has become more and more attuned to the literature of the social sciences in his effort to become definitive about the process of creative inter-change, which is the term he finally appropriated for designating what it is in experience that commands our ultimate commitment. The turn which Wieman’s thought has recently taken seems to render it peculiarly attractive to many of the younger group of theological students. This, I found to be particularly true of B.D. students in Union Theological Seminary last year, during my stay there as a Visiting Professor. III. I turn now to the third period of the continuing search for intelligence in ministry as it developed at Chicago. Along in the early forties, a groundswell of ontological talk stemming from Whitehead’s Process and Reality began to be felt in the theological community at Chicago. It was about this time, too, that the voice of Bernie Loomer began to be heard: first, as a restive and recalcitrant student in the Divinity School, and then, in 1940, as a part-time instructor, which post was to blossom into a variety of impressive roles within the Chicago community, including that of Dean of the Divinity School. It was Loomer while still a student, who persuaded the dean’s office to enable Divinity students to take courses with Professor Charles Hartshorne of the philosophy department, whose concern with Whiteheadian metaphysics was beginning to attract attention. Hartshorne, through Loomer’s efforts as a faculty member and assistant dean, was later to become a member of the Federated Theological Faculty (1943), along with being on the philosophical faculty of the university. On coming to the Divinity school faculty in 1945, I was to employ the imagery and basic notions of Whiteheadian metaphysics in developing a mode of inquiry appropriate to constructive theology. Others in the theological field, notably Daniel Day Williams, were to join in this venture. And, of course, Dean Loomer was to give decisive leadership, both in clarifying and in exercising this perspective in divinity education. The basic orientation of process thought can be said to have been given

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by the new cosmology provided by the more recent revolution in the sciences, introducing fundamental notions that are expressive of the atomic or nuclear age. It is, to my knowledge, the only systematic inquiry in religious and philosophical thought that has sought to take this atomic and nuclear age with full intellectual seriousness in a constructive way. The intent here is not so much to present a contemporary distillation or version of the inherited faith, as in Modernism and Liberalism; or to wrest from theological and religious discourse some one line of inquiry judged to be central or basic to the religious response, as in the new naturalism. The intent of process theology is, rather, to let the illumination of a new structure of intelligibility shed its light upon the lived experience of modern culture with the expectation that what is inherent in that experience, both as a past legacy, and as a vital immediacy, will take on vivid meaning in new and compelling ways. Process theology is therefore concerned with the structure of meaning and meaningfulness in a way that neither of the other two quests for intelligence in ministry have been. Its comprehensive approach to the data of experience makes it more formidable in the initial stages of inquiry; but the perplexity here has to do with something more than the scope of its inquiry. What makes it formidable, really, is the innovating character of the basic notions or concepts themselves, providing a new perspective upon experience and the realities experienced. And, to a degree, this tends to render it unavailable except as one is impelled to give sustained attention to its new vision of man and his world. I suppose this, more than any other feature, is what precludes its being readily available for the pursuit of intelligence in ministry. If one were to master Whitehead’s system as expounded in Process and Reality, along with the rash of commentaries on Whitehead that are now appearing; digest Hartshorne’s formidable volumes, Ogden’s The Reality of God, and John Cobb’s Christian Natural Theology, by the time one were intelligent enough to minister, one would probably be too old to do so. Of course, you can always take the scenic route through process theology by way of Meland’s Faith and Culture and The Realities of Faith. There’s more anguish to cope with in these works, but if you enjoy hardship set to music, it’s not a bad road to travel. This is all nonsense, of course; for the vision of experience process thought provides is not as impenetrable as these statements may seem to suggest; and the theological entry into it is not that discouraging. For there are certain key notions that can be readily grasped by one who has familiarity with the contemporary cultural or scientific outlook as it may be conveyed through any of the disciplines. In a way, process thought is not some one kind of philosophy as over against rival speculative

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ventures; it is the contemporary world-view and scientific outlook philosophically ordered and integrated. Let me enumerate a few of its basic notions by way of pointing up its vision of experience. 1. It shares with modernism and the new naturalism a commitment to the creative character of experience, and thus, like them, fronts a further range of oncoming experience which is to be encountered. It advocates thinking forward as we live forward; thus the dynamic character of existence, as contrasted with static being, is one of its primary notions. Intelligence in living implies here, as in the other two, taking this forwardmoving motif of life in stride, and thinking and acting in terms of it. 2. Process thought is impressed with the structured character of experience, even as it presents itself to us as a stream of ongoing events. Now this concern with the structure of experience, I think, is one point where it is to be distinguished from the other two, modernism and the new naturalism. The structure of experience implies that there is a persistence of the past in every instance of innovation in present experience. In process thought the past is never something static way back there, but always an immediate and qualifying or quality-giving constituent of the present, functioning as a deterrent or as a contributive influence upon emerging events, giving character and measured opportunity to such emergence. This legacy of past experience is thus an inherent quality within experience now lived, subtly, yet surely bequeathing to it qualities, even sensibilities, consonant with its orbit of meaning. For this reason, process thought is more concerned with the negotiation between the present moment of experience and its inheritance than either modernism or the new naturalism tended to be. 3. Process thought focuses upon an efficacy within every present moment of experience that can be simultaneously creative and redemptive. It is an efficacy that is forever engaged in the breaking of forms in the interest of Importance, yet wresting from and redeeming the attained and matured value or creation in a new venture of structured meaning in existence. The interplay of new and old structures of meaning involves real suffering, pain, and unrequited loss, so that creativity is seen to occur at a price. The redemptive theme intercedes as a restorative and reconciling motif in the creative passage, countering this suffering loss. Both modernism and the new naturalism, each in its own way, acknowledged the breaking of forms as an accompaniment of living forward in a creative and evolutionary world. It was never clear, however, that the sense of tragic loss was adequately confronted in either of them; or that the redemptive theme was fully explored as an essential accompaniment of creativity. In modernism there was almost a sanguine hopefulness

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regarding future outcomes, consonant with its evolutionary idealism. This enabled modernism to blunt the issue of tragedy and evil, or to suppress it as being an unnecessary deterrent to expectations regarding future goals. This may, in part, have been a sensibility of the age, unwittingly insinuating into its mood and stance, its cultural affinity with an age uncritically committed to an evolutionary science, democracy, and individual enterprise, with its tenor of idealization and its confidence in progress. The new naturalism of Wieman was more realistic about this issue. In fact, he had much to say about it. Yet, what he says carries the ruthless overtones of a grand indifference to the concrete experiences of tragic loss, stressing full acclaim of the creative good, to the disregard of and even disdain for the created good, in a manner reminiscent of the hardnosed insistence of John Calvin to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever, come what may in these concrete circumstances of a troubled humanity. In both Calvinism and Wieman’s new naturalism, so it has always seemed to me, the problem of suffering and tragic loss are at least muted; and thus to a considerable degree unattended. 4. This suggests a fourth characteristic of process thought having to do with the import of the phrase intelligence in Ministry. I refer to the concern for the individuated event, and the primacy given to it in the schema of qualitative emergence. Innovation occurs by way of individuating events; though novelty occurs within a contextual and communal situation in which an inheritance or transmission of qualities and concerns, both of the communal ground and the creative event is affected. This is the import of the notion of prehension in Whitehead’s thought, which simultaneously points up the distinctive and innovating center of dignity in individualized experience along with its communal ground. The formula is “the individual in community;” and the emphasis is upon creativity in the individuated experience which prehends, in its innovation, all that has transpired prior to its innovation, with varying degrees of relevance, including this ever-present, quality-giving depth of efficacy in creation which is God. I have found this way of envisaging the individual in community to be a helpful corrective of both the modernist and the new naturalist way of dealing with individual experience within the social context. Modernism, though it carried forward, almost as a hidden agenda, the affirmation of individual experience, so highly valued in a capitalistic economy, stressed the social dimension, presumably as a moral corrective of what a capitalistic society tended to become. The appeal to “the beloved community of memory and hope” was eloquently declared by way of bringing the offenders of individual enterprise to repentance. Wieman’s

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new naturalism, and even more so in what he presently advances in his stress upon “creative interchange,” could be almost indifferent to the individuated event, seeing the miracle of novelty and creative experience almost exclusively in the occurrence of communal interchange. What I see as being implicit at least in process theology is a creative and constructive note of dissonance, between individual and community, between the human and the holy, between these various centers of dignity; even as there is this remarkable interlacing and correlating fact of existence and creativity in which each event prehends every other event, with varying degrees of relevance. Dissonance in the context of this communal prehending of the various centers of dignity is, in my judgment, crucial to qualitative attainment in creativity, in culture and the community, as in the Creative Passage; and in the individuated experiences of human beings. And conversely, any premature zeal for unity, correlation, or consensus, looking to the resolution of all dissonance, poses a threat to qualitative attainment, and to the miracle of creativity itself. 5. A fifth distinguishing characteristic of process thought within the Jamesian-Bergsonian-Whiteheadian imagery is its provision for dealing with what might [be] called the dimension of depth in experience. One of the telling points of differentiation between the James-Bergson-Whitehead era of process thinking and the era of modern thought, antedating them as far back as Descartes, was their departure from the preoccupation with consciousness as such, and with conscious meaning as being the sole concern for thought and the interests of “the higher life.” Process thought beginning with James and Bergson appropriated the whole drama of the sub-conscious and the unconscious as being of apiece with the conscious level of experience in the sense of being a highly relevant dimension of it. Whitehead, in stressing the external structure of meaning, as against Bergson’s all-out emphasis upon the internal stream as intuition, appeared to be returning to an emphasis upon the more restrictive, conscious and conceptual level of experience; yet, his famous dictum, “We think with our bodies” gives ample warrant to the judgment that he remained with James and Bergson in giving a certain primacy to the pre-conscious, bodily event as being a depth of thought and experience, continuous, and in certain ways, inseparable from conscious experience. I have tried to turn this acknowledgment of the dimension of depth to a concern with myth and symbol as being elementally and persistently expressive of the primordial in our more sophisticated, present-day level of cultural experience. It is my conviction, expressed both in Faith and Culture and in The Realities, of Faith, that intelligence in religion or in

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ministry cannot be adequately conceived or pursued apart from concern with this depth of bodily feeling and experience, motivating and even shaping conscious experience. While one persists in being occupied with doctrinal or theological meanings, or with philosophically refined formulations of those meanings, as if the whole of religious resources turned crucially or even exclusively upon “right doctrine” or the literal word of scripture or ontology, one tends, in my judgment to take these human forms and symbols all too seriously, and possibly without sufficient humor, considering the fallibility of our forms and symbols, to assure proportion and judgment in the use of such formulations when they are attained. Sharpening the tools of thought for clarity of utterance and exchange of ideas, is one thing; trusting wholly to our acumen in “divining the word of truth” may prove less promising than we are wont to think. All process thinkers, I should add, are not as concerned with this phase of the problem as I tend to be; but their indifference, or neglect of the problem, should not be taken to imply a rejection of it. I should add that my rationale for pursuing this concern stems, not so much from studies in the pre-conscious or the subconscious levels of experience, as from concern with what I have termed “the Creative Passage,” and what it implies concerning our structured experience, both in its conscious and its subliminal depths. IV. We turn finally to a recent phase of the continuing search for intelligence in ministry, that which characterizes roughly the past decade of divinity education at Chicago. The history and character of this latter period, especially with regard to ‘the thrust of its inquiry resists interpretation for the time being, in fact defies it; and it may continue to do so for some time to come, at least until the lines of its identity and intent can be made fully discernible. In some respects it can be said to represent an historic change, both in the way the administrative problem, of divinity education is conceived, and in the scope and manner in which divinity education itself has been understood. This period spans the years of divinity school history when religion in general and Christianity in particular began to be looked upon phenomenologically in a way that both complemented and, to some extent, challenged the strong, empirical tradition of religious inquiry in this place. The process mode of inquiry continued throughout this period as a viable option in the search for intelligence in ministry; yet the formidable presence of scholars and other spokesmen whose bent of inquiry followed in the tradition of phenomenology and existentialism, gave impetus to assuming this stance, or to take it seriously into account, in all seven

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fields. The names of professors Paul Tillich and Mircea Eliade come readily to mind; but it is to be remembered, too, that this was the period in which the theologies of Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, and Rudolf Bultmann were given more serious and probing attention than at any previous time in our theological history. To this rich ferment of theological inquiry was to be added more recently, the impressive contributions of a renascent, Roman Catholic community of scholars, together with those of modem Jewish scholars. When the complexity and scope of these offerings is taken into consideration, it is understandable that no one participant in this melee of exploration can confidently speak for the whole of the experience. It is my impression, however, if I may venture an impression of this era, that what has emerged from these years of theological and religious exploration is a rising tide of phenomenological interest, responsive to a degree to other styles of inquiry, including that of empiricism and process thought, but only moderately so; and that by way of being aware primarily of what is occurring near at hand, and not with any serious intention of confronting or attending alternative modes of inquiry. The phenomenological mode of inquiry, as it has been developing at Chicago, during this era tends to embrace two objectives, which on the face of it, do not as yet seem correlated to one another. The one objective is to get an intelligible purchase on the phenomena of the sacred as these have been exemplified in the historic religions; the other is to acknowledge and to lift up the secular form and setting in which religious issues in their contemporary form are evoked. In the one it is the cultus and its historical forms and symbols that are in focus; in the other, it is the culture at large that defines the bounds of inquiry, notably the area in which social tensions are erupting into conflict and where political and legal power are visibly manifest. The distinctive thrust of this phase of the search for intelligence in ministry can be said to be situation-oriented and action-centered. In-the broad sense, as we have said, the inquiry throughout is culturally oriented. And the resources upon which this mode of inquiry draws in articulating its methodology come largely from the social sciences. The areas of this discipline that are particularly in focus are those that bear upon community organization and its dynamics in which problems of power and motivation can be structurally observed and analyzed. In both respects, its orientation and its resources, this approach to intelligence in ministry recalls the method of the early Chicago School, with modifications pertinent to differences between the phenomenological and the empirical method. The question suggests itself, Can these two phenomenological lines of

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inquiry be coordinated so as to present related or inter-related modes of study, exemplifying, for example, two wings of the phenomenological approach to religious study, embracing the sacred and the secular? Or must they be regarded as two distinct efforts, having no common objective, except to sustain a pluralistic state of religious inquiry under a common method? This question cannot, I think, be readily answered at present? Perhaps it is even too early to raise the question. Meanwhile, explorations within the theological field, itself, appear to be underway, bent on giving full voice to the several serious options expressing themselves within the current pluralism, hopefully to carry each of the strands to greater maturity of expressiveness, and, possibly, to an interchange between them. This latter period is crucial to an understanding of the search for intelligence in ministry as it has been pursued within this theological community in recent years. I would hope that Professor Marty, who is closer than many of us to the present dynamics of thought in divinity education at Chicago, might address himself to some extent to this phase of our history. Such has been the continuing search for intelligence in ministry in this place, as one contemporary ancestor sees it. There is, of course, much more to say, but no more time to say it. And since I have already engaged you in an extensive, and possibly wearying, exploration of our history, let me now conclude abruptly with those historically uncontestable words, “SO BE IT.” Bernard E. Meland First Lecture 75th Anniversary of The Disciples Divinity House March 31, 1970

Beyond Theology and What Else? Today we celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Edward Scribner Ames, whose association with the Disciples Divinity House date back to 1895, whose distinguished career as a member of the philosophy department of the University of Chicago began in 1900, becoming Chairman of that department in 1931; whose ministry in the university Disciples Church of Christ began in 1900 and continued through the next forty years. And in 1927 he was made Dean of the Disciples Divinity House, a post which he held until 1945. Most men do well to manage one major post at a time. Dean Ames had three of them simultaneously for better than a quarter century; and did so with distinction and achievement. Yesterday we reflected upon the Modernist search for intelligence in ministry, which characterized divinity education in this school and in the University of Chicago during the first three decades of this century. I venture the judgment that the one who most aptly and adequately exemplified this Modernist search for intelligence in ministry was the former Dean of this Divinity House, Edward Scribner Ames. I say that knowing that Professor Ames disliked the tern “modernism,” as Harvey Arnold has reminded us, and eschewed the word in relation to himself. I sympathize with his stand, since I have had the same problem embracing the caption, “process theology.” Captions have a way of capturing one despite one’s protestations. This judgment of Ames as one who exemplified the modernist slant for intelligence in ministry is not original with me. It was, in fact, hinted at more than once by one of Professor Ames’ own colleagues, Professor Gerald Birney Smith. It was through Professor Smith that I as a student in the Divinity School in the mid-twenties first acquired my appreciation for the stature of Professor Ames. Smith was a staunch admired of Ames. In a class in Contemporary Theology in which Professor Smith sought to relate current Christian thinking to the work of the ministry, he would pause to contrast various attempts within the American community to affect an enlightened ministry. On more than one such occasion he singled out the work of Professor Ames as a minister to emulate. To him, Ames was not just a philosopher, a psychologist of note, or an impressive preacher; he was a profoundly religious spirit in the contemporary mode. I came to see that Ames brought to his modern view of religion a great deal more than many of his contemporaries were able to do. For he was not simply an intellectual in religion, having found a way to intelligence in ministry; or

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one committed to an intelligent view of religion out of deference to sophistication in learning. He carried into this current mode of Christian thinking a sense of identity with all elemental people of times past who had responded religiously to the common events of experience. Ames brought to the contemporary task of ministry the kind of universal learning concerning religion and people that acquaintance with cultural anthropology tends to provide, but which often it did not: a learning that probed beneath conceptualizations, liturgy, and the institutional life to the feeling responses of the human community being expressed through these overt acts, or concealed behind them as pent-up or suppressed sensibilities. To him the drama and pageantry of religious worship and organization were not the whole of religion; but its celebrative aspect, declaring publicly and in community what persisted in men and women as an inspiriting motivation, impelling the functional activities of their lived experiences toward ideal ends. Thus religion for Ames embraced the whole of man’s experience with varying degrees of intensity and focus, appropriate to the rhythms of these lived experiences. You who worshipped in the church in which he ministered, know that this hearty integration of the celebrative and the functional, the meditative and the active, the spiritual and the cultural, was present in the programming of the church activities themselves; and in the reach of activities beyond the sanctuary and common festivities of the church into the civic and family experiences of the community at large. Ames may have taken his cue from his study of ancient and elemental peoples wherein religious art and symbol intermingled with prosaic experiences of livelihood, becoming expressive of its yearnings and needs or from a pragmatic reformulation and rationalization of the religious response. Either way, he was able to close the gap between religion and culture, between the sacred and the profane, and to compel them to interact in ways expressive of man’s ideal ends. All of his writings convey this mode of an integrated intelligence in ministry. Perhaps his most explicit statement of it is in the smallest of his volumes, his widely read, The New Orthodoxy; but his most eloquent and satisfying expression of it is his book Religion, published in 1929. But you will find the basis of this approach to religious ministry meticulously clarified in the work that was to bring him fame as a psychologist of religion, The Psychology of Religious Experience first published in 1910. When I was brought to Chicago in the winter of 1944 to discuss the possibility of joining the Federated Theological Faculty, I was put up in the guest room of the Disciples Divinity House. The following morning I was Professor Ames’ guest at breakfast in the Quadrangle Club. Our

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conversation of that morning stands out in my memory as one of the delightfully humorous, yet probing occurrences of that entire visit in Chicago. Said Professor Ames, by way of opening the conversation, “So you’re going to teach theology!” I should explain that, following the publication of my Modern Man’s Worship in 1934, Professor Ames and I had developed a sporadic, yet fairly continuous correspondence for several years. Professor Ames could not miss the fact that his influence, along with that of Gerald Birney Smith and Henry Nelson Wieman, showed through in Modern Man’s Worship, and he came to look upon me as “one of his boys,” as he put it. After I had moved to Claremont, California in 1936, where I was with Pomona College, our exchange of letters subsided; hence this breakfast meeting in Chicago was our first encounter after almost a decade. The silence of the years was in that opening query by Professor Ames, conveying to me, at least, muted overtones of censorship and disappointment. “So you’re going to teach theology!” “I am,” I replied, “if they invite me to join the faculty, and if I decide to accept.” “Oh, they’ll invite you all right,” he said. This is just window-dressing to make some of us who think we help run the Federation feel we have a part in making the decisions. And if we invite you, you can’t do anything but accept.” What interests me,” Ames continued, “is that they are going to have you teaching theology.” “Constructive theology,” I added. “I’m not interested in the adjectives,” said Ames; “it’s the noun that disturbs me. Theology: You know I have no patience with that word.” “I know,” I said. “Yet, you have your students attend those courses in theology, I understand.” “Oh yes,” he replied. “That’s part of the arrangement; I tell my boys to go ahead and attend the courses; but I warn them not to be taken in by them.” “Well,” I countered, “if I’m teaching the courses in theology, I want them to be taken in, to the extent, at least, that they listen to what I have to say. And if they listen, I think some of them may be taken in by it. At least I hope so; or else I have no interest in coming.” “Oh,” said Ames, “I’m not talking about your courses. I think you have better sense than to talk the theology I’m objecting to.” “I appreciate your confidence in me,” I replied; “but theology is theology in the sense that one talks out of a sense of commitment and in doing so, one is bound to speak the language of the faith, and to some extent to expound its historic themes.”

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“Sure you talk out of a sense of commitment,” Ames retorted, somewhat irritated, no doubt, by my hortative response. “I wouldn’t give two cents, for what you said unless you did; but you don’t have to talk gibberish in doing so. And that’s what most theological talk amounts to.” Well, I had seen and heard enough of that kind of theology to know what he was talking against, so with that, we turned to less argumentative topics. It was a delightful breakfast occasion. And it lives on in my memory as one of the few occasions I had to visit directly, and for an extended period of time, with this man whom I had admired since student days, and whom I had come to love as a person of genial grace, and a preacher of prophetic and intellectual power. “Beyond theology” was a banner phrase for Professor Ames. It had the ring of a summons declaring war. It was not against any one theology, though from our conversation it seemed to be aimed in a certain direction. More particularly, however, it was against a way of thinking and speaking about religion, a mode of thinking with which he was wholly out of accord. Ames spoke for a generation as well as for himself. They who had become apprised of the scientific way of speaking about human issues saw in theological discourse an antiquated way of thinking about human problems, and about man, himself. Theology, for them, was not only passé as a mode of discourse; it was utterly deceptive in what it purported to say about man, and about human society. It proceeded, they insisted, from a false premise of the fall of man which, at the outset, discredited human nature without even inquiring into it, or giving it a fair chance for expression. Ames belonged to a wide company of twentieth century social scientists, philosophers, and religionists who had set aside all such discourse, consigning it to the discard along with astrology, mythology, and patent medicine. Some of Ames’ contemporaries were more generous in their appraisal of theology. They were the psychologists of religion who had gathered about G. Stanley Hall, the Clark University psychologist and president, who organized a scholarly program specifically designed to translate theological doctrine into the psychological idiom, on the assumption that much of what theologians had said in their doctrinal statements was expressive of truths of human experience which could be better stated psychologically. This was the editorial intent of The American Journal of Religious Psychology and Education founded by G. Stanley Hall in 1904. Some of William James’ early writings can be associated indirectly with this intent; though his relations with G. Stanley Hall were anything but

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cordial. But that is another story. It has been said, for example, that James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1902, was the fulfillment of a promise James had made to himself twenty years earlier to recast his father’s theology in psychological terms so as to distill from it those affirmations which were surely true to experience, but which were obscured and made repellent by his theology and piety. James represented a point of view in psychology at the turn of the century that was reluctant to relinquish the testimony of mystics, or even of charlatans, professing to a religious experience; for, while he was unable to lay claim to any such experiences of his own, he persisted in, holding open the possibility of such experiences. Besides he had more aversion for the kind of naturalism he encountered among some of his colleagues, than the supernaturalism of mystics and saints. On one occasion he burst forth with despair over his inability to make up his mind about certain mystical claims concerning the supernatural, and confessed his misgivings about them; and then added, “But I’ll be dammed if I’ll be a naturalist.” He was to settle for calling himself an experimental supernaturalist. The MORE of experience which he felt to be a persisting dimension of all concrete experience, but to which he was unable to address himself directly, remained a boundary beyond, yet continuous with the human consciousness, for which he had unbounded regard, and before which he preferred to remain mute, rather than run the risk of overreaching his human capabilities. Many other psychologists of religion of the period, notably James Leuba, had no patience with this kind of reticence in dealing with the outreach of the human psyche. For them, all such claims to mystical experience, or to ventures of the mind beyond humanly measurable occurrences, could be accounted for within the canons of modern psychology. Professor Ames was not as iconoclastic in this regard; nevertheless he shared their impatience. The difference between Ames and other psychologists of the period turned, I think, upon his acquaintance with and persistent probing of materials coming from cultural anthropology, as these bore upon the rise and development of religious communities among various ancient people. Two books dealing with the area of inquiry appeared in 1910: The Development of Religion by Irving King, and The Psychology of Religious Experience by Edward Scribner Ames. King along with Ames have been recognized among psychologists as pioneers in shifting the emphasis in psychological studies of religion from a concern with individual experiences of religion to the social aspect of religion, having to do with the expression of social values. It was Ames’

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book, however, that was singled out as being the seminal work in relating the researches of cultural anthropology to the study of religion. Says Gardner Murphy in An Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology (1928), “He (Ames) was the first to utilize on a large scale such anthropological material in the formulation of psychological principles which would prove of general validity.” (307) The difference between Ames and other iconoclasts of the period is to be accounted for further by the fact that he was not just an observer of the religious process; he was a participant as well, wholeheartedly committed to the religious quest as he had come to perceive it, and eloquent in the witness he bore to it. His concern, as he expressed it in his book, Religion, was that the life of feeling, so often represented as superior religiously, and ascribed to the mystical quest, should not be isolated and thus removed from the kind of inquiry and reflection with which the sciences and other modes of rigorous inquiry concerned themselves. Yet, in pursuing this more rigorous line of inquiry, Ames, I have always felt, held to a more proportionate procedure in interpreting and assessing the religious response. This was true even when he was discussing its functional aspect, or the identification of its form of language and ritual with various modes of livelihood throughout human history. Harvey Arnold, in his sprightly and celebrative article, “A Religion That Walked the Earth” (Encounter Vol. 30, No. 2) calls attention to a very important feature of Professor Ames’ religious thinking: namely, its persistent quality of speaking pointedly and perceptively within the commonplace experiences of every-day living, so that the lived experience itself was illumined, spiritually enhanced, and given fresh motivation and purpose. (These are my words, abbreviating Harvey’s; his are more dramatically put.) This is certainly true of Ames’ mode of thought and expression. Only I should like to sound a warning in speaking of Ames’ thought as “a religion that walked the earth.” It was functional and closely attuned to this lived experience; yet it had overtones which made this lived experience resound with dimensions of reflection and celebration, expressive of the MORE to which James made repeated reference. And this is why his way of stating things religiously within a psychological idiom seemed to carry more amplitude of meaning than when other psychologists of religion uttered similar observations or interpretations. When the issue between theism and humanism erupted in the late twenties and early thirties, there were reasons why Ames seemed ambiguous in his comments on it. He was ambivalent, not as to where he stood, but as to how to express the pragmatic idealism, to which he was committed, proportionately, so as not to disavow this that gave resonance

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and amplitude to what was being affirmed. Humanism, in its anxiety to disavow theism, could be flat and almost arrogantly assertive: in its defense of human powers and their possibilities. Ames never overlooked the fact that man spoke out of a vast cosmic history, and was still related and responsive to that cosmos idealized. This was his way of focusing the theistic aspect of this lived experience. He and Gerald Birney Smith stood together on this point, pressing for a way of expressing the issue on which humanists felt deeply in terns that were responsive as well to this wider dimension of man’s experience and selfhood. A religion that walked the earth, indeed! but with a vision of its earthiness that embraced the whole of its historic and cosmic environment. There was something about Ames’ way of projecting the function of religion, or acts of worship, and even a man’s piety that affirmed God as luring the human spirit beyond its own troubled and perplexed psyche to a vision of reality that somehow dispelled these private anxieties. Without meaning to emulate the historic faiths at their best, Ames was doing just that. The stance of faith, as he assumed it and sought to define it, seemed to imply a relinquishment of all fear and misgiving in affirming trust in what summoned one to live forward. It is for this reason, the stance of the man’s reflections, that I venture to suggest that, despite his aversion to the word “theology,” and his absorbing interest in the psychology and anthropology of religion, Ames thought like a theologian—like a good theologian! And at times he spoke like one, not in the sense of one who meticulously examines, interprets, and defends some legacy of doctrine or belief; but as one who thought and talked out of a witness of faith that historically and currently possessed him as a living experience. This was the force of his presence; and the appeal of his utterances. The man, himself, was in his words; and you felt their power even when you did not always concur with the argument they were intending to make. That Ames was consistent with the Christian witness as he had discovered it and had adhered to it since his boyhood days, stands out on page after page of his writings; only, in his adult years, this faith was summoned to answer to the demands of a growing intelligence in his own mind and spirit, and within the community of minds with which he, as educator, scholar, and minister, had daily association. It is really touching to note in his autobiography his own account of the emotions of elation and confidence that seized him when, on first reading John Locke’s Essay on Human Nature he discovered a moving and philosophically convincing view that was attuned to the faith as he bad embraced it from childhood. I know the feeling, as many of you do. There have been many who have been able to disavow their historical roots of faith in response to a more

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sophisticated learning that had come to them in adulthood. And, in doing so, they have been impelled to suppress, and then to lose their responsiveness to the emotive appeal of religious sentiment which looms so large in elemental man, where creaturely feelings are vivid and impelling. One’s delight of spirit then becomes purely intellectual; and often one pursues meticulous, intellectual demands with the passion and zeal that normally would be found under more emotive circumstances. To be able to reclaim the depth of one’s elemental stance within one’s enlightened, critical understanding of man and his culture is to unify mind and spirit with one’s bodily feelings. Intelligence in religious faith will then entail, not simply a critical rejection of what is disavowed, but an affirmation of what is now embraced intellectually in a way that is consonant with the depth of one’s bodily feelings. In such instances, one’s structure of experience has open access to the inquiring mind, wherein thought is made a full-bodied event. In all instances, as Whitehead once dramatically declared in Bond Chapel, “we think with our bodies.” Technically this is true whether we are able to acknowledge it or not; yet, we do so with all the more power of persuasion, to ourselves and to others, to the degree that the words of our mouth, uttering the thoughts of our mind, speak from the depths of our being. Not all thought need carry or convey that depth of existential commitment; nor is it in the economy of intellectual discussion or exchange to weight it with that degree of intensity and feeling. Furthermore, disciplined expression acquires a means of conveying such bodily support of thought without becoming burdening or obtrusive. Yet, the integrity of intelligence, however employed, is proportionate to the degree with which one’s identity as person and human being speaks through the thoughts and language one utters. And this, in large measure, turns upon how well integrated the several selves of one’s person may be in conveying his total structure of experience. Edward Scribner Ames impressed one as being such an integrated human being. In his formulation of religious meaning he was in communication with a vast range of the human community which had participated in his own pilgrimage of thought and experience. Strange as it may seem, to some of you, even venerable personages of the Middle Ages and of the early modern period, got into the act, along with the community of faith in which his own growing spirit had incubated and matured. He had his troubles with uncongenial minds. Calvin and Hegel were his chief intellectual adversaries, as I recall; and in later years, Barth and Brunner were on the rise in his demonic hall of fame. But these aversions, whatever limitations of mind and sympathy they may convey, did not obscure the breadth of spirit and mind with which he employed this word, “religion.”

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The point of this detour into biographical analysis is to single out a trait of character and mind in Professor Ames that made his preoccupation with religion and religious thought, not only deeply and existentially concerned, but specifically oriented within a community of faith; oriented within that community to such a degree, in fact, that he could do no other than to speak out of its witness and nurture. And this, I would claim, is to speak theologically. But let us not quarrel about terms; or insist upon attributing to this venerable man, another caption which he so heartily eschewed. If you prefer to use the less stigmatizing term “religious” or existential, I shall not resist; except to say that, technically, these terms do not gather up all that I have tried to depict in this characterization. In our time, we have come upon captions that express more precisely and, I think, more adequately, what the stance and approach of Professor Ames’ ministry and scholarly life conveyed: captions such as “theology of culture,” “constructive theology,” and one that I have recently dared to propose by way of characterizing the very mode of theologizing that went on in the early Chicago School, namely, “cultural theology,” in the manner of the more familiar caption, “cultural anthropology.” When Professor Ames impatiently asserted, “We must go beyond theology!” he meant a number of things. He did mean going beyond doctrinal statements of religious meanings and insights, not only in the manner in which G. Stanley Bell, Edwin Starbuck, and others sought to psychologize theological doctrine, but in the way that Ames, himself, had found cultural anthropology disclosing the functional, even occupational, meaning of religious ideas and cultic acts. An apt designation of this mode of study is, it seems to me, cultural theology implying the cultural identification and characterization of religious ideas and practices; very much in the manner in which cultural anthropology extended the study of man from a concern with bone structure and its historical ascendancy to an inquiry into man’s cultural environment or ecology. But Professor Ames was concerned, not only to unmask the cultic acts and drama as expressions of functional needs and satisfactions, but to state within the immediate complex of experiences, contemporary man’s affirmation of these realities of faith that await us as resources of the human spirit in the everyday pursuit of human vocations, in times of deprivation, anxiety, and despair, as in times of celebration and joy. This was Ames’ constructive theology. And his sermons were the best expressions of it. But Professor Ames was attentive also to the voice of the poet, to music and to the language of artists of all kinds who could speak sensitively within the idiom of stone, color, or line. In this respect his was

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not so much a theology of culture as a theology informed by the cultural arts and conveyed through them. Much that Ames wrote is prolegomena to a theology of culture. It not only expressed the cultural bases of cultic expressions; it insinuated into the meaning of religion cultural yearnings, valuations, and hopes. His analysis of religion was on the way to expressing a judgment that has become formative of my own insistent theological concern in recent years—namely, to make clear that, though religious faith emerges within and in terms of cultic circumstances, its mythos becomes a nurturing and formative matrix of sentiments and psychic energies shaping the ethos of the culture of a people in which their structure of experience takes form. Simply delineating the forms of belief that have emerged historically within the cultus or the church (or defining them in ways that set these primal beginnings at odds with the forms and values of the culture) is no adequate exposition of the religious legacy of any people. And much of theology, precisely because it has conceived of its role as that of defining religious faith over against the culture and its creativities, has misconstrued the nature of the discipline; and, more seriously, the nature of the process of lived experiences through the cycles of history wherein mythos and ethos have interacted, in which faith and culture have become intertwined as successive periods of an emerging structure of experience among any people have taken form and become articulate within a given orbit of meaning. The thrust of professor Ames psychology of religion, based as it was upon a seasoned understanding of cultural anthropology, was to see the drama of religious worship and its pageantry, along with its piety, within this total, structural view of life as it became manifest in particular sects and communities. His impatience to summon all discussion of this redemptive drama of memory and hope “beyond theology,” as he expressed it, stemmed from a concern to wrest it from its restrictive, cultic forms and to envisage it as the life of the spirit in the larger cultural context. I share this concern, though I find it necessary to press beyond Professor Ames’ beyond, and to see this task as going beyond pragmatic and functional aspects, beyond, even, a trust in the idealization of our highest hopes; beyond the disciplines of psychology and sociology, beyond anthropology, even cultural anthropology; beyond philosophy of religion and even philosophical theology, to a constructive, critical inquiry into the realities of faith themselves, an these cradle us, recreate us, and, in ultimate ways in which we can but dimly apprehend, redeem us from the limitations of our own specific natural structure as individuated human beings, and of our structured experience in communal living.

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The search for intelligence in ministry today may be too intent upon immediate acts of confrontation and reform to take cognizance of this deeper vein of religious acts and ministry. To the degree that it by-passes it altogether, or dismisses it as being irrelevant to the demands now fully upon us, it will be doing what religious humanists did more than a generation ago: Its very enthusiasm for relevance and clarity of attack upon pressing problems will obscure the resources at hand with which to bring clarity of vision. And it may render abortive the very notions with which one might turn the iconoclasm of revolt and confrontation into a breaking of forms in the interest of importance—in the interest, that is, of responding to realities of judgment and grace within these immediacies that offer efficacy beyond the rhetoric of revolution and change. However difficult it may be to articulate it, or to grasp its meaning within the intense preoccupations of these times, this persisting summons of a “MORE” in the Creative Passage that cradles and impels our immediacies toward its creative opportunity in any and every moment of man’s history is not to be denied. For this is no idle or vain summons that is persistently upon us; nor is it a remote end toward which to direct our travail and tears, as theologies of hope would have it. Rather, it is a depth of meaning and motivation within these events of our present history, in which ultimacy and immediacies traffic together. This tropism toward importance, however defined, toward more significant and sensitive ends, is an energy of grace and judgment immediately at hand, implicit in our dedications and determinations to act responsibly, and to act well. To see this resource as real energy of the spirit is to move beyond sheer idealization to a realization of the depth of realities that hold us in existence, and which summon us as creatures beyond the frustrations of established forms, even beyond the sheer breaking of forms, to respond imaginatively, sensitively, even tenderly, yet with efficacy, to the creativity that daily sustains and shapes our every moment of existence. Intelligence in ministry will stop short of full awareness of both intelligence and ministry, except as it partakes of this deeper, creative iconoclasm of the spirit in which all living transpires, and which awaits our response and dedication. As I look back upon these earlier eras of thought and experience in which a search for intelligence in ministry was being pursued, I can see how the search in each instance was motivated and sustained by the lure of what could be obtained if the goodness inherent in each person and in communities were activated and visibly applied. The emphasis was clearly one of appealing to the inherent goodness in man that could be awakened and activated. There was, to be sure, a good deal of prophetic preaching in

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the modernist era, denouncing the social evils of the time; but even this presupposed that the unchristian practices in business, for example, which Walter Rauschenbusch once referred to as “the last unredeemed segment of an otherwise Christian order,” persisted because business men had never been summoned to respond to higher motives. The contrast between that earlier era of prophetic preaching and the present is stark, indeed! Who among us takes for granted that, of course, the relentless greed of our business economy will subside, once a higher motive is appealed to? Or who among us is confident that the suppressive measures of city hall or the racial hostility of suburbia will subside, once they are awakened to the broadened base of our humanity? Within the lifetime of most of us present this morning, the tides of our cultural history have turned. As the poet Gordon Bottomley wrote: It is the turn of the tide, A power goes out of us now. There is a time when it is denied To waves, as to men, to attain. The great things are done at the flow, The holy things, the sins that grow In energy or pain. (The Singing Sands)

What was once assumed to be an irresistible flow of humane and humanizing sensibility and sentiment, assuring intelligent Christian action, appears to have given way to an indiscriminant and uninhibited distrust of human nature. Many things have contributed to this reversal of human judgment concerning man and his social institutions. Overall it appears to have been a shift from a pervading Idealism to an abrupt turn-about toward Realism. But this states the matter too abstractly, and, to a considerable degree, inaccurately. For while it is true that idealization in our day appears simply to be a waste of time as an overt appeal, in theology as in philosophy or in any other sphere of human concern, it nevertheless reappears again and again as flame and fury in the mass resistance and protest of the youth of our day. Here, however, idealization intermingles with realization of what lies concealed behind the proprieties and protocol of established mores and institutions. Thus, while an ideality of the most romanticist fervor motivates and propels resistance to social and religious conventions, this ideality of fervor and protest is transmuted into a social force of realistic concern and integrity. At no time in my memory of lifetime has idealism and realism coalesced in so vivid and intense a demand for social and spiritual reform. In the face of these demands, I find myself confronted with a query

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that I find disturbing in this present period of divinity education. It may be disturbing because it is so basic; yet, despite its basic character, there seems to be no ready answer to it. The question is, In the present-day confusion and complexity of cultural confrontation, WHAT IS MINISTRY? Not only, What is intelligence in ministry, but WHAT IS MINISTRY? What is ministry in the modern mode? Does it imply a witnessing community? A community of faith, responsive to resources of the spirit and of human experience? Does it imply an ultimate commitment, or an ultimate concern? Or is the stance suggested by any of these summons outmoded by what is clearly a new style? Is ministry pointed toward relieving or addressing the confusion of mind and spirit of contemporary men and women? And what are the resources for that kind of ministry? Do they have anything to do with what is religious or Christian? Or must this be a secular ministry. And if secular, what are its resources, other than the play-it-by-ear procedure of employing whatever is available as a good idea at the moment in this situation or that? If faith and culture have become so intertwined that the cause of one is the cause of the other, must it be said that cultural revolution is their mutual cause? And then what are the resources of ministry? And how do they differ, in degree or kind, from the resources and disciplines of the culture, pertinent to cultural revolution in other areas of our life? The shift toward secularizing our thinking on religious issues, and toward conceiving of the problematics of faith within the cultural situation, have had the effect of dissipating the distinctive thrust of religious thought in general, and of the church’s ministry in particular. In so far as these questions can be profitably dealt with in the gatherings of this or another occasion? I hope that we might find some way to speak to them. I would, however, like to offer this closing comment concerning ministry in the modern mode. Confrontation is clearly the mode of encounter, characteristic of our day. Except as this stance is present, somehow many feel that the seriousness of the realities involved in any issue is not being acknowledged; or worse, not even recognized. Thus ministry in our day can hardly escape, or elude, the compulsion toward confrontation. Only I would argue that confrontation is not all in one key, or of the same mode. It may range all the way from an open threat of violence to a clear, but quiet stance of candor that brooks no deviousness, or easy access to resolution, simply in deference to sensibility or protocol; or in response to some smug appeal to our Christian piety. The issues of our day are so serious, and the consequences of their resolution so dire for

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our cultural life together, or apart if that must be, that no pablum (sic) in the interest of peace and quiet, or law and order, can be deemed tolerable. Now since confrontation is the stance most expressive of a realistic encounter in any situation where differences on crucial issues are sharp and serious, we need to be clear as to what is basic in any ministry of confrontation. Is it coercion, or the threat of coercion? Is it demonstration visibly dramatizing one’s stand or persuasion? Is it relentless resistance to whatever and whoever differs with one, or who represents those who differ? Is it categorical defiance against all measures of deliberation, inquiry, and attempts at understanding? I think it is none of these things per cé. All of them tend to dominate any such encounter precisely because of the intensity of the feelings involved. And feelings are involved and intense because issues are important, and the differences concerning them are acute. And on issues differences are acute, often, because backgrounds, histories, and sensibilities contrast so radically. Granting all this, I repeat, none of these things are of substantive importance to confrontation as a mode of ministry. What is substantive is candor—candor that cuts through deception and pretense; candor that places first things first; candor that acknowledges that the plight of people and their humanity takes precedence over proprieties and protocol, and the likes of stilted sensibilities that would value appearances more than realities. But candor is a many-splendored thing, ranging from an appropriate, even kindly, statement of facts and circumstances, to an infantile outburst of temper and emotion. And the mode of candor can be made consonant with the role it is to play, and the situation in which it is to be exercised. Candor in this context, has to do with facing the facts, not only of our social history and circumstances; but of our humanly, creatural, or existential circumstances, in which facts and resources of judgment and grace come into play. An intelligent ministry will often fight shy of this phase of the confrontation, leaving it to those who can speak glibly of such things. But intelligence in ministry can be only half-hearted and half-way in its exercise of reflective concern with these resources and inquiry into them is by-passed or side-stepped out of concern to be where the action is. For religiously, the action is really in the waking life of spirit, affecting every act and decision, and in the tenuous indecisions as to whether participants in the crucial issues of our time can in fact, on the one hand, respond to judgment that is upon them, and on the other receive the grace that is given. Religiously, all social conflict, and specifically the current one, cries out for candor in speaking about and confronting these realities of faith.

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I would add one further comment. Confrontation is not simply protest; it is celebration and joy, in one’s fashion. Much that is erupting in the name of protest today stems from an inability to express either joy or anguish in ways proportionate to their importance as realities of these lived experiences. Where protocol and propriety reign, feeling responses tend to be precluded, or in any case, repressed. We must understand the present upsurge of protest on many fronts as being a visceral reaction to what is implied in the suppressive mores that have dominated experiences—on the political, cultural, intellectual fronts, as in the moral and religious life. Candor is now sought in this realm of life as well. The range of imaginative and designing efforts to be expressive in ways transcending the protocol of conventions in church liturgy and worship, as in public gatherings, witnesses to the fact that the release being sought and demanded is not just a defiance against form and structure, but against rigidly established forms and structures which offer no mode of expressiveness consonant with the realities that vividly and insistently impel life toward creative expression. Intelligence in ministry will thus look beyond simply an inquiry into modes of intelligence applicable to an effective ministry, to concern itself as well with modes of ministry that will be adequate to this impulse toward candor and creativity in our time. Bernard E. Meland Second Lecture Disciples Divinity House April 1, 1970

1971 Reflections on the Role of the Liberal Arts College As a Church-Related Center of Learning You may be familiar with the judgment frequently voiced these days that the church-related college, once heralded as the precursor of higher education in this country, is now on anachronism and is being steadily displaced by secular institutions of learning. Its only promise of a future with a contemporary sense of purpose, so this judgment runs, is to become itself secularized, or absorbed into some major secular complex of learning. During my first week in Ottawa I happened upon an article in the current issue of Liberal Education by Stephen I. Clarke, Chairmen of the Department of Education in Regis College, entitled, “Secularization and the Liberal Arts College” in which this judgment is vigorously advanced. Clarke writes: The validity of the small, private liberal arts college as a viable Institution of higher learning in America is being seriously and quite honestly questioned. As our oldest educational institution, born of colonial Protestantism, its place in the American story is as entrenched as any other piece of genuine Americana. But, functionally, its critics are asking whether the liberal arts college can survive into the seventies on the strength of folklore and Fundamentalism alone. In this age of the immense university and the intractable individual there seems to be little room for an institution of higher learning that places teaching before study, group learning before individual research, wellroundedness before scholarship, and the traditional past before a “now” ethic. As the old raison d’etre of the liberal arts college becomes less attractive and less convincing to college generations, a process of secularization, slowly but inexorably in motion since the American Revolution, must be completed in the next decade or this venerable American institution will face almost certain extinction.

The responses to this judgment among faculty members of churchrelated colleges appear to be divided, even within colleges where relationship with the churches has seemed neither oppressive nor threatening to liberal learning. And among college administrators, the concern appears to be, not so much about the anachronism of such a relationship as the cumbersomeness of being simultaneously beholded to an historic legacy and responsive to institutions like Foundations and

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accrediting associations, bent on innovation and experimentation. In the few instances with which I have direct acquaintance, the weight of concern seems to have shifted in recent years from an unambiguous affirmation of these historic ties, to an avowed commitment to being responsive to present educational demands come what may; at times accompanied by the plaintive hope that alumni and churches will understand the college’s predicament and trust the decisions of the college, nevertheless, to be in character with those historic intentions and in the best interest of the college. And so the ambiguity remains: How the college is to remain in character with historic intentions and, at the same time, act in the best interests of the institution as a contemporary center of learning. Incidentally, it is not clear to me just how the churches in various sections of the country are reacting to this threat of secularization in the colleges, and the possible demise of the church’s relationship with them. For many of them, the threat of secularization in the colleges should evoke no sense of surprise or alarm, for precisely the same process has been occurring in religious institutions at a pace. As for their relations with the colleges, this may loom as a different matter. One might well imagine one of their discerning members, however, reacting out of concern for the church’s self-interest and with some realistic sense of what has been happening within that relationship, at least since the nineteen-twenties, saying he could hardly care less. For in retrospect, this discerning churchman could say, with some justification, “The relationship hasn’t been that important to us. It has netted us very little in the way of lifting our own sights, cleansing our perspectives of bias and provincial religiosity. What effort have the colleges made to transmit the zest and vision of their liberal arts learning to the life and practice of-our faith within the churches and their communities,” or to our conception of it as a resource for living? Our churches (the discerning, churchman is still speaking) have been left to pursue their own ingrown mode of piety and censorship with little reflection of a critical, disciplining leaven of liberal arts learning, following from their relations with the colleges. As a result, such eruptions of relevance and new vision as are occurring among us in the churches smack of gimmickry to spark attention, rather than of liberating insight into the demands and resources of faith.” As one whose entire professional activity has taken place within a church-related institution of learning of some sort I feel the force of these strictures. And to our discerning churchman, I can only say, “You are right. The churches had reason to expect more from us than we have given, especially you among them who are aware of the resources of learning and the critical spirit. They had a right to expect to be summoned

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to more discerning and appreciative dimensions of experience and tradition. For the life of the mind and the spirit, seen within to perspective of critical inquiry, along with appreciative and reflective pursuits in historical study, in literature, philosophy, science, and the arts, is an exciting and demanding adventure, hopefully summoning those who read and reflect to a vision of experience and of our humanity which exceeds that of communities bent upon meeting the immediate demands of living, or basking in the absence of stimulus.” “But,” interjects our discerning churchman, “precisely because of what you say, the colleges and universities more often than not, have alienated our young people from town and country, church and family, once they have sampled the fare of liberal learning. And because of this, their own identity has been threatened. For the chasm that yawns between the life of the mind and spirit of their college and its counterpart in home environings divides their own sense of loyalty and attachment. Without some interplay between these centers of culture, disillusionment, even alienation: can be expected—both among the people at home and among the young people away from home. To be sure, this role of inter-relating home, church, and school is precisely the one young people in college play. But the history of that interchange, which at best is intermittent and of short duration, is not encouraging.” Who among us can disagree with these words of our discerning churchman? Has he not described the plight of generations of college and university people, shuffling back and forth for a time between home, church, and college before venturing upon an independent path toward maturity in establishing their own careers and family relations under new auspices? Some of you will be moved to say, “But the relation between churchrelated schools and the churches or home communities has not always been that nebulous, nor is it now in all areas of the country.” And, to be sure, this is true. What occurred at the turn of the century, and again in the mid-twenties, stands out as a remarkable instance of transmitting the stimulus of critical learning to churches and communities. Having just become awakened to the new learning in history, psychology, sociology, philosophy, biblical study, and theology through study abroad, or in universities at home sparked by new movements of thought within traditional disciplines, or within new disciplines on the make, young faculty people in colleges, universities, and seminaries were astir with zeal and determination to bring this enlightenment, not only to students in their classes, but to churches and town meetings. Many of the publications by the scholars of that period were in the nature of handbooks and tracts,

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designed to acquaint people in the churches with what was being discussed in psychology, sociology, and the physical sciences, notably biology; and with new perspectives in biblical study and theology. True, this was a kind of romancing with knowledge which carried with it its own set of problems; nevertheless it had the effect of summoning churches and communities to new stature in the exercise of their own reflections, piety, and worship. More recently adult education projects, night schools, and “great books” study groups have spread widely, sponsored mainly by universities, or by a nucleus of private citizens alerted to the need or promise of such stimulus. Now I am not one to propose or urge projects beyond the campus. I recoil from such undertakings. And, in admitting this I am likewise confessing to be part of the problem to which our discerning churchman is pointing. And I hear some of you saying, “Welcome to the club! Add one more project or duty to our already overloaded schedule and we will have had it!” There is no gainsaying the importance of this problem, however, of developing some genuine interplay between the church-related centers of liberal learning and the churches. And its urgency is accentuated by the crisis now looming. Except as these centers of learning can somehow be leavening the life of the churches as they educate the young people who come to the campus from these communities; the hiatus between them, and between our graduates and their churches, can only deepen with the years. II. But now a word about this “specter” that presumably looms before us, the absorption of church-related colleges into the complex of secular learning; As an educator, I have two reactions to this announcement: 1) The secularizing of the church-related colleges is not that new; nor does it necessarily forebode disaster or dissolution of historical legacies among the colleges, 2) Much that is now occurring under the aegis of secularization carries within its intentions important correctives of traditional distinctions between the secular and the sacred that have long plagued our talk about religion, education, and culture. Soma clarity on this point night help us to think more profitably about the role of the church-related college in our time. Let me elaborate upon those two points briefly. With church-related colleges registering varying degrees of adherence to their Christian auspices and with less and less sense of an educational purpose other than the one that motivates every other accredited institution of learning, one cannot deny that secularization in the colleges is proceeding at a pace. This process, however, has been underway in all areas of society, certainly since the turn of the century, and it has now become a phenomenon of all cultures the world around. In the colleges it

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has certainly been evident throughout my life-time. Their long-standing readiness to embrace humanistic learning and scientific inquiry on the discipline’s own terms leaving to disciplined inquiry itself to search out and to assess these offerings, long ago incorporated the church-related colleges into the wider community of inquiry in higher education. And in this company there has been no sense of estrangement. This, in itself, bespeaks a secularity that is pervasive and accepted. To be sure, churchrelated colleges identified with an avowed fundamentalist perspective and constituency presents a different story; yet even here despite their biblical and pious rhetoric, the educational experience in some instances reflects forth-right participation in the established disciplines of university education. Through the years, church-related colleges have followed a subtle, yet persisting line of accommodation. Compelled by the momentum of change and by the necessity of being accredited, they have steadily accommodated their procedures and offerings to accord with the norms of accredited learning. In doing so, no one of them has escaped the gnawing sense of tension between present demands and past legacies. As they have sought to balance these priorities, each in its own way, they have developed distinctive styles of correlating or integrating the facts and fictions of their respective traditions with the on-going experience of liberal learning. If there has been any substantive difference in the functioning of the churchrelated college, as compared with that of schools not related to churches, it has probably been reflected more in the selection of personnel than in courses taught or in the literature read. For, it has been almost a universally accepted premise among presidents of church-related colleges that the real burden of correlating their legacy of sensibilities with learning must be borne by the faculty. And in principle they were right. But, having been a member of such faculties for a number of years, and on the inside of faculty talk and tension, I know that the premise has problems. To my chagrin, as I reflect upon those years, I have to confess that I was generally on the side of those who were critical of imparting “the spirit of the college and its heritage” by this means. My objection, as I recall, stemmed not from a disdain of values, not even the ones that, presumably, were to be imparted; but .from the underlying assumption that the values appropriate to the church-related college inhered, somewhat exclusively, in the legacy of the institution, or in the mores of the church to which the college was related. In my callow youth as a young instructor I seemed to imagine that there were values in the process of teaching and learning, or in the emerging insights of classroom discussion that might, on occasion, stand in judgment of inherited beliefs and sensibilities. So at times, for this

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young instructor at least, transmitting values in the classroom, as I understood them, came into direct conflict with the higher wisdom of the school. Most of the church-related schools with which I now have acquaintance have broken free of this mode of understanding their relation to a church tradition, as if that modicum of piety were the last link with Christianity, and their last best hope of remaining morally justified. Secularity, even when it appears in the classroom, may not mean a break with the church’s tradition, but its critical renewal or reconception; even its rebirth under new auspices. What appears to be looming upon the horizon now, however, may prove to be more threatening to historic alliances than the demands implicit in that earlier, more graduated process of accommodation. For in some instances, current changes at revisions in educational procedures, as well as in the content of the learning experience, would seem to presuppose relinquishment of historical legacies relating, not only to church affiliations, but to liberal arts learning itself. The thrust toward innovation and relevance, and the priority given to it by Foundations and Accrediting institutions alike, represents a new kind of demand upon institutions of learning. And it remains to be seen whether this zest for innovation is, in fact, evidence of creativity and vigor, or simply a more desperate effort at accommodation, really out of a concern to survive. To be sure, survival is not an unworthy objective. But, in time, there may be need to assess the terms of survival. One needs to see, however, that the breaking of forms per se is not destructive or defeating of historic intentions or of cherished valuations. In fact, the breaking of forms in the interest of importance, as Alfred North Whitehead has said, is precisely what is indicative of a strength of purpose, prescient of new growth, of new instances of creativity. The breaking of forms in the interest of importance is a tantalizing phrase, seemingly opaque in that it offers as a qualifying directive. Yet, it carries a sense of ultimate import. It is, in fact, a secular way of speaking of ultimate value and purpose. In bluntly stating this more ultimate purpose in secular terms, innovating programs of education may very well recover or recapture within those terms the very values and purposes which have been deemed basic to the human enterprise, as differentiated from the more obviously practical, but compromising, concerns. This hinges in part upon how one understands the term secularization. In current theological literature, there is a tendency to differentiate between secular and secularistic, or between secularization and secularism. At times I feel uneasy about the validity of these distinctions, or at least their inadequacy; yet they can be useful in pointing up difference of intention and the degree

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of departure from traditional valuations implicit in the contemporary act of change. Secularistic and secularism are interpreted to mean an uncompromising commitment to contemporary judgment of desired ends or purposes with indifference to historic values, presupposing an ultimate reference. The words “secular” or “secularization” on the other hand are said to carry more neutral meaning, implying simply seeing religious and coral considerations, for examples within the context of cultural experiences participated in by all people of society, as contrasted with envisaging them more restrictively within the bounds of cultic priorities and attitudes imparted by a specific church tradition. With this understanding, a college or university might assume secular intentions without meaning, necessarily, to depart from historic affiliations. The secularization intended, in this case, is represented as being largely operational, rather than valuational. It applies to educational procedures and the context in which they are to occur. And these may not imply, on the face of it, the avowal or disavowal of values as such. To some this may seem sheer casuistry. After carefully considering this objection, I have decided that the word “casuistry” is too pejorative. It is true that these distinctions leave certain issues unexamined; yet they make room for some discriminations in judgment and commitment which can be functionally helpful. The stance here described as secular states quite accurately the one that is being assumed by many educators in church related colleges, educators who remain sensitive to the claims of the colleges’ heritage, while coating their responsibilities as educators in the contemporary scene. III. Granting the secularized stance of the church-related college or university, in the sense in which we have just described it, how are we to conceive of the role of the Liberal Arts College as a Church-related institution of learning? Does it follow that this historic relationship with the churches is to be dissolved? Or does it mean, rather, that the relationship itself must be reconceived? I think the latter is the case. But then the further question follows, how radically must we reconceive it? Our judgments on this question may differ. As I reflect upon the matter, I see no way of adequately dealing with the problem, theologically or educationally; short of a radical reconception of the relationship. And this is the burden of the discussion that follows. Instead of conceiving of such a relationship as turning upon the college responsiveness to certain theological or moral proprieties or values, stemming from, and held in common with the churches, we might consider conceiving of the relationship as a bond of deeper affinity relating to the nurturing matrix of this Western experience. Let me see if I can clarify

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what I mean by that statement: Our heritage of faith is not simply a legacy of doctrine and belief. In fact, I would argue that doctrine and belief have been the most expendable aspects of this legacy. They have undergone considerable attrition, revision, even rejection. Nor has any specific ethic, moral code, or set of ideals persisted from age to age as the definitive statement of the Christian witness or measure of life, through particular groups or sects within that tradition have held persistently to their own historic formulations as being definitive for them. What have been enduring and efficacious have been the primal themes or motifs of the faith, conveyed through the mythos of our culture within a structure of experience that defines and has given character to our Western experience as a people—a structure, not so much designed by any single generation, as distilled from the persisting modes of feeling and decision within that lived experience. It may be helpful if I state briefly what is implied in each of these terms. 1. THEMES (OR MOTIFS) OF THE FAITH. The defining and formative motif of the Christian perspective upon the experiences of man is the redemptive theme, centering in the drama of redemption. This drama has empirical roots in certain events of HebraicChristian history in which apprehensions of the Holy One are said to have been recorded, as elemental folk will take note of such things. These apprehensions came to be celebrated in folk-song and folk-lore as a commonly shared “wisdom of the people,” to use Dorothy Emmet’s phrase. But more than that, they were to be given articulate, sophisticated expression in the prophetic sermons and poetry of exceptional seers who saw critical implications of judgment and hope in .these events beyond the common celebration of them. Folklore, prophetic sermons and poetry, then the Law! The Law was not contrary to these sensitive apprehensions. It was the systematic codification of them. Yet the Law, expressing the accumulative and integrated wisdom of generations of tradition was the root and stalk of the flower that was to break forth in full bloom in the revelatory event in Jesus Christ. In this person and in the events that gathered about his person, there appeared to emerge a new kind of folk-wisdom, at once more simple and penetrating, a correlating of judgment and grace which had spontaneity of meaning that could not be contained in law or in any similarly measured wisdom. It was gospel as over against the law, they said; a creative word as over against words which men in collaboration with one another had fashioned into Law or moral directives. The subtle process by which the sensitive core of an individuated spirit is insinuated into a corporate movement of faith is one of the mysterious

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occurrences of human history. And the forming of the communal witness of faith giving to this nucleus of revelatory being carrying power; cultural actuality, and persistence beyond its initial, individuated form, is one of the remarkable instances of that subtle process. Briefly, then, when I speak of the motifs of the faith, I refer to the themes centering in and giving content to the redemptive drama conveyed in the biblical lore of Judaic and early Christian history. In this sense, the Bible is the primal document, (I want to say) not only of Christian experience, but of Western history. What happens to these motifs after theologians and church councils go to work on them is another story; not an altogether irrelevant story by any means, yet one that has to be seen as being appropriate in large measure to specific, historical occasions and circumstances; not necessarily normative for all times and seasons. Now it is this elemental thrust of the primal perceptions of ultimacy, particularly as it endures within our immediacies, that 1 have in mind when I speak of the motifs of faith. To be sure, when we meet them in medieval, reformation, or modern history we find they embellished, possibly strained or stretched into other complicating meanings, and, at times, vividly clarified in terms of the contemporary experience. But at the root of all Christian faith and worship is this primal legacy of Western experience— the themes and motifs of the faith. The drama of redemption is what gives form and movement to these themes; out the root metaphor appears to inhere in the covenant relation between God and his people. This way of envisaging ultimacy and immediacy in personal encounter has undoubtedly played a part in accentuating the personal dimension in Western thinking about God, and may lie back of the emotive reaction whenever that personal dimension of deity is challenged. Many other cultures seem not to have this kind of concern in speaking of ultimacy. The redemptive theme gives rise to reflection on the act of Creation in the biblical writings, and together they provide imagery for anticipating an open future. Creative expectancy follows upon the redemptive act and many other notions as well: glib theories of progress, the second chance, problems in law and order, hope. “Hope springs eternal.” Only in a redemption religion, and in a culture in which the options are not categorically defined, structured, and rigidly adhered to. 2. MYTHOS. This word is not to be equated with myth or mythology; though obviously it is related to the mode of apprehension implied in myth, and partakes of the discourse that emerges out of the mythical structures of a people. In my Faith and Culture I paired together the two terms “ethos” and “mythos,” and then proceeded to distinguish them. In defining

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“ethos,” I simply reiterated Webster, saying that “ethos is the character, sentiment, or disposition of a community of people; the spirit that actuates manner and custom.” Since “mythos” was not given as a dictionary term, I took it upon myself to formulate definition as I was using it, saying, “It is the pattern of meaning and valuation arising within the structured experience of a people which has been imaginatively projected through metaphor and drama, expressing the perceptive truths of the historical experiences of a people, bearing upon man’s nature and his ultimate destiny.” (28) 1 think I should now add, “as these perceptive truths of experience express themselves within the culture as psychic energy in the form of hopes, expectations, attitudes of trust, or even determination; or in the form of human responses to circumstances joyous or tragic, promising or threatening, and similar historical occurrences affecting the stance in meeting human situations. In a manuscript I am currently working on, which I entitle “Fallible Forms and Symbols,” I compare the terns Mythos and Logos. Logos, when it is employed theologically, has generally referred to the rationality inherent in the cosmos, and in liberal renderings of it available through overt inquiry into conscious experience. The word “mythos,” as I employ it, on the other hand, addresses a depth of awareness which, while available to conscious experience, functions in the main as a non-cognitive mode of meaning and motivation within the structure of experience of any people. The terms mythos and logos together, therefore, convey different dimensions as well as different modes of meaning conveyed by experience: i.e., by experience as lived. The word mythos is not to be equated with myth or mythology; though obviously it is related to the mode of response that has given rise to both in various cultures during the early periods of their history. I am inclined to associate myth with mythos more readily than mythology; for myth tends to represent elemental, and one might say, spontaneous and innocent responses to what is deeply at work in the life of a people. Myth is thus an elemental ingredient of the mythos, though less durable and pervasive in the culture as a whole. Mythology, on the other hand, I have come to see as a secondary level of imaginative reflection within the mythical mode which often carries with it certain didactic and speculative intentions. When Hegel, for example, put forth metaphysics as the sophisticated alternative to myth, he was really intending by myth what I have described as mythology—a more didactic and speculative reflection upon the poetry of myth. By mythos I mean something more than a particular mode of reflectiveness or poetry. The mythos encompasses these responses, but it includes them along with other more visceral and imaginative assertions of

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the psychical thrust of a people, fashioning them into a structured reality within experiences in a given cultural history, and carrying forward a subliminal depth of perception and feeling within the lived experiences, that which gives shaping to the sensibilities, apprehension, expectations, intentions, and valuations of a people. In so far as it is expressed as the conscious level, it may be said to surface in the mode of an appreciative awareness, or an appreciative consciousness; for the latter represent the consciousness of men responding out of the depth of its relationships, in contrast to the kind of critical or observational reason that is selective and sharply focused for definitive and practical ends. The notion of mythos partakes of the stream of experience as well as of the stream of thought. And it gathers in as well inert, though symbolically significant precedents and practices which body forth, as it were, what the phenomenologists call the intentionality of a people. 3. THE STRUCTURE OF EXPERIENCE. To convey the meaning of this third notion, the structure of experience, I shall quote excerpts for my Faith and Culture. The structure of experience… is the most elemental level of meaning in any culture. I hesitate to call it a level of meaning because immediately it assumes to those nature’s mindless creatures moving in a familiar environment a cognitive character. Obviously there is awareness of some sort, but it is an awareness comparable to those of nature’s mindless creatures moving in a familiar environment. The structure of experience gives form to our repeated valuations. It is impossible to get at the details of this accumulative valuation response, though of course certain memorable events or observations stand out in any period. And the history of events presumes to tell the story of this growth of the psychical structure. But compared with the actual process of the evolving structure of experience, recorded history is a relatively superficial account. (96) Within our culture, the Christian faith is mediated in this structure of experience, rising out of the accumulative valuations of the culture in which prophets and poets, its hopes and aspirations, its destructive and redemptive forces have been persuasively at work. It is an oversimplification to say that this is the structure of experience that has arisen out of the dedications and betrayals of Jesus Christ, but this is one way of saying it. The process is much more complex, but clearly, Christ is the focal point of the pattern. We may be able to convey the meaning of the structure of experience more vividly if we attend to its concrete character… The cultural history I am speaking of here is the continuity of human events that is represented by the generations that move in upon one another. Every contemporary period, every present, embraces at the most four generations: great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, and children.

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Yet its persisting presence is unmistakable. The Three Foci of the Christian Witness What has been said so far in characterizing the three basic notions,

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motifs, mythos, and structure of experience, was aimed at giving substance to the conception of faith as psychic and social energy, operative, not only within the cultus or individual instances of religious or mystical experience, but in the culture as well. We now advance to a further stage in the argument to say that the witness of faith in any culture, but preeminently in the culture of the West in which Christian faith has been formative, proceeds from at least three sources. Thus we must speak of three foci of the Christian witness, three centers from which response to the themes of the faith has been conveyed in Western history: a) the cultus (church); b) individual, often dissonant strands of nonconformity (saints, mystics, and other minority voices); and c) the culture itself, notably the cultural arts and music, but even the philosophic lore and sciences as they relate to the primal themes of the faith, not to speak of industry and the political sphere. In my judgment, the historical witness of faith, or experience of faith in Western history, has been conceived in too restrictive a way as being wholly church-centered. Clearly the church came to be the major point of focus and source of the witness following the fourth century A.D., though prior to that period, the notion of church, or even cultus, hardly seemed appropriate. But, even granting that the church did become the focal point, the major source of the witness of faith in Western, Christian history, it retains, in fact, one among three foci of this historic witness from which response to the themes of the faith has been conveyed. The witness of faith, then, both as an historical legacy, and as a persisting phenomenon within the structure of Western experience, is a vast and variegated complex of leaning and valuation, convoyed through multiple modes of expression, decision, and action. Faith, I have argued also, is not just a response of sentiment, nor is it purely conceptual, as in forms of belief; it is an ingredient of the human psyche which weighs heavily our human acts and decisions as well as the state of mind and bodily feelings with which we come to acts and decisions. Faith, I have insisted, is a primal energy of a people and of individuals which is of a piece with the structure of experience that has formed the matrix of their living, and which, in every moment of immediacy, gives context, depth and relationship to their individuated modes of existence. However inchoate, however intermittently assertive or expressive; faith is the elemental source of our being, active often only at the level of bodily feeling, but always potentially expressive through conscious and assertive acts. In brief, faith points up the character of a people or of individuals, rising out of participation in any given structure of experience. Thus faith as a social energy, conveyed through the mythos

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and expressive within the structure of experience, is what bequeaths to a people their identity as persons and as historical beings. But faith has its language and its modes of creative expression. Not all of it is pious or conforming to the demands of cultic proprieties; in fact, not all of it within the church, itself, simulates its stereotypes. For when the creative spirit addresses what might otherwise be cultic or conventional, this legacy takes on nuances of meaning and beauty which only the imaginative talent can bequeath to it. Similarly, when a critical, probing mind addresses its themes and its issues, it can assume proportions of meaning not readily discerned in the cultic statements of faith formulated for purposes of piety, preaching, and other practical or didactive disciplines. These critical inquiries may also dissipate the lure of faith and create dissonant reflections that confound one’s identity, which is the risk in all inquiry. Yet the health of creative imagination and of critical inquiry, and its power to enhance the witness of faith beyond its cultic expressions, has been demonstrated again and again; and is, in fact, a presupposition of all liberal learning. This vast heritage of creative and imaginative rendering of the themes or motifs of the Christian faith within and under secular auspices, is one of the major dimensions and source of the Cultural witness of Christian faith, and as such, is a resource for enlarging and rendering in subtle and imaginative form, not to speak of disciplined form, the vision and incentives of human experience as these are conveyed within the Christian mythos. I might say, parenthetically, that our inability, or our reluctance, within our American experience to take readily to discerning this cultural rendering of the themes of our historic faith stems, in part at least, from our mode of studying our religious history. It stems also, of course, from our historic, Protestant posture within the American experience; but that is another story. To put it briefly, the study of Christianity tends to be pursued differently than the study of other religions. We rarely think of the people of other religions or cultures, or of their religious ideas and practices, in isolation from the lived experience within these several cultures. This, no doubt, follows from the fact that the disciplines employed to study these faiths has been the history of religions and cultural anthropology. Yet; no historian of religion to my knowledge has delved into the cultural matrix of Christian faith, in the way, for example that they have explored Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and other nonChristian religions. And few church historians have addressed themselves seriously to this cultural matrix. Not until Troeltsch’s studies and the socio-historical inquiries of the early Chicago school, were even

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environmental studies undertaken. There is some corrective of this lack among younger church historians today, but the efforts here still are not probing; and they may not be until our historians of religion overcome their reticence to enter their homeland with their disciplined tools of study. Meanwhile we have to grope about in this area of study, only half enlightened by such efforts as Paul Tillich’s Theology of Culture and B. E. Meland’s Faith and Culture. Until this kind of study is rigorously pursued, we shall continue to isolate the cultic lore of Christianity from the cultural matrix in which it has evolved and to which it bears historic dependence and affinity. Now the point I am reaching toward is to say that this Christian legacy which we tend to think of in educational circles as being remote, optional, expendable, tangential to the educational experience (because it is presented as being essentially cultic) is, in fact, not remote, optional, or expendable if we are concerned about our identity as Western people or just as you and me, human beings with explicit hopes and aspirations, modes of reflections and imaginations, styles or creative inquiry and workmanship, as well as kinds of reticence, sensibilities, or lack of them. Our whole feeling context and modes of awareness bear witness to our Western Christian shaping, steeped in the sensibilities of this complex of faith bears the motifs and motivations derived from our Judaic-Christian history, impregnated, refracted, or refashioned by Grecian lore and Roman Law, and radically reformed through northern European and American non-conformity. This that is history, in Richard Niebuhr’s terms, “the story of our lives, is also the structure of experience that forms our vital immediacy as people now living.” In this sense the faith motifs and motivations that have insinuated character and mode of being to any people can never be set aside as being remote or optional to any generation within that culture. For faith as the feeling context within the structure of lived experience holds basic clues to their identity as a people and as individual persons. As I continue to press hard on this insistent theme that our identity as Western peoples stems from its Judaic-Christian heritage, I sense a flood of demurs in the wave lengths coming from your critical reflections. “Certainly,” I seem to detect you recounting, “Western experience is not simply the bearer of the Judaic-Christian heritage. You have acknowledged the refractions of Greece and Rome; and you might have aided that of the Moslem era of the Near East as it flooded in upon Europe, notably Spain and France, and through them, a prolonged era of Aristolian Greece. But what about Marx, Darwin, and Freud, to mention only three dissonant voices?” My comments here may not be persuasive to you, but I offer

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them as supplements to what I have already said by way of correlating these divergent and challenging episodes of Western history with the structure of experience I have described. One will immediately recognize that the Judaic-Christian pattern of meaning and valuation has undergone periodic translation, even metamorphosis, at various stages of Western history. In each instance, the primal themes, in effect, have been summoned to the demands of, say, Greek or Roman, even Moslem modes of thought and styles of expression, or sharply challenged, even driven underground by then for stretches of time, as in the case of Marxist and Freudian attacks in recent times. This legacy of faith has been summoned as well to release its cultic form of witness from inhibiting restraints which foreclosed interchange with modern science in response to discoveries and new perspectives upon man and his world, as in the Darwinian episodes of reaction; and, more recently, in the refashioning of the imagery of thought following upon disclosures in physics concerning relativity and atomic research. These many historical challenges I have taken to be, not rival alternatives to the Christian mythos and structure of experience, though each of them in turn has, in effect, simulated the cultic role, but deeply dissonant, even heretical, strands of disavowal which, nevertheless, in so far as they have been assimilated to the witness of faith, have often purged the contemporary formulation of faith of debilitating idealizations and illusions, and confronted it with realistic demands of the lived experience. Orthodoxies and fundamentalist expressions of the Christian legacy, sad to say, have followed a consistent method of eluding encounter with any such deviant challenge to their historic formulations. They had only to declare them heresies, meaning innovating or strange doctrines carrying a margin of truth hopelessly mingled with error, and thus basically false doctrine, to exorcise their threat to the faithful. Unfortunately, it was often the margin of truth, pertinent to that occasion in history, that offered serious challenge and corrective to these historic formulations, from which new insight into the faith might possibly be forthcoming; as in the Marxist attack upon individualistic modes of idealization and fulfillment, to the neglect of the human community; or the Freudian disclosure of the unconscious as a challenge and supplement to our insulated modes of reflection and inquiry, based on a rigid adherence to conscious experience. When Christian theologians and churchmen have simply reacted negatively to these dissonant strands of disavowal, they have forfeited occasions for rigorous appraisal and reform of cultic and cultural perversions of the sustaining faith. To be sure, these dissonant strands, when they have assumed cultic

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force and appeal, have been taken to be viable alternatives to the JudaicChristian legacy. In so far as this legacy and its survival hinges upon its doctrinal decisions or perspectives, these dissonant cults tend to be just that. But, as I have insisted, the vitality of this Judaic-Christian legacy does not rest exclusively upon the viability of its doctrinal statements. Nothing is more fraught with seasonal judgments, amounting to positive error, than many of our staunchly held “truths of the faith.” IV. All that I have been saying thus far in pointing up the nature of the historic legacy of faith in Western experience has been directed to one purpose: namely, to respond to the query, “Can the role of the Liberal Arts College as a Church-Related center of learning be reconceived?” My own conclusion is that it can. For it is clear to me from this analysis that the church-related college has an opportunity (one might even say an educational obligation) to convey this Christian legacy within terms consonant with its liberal arts learning. And it can do so in two ways: one, in the appreciative mode; the other in an analytical and historical study, bent on addressing the theme of our identity—our cultural identity, our religious identity, our individual identity as human beings within an historical context. Conveying the legacy in the appreciative mode is, of course, more readily at hand. In fact much of it is already being done in the context of the history of music, art, literature, and possibly other areas of study. One may not wish to disturb their present format; and simply to intrude what could readily be taken to be an incidental homily into an otherwise disciplined presentation of the subject, would hardly amount to conveying this legacy in the appreciative mode. One can settle for providing occasions for simply hearing some of the great secular renderings of these themes of the faith. You know what they are: the Bach B-Minor Mass, and the various Requiems of Mozart, Brahms, and Verdi. And, of course, Handel’s Messiah, which is always with us. (Comment) Comparable renderings are possible in other areas of the arts and in literature. If this mode of appreciative study and presentation is already commonplace in the liberal arts college, then it should be recognized as activity genuinely expressive of the role in relating liberal learning to the legacy of faith and to the churches, doing for the churches in this regard what many of the churches cannot do for themselves and their people. And clearly the college should be engaging in a mode of witness, possibly in an area of witness that exceeds in stature and discernment that of the more limited cultic conveyance of it; else what is liberal arts learning about? I have no intention here of belittling the simple act of piety, performed in

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the austerity of one’s own limited resources. This, in itself, can have stature. Put the witness of faith, shorn of imaginative power and haunting beauty, is not always of this stature. And this is the pity of it. In a similar way, much that is already taking place in the classroom and in private study under the auspices of historical study, or critical inquiry into issues relating to man and his world, are already of a piece with the cultural witness of faith about which I have been speaking. This, too, should be lifted up, at least in our own minds, if not beyond the bounds of the college, as being genuinely expressive of our role in relating to the legacy we have in common with the churches. Make no mistake about it, liberal arts learning, in much of its content and exercise, is precisely an extension of the witness of the church as its cultural counterpart, even in its critique of the church and of its cultic legacy; but more explicitly in its rendering of the cultural witness of faith within its own idiom, engendering appreciative and imaginative discernment, and a capacity for critical inquiry. I would not think of adding to the burden of the present program in General Education by suggesting that core studies might be formulated to pursue the area of inquiry into this Western Christian legacy relating to the theme of our identity. But, obviously, that program is made to order for just such a study. V. Let me close with a few general remarks about religion in the university. They may sound like homilies. If so, I shall emulate Schleiermacher and call them “Homilies to the Cultured Despisers of Religion.” 1. My own approach to this matter of religion in the university from the time I first began teaching religious studies in a liberal arts college more than forty years ago, has been one concerned with the nature of thinking; or perhaps one might better say inquiry. I have held that the central concern of a college or university is inquiry, intellectual inquiry, if you please. Many other things occur on a college campus; but, except as one enters into this community of inquiry, one is simply not with it, as they say. And any program of nurture or study that does not materially affect or participate in the critical centers of intellectual inquiry, however impressive it may be on other grounds, cannot hope to be taken seriously, except possibly in marginal ways. It is on this basis that I have repeatedly asserted that much of what goes on in colleges and state universities under religious auspices is peripheral to the main business at hand. It may be palliative, supportive, and even interesting, and we may have reason to settle for that in some instances; but it is not integral to the life of learning. To be integral to the life of learning, religion must first of all be grasped as

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a basic human activity or response, and then related to the processes of critical thinking about man, and about dimensions of reality within these lived experiences that not only contain or envelope his world, but which, in ways difficult to discern, transcend his world of manageable realities. The mystery of existing is always with us, even in our most discerning moments of clarity. 2. As educators, dealing with problems of religion, we should be clear about one thing: Religion, as such, in whatever guise or expression, is not necessarily a cultural good or a human good. And in many of its manifestations it may be a positive evil. William Ernest Hocking exorcised this term “religion” many years ago in, what for me has been, an unforgettable statement: “Religion,” said Hocking, “is a huge potency of ambiguous meaning and value.” In its immoral practices it can be tawdry, offensive, and imperiling; but even in its moral acts and expressions it can he restrictive and depressive to the point of destroying the graces of the human spirit. In my unrestrained moments I want to say that most religions in practice are intolerable, or barely tolerable, to the sensitive and discerning human being; yet the religious capacity, more particularly, the capacity for a religious response, remains, in my judgment, basic, even indispensable to the complete and adequately critical human being. 3. With the previous homily in mind, I regard it important, particularly for the undergraduates, that they become sufficiently divested of the sacrosanct attitude toward all religious institutions as to be intelligently mindful of their fallible, human character; yet understanding enough toward all human failings, even among religious institutions, to be capable of discerning and appreciating the basic, human phenomenon that becomes manifest in this response to what is ultimate in existence. From an encounter with religious studies, or reflections upon them, I would hope for a degree of maturity and sensitivity in the undergraduates’ attitude toward religion to enable then to participate in its organized expressions, in churches, in religious movements, with critical judgment and compassion. If no positive relation to such organizations or interests are possible for them, I would hope that this same degree of maturity and sensitivity would enable them to exercise their doubts, skepticisms, and disaffections with critical judgment and compassion. 4. If I were to venture a generalization upon the life of learning, as it assumes or simulates sophistication in thought and criticism, I would have to say that what renders it most vulnerable at the hands of critics is, or at least has been, its acidic effect upon the human spirit. Through its most effective talent, the art of criticism, many educators have been remarkably effective in relieving the educated mind of commonly held overt beliefs

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and sensibilities; and this, in the main, has been a plus for their profession. At the same time, however, they have been equally effective in transmitting overt, or at least covert, biases or prejudices against affirming and appreciative interests. And this has often been insidious to the point of making invalids of the educated mind. To counter this condition, and the process productive of it, we should not be content simply with opposing this process with its didactic counterpart, advancing or reaffirming the accepted values. For this is almost to guarantee that such values, however worthy or indispensable, will emerge as stereotypes. The thrust must be at the act of criticism, itself; not simply to reveal the hidden agenda that lies back of the uncritical assault, if such there be, but to help us to see as educators that the critical spirit, even when it is judiciously done, carries one only half way. It may not be possible to proceed beyond that half-way point; but it is important to acknowledge where we have come as being so. For to go beyond that point may require imaginative and appreciative powers, even patience in inquiry, denied to one who has mastered the art of criticism. No one should belabor the critic, repeating the old cliché, “If you can’t offer a constructive solution yourself, don’t criticize it.” The critic, when he is judicious and informed, is indispensable. All learning has thrived on his art; as have creative expression and the religious life. But the appreciative task and the art of reconception lie beyond the art of criticisms as a journey to risk on the basis of criticism or in the face of it. And this must be seen for its educative value. For this entails, along with responding to the critical spirit, generating compassion and discernment in thinking about problems, factions, or people; or in confrontation and dealing with human institutions and forces. To summon critical inquiry to an appreciative and imaginative level of response in dealing with basic human phenomena and activities, in short, in venturing upon a creative effort in response to criticism, is to impel critical inquiry toward discerning, as well as toward disciplined results. Bernard E. Meland November 18, 1971

1979 Response to Mr. Loomer’s Question Concerning the Being of God “I don’t say what God is, but it’s a name that somehow answers us when we are driven to feel and think how little we have to do with what we are.” Edwin Arlington Robinson 1. This quotation points in the direction in which the reality of God is sought in our inquiry. The mystery of existing, whether the experiencing of it conveys joy or sorrow, fulfillment or defeat, is the vivid empirical datum which evokes such inquiry. The bare event of existing is the most immediate and enduring fact of experience, and thus the most immediate empirical datum; yet this bare event of existing rarely, if ever, presents itself to our conscious awareness. For the sensory responses in each individual, and the quickening of conscious meaning that follows from such psychical interaction, clothe each life span with a plethora of images, giving to each moment of existing its own self-conscious experience. And this can be a complex of feelings and valuations, expressing intermittently a heightened awareness of the joy of living, or an aggravating sense of anguish, anxiety, and despair, or possibly a persisting experience of ennui in response to its deadly routine and futility. Normally an intermingling of these moods and valuations define human existence. 2. This event of existing is deeper than consciousness, and deeper than any one’s sensory or conscious awareness of it. It opens into an ongoing stream of interrelated events simultaneously enjoying or enduring this fact of existing. 3. Each event, at whatever level, appears to be held in existence through a structure of relationships that is integral to its own act of existing, and to circumstances creative and supportive of its existing. The history of natural structures is thus a serial accounting of the various nexus of relationships that have accompanied this “coming into being and perishing” of the many existing events throughout nature. 4. Our human existence in each instance subsumes much that has preceded man in this emergence of natural structures; and it contains within its own structural emergence tendencies and sensibilities that are responsive to the MORE in this depth of relationships that supervenes it. 5. The MORE is not just this sequence of sub-human structures, but the

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MYSTERY OF CREATIVITY, SENSITIVITY, AND NEGOTIABILITY that gives dynamic possibilities to each nexus of relationships. This supervening mystery that is creative, sensitive, and negotiable within every event (a nature within nature as I have said), is what gives to every event its zest to live meaningfully. That is, it is what imparts to each event a creative intent which enables it to live forward, to participate in the élan of existing. 6. The limits of our own structure preclude our having a full understanding, or even a steady awareness of this depth of mystery that has brought us into existence, and, for a time, holds us in existence as humanly conscious beings. These limits preclude as well our having certainty of knowledge as to what could define or characterize any post-conscious existence, or even as to whether existence in any structured sense does persist beyond this conscious span. Thus our delimited structure of existing, along with our expectations of perishing, as immediate occurrences take place with but marginal awareness, and often with relative indifference, within a penumbra of occurrences that carry and give intimation of the Ultimate Efficacy attending all existence. This Ultimate Efficacy, I repeat, is in the creativity, sensitivity, and negotiability of relationships that give to each event its dynamic possibilities. It is this Ultimate Efficacy within relationships, providing our creative and redemptive ground, to which I ascribe the term “God” within the metaphysical idiom. 7. All existing is fraught with peril as well as with possibility. The peril of all existing lies in the surd of insensitivity that intrudes upon all relationships with varying degrees of defeat and destructiveness, ranging from the anguish and evil of isolated existences among individuals, to the explosive encounters between groups, or between individuals. As an empirical datum this surd of insensitivity appears to be limited to the pathological conditions and occurrences within the natural structures that have come into existence, being most vividly present in relationships that form within the human structure. There is no assurance, however, that this surd of insensitivity is confined to conditions within these created structures. Speculatively speaking, there is the possibility that it may extend to conditions accompanying creativity itself, that it impairs the creative process, or, in any case, sets obstacles in the way of the creative act, thus persistently offering a threat to this act and to conditions consonant with it as implied in the terms sensitivity and negotiability. 8. To the degree that this peril assumes ontological proportions (as an abyss of disorder and irrationality or as das Niehtige, it becomes a threat to the Ultimate Efficacy attending existence as well as to existence itself. I

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have no way of affirming or disavowing such an ontological peril categorically; yet the tendency of my thought is to assume its possibility to the extent of acknowledging that the creativity, sensitivity, and negotiability that brings meaningful and redemptive events into existence, does so at a price—at the price of an ultimate encounter in which suffering and anguish consonant with qualitative attainment occur. 9. Thus our anguish and suffering, while pertinent to the conditions that attend our structure of existence, may not be peculiar to our situation as created human beings. It may be analogous to, if not a counterpart of, the strain attending creativity itself in its encounter with an ultimate surd of insensitivity. 10. The reality of God, then, in Empirical Realism is discerned, not as “Being,” nor even as “power of being,” though some hint of this way of speaking may be inferred from what I have said; but rather as the primordial and provident goodness within relationships whose efficacy inheres in every event of creativity, sensitivity, and negotiability by which relationships are sustained, or, when broken, restored; and by which such relationships are made redemptive and healing as a work of grace and judgment. Bernard E. Meland

Reflections on Changing Cycles of Religious Liberalism Address at Collegium Annual Conference Craigville (Cape Cod), Mass. September 28, 1979 The thrust of my remarks this evening is to raise questions about the current use of the term “post-liberal” as it has come to be used in recent years. In addressing this theme, I mean to question, not only what others among my contemporaries have assumed, but what I, myself, have said or implied through several decades of speaking and writing. Before addressing that theme directly, however, I wish to comment on my own preoccupation with the history of liberalism in religious thought. Various aspects of this theme were in focus from the very beginning of my professional, concern with religious thinking and history more than fifty years ago; but I began to concentrate specifically on the history of liberalism in the late fifties. During that period I developed my own format for exploring what had developed in Western Europe and America from the mid-seventeenth century through the nineteen twenties. Various words were employed in the literature for designating phases of liberal history in the modern period—words such as “Enlightenment,” “Rationalism,” Liberalism,” and “Modernism.” As a result of my own studies, I came to identify the word, “Liberalism” as the generic term; and to designate Rationalism, Romanticism, and Modernism as distinctive cycles of the Liberal legacy. Within that format during those years I define “Liberalism” as “resistance to the coercive control of external authority and structures, and a consequent concern with inner motivation in religious and ethical inquiry, along with their nurture and social application.” Although this way of defining liberalism expressed concerns of all three cycles within the span of history I was undertaking to study, namely, Rationalist (1650–1750), Romanticist (1750–1850), and Modernist (1850– 1930), I have since come to believe that Liberalism might better be conceived of as a sensibility of thought, rather than as a specific mode or impulse of thought or action. That sensibility is expressive of an openness toward changing conceptions of nature and human existence; and responsiveness to resources of inquiry informing such a developmental view; but more of this theme later. Another judgment that has become increasingly persuasive to me is that all modes of liberalism have disclosed two-pronged thrust of inquiry in its appeal to stimuli or resources, in the pattern of Renaissance thinking.

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The phenomenon of Renaissance, Arnold Toynbee once said, speaking at The University of Chicago, has always been expressive of a thrust forward to new, impelling demands along with an appeal to earlier, even ancient sources, which in effect tended to reinforce and illumine the current reaction against the status quo. This is a fairly obvious insight; but, it struck me with particular force on hearing Arnold Toynbee develop that theme. On examination, I came to see that all three of the cycles of religious liberalism with which I was concerned, did in fact exercise that mode of reflection and inquiry. Within the Rationalist Cycle in England, for example, one encountered responsiveness to the Renaissance mode of Neo-Platonism, along with vigorous efforts to recover the stimulus of Wycliffe as well as that of the Radical Reformers on the Continent; simultaneously with a thrust forward in their attentiveness to Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Locke, and others. Similarly within the Romanticist Cycle in German Protestantism, one is made aware of a lively concern with the prophetic literature of the Old Testament, culminating in an appeal to the historical Jesus, as well as with direct ways of encountering the stimulus of Plato, as in Schleiermacher’s translations of Plato’s works. In other strands the appeal to biblical sources and to Luther is correlated with the stimulus of Kant’s practical reason; or in others, with Hegelian idealism, or the personalistic thrust of LöTzu. The Modernist Cycle would appear to have represented a more decisive thrust forward, resulting from its preoccupation with new disciplines which had emerged or were emerging in the nineteenth century, such as the history of religions, cultural anthropology, psychology, especially social psychology, and sociology along with new developments in biology following from the Darwinian theory of evolution. Yet these new disciplines were to give rise in Modernism to a distinctive way of studying history and historical religions, notably the Christian religion; as well as to a distinctive way of conceiving of Christianity: namely, as a social movement. This conception of Christianity led Modernists, in turn, to employ what they called a sociohistorical method by way of understanding what went on in church councils in ancient times in the formation of doctrines and creeds. Employing a functional method, informed by pragmatism and empiricism, doctrines were seen as being functional patterns of meaning, derived from the social mind of a given historical period. The import of this analysis was that, Christianity as a social movement continued through history; though specific doctrinal formulations did not. What was persistent in the legacy required reformulation within patterns of meaning that were intelligible and impelling to each succeeding period of its history. Here the interplay between antecedents and innovating modes of understanding and

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inquiry is more subtle than in either of the other two cycles; yet it is insistent. The modernists were never content with being oriented exclusively toward modernity, as in civil religions or in comparable secularly oriented religious groups. A further observation to make concerning these historical cycles of Liberalism is that each of them exercised or conveyed the liberal ethos in ways that differentiate them sharply from one another. In the literature of the Rationalist Cycle, for example, overtones of the scholastic imagery differentiating sharply between Natural and Supernatural levels of reality, persisted, despite resistance to it and arguments against it. The very fact that argument against it seemed necessary or was evoked gave evidence of its persistence. Even their formulations of belief reflect a persisting awareness of it. Shailer Mathews in characterizing the procedure of Deism used to say, “The Deists avoided the implication of a supernatural agency interfering in the processes of Nature by rendering God emeritus. Or, in the imagery of British constitutional monarchy, they permitted God to exist, but without portfolio.” Hence the overtones of a rejected supernaturalism lingered even as the natural universe was vigorously affirmed and explored. In the Romanticist Cycle of Liberalism the dualism of a Scholastic imagery gave way decisively to philosophies of immanence; the notion of Being to a developmental imagery of becoming, anticipating later theories of evolution. With the notion of development assuming so central a role in the Romanticist imagery, concern with the concrete, regional, even individual event of experience was accented, countering the insistence among the Rationalists to elevate the notion of the “Universal” as the criterion for judging the significance of any idea or phenomenon. This became manifest in the theological lore of the period in the prominence, even primacy, given to the appeal to individual religious experience as a criterion for judging the import, meaning or even the reality of a religious idea. In the Modernist cycle of Liberalism, the thrust of the Romanticist Cycle was rejected as being over-individualistic and subjective. And while the Modernists shared somewhat in the Rationalist temper of mind in their attentiveness to the sciences, and the rigor with which they pursued their methodological inquiry, the social orientation of their inquiry impelled them toward a different set of problems and objectives. I cite these distinctions in orientation aid outlook as well as in emphasis by way if pointing out that radical differences in perspective, method, or resources between the various cycles of religious thought did not preclude observance of the sensibility of thought that has been basic to

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historical liberalism; mainly, openness toward changing conceptions of nature and human existence, and responsiveness to resources of inquiry informing such a developmental view. And that observation leads me to ask, may not the same observation be made concerning the various theological movements that were emerging during the nineteen twenties and early thirties, countering what was then to the fore as liberal theology, be viewed as a new cycle of Liberalism, rather than as “post-liberal” history, itself, I am led to the judgment that caption “post-liberal” is not appropriate. The only criterion I see as pertinent for judging whether or not any movement or mode of religious thought is or is not identifiable with the liberal ethos is its stance with regard to the defining criteria: namely, openness toward changing conceptions of nature and human nature, and responsiveness to resources of inquiry informing such a developmental view. I. Using those criteria, how are the various strands or movements theological inquiry since the nineteen twenties or early thirties to be understood on this point? Before addressing that question, we need to review some of the decisive changes in the conception of nature and of human nature; and to note some of the distinctive resources of inquiry that have initiated and informed such developments. In this, for obvious reasons, I shall have to be selective. The decisive change in my judgment is the new vision of the sciences, stemming from relativity. There can be no doubt that this radical innovation in scientific inquiry, and the revisions of judgment and procedure that followed, altered the stance and methods of inquiry in religious thought as well, in so far as the liberal ethos motivated or directed inquiry. A brief review of circumstances antedating the disclosure of relativity will help to explain why. By the turn of the century the mechanistic view of the sciences, following from the Newtonian perspective, had precipitated a dichotomy between science and philosophy. The Kantian Critiques had anticipated this dichotomy in distinguishing between pure and practical reason. And liberal theologies of the Romanticist Cycle were to avail themselves of this distinction, allying religious inquiry with “the qualitative realm of judgments.” This was the decisive thrust of the Ritschlian theologies; but it was to be expressed in various ways in other modes of liberal theology and philosophy of religion as well. Even in that earlier period, tension between the two modes of inquiry as represented by science on the one hand and philosophy, along with philosophy of religion and theology, on the other, was evident; but by the turn of the century the situation of tension was moving toward open

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conflict. This is reflected most vividly in the writings of Absolute Idealists such as Josiah Royce and the Personalists. What had precipitated this situation, no doubt, was that the Newtonian vision, itself, had become assertive as a world-view under the caption of “Mechanism;” which, as it was supposed, rendered all idealizations or even humanisms irrelevant, or even pathetic. Bertrand Russell was to give classic expression to this perspective and judgment in Mysticism and Logic when he wrote: Meland must have read Russell’s quote from a book, as it is not included in his manuscript. ed.

William James revealed his own quandary with regard to this state of affairs in those passages in his Varieties of Religious Experience where he muses upon his own predicament in being caught, as it were, between the supernatural stance of his father’s theology and the mechanistic view then in dominance among scientists. In commenting on his situation in another context he is reported to have said, “but I’ll be damned if I’ll be a naturalist.” In the Varieties, he settled for being “a piece-meal supernaturalist,” as he phrased it. What the new vision of science, following from the relativity theory, precipitated in effect was a release from James’ predicament. Had subsequent disclosures and commentaries among physicists in responding to the new vision of science been available to James, clearly he would have identified with a new naturalism. In my judgment he was the precursor of it. And I think Whitehead’s words in Science aid the Modern World concerning the contributions James in creating a new philosophical perspective reinforce that judgment. One way to describe the distinction between the mechanistic view and the new vision of science is to speak of it, as the language analyst Ian Ramsey expressed it in Models and Mystery, namely, as the contrast between “picture models” and “disclosure models.” Ramsey’s terse distinction was not available to us in the nineteen twenties during my student years at Chicago; yet the import of it was conveyed to us in other terms in what Professor Gerald Birney Smith projected as a disciplined inquiry into the mysterious universe. And in the nineteen thirties physicists and philosophers caught up in the new vision of science, were publishing books under titles like The Mysterious Universe. My own period as a mystical naturalist stemmed in part from those influences. Concurrent with these developments, altering perspectives within the sciences, was the impact of the new realism in philosophy, notably as it was being conveyed in several of Whitehead’s works. Whitehead sought to convey a new vision both of science and philosophy; and to insinuate

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their implications for religious understanding. The thrust of the new realism in Whitehead’s works was initially two-fold: 1) to heighten the aesthetic vision in philosophical reflection by way of focusing attention upon the relational data which attend every event of experience, thereby enabling one to envisage the intricately and persistently textured Character of experience. The import of this procedure for my own reflection was to demonstrate that the simple individuation of events or experiences; or contrary-wise, an over-zealous socialization often ignored the complexity of existing events or entities. Patterns of relationships disclosing “individuals in community,” to use one of Whitehead’s favorite phrases in Religion in the Making, are to be noted. And in the later work, Process and Reality, this notion is restated as a doctrine of prehension in which it is argued “that every existent entity, including God, prehends every other entity with varying degrees of relevance.” This richly textured view of existing entities implied a revision of the prevailing individualistic tone of both the Rationalist and the Romanticist cycles of Liberalism, as well as of the radically socialized vision within the Modernist Cycle. I should add that the fact that Gestalt psychology was just making its way into the literature of the period in those years heightened the import of Whitehead’s “aesthetic-ethic,” and, in effect, reinforced its impact. A second major resource of inquiry which was shaping the course of reflection during this period antedating the nineteen twenties and early thirties has been the literature on phenomenology. The movement, itself, acknowledged Edmund Husserl as its initial stimulus; yet he, in turn, acknowledged the stimulus of Dilthey’s “concern with the stream of history as experienced in oneself and in the phenomena of culture;” as well as that of William James’ notion of “the stream of thought.” A belated but most exhilarating stage of this mode of thought was to emerge in this country and in certain centers of Europe during the nineteen sixties, in which the contributions of James were given particular focus. One of the significant works of that period, in [my] judgment, was The Phenomenology of Perception by the French Phenomenologist, Merleau-Ponty who, like Whitehead, had been attentive to implications of the new vision of science and to the concerns of a post-Hegelian orientation of phenomenology. In an essay entitled, “Can Empirical Theology Learn Something From Phenomenology?” I ventured the thought that: By virtue of having become a more completely generalized vision, process metaphysics can throw light on what the phenomenologist has been about. In relating the phenomoology of perception as Merleau-Ponty has pursued it, for example, to process metaphysics, one sees more a convergence between his notion of intentionality and Whitehead’s causal efficacy.

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Meland’s Unpublished Papers There is, in fact, a fruitful interplay between these notions, for when Whitehead’s doctrine of prehension is brought to bear upon his phenomenological notion, Merleau-Ponty’s advance upon Hussarl in conceiving of intentionality as an organismic event is distinctly illumed.

Other major sources of reflection and inquiry which have given shape and new direction to religious thought in this so-called “post-liberal” period include the literature on the Existentialist theme, notably that of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Martin Buber. It is in the context of these various innovating resources of thought that me is to understand the intent and mode of inquiry pursued by various theologians and philosophers of religion during the latter part of the nineteen twenties and thirties, the period when the stimulus of their writings was being felt in this country. The literature of the so-called dialectical theologians, as they were sometimes called, including especially Barth, Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr, was clearly in the phenomenological and existential mode of inquiry; as one may now see. Tillich acknowledged freely that this was the case, though he characterized his own position as “a critical phenomenologist” in his Systematic Theology. And in response to questions concerning his methodology in theology he would frequently say, “It has been my good fortune to have existentialists of our time pose questions to me, to which I have given my answer.” That interchange, in effect, he suggested, had given rise to his pattern of inquiry and response. Neither Barth nor Niebuhr was ever that explicit concerning sources influencing their methodology; yet the dialectical interchange was implicit. And in this the phenomenological and Existentialist mode of inquiry seemed implicit. The initial response to the dialectical mode of inquiry, especially that of Barth at Chicago during my student years, and for some years following, was decisively negative. Yet I recall that a few years later suddenly changed. The key to this change, I have always felt, was in part, at least, the publication of translations of the works by Kierkegaard and Buber. In the light of these sources, less pedantically put, the whole movement of “Crisis Theology,” as it was frequently called, seemed pertinent and persuasive; or at least more so. It was during this period that Professor Wieman wrote the article, published in The Christian Century series on “How My Mind Has Changed.” His had changed with regard at least to the intent of that theology; though he proceeded to respond to the questions they were asking in the vein of his own empirical theology. And that brings me to a consideration of Wieman’s thought in relation to the liberal ethos. No one present this evening, I feel sure, would deny the propriety of applying the word “liberal” to Wieman’s thought through the years. Yet Wieman, himself, recoiled from such a characterization of

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his stance in his earlier years; the years about which we have been speaking. His long-time exposure to attacks by personal idealists on the West Coast during his years on the faculty of Occidental College in Los Angeles, had led him to look upon all liberals as having been misled and even menacing at times. And his encounter with spirited, and at times, aggressive attacks by religious humanists after he had joined the faculty of The Divinity School at The University of Chicago accentuated that stance. To his venerable colleagues, Eustace Haydon and Edward Scribner Ames, Wieman’s theism was at least suspect as being a reversal of the liberal ethos. Ames used to say that “Wieman is putting us back into that era when it was thought that ‘the soul’ could be located in the body as a specific organ. Now he wants to make God that definitive.” Wieman’s one credential that seemed to relieve him of being wholly culpable was his devotion to John Dewey; and his frequent assertion that he and Dewey were meaning to say the same thing. His colleague, Ed Aubrey’s rebuttal of that claim, supported by Dewey’s own concurrence with Aubrey, left Wieman confused and a bit saddened. Recalling those years, I was cheered by a letter from Wieman some years later, after he had retired from The University of Chicago and was teaching in Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, in which he reported that he and Dewey had been corresponding with each other at some length and had found a great many areas in which they whole-heartedly agreed. And, he added, “In retrospect, I think have had more in common with Dewey through the years than with any other contemporary thinker.” Nevertheless, the divergence from Dewey in the nineteen-twenties and thirties was unmistakable. For, though he had retained a hearty degree of his earlier idealistic stance and of the pragmatic, empirical correctives he had acquired from Dewey’s writings during his Harvard years, Wieman was vigorously involved during the nineteen twenties and thirties in assimilating that legacy to the new realism. This mode of inquiry he had first encountered at Harvard during his graduate study. He was now encountering it anew in his reading and grappling with Whitehead’s thought. In the first class that Wieman taught in The Divinity School of The University of Chicago in 1927, in which Gregory Vlastos, the Plato Scholar at Princeton, and I were students, only two readings were assigned: Part IV of Hocking’s, The Meaning of God in Human Experience and Whitehead’s Religion in The Making. In retrospect that seems like a slim reading list; but the way we probed these works in class, with Wieman as interpreter and interpolator, along with his own book, Religious Experience and Scientific Method; which, by the way, was not assigned, but which we all read, this proved to be ample for a quarter’s

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work. Wieman’s enthusiasm for Whitehead, however, was short-lived. In his Wrestle of Religion With Truth (1927) Wieman was ready to settle for using Whitehead’s principle of creativity as a viable answer to his min question posed in Religious Experience and Scientific Method, “What is that Something upon which human life is most dependent for its security, welfare, aid increasing abundance?” But when, in 1929, Whitehead’s Process and Reality appeared with its concluding discourse on “The Consequent Nature of God,” Wieman turned away from Whitehead as a false allure. He was also to forsake his own mystical concern with dimensions of the lived experience he had pointed up so graphically in such magical phrases as “the rich fullness of experience,” “our undefined awareness,” “that which is more than we can think,” and the like, all of which had evoked in me as a novice in these things at the time an excitement of inquiry from which I have yet to be delivered. On another occasion I reported a conversation with Wieman which took place in his home in Chicago late one night in the early thirties. It was during the time that he and I were writing our American Philosophies of Religion. Wieman said to me, “Eventually one has to make up one’s mind whether to continue pursuing the manageable and unmanageable course of inquiry simultaneously and in correlation; or to choose between them. I have made my choice.” No elaboration of his decision was needed; for it was that issue that had dominated the latter part of our evening’s discussion. I, in turn, knew that the seeds of a mystical naturalism had been implanted in me so deeply and receptively that I might never escape or elude its lured uncertainty. The very fact that I viewed it as a lure implied a fascination with it as being productive of wonder, awareness, even vision which might emerge in no other way, and which might vastly enhance the definitive word—were they to be in conjunction with one another. I have thought of that evening many times; and of the crucial consequences it was to have for each of us; or perhaps it was only a signaling of such consequences. In this quest for meaning, for understanding, for orientation within the complexities of these lived experiences, and within the perspective of one’s own ultimate fulfillment, as it becomes of apiece with the immediacies of one’s final years, clarity of vision, in so far as this can be achieved marginally, merges with and is enhanced by the very fact of complexity. The British Unitarian, E. G. Lee, has said this well in his Mass Man and Religion when he wrote: In its spiritual life mass-man must turn from his factual, spatial simplicities

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with their correlative myths to learn to live with complexity. It is the complex which this real not the simple. The human being is surrounded by infinities that leap up out of facts; and he is faced by death, the surest fact of all. But one that somehow contains within itself all those other infinities also. He must attach himself to the vast complexity, for only this is real. all else without this is but a shadow or a blank.

Whitehead said it succinctly: “Seek simplicity and distrust it.” I have paraphrased Whitehead, saying: “Seek clarity and distrust it.” On ultimate issues, intelligibility may be the most we can hope to achieve; and, conceivably, only a marginal portion of that. Nevertheless, Wieman’s insistent and persistent concern to focus upon and to clarify that datum in experience which, in his words, “can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and ultimately save us,” has yielded results that loom as one of the major and most fruitful accomplishments of these past fifty years of religious inquiry. Looking back, then, upon the various movements of religions inquiry which have emerged during this past half century in response to the revolution in science and the new realism in philosophy, I see one strand of reflection that is common to all; that is a persistent, even poignant concern with “experience as lived,” or as some phrase it, “the lived experience.” The word that best expresses this insistent theme is “existentialist.” If we can overlook the fact that that word has been preempted and pursued so decisively by one of the strands of inquiry, it is, in my judgment, the caption that best characterizes the mood and insistent concern of the whole era of inquiry. Hence the argument implicit in what I have been saying this evening leads me to affirm that the era of religious inquiry commonly referred to am, “post-liberal” can more appropriately be conceived of as a fourth cycle of the liberal ethos, and designated the Existentialist Cycle. II. Experience as lived encompasses a range of data that go beyond what has been commonly intended or understood as empirical. In the latter there is an assumption that one can focus quite sharply upon a manageable body of data which can be isolated for minute study in isolation; which is what the empirical method had commonly implied in British philosophy. William James projected what he called a “radical empiricism” which I have taken to imply an effort to attend the act of experiencing in its most inclusive and embodied form. Where that mode of awareness is stressed, the act of experiencing becomes literally a bodily event; the mental or cognitive responses being, in effect, a highly abstracted stage of the experiencing. James’ way of stating the matter was to hint at the bodily act

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of experiencing as having a primacy in the sense of sheer livingness. Perception represented the lived event of experiencing one step removed; cognition a highly abstracted level several steps removed. Radical empiricism thus implied attending the dimensional act in which the individuated self-partook, as it were, of the subliminal ground or depth of its being. (These are my words, not James’.) James used the words “the More” repetitively to suggest or to point to what is continuously attending or providing a fringe of the act of living and thinking; even when there is no awareness of it. James, one has to recall, grappled with this dimensional mode of reflecting before Gestalt psychology had appeared. Some have said he was the precursor of it. James’ younger contemporary, Henri Bergson, had been working independently along lines similar to those of James’, which led him to contrast the cognitive act with the act as lived in the way a camera shot is to be differentiated from the scene that is being photographed. The import of this contrast was to emphasize the static or fixed character of the cognitive act in contrast to the lived events which are perceived or cognized. James, while pursuing much the same intriguing area of inquiry, happened to recall the Danish philosopher, Harald Høffding’s quotation of a saying of Kierkegaard to the effect that “we live forward, but we understand backward.” James commented, “Understanding backward is, it must be confessed, a very frequent weakness of philosophers, both of the rationalist and of the ordinary empiricist type. Radical empiricism alone insists on understanding forward also, and refuses to substitute static concepts of the understanding for transitions in our moving life.” (Essays in Radical Empiricism, 230) In pursuing this route, empiricism for James assumed a radically adventurous form of inquiry in which “the picture model” way of registering experience was exchanged for “a disclosure model.” James’ only available means of apprehending that dimensional character of experience seemed to be that of mysticism. The import, of Gestalt psychology, one might say, was that it provided a mode of inquiry and discourse with which to attend such relational meanings of depth, and to convey them in the imagery of context. An imagery that was to inform my own in decisive ways, relating to this theme of deepening and extending empirical inquiry, was that of emergence, as developed by various British philosopher-biologists, a mode of thinking, by the way, that stemmed from Bergson’s influence. Here the contextual mode of thinking was presented in a pattern of embracing both antecedent and consequent dimensions of the human structure, or level of emergence. And in that discourse, the

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import of the word “prescience,” which applied to all structures within nature, lent credence to a sense of opening beyond each and every level of emergence; which, in turn, seemed to provide an impulse toward “the More” in the Jamesian sense without evoking or requiring James’ dubious words, “piecemeal supernaturalism.” For such awareness was not to be understood as “supernatural,” but as trans-structural” within the processes of Nature; which nevertheless implied, in Wieman’s words, sensitivity toward “that which is more than we can think.” “Experience as lived” connotes a certain direction and focus of inquiry. It may, however, be applied to various modes of inquiry and commentary: 1) to the route of experience, for example, to which phenomenological inquiry has been addressed; 2) to more acutely solitary and traumatic occurrences, as in the existentialist novels of Camus and others; to historical strands within any cultural history, as in Heidegger’s analysis of the “subject-object situation;” or to Whitehead’s “experient occasion.” It is that focus of inquiry, or the similaritids of focus among the various strands, that is significant as being expressive of the Existentialist Cycle of Liberalism; and which gives it its distinctive character. It is that, along with the fundamental notions and resources of reflection that inform the various routes of inquiry within the cycle. In some instances the mode of thought within a new cycle is explicitly a thrust countering an earlier cycle of liberal religious inquiry, in the sense of being a reaction against the orientation, method, or claims of a previous cycle: as in Kierkegaard’s departure from Hegel in his idea of “existentiality;” and in the various theological strands which, in responding to Kierkegaard’s stimulus, openly rejected their own earlier mode of liberal stance, as in Barth, Brunner, Tillich and Niebuhr; or in Wieman who reluctantly veered from an earlier involvement with the Absolute Idealism of Royce and Hocking, as he felt the persuasion of Dewey’s empiricism along with that of the new realists he had encountered at Harvard, during his student years. The interplay of these influences was to be followed by an interim of concern with Whitehead’s new realist cosmology. Yet he was finally to return to an empirical stance expressive of his long-standing affinities with Dewey. In all instances of the new cycle, however, whether the philosophical or the theological context, the new stance or modes of inquiry, have been informed, stimulated, or nurtured to some degree by innovations in fundamental notions stemming from the new vision of science along with the cultural experiences of the period; evoking a redress of the intellectual and religious response to the problems of the times. In all of these instances, one sees sensibilities of thought at work expressive of openness

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toward changing conceptions of nature and human existence, and of responsiveness to resources of inquiry informing such a developmental view. III. The existentialist theme, taken in the larger sense of vilifying, clarifying and fulfilling the promise and possibilities of these lived experiences, has had ramifications in our time beyond those envisaged in their philosophical and theological contexts. Here one sees a burgeoning of causes, crusades, and reforms reminiscent of the social gospel era. The comparison, however, is inept and even deceptive. For the contrasts between the social vision of that earlier era and that of recent years are so vast as to seem to set them apart. To begin with, the social gospel was distinctly theologically oriented, having stemmed initially from the application of the prophetic literature and the social teaching of the historical Jesus. Though it had its counterpart in labor movements and socially motivated reform groups and institutions at the turn of the century and after, the interchange between them was marginal, with some exceptions. Within the Romanticist cycle, notably as it was shaped by Ritschlian theology, social ethics took on the character of an eschatological vision. Ethical activity became the way of participating in the ultimate end of history. This vision of ethics was voiced at times among liberals of the Modernist cycle as I recall a sermon by Edward Scribner Ames in the Rockefeller Chapel at The University of Chicago during my student days in which, in effect, he was celebrating that social vision in our times. It may take a long time to realize our dreams, he said: fifty years, a hundred, possibly more. But by participating in these socially redeeming activities we now participate in that ultimate goal. These are my words, paraphrasing his as I recall them. Yet the social gospelers were not visionaries. Their motivation was that of living and expressing themselves in character with life as they affirmed it; and this implied exercising a social idealism that pervaded the whole movement. One senses in current movements and episodes of reform, as expressed in “liberation theologies, declarations of rights, in the Women’s movement, or other civil rights activities, a more realistic stance. One cannot characterize them simply as self-interest groups, in contrast to the socially motivated reforms of earlier years. For the concept of humanity as expressed through individual persons and groups pervades and motivates much that is projected. Thus claiming or proclaiming one’s humanity is at the core of it. The fact that this claim upon society appears to be accepted or

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acknowledged; or, to the degree that it is so accepted and acknowledged, would seem to imply that much that was envisioned in the social idealism of the twenties and earlier has become a reality in the spheres of public opinion, government and law. But to imply so direct a correlation or transition between the two periods of social motivation is to blur the distinctions between them, and to accord too much to that earlier age of the social gospel. I would say that the current spheres of ethical motivation are expressive of the realism of the age, rather than the flowering or fulfillment of an earlier idealistic motivation. And in that respect the ethical vision of our time participates in the milieu and perspective consonant with that affirmed in the philosophical and theological versions of the new cycle of liberalism. The lived experience is not only in focus and being affirmed; the bounds and implications of its fulfillment are being immeasurably extended beyond anything earlier cycles of liberalism envisaged or approved. I am always astounded, for example, at how utterly absent consideration of the racial question was in the discussion of social questions during my student years; or how impervious we were to the denial of human or civil rights in the major social institutions of our time—in churches, schools, hospitals, industry and sports. The revolt of youth was highly visible and vocal; and I was actively, even aggressively involved in it. But these basic human questions involving the lived experiences of people were not in focus in what we addressed as vital questions of the day. Liberals during those years did not resist discussion of such issues; they seemed simply unaware of them. And that is a deficiency in the perceptiveness of my own generation and of those who instructed us during those times that haunts me still. It is during times when these deficiencies of vision and sensibility loom as being characteristic of the liberal legacy that the words “post-liberal” seem meaningful and welcome. How could generations of socially concerned human beings in rebellion against the coercive control of “internal authority and institutions, and thus concerned with inner motivation, its nurture and fulfillment” be so indifferent to the human and humane implications of their own affirmations and commitments? The explanation of our insensitive or restrictive awareness in that easier period it to be found, I believe, in the restricted character of our vision and in the island character of the lived experiences as we encountered them in churches, interplay of the immediacies of experience as lived. Thus, whether post-liberal, or liberalism re-envisioned this contextual interplay within the immediacies of experience that now looms as the scene of action and decision registers, it would seem, an advance

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upon what liberalism in eras antecedent to our time, proclaimed; and toward which they worked.

Reflections on Loomer’s Interpretation of the “Size of God” (and Related Papers) From within any perspective one may view these papers by Bernie Loomer they are impressive. For one who has known his thinking, or presumed to be familiar with it during a period of three decades or more the shifts in stance are arresting, even shacking at times. I must confess, too, that I sense in the general orientation of his thought as expressed here one that conveys heartening symptoms of rapport with my own efforts through the years. This is made particularly evident in so far as the stance is expressive of an “attachment to life” concretely envisaged, and of a “process-relational” mode of envisaging the “web of life” to which attachment is acknowledged. In recent years Loomer has mentioned this sense of affinity from time to time; but I had no idea of the extent of our rapport, particularly as expressed in his questioning of the lure of conceptual abstractions in deference to concrete intimations from the lived experiences. Another source of surprise was Loomer’s frequent reference to William James’ radical empiricism as a resource or reassuring reference concerning the priority of the theme “lived experience;” and, conversely, his current way of sensing so sharply the abstractiveness of Whitehead’s cosmology as conveyed in Process and Reality. I have stressed the continuities between James and Whitehead in so far as I discerned in each of them a vivid sense of the priority of experience as lived, and took Whitehead at his word when he offered his highly technical and abstract work, Process and Reality as “an adventure of ideas” in the interest of providing a substantial margin of intelligibility amidst an expanse of wanderings and gropings within the new vision of science that might otherwise provide no sure footed reflection in what was then emerging (1929) as a post-mechanistic community of inquiry. Despite the abstract character of those reflections, I have argued, Whitehead’s legacy, even in that work, is infected with an imaginative thrust of inquiry. I. Before addressing the main thrust of Loomer’s current concerns, as expressed in “The Size of God,” I wish to comment briefly on his claim that Whitehead lacks relevance with regard to issues that now press upon us; and that process theology in its current mode, in so far as it centers so assiduously upon the abstractive role in philosophical and religious inquiry, shares that irrelevance. I recall his making that point quite

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insistently in a conversation we had at my cottage in Michigan a year or more ago in which he noted that Whitehead had had no acquaintance or concern with such impressive movements as Existentialism, Phenomenology, or even Marxism. Furthermore, that he could not have anticipated the torrential cultural upheavals that were to surface following his death in 1947, stemming from Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the mounting cultural and technical consequences of the release of atomic energy, not to speak of radical shifts in national and cultural alignments following the Second World War and the “Cold War.” Hence the human situation, with its menacing and seemingly irresolvable dimensions of tension and evil, along with its potential for productive purposes, could not have figured in any formative way in formulating his system. At the time of our conversation I felt the appropriateness of these observations; and, on historical grounds, one cannot dismiss than altogether. Yet I was to recall some weeks following our conversation that it was during that very season of anguish and despair, the late forties and fifties, that I rediscovered Whitehead’s writings in this idiom of existential trauma. One may say that I read into Whitehead what the season of anguish demanded or illumined. To a degree that is true; yet the conceptualizations were there to be read and read into. Their very formulation as Whitehead conveyed them bore witness to existential concerns that were not to be resolved readily in conceptual ways. The lived experiences of that period harbored depths of tension and irresolvable issues simply because of their textured or relational character; which, in turn, displayed in each instance the prehensive character of every actual event. The implicit anguish in that dictum that we are made for ourselves, for others, and for God; and the opaqueness of this stubborn, implacable, and seemingly irresolvable creatural situation bore in upon me with fresh and acute existential force. Nevertheless, intermittent release from such anguish was intimated in the resources of grace to which Whitehead’s account of the creatural nexus pointed. It was, in fact, in this very context of rediscovering Whitehead in the forties that I recovered a lively sense of potency in the “themes of the faith.” Since then, the resources of existential meaning inherent in Whitehead’s tightly woven conceptual scheme having become increasingly vivid to me, have loomed as a neglected resource even among process theologians, themselves. I need not prolong this testimonial, except to add that Whitehead’s formulation of key notions such as his “reformed principal of subjectivity,” his “doctrine of prehension,” and “causal efficacy” have provided seemingly indispensable tools of thought with which to illumine existentialist and phenomenological themes in ways that are not to be

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found in the literature of either of those movements of thought. I think the reverse is true also; hence rapport between these movements and modes of thought and process thought could enhance the force of each of them. And I think Loomer’s current stance could contribute significantly to the likelihood of such a rapport. II. Loomer’s Revised Caption, “Process-Relational Thought.” I respond heartily to Loomer’s intent in his stress upon the “processrelational” theme as being more adequately expressive of what is implied in a philosophy of becoming than the familiar caption, “process thought.” Loomer will recall that, at a Conference on Philosophy and Biblical Studies, held in Indianapolis in the winter of 1974, I protested the singular use of the word, “Process” in characterizing the essential thrust of Whitehead’s legacy. Given the aesthetic vision and imagery that lay back of Whitehead’s reflections and permeated its conceptualizations, I suggested, one should see that “relations,” expressive of the textured character of reality as experienced, was indigenous to the way “process” in his mode of thought was to be envisaged. It is this textured or relational theme expressed processively that gives to process thought in the Whiteheadian imagery its unique and radically innovating character. I suppose I am sensitive to this distinctive character of the Whiteheadian mode of process thought, or process-relational thought, because, during my student years, I had experienced the process-relational mode of thought of the Chicago Modernists, who employed a socio-ethical imagery. The Modernists, too, used the word “process” in characterizing their theology. Shailer Mathews’ Festschrift was entitled Process and Religion. For the evolutionary theme was vividly to the fore. Yet it was “social” process that was primarily in focus, exemplifying the evolutionary theme in human history and in the affairs of the human community. And in that context the “social good” was preeminent. Summoning individual enterprise and initiative to the lure of that social good was the essence of their social gospel. I recall, too, how the import of Whitehead’s phrase, “individual in community” impressed us as being refreshing and shockingly innovating. And Wieman’s enthusiastic elaborations upon it during those years heightened our response to it as being a subtle, but important corrective of what the modernist’s social gospel had implied. At the time I had no awareness of the aesthetic vision or imagery that lay back of Whitehead’s reflections; nor of his “reformed principle of subjectivity” or his “doctrine of prehension,” expressive of dissonant yet coherent identities within

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relationships. For these were to appear later in the 1929 volume. Yet the spell of his discourse was upon us. And his magical way of conveying the relational theme within an aesthetic discourse, however muted left its imprint upon my own reflections. The socio-ethical, in and of itself was no longer enough. I am aware that Loomer’s process-relational view also aspires to a more sophisticated rendering of that theme as it becomes informed within an aesthetic vision of relations. Yet his discussion of the theme seems to revert at times to a socio-ethical vision reminiscent of the processrelational theme of the Modernists, chastened by Reinhold Niebuhr’s cryptic correctives. The issue here as I see it is double-edged: how can the individual become aware of its identity within its relational ground; and how can the communal ground assimilate individual identities without impairment or loss of the individual’s potential for unique, creative, innovating capacities. The symbolism that is appropriate here is that of contrasts under identity; or even, as may be the case, the coincidence of opposites within a more sustaining pattern of coherent themes, as in the symphony; or in other media of the arts expressive of a textured mode of relationships. III. The Size of God I am encouraged by this paper by Loomer on “The Size of God.” Having made a career myself out of baffling myself and others, including Loomer, in pursuit of the unmanageable, I now find my colleague stirring up a facade of impenetrable fog such as I have never been able to achieve. Concerning my inimitable prose, Joseph Sittler once said, “I like Meland, and I read him; but his wards are seductive. With the turn of a phrase he will take you in. And as you read, a vast fog will settle over you. The fog always lifts; but when it lifts, all the furniture has been rearranged.” I submit that, were Sittler to read “The Size of God” the fog would never lift. But that is what is intriguing about this paper; and reassuring as well. There is no obligation here to search for “clear and distinct ideas;” for the nature the problem precludes it. And if any of you have encountered any clear and distinct ideas, you probably took a wrong turn, and are now on a different path of inquiry. When I first heard Bernie use that phrase, “The Size of God,” I said to myself, “That’s what the California sun will do to one. Size is what counts. And now it has been made an attribute of the Deity!” Yet, after several readings, while I have not become oriented toward the problem under

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discussion, I am able to grope my way toward some recognizable observations, though by no way assured or clarifying. So let me put this whimsical mood aside and see if I can offer some serious reflections on this important theme. What impresses me as being distinctive in Loomer’s presentation of The Size of God is his ascription of growth, compatible with the process of becoming, to the realty of God. My own designation of “The Creative Passage” as the ultimate ongoing nexus cradling and fulfilling what is immanent or potential as emergent events hints at such as ascription; but I have recoiled from equating “Creative Passage” directly with “God;” though it is the closest I am able to come within the discourse of a cosmology to such a specific designation. If the ultimacy of Becoming is affirmed, as implying an alternative to an imagery of the ultimacy of Being, then both of our designations would seem appropriate. Loomer’s is the more daring; and, in so far as it implies a new route of inquiry or conceptualization concerning God, it is the less empirical. I am intrigued by his daring proposal in that context; but my own reticence about trusting conceptualization in probing so hidden a dimension of reality as experienced impels me, in the language of the phenomenologist, to want to “bracket the suggestion.” It remains, nevertheless an intriguing and daring proposal. Oddly enough, were I to undertake to probe the import of my own notion, “Creative Passage” with some of Loomer’s queries in mind, I would feel no reluctance or hesitancy in undertaking it. And it is quite likely that, in so far as I am able to follow the argument as Loomer develops it, I tend to relate it to that theme. This, in itself, would tend to limit, or at least to qualify my understanding of what Loaner is projecting. I have wondered why or how Loomer came to center upon the word “Size” for envisaging the reformulation of attributes ascribable to “God” consonant with an imagery of “Becoming,” as contrasted with that of “Being.” I note that he equates “Size” with “Complexity;” and in other instances with “dimensional” aspects. This has suggested to me that the word “Size” is a colloquialism that affords ready recognition of the intention to enlarge upon the envisagement of a Reality conceived statically in rendering it consonant with Process or the act of Becoming. However, conceiving of “complexity,” dimensional quality, stature of becomingness, or even character of becomingness within the idiom of “Size,” would seem to limit, even trivialize the import of meaning being inferred. Furthermore, I have been unable to determine whether Loomer means to infer, in equating “Size” with “Complexity” and related terms, that a God in process cannot be assuredly affirmed “Good,” given the weighting

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he ascribes to the process of transition within the nexus of the Creative Passage. This question occurred to me while noting his treatment of the theme concerning the continuity or the lack of it between past and present in the formation of each individual life span or cultural identity. In my own thinking, the persistence of formative influences and legacies is given more prominence. Loomer appears to discount such continuity, or the import of it, within the context of the new emergent; in deference to what is compelling and novel in each instance of emergence. I may have misread his intention in this regard; or perhaps the weighting he gives to the thrust of emergence as compared with what persists as a legacy out of the past, led me to interpret his wording as a threat to my own assessment of these persisting legacies. For in my own thinking, the persistence of formative influences and legacies is given more weight and prominence. Again, it was the corrective which Whitehead provided, as against the Modernist’s way of envisaging the evolutionary process. There, too, (in Modernism), the stress was on instance of becoming which, in effect, rendered all things new; hence legacies were important only as historical lore, chiefly by way of understanding past social minds. As I read Loomer in this paper, he, too, appears to discount the import of such continuity in deference to each emerging, novel circumstance of concretion. To my mind this stresses the innovation import of “process” to the neglect of structural continuities which persist, even though dormant and seemingly ineffectual for long stretches of time. Whether one is speaking of cultural orbits of meaning, or individual structures of experience, I think one has to take the efficacy of that dimension of duration more seriously than Loomer seems inclined to do. These persisting continuities with past experiences are not just “hand-ups” to be overcome in the processiveness of the lived experience. In some important respects they are qualitative residuals that are of apiece with what defines and illumines what is presently emerging as a concretion. What may be at stake here is a difference in the weighting given to conceptual expressions as compared with bodily feelings and their reservoir of imminent reactions or responses. To the degree that one takes seriously the injunction ascribed to Whitehead that “we think with our bodies,” implying a deeper reservoir of characteristic modes of reticence and expressiveness than the conceptual track may disclose at any-given time, one will hold in reserve the possibility of deeper disclosures of the self-experience or of cultures than any current expressions of them may convey. It will be clear from these remarks that both my distrust of the Modernist way of conceiving the evolutionary theme of process, and my confidence in what I derive from Whitehead’s interpretation of “causal

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efficacy” (which I have employed in developing my own notion of “the structure of experience” and “cultural orbits of meaning”) impel me to be wary of any formulation of process or of a process-relational theme that seems to accentuate innovations to the neglect of persisting structures of experience. I am sure I have exaggerated the differences in our views in this context; I have meant only to point up the contrast in what we emphasize. This leads me to say that one of the strands of Whiteheads legacy that seems to me either to have been understated or unattended in Loomer’s discussion of “everlastingness” is that which stems from the formulation of “causal efficacy.” Whatever else that puzzling doctrine or notion was meant to imply it would seem to convey a persisting distillation from past experiences of an individual life span, or of a community of people which, in each moment of immediacy presents the past as being both continuous and changed; and the immediacies as being both innovation and laden with givens of the structured experience within which they occur. The degree of efficacy with which this mysterious interchange of assimilation and innovation is effected in each instance varies from creature to creature; or from one historic period of a culture to another; as well as from culture to culture: Nevertheless the interplay of ingredients registers with varying degrees of change or changelessness. The import of this observation is to say that, in every concretion, the past lives on in the present and qualifies the future with varying degrees of subtlety and efficacy. This fact of becoming qualifies or conditions the emerging span of existing within each individual or community with varying degrees of conscious awareness. Character, quality, identity, even stance, though this is more mobile, issue from this structuring stream of existing and becoming. Hence the Creative Passage itself, though incessantly issuing in change, innovation, and conceivably growth, is the carrier of a vast nexus of created and creative good; functioning both as burden and opportunity. In so far as the notion of “Creative Passage,” as I use it, can be assimilated to, or identified with “God,” as Loomer means to employ this word, the affinities would seem to outweigh the contrasts. Yet the one contrast could be crucial. I seem to be sharing in the ultimate vision of “Everlastingness” in which there is more persistence of the scoured legacies of our lived experience in the Ultimate Becoming of God than appear to be affirmed or assumed in Loomer’s projection of “The Size of God.” That difference, as I view it, turns in large measure on what seems to be a distinction in assessing the import of “causal efficacy;” and what that purports of our becomingness in relation to the becomingness of God. This would seem to partake of what is implied in Whitehead’s “Consequent Nature of God.” I recoil from so

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ready an identification with that way of projecting the theme. Yet, on grounds I have intimated concerning the Process of Becoming, both as they apply to “God” and to his creatures, creatural trust would seem our measured and disciplined stance. Bernard E. Meland Professor Emeritus, The Divinity School, of The University of Chicago November 13, 1979

MELAND’S UNPUBLISHED PAPERS (UNDATED)

Some Directives for Theological Method (As Seen Within an Empirical Realism) I Since the writing of this paper was prompted by an incidental reference to my theological method in a paper being written By Dave Rasmussen, the manner in which I get into the problem is dictated somewhat by my response to his comment. I started out simply to write a paragraph or so commenting upon his paper; but I became so absorbed in the exposition and defense of my own approach to theology that I ended up writing this statement. So instead of confining my remarks to a conference with Rasmussen I am presenting this extensive document to all of you at this final session of our seminar. Along the way, as you will see, I direct some pointed criticism at some of my colleagues whose thinking is akin to my own. On the assumption that members of the family should be present when a family argument is being initiated, I have asked Mr. Loomer, Mr. Roberts, and Mr. Long to meet with us. David Rasmussen has spoken of my theological method as one that begins with an analysis of culture as a way of getting at the primal witness of faith. My response to this characterization must be to say that the analysis of culture in this case is not in itself sufficiently expressive of a theological method. At best it can be but one strand in a method of empirical realism, which takes the immediacies of experience as the bearer of a depth of reality to which response and interpretation must be given. Yet, in as much as the structure of experience is given such prominence in my thought, there would appear to be some basis for characterizing my method as a theology of culture. What follows is an exploration of this point. All human existence takes place within a particularized orbit of meaning. An orbit of meaning is determined by the cultural history of a specific people. Interchanges with alien and rival orbits occur from time to time; hence syncretization and secularization are intermittently present.

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Yet, historically speaking, initial, primordial drives within a culture achieve sufficient focus in the form of sensibilities, modes of awareness, and reflection, to generate both a characteristic mind-set and a persistent thrust of the psyche. One has only to look around or to move about among the various well-defined culture-groups of East and West to get some intimation of this historical development. The human response, therefore is hedged about by two kinds of limitations 1) the limitation of finitude of creatureliness that applies to all men; 2) the limitation of the cultural orbit of meaning which prepares the human mind and psyche within a given area of human association to receive and to react to occurrences in specific and characteristic ways. The tendency of every people is to employ the terms of their orbit of meaning universally, i.e., to speak for every man. The effect of this tendency has been to impel each culture to conceive of its faith and perspective as being singularly significant, if not absolute, and thus to resist alien forms of religious witness. A first step, as a prolegomena to theology method, is thus to attain self-understanding as a participant in a cultural faith, and to acknowledge as well as to accept the limitations of its historical witness. A second step, however, is to take adequate measure of the relative situation in which each cultural witness stands. To my knowledge, Radical Empiricism was the first metaphysical interpretation of human existence in the West to lift up the simultaneous presence of an ultimate dimension of reality and the humanly imposed immediacies within the stream of experience. Life for every man is thus seen to be ambiguous (i.e., partially distorted by our human limitations) yet at the same time to be borne forth by, and in its momentary passage, to bear forth an ultimate depth of reality. In this respect, no cultural witness, however limited, is devoid of an ultimate reference which simultaneously speaks forth and stands in judgment of the articulate cultural witness. For this reason cultural relativity does not imply sheer religious pluralism. Each bears some relevance to the truth of actuality, though its witness is partial and limited. A third step is to get an adequate understanding of the phenomenon of myth in any culture, and of the mythos that shapes its orbit of meaning. Myth is the elemental response of a people to what is ever present as an ultimate demand and measure upon human existence, (sense of destiny, sensus numinous, idea of the holy, ultimate concern, etc.). However transitory specific myths may be, or the mythologies that arise as explications of what is discerned or apprehended in myth, the shaping of the human psyche by the mythical response, generating sensibilities, modes of apprehension, expectations and their consequent reflections, is

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more enduring. Thus the outgrowing of specifically formulated myths and mythologies does not imply necessarily a relinquishment of the mythos, which is the deep-lying orbit of meaning, giving structure and direction, both at the level of the human psyche and within the realm of imaginative and cognitive experience. In so far as a people remain elemental in some respect, which is simply to be responsive to what is ultimate in man’s existence, they participate in this deep-lying mythos of the culture. But even in becoming sophisticated to an extent, which enables them to disavow or to ignore this elemental response, they will not wholly relinquish the mythos; for their disavowals, and possibly their alternative, secular affirmations, will partake of or be defined against (and thus to some extent defined in terms of) what has once been elementally embraced. The reasons for this persistence of the mythical forms of sensibility and cognition are subtle and devious; for they have to do with the shaping of the human psyche at a sub-conscious level, both individually and collectively. Simply dealing with the problem at the level of conscious meaning will not reach the formative influence of lived experiences or of history as it has been lived. A fourth step is to take note of the various forms of participation in the mythos within any culture. These forms are not always differentiated, nor have they always been so in our Western experience. Looking at the situation in more recent history we would recognize at least three fairly distinct forms: 1) the cultus, 2) individual experience, and 3) the wider, socalled secular domain of experience within the culture. These three forms of participation overlap, even intermesh; yet one can detect boundaries between them at certain points and in certain respects. The f act that there are issues between individual religious people and the faith of the church, for example; or between the church and society, not to speak of tensions between individuals and society on the grounds of conscience or belief, is evidence of the differentiation of which we speak. This degree of differentiation has not always been present in Western culture. For in its earliest history, Western and mid-eastern life did not acknowledge individuality in the modern sense of that term. Personality meant “corporate personality”—the corporate mind and sensibility speaking through persons. Individuality, understood as a person dissociated from or differentiated from the group mind and its sanctions, was an abnormality not to be recognized or tolerated. Similarly one can find instances when the cultus and the culture were conceived as being one and the same. This was interrupted by events centering around the history of Israel which were to continue through the early years of Christian history. Roman Catholicism was an effort to re-establish a church-controlled culture and a

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conformist mind among its believers. Protestantism created a breach in the pattern of conformity, though with initial qualifications, (the national, or established church). The Separatist movement marked the completion of the breach, issuing in clear demarcations between individual believer, the tradition of Church and the State. Liberalism implied an elevation of individual experience and a redefinition of theological norms in terms of the appeal to religious experience. A consensus could be tolerated in this context, but not conformity. So much then, for these three forms of participation. I shall have occasion to speak further of them as vortices of revelation when we come to a more specific statement of methodology. II. The critical problem arising from a reaction against liberal theology has been the repossession of the communal context of faith and inquiry and a reassessment of the relation between the individual experience of faith and the communal witness of an institutionalized faith, the Church. By way of cutting through the interminable discussion that could ensure, were this age-old tension in Protestantism between individual believer and the faith of the church to come under review, contemporary theologians have defined themselves against both modernism and orthodoxy, seeking to engage theological thinking afresh in the live encounter with revelatory experience in which “God addresses man,” or “grasps man and turns him about,” or “transforms man as he cannot transform himself.” In so far as these theologians conceive of their theologies as being something other than a relapse into fundamentalism, or a return to some form of orthodoxy in defiance of modern culture, they are clearly drawing upon the resources of intelligibility made available through innovations in the imagery of discipline thought. And they do this whether their statement of method acknowledges this to be so or not. The point at which contemporary theologians appear to have exercised an unwarranted tour-de-force is in their appeal to Scripture or to biblical faith. On examination one will find more explicit justification of this procedure than is commonly acknowledged. Again, this implies making use of the general consensus among contemporary disciplines concerning modes of thought relating to depths of reality which can be approached only symbolically or by way of an internal track of meaning within experience that is lived. Kierkegaard gave some intimation of this procedure in speaking of the truth of subjectivity. James and Bergson made the distinction between “knowledge about and knowledge of” a primary emphasis in their radical empiricism. In Bergson this internal track of knowing was given the value of intuition and was interpreted as such. The philosophy of phenomenology provided an alternative

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justification, taking the effects in phenomena as visible signs of realities which can reach us only in this symbolic way. Here the epistemological question which had long haunted philosophical and theological inquiry was circumvented by relinquishing the concern with literal meaning and settling for holding this ultimate reference in focus by recourse to a symbolic discourse. You will immediately recognize that contemporary theologians have availed themselves of both resources with varying degrees of emphasis in coming to a solution of their methodological problem regarding the use of Scripture in theology. All of them, we might say, have acknowledge the mytho-poetic character of biblical statements; though, contrary to customary interpretations in orthodox circles, they have represented biblical myths as having significance only as signs attesting to depths of meaning in human existence. All historical or temporal reference in such notions as Creation, the Fall, Sin, and Redemption, has been disavowed. In this respect, the “truth in myth” is considered to be wholly intuitional (as in the Niebuhrs), or phenomenological (Barth, Brunner, Tillich, et. al.) pointing beyond itself to what is ultimate in the immediacies of existence. The appeal to Scripture thus rests back upon a repossession of the language of myth together with a reconception of myth in terms familiar, either to radical empiricism, or to phenomenology. But this explains only how the Bible is to be used in theology. There still remains some unfinished business in this appeal to Scripture. Even after one has justified a way of using the language of biblical myth, the question still persists, Why turn to the Bible in this present age? What is there about the Bible or any ancient myth that impels one to be concerned with it as a modern person in modern times? I do not see that any of the major theologians of our time have adequately answered that question. Simply to say that it is “the Source of the Word of God,” or “the primary document upon which the church rests” (assuming this to be true), is not to justify the appeal to Scripture within the modern ethos, unless, of course, once conceives of theology solely as a cultic discipline. This is where some of the bugs in this theological business begin to crawl into view. On the one hand, some will insist upon conceiving of theology as being a discipline of the church, answerable only to the demands of its witness; and, on the other hand, they will defend theology’s right to be made a university discipline—a science along with other sciences, though in some respects a distinctive science. You can’t have it both ways. Either theology is a cultic discipline, applicable only to what pertains to the internal demands of the church; or it is a cultural discipline along with being a cultic concern. It represents a way of understanding the

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culture as well as the cultus. And it does so because it sees the culture as having organic relations with the concerns of the cultus. In short, the mythos that has remained in focus in the cultus is persistent, however obscured or ignored, within the cultural fabric of meaning; and in historicways can be seen to have shaped the orbit of meaning within which the present cultural discourse moves and his its being. Our analysis has now come full circle: for we have now come back to the point with which we started, namely, that all human existence takes place within a particularized orbit of meaning. One is made aware within our culture that the Bible is the repository of the very root metaphors which have given rise to concrete and relational notions that have gone into the forming of our Western and Mid-eastern orbit of meaning. It is therefore more than a primary document of the church; it is the primal document of the culture as well, however remote form it our present discourse may appear, or our present mores and sensibilities may in fact be. In pointing to this fact, I believe I contribute something of importance to all contemporary theologies based on a repossession of the appeal to Scripture as a mytho-poetic witness. When the appeal to Scripture is made on these grounds, it is made consonant with the method implied in justifying the concern with revelatory experience. In both instances, acknowledgement is made that the sensibilities of thought as well as the imagery of thought made available by contemporary refinements in human inquiry have opened our eyes to depths of meaning in human existence, thereby enabling us to take some account of the mystery that has cradled us and which presently envelopes and sustains us. And this raises the question as to how the witness of faith can be more than a mythical response. I do not say whether it should be more than myth; for I am persuaded that modern man cannot live by myth alone. His conscious mind is too sharply differentiated, as was true of earlier Christian thinkers in the history of our culture; hence what is addressed to him as a Word beyond his own human words and meanings will either ride over him as being meaninglessly remote; or it will plague him as a thorn until he comes to terms with it within his own intelligible discourse. This is the problem to which we now turn. The fact that contemporary theology rests precariously upon a repossession and reconception of myth has led some of our colleagues to challenge any appeal to the biblical witness that has not first addressed itself to the dilemma in which this appeal to myth involves the theologian in modern times. For some, as we know, there is no way out short of demythologizing the New Testament. Without going into the intricacies of this issue we may note that the end result of this proposal is to move

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beyond mythical language to analogical statements within a contemporary idiom with a view to setting forth in intelligible and logically defensible terms the redemptive word to which the biblical witness of faith attests. Here we come upon the problem of how we may employ our reason in addressing ourselves to ultimate dimensions of reality. The question as to how we understand reason is crucial here; so let me make my own position clear on this point. Reason is not one thing among other things, one faculty or organ among others; rather it is the total organism acting in a specific way under certain conditions; that is, with a specific focus, following from being attentive to something, in response to something, or intent upon something. Reason is the human organism when it is luminous with thought and inquiry. And the human organism is that kind of structure that can fluctuate between a highly attentive state in which, as we say, reason is alert and active, to a near indolent state in which consciousness appears barely to exist. But one is not to assume that reason is active only in this highly attentive state of the organism; for to the degree that selected impressions have been reflected upon, assimilated and judged, they tend to be stored away, as it were, kept dormant, but ready to be activated internally as a memory recalled, or as an internal stimulus to further reflection. Thus what appears to be indolence is often either reverie or a vibrant internalizing of thought, sustained by this inner stimulus of recall and its reflective response. My understanding of reason rests back upon what I understand to be the limitation of creatureliness as it applies to man. Our limitations of creatureliness can be defined more precisely as the structure of organ existence characteristic and definitive of the human being. The human organism, which forms the organic base of personality, stands high in the sequence of organic development commonly spoken of as the growth of natural structures. One may not assume, however, that this human structure is definitive of reality beyond its own level of emergence, or even indicative of what is ultimate. The practice of employing human personality or the human body pictorially or analogically for extending the range of existence is understandable as a mytho-poetic way of speaking or thinking. However, the extent to which it presumes to be a serious undertaking in local construction it becomes a dubious venture. For then what is metaphorically imagined is given the weight of literal meaning, and the literal and imaginative elements then become so intermingled as to produce a new mythology. The fact that one does not acknowledge this effort to be mythological makes it all the more dubious; for one then assumes that one is really speaking logically in every respect, when as a

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matter of fact, one is simply marshaling an intricate system of logical arguments behind a mytho-poetic assumption. The enterprise as a whole rests upon a mythical apprehension. Now the response to mysterious awareness is legitimate when it becomes a way of expressing wonder, apprehension, gratitude, praise, or even anxiety before the mystery that holds us in existence. This is the elemental response in man that is always appropriate, if not imperative. And it is quite possible that, given man’s structural limitations, he cannot respond in any way other than that which employs terms analogous to his own world of experience and meaning. But whenever the response takes on the semblance of literal understanding, fortified by meticulous logical argument, it become illegitimate as religious or theological speech precisely on the grounds that it is no longer simply pointing or reaching toward realities that form the depths of existence, but is presuming to define, describe, or characterize them in logical terms. This is patently to over-reach the human structure of conscious existence, and thus to impress upon these realities the restrictive image of this limited human structure. Apart from being an illegitimate extension of the human structure, this kind of procedure tends to preclude the possibility of a more sensitive encounter with realities at the edge of our being and instead to enclose our understanding within the recognizable bounds of our own structure of meaning. It has seemed to me that the ventures in theological method presently being pursued, both within the perspective of existentialist philosophies and of process thought, must come to terms with this kind of critique of analogical thinking. What Professor Ian Ramsey has said concerning both scientific and religious language applies even more forcibly to theological language, namely, that they can no longer justify employing “picture models” in any form of inquiry bearing upon ultimate issues of concerns. What alone are available are what he calls “disclosure models,” that is, models which presuppose a distance between humanly formed notions or analogies and the realities toward which inquiry is being directed. In this mode of address, the terms familiarly in use, when applied in theological inquiry, or in the making of theological statements, are not made defining or descriptive in any categorical or doctrinal sense; but simply suggestive in an explorative effort to find a way in which the reality apprehended can be thought about, of made marginally intelligible to commonly accepted disciplined speech. Maintaining a sense of distance between imagery and reality in the use of disclosure models can be accomplished for more readily when one is employing such models simply to demonstrate the fact that religious

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language already in use is meaningful, as Ramsey does, who works mainly with the language of the Prayer Book. When, however, one presumes to use such a model, calling it an analogy, to see what meaning a biblical or theological assertion can have, such as the statement, “God was in Christ,” or “God acted in history,” the tendency to assign definitive meaning to analogical statements, and thus to close the gap between imagery and reality, is almost inescapable. It has seemed to me that Professors Loomer, John Cobb, and Schubert Ogden exemplify this hazard in their attempts to speak doctrinally within a process framework. I am aware that my own thought is subject to the same hazard; yet I sense a difference in the sensibilities of our thought at this point. Where I am troubled about the disparity between the human image or formulation and the realities to which these formulations refer, I find Mr. Loomer, Mr. Cobb, and Mr. Ogden imperturbable, on this point; hence they are more free in their use of a process framework, confident that what is thereby set forth as an ontological meaning is reasonably expressive of the reality affirmed in the witness of faith. This confidence appears, not only in their constructive effort when they seek to give content to a theological term or doctrine such as “revelation,” “incarnation,” or “the Christ-event,” but in their critique of rival doctrinal formulations as well. Here the process framework is employed normatively to adjudicate between formulations. It is at this point that they appear to attribute to what is distilled from the philosophical a degree of truth concerning the infinite structure that amounts to specifying the structure of reality; whereas I would hold that the framework and what issues from it in the way of a model is clearly a human formulation having the value only of a venture in intelligibility. The truth is not given by the framework. The truth is a truth of actuality (revelation), received from the witness of faith, or out of the depths of experience. Presumably one can live in the truth of this event, be transformed or shaped by it, yet have no vivid glimpse or grasp of its structure or meaning. One may, on the other hand, bring the resources of the mind to bear to some extent upon this witness of faith or upon the experience of judgment, confronting the act or event with an analogy out of the humanly formed framework, in which case, a margin of intelligibility may ensue. The concurrence of the act and the illumination of the analogy may thereby be sufficient to commend the truth of this actuality to the mind’s vision. And in this way, the mind, with this margin of intelligibility at hand, can affirm what faith and experience have conveyed as a lived and living truth. Attaining intelligibility in our thoughts of this work of grace and judgment is not to be equated with seizing upon the truth of this reality in

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the sense of assimilating it completely (without remainder) to a philosophical framework. It is more a matter of momentary recognition that alleviates “the mind’s allegiance to despair” as it strains to conceive beyond its bounds. It is an effort, summoning our perceptions to a vision of the mind that can serve to illumine the context in which this mystery occurs, such that we can receive and respond to its visitation; or, to speak more properly, to the depth of its occurrence. Thought so employed is instrumental to effecting a human response to what is given as a depth of reality beyond our own structure and form. There is more involved here than assessment of the powers of reason in relation to faith; it implies also an assessment of the mythical response which expresses itself through the act of faith. Since so much of the discussion of faith and reason has taken place in the context of conscious experience, resulting no doubt from the dominance of Idealism, faith has been given the meaning simply of a subjective response, or inner experience. Thus, in contrast to the more public and verifiable exchange at the level of reason, the report of faith has seemed unreliable and dubious. In associating the act of faith with the mythical response I mean to break away from this subjective connotation and to represent it as a holistic response to this depth of reality in experience which is not readily available to conscious scrutiny, yet ever-present and efficacious in experience as it is lived. Faith as mythical response is more elemental than reason, not in the sense merely that it is less critical, less sophisticated; but in the sense that it is more basic in its integration with this depth of reality, more innocently responsive to what is unmanageable and commanding in the exigencies of existence. Reason offers each individual person freedom, independence and an assertiveness expressive of one’s individuated existence. Left to itself it can be divisive and alienating; but when it is responsive and integrative with faith, it can be illuminating. It can be emancipating without dissipating this elemental response to the depth of experiences. Now it is in our handling of this tension between the report of faith and reason that I sense differences among us. The significance of these differences I am not ready at the moment to assess. They may be more or less significant than I assume. But I thought it might be useful to us on this occasion simply to note them. Leaving these comparisons aside for the moment, I should like to have you consider with me more specifically how the theologian may appropriately employ philosophy in pursuing his task. One’s view on this matter may determine other matters bearing upon theological method. As a preliminary observation, I would say that a theologian, in so far as

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he is a disciplined mind, will exemplify a critical handling of his material without necessarily calling attention to, or even being self-conscious about, the specific aspects or bases of his critical procedure. In this respect I would argue for some indifference toward what shapes one’s intellectual bent of mind in theological inquiry at the time one is engaging in it. This is not to say that one will be indifferent to the problem as to what makes for disciplined theological inquiry. I am speaking here solely of the creative or constructive effort in expressing theological judgments or in venturing interpretations. Here all that has previously entered into one’s experience and preparation is suffused into a sharply focused act of attentive inquiry and decision, for better or worse, we are what we are as a holistic being as a result of what we have been becoming. Furthermore during the act of theologizing, one’s disciplined effort in thought in this creative or constructive act cannot readily be reduced to a simple ideology or a particular school of thought. Usually it is a very subtle blend of many disciplining influences, ranging from humanistic studies, including philosophy and literature, to various kinds of sciences. The act of discipline thinking in theology is thus like the artistic effort of a discipline artist: it has been chastened and perfected through technical study, yet in the performance itself technique does not protrude. It subtly, yet faithfully serves the theologian in carrying forward his discipline act of inquiry. On examination, following one’s effort at theologizing, a theologian should be able to be self-conscious to some extent about what has entered into his critical decisions and formulation, and be able to state his basic presuppositions; but he may not be fully aware of all that has given discipline and authority to his mode of speaking. But now we move to a further aspect of the problem; and here I go beyond the kerygmatic theologian to affirm some degree of conscious effort in bringing intelligibility to theological statements. Yet I would want to do so in a way that stops short of translating mythical apprehensions or statements of faith into explicit metaphysical or ontological propositions. What I understand Bultmann to do in part, and what Ogden aspires to do in entirety, i.e., to translate myth into ontological statement “without remainder” strikes me as being an inappropriate use of philosophy in theology. In so far as Professor Loomer and Professor Cobb mean to follow a similar procedure, resetting Christian faith in the categorical scheme of process philosophy, I would want to take issue with them as well. What is permissible, as I see it, over and above the implicit use of process thought integral to one’s disciplined act of theologizing, is to employ selected ways of speaking derived from process thinking, or suggestive notions consonant with a process imagery in so far as they help

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to show how a mythical symbol of apprehension could be made understandable, or acceptable as a meaningful way of speaking to the modern mind. This is to introduce a margin of intelligibility into one’s theological explication without seeming to enclose all meaning attested to in the witness of faith within a philosophical framework. The philosophical vision is thus made to illumine the witness of faith and its theological explication. Neither the witness of faith nor the theological explication is reduced “without remainder” to the philosophical notion itself, or to the philosophical system. To illustrate what I mean, I would say that it is helpful within the process idiom to employ the notion of emergence by way of understanding what it means to have an innovating mystery break forth from a given structure of experience. But I would regard it an act of over-reaching simply to equate “revelation” with “emergence.” In the one instance one is availing himself of a helpful image within an intelligible discourse to grasp at a mystery that evades one’s discourse. In the other instance one would be incorporating the mystery into accepted framework of meaning and thus reducing it to an intelligible notion “with our remainder.” To the question, then, How may one employ a philosophical framework in the theological task? I would argue along this line: A theologian must distinguish between having his own philosophical thinking shaped by a particular philosophical system, and the act of assimilating or accommodating every theological statement or statement of faith to that system. A philosophical system is a rigorous and comprehensive characterization of the whole of reality as the human mind can envision it within the laws of thought formally accepted within this sphere of thinking. Its principles of logic designate the rules of responsible reflection within the human frame of meaning. It is avowedly a look at the world as a disciplined human mind can envision it. Now if the limitations of creatureliness or of the human structure are ignored, one will assume that what the human mind thus envisions can be taken to be reality as it really is. Any misgiving about the disparity between reality and our human vision, however disciplined, will open the way for acknowledging some distance between what the mind envisions and what really is. On this basis, process philosophy, in speaking of its own basic notions as metaphors, has intended to be faithful to this acknowledgment. At the base of its system, therefore, there is the recognition of a distance between imagery and reality. Now it is possible that the process theologian may assume that, because there is this acknowledgment at the base of process metaphysics, he is free to assimilate theological statements and statements of faith, or the ultimate reality to which it point. However, even if this

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practice were legitimate, it is made such a cumbersome procedure that the sensibility of thought necessary to maintain this distance between imagery and reality is dissipated. For in order not to misrepresent the theological explication at the metaphysical level as saying more than one intends to say, the philosophical theologian would have to remind himself and his listeners periodically with the caution, “Understand, I am speaking analogically, not logically in a literal sense.” The fact that this procedure is cumbersome means that the process thinker tends to fall into the habit of assuming that what he expresses at this ontological level is, in fact, not only intelligible but true in a definitive and adequate sense of that term. And because of the seductive nature of this habit of mind, one will soon speak theologically within this framework as if the framework itself were normative of meaning for ultimate reality, itself. This is indicated by the readiness with which the process theologian will repeat the metaphysical dictum, “God is not an exception to the metaphysical principles but their exemplification.” Now I would say that this statement is appropriate as a philosophical statement; for presumably the process philosopher is aware of the fact that he is speaking within a human framework, and means to give only a full report of reality as it looks from within this rigorously define human perspective. To say in this context that God is no exception to the principles, but their exemplification, means that in so far as one attempts to speak of God philosophically within the human framework he must be faithful to the limitations which that framework imposes. To be sure, the philosopher, in falling into the habit of taking his principles as being more than analogical, may himself imply by this assertion that that there is nothing more one may say of God; in which case the human formulation is made normative of the ultimate reality. And this is what I have called over-reaching, whether it occurs within philosophical speech, or within theological speech. However, one who is sensitive to the limits of the human structure, and therefore of the limitations of human reason, will be content to view this work of reason as a vision of the mind which may be tentatively and experimentally employed, say as a model of disclosure or in any case as a defensible way of speaking intelligibly within the limits of this human structure. The degree of congruence between this vision of the mind and reality, the metaphysician will be exhibiting the same degree of reticence and sensibility in the use of his formulations that the relativity physicist displays in his use of mathematical formulae. I have understood Whitehead to have philosophized in this manner. In this context, to say that God is not an exception to the principles, but their exemplification, should be taken to imply, not a definitive and exclusive statement

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concerning the reality to God, but a caution as to the way one is entitled to speak when one presumes to be speaking within this humanly formulated vision of reality. Were it to imply anything more, particularly if it were to mean that God is declared to be nothing more than the principles express Him to be, the language of philosophy would not be analogical, but literal, definitive and thus exclusive of any judgment beyond this rational formulation. Theology can be served helpfully and imaginatively by an appeal to philosophy, then, only if this distinction between ways of speaking is observed. What I am implying, of course, is that when one speaks as a philosopher one is speaking rigorously within the accepted limits of a categorical system. A theologian, by reason of the fact that, admittedly, he undertakes a less manageable task, namely, that of attending to the witness of faith and bringing to it the refinement of critical and disciplined thinking, must assume a more difficult and precarious stance with regard to the disclosure of meaning. When, as theologian, one employs a philosophical notion for tentatively offering some possible meaning to the mystery to which the act of faith bears witness, he is borrowing reflected light from this framework of intelligible discourse. The model so employed reflects meaning from the system only indirectly. It insinuates meaning. It suggests what this reality could mean, not what it does in fact mean. Even after this philosophical notion has been brought into the service of the theological task one continues to look at this depth of meaning as through a glass darkly, yet with a margin of transparency; enough at least to enable one to receive this mystery at a minimum level of intelligibility. And this may be enough to let the mind be efficaciously addressed by, or be related to, this depth of meaning. To be sure there will be more than insinuation of meaning taking place in such an employment of philosophical notions. The philosophers we are will unwittingly say more philosophically through our theological interpretation than we intend to intrude, or than we consciously undertake to say. And this may be good or bad. But this is why one must be wary of every theologian’s speaking and insist upon looking for his veiled presuppositions. But the conscious use of philosophical notions is something else again. Here we need to be aware of the proprieties of theological speech as distinguished from the demands of philosophical reasoning when one is speaking as a philosopher within a philosophical system. Let me say a brief word about theological speech. Theological speech, as well as philosophical speech, is a human form of speaking, and therefore subject to the limitations of the human structure. However the

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object of theological speech differs from that of philosophical speech. The philosopher attends to the world of meaning which can arise within conscious awareness from whatever point he may wish to start; and his speech is pursued within the rules of an accepted logic. The theologian, on the other hand, must attend to the limitations of the human structure. However, the object of theological speech differs from that of philosophical speech. The philosopher attends to the world of meaning which can arise within conscious awareness from whatever point he may wish to start; and his speech is pursued within the rules of an accepted logic. The theologian, on the other hand, must attend to the intimations of an ultimate reality which, presumably, persistently sustains existence, but which intermittently arrests his attention as a work of grace and judgment. The theologian is thus compelled, as it were, to live on the boundary between his clearly formed structure of existence and an unmanageable depth of grace and freedom that opens into a relational ground exceeding his conceptual reach. The language appropriate to this mode of inquiry and speaking is not the language of philosophy or of any discursive discourse. And when the idiom of philosophical speech is drawn upon, as it frequently is in theology, it must be summoned to a precarious role which of necessity strains its conceptual meaning to the utmost, even as it responds to the incursion of innovating depths of meaning in this act of listening to what is other than this human structure. In this sense, to recall an observation mad by Ben Lilves, philosophical terms, when they are employed theologically, of necessity, are transformed in response to the demands that are placed upon them by the object of theological inquiry. This is an unfinished chapter as far as my own thinking is concerned, so I will leave the matter here for the time being. I must add an extensive footnote to this discussion. It is this: I am not altogether clear as yet how pertinent my structures upon process thinking in theology apply to the word of Charles Hartshorne. While his philosophy has been appealed to and specifically employed in theology, it cannot be said that Hartshorne has conceived of himself as a theologian, or that he thought of himself as doing theological work. He regards himself as a metaphysician – one of the best, if not the best now extant, according to his own self-estimate in his recent work, The Logic of Perfection. And I am inclined to agree with this estimate. I would assume that, as a metaphysician, Hartshorne is justified in pursuing the logic of perfection with rigor and precision, seeking to arrive at the most competent and adequate way possible of speaking about ontological questions within his accepted philosophical framework. The pertinent question here is does Hartshorne employ analogical thinking in

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such a way as to close the gap between imagery and reality? I must confess that I have had serious misgivings on this point. His frequent appeal to Leibniz, and his complaint that other ontologists have not read enough of Leibniz, seem to suggest that a large measure of harmony between the human imagery and reality is presupposed, and that therefore logically clear and defensible statements can be assumed to be explicitly true to the reality apprehended. Hartshorne, in other words, appears bent on precision and perfection of conceptional and doctrinal statements in the sense in which “picture-models” provide descriptive clarity. In this respect I find the mark of rationalism more in evidence in Hartshorne’s language than in that of any other process thinker. It is quite clear to me that he is more rationalistic than Wieman, Whitehead, James, or Bergson. In as much as process theologians appear at the moment to be relying more heavily upon Hartshorne’s works than upon any other process thinker, the import of this strong rationalistic bent of mind in him can have serious theological implications. What is serious about it is that a theology based upon his ontology of becoming will presume to have more security and certainty than it is entitled to affirm. And this, in turn, could encourage the theologian to take his theological assertions as well as the philosophical notions underlying them more literally than is discourse can justify. I take it that the aim of demythologizing in terms of the analogical notions drawn from Hartshorne’s philosophy is to attain, not only intelligibility, but the security of a logically defensible ontology, rivaling that of Thomism; in short, a Protestant neo-scholasticism, Hartshorne’s term is “neoclassicism.” It is this expectation that impresses me as being both unlearned and illusory. My own view is that neither the ontological security to which this rationalistic effort aspires, nor the degree of empirical certainty which Professor Wieman has sought to establish through the years, is available to us. Both efforts seem to me to draw upon intellectual assumptions, or upon assumptions concerning the status of our intellectual powers, which our present imagery of thought will not sustain. But my quarrel with these efforts, as they relate to the theological task, goes more deeply that this matter of our present facilities of thought. It touches upon what is basically involved in the concern to bring to modern man, or to restore to him, the religious option which, presumably, for many reasons, has been lost to modern life. To put it bluntly, it is not simply a matter of putting into the hands of modern men a theological or ontological formula that will speak to their sophisticated minds, and thus enable them to participate, at least at an intellectual level, in the demands of the religious Christian story. Rather, it is to some extent a matter also of

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challenging this sophistication of modernity, of breaking through this pose of human self-sufficiency and its façade of intellectualism or asestheticism or scientism which has enabled modern man for more than three hundred years to stand off from, or to appear superior to the elemental stance of man as creature. Cultural anthropology and the history of religions has led me to have profound respect for this response of elemental man. All of the contemporary disciples to some extent, for that matter, seem to be striking at the root of this modern pose, and to be recalling us to look at every man more elementally, and, in Schleiermacher’s terms, as being ultimately dependent, a condition that allies man with creatures of God. This is to call us back to what, in the nature of things, in the nature of ourselves and our human history, can evoke this deeper, more elemental response in us. The procedure to be encouraged, in other words, is not to intensify reliance upon the intellectual formulation of meanings as such, as if these were the modern man’s alternative to encountering the realities of faith; but, rather, to take seriously this fresh awareness of the depth and complexity of the sheer act of living and dying, the tragedy, pathos, and hope of existence mere, and thus to seize upon the degree of elementalism that is offered us out of the historical situation that is upon us. It will then devolve upon us, both to bring our disciplined speech and mode of thought to terms with this fresh awareness of realities, and to bring our disciplined thought to bear upon them, in the hope of wrestling from this awareness, a measure of intelligibility. This is the reverse of demythologizing. It is recovering what the liberal era lost or forfeited, namely, a vivid sense of this shaping and redemptive force to which the life of faith bears witness. This is not a matter of going back of liberalism, but through it and beyond it, the witness of faith expressive of the mythos that still informs and motivates our structure of experience. IV. What this analysis comes to in the form of directives for theological method can be summarized: 1. The relation between reality and human reason is simultaneously that of continuity and discontinuity. The extent to which continuity or discontinuity is stressed will determine the degree to which rationality is made relevant in pursuing ultimate questions. On the basis of my own understanding of the development of natural structures and the experimental evidence of modern physics in the use of its reconstructed models, I am led to assert as an ontological judgment that our human structure both participates in, and to a decisive degree is discontinuous with, the ultimate structure of reality. This simply a way of acknowledging the creatural

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limits of the human structure of consciousness without disavowing altogether its rational participation in that ultimate structure. Human reason is not directly, nor wholly consonant with the ultimate structure of order; yet it bears witness to it, and in marginal ways is expressive of it. 2. Because intelligence is marginal and ambiguous in relation to the ultimate structure of reality, intelligibility can be only marginal. Any effort to make it more than that, or to extend it to proportions of all-inclusive rationality must be regarded as an over reaching of the human structure, and a willfull retreat to an ideational illusion. The reality in our situation thus present us as moving ambiguously and in tension at a boundary between our human structure and the infinite structure of the creative passage. 3. Now to speak more explicitly of the theological task as I envision it, and of the procedure by which this task is pursued. One who takes the cultural history of The West seriously as being integral to Christian history will be encouraged to see theological method as a comprehensive dialectic between its primal source of ultimate valuation in the Bible and the contemporary forms of witness to this depth. This may prove to be more complex than the dialectic between kerygma and proclamation, but the pattern and movement are comparable. The latter is a church dogmatics and presupposes a single strand of witness issuing from the preaching of the Word in the churches. The former presents a theological texture with diversified, yet interwoven strands of the vertebrate. Historically, one would see the structure of Christian faith forming out of the movement from the primal myth structure of Scripture through the Christ-event, which then issues in the notion of the living Christ. When one traces this movement symbolically it takes the form of a supervening work of judgment and grace which is intermittently known and experienced sacramentally or ceremonially through the forms of the church. A method of empirical realism would see this sacramental expression as one strand of the Christian witness, bodying forth the living Christ. And beyond this sacramental and ceremonial witness it sees other vortices, or centers of witness: 1) The culture, both in so far as it retains formative influences within its orbit of meaning expressive of the mythos, and in the sense that it exmplifies the fate and folly, along with the glory and creativity, of the human structure in its participation in the infinite structure of the creative passage. 2) The individual experiences of men and women in so far as they bear a distinctive witness of response and decision. 4. These diversified, yet interwoven strands of witness within the culture constitute the articulate aspect of the Judaic-Christian mythos. What persists as a shaping force at the level of sensibilities and

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perceptions conveys the mythos as unconscious motivation. But the living Christ is encountered more concretely as energies of grace and judgment in the exigencies of living, which may or may not be known for what they are by all who experience them throughout the culture. In this sense men and women participate in the stream of experience more deeply then they know. To the extent that we are made aware theologically of what this concrete encounter implies, we will be led to respond to them consciously as one participating in the Judaic-Christian mythos. Thus it will be seen that there is a conceptual or symbolic level of witness of the living Christ as well as a concrete level of participation in the energies of grace and judgment. In some instances the latter is vividly known as concrete experience with little or no knowledge of their symbolic reference. In other instances the symbolic level of meaning may be readily acknowledged and verbalized without a vivid sense of the empirical realities of Spirit as these are concretely encountered. The method of empirical realism means to be attentive to both to levels of witness in its dialectic. Thus we are concerned to say that each of these vortices or dynamic centers of witness points beyond itself to the living Christ, or to the continuing work of New Creation, revealing the Infinite Structure in each generation of history. Together they point back to the primal witness in Scripture which, for reasons of symbolic force and historical primacy, have been acknowledged to be the theological norm of Christian faith. But one can make an even stronger case for this biblical norm; for not only are all the root metaphors of the Judaic-Christian mythos to be found in Scripture, but the structure of the Christ-even is vividly set forth in that portion of the new Testament called the kerygma. However one views this luminous center (the Christ-event), one cannot ignore its controlling force in theological construction. It is the fulcrum which gives leverage to every other doctrine. Hence, in the last analysis, one can say that a Christian theology stands or falls on the strength and character of its Christology. A firm Christology will give focus and clarity to the Christian themes. An indecisive one will leave a theology without clear directives. Or again, an inclusive Christology that draws all men and things into its luminous center will disclose this revelation in Christ as a unifying and transforming event, literally a New Creation. An exclusive Christology, on the other hand, that dissociates the Christian witness from everything other than itself will disclose this revelation as a restrictive and judgmental word to man and culture, thus turning the redemptive life that is thereby revealed into a radical disavowal of what was given in Creation. Lacking a Christology, one will be disposed to turn to a theory of value, to an empirical criterion of God’s working in history, or to some other

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normative measure by which a selective view of good and evil, grace and judgment in existence can be established. Conceivably, too, one may seek to establish a selective form of theism or ontological grounds, God qualified by his goodness (Whitehead, Hartshorne). Incidentally, I have always considered Wieman’s concern with an empirical criterion of God’s working to be his alternative to Christology. In his later works he finally came around to associating the Creative Event. Together they point back to the primal witness in Scripture which, for reasons of symbolic force and historical primacy, have been acknowledged to be the theological norm of Christian faith. But one can make an even stronger case for this biblical norm; for not only are all the root metaphors of the Judaic-Christian mythos to be found in Scripture, but the structure of the Christ-event is vividly set forth in that portion of the New Testament called the kerygma. However one views this luminous center (the Christ-event), one cannot ignore its controlling force in theological construction. It is the fulcrum which gives leverage to every other doctrine. Hence, in the last analysis, one can say that a Christian theology stands or falls on the strength and character of its Christology. A firm Christology will give focus and clarity to the Christian themes. An indecisive one will leave a theology without clear directives. Or again, an inclusive Christology that draws all men and things into its luminous center will disclose this revelation in Christ as a unifying and transforming event, literally a New Creation. An exclusive Christology, on the other hand, that dissociates the Christian witness from everything other than itself will disclose this revelation as a restrictive and judgmental word to man and culture, thus turning the redemptive life that is thereby revealed into a radical disavowal of what was given in Creation. Lacking a Christology, one will be disposed to turn to a theory of value, to an empirical criterion of God’s working in history, or to some other normative measure by which a selective view of good and evil, grace and judgment in existence can be established. Conceivably, too, one may seek to establish a selective form of theism on ontological grounds, God qualified by his goodness (Whitehead, Hartshorne). Incidentally, I have always considered Wieman’s concern with an empirical criterion of God’s working to be his alternative to Christology. In his later works he finally came around to associating the Creative Event. But more of this in a moment. One will see, then, that speaking of my method simply as an analysis of culture does not express it adequately, or even focally; unless one means to begin with the mythical response in its primal context. Since I use this term “mythical response” interchangeably with the witness of faith, as the elemental response to what is ever-present as an ultimate

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demand and resource in the immediacies of existence, focusing upon the mythical response leads us to the Bible as the primal document of Christian faith, everything relevant to theological inquiry, formally speaking, fans out from that focal document, and becomes an historical and empirical commentary upon it. But I am concerned to point out that materially, the Bible may not be the starting point for every Christian, or for that matter, for every theologian. In our contemporary experiences it takes a bit of doing to get back to the Bible methodologically with integrity of meaning and purpose. Thus it may be that one will start where the problems are thickest and more acute—i.e., with a specific area of individual experience where faith and belief are in crisis; with poignant reports of the human story in modern literature and the arts; with the tragic cleavage between human groups within society; with the struggle for unity and identity within the contemporary Christian church; with human anxiety as such as it tears men and women apart in their loneliness and growing sense of life’s meaninglessness. All of these represent vortices of human experience where the realities of existence come vividly and critically into play—where, in a word, ultimacy and immediacies traffic together. Here, in the exigencies of critical situations that are thrust upon us, what was revealed as a New Creation in Christ, and which has been preserved in symbol and ceremony, can be opened up to us to be a resource of grace and judgment, offering us real energy of the Spirit. These vortices of witness will not be made the source of theological method; but they may be the beginning of what prompts one to turn, or to return, to Christian faith in its more structured form, to the story of our lives as it has been written into events and decisions previously recorded. What theology seeks to do then is to attune our listening to the realities of faith beyond, yet intimately involving our structured existence. And its task is simultaneously that of conveying this witness through, yet differentiating it from the limited and ambiguous cultural forms, which are the only forms we have through which to become self-conscious and articulate. The tension is always between form and realities. My preoccupation with myth, and the concern to understand the role of myth in culture and in current history, is directed toward solving the methodological problem concerning the appeal to Scripture. It is my own judgment, if I might indulge in a bit of self-appraisal, that in this aspect of my method I have done what other contemporary theologians have neglected to do: namely, justified the contemporary relevance of the appeal to the Bible. To state the method of empirical realism succinctly, then, one may say, 1) that theology begins as a critical response to what is conveyed through

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the three vortices of the Christian witness within the contemporary period. This critical response consists in attending to that witness in the light of the disciplines available for studying the phenomena of man’s elemental response to what is ultimate in existence. 2) On the basis of this critical appraisal, the theologian must determine whether what is given in the witness of faith is available only to one who stands within the community of faith, i.e., whether it is clearly a cultic statement of faith made on the basis of a volitional act of acceptance, irrespective of the mind’s resistance or despair; or available to everyone within the cultural orbit of meaning who is open to receiving this witness as pointing to a depth of grace and judgment in every man’s existence. It will be clear that I have moved in the latter direction. 3) Although the tendency of the impatient modern mind will be to try to find a swift and convenient way of taking hold of this insight into the depth of our existence through recourse to psychology, philosophy of religion, or some similar medium, the theologian will insist upon understanding this insight in the context of the nurturing matrix which has kept this witness of faith alive and efficacious through many centuries of our cultural history. 4) The nurturing matrix is the Judaic-Christian mythos and cultural forms that have bodied it forth. Whether or not even the notion of such a matrix is available to the modern mind turns upon the question as to whether one who is responsive to the imagery of thought that is formative within the disciplined thinking of our time finds it possible to embrace this dimension of man’s elemental response to ultimacy. I have argued that this possibility is available to the modern mind. And it is possible a) because a relational mode of thinking, along with the imagery of depth in experience, make such notions as “revelation,” “grace” and “judgment,” as well as their relation to man’s freedom conceivable and employable on the basis of analogical thinking; and b) because the mythical response as a holistic phenomenon can be given credence within the contemporary idiom. 5) It is on the basis of this contemporary repossession of the notion of myth as a legitimate and persistent human response to ultimacy in existence that the modern mind finds his way back to its primal beginnings, and in this return, recovers the authority of the Bible as a primal document. 6) At this point one is made ready to attend to the witness of faith in its primal historic form, the Word of Scripture, which comes to a sharpened focus in the kerygma and its witness to the Christ-event as new creation. 7) There then follows the crucial matter of receiving this witness of faith, of being addressed by that to which it points concerning the Infinite

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Structure of God. It is here that one confronts the options whether a) to demythologize the witness of faith “without remainder;” or b) to retain the mythos as being itself the elemental response to ultimacy appropriate to every man who is sensitive to the limits and depths of his existence; yet concerned to attain what margin of intelligibility is possible under the circumstances of our limitations. The movement of the method thus completes the circle in that it begins with the empirical witness in the present, moves to the primal source and norm of the mythos, and returns to the present demand for intelligibility in Christian faith.

Our Common Faith That God as revealed through Jesus Christ, lives and works among us. That man and society are dependent upon God for their fulfillment. That men and women of our generation in great numbers are unmindful of this imperative relationship or indifferent to its demands. That this blindness and indifference are at the root of our individual and social frustration. That the hope of personal and social salvation lies in men’s return to God as the center of life and in their readiness to yield to Him in humility in order to be cleansed of the arrogant self-sufficient attitude that shuts them out from His divine working. That the way to return to God is to commit ourselves to Christ who is the revelation of God in human history and the one who did yield utterly to the will of God. In him therefore we envisage God and the way that brings life and we receive the power to give ourselves to God. That the men and women who have thus turned to God through Christ, in spite of their differences in thought and expression, constitute a worldwide community through which flows a unifying life, strengthening the several members in their common loyalty and enspiriting them for Christian living. These truths have certain direct implications for human living and social organization and therefore lay upon us certain demands in the form of Christian ethics, the exact character of which are to be determined through faithful effort to find God at the centre of every situation as it arises. As an aid to Christian living, then, an ardent study of the Bible is imperative, for there we are confronted with a clear portrayal of life lived in relation to God. However differently we word our creed or define our terms, we come back to this basic affirmation. That God is in our midst, the source of our life, and the Creative Order that sustains and fulfills our life. We may vary in the course we pursue to discover more fully what God is like, and how he works among us. Some may define the course very rigorously, as do the Barthians— Others of us may hold that we do know far more about the work of God than our European friends recognize, that God is made known to us through the life we see in Christ, yes—but that our envisagement of

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God is not exhausted in that high vision— We are not driven by authority to look in one direction—to a revelation in the past, but with our own sensitivity and the assurance that God is among us, shaping us in ways which we do not understand and of which we are hardly aware, we may, with the perspective that Christ has given us, see his mighty gentleness clearly at work among us. We may even define our search more accurately by developing a theory of value which will give us the philosophical formulation of the gospel of love. That reality is supremely worthful and worthy of our devotion which makes for mutual support, mutual value, and mutual meaning. That which tears and mars and destroys the organic unity of life is evil. That which mends, enhances, and fulfills that organic growth of fellowship is good. God, then, is what Jesus said He was: The Good. Not a static good, but the growing Good. The silent working reality in our midst that weaves the web of human and divine solidarity. The Power that makes us one. We cannot grasp this reality in all its manifold ways. But we can envisage its operations. This, then, is the core of our common faith— That God, the eternal spirit of the ages, is working among us as a mighty movement toward the realization of an organic fellowship of the good. He is manifest on every hand—in every activity about us that works toward the growth of organic unity. If men could but see in this mighty wave that is moving silently among us toward the triumph of the good, the very God of all the ages, and would give themselves in full devotion, would yield to the sway of his mighty tide—the Great Society for which all the saints and prophets have hoped and pondered would be within our power to realize. Here then is the second basic truth of our common faith— Men of this generation, as was true of other generations before them, are shut out from that high destiny by the very nature of their self-centered living. Individualism vs. sense of community They must thrust themselves from their tiny thrones and become subjects of a greater kingdom. And here is the third basic truth of our common faith—

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We have a Christian heritage that points us to one who did yield utterly to that divine life. Men and women of Claremont— In this day when civilization is in crisis, When men and women the world over are sick and distracted because they have lost track of the centers, In this day when opportunity hovers over us as a springtime of history, when the world could rise to yet unexplored heights of achievement and mutual living, Is it not imperative that we recover this vision of the reality that shapes our destiny and come to terms with its demands? To be aware of this reality, and to turn with humility and devotion to his sustaining ways, is to affirm creatively common faith.

Prayer O God, in the quiet of this morning hour, We pause to acknowledge thy mighty gentleness in our midst. We are aware of our own unworthiness; Yet the vision of what we might become, Were we to bring our lives into adjustment With thy sustaining ways Heartens us with new hope. Make us more worthy, more humble in spirit; More athirst for the good, More sensitive to that which tears and destroy as the good in the common life. These are hard days, O God, thou knowest. Give us insight to penetrate the problems that confront us. Save us from the blindness that Leaves men unaware of their impending peril; Save us from the stubbornness of mind and heart that resists vision; Save us, too, from that prophetic morbidness that makes peril more real than opportunity; Lift us from our lethargy and impel us with creative zeal for the tasks of our generation. We are only too mindful of the sobering trials and disillusionment that have broken many good people. We pray their recovery. Help them to find the healing hope of thy organic growth That the web of relations that once gave meaning and purpose to their lives may again take form on the loom. Save us from cynicism and despair. May the cavalcade of the years not leave us plaintive and marred. Give us deep roots that will enable us to stand patiently and expectantly through the days and the years. Help us in all things—in our common life, in the troublesome affairs of state, in the confused and chaotic turmoil of this torn and dazed world, to see thy silent working in our midst. Call us back to the center and source of our life and being, And give us perspective and vision to live eagerly, and adequately, and worthily. Our prayer is in the name of him who saw thee so well. Amen.

Reality Over Reason Some Results of Our Inquiry B. E. Meland Has this analysis of philosophic contexts disclosed anything of significance illumining the contemporary theological discussion concerning liberalism, neo-orthodoxy, and neo-naturalism? I. 1. A first point to note is that theological liberalism and neo-orthodoxy have philosophical affinities in a common dependence upon the Kantian heritage. Liberalism was somewhat amorphous philosophically in that it represented a variety of philosophic emphases, ranging from a reluctant identity with the Kantian practical reason to an avowed and thoroughly articulated exemplification of modern Idealism, either in its Absolute or Personalist form. In a previous paper on Kantianism in Christian Thought, we tried to show that in every instance, the philosophical ground of liberalism was traceable in some respect to a Kantian source. This was true even of the early attempts to come to terms with pragmatism. The form of pragmatism that loomed as a possible carrier of Christian insight to the theological liberal was that form of will-to-believe which had received some of the impetus from an adaptation of the Kantian practical reason. We may have overdone our insistence upon this Kantian vein in the various philosophies; but I think we cannot forego the conclusion that theological liberalism, in so far as it acknowledged any kind of philosophical orientation, exemplified that kind of philosophical basis that was given credence by the critical philosophy of Kant or by some derivative from the Critiques. 2. We are justified further, I think, in holding to the observation of last quarter, that the nee-orthodox theologies commonly associated with the writings of Barth, Brunner, and Niebuhr reflect (a) a radical, explicit rejection of idealistic premises; (b) an implicit acceptance of the Kantian critical philosophy in so far as it provides a basis for transcendental faith. Neo-orthodox thought presumes to press back of the Kantian position to recover Reformation premises which offer more avowedly Christian affirmations. In doing so, however, it is mindful of remaining within a recognizable and, in fact, acknowledged, historical lineage, connecting, for example, Luther and Kant.

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The departure from Kant, in preference for Reformation premises, is dictated by a conviction that theology must dissociate itself methodologically from philosophy, on the ground that faith, not reason, is its informing technical tool. Interestingly enough, faith as it is used in Brunner, especially, appears to imply a theological adaptation of Kant’s practical reason, though the procedure is veiled. And one would have to feel his way into Brunner’s orientation to get the force of this adaptation. Faith is found to be a tool of intelligibility, a regulative Principle, enabling one, in whom the frailties were, that separates the finite mind from what, under ordinary circumstances, is beyond comprehension. Faith, in other words, is a shift in orientation, setting the mind in a receptive mood for what is given in revelation, that oblique impartation of truth, objectively given within a perspective that is beyond the historical realm of beginnings, having its reference in the creative will of God which is antecedent to all beginnings. 3. Again, neo-orthodoxy depends upon stimulus provided by certain forms of existentialism that stem from Kierkegaard. Existentialism, whether taken in its earlier Kierkegaardian form, or in the form of Heidegger, Scheler and Huber, accentuates the rejection of Hegelian idealism and establishes a subject-object relation that derives eventually from the Kantian analysis. One may not blur the distinction here. Existentialism parts company with the Kantian postulates in so far as they mean to point to a constructive metaphysical route; but it retains the essential critical analysis of the situation in which the human ego pursues meaning. On all sides, this philosophical orientation contends, the human ego stands separated from objective reality by an unbridgeable abyss. No direct path of human reason is available to man by which to reach the wholly other. The wholly other may be said to be a theological variation of the thing-in-itself—though obviously it carries certain special connotations. It is interesting, however, that Rudolf Otto used this term before earth and Brunner appropriated it. Within their common Kantian philosophical imagery it carries recognizable meaning. This imagery of the abyss is but a graphic way of envisaging the stark isolation of finite man in confronting the ultimate concerns which Kantianism underlined. In short, the imagery of the abyss is the Kantian philosophy minus the postulates—minus the regulative ideas. Faith, in the Reformation meaning, is the only alternative. Faith then becomes regulative in a way that the postulates served to transcend the abyss.

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II. Certain theological observations follow from this philosophical imagery: 1. Within this framework, reason in the logical or scientific sense is of no avail in the pursuit of God’s meaning, or in the pursuit of understanding man’s ultimate destiny—To try to use reason to substantiate faith or to go beyond faith, is futile. Reason applies only to the empirical realm of science and logic. It is very important in this sphere. Beyond this sphere, however, it can only be regarded as a frail instrument, a broken reed. 2. Revelation is indispensable—the sole source of knowledge concerning God and man’s salvation. For the Barthian, revelation can only mean disclosure in the moment of crisis wherein the divine-human encounter is enacted—a seeing, as it were, made possible by an orientation which faith in Christ provides. This is not a position permanently achieved, but an orientation recaptured again and again in moments of decision, a critical vantage point of faith, won over despair—and through despair. 3. Negatively speaking, then, knowledge of God or crucial knowledge of man’s salvation through observation or reason is simply unthinkable. New concessions can be noted here. Correlations between the crucial encounter and the casual events of common experience can be made. But ultimately Barth is correct in insisting that within this perspective all concessions are corrupting. It is as if one were to say that possibly some concession can be made to the claim that science can penetrate the thing-in-itself. Open that door, and absolute idealism, or some form of an immanental philosophy, will spring forth. 4. The hiddenness of God in the dialectical form in which dialectical theology stresses it is simply the converse of the isolated ego. Han is without intelligible approaches to God. God’s ways are wholly other than man’s ways. There is no way from man to God. Even the bridge of the postulates is down. God, then, is hidden. One could say, this is not a premise—it is a conclusion. It follows directly from the existential predicament of the human ego. One would have to say more about this doctrine, to be sure, were one to interpret the otherness of God’s nature as a Christian affirmation. The comments here have relevance only to the peculiar emphasis given to this aspect in dialectical theology by reason of its philosophical context. III. Now what are we to say of the neo-naturalist position in view of its philosophical orientation as over against that of neo-orthodoxy just described.

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1. It is initially grounded in a social conception of reality that denies the predicament of the isolated ego. Oh, there are problems of the individual consciousness—but the concept of relations being made an empirical datum sets man in a context of external and internal relations. Communication through cognitive symbols is accompanied by the pervading depths of feeling associating knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance. Where the isolated ego falls out, the whole sequence of theological problems based upon this notion in which relations are formal, transcendent concepts, and upon the subject-object antithesis is brought under review. The question then intrudes itself, in what sense do these theological problems likewise fall out? Or to what degree do they require reformulation? The neo-naturalist, eager to come to terms with neo-orthodox discussions, may undertake to translate these problems into discussable issues. Unless he distinguishes carefully between what is a persistent feature of Christian criticism in these issues, and what is imposed by the presuppositions that speak out of a particular metaphysics, the attempt to come to terms with the problems will appear futile and the outcome confusing. For example, the question: “Does reason or experience provide a path to the religious knowledge of God?” may not be fruitfully explored by empiricist in, relation to dialectical theology until the specific philosophical ground of each position has been isolated and examined. The neoorthodox rejection of reason or experience as paths to knowledge of God, like the existentialist doctrine of despair, rests back upon a metaphysical view of man as an isolated ego which is found in Kant and which takes its rise in Descartes, following the breakdown of the medieval formulation of the metaphysics of substance. The Reformers’ rejection of the institutional supports of grace and redemption placed them in a theological position comparable to the philosophical position which was later assumed by Descartes. Thus the problem of the subject-object relationship is accentuated in a way that defies solution, except by formal efforts at transcendence, as in the Reformation doctrine of faith, or in the Kantian formulation of regulative ideas. Every assertion of this ego-centric predicament must result either in a philosophy of despair, a philosophy of humanism, or a theology of faith that negates the relevance of reason in religion. Absolute Idealism represented an effort within the liberal world view to rid philosophy and theology of the metaphysical and religious problems created by this isolation of the ego by showing how the finite ego deepened into the stream of the Infinite Consciousness.

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The critique of Hegelianism by Existentialism takes the form of puncturing the bubble of ego-inflation, showing that no matter how far one elaborates the meaning of the human consciousness, it remains subjectively enclosed within its own human bounds. In short, it returns it to a neo-Kantianism. The critique of Hegelianism by dialectical theology appropriates this existentialist stand, but goes further in insisting that the Absolute to which the Hegelian points as God is not God at all, but man’s rational ego magnified. God is wholly other; thus, the subject-object antithesis is restored. The radical empiricist questions with a wholly different metaphysical orientation, for he stands in opposition both to Kantian and Hegelian premises. He accepts neither the notion of the isolated ego, nor the Hegelian Super-ego subsuming the human ego. The net result of his metaphysics is a social conception of reality in which the individual consciousness is distinguished, without being isolated from the communal stream of consciousness; and related, without being absorbed into the total community of conscious experience. Now, neo-naturalism, operating within a world view of radical empiricism, achieves an independent judgment of the use of reason in theology, coming to conclusions that are both similar and dissimilar from those of neo-orthodoxy. 1. It rejects the rationalistic method of Idealism on the grounds of a radical empiricism. This rejection implies two strictures upon rationalism: (a) upon its formalism, insisting that its conceptual constructions bear no direct relation to actual existence; (b) upon its uncriticized view of reason as a logical tool, insisting that conscious experience taken in its empirical context, stands related to sensory drives and complexities of the physical life which seriously question the validity of rational exercise apart from empirical tests. To this general empirical criticism of rationalism may be added the caution of emergent thinking which asserts that all of man’s thought and experience operates within a creatural level that defines the peculiarly human structure of consciousness. A limitation comparable to the theological notion of finitude results from this analysis, insisting upon a tentative character in human reason as well as, in human experience. Here appreciative awareness becomes relevant to religious inquiry for extending its range and reliability in a sense not unlike the Reformation concept of faith. In both instances, man in his limitations is made receptive to what is objectively beyond his direct rational or sensory grasp. Neo-naturalism, thus, comes to a judicious skepticism of rational

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inquiry on grounds wholly different from those of neo-orthodoxy; though it cannot be said that the skepticism is as deep nor as final as in the latter. When to the philosophical stricture is added the theological analysis of rational inquiry within a neo-naturalist perspective, the skepticism is deepened by reason of Christian insights that become freshly illumined within this perspective. Theology brings to bear upon rational inquiry the witness of the Christian faith regarding the evil in human nature resulting from man’s sin. The nature of this stricture does not differ in kind from that which neo-orthodoxy affirms; for the impairment of human reason that is cited derives from the Christian myth in both cases; but the context in which this impairment is interpreted varies according to the metaphysical framework in each instance. In neo-orthodoxy, the meaning of sin is illumined by such notions as the Kantian concept of radical evil, the Kierkegaardian concept of dread, and the modern existential analysis of anxiety and freedom, reinforced, as in Niebuhr’s theology, by insights from depth psychology bearing upon pride and sexuality. All of these insights are related by the neo-orthodox theologian to the transcendental ego in its encounter with the will of God. Here the context is clearly Kantian, or in some sense derived from Kantian transcendentalism either through earlier forms of neo-Kantianism, or through modern existentialism which rests back upon a neo-Kantian imagery The neo-naturalist analysis of sin may also draw upon sources common to neo-orthodoxy; but the context in which these insights give illumination to the Christian criticism will be some version of radical empiricism, in which the social character of existence replaces the imagery of the transcendental age. Here sin becomes associated with the problem of the individual in community, or with the tension involved in the juxtaposition of subjective experience and the wider pattern of mutual relations. In both instances, sin is seen to be an assertive force of the autonomous ego, involving the rational consciousness in pretensions, deceptions, and decisions that pervert the personality structure, thus impairing both its integrity and its vision. The outcome of the analysis in both instances is a distrust of the unredeemed rational ego and a consequent insistence upon Christian humility and penitence as a prerequisite to religious understanding. 2. Again we see the necessity of being philosophically oriented in viewing the divergent and convergent aspects of neo-orthodoxy and neonaturalism in their respective handling of the concept of revelation. The neo-orthodox formulation of the doctrine of revelation, rather than being translated simply into super-naturalistic terms, should be understood (a) as

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a necessity of the Kantian framework minus the postulates that insulated the inquiring mind from God the wholly other, save as God initiates communication with man; and (b) as a corrective of immanentism wherein the latter overlooks the otherness of God and the creatural limitations of man, both of Which are persistent features of the Christian criticism. Revelation in the radical empiricist context is to be understood best, not in the imagery of the divine breaking through (which is the transcendental imagery), but in that of “creative emergence,” wherein conditions are provided for the disclosure of God’s grace or judgment upon human events. The question may arise: Does revelation have any real meaning in the perspective of radical empiricism? If the answer must be in the negative, then the further question is pressed upon us, Does radical empiricism then probe the depths of existence to which the Christian faith is addressed? For revelation implies that to some extent, God is hidden; that man’s powers, of themselves, are helpless to discover, or seek out, in self-conscious ways, the mystery of this dimension of God’s work in nature. Thus the Christian faith, apart from its intelligible enterprise as a directive of living, serves to keep men and women alerted to that horizon of God’s working which is more than we can think. Revelation in this sense is seen to mean, not only unique disclosure as a past event, but the impending possibility of God’s disclosure in history as an event of grace or judgment. Revelation thus implies that God’s ways are not our ways; and that the unexpected can happen in the form of a beneficence beyond what we are able to ask or think; or in the form of our undoing beyond what we had anticipated within our meager measure of value and goodness. It relates to the fullness of emerging meaning which is continually beyond our grasp, and which will always exceed envisagement in the moment of happening because, in our limited capacity as creatures; we cannot enter into the total happening of events, or discern the full reach of their implications. Revelation implies that God speaks to his creatures out of the fullness of his participation and creative working through the visitations of grace and judgment. Revelation is always a summit vision that breaks upon us, or upon a people or a generation, with the force of stark reality, putting to rout our vain hopes and expectations, correcting the subjective measure of our ways, compelling us to see with a sharper seeing than our normal preoccupations permit, that a process worketh in our midst, creating our good, and pyramiding the consequences of our evil. Revelation occurs in the arresting moment of judgment and in the

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periodic ascent to the mount of transfiguration. Revelation, then, in the context of radical empiricism, is a constant reminder of the more in existence—the more of possible good, and the more of possible tragedy, because, despite all our efforts at precision and completeness in thought and planning, “we see through a glass darkly” by virtue of the creatural limitations that define our level of emergence. I would call attention here to the way in which the imagery of theology in the radical empirical context exemplifies the dynamic, forward-moving motif of this philosophy. To a certain extent, the dialectical theology is dynamic in the sense of the encounter being the moment of crisis and decision. This derives from its affinities with existential thinking. The dynamic character of theological thinking upon revelation in the context of radical empiricism is more than existential (though something of this feeling is appropriated, too); rather, it is of a piece with the metaphysics of creative process. It is related to Bergson’s notion of taking time seriously, and to the notion of emergence, wherein that which was heretofore not yet given—for which the necessary structure had not yet formed—stands forth in unique and novel presentation. Now revelation is not to be equated simply with the advance into novel concretions, but with the further disclosure of God’s working which such creative happenings make possible. Revelation is the vision of God’s character attendant upon creativity, wherein the ideal possibilities on becoming actual; release into the world fuller amplification of God’s hidden nature as an empirical datum. At this point there is a convergence of thinking upon the meaning of revelation in neo-naturalist and neo-orthodox views. The tendency in neoorthodox thought is to heighten the personal imagery and to say that we do not know anything about God as a result of such and encounter; only we know God—we know him in the sense that we now trust him. The anxiety that widened the abyss, leaving us desolate in our despair, is now routed, displacing despair with faith. In the thinking of the radical empiricist, this analogy from knowledge of as against knowledge about is likewise employed. James implied it in his distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description; Bergson’s chief concern in his Introduction to Metaphysics is to depict that way of seeing into the meaning of existence which yields disclosure as contrasted with accumulative knowledge through analysis. The neo-naturalist may hesitate to follow either James or Bergson the full way lest he become involved in their specific forms of mysticism; but he cannot profitably sidle away from the revelatory qualities of insight or discernment to which each was pointing. Such discernment is distinct from

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knowledge distilled from awareness. It bespeaks a more passive mood of understanding. It has to do, not so much with the findings of the inquiring mind, as with understanding that is given, as if the initiative were with a concrete fullness together with possible meaning, compelling the awakened mind to receive its witness. Something like the Ritschlian value judgment is doubtless implied here—the notion that affirmation and assent are elicited with a clear sense of discernment without recourse to the analytical method. Since both the Ritschlian and the Barthian positions rest back upon Kantianism, they would deny any relation between such revelatory insight and analytical knowledge. In both instances, it is the witness of faith, superseding knowledge. The neo-naturalist is in a position, metaphysically, to make more of this relationship; but when he does, he is in danger of trivializing the vision of revelation. Though he will affirm that “God is more than we can think,” he is reluctant to entertain insight concerning God which comes with the swiftness of seeing and that overflows the categories of thought. Yet it is possible to contain such revelatory insight within the empirical context if one will recall Whitehead’s caution that the body carries sensibilities to which the mind is often slow to rise. Our perceptive powers may exceed our reflective powers. This is certainly true of simple, unreflective people. It may be truer of the intellectually disciplined person than he himself is aware. Even he takes in the qualitative meaning of a person in a few swift glances without benefit of analysis. In situations of greater moment, such receptivity is more urgent and more compelling. The question remains whether these moments of revelation suggest a more radical intrusion upon the personality structure than such sensitivity beyond intellectual analysis implies. Does God overwhelm man in the encounter? Does the human creature, in the event of radical innovation, rise to a new stature of mind and sensory awareness? These questions are difficult to answer. The normal conclusion would be that where such emergence of understanding takes place, it follows upon an almost imperceptible tendency toward understanding—the revelation is a moment of awareness forced upon one by a convergence of circumstances that compels one to rise to his full height of insight. To the degree that one holds to this explanation, he keeps analytical reason and disclosure in a workable relationship. And the tendency will be to minimize the disclosure and to accentuate the progression of sensitive awareness which provides a track to which analytical reason can attend. My inclination is to accept this explanation as the saner course; but I am disturbed by the possibilities of a more radical, objective event being

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involved here. To the degree that empiricism can reach in this direction, it gets beyond the liberal’s orientation. The appeal to religious experience gives way to the objective fact of God. Neo-naturalism then converges toward the neo-orthodox doctrine of revelation, however differently it elaborates its explanation. The way in which emergent philosophies deal with this point is to insist that while conditions may be provided for the event of emergence, the relation between these conditions and the novel event is by no means a one-to-one relation. This gives a basis for saying that a nisus toward deity, an operation of God’s grace over and above the work of men, intrudes as a creative factor to wrest from our feeble offering the more that is possible but not in our power to give. 3. There is a subtle issue here that divides this emergent philosophy from all forms of humanism and from philosophies of rationalism. The latter take the human species as a clue to the final meaning of nature. In rationalism, the human mind is taken to be the index to the ultimate substance in some sense; or an increment of divinity that provides a knowable pattern for the whole of meaning. In religious humanism, “man is the planet come to consciousness,” and as such represents the summit of the natural order. Human existence thus becomes an organizing center for the whole of nature. Meaning and value are taken to imply human meaning and human value. There is no intelligible reference beyond this acknowledged regulative good. It becomes evident that in these forms of philosophy, revelation in the sense of the more of meaning, beyond the level of man or reason, is an unintelligible concept. Emergent philosophies, on the other hand, take a modest view of human emergence. Where is, to be sure, recognition of the unique status of man as a peculiar structure of consciousness, having a degree of freedom from the closed world of mechanism which no other creature can emulate. Man is clearly a spiritual being in the sense that no other creature is so defined. But the total sequence of emergence lays tentativeness upon every emergent structure. There is nothing final or finished about any structure per se. And there is nothing necessarily ultimate about any one structure. Each one is seen for what it is—an amazing instance of novel advance which nevertheless gathers into itself the whole range of proceeding structures. Within that range of historically evolved structures, the human consciousness stands out as singularly significant. And one could conclude from this observation, that “man is the universe come to consciousness,” and on this basis establish oneself within humanism. The conclusion, however, would be arbitrary. It marks a rash step toward finalism,

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cancelling out the tentativeness which is implicit in the whole history of emergence. It is, as it were, consolidating the gains of creation at the human level, on the assumption that creative advance, having reached this level of emergence, has become arrested. Now the difference in feeling tone that results from assuming that the creative passage is flexible, dynamic and open, as over against the assumption of humanism that it is arrested, having reached its final goal in man, is a significant one. In contrast to the smug and even arrogant attitude of man, the conqueror, the legitimate creatural feelings of wonder, reverence, expectance, and humility persist. The limitations that mark human emergence, that hold it fixed for the time being within a given perspective, become as formative in one’s philosophical outlook, as the new possibilities and capabilities that characterize the human structure. The magnitude of man’s limitations cannot be known. By analogy, we can imagine the possible folly of projecting the human equation into a cosmic equation, by noting what results when a similar projection is made at other levels. The difference in range of sensitivity and comprehension as between lower creatures and ourselves gives us some clue as to the qualitative significance of emergence. And the difference between those levels of emergence and that of inanimate structures, accentuates the import of this qualitative contrast. By analogy (holding in mind the gap, or the impasse, the creatural barrier that separates the levels of emergence, even as the lower anticipates the higher and is subsumed in the higher), the limitation that marks the summit of sensitivity in the human creature may be seen to be an inescapable qualification on all things human, including his rationality, his will, and his capacity for good and evil. Now a rash conclusion may be drawn from this observation; namely, that supernaturalism is inevitable. This conclusion I deny unless one is ready to apply supernaturalism to each of the preceding barriers between creatures. It is, rather, a superhumanism that is envisaged. That precisely is envisaged under such a category is not easily affirmed. If it could be clearly envisaged by us, it would not be superhuman. Man alone, it appears, has the capacity for imaginative projection beyond his own creatural demands. He can anticipate emergence beyond his own structure in a way that lower levels presumably could not. He can also discern, within his creatural level, varying degrees of qualitative emergence, thus recognizing orders of existence or behavior which give promise of emergence beyond the immediate structural level. Conceivably the history of group life has some relevance here. Conceivably, also, the transition within civilizations relating to the problem of the individual in community, have a bearing upon this matter. The contrast

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between orders of justice and love relate to the problem of emergence. And I am convinced that the contrast between the moral or ethical consciousness and the appreciative consciousness is productive of insight into this question. Thus the advance in qualitative meaning in the structure of good indicated by the word spirit as over against that of moral goodness, ethical rightness, or rationality, seems to me to point in the direction of emergence beyond the common level of our human consciousness. To my mind, this is the nearest we can come to a definitive reach beyond ourselves. Spirit as a concept of goodness in some sense subsumes the good that is implied in moral, ethical, and rational good in the way that all higher levels have subsumed the facilities of lower structures. It is a mistake to regard them, therefore, as antithetical or as irresponsibly distinct. They can no more be related in a one-to-one ratio, however, than one can relate, e.g., inert matter and psychical life. In the emergence of spirit, something creative has occurred to provide a new center of meaning, a new motivation, a new organization of concern. 4. Now if spirit as a beneficent good that somehow crowns existence as a flowering of human effort, is taken to be the most visible clue to the level transcending our human structure of consciousness, then we have some empirical ground for understanding the Christ consciousness and the claim of the Christian myth which attests to the redemptive role of Christ. For the motivating center of the Christ, both as given in the fragmentary historical record and in the drama of the myth, is that quality of response that is best described as suffering love, standing in judgment, as it were, upon all legal, moral or rational good; yet bearing a responsible relation to these several structures of good. It is not straining language in the least to say, in the imagery of the Christian faith, that the emergence of this strain of suffering love in western history was a revelation in history. Christ, the new man, the new being, disclosed the new structure beyond the structure of consciousness that was organized around and motivated by moral and rational good. It will be seen from this analysis so far that radical empiricism, in appropriating the idea of emergence, provides a fruitful context in which to explore the meaning of revelation and provides a clue within this context to a new Christology. Unlike the positivistic philosophy underlying humanism, which moves upon a plateau of human value, or the closed system of rationalism, radical empiricism attends to the dynamic expectancy of the creative event in which the human structure of consciousness constantly confronts the lure of a good beyond itself.

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IV. We are now led to ask, Is this redemptive good beyond the human structure an objective good given only in a unique revelation, as claimed by the Barthian theology, or is it, in part, empirically apprehended? This is again, in part, the question of the hidden and the evident nature of God. The Barthian theology, we observed, was impelled to hold to an exclusive or at least to a predominant emphasis upon the hiddenness of God essentially on Kantian grounds; and any concession on this point, we noted, led to a tendency toward idealism; in which the whole doctrine of hiddenness became dubious. Radical empiricism sustains an emphasis upon God’s hiddenness for the very reason that it upholds the concept of revelation. Its world is not wholly given, or implied. The “more” constantly attends what is given, not in the form of substantive being, but in the form of creative possibilities in this complex of events that comprise the creative passage. This presents a problem as to the meaning of that which is hidden. Where is that which is hidden? What, more than the visible evidences of God’s working, is God, conceived more hiddenly? We are thrown back here upon a habit of thinking which impels us to view the total datum of the creative passage. All that there is or ever has been in the interminable emergence of events becomes the whereness of God, both hidden and disclosed. By identifying God with this totality, we move in the direction of Idealism. But we are not compelled to equate deity with totality; but only with that selective portion of the interminable emergence of events that distills from its ongoingness, qualitative attainment. This is the gist, not only of Whitehead’s metaphysics, and, in modified form, of Wieman’s thought, but of the whole movement of organismic philosophy in which the creative process is qualitatively appraised. In Morgan and Alexander it is the nisus toward deity, the tendency at each level to move toward the higher structure that is designated; in Smuts, it is the holistic tendency (the tendency toward whole-making). In Whitehead, it is the principle of concretion by which actuality, in each event, is qualified by a tendency toward meaning, prehending the whole community of events. In Wieman it is creativity concerned as a four-fold event. However the selective portion is defined, God is clearly known in terms of the designatable track of emerging good within observable structures; but God is also hidden in the sense that even this distinguishable track of emerging good is beyond our grasp. We glimpse it, as through a glass darkly. We understand it within the limited vision of our human perspective. The fullness of its working we do not comprehend. The

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fullness of its intent, we shall never know, except as we may generalize the actualization of spirit which we have discerned in the Christian witness. There are ways by which we may extend the technical delineations of these metaphysical characterizations of God and of God’s working; and we should not assume that such attempts undertaken through the imaginative medium of poetry or theology are necessarily distortions or sentimentalizations of these sharper, rational concepts. On the contrary, they may lead toward providing us with more ample instruments of thought and feeling and thus direct us toward a more sensitive vision of the work of God. God’s hiddenness is not only a matter of the subtle and far-reaching character of his operations; but of the undiscerning character of our own seeing. With the full reach of God’s meaning, we shall never attain conceptual knowledge; but through the discipline of thought and feeling, we may expect to greatly extend the range of our understanding of God. But the problem of the nature of possibilities also intrudes here. In the metaphysics of radical empiricism, the concept of possibilities becomes singularly important as an exemplification of the dynamic character of events and of the whole of reality. Possibilities must be seen as having a graded relevance. There are first of all, the immediate possibilities which are simply the probable future occurrences implicit in present, existent structures they exist in present form as tendencies, within a recognizable structure of life: e.g., the growth possibilities of an individual person, or the growth possibilities of an institution or a community. The possibilities here are reasonable calculations of the expectancies; based upon knowledge of given data: the personality structure of the person, the envisageable opportunities, the past record of achievement, etc. Possibilities in these instances are not necessarily hidden since they are implied in what is actual. If they are hidden from any one, the hiddenness is due in large part to one’s imperceptiveness—one’s inattentiveness to subtle happenings or tendencies presaging a future happening. This observation, however, points to the likelihood of even immediate possibilities being hidden in some sense; for however perceptive each one may be, or the whole of observing men and women may he at any time, in any given situation, the fact remains that human perceptiveness has limitations. Despite its highly developed instruments of measurement and calculations, its perceptive powers are relatively crude. Thus, a great deal more may be happening in our midst than any one singly, or all collectively, may at any one tine discern.

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But since time flows, and since time makes a difference in altering the structural conditions of existence, possibilities of a new order are continually arising; other possibilities are forever vanishing. But the new order of possibilities, made likely by the alterations in structures, points beyond itself to still newer orders of possibility as remote, but as yet unrealizable or even unenvisageable events, pending alterations in structures which are intimated in general by reason of the basic notion of perpetual perishing and emergence, though not as yet given in any series of designative events. Thus I would distinguish between possibilities that are immediately referable to tendencies or features of actualized structures of events; and possibilities that are referable only to the principle of creativity and to the qualifying work of God, bent on qualitative attainment. New the latter category of possibilities may be ideally cast into a realm of possibilities, and thus treated as a concept within the framework of idealism; or it may be held on empirical grounds as the open frontier, the creative passage that awaits resolutions which shall distinguish in actuality between perishing and emerging occasions. In this sense, the present moment not only cradles the future occasions that are implicit in the structures of events now definable; but it bears, in undesignatible form, as in a protoplasm, the whole range of future occurrents which cannot even be anticipated, except on the general principle of creativity. There may be yet a third grade of possibility which in fact hovers between actuality and possibility. This is a form of possibility that, one might say, is given in present structures as an accumulative tendency which, however, is prescient with more of meaning and future effect than any the designatible features can disclose or exemplify. An example of this kind of possibility is the foreshadowing of emergences of new structures wherein the same ingredients assume a new character by reason of a different mode of regulation of the parts— psychical life, as a tendency in physical structures, personality, as a tendency in psychical structures below the human level of emergence. Prior to the actual emergence of a full-blown psychical event, the psychical appears as an ambiguous feature of physical life and was so regarded; its actuality thus did not disclose its real meaning—its real meaning lay in the emergent that was being carried toward actuality. So it was in the emergence of personality at the human level: prior to the emergence of the full-blown human being, the personal equation appeared as an ambiguous feature of animality, and doubtless was so regarded. Its actuality, or what was recognized as its actuality, did not disclose its real

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meaning. Its real meaning lay in the new emergent that was being borne toward actuality. Possibility here was impossible to detect, even though its structural antecedents were forming and to some extent were formed. Its track of behavior may have been noted, but it was known in terms of a level of meaning which as a new structure of meaning it was in the process of transcending. The disclosure of its meaning in its own terms awaited its emergence as a full-blown organization of responses. In short, awareness of a man as distinct from animality awaited the emergence of a fully integrated cortical mechanism by which personality assumed a new independence of conscious awareness and action. The structure of good that is beyond man stands in the same tenuous relation to the human consciousness that the previous emergents bore to the level out of which they took rise. It is, as it were, an ambiguous order of existence that seems to have no definite rootage in the human consciousness: that is, it appears to be a feature of it, yet not to be integral to it;—to be actualized in it under special circumstances, yet not to be characteristic of it. In the same fleeting, sporadic way that psychical activity was once manifest in physical structures, or personal features became manifest in animal structures, spirit is found flaring forth as a flame in the human structure—an intimation of some intent, though seemingly not the normal fruition of man, himself. We are now in a position to give a tentative answer to the question that is frequently raised in theology, namely, Is this redemptive good beyond the human structure an objective good that was given only (and shall we say, once-for-all) in a unique revelation, as the Barthian would claim? We are now in a position to give a tentative answer to the question that is frequently raised in theology, namely, Is this redemptive good beyond the human structure an objective good that was given only (and shall we say, once-for-all) in a unique revelation, as the Barthian would claim? Spirit, as a fugitive evidence of love rising spasmodically and sporadically from the human consciousness is, we are led to believe, not an uncommon occurrence—though it is clearly not a sustained feature in the human creature. And when appearing, it is intermingled with a complex of counter tendencies, making of spirit an occasional burst of beauty so rare that it seems to be a gift to man’s nature, a beneficence unearned, under heightened circumstances. The question then intrudes itself, Is there a structure of consciousness available to us, either in the historical record, or in the evidences about us, that exemplifies “the new being,” the emergent structure in which spirit, understood as suffering love, has become its organizing center?

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This is not a question of priority merely, but of vividness of the concrete event which becomes, as it were, normative for defining the structure of spirit, in the way in which the structure of personality is defined as distinct from animality, or animality as distinctive from psychical life which is vegetative, etc. The motivation back of this query, it will be seen, is not apologetic. There is no disposition here to save Christian face, or to find some basis for a Christology somehow or other. The question just intrudes upon us in the line of inquiry, If there is objective good beyond the human structure, beyond personality, which normally defines humanness, or if there is a clue to such an emerging structure, where is it given in vivid concrete form? It could be that a habit of mind is at work here, causing us to fall into a theological convention. Conceivably one might escape such a trap by avoiding the closing in question, simply asking, instead, Are there evidences anywhere—in any period, in any culture, in any stage of human emergence, that give hint of the new being,—of the new structure of consciousness carrying spirit as its organizing core? Perhaps some fresh instances will suggest themselves; but in western history, will they be more than a St. Francis, or a Thomas a Kempis, who consciously labeled their efforts, in so many words, as the Imitation of Christ? I am just asking—for I am wondering if emergent thinking within the context of radical empiricism can avoid running headlong into a fresh, empirical recognition of the significance of Christ, as fact or as formulation, in the psycho-physical sequence of emerging structures. Understood in these terms, the Christ-consciousness is seen to be the appreciative consciousness as a type, distinct from, in advance of, and creative of good more than the moral consciousness or the rational consciousness. It is, of course, true that we cannot speak of the Christ-consciousness as an historical datum in the same, free way that Schleiermacher and subsequent theological liberals were able to do. The critical work of New Testament scholarship has deprived theology of such an individual historical norm. What is historically given as an empirical datum is the community of awakened men and women who bear witness to such a new being, and who in some sense become the bearer, of the stimulus of the new consciousness, thus released into history, and to that extent become themselves, in practical ways, bearers of the new consciousness. The risen Christ, in contemporary theological discussion, has been taken symbolically to mean the living force of the valuations which the suffering love of Christ awakened in the Christian community.

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Speaking wholly within the framework of our emergent empiricism, we would say that in Christ, love became a new kind of energy within the cultural process, and a psychical thrust beyond the structured conscious experience of the social group. From the moment of this awakening, the Christian community that was to become the church bore witness to a depth of existence that had been opened to men in the events of a life and person in whom the creative love was sovereign. Love did not come into the world through Christ, but love, understood as self-giving, as implied in the creative act of God and in the redemptive experience, was exemplified in this life as the organizing center of a new level of conscious experience such that within a specifiable period of time in western history, the energies of men were concretely affected and subsequently organized into a communal effort to retain and to re-vivify the glory of this vision of existence as a permanent revelation of its meaning. The witness to this concrete good in Christ, affirmed to be a creative energy within the operations of history, is what points to the meaning of the living Christ. Christ as an organizing energy in existence within the cultural experience of the West is the historical equivalent of the metaphysical meaning of the concrete nature of God. All cultures may not know and experience the concrete nature of God through this historical vision of the living Christ, and in that sense, may not vivify its meaning as a cultural energy; but all mankind in some sense, to some degree, with some measure of apprehension, is visited with beneficence and judgment by the tender working of God in his concrete aspects. The energies of divine grace depend upon the structural meanings of the culture for communication, vivification, and enjoyment, and thus for man’s conscious participation in their meaning. The actuality of their operation as judgment or grace, however, is no respecter of cultures or language. It generates the fertility of seed and harvest in the realm of the human psyche with the realism of sun and rain just as surely as every emergent event carries the imprint and intention of the creative act. This means that the structure of the human consciousness, whatever its cultural history, its myth or language, is the seed bed of the new emergent, spirit. However this movement of life, beyond man’s structure, is exemplified, it operates as a qualifying influence of grace or judgment upon human ways. In traditional terminology, this wider operation of God’s working is referred to as general revelation. The question as to whether this beneficent and judging good beyond

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the human structure has assumed the form of a decisive revelation in a manner comparable to the emergence of Christ in the West, is an inquiry in the history of religions and of cultures. It is not enough, however, simply to consult existing studies in this field; for the question must be raised, Have its data been examined in the philosophical context of empiricism and emergence? Only such an analysis would provide a comparable inquiry. Furthermore, the fact of such a decisive, revelatory event in other cultures may not be adequately disclosed by the historian’s search for some individual in these non-Christian areas comparable to the Christ, if the Christ is taken to mean an historical individual. For the circumstances beyond the West have been more communal; hence, the operations of sensitivity and goodness appear in the interrelations of simple group life. It is this unit of experience, a communal structure of consciousness, rather than the individuated consciousness, that offers, in these instances, the proper datum for inquiry into the operations of spirit. It is my impression that serious inquiry of this nature among nonChristian peoples has as yet hardly began. The empirical datum of the living Christ, then, has two dimensions: (a) the witness to Christ that is borne by the tradition that lives on in the Christian community; (b) the energies of grace and judgment, exemplifying the truth and relevance of suffering love, that are operative in the immediate events of experience among all peoples, which, metaphysically speaking, are the operations of the concrete nature of God. It is the historic function of the church to bear witness to the testimony of the Christian community concerning the living Christ—this is its center as a continuing voice of the Christian community. In this sense, it is the responsible carrier of the myth in dramatic and expositional form. It is the contemporary task of the church to pursue with inquiring and experimental effort, the empirical evidences of this creative good discerned in the Christ as a redemptive energy in men’s lives, and as a directive of history. In the pursuit of this task, the inquirer may cross boundaries of faith and order. For the creative working of God issuing in judgment and redemptive love is as wide and diverse in its operations as the structures of human consciousness that exist throughout the actual world.

The Significance of Henry Nelson Wieman In American Religious Thought The years following the First World War presented a number of theological issues—some surviving from the prewar period, others representing problems that were being newly pointed up by the anxieties and tensions of the time. Social Christianity persisted somewhat as a prevailing mood in all Liberal circles, and inquiries into the social demands of Jesus’ teachings continued to seek an answer. Yet the direction of social effort following the war was no longer clear or assured. Confidence in the ideal of progress had not yet been discarded, but certainly symptoms of a more discerning and realistic grasp of the discontinuities of history were becoming evident. Concern for the social gospel faltered among Liberals during these years in part, no doubt, because social idealists, themselves, had become crestfallen as compared with the spirited and assured voice of Rauschenbusch in 1912; but also because a new interest in the profounder meaning of religion as a solitary experience was beginning to assert itself. William James, to be sure, had contributed before the war to a restless concern with mystical inquiry, pursuing it both in the direction of psychical research, and in the more philosophical exploration of experience in which his thought found common ground with Bergson. The numerous writings of Rufus Jones, fusing the insights of the new psychology, philosophical idealism, and the Quaker tradition, had deepened the social passion of the period with mystical feeling. The studies of William Ernest Hocking, Baron Von Hugel, and Rudolph Otto turned this mystical interest into a more avowedly reflective direction, bringing to it the depth and imaginative quality of the contemplative mind, but relinquishing at the same time experimental inquiry into the problem. Whitehead proceeding from a thoroughly naturalistic ground converged toward a similar conception of religion, saying “religion is what you do with your solitariness; if you are never solitary, you are never religious.” It was in this transitional stream in which the current of religious reflection began to deepen that Wieman’s thinking first impinged upon American religious thought in the late nineteen twenties. I recall with what force the sentence just quoted from Whitehead’s Religion in the Making impressed Wieman. I was in his class in the Philosophy of Theism at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago the year after Whitehead’s book had appeared. This sentence became Wieman’s text for decrying the

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superficiality of social religion. Social idealism, he argued, was often little more than the assertion of human ideals which had no ground in a religious devotion centering in God. It was man-centered activism that was insensible to the depth of this solitary adjustment to God. Along with Whitehead’s stress upon solitariness, Wieman drew heavily upon Hocking’s principle of alternation in which worship, as recovery of wholeness, was seen to be an indispensable supplement to all practical activity. Here again religion with depth was seen to be necessarily a solitary adventure. Wieman gave fullest expression to this conception of the religious adjustment in his Methods of Private Religious Living; but the basis for it had been developed in his two earlier works, Religious Experience and Scientific Method and The Wrestle of Re1igion with Truth. It may come as a surprise that I should begin my discussion of the significance of Wieman’s thought by citing this issue of religion as solitary adjustment to God in contrast to the social gospel; but it has always seemed to me that the distinctive force of Wieman’s thought, as a reform within theological liberalism, lay in his relinquishment of Kantian rationale of religion as an ethical venture which had come to dominate theological liberalism since the time of Ritschl, and his recovery of the more concrete, empirical sense of Schleiermacher and James. Not that Wieman was consciously aware of a preference for Schleiermacher or for James, but that in centering his thought upon “that Something upon which human life is most dependent for its security, welfare, and increasing abundance,” he restored the objective reference within experience as a religious datum of which Social Christianity, following Ritschl, had tended to lose sight. Wieman resting with full weight upon the perception of this religious datum was, again like Schleiermacher, uneasy in his nature mysticism. Thus he sought the security of a criterion. Yet, unlike Schleiermacher who turned to the person of Jesus as the one historical event that provided a criterion, Wieman seized upon a contemporary measure of value which he found in the scientific method. Wieman was to alter his attitude toward the social conception of religion in subsequent publications, in time giving it his full attention; but his writings prior to 1935 were almost wholly in this individual vein. I. An issue which had become urgent in the years immediately following the First World War, and to which Wieman’s thought came to be directed was that of science and religion. This problem had two aspects—one that had emerged out of a growing distress among the pious as well as among others of a tougher mind over the results of the critical study of the Bible

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or of biblical history; another that issued straight from the controversy over the biological study of man. The problem was much more complex than this, and involved areas of scientific thought that went beyond both biblical criticism and biology; but the problem of science and religion had its focus in these two areas. To the first aspect, Wieman’s thought made no contribution whatsoever. He was, in fact, strikingly indifferent to the whole field of biblical criticism. He shared something of the modernist’s release from the dogmatic appeal to the Bible; but he showed no concern to enter into the problems of the biblical scholar or grapple with issues relating to the relevance of biblical scholarship to modern thought. Scientific study of religion in this sense was to him antiquarian, as was historical study of all sorts, in the main. The contemporaneity of Wieman’s early thought cannot be overemphasized; for it opens the way to understanding both his blind spots and his rare capacity to break fresh ground in dealing with religious problems. To the problem of science and religion arising from the biological interest in man, however, Wieman made significant and lasting contributions. The display of wit and invective at the Scopes’ trial in Tennessee, in which Bryan and Darrow were the leading figures, is said to have shocked European observers, since they, presumably, had settled that matter in the days of Huxley and Gladstone. It may very well be that the controversy in 1925 was a throwback in the American scene, attesting to the scientific lag in the Bible Belt. Yet a canvassing of theological literature during the decade preceding the Scopes trial would reveal that this issue was no surprise to the scholarly mind either in England or in America. In 1922, the year that William Jennings Bryan’s book In His Image appeared, W. W. Kean published I Believe in God and in Evolution and E. E. Unwin, Religion and Biology, The following year, substantial works like H. H. Lane, Evolution and the Christian Faith, Dawson, Nineteenth Century Evolution and After, and J. Y. Simpson’s The Spiritual Interpretation of Nature, appeared. The next year saw Coulter’s Where Evolution and Religion Meet, L. P. Jacks, A Living Universe and Dinsmore’s Religious Certitude in an Age of Science. Shailer Mathews published his Contributions of Science to Religion that same year. This was also the year that John Roach Straton and Charles Francis Potter began their widely advertised debate on The Battle over the Bible, and E. Y. Mullins published Christianity at the Cross Roads in which he declared that the scientific study of religion had steadily destroyed the authority of Christianity and that the time had now come to face the issue and to affirm

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the supernatural origin of Christianity. The Scopes trial, and the Fundamentalism that followed, precipitated in large measure by the colorful oratory of William Jennings Bryon, were but eddies of back water on a much more significant theological current. The issue over science and religion was a genuine, scholarly concern of this period. In large measure the problem was being discussed in a context that simply carried forward the nineteenth century issues relatively unchanged. Evolution as “God’s way of doing things” was being advanced in opposition to God’s act by fiat in miracle and revelation. But a deeper undertow was at work here also; a movement of thought that was to add some new words to the scientific and theological vocabulary: the words creative and emergent. Bergson had made the first thrust in his Creative Evolution, published in 1911. This book, Gerald Birney Smith used to say, opened a new era in the adjustment of religion and science, scrapping many of the old arguments, and directing inquiries upon a wholly new level. Bergson can be credited with initiating process thinking in regard to the concept of God. Although it is generally recognized that James, in his article: “Does Consciousness Exist?” advanced the first suggestion that led to a dynamic conception of event. The publication of a sequence of books by British scientists and philosophers, following along Bergson’s path; led to a concerted movement to unite biological and metaphysical concepts and gave rise to what has come to be called the organismic philosophy. To this group belong A. N. Whitehead; Lloyd Morgan, S. Alexander, Jan Smuts, Edmund Noble. Now Wieman’s attack upon the problem of science and religion stems from this influence.184 Bergson was an early influence upon his thinking. Like many an alert thinker of the time, he was convinced that Bergson had come upon a clue to understanding both ourselves and God which might well provide the solution of the mystery that had hounded both science and religion. Wieman disagreed with Bergson at significant points. For example, he strongly denounced Bergson’s epistemology in Religious Experience and Scientific Method; saying: We do not agree with Bergson in saying that instinct gives us an awareness of the unanalyzed and unselected mass of experience. Instinct is simply the operation of certain automatic mechanisms of behavior. These mechanisms do, of course, determine the objects of our attention. But they are just the opposite of what Bergson says they are in this respect. They are highly selective… Our second point of difference has to do with identifying what Bergson calls intuition with knowledge. We are never fully aware of unanalyzed

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and unselected mass of experience in its original continuous flow. But we believe Bergson is right in saying that we may have various degrees of awareness of it… Our third point of difference has to do with metaphysics. Because of his initial error of confusing immediate experience with knowledge, Bergson is led to the conclusion that through our awareness of the continuous flow of experience we have intuitive knowledge of ultimate reality and that this ultimate reality is a continuous stream of experience without thought and without purpose, but which is ever evolving into something further, the something further being wholly undetermined and unknown until actually achieved. In our contradistinction to this we have maintained that our immediate experience of God is merely datum, and taken by itself alone gives us no knowledge concerning the character of God. Because this datum is a continuous, unsegmented flow of experience, we cannot immediately jump to the conclusion that God is a universal, unthinking, unpurposing flow of experience, any more than we can conclude that a chair is a disembodied pressure because our immediate experience is that of pressure.

Nevertheless, Bergson had pointed the way for Wieman toward an empirical analysis of the actual ground of existence as creative process. Not only was Bergson’s concept of the élan vital to be the forerunner of Wieman’s idea of God as Creativity; but his notion of duration was to give new and significant meaning to Wieman’s use of the word, growth. With the appearance of Whitehead’s works, Wieman advanced further in an organismic direction. Wieman began reading Whitehead when the latter’s earliest philosophical books appeared. He was particularly attentive to The Concept of Nature, and derived from Whitehead’s analysis of sense awareness, especially awareness of the “whole occurrence of nature” the suggestion which led to his own formulation of the objective datum of religious experience. The section in Religious Experience and Scientific Method in which Wieman elaborates this suggestion is easily the most exciting portion of the book and contains some of Wieman’s most incisive writing. The chapter that follows on “Awareness and Scientific Discovery” remains, in my judgment, as suggestive a treatment of the relation both of common sense experience and science, and of aesthetic experience and science, as is to be found anywhere. In this analysis, Wieman advanced religious thinking beyond the theological empiricism of Schleiermacher, as well as beyond the physical venturing of William James, and opened up a vista through which a nonobjective sense of the reality beyond man might be envisaged. If Wieman had done no more than this, his constructive theological effort would have put us in his debt. The elaboration of this insight in subsequent works, wherein Wieman

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sought to give definitive interpretation of the objective datum of religious experience, is what gave Wieman his following among those who, having outgrown the subjective appeal of theological liberalism, were not of a mind to respond to Karl Barth. Charles Clayton Morrison has said that it was Wieman’s clarification of the objective datum of religion that rescued him from disillusionment. “I didn’t need Barth,” Morrison commented, “Wieman was my Barth.” By the time that Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World had appeared, Wieman was fully prepared to envisage what was to come in Religion in the Making. Wieman took from Whitehead what his Bergsonian evolutionism and Dewey instrumentalism had prepared him to select. Whitehead, the empiricist, was his mentor. Whitehead, the— mathematician and Platonist was alien to him. In so far as Whitehead sought to designate and describe the structure of events that disclosed the empirical working of God, what Whitehead termed the primordial nature of God. Wieman was attentive. This advanced his inquiry. But when Whitehead, with the richness of his imagination and constructive ability turned to erect “the domes and spires” as Wieman called the speculative constructions, in his theory of the consequent nature of God, Wieman turned aside. This was something else again—a private indulgence of fancy, not open to cooperative inquiry. Even more definitely, one might say, than Whitehead’s influence at this point, was that of Smuts’ significant work Holism and Evolution. Smuts’ work appeared too late to affect Wieman’s earliest efforts in Religious Experience and Scientific Method, but clearly Smuts provided a technical analysis of structures and of the growth of structures that was too pertinent to Wieman’s own concern to be ignored in later works. The notion of emergence and of creative process took on explicit meaning as a result of Smuts’ patient exposition of the holistic tendency at work on all levels of organic structures. Thus in his effort to go beyond the abstract discussion of categories or behaviors which characterized his Whitheadian chapters in The Wrestle of Religion with Truth, he began to delineate more sharply the concrete happenings in the formation of structures. Wieman has protested that he had no concern with “reconciling science and religion or of introducing scientific method into religion in order to make religion respectable and acceptable to the intelligentsia.”185 Be that as it may, his thinking nevertheless made solid advance in these directions. Wieman’s contribution to the problem of science and religion had more immediate results in clarifying the inter-relations of the two. Wieman was little concerned with the apologetic effort to establish religious truths upon the foundations of science,186 or with the iconoclastic effort to divest

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religion of its objective claims187 his sole intent was to establish the objective datum of religious experience as a cognitive event, which involved applying the scientific method to the datum of undefined awareness, thus reducing awareness to knowledge of God. Wieman’s interest in science, therefore, was wholly epistemological. He believed the sciences had a refined way of dealing with facts of experience which, while not adequate for the whole of life, provided a kind of certainty which religion could ill afford to do without. Life must have its poetry, art, and mystical experience; it must have the surplusage of high sentiment in love, companionship and fellow feeling. Wieman had no intention of belittling or denying their import. Only these, of themselves, offered no way by which the surety of fact undergirded experience. These high adventures of the human spirit, because they were surcharged with feeling and emotion, capable of the greatest enhancement of human experience, likewise carried implications of illusion and sentimentality, which were as deadly poison. Sentiment tempered by the selective measure of science, wide ranging perception, tested by the method of science, offered, Wieman insisted, greater promise of religious value than unchecked indulgence of high or deep feeling. That Wieman intended the opposite corrective as well is clear from a careful reading of Religious Experience and Scientific Method, but this concern in thinking has not been as fully recognized. Instead, Wieman’s thought has often been put down as another form of rationalism reducing the wealth of religious experience and pious emotion to the meager dimension of the cognitive event. It has become my considered judgment, after many years of affinity with Wieman’s thought, that this criticism had some justification—not as the critics themselves often contended, but on different grounds. No one who knew Wieman personally could miss the mystical passion of his thinking. But Wieman’s own lack in imagination and sensibility, or his distrust of them, led him to be single-minded in dependence upon scientific method for deriving cognitive security in the form of tested knowledge. Many years later, Wieman was to distinguish between truth and knowledge and in this distinction, make room for a certain kind of intuition as a preparation for our way of knowing. But he was not to depart from his early stand that “observation and experiment alone can inform us.”188 That this turn of his mind suggests a literalness in his thinking that precludes recognition of more discerning and subtle apprehensions of meaning is, I am inclined to believe, true. His impatience with men like Santayana, Brownell, Hartley Burr Alexander, or even William James attests to his logical adherence to the literal pursuit of religious knowledge.

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He is I am confident, incapable of entering understandingly into the discernments of their minds. This is not to say that he himself is not discerning. On the contrary, his own sensitivity is great. And these is a marked poetic feeling in all that he writes; but the concern to keep clear of even the shadow of illusion, impels him to imprison these graces of the spirit in the confines of logical thought. II. If we are to take Wieman at his word, his own conception of what would be a clarification of the concept of God [as] an empirical datum. A fuller treatment of this problem will be given in a later chapter, but I should point up here the issue and the situation to which Wieman’s writings upon the concept of God was addressed. Theism was the crucial issue throughout the nineteen twenties. It was felt with considerable justification, I think, that the total effect of the Christocentric movement in American theology had been to relinquish the idea of God altogether. “God was such a God as appeared in Jesus,” William Newton Clark had said.189 A. C. McGiffert,190 Henry Churchill King191 and William Adams Brown192 had carried this thesis to the point of identifying Jesus and God. And the practical emphasis of theological liberalism went far toward justifying this procedure. The concern to read the mind of Jesus and to decipher his teaching, therefore, was more than an ethical concern as ethics is generally understood. It was, to use A. C. McGiffert’s term, an ethical theism that was thus being delineated, on the basis of the historical revelation of Jesus life. Rejection of the Christocentric method in theology posed the theistic issue as a critical problem. Unless one had access to one of the forms of philosophical idealism such as Absolute Idealism or Personalism, the loss of this Christocentric principle left the liberal without a clear conception of God. The plight of the Chicago School in the days of G. B. Foster was made grave in the eyes of Foster precisely at this point.193 Shailer Mathews resolved the problem to his satisfaction with the method of conceptualism, taking the word God as an analogical term for designating in a personal way those personality—producing forces in the universe to which men must come to terms.194 Edward Scribner Ames, at first inclined to identify the concept of God with the group spirit, or the social values idealized,195 moved beyond an avowed humanism to regard this pragmatic absolute as, in some sense cosmic in scope.196 Haydon stood firm for an outright humanistic interpretation of religion. All conceptions of God, he insisted, falsified the real meaning of the sovereign social good to which men were to be devoted. It is the universe that cradles our minds and bodies, he

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acknowledged, but the universe reaches us through our social environment. Except as this can be shown to be in every way beneficent, there is no justification for using the word God.197 Gerald Birney Smith remained resistant to all these solutions of the theistic problem. He had been a Ritschlian in his earlier years, and had revealed something of the troubled spirit of G. B. Foster in relinquishing the value—judgment that God was like Jesus. Yet the spirit of science had prevailed to such an extent in G. B. Smith’s thinking that he felt he could not do otherwise than relinquish all support from a theological tradition and turn forthrightly to an examination of the natural environment in which man, according to the sciences, experiences his life. Smith’s memorable article, “Is Theism Essential to Religion,”198 suggests the extent to which Smith would press this inquiry. His conclusion to this inquiry was that humanism not only was not enough, but that it was an unjustified assertion of human loneliness. Yet Smith had no real, constructive alternative to humanism. It was more the dimension and mood of a theistic view that he sustained in insisting upon a great mystic experiment in the effort to become helpfully related to the sustaining quality of the cosmic environment. Wieman’s suggestion of a minimum definition of God, beginning with that Something in environment, however defined, “upon which human life is most dependent for its security, welfare, and increasing abundance”199 fell upon G. B. Smith’s ear as a revealed word. I don’t think one can imagine the fruitfulness of Wieman’s suggestion taken out of this context. I well recall the eagerness, almost dependence, with which Smith reached out to this suggestion. Smith was a cautious man, soft—spoken and inclined more to offer critical appraisal than a constructive insight. He was suspicious of pat arguments or too perfectly reasoned expositions. But in Wieman’s presentation he sensed a sound and new beginning upon a stubborn issue that had all but reached an impasse in theological thought. The significance of Wieman’s minimum theism, then, was not that it resolved the issue between theism and humanism. Humanism was to flare forth with fresh energy in the decade that was to follow—a final burst of flame, as it were, in what was otherwise a dying ember. Wieman’s significance lay in the fact that he had redefined the issue and posed it for more fruitful inquiry. Whether or not Wieman’s own constructive efforts have fulfilled the promise of that exciting turn in theological events, the brilliance of that brief moment stands as a tribute to his constructive ability. In one respect, one might say that Wieman made no constructive

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contribution to the doctrine of God. His was not a theological or philosophical inquiry into the meaning of God in the customary sense. He eschewed all speculative efforts to expound God’s nature or to substantiate such affirmations as the personality of God. Under pressure he could be spurred into denying the appropriateness of ascribing the category of personality to God; or of asserting that God is more than we can think. But neither of such denials nor such assertions were in the direction of Wieman’s primary thinking about God. The concept “God” was for Wieman, the equivalent of the concept of supreme value, taken as structured event. God, as the indispensable source of man’s good, was the one facet of theism that interested Wieman. God, in all other respects, was inconsequential to his inquiry. This may state the matter too brusquely; but no account of Wieman’s theocentric religion would be adequate if it did not point up the single-minded character of his pursuit of God’s meaning. In a sense one could say of his earlier writings, that they came to focus around the problem of human fulfillment, and that the inquiry into the nature of God was but an extension of the concern to understand the conditions and possibilities underlying the problem of human fulfillment. Wieman’s theocentric religion was, in its final concern, therefore, human centered. Wieman’s concern broadened beyond this human-centered inquiry to a genuine preoccupation with Creative Event as a structure of value— underlying human existence, to be sure; but, apart from it too, and surviving it, should the human structure—consciousness—go down into dissolution. In this more objective vision of God’s structured existence Wieman came nearer in his later writings to the customary concern with God’s nature. It is doubtful, however, that with his commitment to empirical evidence and his aversion to speculative construction, that his contribution in this direction could ever go far toward satisfying the inquiring minds that seek a solution of the problem of God in this context. Wieman’s theism remains a kind of instrumentalism by which our human powers can take hold of the “cosmically mighty working which magnifies the value of existence.”200 III. Another area of concern which emerged in the thinking of period following the First World War; to which Wieman’s thought took form was the “spiritual force of ideals.” This was in the main, an insistent line of thought coming out of philosophical idealism, although it appears also in such widely different types of thought as the philosophy of Santayana and the pragmatism of William James, John Dewey and Edward Scribner

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Ames. Philosophical Idealism, to be sure, had provided the most substantial metaphysical ground for appealing to man’s ideals. Whether in Platonism, where the ideal shone as the solar illumination of the real, or in Absolute Idealism, wherein the ideal of man was but the inverse side of the divine, the stress upon moral and spiritual ideals was given singular justification. Man in his actuality was but a meager anticipation of the fullness of being that beckoned him onward in his ideals. Ideals were what gave currency to every fact. Apart from them, facts lost all spiritual appeal; all human appeal. Ideals heightened existence both with the assurance of meaning beyond every observable event, and with the promise of significance that intimated ultimate worth. Even when the metaphysics of the absolute had collapsed in one’s thinking, the lure of the ideal persisted relatively unmarred. Thus William James could advocate “the will-to-believe” on grounds strikingly reminiscent of Kant’s practical reason as a means of actualizing a good faintly envisaged as an ideal. And Edward Scribner Ames, having dispelled all notions of a transcendent or spatialized deity, placed full confidence in the man’s capacity for idealization, designating this reach of human imagination and sensibility the functional equivalent of God.201 Even John Dewey came to rest with full weight upon the creative possibilities of the ideal. In his thought “any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal and against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of its general enduring value is religious in quality.” And “God,” he contends, “is the transmutation of the ideal into action.”202 Against this whole stress upon ideals and upon ideal ends, Wieman pitted the full weight of his empirical stand. In this, he was attacking chiefly the citadel of Idealism, yet aiming his shots also at every outpost that retained any of its ground. Wieman’s relation to Idealism is itself an interesting story. During his college days, he came to know philosophy through the eyes of the Idealist. His teacher, Silas Evans, was a disciple of Josiah Royce. Philosophy at Park College was Roycean Idealism undiluted, unmarred. Wieman was led to take Royce’s thought unquestioningly as philosophy per se. Philosophy meant idealism, and vice versa. Actually the indoctrination was so complete that Wieman, for all his later resistance to it, never completely cast off its spell. No one can fail to detect in the temper of his thought, even in the imagery with which he clothes his naturalistic theism, the shadow of Royce’s Absolute Idealism. One can go further and say that back of the influence of the Roycean absolute in Wieman’s thought is the deeply laid imagery of Calvin’s sovereign God inherited from his

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Presbyterian forbears. And behind Calvin is the Apostle Paul. Wieman was long delayed in recovering the company of St. Paul, but when he rediscovered him, he was not to mistake his affinity. Wieman and the Apostle Paul are kinsmen at heart in the intensity of their belief and in their single-minded devotion to a sovereign idea. But this is diversion. Wieman’s early dependence, even identification with the thought of Royce, led to a later reaction against it. He was helped to this point by a reading of Bergson and later by discovering John Dewey in his more radically empirical aspects. What motivated Wieman’s hostile reaction against this “much rating of ideals,” was the concreteness with which he envisaged events and the vividness with which he sensed the objective datum. No distortion of the otherness of the objective event by a projection of the human equation was to be tolerated. This prevalent process of intruding human categories upon objective existence, he observed, must always end—either in solipsism or in a Humanism that relinquishes concern for the objective datum. On these grounds, he resisted conceptualism as a method of reconstructing theism203 as well as idealism. Both, he insisted, revealed an over-regard for concepts. Conceptualization, he felt, created a fine mist of menu imaginings that could be mistaken easily for something great and grand beyond the realm of man. Elaborate Systems of ideals or supervening essences, purporting to answer the divine reach of man turn out to be undifferentiated, unselective creation of human fancy. Man cannot give himself to this indiscriminate vision of wholeness, he argued. “It must be some selected portion of this ‘world’ that is God.”204 In the same way he repudiated vague aspiration that cherished simply the sentiment of goodness without a clear and tested knowledge of this good as a worthy objective. Wieman conceded that under certain circumstances, for example, As long as tradition sustains us, we can get along without knowledge of objectives. We can give our thoughts to the luxury of ideals: and because of the meager, mean and impoverished life which tradition often imposes, these pleasant, fanciful illusions are indispensable to make our living humanly possible. We must deceive ourselves with “ideals” in order to carry on. But when tradition breaks down, and we must direct our own life accordingly to goods which we have deliberately chosen—when we thus pass from drift to mastery—we must know our objectives. We must know that actual good, the conservation and increase of which constitutes the good of living. Pleasant “ideals,” illusions, and dreams, however valuable in the past, no longer suffice.205

Wieman was to moderate his distrust of the appeal to tradition and to

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modify his view concerning the effectiveness of its present shaping of human life; but he was not to relax his insistence upon the priority of objectives as a realistic expression of conscious purpose, which implied providing, preserving, and magnifying the conditions which living requires.206 No one, I think, can fail to respond to the realism of this view. At the same time that Wieman first uttered these strictures upon Idealism, his words fell as an astringent upon prevailing assumptions and served to shrink down an overwhelming mass of speculation and sentiment. It is well to recall with what regard men like George Coe held him. George Coe was himself a recalcitrant figure of no mean stature, whose reverence for a fact was exceeded only by the glee with which he could prove a belief an illusion. Yet for all his iconoclasm (and he possessed it to a greater degree than did Wieman), Coe reveals an integrity of spirit that is positively redemptive in its influence upon one’s mind. During my years in Claremont I had frequent occasion to be with him in programs, discussions and conversations, and the effect of his association was always one of clarifications of tightening and of discipline in thought. Many like Coe responded to the rigor of Wieman’s thinking, especially in these earlier years, when, in the name of both integrity and intellectual clarity, he fought to rid religious thought of its ambiguities. But the force of a corrective is soon spent unless it issues in something more suggestive and appealing. It is here that I find Wieman less effective and decisive. Not that he has been without constructive vision. In fact each critical advance has issued in a reconstructed meaning, His rejection of ideals led him to a clarification of objectives.207 His rejection of various forms of mysticism concluded with a highly suggestive re-formulation of mystical awareness.208 His distrust of intuition and of the appeal to religious experience led him to the arduous task of developing a theory of value which he pursued over a period of many years.209 Yet with all this constructive endeavor there is an evident absence of constructive appeal in its practical results. The logical formulation of the religious criterion is there—a clearly intelligible criterion. Yet like the “Great White Bird” of Da Vinci, it lies there, a model of fine workmanship, but without lifting power. Clearly something has been left uncalculated. It is conceivable that Wieman’s criterion of value anticipates a distinct but more promising period of spiritual implementation in the sense that Da Vinci’s premature model of the “flying machine” anticipated modern aeronautics. The judgment of contemporaries on these matters [is] notoriously unreliable. The tools of thought can be ever so sharpened for significant workmanship; but if the market is undeveloped and there is no

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obvious sense in which they might serve or enhance the existing demand, the tools lie idle; potential with great good, but condemned to await a suitable tine of implementation. The practical force of any man’s thought depends upon the readiness of the period to receive its proffered insights. The prevalence of Kierkegaard’s ideas today or of Van Gogh’s art, or even of Marx’s influence, as compared with the relative ineffectiveness of their impact upon their contemporaries must sober one in appraising the practical fruitfulness of any individual’s work during his lifetime. Yet the limitations may inhere to some degree in the individual’s work as well, I believe there are some clues to limitations in Wieman’s work which preclude his being as constructively effective in our tine as he might be, or, shall we say, from offering a significant alternative to the Idealism he set out to destroy. One lies in the area of the emotional basis of belief; the other in the cultural continuity of thought. Early in Wieman’s philosophical career, he set to work to dissipate the hold of what he called “heart-warming beliefs.” He was convinced, as was many a scientific modernist that the futility of religion and of Christianity in particular, as a transformative power in the world’s culture, derived from the sentimentality of its words and beliefs, depriving religion of intellectual force and direction. “Sentimentality,” he wrote in Religious Experience and Scientific Method, “is not a little thing as some would think, but a dry rot that destroys religion at its roots. One of the most common and dangerous forms of sentimentality that fastens itself on Christianity is what we shall call the evocative use of words.” (p. 48) Wieman was directing his criticism against some evident excesses in the didactic exploitation of words like the Cross, the Blood, Spirit, etc. He was not denying the propriety of the evocative use of words in the ceremonial, or in art and in poetry. His intention was to establish a discursive level of religious discourse that should be free from ambiguities and meaningless impulsions. Yet to dissociate cognitive and emotive meaning without implying or in one’s own thinking, assuming a derogation of the emotive level of thought is difficult at best. And a zeal for clarification might well throw the balance on the side of derogation. Logical positivism has been an impressive experiment in denuding concepts, stripping them bare of all but a designative reference. While it has gained in exactness of discourse, it has clearly become an enterprise apart in so far as qualitative meaning is concerned. Wieman’s thought, following upon his early attempt to rescue religion

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from the evocative use of words has revealed something of the logical positivist’s procedure. And in his effort to be faithful to this intent, he has pretty well succeeded in divesting his formulations of emotive reference. That is to say, there is no ready process of communication at work, relating the mind’s perception of meaning in this chastened discourse to the fulsome body of impulses or motivations that reach one through the structure of experience, in which tradition transmutes to the present the burden of part assent. Wieman addresses the mind of the religious man in a singularly unimaginative way. This is the literalness of this thought asserting itself again. The religious man’s grasp of the meaning which Wieman would communicate through his criteria or concept is thus uninformed and unenhanced by a community of sentiment that would ordinarily provide an imaginative extension of precise knowledge through integration with an “appreciative mass.” Wieman reveals extraordinary confidence in the communicability of the objective meaning, intending, no doubt, that where religious criteria are sufficiently clarified religion, like science, can be relieved of all subjective appeal. There is, I am convinced, a fallacy in this fierce dependence upon objective meaning. It is apiece with the false notion that knowledge issues in virtue. One way in which to apprehend the root of this fallacy is to point to the recent advances in discriminate thinking about myth and symbol. This is not a fair way to evaluate Wieman’s thought, but it affords a swift way of pointing up the area of deficiency in Wieman’s thinking, impelling him in a literal course where the subtleties and depth of imagination were to be indiscriminately disregarded with the same fierce disdain with which he dismissed illusions. Here again I am stopped by the realization that Wieman’s own sensitive outreach carried with it an imaginative quality that actually had creative force. But the nature of his objective which he pursued with fever heat—led him again and again to make this sensitivity in his nature subservient to a literal demand. The literalist in him invariably triumphed. Now this condition of mind which enables one to acknowledge only literal certainty on the one hand or illusion on the other as possible alternatives in religious thought, leaves one’s thought barren of subtle discrimination and nuances that are given in an imaginative grasp of an event. I see no way of giving adequate support to this criticism without discussing the nature and merits of analogical thinking for dealing with concerns that in some sense are beyond comprehension.210 My concern

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here is simply to indicate that when one relinquishes the imaginative reach of symbolic thought, not only is there a visible loss of emotive power, but there is loss of dimension in thought as well. IV. The years during which Wieman’s thought began to emerge as a significant influence in American religious thought were marked by a bitter struggle between an aggressive pragmatic emphasis and a waning idealistic influence which was nevertheless making a vigorous attempt to recover its former regency in thought. The conflict between pragmatism and idealism sharpened into an issue between contemplation and action. The concern for the contemplative attack upon human problems was more than mystical musing. It represented a deep-seated protest against swift-moving tendencies in American culture as well as in American thought to enthrone action as the controlling idea. In education this took the form of a clash between the humanities and the science-centered curriculum. In philosophy it generally assumed the guise of a conflict between Idealism and Pragmatism. In religion it became a tension between an emphasis upon worship and social action. While there were sharp protagonists of both extremes, the concern to conciliate these opposing views was being increasingly heard. Clarence H. Hamilton, writing in the Journal of Religion in 1921, after analyzing what he regarded as the two prevailing interpretations of religion of the period, concluded his comments with this observation: We feel that idealism is correct in holding to the mood of contemplation and worship as a significant phase of the religious life, but its difficulty comes from conceiving this mood as its most important or even its exclusive aspect. As to pragmatism, its emphasis on volition and activity is profoundly important and calls for the inclusion of voluntaristic values in religion. But its religious implications have not [been] adequately worked out either in James or Dewey. What is called for is a religion in which worship is means as well as end, and ameliorative activity is both an outcome of and an occasion for worship.211

And Hocking in a similar effort, appraising the pragmatic ideal as It had been expressed in the writings of Edward Scribner Ames, set down his conclusions as an Idealist, saying Worship, while it means peace, is not an idle attitude; this sort of peace is a release from the self-anxiety that hampers our best efforts. But in another sense also worship is the focus of religious action; it fixes the degree of the will.212

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The thinking of Wieman takes on significance as a particular resolution of this issue. Wieman embraced both the perspective of the Idealist and the impulse of the Pragmatist. He had read Dewey later than he had read Royce and had found in Dewey both stimulus and argument with which to resist his former philosophical love. Nevertheless in Hocking he found a new stimulus to retain the “contemplative corrective” of activism. Unwilling to associate this concern with Idealism, Wieman wrote in his autobiographical account, “I distinguish sharply between the profound insights into the religious way of living, which Hocking reveals, and the system of philosophy in which he clothes them. In the former, he is, to my mind, unsurpassed among living men.213 Wieman appropriated Hocking’s “principle of alternation,” giving contemplation a place of equal emphasis with action. Hocking had explained the importance of contemplation on the basis of his Absolute Idealism, saying that activity is fragmentizing, compelling the mind to be attentive to the parts, to the disregard of the whole. Man needs to recover his sense of the whole if his absorption in action is not to deprive him wholly of his sense of the Absolute. Yet prolonged preoccupation with the whole can dull man’s feeling of the concrete and blur his practical sense. The observance of fertility and utility, worship and work in alternation is thus an indispensable principle.214 Wieman, without availing himself of the logic of Absolute Idealism, sought to show the importance of this insight on pragmatic grounds. Worship, as a contemplative act, he contended, is in point of fact, a problem-solving process of greater amplitude than analysis taken by itself. He had been helped to such an interpretation of worship by the words of Whitehead which defined religion as “the transition from God the Void, to God the Enemy; and from God the Enemy to God, the companion.”215 Wieman defined the steps in worship in three stages. “The first,” he said, “is that of exposure. One puts himself amid those physical conditions and in that bodily and mental state in which he can feel most profoundly and pervasively the stimulus of that order of being which most vitally affects him… Through this exposure the deepest drives of one’s nature is awakened to its highest aspiration.” The second stage was diagnosis. “We must find out,” continued Wieman, “wherein our habitual adjustments are inadequate for realizing those possibilities which the environment has in store for human living. What is wrong with our “clamping mechanism?” How can we better lay hold of the “lifting cable?” The third stage of worship he called reconstruction. “It is that curative treatment,” Wieman added, “which cannot be applied until after diagnosis.

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It is that reconstruction by which the worshiper establishes those mental attitudes which are better adapted to ‘clamping the cable.’”216 The force of worship, Wieman found to be not in the words men utter, not in the ideas they entertain, but in those habitual attitudes which the words and the ideas serve to engender and establish.217 Thus contemplation, in Wieman’s thought, was interpreted to be a creative stage in preparation for action. It was action receiving depth and range and sensitivity to the fullness of meaning in event, which only perspective attained in contemplation, could provide. Here the juxtaposition of mystical feeling and critical analysis, which distinguishes all of Wieman’s thinking, is clearly evidenced. V. The mystical quality that pervades Wieman’s thought is not incidental to his thinking. It is, in fact, an important index to the resources of his thought. Wieman, more than any other empiricist with whom I am acquainted gives evidence of concealing an emotional drive behind his vigorous pursuits of an adequate intellectual formulation of religion. He is like William James and Gerald Birney Smith in this respect. With James it was a moral struggle over the problem of evil;218 with Gerald Birney Smith, the desperate effort to win scientific assurance by cosmic companionship concealed a vivid sense of tragedy that would not be downed by traditional hopes of Christian sentiment. With Wieman, the emotional problem has been twofold: The vividness of his own sensory response to situations has given him a full sense of the abundance of possible meaning in concrete experiences. He has had a natural attachment to sensitive spirits like Richard Jeffries, Walt Whitman and Walter de la Mare even though he has viewed them with critical eyes. His suspicion of them amounts to a suspicion of himself—of his own outgoing nature that would receive this “rich fullness of events with an open and eager grasp, only to withdraw from it, out of fear of its illusory good. Wieman is an “insecure mystic,” a mystic who dares not trust the mystical sense and who fears the consequences, were mysticism to get out of hand. The fear of sentiment and of an uncritical appeal to concrete experience is thus exaggerated in him because for him the lure of the concrete stimulus of events is great. Running through his analysis of every concrete datum—the growing child, the mother pondering her child, the emerging community, the present moment of experienced value, nature as a total event; there is this sense of “the surplusage of stimuli” that beclouds every clarified concept with an aura of unanalyzed meaning. Wieman speaks with a will for

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precision, yet his every utterance betrays an “undefined awareness,” that confounds clarification. Wieman never describes or measures; his mind does not run to descriptive analysis. For events do not appear to him in the guise of orderliness and partial perspectives. Instead it is the fullness of events that he encounters—a wealth of stimuli that must somehow be grasped with clarity. Consequently Wieman’s attempts at precision always follow the course of reducing this complexity to a simplified version, a working conception. “God is more than we can think;” nevertheless, for practical purposes, we may undertake to think of him in terms of a workable Idea. This procedure, rather than being a process of simplification, actually requires a high degree of conceptual imagination. For its simplification implies condemnation: and a form of condensation that is addressed to some practical end. Wieman’s opening statement in advancing “A Workable Idea of God” will illustrate what I mean. He writes A workable idea of God is one which will guide us in making those connections between men and between men and other objects through which the beneficent working of God can fulfill itself in the world. Many ideas of God which are fondly cherished do not do this. Many ideas which may be true are not workable in this sense. They are not applicable to the urgent practical problems of human living. They do not help us in our endeavor to make those connections which release into human life the cosmically mighty working which magnifies the values of existence.219

Now the workable idea of God so derived is not altogether an intelligible idea. It would be if one were able to banish from one’s mind the intimations of the possible more in “the cosmically mighty working which magnifies the values of existence” just as we are able to dispel the sense of mystery that conceivably could hover about electrical force, or atomic force—which are workable ideas in a specifically physical realm. But the workable meaning of God, so defined, remains a condensation of a mysterious datum not a clear designation of a concrete datum that is visible to all seeing eyes. One comes upon the same form of simplification in Wieman’s most recent formulation of the structure of value which is said to designate God: The fourfold event— Emerging of new perspectives. Integrating of these new perspectives with those previously derived. the Expanding of the appreciable world. the Widening and deepening of community.

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Now again, this concept is a highly complex one. Its envisagement requires a great deal more than the scientist’s sensitive eye for facts, or the common man’s sense for practical realities. It requires first of all a wideranging grasp of total happenings, then a capacity to see their interrelation, and finally a subtle effort to imagine their happening simultaneously. This concept of God as structure of value is no simplified, workable idea of God which may be sharpened into an educator’s tool or into an historian’s criterion. It must remain a philosopher’s instrument; and the instrument of a special kind of philosopher. My purpose here is not to question the validity of this concept nor to detract from its significance as a concept of value; but simply to call attention to its complexity, precluding ready intelligibility by reason of this procedure of condensation. A further illustration of how Wieman’s effort to achieve clarification through condensation results in a complexity of meaning that defeats intelligibility, in his concept of Creativity. Whitehead used this term to designate brute force, which he understood to be the dynamic equivalent of Aristotle’s concept of matter.220 God, in his primordial nature, he defined as the principle of concretion which, together with the ideal forms, pressed upon this brute process of creativity the opportunity of character and value. Wieman, concluding that the net effect of this threefold operation, involving three distinct concepts, was always creative event decided to discard all but the one concept, Creativity, giving to it the complex meaning implied in Whitehead’s three concepts. All of these instances of clarification through condensation indicate to my mind that Wieman works constantly under the burden of mystical awareness. Whatever he handles as a concept points to something “more than we can think.” Hence the necessity of transmuting it into an intelligible datum through condensation. Yet it is my contention that such condensation never presents a concrete datum that is designatable in the sense that an empirical fact is designatable. It is always the fullness of meaning perceivable to this mystical awareness, translated into a manageable vision. VI. All of the emphases which we have thus far noted, in relating Wieman’s thought to the issues of the period in which his thinking had force, combine to express an objective temper in contrast to the subjectiveness that characterizes much of liberalism and religious humanism. This points up the all-embracing significance of Wieman’s theology in American thought. He himself has used the phrase theocentric religion to characterize his total effort in an autobiographical account.221 And he adds, “My

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sole concern is to find some way of escaping from the miasma of subjectiveness and making contact with sacred reality.” This concern met a ready response at a time when reaction against the subjectiveness of theological liberalism was becoming increasingly voiced. Charles Clayton Morrison, having acclaimed the publication of Wieman’s first two books as events of historical importance, and “the beginning of a renaissance of religious conviction,”222 stated a few years later, I am one who believes that his method marks the dawn of a new day in theology and religion. Mr. Wieman gives us an objective God, a God “wholly other” as Karl Barth would say, a God as practically absolute as the God of John Calvin. He extricates God from the sentimentalism of 19th century optimism and from the subjectivism of present-day liberalism. He overcomes the theological bad effects arising from modern psychology and modern social ethics. He is bringing God back again to the place which liberalism, with fading ideas of God, had been trying to hold for religion.223

And again, Wieman’s thought leads direct to Calvin’s God. He sets science singing the evangelical story of a God with whom is the eternal initiative, who, though we seek him, is always long beforehand with our soul.224

Undoubtedly more was made of Wieman’s restoration of an objective faith than he, himself, was prepared to sustain; but it cannot be denied that, within a limited group of religious thinkers during this period, Wieman served a function in American theology comparable to that of Barth in Continental theology. At the time, one would not have recognized this to be the case. Wieman was looked upon as an antithesis to Barth. Yet in following Wieman, one realized that one was going beyond liberalism in a sense that was quite comparable to the Barthian reaction. Karl Barth and Henry Nelson Wieman may be said to be two quite different voices in wholly different cultural situations, speaking out of different philosophical perspectives, declaring, as over against pragmatic liberalism, that God, not man, must be the measure of our values. One who stands within the orientation of liberalism and who is committed to any one of its procedures will not understand the intent of these two voices. For that intent is not clearly viewed within the orientation of liberalism especially if the basic presupposition regarding man as the measure of God is retained.

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This is the crucial point of divergence between the era of theology which began with Schleiermacher and which has recently ended with the passing of such men as William Adams Brown, Shailer Mathews, and the era of theology that dimly began, say twenty-years ago with the publication of Barth’s writings in Europe and Wieman’s writings in the far-western and Midwestern corners of America. Barth and Wieman are more nearly theological contemporaries than are Wieman and Ames, for example: or than are Barth and Rudolf Otto. Now let it be clear as to what I am saying here— I am not putting Barth and Wieman in the same theological basket. These men stand apart—almost back to back—so far as their specific theological utterances are concerned. Nor will the one ever convert the other—though I should say the conscious affinity between their temperaments and insights is more marked today than was true twenty years ago. Their basic affinities are (a) in what they recognize as limitations, even errors, in the liberal era’s approach to theological meaning, (b) in what they recognize as limitations in the human creature so far as manifesting, disclosing, or articulating the Sovereign God is concerned, (c) in what they say, specifically, about religion, human desires or aspirations, human ideals, religious experience. For the liberal, these were the empirical channels through which God was made known to man. For both Barth and Wieman, these are the deceptive dead ends through which God is fashioned into the image of man. Thus they end in idolatry for they end in worship of what is less than the Sovereign God. Their affinities appear also in what they conceive to be man’s nature. Both have restored to contemporary religious thinking about man a grim realism that constantly borders upon pessimisms the evil in in human nature is so great. This evil is greatest when it parades, itself as good— when, that is, this limited, deceived, and deceptive Creature sets up his ideals, his wishes as being of God, or as substituting for God. Given this tendency to deception, to illusion, in human nature, the last place to find a valid approach to truth about God’s nature and about the ultimate good is in man. Having brought Barth and Wieman onto a common horizon, we need to see how differently each seeks to resolve the modern man’s dilemma: It can be said that their differences arise in part from the nature of their concerns. Barthianism is preeminently a preacher’s movement which pursues the problem of our present uncertainty from within the perspective of the pulpit. The question that persists throughout his thinking and which gives direction to his dogmatics is “what makes Christian preaching

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Christian?” The questions that are asked are questions that ministers within the liberal tradition well understand as was evidenced by the response which immediately came to his cry for certainty. The men who rallied to his call in this country were exclusively men of the pulpit at first—Douglas Horton, Reinhold Niebuhr, Emil Homrighausen—to mention early leaders. Douglas Horton, who translated Barth’s The Word of God and the Word of Man, wrote as follows in his Preface: Parish ministers have found his utterances stimulating because, having been one of them himself, he speaks and writes from their standpoint.

I could mention this pulpit orientation of Barth’s thought, not to commend it or to depreciate it, but to suggest the source of its stimulus and the nature of the demands that dictated its solutions. It was inevitable that this approach to the modern religious perplexity should find its focus in the problem of revelation—not as a problem of knowledge; but as a problem of communication by which the Divine Initiative might illumine the basic concern of man—namely his relation to the Lord of conscience. Wieman’s thought moves within the orbit of philosophy and is essentially a philosophic attack upon the modern problem of religion. It began with inquiry into the nature of God and a critical exposition of the problem of religious knowledge. It was inevitable that this combination of inquiries was to move toward the problem of value; for the meaning of God and the criterion for knowing its operational meaning hinged upon this ultimate issue. All roads in Wieman’s thought lead to the problem of value. Differences in their solutions of the modern problem in religion arise also from differences in the metaphysical orientation of their thought. Barth stands within the Kantian philosophy and never really emerges from it. This, one might say, is as normal a situation for the Germanic thinker as Jamesianism is for the American. Wieman’s thought is the confluence of the radical empiricism stemming from James with affinities for Bergson and more particular identification with the organismic naturalism arising from Bergson which found expression in the British naturalists, Lloyd Morgan, Jan Smuts, and Whitehead. The metaphysical set of each theologian tends to define the nature of the problem and to suggest the direction of the solution. Barth, for example, sees the problem of the liberal arising from a preoccupation with the actual world to the neglect of the world of final goals from whence comes the moral demand.225 The voice of conscience is from a transcendent source. But the transcendence is not that of a

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cosmological dualism; but of an epistemological dualism. It is the transcendence to neo-Kantianism—a transcendence that nevertheless points to an inescapable relationship between God and man—between the source of conscience and human action. One comes closer to understanding this transcendence of God, if he views it as a wholly otherness as regards purpose and tendency. God, as the wholly other, is the radical interruption of all that is human. He is the Sovereign counter-tendency to all that man is. “His ways are not our ways.” His intrusion upon life through conscience disrupts the peace and complacency of life lived in accord with human desires and purposes - and puts us at odds with our cherished values.226 With his Kantian orientation, Barth is impelled to point to conscience as the source of ethical guidance and of the impulse toward the righteousness of God. The Barthian theology, therefore, partakes fully of an imagery that is more adequately illuminated when it assumes a Kantian or at least a new-Kantian orientation. Wieman’s thought remains consistently within a radical empiricism, however far he may press toward a metaphysical perspective. It is apparent in his negations (as when he departs from Whitehead’s doctrine of the consequent nature of God), and it is apparent in his constructive insights (as when he insists upon designating the operations of God within concrete events). Wieman’s resistance to the Barthian idea of transcendence and to such phrases as “time and eternity” likewise illustrates his radical empiricism. Professor Pauck has insisted time and again that the Barthian view of transcendence is generally misunderstood and that it is particularly misunderstood by Mr. Wieman; and when he tries to explain what the Barthian means by transcendence, Mr. Wieman will say, “Well if that is the case, then we agree.” There is agreement; it seems to me, at the point where transcendence is intended to distinguish between the operations of God and the operations of man. There is, in fact, something reminiscent of Wieman’s well-nigh ascetic emphasis upon the Source of Value as distinct from Created value in the passages of Karl Barth’s Commentary on Romans. For Wieman, too, the Source of Human Good is as an Enemy to the man who is in pursuit of his cherished values. Man living for the created good is idolatrous and must be broken by the creative good. What distinguishes Wieman’s thinking from the Barthian on this point of transcendence; however, is his readiness, in fact his concern [is] to designate God’s working (his operation) in empirical events. The fact that God is designative in terms of operations leads Wieman to an insistence

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upon the use of observation and reason in establishing a criterion of the good, of value initiative of God, which Barthian thinking, based upon a Kantian metaphysics, would not tolerate. However much one might wish to relate Wieman’s thinking upon the Source of Good to Barth’s stress upon transcendence, therefore, he cannot overlook this fundamental difference in their theology which turns Barth in the direction of a new-supernaturalism, and Wieman in the direction of a neo—naturalism. What then is the source of the true God? How is the modern man to escape from his own descriptions and from the illusions that gather about him like a mist in pursuing the lure of his own ideals? How is the modern man to lay hold of a sure path to truth and to the objective reality that is rightfully sovereign over all men? These are the questions that arise from this new theological orientation. Barth and Wieman must be seen as prophets of this new objective note in Christian theology. And their solutions as answers to these desperate and anxious yearnings of religious man, driven from dependence upon sheer subjectivity—which was of the essence of liberalism—by the awful realization that God in the image of man is not God at all, but man more deceptive, however alluring and lifted up. Barth and Wieman stand upon a common horizon; but immediately from their respective points of vision, paths lead off in quite different directions. Barth has caught a trail that leads theological thought back into a maze of creedal doctrine which he seeks to revivify through recourse to the myth.227 Wieman, on the other hand, has no interest in restoring the supernatural faith, but is concerned to illumine what has been supernaturally believed in such empirical terms that its certainty and clarity of direction will be established beyond doubt. This divergence of paths, the one leading to a renewed supernaturalism, the other to a renewed naturalism, results from a basic disagreement with regard to God and man. With Barth, God is in heaven, man is on earth—which is to set the two natures totally apart. With Wieman, the working of God depends upon structures of consciousness which bind God and man together inseparably as mechanism and spirit are interrelated. Recent years have brought Wieman closer to the company of Barth than any of us might have expected in those earlier years. To be sure the possibility of rapport on certain issues, involving a reaction against Liberalism, was always there. But Wieman was to converge toward Barth’s center with an even more self-conscious alignment. And in his own thinking, this amounted to a conversion in which he departed from

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some of his earlier views. The root of this change, as he acknowledges in an autobiographical statement entitled, “Some Blind Spots Removed,”228 was the re-reading of the Pauline Epistles and the writings of Barth and Kierkegaard. Not that Wieman was inclined, at this time more than in earlier years, to concur with the Barthian conclusions in theology. On the contrary, he says in the article cited that his reaction to their stimulus was one of decisive disagreement. Nevertheless, he continued, “We learn most from those with whom we most disagree. They do not make us see what they see, but out of the conflict and stimulus we see what neither saw before.”229 Out of this conscious effort to come to terms with Continental theology and its antecedents, there emerged in Wieman’s thinking a new appreciation of the import of the Christian faith and of the Christian tradition as the carrier and nurturing ground of this faith. His concern with issues which had been raised in conflict with Barthian thinking was to awaken Wieman to the importance of the inherited doctrinal language and symbols for communicating theological meaning even as a contemporary.230 This marked a sharp change of emphasis in his thinking. Heretofore he had been concerned with precision in theological meaning to the extent of abandoning, if necessary, traditional Christian terms which seemed to obscure the cognitive content that was intended. In his new emphasis, he was content to say that enough clarification of these Christian meanings has now been achieved in contemporary theology to justify their usage; and that using these words, freighted with symbolic meaning of the tradition, was important precisely because they were able to point beyond their bare, definitive meaning. The Christian faith, Wieman observed, is a witness to specific historical happenings in response to the person of Jesus Christ who released into history the working of Creativity at a level hitherto not possible in human history. Wieman likewise saw new importance in such theological terms as Christ and the Church within his contextualist philosophy. These, he argued, are structures of meaning carrying into the living culture the continuing work of Creativity which had been released into history by the response of men to the person of Jesus. In recent years he has brought the full force of his labors in philosophy of religion to clarify this creative event, believing that with the criterion which his philosophy of religion can provide for designating the actual work of God in human history, he can distinguish with the certainty of scientific method between that which is actually creative event, following from the stimulus of the Christ, and that which is illusion and sentiment, the workings of men’s imaginations

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and undisciplined hopes and desires rather than God’s working. VII. The nature and extent of Wieman’s influence upon American theology is exceedingly difficult to assess. Within certain areas it has been deep and pervasive. It may not yet be gauged how far a new ministry this side of the North Atlantic seaboard has been created by his stimulus. I say this side of the North Atlantic seaboard, for clearly Wieman’s influence did not cross the Alleghenies except in fugitive invasions, yet it did reach deep into the southern states as far as the Virginias, Florida, and Texas; it spread northward into Michigan, the Dakotas and into north central Canada, as well as into the far northwest, and the southwest as far as California. Wieman’s thought has the saltiness of the pioneer. In this respect it is part of the American experience. It has a thin sense of tradition, and a venturesomeness that has known no bounds. They, for whom orthodoxy in whatever form has proven a stumbling block, found in Wieman a champion and a constructive leader. Pat Malan expressed it as “Fresh Air in Religion,” calling Wieman’s thought [relentlessly] scientific yet warmly sympathetic,” and judging his book “immensely valuable chiefly in that they make you want to do something and also supply intelligent suggestions as to what to do.”231 Under Wieman’s tutelage a new kind of minister emerged, concerned less with the evocative use of ritual and pageantry and more with the direct harnessing of sound forces to the dedication of God, conceived as a structure of value. Wieman has perhaps made greater impact upon certain areas of leadership in religious education and higher education than upon the ministry of the church itself, although this would be difficult to document. Certainly religious educators have been more receptive to the tentative and experimental character of his thought than have the leading churches. And within higher education, Wieman’s attempt to formulate a criterion of value, independent of sectarian faith has fallen upon attentive ears; although it cannot be said that his influence here has gone beyond the stage of being suggestive. Certain university church workers and directors of religious activities on university campuses have seen in Wieman’s theory of value, a tangible basis upon which to recreate the educational process; but the consequences of this stimulus are as yet inchoate and unpredictable. Perhaps the greatest single channel of his influence has been the teaching of religion in colleges and universities. This has been the natural focus of his influence, for the dominant practical concern motivating Wieman’s thought for many years has been to provide a structure of

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religious thought for college and university teaching comparable in rigor and in consistency of content to any of the standard intellectual disciplines.232 To this end he has trained a sizable core of teachers of religion who, in their respective colleges and universities, seek to contribute to meeting this concern. The limitations of Wieman’s influence are more easily gauged. His effect upon philosophical thinking, e.g., is astonishingly negligible. One must search the philosophical journals and publications for even the mention of his work. This neglect of Wieman by the professional philosopher can be explained in part by Wieman’s neglect of them and of the philosophic traditions to which they have given allegiance. His comment upon philosophy in The Source of Human Good is perhaps a good index to the reason for this indifference. “The dispute between the several philosophies,” he writes, “does not appear to the present writer to be so important as it seems.” He explains his judgment, saying that the differences which divide philosophies are not, as they assume, ultimate questions in a metaphysical sense, but pragmatic differences as to which “precondition”—matter, mind, form, or event—might better be taken to be “ultimate.” Any one of them might be true in a structural sense, meaning, that given some one precondition as the ultimate reference, the metaphysical interpretation that follows will be as true as an elaboration of that particular perspective. Thus the question of importance is not its metaphysical truth—this is basically an aesthetic matter. The important question is: which is pragmatically better as a means of getting the particular kind of illumination that is sought? One can thus understand why Wieman would not feel obligated to take every conceivable philosophical approach into account, or, for that matter, why he would be disinclined to take any of them over seriously. He has, as a matter of fact, been notoriously indifferent to established philosophic conventions and he has remained unimpressed by the achievements of pedantic philosophical scholarship. This has made him a freelancer in matters of scholarly thought. And in this respect, if one takes scholarship to mean the progression of thought based upon the accumulative results of inquiry, his thought might not properly be called scholarly in the humanistic sense. It is this feature of his thought, I am confident, that has caused him to go relatively unheeded by the greater number of contemporary philosophers. When one turns to the field of social thought, there is likewise a dearth of recognition of his work. Here the opposite condition is true. Wieman has been more than attentive to social psychology and to the sociological

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analysis of human problems. This was not true of his earlier works; but beginning with The Normative Psychology of Religion and The Growth of Religion, he has made the social organism a focal point of inquiry. Why, then, have his contributions not made a greater impact upon the social sciences and upon social philosophy? Undoubtedly it has been because Wieman’s theocentric presupposition pervades his every thought. The social sciences are positivistic in their premises in so far as they are attentive to premises at all. The event is an interaction of persons in a psychological sense in relation to a physical environment. With Wieman it is much more. And while he has sought to achieve a manageable grasp of events in their empirical context, he has not excluded this reference to his theistic premise. For the present, one would have to say that the social sciences would not know what to do with Wieman, were they to take him seriously. This situation is by no means permanent. And if the social sciences ever mature in a philosophical direction, they may find constructive significance in Wieman’s arduous efforts to establish an empirical understanding of the structure of value. The neglect of Wieman in the churches presents a problem that is too many-sided to permit adequate analysis. Clearly this situation is not peculiar to Wieman. No philosopher of religion has fared well in contemporary Christianity; for the temper of Christian thought since the inception of theological liberalism has been essentially unphilosophical; and the recent period of reaction against theological liberalism has been characterized by a renewal of the Reformation emphasis which was notoriously resistant to philosophy. It is true that philosophical idealism, both in the form of Absolute Idealism and of Personalism, captured a large proportion of liberal-minded Christians at the close of the 19th century, the influence of which has continued to the present day. Philosophy of religion has made inroads upon the churches in these instances. But an examination of the circumstances under which philosophical idealism interpenetrated Christian thinking would reveal some affinities of mood and of emotional ground which facilitated accommodation between the two. These philosophical systems became apologetic instruments of huge magnitude, serving to restate essential Christian doctrines in new form and with new rational content; yet conveying a sense of continuity with an age-old faith. Wieman’s philosophy of religion was anything but an apologetic instrument. His very premise presupposed an intellectual alienation from the inherited faith. The conviction that the breakdown of a guiding tradition had occurred signaled Wieman to venture upon his search for a secure criterion of value. His intent was not to restore the ancient faith,

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least of all to justify it; rather it was to provide intellectual guidance that would enable contemporary man to take hold of the power of the living God to whom the ancient faiths in their fumbling ways, had borne witness, and upon which modern man stood terrifyingly dependent. Wieman’s zeal to strip this reality bare of illusory meaning, to disclose God as fact, led him to an unrealistic purity of purpose. It was expecting too much that every man in pursuing his faith should become tenaciously attentive to fact. It was equally unrealistic to assume that a religion of adjustment to fact, unattended by a comparable concern with the imaginative grasp of this event, such as the Christian tradition had nurtured, could take hold in any great numbers. The failure of Hinayana Buddhism or of any of the rigorous ascetic efforts to define the rule of life for all men is not unrelated to this philosophical formulation of faith. To expect it to become anything more pervasive than they achieved, would be to ignore the historical evidence which is here in abundance. What Wieman hoped to achieve in his later efforts was to release the Christian faith from its speculative entanglements and to present it in instrumental form as a dynamic of the cultural life of our times. To this end, he was willing to abandon his purely modernistic stand and to embrace the Christian tradition along with its conventional terms. Yet; again, this would be unrealistic unless one were to be oblivious to the emotive associations of this tradition and of these terms. Under conditions that permit of discipline and clarification, the sense for fact in attending to the inherited tradition can be sustained, but in the practical pursuits of religious faith; as in the churches and in the communities, these conditions cannot be continuously sustained. The very appeal to tradition blurs the sense for fact in a way that appears redemptive to the common man. To be compelled to attend to factual meaning in this context that is richly associated with emotionally charged ideas and insights can only create an impression of negativism. It would seem to me that the very setting of the churches in which the appreciative response to historic meanings is made dominant, precludes the intent which is decisive in Wieman’s theology. This points to a weakness in the procedures of the churches, but it points also to an obvious limitation in Wieman’s theology as a function of the churches. It would be inaccurate; however, to say that for this reason Wieman’s philosophy of religion permits no ready implementation in the churches. The preaching of men like Gregory Vlastos, Duncan Iittlefare, Harold Bosley, and Carl Stromee give evidence that it can be effectively employed in homiletic ways. Yet, it becomes clear that when Wieman’s thought is applied to the practical field of worship or of preaching; a new

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kind of ministry emerges. It is explicitly a problem-solving ministry, having little in common with the mood or objective of the conventional church service. The instrumentalism of Wieman’s position becomes more evident than ever when it is considered in relation to the practical expression of religion and his suspicion of the evocative use of words as an imaginative medium in worship looms as a forbidding barrier to the liturgical adaptation of his theology. Were the churches to take Wieman seriously to the extent of accommodating their services or functions to the mode of communication of Christian meanings which his theology requires, they would forthrightly abandon much that is now considered indispensable both in doctrine and in practice. There is little likelihood, therefore, that his influence can shape the churches’ course in any pervasive or extensive way, except, of course, in singular instances. But the force of Wieman’s thought is not to be discounted by this fact. It merely defines the character and limitation of Wieman’s influence among the churches. At its best it can be a persistent cleansing and clarifying force within the church’s life. Its acidulous effect will be to shrink down the sentimental bulk of unfocused zeal to a muscular effort in the direction of clearly envisaged value. The measure of a man’s work is often best delayed until it can be seen against the full account of the years in which his labors took on significance. Men vary in the way they gather significance to their work. Some achieve it through the vigor of their effort in dealing with issues that rise as urgent inquiries of the day. Others come upon it less out of effort than out of the mood into which their thought settles, giving to all thought and action a certain depth and illumination. Hegel and Royce seem to me to be significant in the former sense; Emerson and Santayana in the latter. Wieman’s achievements, strangely enough, partake of both kinds of significance. Like those of Hegel’s and Royce’s, his labors have been effortful. He has been intent upon one objective—to find the meaning of God as an empirical structure of value, and thus to give certainty of a scientific sort to the religious affirmation. This has been an arduous search. With the patience of the scientist, he has ventured one possible formulation after another, tentatively holding to each one as an instrument of truth until he has been led to a more satisfactory formulation. His writings over the years form a trail, strewn with discarded concepts of God and of theories of value. This has been a labor of single-minded devotion to an intellectual task, urged on by a restive religious spirit. Apart from the definitions and criterions, of which there have been many, Wieman’s theology sheds clear shafts of illumination, not only upon the issues of our time, but possibly upon an empirical understanding

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of religion for all time. Reviewers of his writings were often impelled to say that they were shocked into a fresher understanding of an issue even when they heartily disagreed with him. Wieman’s forte was his decisiveness. Not that he was always clear; but the spirit of his assertion was definitive. This sharpened the problem and roused one, either to a defense of one’s own stand or to a further clarification of one’s position. Wieman’s readiness to lay bare the minimum and tentative character of his affirmations opened him up to devastating criticism from those who cherished the possibility of beliefs. Yet the rigor with which Wieman pursued this course, despite the obvious losses, despite its implied iconoclasm, must be accredited a source of intellectual illumination. Here again the illumination is indirect—a negation of positive claims, except what can be minimally affirmed. Nevertheless it provided its own kind of clarification in separating what is shadow from that which is clearly light. Bernard E. Meland

Wieman’s Concept of “Creative Interchange” Stages in the Development of Henry Nelson’s Philosophy of Religion Relating to His Concept of “Creative Interchange” I am impressed by the fact that different ones of us who have been attracted to the thought of Henry Nelson Wieman through the years encountered him at some specific stage of his career and development, and thus tend to see his work and legacy within a restricted range of its dimensions; and possibly of its meaning. In so far as this observation is true, an historical account of stages or cycles of his philosophical explorations and resolutions may help to provide a perspective for interpreting or reassessing one’s own understanding of Wieman’s thought. I am aware of such a periodization of my own understanding of Professor Wieman. For a quarter of a century, beginning in the midnineteen twenties, I was intimately associated with his work, first as his student in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, then as a collaborator with him on writing projects, and later as his colleague on the faculty of the Divinity School. Thus such interpretation of his thought as I am able to give rests heavily upon my understanding of it as it developed during his Chicago years. Although, admissibly, a limited understanding, it does not preclude some awareness of critical developments in his thinking following that period. In fact, I would argue that the import of his most recent formulation of what defines “man’s ultimate commitment— creative interchange,’” rests back upon a rich legacy of insight and exploration, much of which took form during those Chicago years. I shall begin my account of historical developments in Professor Wieman’s thought by relating some reminiscences concerning his coming to Chicago, and the circumstances encountered there affecting his initial stance as a philosopher of religion in a theological school within a university community. I. It was a bright, unseasonably clear and cool mid-summer morning in Chicago during 1926 when I had my first glimpse of Henry Nelson Wieman. A fellow alumnus of Park College and I were walking from Harper Library toward Swift Hall on the University of Chicago campus when a tall, erect, vigorous looking man of rapid gait passed us. “That’s Henry Nelson Wieman!” my friend exclaimed, “a Park alumnus. He’s just written a book that is considered important. The word is that the

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philosophy department of the University of Chicago is interested in him.” As it turned out, it was not the philosophy department, but the Divinity School of the University that was interested in him. That chance meeting of Mr. Wieman in rapid stride, though my first glimpse of him was not my initial encounter with his name or thought. Earlier in the year, Professor Gerald Birney Smith had called our attention to two articles by Wieman, published in The Journal of Religion. G. B. Smith, in his quiet way, commented on the fresh and intriguing approach of Wieman to familiar problems relating to theism. It was clear that Professor Smith had more than a bibliographical interest in Wieman’s work; and of course the thought occurred to some of us, “Why don’t they bring him here?” Wieman at the time was a visiting Professor in McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, on leave from Occidental College in Los Angeles. In the fall of 1926 our Theology Club invited Wieman to speak to a joint assembly of faculty and students of The Divinity School. I learned later that that occasion had been arranged by Dean Shailer Mathews and Gerald Birney Smith by way of presenting Wieman to a wider group of the Divinity School community. I have described that memorable occasion in my Realities of Faith,233 so will not repeat it here, except to say that on that occasion Wieman undertook to interpret that “strange and incomprehensible book,” Religion in the Making, (as it was then regarded) by that equally “strange and esoteric philosopher,” Alfred North Whitehead. With the deftness of an artist, chiseling visible and graphic figures out of a meaningless mass, Wieman performed the miracle of interpreting the book. In retrospect, of course, it was an elementary act of interpreting a document steeped in the lore of the new realism to an audience absorbed in the functional idiom of pragmatism. Those of us who had been slightly initiated in this strange, new realistic lore in G. B. Smith’s seminar, reveled in what we were witnessing; and our enthusiasm mounted on discovering that some of the recalcitrant members of the faculty in the audience shared our enthusiasm. On the way out Dean Mathews said to me, “He’s a brilliant fellow—We must have him.” And so Wieman joined the Divinity School faculty and began his teaching there in the autumn quarter of 1927. In retrospect, no one could have been less prepared to participate in the community of inquiry that confronted him on joining the Divinity School faculty at Chicago during those years. And conversely, no faculty could have been more ill prepared to encounter his mode of thought. The one area of rapport was their mutual concern with the empirical method in religious inquiry. Yet here the point of mutuality led off in divergent directions. For, while each of them had been responsive to John Dewey’s

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Pragmatism, members of the early Chicago School, with some exceptions, had given little attention to philosophical issues implicit in that pragmatic stance. Their orientation had been in the social sciences, specifically sociology, social psychology, cultural anthropology, and the history of religions, particularly as the latter informed biblical history and environmental studies in religion. Wieman, on the other hand, up to that time, having been absorbed in philosophy and problems in philosophy of religion, had given no attention to the social sciences or to the historical method in any of its disciplined forms. Furthermore, Wieman thought and spoke out of a wholly new frontier of inquiry represented by emergent evolution, the new cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead, stemming from insights from the new physics; as well as from an epistemology that partook of the new realism, which he had first encountered at Harvard, and to which he continued to adhere. Wieman was also attentive to studies in Gestalt psychology, and to related studies attentive to the dynamics of human relationships. With this background and orientation of thought, there were few bridges between his mode of reflection and that commonly pursued in the Divinity School, committed as it was to a Modernism that had arisen in response to critical insights stemming from Darwinian evolution, and its application to historical studies, biblical criticism and the social evolution of Christian thought and institutions. Thus Wieman’s coming to Chicago had implications for a reorientation of religious thought that was deep and widespread. The immediate effect of the situation, however, was one of disorientation which nevertheless evoked a confident sense of expectancy. Wieman’s philosophical and theological stance during those early years proved to be even more of an enigma to scholars in religious studies outside of Chicago, notably among eastern schools of theology. For up to that time, the innovating insights and judgments in the sciences and philosophy which had been formative of Wieman’s thought appeared to have had no impact upon critical inquiry in theology, philosophy of religion, or even psychology of religion. In the decade that followed the situation was to change radically. By that time historical liberalism, including its modernist phase, was reflecting insecurity, if not disenchantment, with its own critical approach to religious history and experience. The impact of the Continental theology, initially represented by Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, later to include as well the theologies of Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, began to be felt more seriously in the nineteen thirties, stimulated in part, no doubt, among British and American readers by the publication of English translations of Kierkegaard’s writings. Disillusioned liberals of the period, not able to respond readily or even marginally in many instances, to Barth, or even

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Tillich or Niebuhr, found in Wieman a critical advance beyond liberal idealism. The decisiveness with which Wieman declared the existence of God was the initial stimulus in this direction; but the sense in which God’s otherness was affirmed as well projected the correctives which disillusioned liberals had begun to feel and express. There developed periodic efforts to bring Wieman together with Tillich, Niebuhr, and Brunner in conferences and special study groups with a view to exploring their affinities and differences. To my knowledge, nothing of consequence followed from these sessions, except a sense of bewilderment over the fact that people who appeared to have profound affinities in mood and perspective could be so incommunicable when brought together to discuss their similarities and differences. What was being sensed in this lay response to new voices being heard within the theological community was an affinity, however differently expressed, between the new realism and phenomenology, as these were being articulated in religious and theological inquiry. That rapport has become more readily acknowledged and explored in recent years;234 but in those years, particularly within the theological community, there was little interest in acknowledging it, and no interest in pursuing it. Quite apart from this abortive concern to explore affinities between Wieman’s new realism and the phenomenological, existentialist stance of the continental theologians, Wieman’s own innovating stance and procedure in philosophy of religion began to evoke widespread interest among theological seminaries and centers of religious study in colleges and university in the Midwest, including central-southern areas of Canada, the Southwest and portions of the Far West, wherever a reconception of the liberal legacy in religious thought was afoot. One of the anomalies of Wieman’s thought during the earlier period of his Chicago years was his disdain of intruding Christian imagery and language in the discussion of religious issues or problems. This was of apiece with his preference for discussing religious issues and problems in religious living in their philosophical context; yet it rested back upon his own radical disillusionment with customary ways of expressing or defending Christian faith and experience. The technical expression of this aversion took the form of advancing philosophy of religion, as over against systematic theology, as the only defensible way of exploring and formulating religious issues in an age “when the form of religion is not satisfactory,” and “when its basic structure must be reexamined.” He was to give explicit expression to this stance in an article entitled, “The Need of Philosophy of Religion”235 This stance was not peculiar to Wieman during that period. Others in religious studies outside of seminaries and

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divinity schools were insisting upon the need to give priority to philosophy of religion, some even proposing a moratorium on systematic theology until philosophy of religion could do its work. Wieman was to veer from this anti-theological stance in the late thirties end early forties, as is evidenced in the articles, “Some Blind Spots Removed,”236 and “On Using Christian Words.”237 And ironically, he was to do so in response to the stimulus of the very vein of theological inquiry which the earlier Chicago School had repudiated, and with which he, years later, was to be compared; namely, the Continental theology stemming from Kierkegaard’s influence as expressed chiefly through the theology of Barth, and Reinhold Niebuhr and, to a lesser degree that of Paul Tillich. This interim of rapport was brief, however; and the stimulus Wieman derived from it was more in the nature of impelling him to take account in his terms of problems and issues he had overlooked. Nevertheless, following that brief interim of response to Barth and Niebuhr in the late thirties and early forties, one detects a more direct and explicit use of theological language in discussing religious problems evoked by his own inquiry into value and the human response to the Creative Event. Christian themes such as Judgment and Grace, Sin, Forgiveness, and Redemption enter more readily into the discourse on creativity and value. As a summary characterization of his Chicago years, one could say that Wieman’s thought moved from an explicitly philosophical orientation of religious problems, devoid of explicit reference to cultic themes, pursuing a mode of discourse expressive of philosophy of religion, to what is currently spoken of as philosophical theology. During the earlier phase, his concern was with structures of meaning underlying basic religious affirmations, focusing chiefly upon the reality of God in human experience and the nature of religious living. During his later Chicago years he addressed himself more explicitly to the themes of the Judaic-Christian legacy in the context of the philosophical orientation provided by his conception of the Supreme Value which he now characterized as “Creative Event.” II. Stages in Wieman’s Thought Wieman’s path of inquiry through the years is literally strewn with discarded notions and beliefs which were initially advanced as tentative formulations of a working idea of God or Supreme Value; or of notions ancillary to them. It would not be amiss, in fact, to say that Wieman conceived himself to be simulating the scientist’s role in projecting such tentative formulations. He intimated as much in his first book238 when he wrote that “all knowledge must depend ultimately upon science for science

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is nothing else than the refined process of knowing.239 And on this basis he wistfully envisaged the possibility of developing “a science of God.”240 It was this bent of mind and procedure in Wieman’s inquiry that tripped up many who became enamored of his philosophy of religion at some specific stage, and took that period of formulation as being expressive of Wieman’s continuing thought. Yet, along this trail of discarded notions one comes upon certain peaks of insight which can be taken to be formative in more enduring ways. The initial formulation appears in Religious Experience and Scientific Method (1926)241 and reads as follows: Whatever else the word God may mean, it is a term used to designate that Something upon which human life is most dependent for its security, welfare and increasing abundance. That there is such a Something cannot be doubted. The mere fact that human life happens, and continues to happen, proves that, this Something, however unknown, does certainly exist.242

Although this formula is directed specifically to, inquiry into the meaning of God, the core of themes implicit in subsequent inquiries is clearly enunciated: human security, welfare, and increasing abundance. By themselves these terms appear to express but a minimal, almost material level of human good; but this accords with what Wieman was intent on doing at that time: namely to offer a definition of God addressed to minimal, yet basic human need; presumably by way of countering the prevailing tendency in liberal theologies to relate God to human ideals, even to think of God in terms of man idealized. During those years Wieman’s principal concern seemed to be to cut through what he regarded vapid idealizations and sentimental theories concerning the reality of God and to fix upon what was indispensable to existence, itself. God, he argued, is not merely an idea, or an Ideal, or some cherished illusion expressive of the best we know; “God is real, as real as a toothache.” At this initial stage, Wieman was intent on specifying those basic processes or conditions essential to creatural survival and fulfillment; and to see the Ultimate Source of this security and abundance as a specifiable event. Throughout that early period he described the human response solely in terms of individual religious living, influenced in part, by Whitehead’s memorable statement in Religion in the Making, “Religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.”243 Here again Wieman was voicing his vendetta against liberal religion as he had come to know it through association with personalism on the West Coast. Social idealism, like the vaunting of human ideals, appeared to him to be

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an uncritical projection of human ideals into spheres of public activity. Philosophically, he saw liberalism as but a veiled humanism, devoid of any realistic sense of our human dependence upon realities other than man. The second stage appeared with the Publication of Normative Psychology of Religion.244 By the time he was writing these essays, Wieman had undergone a shift in orientation both with regard to his conception of religious living and his concern with the processes of culture as they bore upon human destiny. It was during this period that he began teaching a course in Religion and Culture; and students were remarking about his frequent allusions to the writings of Karl Marx. Whatever the causes, the shift in orientation was real and pervasive. In his writings at this time, the communal context is more vividly in focus in discussing the marks of religious living. Supreme value is conceived as “growth of meaning in the world.”245 Such growth of meaning is superhuman; though this does not mean that it is supernatural, or “something outside of human life.”246 Growth of meaning, he writes, must always “appropriate the materials of human life.” Yet “It is not the work of human life.” It is superhuman because it operates in ways over and above the plans and purposes of men, bringing forth values men cannot foresee, and often developing connections of mutual support and mutual meaning in spite of, or contrary to, the efforts of men.” 247 On the other hand it would be a mistake to think that men can do nothing about it… In many cases it could not occur at all if men did not assist. 248

What, then, can human beings do, to further the growth of meaning? The chief thing man can do for this sort of growth which is superhuman is to be intelligently and devotedly religious. That means, first of all, to recognize the fact that this creative interaction is going on. It means, in the second place, that he search out this creative interaction in all the specific forms in which it may be found: in friendship between persons, in employer and employee, in relations between producer and consumer, in the class room, in international relations, and in all the relationships of life. It means, in the third place, that he yield himself to this creative interaction in those specific forms in which it is most accessible to him, and let himself be used by it and transformed by it, to the end that it may enrich the world in ways which no man could foresee nor plan nor intelligently direct. Finally men must clear the way for this growth… The fourth kind of work man must do is of great importance. He must clear the way. We have seen that this growth is an extension and multiplying of connections between activities by which they control one another. This involves increasing interdependence. But when diverse activities become interwoven in interdependence, the persons and groups involved may fail

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Wieman concludes his chapter on Supreme Value with a stirring eschatological warning, saying: We today have reached one of those crises in history when old institutions, ideals, and habits are being cracked and shattered by the upthrusting force of the superhuman growth of meaning and value. But these meanings and values cannot be consummated in the experience of human living until this old obstructive debris is taken out of the way. Such is the present state of society. In face of such a situation anyone who thinks that God will do it all and man has nothing to do, is wrapped in a blanket of delusion. It may be that men will refuse to do this work. If so, it will never be done and the great opportunity of this age to experience a superhuman flowering of meaning and value, will pass. In that case future historians will say: A springtime of history hovered near and then departed. After that winter came. 250

Two decades later, on a return visit to Chicago, speaking to one of my classes meeting jointly with Professor Loomer’s students, Professor Wieman stated the warning more decisively. In response to one of the questions raised he remarked: If men and women refuse to do the work which the growth of meaning requires the human community will disappear from the face of the planet. If that happens, the creative event will be thrown back upon less highly developed structures in nature, and the long, arduous process of creative emergence will begin all over again.

A third summit of Wieman’s philosophical pilgrimage appears toward the end of his Chicago years in his formulation of the Creative Event as a four-fold event. By now Wieman seemed to be intent on addressing the empirical happening of creative value more concretely and dynamically within the lived experiences of people and to identify specific occurrences expressive of it. This concern is highlighted in his “Technical Postscript” to the Source of Human Good251 in which he distinguishes his metaphysical stance from that of Contextualism, with which his approach had often been compared; and then clarifies the distinction between “creativity” and “the creative event,” as he uses the terms. In contextualism, change is ultimate. Nothing is immune to change; no structure, order, or form. is permanent. Hence, also, there is no basic unity. Unities come and go, integrate and disintegrate, but nothing continues forever. In contrast to this view, the present writing asserts that there is

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something which retains its identity and its unity through all change in itself and through all change in other things. It is creativity. Creativity characterizes one kind of event. Every event is continuously changing, and so also is the kind of event characterized by creativity. But this kind of event has a certain identity and unity throughout all its manifestations, namely, the character of being creative of all the changing orders of the world so far as they are accessible to human life at all.252

This distinction has the effect of noting the continuity of structure and identity throughout all the processes of change, and thus dissociates his use of the term “creativity” from any implication that creativity and change come to the same thing, or that change, in and of itself, is the leitmotif of his metaphysics. In distinguishing creativity and the creative event he was, in effect, moving toward a differentiation in perspective and discourse, though not in the sense of opposing the one against the other. “Creativity and the creative event,” he wrote, “are inseparable, but the two words carry an important distinction in meaning. Creativity is the character, the structure, or form which the event must have to be creative. Creativity is therefore an abstraction. The concrete reality is the creative event. 253

Both themes are pursued in The Source of human Good; but the distinctive turn in his thought here is in his delineation of the creative event. The complexity of this concept is indicated by the fact that he found it necessary to depict it as embracing four kinds of happenings simultaneously. Briefly stated they are: 1) the emerging of new perspectives; 2) the integrating of these new perspectives with those previously derived; 3) the expanding of the appreciable world; and. 4) the widening and deepening of community. Wieman recognized the omnibus character of his four-fold event. Whenever he stated it, which often had the air of reciting a litany, he would add, “but these four sub-events must be seen as happening simultaneously.” I once remarked half chidingly, after hearing Wieman make this explanation, “That notion of creative event is no simplified, ‘working idea of God,’ nor can it be readily sharpened into an educator’s tool, or into an historian’s criterion. It must remain a philosopher’s instrument; and the instrument of a special hind of philosopher.” I was not questioning the validity of the concept, or its significance. I was merely voicing my own concern about its unwieldiness. And, of course, I was not telling Professor Wieman anything new. Despite its unwieldiness, Wieman undertook to employ this four-fold

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conception of creativity in a variety of contexts. In fact he first announced the formulation at a luncheon meeting in The International House on the University of Chicago campus during a Conference on Religion in Higher Education under the auspices of The Divinity School in 1943. A preliminary formulation of the manuscript that was to become The Source of Human Good provided the basic reading for the conference. The following year, in a paper presented to the Fifth Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion, held in New York City in September 1944, under the title, “Education for Social Direction,” he expounded what he there called a four-fold creativity, as giving rise to creative intercommunication in the classroom, implying a mode of response within all studies that might generate awareness and an appreciative response toward people and their problems in all cultures throughout history and during the current period of change. His depiction of the educational experience as it might occur in Literature and the Fine Arts is expressive of his concerns at this stage: Literature and the other fine arts serve the goal of education by enabling the student to feel the feelings of others. Literature communicates to the present generation and to each individual the thoughts and feelings, the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears, the tragedies and comedies, the visions and regrets of innumerable men living and long dead. Culture is to feel what a great host of other men are feeling and have felt by way of those forms of apprehensions which render such feelings communicable. A great culture is precisely the development and transmission of those forms of apprehension by which each participant can feel that the others have felt and are feeling in the nuance and diversity of vivifying contrasts of quality accessible to human experience. Only as we feel what others feel can each help to sustain and magnify the good of others. Only so can we act intelligently and cooperatively to sustain the good of all. Only with such forms of apprehension can the past endow the present with that abundance of qualitative meaning which enriches life and makes it greatly good. 254 Christ, as here understood, is not merely the man Jesus. Christ is the domination by the creative event over the life of man in a fellowship made continuous in history. How it was achieved we described in Chapter II. Through this domination Christ is the revelation of God to man, the forgiveness of sin extended to all men, and the salvation of the world. This historic consequence of events centering in the life of the man Jesus, and not merely the deeds, teachings, and person of the man, is the hope of the world and the gospel of Christ. God incarnate in these creative events, and not the human nature of the man, is the Christ revealing God, forgiving sin, and saving the world. 255

I had observed several times during our times together that Wieman’s

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theory of value was his alternative to a Christology. It is interesting, therefore, to see here his interpretation of the Christological problem in terms of that theory of value. The fourth and final summit of Wieman’s thought is marked by his formulation of the process of creative interchange. This formulation is at once a distillation from his previous formulations, notably the four-fold event presented in The Source of Human Good, and a redirecting as well as a sharpening of the mode of inquiry in addressing creativity. In the earlier formulations the focal problem was explicitly the creative happening in optimum form as expressed through terms such as “Supreme Value” or “Creative Event” with a corresponding, though less definitive structuring of what “man does” as a condition assuring the fulfillment of creative experience in human life. The first three formulations can be regarded as successive efforts to refine and amplify specifications for attending “that something” upon which human life is most dependent for its “security, welfare and increasing abundance.” At the core of these stages of inquiry is the concern to clarify the meaning of God as an empirical datum. It would be overstating the shift in orientation to say that, in addressing “creative interchange,” Wieman abandoned or relinquished the theistic dimension of his quest; nevertheless there appears in Wieman’s speaking an indifference as to whether explicitly Theistic language is employed in speaking of creative interchange. The simplest way of accounting for his change of stance and way of speaking is to say that this final summit expresses a refocusing of his concern with creativity, addressing more directly the human context in which creativity occurs, and employing resources drawn directly from the sciences, especially the social sciences, in explicating the process of creativity. This transition between his theological discourse and that of the sciences, giving rise to his use of the notion of creative interchange is succinctly stated in an article on “Knowledge, Religious and Otherwise,” published in the Journal of Religion in 1958.256 Here Wieman relates “the saving power revealed in Jesus (as expressed in “the Christ of faith”) to what can be discerned as “the saving power in human life,” to which he gives the caption, “creative interchange.” The difference between them, however, he asserts, is that in the latter knowledge is conveyed. “It must be emphasized,” he writes, “that revelation is not knowledge. Revelation is the conspicuous presence of the saving power in human life. Knowledge of this power is, how it operates, what conditions must be present in order for it to operate most effectively—all this must be discovered by the social sciences, including the kind of knowledge going by the name of ‘common sense’.”257

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Then he adds, We already know something of the conditions which must be present for this creative interchange to operate effectively in saving men from evil and to do good. The traditional church, by observation and experimentation, has gathered considerable knowledge of the required conditions. For example, repentance is one of the required conditions. Much more knowledge is now being gained by studies in interpersonal relations, psychiatry, and clinical psychology.258

The major work in which Wieman employs his notion of creative interchange to expound his philosophy of creativity is Man’s Ultimate Commitment, published in 1958. Here creativity is explicitly presented in the context of interpersonal relations: Creative interchange is that kind of interchange which creates in those who engage in it an appreciative understanding of the original experiences of one another. One gets the new point of the other under such conditions that this original view derived from the other integrates with one’s own personal resources. This integration modifies the view derived from the other in such a way that it becomes a part of one’s own original experience. The understanding of the evils and errors in oneself and in others, brought about by creative interchange, will be prized as highly as the understanding of the virtues and the truths, because the understanding of errors and evils in human life is as great a good as to understand the virtues and the truths. Indeed to understand evil and error is itself virtue and truth.259

Creative interchange, says Wieman, has two aspects which are really two sides of the same thing. One is “the understanding in some measure of the original experience of the other person;” the other is “the integration of what one gets from others” in such a way as to “create progressively the original experience which is oneself. This creative interchange creates the unique individuality of each person while at the same time enabling each to understand the individuality of others.”260 Creative interchange, so represented, is a rich process of integration. It is not limited to acquiring information alone concerning one another. It includes as well receiving from others their “appreciations, sentiments, hopes, fears, memories, regrets, aspirations, joys, sorrows, hates, loves, pieties, and other features of that vast complexity which makes up the total experience of every human being.”261 In focusing upon the process of interchange between people in this profound and intimate manner, Wieman has brought his long-range, arduous inquiry concerning value and human good into more familiar and

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readily recognizable areas of human experience. The datum of creativity is visibly focused within the complexities of the interpersonal encounter, between human beings, between communities, conceivably, even, between cultures varying widely in historical legacies as well as the felt experiences within the immediacies of history. Whoever has pursued the import of appreciative awareness in self-understanding, or in understanding communities and in awakening an informed and sensitive communal response can identify with what is being sought here. Much that was wistfully appealed to in Buber’s I-Thou encounter, especially as he sought to develop this notion, within educational experiences in Between Man and Man262 appears to have affinities with Wieman’s concern, however differently formulated or directed. What has been sought after in much of psychiatry in recent years, notably by Karl Menninger, Carl Rogers, and Barry Stack Sullivan, would seem to have affinity with such interchange. What Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the historian of religion, has been pursuing through the years, and more recently formulated as an appreciative interchange between peoples of various historic faiths, partakes of both the mood and mode of reflecting upon human good discerned in the criteria of creative interchange. I mention these parallel efforts, not to assimilate Wieman’s notion of creative interchange to this wider body of literature, but to indicate that, when expressed as creative interchange, Wieman’s thought immediately assumes wider currency and proportions of meaning, as well as a more ambiguous fringe of implication and application, despite Wieman’s sharpened formulation. III. It would be a distortion of Wieman’s thought, I think, to view these several summits in any simple order of ascendancy, thus making “creative interchange” the final summit substantively as well as serially. There will be differences of opinion on this point. I express merely a judgment of my own. Creative interchange, as I have said, is easily the more readily available notion precisely because it coheres most readily with processes which can be envisaged, recognized, and addressed by other disciplines, notably the social sciences, including psychology, education, and communications. It thus accomplishes an objective toward which Wieman pointed his efforts at the very outset of his professional inquiry. In so far as that objective is to be considered a major thrust in Wieman’s long-range effort, the formulation of the notion creative interchange does, indeed, constitute a climactic point in Wieman’s years of inquiry. By itself, however, it aunt be considered instrumental to his major objective, his major objective being to identify:

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Meland’s Unpublished Papers …what operates in human life to transform man as he cannot transform himself to save him from evil and lead him to the best that human life can ever attain, provided that man commits himself in faith to this reality and meets the other conditions demanded.263

To be sure this efficacy is implicit in the process of creative interchange; yet, as presented in this formulation, that dimension of the event “which is more than we can think,” implying a resource which is more than our human efforts, and which we encounter as a judging and redeeming resource in interpersonal relationships and the interchange of meaning that transpires, is muted. It is interesting that in this context the terms “creative event” drop out and are replaced by the abstraction, “creativity.” Undoubtedly this is a semantic adjustment in the interest of inter-disciplinary communication. Creative event, pointing up the presence and functioning of a good not our own, concretely at work in the creative interchange within the lived experiences, intrudes a surd to which disciplined inquiry will not, or cannot, address itself. The effect of accommodating the conception of what transpires in occurrences of creative interchange to the discourse of the disciplines is, I would say, from Wieman’s own perspective, to overstate the meaning and import of the human encounter as creative interchange. To be sure, the abstract term “creativity” which serves point to an overview, expressive of that which is “more than as can think,” provides a backdrop of meaning which can be insinuated into the concrete event, if desired; but the way in which it is presented in this context tends to make it optional in any critical consideration of what occurs in creative interchange. My point in these concluding remarks is not to discredit the formulation of creative interchange, but to call attention to the truncation of meaning that is implicit in the methodology by which it is attended and discussed. In effect, therefore, the formulation “creative interchange” exercises a secularizing of what Wieman sought to set forth in the three former formulations. Conceivably this was Wieman’s intent, undertaken in the interest of testing, clarifying, and communicating as knowledge what might otherwise, be acknowledged only as an act of awareness or as an affirmation of faith. Bernard E. Meland Professor Emeritus The Divinity School The University of Chicago

NOTES

Notes are numbered consecutively for ease in referencing. Chapter headings are placed before the notes that apply to that particular chapter. Attachment to Life 1. Havelock Ellis, The New Spirit. New York: The Modern Library. pp. 286–88. 2. de la Mare, Walter, Early-One Morning-in Spring, New York: Macmillan, 1935. p. 305. 3. Walter de la Mare, “Some One.” 4. John Masefield, from Sea Fever. Man’s Religious Outreach 5. cf. George Foote Moore, Birth and Growth of Religion. 6. The Dance of Life. 7. Faith, Hope, and Charity in Primitive Religion, pp. 53–54. 8. Primitive Culture. 9. The Golden Bough. 10. Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. 11. The Mystic Rose. 12. The Development of Religion. 13. Psychology of Religious Experience. 14. Psychology of Religion. 15. The Quest of the Ages. See also Man’s Search for the Goodlife. 16. cf. Tillich: The Religious situation; also article by Tillich: “Protestantism in the Present World-Situation,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 43. pp. 236–48, September, 1937; also: Niebuhr, Pauck, Miller, The Church Against the World. 17. Two Sources of Morality and Religion. 18. Meaning of God in Human Experience. pp. 230–32. 19. A Common Faith. 20. Whitehead, Religion in the Making. 21. Reason in Religion. 22. Meaning of God in Human Experience. 23. The Birth and Growth of Religion. 24. The Mystical Life. Primary Religion 25. New York: Macmillan, 1929. 26. Religion in the Making. New York: Macmillan, 1926. 27. Reason in Religion. New York: Scribners. 28. Religion in the Making.

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29. Confessions, I.V.5, (Everyman’s Edition). 30. See Santayana, Winds of Doctrine, Chapter II; Paul Elmer More, The Catholic Faith; and John Crowe Ransome, God Without Thunder. 31. G. B. Smith’s Changing Theology and Social Idealism has an illuminating discussion of this point. Praise and Relinquishment 32. Translation by Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, London: Macmillan & Company, 1883. Reprinted in Paul Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi. Trans. Louise Seymour. Houghton. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1917. pp. 305–306. 33. Margaret Prescott Montague, “Twenty Minutes of Reality.” The Atlantic Monthly. 34. Anonymous, In The Shadow. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1924, p. 1. 35. Ibid., p. 2. 36. Ibid., p. 13. 37. Ibid., p. 15–16. 38. Ibid., p. 16–17. 39. Anonymous, In The Shadow. New York: Henry Holt & Co., p. 20. 40. Ibid., p. 21. 41. Ibid., p. 39. 42. Ibid., pp. 39–40. 43. Ibid., pp. 46–47. 44. Ibid., p. 55. 45. Ibid., p. 74. Reality in Process 46. The Quest of the Ages. 47. Religion. 48. cf. Calhoun’s articles in Christendom; Buckham’s book, The Humanity of God; Macmurray. Reason and Emotion: Interpreting the Universe. Religion Rooted in Nature 49. T’an Chungyo, from Illustrated Guide Book, by Huang Shou-Fu and T’an Chungyo, 1887–91. Translated by Dryden Linsley Phelps. Harvard-Yenching Institute Series. 50. Hinduism is too diverse and multifarious in character to be characterized in this general manner. Actually there persisted in the popular faith, even after asceticism had set in, a zestful interest in life. Their four stages of life enabled vast numbers to pursue a normal, robust life, even though many others, in advanced years or retired from active affairs of society, were to take to the disciplined and solitary existence of monastery and forest. A similar qualification holds for certain periods of Christianity. For side by side with the ascetic strain, there developed the life of secular society. We may not overlook the fact, however, that the religious ideal that inspired the elect of both faiths and which always stood forth as the norm for the common life was an otherworldly one. And in the long run, this shaped the character of their religious mood and outreach. 51. Case, S. J., Social Origins of Christianity; Evolution of Early Christianity; Experiences with the Supernatural in Early Christian Times; Angus, S., The

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Environment of Early Christianity; The Mystery Religions and Christianity; The Religious Quests of the Graeco-Roman World. 52. Philosophy of Religion. New York: Scribners. 1937. 53. See Otto, M. C., Things and Ideals, and Sellars, R. W., Next Step in Religion. 54. See Haydon, A. E., The Quest of the Ages, and The Search for the Good Life. When Religion Uproots Life 55. Angus, Environment of Early Christianity. 56. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, pg. 159. 57. Ibid., pp. 153–55. 58. The Atlantic Monthly, June, 1932. 59. What You Owe Your Child, New York: Harpers, 1935. 60. In The Shadow. New York: Holt, 1924. Mysticism in Modern Terms 61. Religious Experience and Scientific Method, p. 311f. 62. See the Chapter on The New Language in Religion, pp. 26–27. The Controlling Concept of Our Times 63. Gestalt Psychology, quoted by Boodin in the Three Interpretations of the Universe. New York. 1935. 64. After I had written tis section, I came upon an identical observation by Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization. p. 37. The Nature of Man 65. I do not mean to imply a cosmic unity in the sense of Spinoza or Fechner. Perhaps the notion of a growing unity within a chaos of pluralistic forces gives a truer picture of the environing reality. Art, Religion and the Cultural Mood 66. Quoted by B. Roland Lewis in Creative Poetry, Stanford University, California, 1931. p. 317. 67. Walter R. Spalding, Music: an Art and a Language, Boston: Arthur P. Schmidt Co., 1920. p. 2. 68. Ibid., p, 20. Italics mine. 69. I should say that Bixler is using a figure of speech here to refer to romantic abandon (blessings of the deep) and classical form (blessings of heaven). 70. “Religious Insights and the Aims of higher Education” in The Hazen Conferences Bulletin, 1942. p. 40. 71. Furniture Treasury, Vol. III. Old America Co., 1935. 72. cf. The Education of Henry Adams. NY, 1907 (privately printed). Modern Library Books edition, 1931. 73. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1954. 74. See L. M, Hacker and B. B. Kendrick, The United States Since 1865; Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Modern America, 1927; and A. M. Schlesinger, The Rise of the City, 1933. A brief discussion of the Industrial Age appears in H. U. Faulkner, American Political and Social History, Chapters XXV–XXIX.

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75. As You Like It, Act. II. 76. A contemporary of Shakespeare, Thomas Heywood (1612) had written in Apology for Actors, “The world’s a theatre, the earth a stage, Which God and Nature do with actors fill.” 77. cf. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. 78. The Divine Comedy. 79. Paradise Lost. 80. cf. Bertrand Russell, A Freeman’s Worship in Mysticism and Logic. 81. The Modern Temper. New York: Harcourt Brace. 1929, pp. 117–18. 82. James Oppenheim, from “Morning Song,” in The Sea, NY: Knopf. 1924. 83. Ibid. 84. Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought. cf. Ethics and Civilization. 85. Art is Action. New York: Harper, 1939. pp. 80–86. cf. also Daniel Gregory Mason, The Dilemma of American Music. New York: 1928; and George Dyson, The New Music, London: Oxford University Press. 1924. 86. Introduction to Selected Poems by William Vaughn Moody. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1931. 87. Modern Art, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954. pp. 177–8. 88. Poetry and the Individual. New York: Putnam, 1906. pp. 107–9; 113. Towers of the Mind 89. cf. “The Faith of a Mystical Naturalist” Review of Religion. 90. The History of Materialism. 91. Literature and Dogma; cf. also God and the Bible. 92. cf. Essay on Radical Empiricism In A Pluralistic Universe. 93. Yale Review. 94. School and Society, November 14, 1936, Vol. 44. 95. Vol. XIV, No. 2, February 1943. 96. Considerable effort has been made both by Bernard M. Loomer and Daniel D. Williams to pursue such cooperative inquiry with representatives of the dialectical school. cf. Loomer, “Neo-naturalism and Neo-Orthodoxy,” Journal of Religion, and Christian Faith and Process Philosophy, Journal of Religion, July, 1949. cf. D. D. Williams, and God’s Grace and Man’s Hope. New York, NY: Harper, 1949. 97. cf. “The Thought of Emil Brunner; An Evaluation.” Journal of Bible and Religion. July 1948. Radical Empiricism 98. Italics mine. The Pathology of Form and Symbol 99. Emmet, Dorothy, The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking. London: Macmillan, 1975. 100. Adventure of Ideas, p. 214. 101. Lamprecht, Serling P., Our Religious Traditions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950, pp. 44–45. 102. A Survey of Protestant Theology in Our Day. Westminster, Maryland: The

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Newman Press., 1954. pp. 42–43. 103. The Hoover Lectures, 1954. “Ecumenicity and the Thought of Paul Tillich.” cf. also, Tillich, Systematic Theology I, p. 85. 104. Tillich, Paul, The Protestant Era, Translated with a Concluding Essay by James Luther Adams. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948, pp. xiv–v. The Roots of Religious Naturalism 105. Emergent Evolution and Life, Mind, and Spirit. 106. Alexander, S., Space, Time, and Deity. 107. Smuts, Jan, Holism and Evolution. 108. Nature, Man, and God. 109. Science and the Modern World; Religion in the Making; Process and Reality; Adventures of Ideas. 110. Religious Experience and Scientific Method; The Wrestle of Religion with Truth; The Growth of Religion, Part II; and The Source of Human Good. 111. Beyond Humanism; Man’s Vision of God; The Divine Relativity. 112. The Enduring Quest. 113. The Emerging Christian Faith. 114. The Religious Way, “What is Love,” Christendom, Autumn, 1925; with Scott. Toward a Christian Revolution. 115. The Quest for Religious Certainty; The Philosophical Heritage of the Christian Faith. 116. “Can Philosophy of Religion be Empirical?” Journal of Religion, Vol. XIX (1939), pp. 315–29, Vol. XX (1940), pp. 241–56. 117. The Theological Significance of the Method of Empirical Analysis in the Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead. (Doctoral Thesis); “Neo-Naturalism and NeoOrthodoxy.” Journal of Religion, April, 1948. 118. “Theology and Truth,” Journal of Religion, Vol. XXVI (1942); “The Perplexity and the Opportunity of the Liberal Theology in America.” Journal of Religion, Vol. XXV (1945); God’s Grace and Man’s Hope (forthcoming book). 119. Modern Man’s Worship; Seeds of Redemption; America’s Spiritual Culture; The Reawakening of the Christian Faith. 120. Social Salvation; Christian Realism. 121. Theism and the Modern Mood; A Psychological Approach to Theology; Realistic Theology. 122. (See articles in Christian Century regarding Wieman, 1927f); What is Christianity? 123. God and the Common Life. See also “Conversations” with Wieman, Christendom. 124. The Christian Faith; Faith and Reason; Evil and the Christian Faith. 125. Reality. 126. The Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead, and The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking. 127. Experience and Nature, and The Quest for Certainty. 128. Mind, Self and Society; The Philosophy of the Present; and The Philosophy of the Act.

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129. The Universe Around Us; The Mysterious Universe; Physics and Philosophy. 130. The Nature of the Physical World. 131. B. E. Meland. “The New Language in Religion,” Religion in the Making, May, 1942. 132. James. A Pluralistic Universe, p. 234. 133. Speculations. See also his preface to Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics, NY: Putnam, 1912. 134. Meland, B. E. Seeds of Redemption, pp. 121–22. The New Realism in Religious Inquiry 135. Der Romerbrief. Bern: Baschlin, 1919; Trans. Hoskyns, London: Oxford, 1933. 136. Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie. Munchen: Kaiser, 1925; Trans. Douglas Morton, Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1928. 137. Tillich, Paul. The Protestant Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948. p. 207. 138. Tillich has acknowledged this in part. See his essay. “Existential Philosophy,” Journal of The History of Ideas. 139. cf. Bultmann’s preface to the 1950 re-issue of Harnack’s Das Wesen des Christentmus. See also Wilhelm Pauck’s inaugural address. “The Significance of Adolf von Harnack’s Interpretation of Church History,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, Special Issue, January 1954. pp. 13–54. Excerpts from both references appear in my “Renascent Protestantism,” The Christian Century. Vol. LXXI, No. 15, April 14, 1954. 140. The Protestant Era, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948, p. 76. 141. Ibid., p. 67. 142. I mean to designate here the explicitly liberal or modernist theologies of the nineteenth century through the nineteen twenties. This would include pragmatic liberals and modernists of the early Chicago School as well as continental and American Ritschlians, Personalists, and Religious Humanists. For, despite their objections to certain expressions of philosophical idealism, especially to Absolute Idealism, all of the theologies shared and participated in the imagery and fundamental notions of idealism, either in the form of a moral idealism in which “self-experience: was made the normative base (Ritschianism, Personalism, Religious Humanism), or of a conceptualism or a conceptual theism (as in Shailer Mathews and Edward Scribner Ames). In all of these theologies, one could say that the logic of their position le to humanism, though, with the exception of the Religious Humanists, the sensibilities of faith restrained them and held them within the bounds of some form of theism. I think a careful reading of these representative systems of liberal thought, with particular attention to the problem of God in liberal theologies, cannot fail to bring one to this judgment. I find the one exception to be that of Schleiermacher, who in a remarkably perceptive way, was able to convey in his notion of “absolute dependence” the sense of otherness that seemed to escape the enclosure of both intellectualism and moralism. Rudolf Otto has noted this point in saying that it was Schleiermacher who rediscovered “the Sensus Huminis.” (cf. Religious Essays: A sequel to the Idea of the Holy. London:

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Oxford, 1931. pp. 68ff.) 143. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920. 144. Religious Experience and Scientific Method. New York: Macmillian, 1926. pp. (citation incomplete) 145. Ibid., pp. (citation incomplete) 146. New York: Macmillan, 1928. 147. cf. Niebuhr, Reinhold, “What the War Did to my Mind,” The Christian Century, Vol. 45, Sept. 27, 1928, pp. 1161–63. See also, his article, “Barth– Apostle of the Absolute;” Ibid., Vol. 45, Dec. 13, 1928, pp. 1550–51. 148. Journal of Religion, Vol. XI, January 1931, pp. 1–19. Christian Century, Vol. 51, December 5, 1934, pp. 1550–51. 149. Kerygma and Myth. Ed. By H. W. Bartach. (Tr. by R. H. Fuller). London: S. P. C. K., 1953. pp. 19–20. 150. cf. Bergson, H. Creative Evolution. New York: Holt, 1911; James, William, Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longmans, 1912, esp. pp. 238ff. 151. The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, Edited by Paul A. Schilpp. New York: Tudor, 1951, p. 684. 152. Wieman, H. N. The Source of Human Good. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946, pp. 277–78. 153. Ibid., pp. 278–79. 154. E. A. Burtt’s paraphrase of Spinoza in Types of Religious Philosophy. New York: Harpers, p. 185. 155. cf. Journal of Religion and Psychology. Vols: Hall, G. Stanley, Adolescence; Studies on the Psychology of Religion. 1899; Louba, James, Studies in the Psychology of Religious Phenomena, 1896; James, William, Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902; Coe, G. A., The Spiritual Life, 1900; Ames, E. S., The Psychology of Religious Experience, 1910 were some of the early and important works in this transition. 156. cf. Bowne, B. F. The Philosophy of Theism, 1902; and Royce, Josiah, The World of the Individual, 1901. 157. See the writings of Shailer Mathews and other members of the early Chicago School. Glimpses of India’s Faith and Culture 158. Since writing those words I have noted a number of references in the American press to the possibility of Nehru resigning in the near future. And the kind of successor that appears most likely seems to be one who will concentrate on the internal affairs of India, rather than the international role which Nehru has assumed. Some Concluding Observations Concerning Theological Method 159. cf. The Protestant Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948. pp. 13–4. The Changing Role of Reason & Revelation in Western Thought 160. Actually liberation from church authority was not consciously to the fore in Descartes’ mind. His problem was that of certainty, which in a way implied the rejection of the assurance which church authority provided, as well as of the

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formula “believe that you may understand.” Descartes reversed this injunction, pursuing instead the path of doubt until doubt, itself, was arrested by what could be affirmed. His formula became, “Doubt that you may know.” 161. From a conversation with Canon Raven. 162. An Historian’s Approach to Religion. 163. The Decay and Restoration of Civilization; Chapter I. 164. Process and Reality. 165. Religious Language, and in an address in reply to H. D. Lewis at Oxford University, Dec. 2, 1960. Empirical Theology at Chicago 166. cf. Case’s article on Christology in JR. 167. cf. Realities of Faith, Chapter ?? 168. This note is beyond the bottom of the page in the existent copy. 169. This note is beyond the bottom of the page in the existent copy. 170. cf. Religious Awareness and Knowledge. 171. A thorough canvas of this earlier phase of Wieman’s thought appears in a doctoral thesis by Charles Rick, in which a full analysis of Wieman’s doctoral thesis and the persisting concern with value that follows from it is given. 172. Religious Expression and Scientific Method. 173. This note is beyond the bottom of the page in the existent copy. 174. Varieties of religious Experience. Creativity in William James 175. Psychology, I. New York: Holt, 1890, p. 403. 176. Ibid., p. 420. 177. Ibid., p. 448. Italics mine. 178. Pluralistic Universe. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909, pp. 388–90. 179. Ibid., p. 392. 180. Some Problems of Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. 1911. p. 218. 181. Ibid., p 214. 182. Ibid., p 214–15. Some Autobiographical Reflections 183. Paper presented at the opening session of a seminar on Faith and Culture at Union Theological Seminary, New York. February 1969. The Significance of Henry Nelson Wieman 184. cf. Religious Experience and Scientific Method, pp. 150ff. 185. Contemporary American Theology, p. 347. 186. It is in this respect that Wieman’s work differed chiefly from that of D. C. Macintosh. cf. the latter’s Theology as an Empirical Source and The Reasonableness of Christianity. 187. cf. Wieman’s review of Leuba’s God or Man and his response to M. C. Otto. 188. Sources of Human Good, p. 187. 189. An Outline of Christian Theology.

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190. “Theological Reconstruction,” in The Christian Point of View. 191. Reconstruction in Theology. 192. Christian Theology in Outline. 193. Christianity in its Modern Expression. 194. The Faith of Modernism. 195. Psychology if Religious Experience. 196. Religion. 197. The Quest of the Ages. 198. Journal of Religion, 1925. 199. Religious Experience and Scientific Method, p. 9. 200. “A Workable Idea of God,” Religious Education. Vol. 23. p. 960. 201. cf. “Religious Values and the Practical Absolute.” International Journal of Ethics, 32: 347–67, and “The Validity of the Idea of God,” Journal of Religion, 1:462–81; Religion, Holt, 1929. 202. A Common Faith. 203. On these grounds he opposed the view of Shailer Mathews as well as that of Edward Scribner Ames, despite their affinities. 204. Religious Experience and Scientific Method. p. 273. 205. Ibid., p. 282. 206. Ibid., p. 283. 207. Religious Experience and Scientific Method. 208. Methods of Private Religious Living. 209. He began this task seriously in his chapter “God and Value” which is one of the chapters in Religious Realism, Edited by D. C. Macintosh, New York: Macmillan, 1931, and completed his conclusions fifteen years later in The Source of Human Good, University of Chicago Press, 1946. 210. cf. Dorothy Emmet, The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking. 211. Clarence H. Hamilton, “Idealistic and Pragmatic Interpretations of Religion.” Journal of Religion, Vol. 1, p. 625. 212. “Is the Group Spirit Equivalent to God for all Practical Purposes?” Journal of Religion, Vol. 1, p. 487. 213. Contemporary American Theology, V. Ferm, editor, New York: Round Table Press, 1932, p. 344. 214. The Meaning of God in Human Experience, Part IV. 215. Religion in the Making. pp. 16f. 216. The Wrestle of Religion with Truth, pp. 71–73. 217. Ibid., p. 73. 218. Perry, R. B., The Thought and Character of William James, Boston: Little Brown, 1935. Vol. 1. 219. “A workable Idea of God,” Religious Education, Vol. 23, pp. 960–66. 220. Process and Reality. N. Y. Macmillan, 1929. 221. Contemporary American Theology, p. 347. 222. Charles Clayton Morrison, “The Significance of Professor Wieman,” The Christian Century, April 24, 1929, p. 545. 223. Charles Clayton Morrison, “Mr. Wieman Defines God,” The Christian Century, September 28, 1932, p. 1166.

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224. Ibid., p. 1167. 225. The Word of God and the Word of Man, p. 153. 226. Ibid., p. 110. 227. Dogmatics, Vol. I. 228. The Christian Century, January 25, 1939, pp 116ff. 229. Ibid,, p. 116. 230. H. N. Wieman, “On Using Christian Words,” Journal of Religion, Vol. XX. July 1940, pp. 257–269. 231. The World Tomorrow, Vol. 11, p. 280. 232. Wieman, H. N. “Wanted: A Structure of Religious Thought for Higher Education.” Religious Education, 35:26–28. Wieman’s Concept of “Creative Interchange” 233. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962. pp. 109–11. 234. cf. John Wild, The Challenge of Existentialism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1955; Schubert Ogden, The Reality of God. New York: Harper and Row, 1963; George Guthrie, “The Importance of Sartre’s Phenomenology for Christian Theology,” Journal of Religion 47. 1967. pp. 10–25; Bernard E. Meland, “Can Empirical Theology Learn Something from Phenomenology,” in The Future of Empirical Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. pp. 283–305; “The New Realism in Religious Inquiry,” Encounter. Vol. 31. No. 4. Autumn, 1970. pp 311–24. 235. “The Need of Philosophy in Religion.” Journal of Religion. XIV. October 1934. pp. 379–95. Reprinted in American Philosophies of Religion. by Henry Nelson Wieman and Bernard E. Meland. Chicago: Willet Clark & Co. 1936; New York: Harpers, 1948. 236. The Christian Century. LVI. January 27, 1939. pp. 116–18. 237. The Journal of Religion. XX: 3. July 1940, pp. 257–69. 238. Religious Experience and Scientific Method. New York: Macmillan Co., 1926, p. 9. 239. Ibid., p. 23. 240. Ibid. 241. New York: Macmillan, 1926. 242. Ibid., p. 9. 243. New York: Macmillan, 1926, p. 17. 244. With Regina Wescott Wieman. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co. 1935, Chapter III. 245. Ibid., pp. 51ff. 246. Ibid., p 52. 247. Ibid. 248. Ibid. 249. Ibid., pp. 60f. 250. Ibid., p. 62. 251. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1946. 252. The Source of Human Good. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946. pp. 298–99.

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253. Ibid., p. 299. 254. “Education for Social Direction,” in Approaches To National Unity. Fifth Symposium, Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life. Ed. By Lyman Bryson, Louis Finkelstein, Robert M. MacIver. 1945. Distributed by Harper & Brothers. New York, p. 948. 255. The Source of Human Good. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946. p. 269. 256. Journal of Religion. Vol. XXXVIII, January, 1958. No. 1. pp. 12–28. 257. Ibid., p. 27. Italics mine. 258. Ibid. 259. Man’s Ultimate Commitment. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958. p 22. 260. Ibid., pp. 22–23. 261. Ibid., p. 23. 262. Between Man and Man. Trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith. London: Kegan Paul. 1947. 263. Wieman, Henry Nelson. “Knowledge, Religious and Otherwise,” Journal of Religion. Vol. XXXVIII, January, 1958, No. 1, p. 27.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Meland, Bernard E. America’s Spiritual Culture. New York: Harper , 1948. —. Faith and Culture. London: George Allen Unwin, Ltd., 1955. —. Fallible Forms and Symbols. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977. —. Higher Education and the Human Spirit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. —. Modern Man’s Worship. London: Harper , 1934. —. Seeds of Redemption. New York: Macmillan, 1947. —. The Realities of Faith. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962. —. The Reawakening of Christian Faith. New York: Macmillan, 1949. —. The Secularization of Modern Cultures. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. —. Write Your Own Ten Commandments. Chicago: Willett, Clark & Co., 1938. Meland, Bernard E., and Henry N. Wieman. American Philosophies of Religion. Chicago: Willett, Clark & Co., 1936. For a complete list of Bernard E. Meland ‘s articles see the following: Inbody, Tyron. The Constructive Theology of Bernard Meland, Postliberal Empirical Realism. pp. 235–248, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1955.

INDEX Absolute, 67, 99, 141, 191–3, 196, 201, 206, 353–5, 375, 407, 479, 536, 543, 582, 585–6, 608, 611, 617, 629, 652, 655 ADAMS, Henry, 129 ADAMS, James Luther, 651 AESCHYLUS, 650 ALEXANDER, Hartley Burr, 99, 137– 8, 154, 607 ALEXANDER, Samuel, 49, 91, 221, 325, 372–3, 380, 386, 422, 594, 604, 651 America, 14, 76, 108, 110, 115–6, 129–31, 173, 193, 234, 262, 264, 271, 284–5, 296, 300, 321–2, 359–60, 410, 412, 422, 428–9, 509, 532, 603, 622, 649 American, ix, 61–2, 75, 90, 99, 112, 115–6, 118–9, 129, 131, 151, 154, 157, 160, 169, 175–6, 192– 3, 221–2, 243, 250, 265, 269, 279, 289, 292, 296, 300, 315, 321, 324–5, 337–8, 364, 366, 383, 395, 404, 409–10, 413–4, 428–30, 440, 443, 452, 478–9, 493, 496, 509, 522–3, 540, 601, 603, 608, 616, 620–1, 623, 627, 635, 652–3 AMES, Edward Scribner, 13, 30, 49, 51–2, 86, 119, 142–4, 150–1, 197, 322, 363, 368, 375, 420–1, 477, 480–3, 493–502, 539, 544, 608, 611, 616, 622, 652–3, 655 ANGUS, Samuel, 648–9 APOSTLE PAUL. See Paul ARISTOTLE, 67, 118, 335–6, 436, 447, 620 ARNDT, Ed, 170 ARNOLD, Charles Harvey, 414, 416–

7, 493, 498 ARNOLD, Matthew, 151, 190, 197, 321, 648 AUBREY, Edwin Ewart, 316, 539 BABBITT, Irving, 56–7 BACH, Johann Sebastian, 100, 132, 163, 525 BACON, Francis, 1st Viscount St. Alban, 178, 182, 335, 365, 446 BAKER, Herschel C., 135, 317 Baptist, 289, 467–8 Baptists, 286, 414, 468–9 Barrows Lectures, 247, 258, 262–3, 297, 330 BARTACH, H. W., 653 BARTH, Karl, 34, 169, 171, 185, 190, 199, 233–4, 237–9, 244, 259, 279, 307, 310–3, 322, 326, 329–30, 335, 337–40, 342, 344– 5, 351, 354, 430–1, 435–6, 442, 491, 500, 538, 543, 559, 582, 584, 606, 621–6, 635, 637, 653 BASTIDE, Roger, 23 BEETHOVEN, Ludwig van, 124–5, 132, 163 BENET Stephen Vincent, 136 William Rose, 136 Bengal (India), 255–6, 286, 290 BENNETT, John G., 116–7 BENTON, Edwin Dewitt, 363 BENTON, Thomas Hart, 136 BERGSON, Henri-Louis, 16, 22, 202, 207, 222–5, 229–30, 234, 239, 241–2, 259, 322, 324–5, 336, 351, 355, 369, 372–4, 380–1, 383–4, 386, 393, 402, 406, 422, 435–6, 454–5, 489, 542, 558, 570, 589, 601, 604–5, 612, 623,

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652, 653 BERNARD of Clairvaux, 215 BINOT, William Rose, 123 BIXLER, Julius Seelye, 124, 391, 397, 649 BOAS, Franz, 154 BONAVENTURA Francesco Cavalieri, 215 BOODIN, John E., 91, 229–30, 649 BOSLEY, Harold Augustus, 221, 630 BOWNE, B. P., 193, 653 BRADFORD, Gamaliel, 403 BRAHMA, Nada, 100 BRAHMA, Pyort I., 100 BRAHMS, Johannes, 100–1, 132, 163, 525 BROAD, C. I., 402 BROOKMEYER, H. C., 479 BROWN, William Adams, 117, 622 BRUNNER, Heinrich Emil, 34, 68, 169, 171–3, 176–9, 185, 190, 199–200, 236, 259, 310, 351, 354, 430, 434–5, 442, 491, 500, 543, 559, 582–3, 635–6, 650 BRYSON, Lyman, 657 BUBER, Martin, 322, 436, 442, 538, 645 BUCKHAM, John Wright, 648 BUDDHA, 16 Buddhism, 14–6, 22–3, 61–2, 254, 259–60, 263, 522, 630 Buddhist, 1, 61, 154, 259, 263, 300– 1 BULTMANN, Rudolf Karl, 240–2, 322, 379, 442, 491, 565, 652 Burma, 14, 295, 297, 299, 330 BUSHNELL, Horace, 72, 90, 193–5, 321, 479 CAIRD Edward, 321 John, 321 CALHOUN, Robert I., 221, 648 CALVIN, John, 34, 237, 239, 337, 339, 488, 500, 611–2, 621 Calvinistic, 229, 239, 295, 442 CAMPBELL, Reginald John, 192, 360

CAMUS, Albert, 543 Capitalism, 15, 295 CAREY, William, 286 CASE, Shirley Jackson, 142, 369–71, 414, 416–7, 426, 441, 473, 480– 1, 648, 654 Caste (system in India), 248–51 Catholic, 27, 29, 65, 82, 101, 115, 128, 213, 215, 218, 266, 337, 347, 491 Catholic Church, 27 Ceylon, 14 CÉZANNE, Paul, 92 CHAPIN, Francis Stuart, 166 CHARMING, William Ellery, 321 Chicago School, 151, 169, 322, 368–70, 373, 378, 380, 405, 409– 14, 416–20, 422–6, 429, 433, 442, 463, 465, 470, 473, 491, 501, 608, 635, 637, 652–3 China, 1, 14, 61–2 Chinese, 1, 61, 303 CHRIST, 1, 16, 54, 141, 192, 209–10, 237, 245, 278, 299, 304–5, 307– 13, 315, 325, 340–1, 344, 361, 367, 374, 479, 493, 516, 519, 563, 572–6, 578–9, 584, 593, 598–600, 626, 642–3 Christian, 1, 14, 21, 27, 33–4, 44, 47–8, 62, 64, 66–8, 70, 82, 89, 96–7, 102, 108, 112, 118–9, 141– 2, 145–6, 150, 152, 155, 163, 171–7, 180, 182–3, 185, 192–3, 195, 199, 209–10, 213–5, 218–9, 234–8, 240–5, 248, 252–4, 259, 262–3, 267–8, 273, 275–97, 299– 310, 312–5, 319, 322–3, 325–7, 329–33, 336, 342–4, 355, 367–9, 371–3, 377–8, 405, 412, 414–20, 424, 427–30, 434–7, 440–2, 446, 449, 463, 468, 470–6, 480–1, 486, 493, 499, 504–5, 512, 516– 7, 519–26, 533, 538, 557, 560, 565, 570, 572–8, 580, 582, 584– 5, 587–8, 593, 595, 598–600, 603, 618, 622, 625–6, 629–31,

Index 635–7, 648, 653, 655 Christianity, 1, 14, 16, 22, 27–8, 34, 62–4, 68, 70, 82, 96, 155–6, 175, 196–7, 199, 211–2, 215, 218, 236, 251–2, 254, 267–8, 275–8, 280, 283–5, 293, 300–1, 307, 309, 320, 324, 333, 338, 363, 371–2, 374, 405, 412–3, 415, 418, 426, 435, 440, 471–3, 481, 490, 514, 522, 533, 601–3, 614, 629, 648 liberal, 22, 69 Christians. See Christian Clark University, 368, 496 CLARKE, Samuel, 320–1, 328 CLARKE, Stephen I., 509 CLARKE, William Newton, 72, 321, 367 COBB, John B., Jr,, 378, 486, 563, 565 COE, George Albert, 13, 86, 322, 613, 653 COHEN, Morris R., 156 COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor, 190, 193–5, 321 Communist, 249–50 COMTE, Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier, 195 Confucianism, 14–5, 61 CRAVEN, Thomas, 136 CRAWLEY, Alfred Ernest, 13, 154 Cross, 47, 603, 614 DARWIN, Charles Robert, 222–3, 322, 523 DE BEAUVOIR, Simone-ErnestineLucie-Marie Bertrand, 388 DE LA MARE, Walter, 3, 618, 647 DE SAINT EXUPERY, Antoine (Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint Exupéry), 163 Deists, 321, 328, 534 DESCARTES, René, 182, 185–6, 222, 243, 321, 323, 328, 347–9, 533, 585, 653–4 DEWEY, John, 19, 30, 86, 122, 183,

663 202, 207, 222, 224, 229, 239–40, 259, 322, 325, 335, 355, 370, 374–5, 383–4, 405, 410, 425, 429, 479, 539, 543, 606, 610–2, 616–7, 634 DHAMMAPA, 1 DURKHEIM, David Émile, 13, 154 dynamic religion, 16 DYSON, George, 650 Egypt, 14–5, 33, 62 ELIADE, Mircea, 491 ELIOT, Frederick May, 334 ELIOT, Thomas Stearns, 162, 175, 224 ELLIS, Henry Havelock, 1, 11, 87, 122, 154, 360, 647 EMERSON, Ralph Waldo, 67, 190, 321, 328, 410, 631 EMMET, Dorothy Mary, 209, 221, 516, 650, 655 empiricism, 46, 50, 86, 138, 151, 164, 179, 182, 203, 207, 222, 240, 322, 324–6, 337, 364–70, 372–3, 375–6, 379–81, 384–5, 388, 395, 405–6, 491, 533, 542– 3, 556, 588, 591, 593–4, 599– 600, 605, 650, 653 Enlightenment, the, 33, 177–8, 182– 3, 234, 244–5, 304, 319, 337, 339, 348, 350, 352–4, 446, 532 Episcopal, 214, 290 ERASMUS, Desiderius, 318 ERSKINE, John, 157 EURIPIDES, 650 Europe, 14, 62, 70, 114, 118, 131, 169, 234, 264, 285, 296, 300, 404, 412–3, 429, 523, 532, 537, 622 evil, 20, 31, 33, 35–6, 55, 72, 77, 105, 132, 140, 167–8, 179, 200, 211, 272, 309, 318–9, 379, 391, 431, 459, 483, 488, 527, 530, 548, 574, 579, 587–8, 592, 618, 622, 644, 646 faith, 3–5, 20, 23, 25–30, 47–8, 54, 63, 67, 69, 71, 76–7, 82, 90, 102,

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104–5, 115, 118–9, 126–7, 134– 5, 137, 140, 146, 148, 154–6, 158, 170–1, 173–7, 179, 181–2, 189–90, 196–201, 209–10, 213, 215–8, 233, 235–8, 240–4, 248, 250–1, 253–4, 256–8, 260–2, 268, 275, 277, 281–4, 286, 289, 300–1, 303–6, 308–10, 312–3, 315, 323, 325–6, 328–33, 336–8, 341–5, 348, 357, 370, 372, 374, 376, 378, 380, 392, 407, 413–4, 417, 419, 423–5, 427, 429, 431, 433–8, 440, 449, 462, 470–6, 480–1, 486, 495, 499–502, 505– 6, 510, 516–7, 519, 521–6, 548, 555–8, 560–1, 563–8, 571–7, 579–80, 582–90, 593, 600, 621, 625–7, 629–30, 636, 643, 646, 648, 652 philosophy of, 28 FAULKNER, H. U., 649 FERRÉ, Nels F. S., 221 FEUERBACH, Herbert, 197, 351, 425 FEUERBACK, Ludwig Andreas von, 195–6 FICHTE, Johann Gottlieb, 191, 320– 1 FINKELSTEIN, Louis, 657 FISHER, Galen, 108 FISKE, John, 322 FOLLETT, Mary Parker, 403 Foreign Boards of Missions, 292 FOSDICK, Harry Emerson, 322 FOSTER, George Burman, 369, 414– 7, 420, 425, 608–9 FRANCK, César-Auguste-JeanGuillaume-Hubert, 100, 124–5, 163 FRAZER, Sir James George, 13, 154 FRIES, Jakob Friefrich, 190, 196–8, 401 FROST, Robert Lee, 123, 136 GALILEO Galilei, 161–2, 321, 454 GANDHI, Mohandas Karamchand, 269–70 GASTON, John N., x

Germany, 114–6, 169, 173–4, 404, 424, 428, 431 GIBRAN, Kahlil, 163 GIOVANNI Francesco di Bernardone See Saint Francis of Assisi GOD, 1, 8, 10, 16–7, 25–6, 30, 36, 38–9, 42, 44, 48–53, 55–60, 71, 75–8, 95–7, 99, 103–7, 119, 133, 137, 142–4, 147, 148–50, 172–3, 176–8, 181–2, 189, 191–3, 197, 199–201, 209–13, 215–9, 225, 233, 238–9, 241–2, 244–5, 281, 295, 305–10, 312–3, 317–9, 325, 329, 337, 339–42, 352–3, 355, 361, 367, 374, 381, 391, 397–9, 404–5, 416, 420–2, 425, 434, 439, 440, 444, 477, 479, 483, 486, 488, 499, 517, 520, 529–31, 534, 537, 539–40, 547, 550–1, 553, 558–9, 563, 567, 571, 573– 4, 577–9, 581, 583–91, 594–6, 599–600, 602–12, 617, 619–27, 630–1, 636–8, 640–3, 650–2 GOLDENWEISER, Alexander Aleksandrovich, 154 GOODSPEED, Edgar Johnson, 114, 118, 143, 363, 414, 423 GORDON, George A., 192, 504 GRANT, Ulysses S., 30, 129–31, 136 Great Ideal, 23 Great Society, 55–6, 579 Greece, 14–5, 33, 62, 131, 279, 523 GREELEY, Horace, 321 GUTHRIE, George, 656 HALL, Granville Stanley, 114, 118, 143, 322, 368, 423, 441, 496, 633, 653 HANSON, Howard Harold, 136 HARKNESS, Georgia Elma, 175 HARNACK, Adolf von, 169, 197, 237, 314, 412, 419, 652 HARPER, William Rainey, 286, 363, 414–5, 633, 650, 656 HARRIS, William Torrey, 479 HARTMANN, Karl Robert Eduard von, 351

Index HARTSHORNE, Charles, 221, 262, 322, 330, 378, 383, 390, 397, 423, 465, 485–6, 569, 570, 574 HAYDON, Albert Eustace, 14–6, 49, 114, 142–4, 153, 420, 539, 608, 649 HEARD, Henry Fitzgerald, 403 Heaven, 1, 45 Hebrew, 14, 15, 16, 33, 126, 141, 242, 243 HEGEL, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 34, 191–2, 195–6, 201, 321, 324, 337, 339, 351, 353–5, 406, 417, 442, 455, 500, 518, 543, 631 Hegelianism, 190, 192–3, 324, 351, 355, 479, 586 HEIDEGGER, Martin, 322, 336, 351, 538, 543, 583 HEILER, Friedrich, 115–6, 169, 428 HERDER, Johann Gottfried von, 190 HERMANN, Johann Wilhelm, 146, 169, 190, 196–9, 321, 412, 417 HESIOD, 126 HEYWOOD, Thomas, 650 HIGH, Stanley, 113 Hindu, 15, 23, 83, 154, 250–4, 257– 64, 266–8, 270, 274–6, 278, 280– 1, 287–8, 291, 293, 299–302 Hinduism, 14–5, 82, 250, 251–5, 257–60, 262–3, 268, 274–5, 279, 281, 301, 303, 522, 648 Hindus. See Hindu HITLER, Adolf, 443 HOCKING, William Ernest, 16, 20, 99, 192, 307, 374, 422, 527, 539, 543, 601–2, 616–7 HØFFDING, Harold, 203, 351, 542 HOMER, 126, 650 HORTON, Douglas, 623 HORTON, Walter Marshall, 152, 173, 221 Humanism, 16, 499, 609, 612, 652 Humanists, 28, 33, 48–9, 143, 423, 484, 499, 503, 539, 652 religious, 48, 423, 539, 652 Renaissance Christian, 33

665 HUME, David, 178, 186, 222, 321, 352, 365–6 HUME, Theodore Carswell, 170 HUSSERL, Edmund Gustav Albrecht, 322, 350, 384, 537 IKHNATON, 15–6, 104 IMMANUEL, Rajappan D., 278 INBODY, Tyron, x, 659 India, 15–6, 23, 62, 115, 247–58, 260–70, 272, 274–9, 282–97, 299–304, 330, 443, 653 Islam, 14, 22, 279, 522 I-Thou, 311, 442, 645 JACKSON, Andrew, 321 JACKSON, Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall", 129 JAMES, William, 86, 112, 151, 185, 190, 192, 200–7, 222–5, 229–30, 234, 239–42, 259, 322, 324–5, 327–8, 351, 355, 369, 372–3, 375, 380–99, 401–10, 422–3, 435–6, 448, 455, 465, 480, 489, 496–8, 536–7, 541–3, 547, 558, 570, 589, 601–2, 604–5, 607, 610–1, 616, 618, 623, 649, 652–5 Japan, 14, 62, 296 JASPERS, Karl Theodor, 322, 351 JEFFERS, John Robinson, 136, 140 JEFFERSON, Thomas, 321 JESUS, 16, 192, 237, 245, 299, 304– 5, 308, 310–1, 313, 315, 340, 361, 374, 516, 519, 578, 626 JESUS CHRIST, 16, 192, 237, 245, 299, 304–5, 308, 310–1, 313, 315, 340, 361, 374, 516, 519, 578, 626 JONES, Rufus Matthew, 67, 149, 192, 402, 601 JORGE AGUSTÍN NICOLÁS RUIZ DE SANTAYANA Y BORRÁS. See Santana, George Judaism, 14, 16, 22, 63, 156, 251, 363 reformed, 22 justice, 23, 46, 268, 378, 399, 455, 482, 593

666

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KAFTAN, Julius, 190 KÄHLER, Martin, 216 KANT, Immanuel, 34, 177–8, 185– 91, 193–7, 199–201, 206, 223, 234, 244, 318–21, 323, 325–6, 328, 337, 351–4, 366, 405, 436, 442, 533, 582–3, 585, 611 Kantian, 142, 144, 151, 177, 179, 185, 190–1, 193, 196–201, 239, 325, 351, 353, 369, 436, 442, 535, 582–3, 585–8, 594, 602, 623–5 KIERKEGARD, Søren Aabye, 34, 171, 190, 199, 203, 234, 279, 322, 324, 326–7, 336, 351, 355, 425, 436, 538, 542–3, 558, 583, 614, 626, 635, 637 KING, Henry Churchill, 190 KING, Irving, 13, 497 KINGSLEY, Charles, 195 KNOX, John, 118, 363, 423–4 KÖHLER, Wolfgang, 92 KOHT, Dr. Halvdan, 110 KOLSTØ, Friedrich, 110 KRAEMER, Hendrik, 304–5, 307 KUNKEL, Fritz, 91–2 LAMARCK, Jean-Baptiste, 223 LAMPRECHT, Sterling P., 213, 650 LANGE, Friedrich Albert, 151, 197 LANTZ, Henry, 108 LAO-TZU, 1, 193 League of Nations, 443 LEE, Ernest George, 332, 540 LEUBA, James Henry, 154, 497, 654 LEWIS, Benjamin Roland, 649 LEWIS, H. D., 654 Liberalism, 202, 314–20, 322, 324, 327–30, 333, 338, 437, 486, 532, 534–5, 537, 543, 558, 582, 625 liberals, 28, 72, 168–9, 173, 235, 316, 327–8, 333, 417, 430, 484, 539, 544, 598, 635, 652 LINCOLN, Abraham, 129–30, 321 LIPPMANN, Walter, 25–6 LOCKE, John, 186, 222, 320–2, 328, 352, 364–6, 369, 480–1, 499, 533

LONG, Huey Pierce, Jr., 113 LOOMER, Bernard MacDougall, 221, 330, 377–8, 485, 547, 549–53, 555, 563, 565, 640, 650 LOUBA, James, 653 LOVEJOY, Arthur Oncken, 186, 193, 454 LOVETT, Robert Morse, 135 LOWELL, Amy Lawrence, 135, 224 LUTHER, Martin, 27, 34, 113, 141, 148, 237, 314, 338, 441, 465, 533, 582 Lutheran, 110, 141, 282, 285, 338 Lutheranism, 115, 338 MACH, Ernst, 206 MACINTOSH, Douglas Clyde, 150, 368, 423, 654–5 MACIVER, Robert M., 657 MACLEISH, Archibald, 136 MACMURRAY, John, 648 MALINOWSKI, Bronisáaw Kasper, 154 MARCEL, Gabriel Honoré, 388 March of Destinies, 55 MARETT, Robert Ranulph, 12, 154, 403 MARITAIN, Jacques, 170, 316 MARTIN, Everett Dean, 14 MARX, Karl Heinrich, 322, 324, 351, 355, 425, 523, 614, 639 Marxism, 252, 355, 479, 548 MASEFIELD, John Edward, 647 MASON, Daniel Gregory, 650 MASTERS, Edgar Lee, 59 MATHEWS, Shailer, 86, 112, 114, 117, 141–4, 150–1, 319, 322, 329, 367–73, 403, 409, 412, 414– 21, 423, 426, 429, 441, 467, 472– 3, 480–1, 534, 549, 603, 608, 622, 634, 652–3, 655 MAURICE, John Frederick Denison, 195 MCCLUSKY, MARGARET EVANS. See Meland, Margaret McClusky MCGIFFERT, Arthur Cushman, 114, 190, 608

Index MEAD, George Herbert, 91, 222, 231, 325, 405 MELAND Bernard Eugene, ix, x, 9, 24, 89, 107, 119, 148–9, 207, 245, 247, 254, 260, 297, 299, 315, 334, 345, 357, 361, 363, 378, 399, 408, 423, 427, 438–9, 441, 465, 486, 492, 507, 523, 528, 531, 536, 550, 554, 582, 632, 646, 652, 656, 659 Erik Bernhard, 359, 361 Margaret McClusky, 118, 260–1, 283, 289–91, 293, 296–7 MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice, 384, 427, 450–1, 537–8 metaphysics, 49, 50, 83, 91, 95, 112, 131, 181, 188, 190–1, 193–4, 196–7, 199, 201, 203, 225, 238– 9, 325–6, 365, 375, 377, 384, 387, 407, 423, 485, 518, 537, 566, 585–6, 589, 594–5, 605, 611, 625, 641 MICHELANGELO di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, 318 MILL, John Stuart, 195 MILLAY, Edna St. Vincent, 163 MILLER, Francis P., 173, 647 modernists, 28, 320, 412–3, 435, 442, 479–81, 534, 652 MONTAGUE, Margaret Prescott, 648 MOODY, William Vaughn, 135, 411, 650 MOORE, George Foote, 12, 20, 116– 7, 647 MORE, Paul Elmer, 48, 648 MORE, Sir Thomas, 318, 321 MORGAN, Arthur Ernest, 166 MORGAN, Conwy Lloyd, 49, 91, 221, 224, 226, 325, 372, 402, 404, 594, 604, 623 MORRIS, Charles, 156, 186, 206 MORRISON, Charles Clayton, 655 MORTON, Douglas, 652 MOZART, Wolfgang Amadeus, 100, 132, 525

667 MUILENBURG, James, 171 MUMFORD, Lewis, 649 MUNSTERBURG, Hugo, 465 MURPHY, Gardner, 498 MURTI, Professor T. R. V., 259–60, 262–3 mystery, 2, 15, 17, 33, 35, 43, 46, 57, 62–3, 69–70, 79, 90, 134, 187, 189, 243, 308, 352, 356, 390, 405, 433, 527, 529–30, 536, 560, 562, 564, 566, 568, 588, 604, 619, 649 mysticism, 24, 83, 85, 87, 149, 176, 307, 536, 649 naturalism, 47, 62, 68–9, 99–100, 196–7, 221–2, 225, 229–31, 240, 385, 393, 430–1, 483–4, 486–7, 489, 497, 536, 540, 582, 586–7, 591, 623, 625, 650 religious, 47, 240 NEARING, Scott, 112 NEEDHAM, Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery, 402 NEHRU, Prime Minister, 248–9, 270, 653 New Testament, 211, 240–1, 267, 278, 306, 308, 379, 405, 419, 560, 574, 598 NIEBUHR Helmut Richard, 322, 326, 491, 523, 559 Karl Paul Reinhold, 34, 169–72, 175, 178, 239, 259, 326, 329, 434–6, 440–2, 491, 538, 543, 550, 559, 582, 587, 623, 635– 7, 647, 653 NIETZSCHE, Friedrich Wilhelm, 141, 234, 322, 324, 351 Nirvana, 1 NOYES, Alfred, 161 OCCAM, William of, 365 Occidental College, 116, 171, 539, 634 OGDEN, Schubert Miles, 378, 486, 563, 565, 656 OPPENHEIM, James, 650

668

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OSIRIS, 14 Oslo, 110 OTTO, M. C., 150 OTTO, Rudolf, 115–7, 149, 169, 190, 196, 307, 322, 350–1, 354, 367, 401, 403–5, 407, 428–30, 433, 583, 601, 622, 649, 652, 654 Pacific Coast Theological Group, 171 Park College, 112, 229, 441, 611, 633 PATER, Walter, 14, 126 PAUCK, Wilhelm, 119, 171, 215, 314, 327, 420, 465, 624, 647, 652 PAUL, 16, 34, 237, 336, 612 Payne, E. A., 308 PEABODY, Francis Greenwood, 112, 141 PEDEN, W. Creighton, ix, x PEIRCE, Charles Sanders, 86, 207, 325 PERRY, Edmund, 304–5 PERRY, Ralph Barton, 200, 207, 223, 406, 655 PFLEIDERER, Otto, 196, 199, 351, 480 philosophy, 2, 23, 28–9, 36, 46, 49, 51–2, 54, 67–8, 86, 90–1, 99– 100, 103, 108, 112–4, 116–8, 128, 135, 137, 139, 147, 153, 163–4, 173, 177, 179, 183, 185– 6, 189–91, 194–6, 199, 206, 213– 4, 221–3, 225, 227–9, 231, 242– 3, 252, 257, 259, 262, 264, 266, 269–70, 283, 302, 304, 322–4, 326, 329–31, 335–7, 343, 345, 347–9, 356, 365–6, 370, 374, 376, 378–80, 383–4, 391, 393, 395–6, 402, 405, 412, 420, 422, 433, 437, 451, 454, 475, 479–80, 484–6, 493, 502, 504, 511, 535– 6, 541, 549, 558, 564–6, 568–70, 576, 582–5, 589, 591, 593, 610– 1, 616–7, 623, 626, 628–30, 634– 8, 644 organismic, 49–0, 91, 94, 224–5,

234, 325, 594, 604 PICASSO, Pablo Ruiz y, 136 PLATO, 118, 135, 162, 190, 335–6, 353, 447, 533, 539 PLOTINUS, 16 POLANYI, Michael, 427 politics, 18, 20, 28, 127 cult of, 18 Pomona College, 9, 24, 108, 154, 158, 170, 180, 431, 495 positivists, 28, 374 POUND, Ezra Weston Loomis, 135, 224 pragmatic, 30, 50, 90, 118, 134, 145, 169, 192, 198, 223, 304, 325, 355, 370, 376, 379, 381, 386, 410, 416–7, 422, 424, 429, 440, 480–2, 494, 498, 502, 539, 608, 616–7, 621, 628, 635, 652 pragmatism, 50, 51, 90, 99, 142, 151, 206, 224, 349, 355, 370, 376, 384, 405, 420, 429, 451, 453, 479, 484, 533, 582, 610, 616, 634–5 PRATT, James Bissett, 154 Presbyterian, 112–3, 149, 285, 441, 467, 612 Protestant, 27–9, 68, 82, 115, 128, 170, 177, 197, 211, 214–8, 233, 236, 238, 243, 281, 285–6, 294, 300, 314, 317, 323, 338, 343, 421, 424, 435, 467–8, 471, 522, 570 Protestantism, 15, 27–8, 72, 89–90, 128, 197, 215–9, 233, 235–6, 284, 317, 323, 337–9, 341, 404, 413, 509, 533, 558, 647 PTAH-RE, 14 Quaker, 116, 601 RACHMANINOFF, Sergei Vasilievich, 136 RADHAKRISHNAN, Vice President of India, 251–2, 263, 274 radical empiricism, 85, 151, 164, 179, 205–6, 223, 234, 239, 325, 355, 384, 388, 390, 394–5, 399,

Index 405, 408, 422, 541, 547, 558–9, 586–9, 593, 595, 598, 623–4 Ramakrishna Missions, 252 RANDALL, John Herman Jr., 117 RANSOME, John Crowe, 648 rationalists, 28, 48, 320–1, 328, 348, 357, 377 RAUSCHENBUSCH, Walter, 112, 141, 321, 442, 504, 601 religion, 1–2, 10, 12–3, 15–26, 29– 31, 33, 35, 45, 48–9, 51–2, 56–8, 62–70, 72–3, 75–7, 81–2, 84, 86– 7, 90–1, 93, 99, 102, 104, 116–9, 121–3,125–9, 133, 138, 144, 147, 150–9, 163–4, 173, 190–1, 195– 202, 212–4, 222–3, 225, 229, 231, 233, 243–4, 250, 254–6, 259–63, 266, 269–70, 276–8, 283, 293, 299–300, 302–7, 309, 313, 319, 321–3, 330, 332–3, 335–6, 353, 357, 366, 368–9, 371, 389, 392, 402, 404–5, 412– 3, 416, 418, 421–2, 424, 430–1, 433–7, 440–1, 460, 464, 470–1, 473–5, 480, 482–3, 489–90, 493– 4, 496–502, 512, 517, 522, 526– 7, 533, 535, 537–40, 576, 585, 601–4, 60–10, 614–8, 620–3, 626–7, 629–30, 632–9, 642–3, 645, 647–9, 653–5 Christian, 15, 35, 68, 262, 323 dynamic, 16 prophetic, 22–3 static, 16 Resurrection, 47, 242 RICK, Charles, 654 RICOEUR, Paul, 382, 384, 388 RITSCHL, Albrecht, 34, 190, 196–8, 237, 321, 602 Ritschlian, 146, 198, 239, 369, 412, 535, 544, 590, 609 RIVERS, William Halse Rivers, 154 ROBINSON, Edwin Arlington, 136, 140, 160–1, 529 ROGERS, A. K., 194, 645 Roman, 14, 33, 63, 101, 128, 212,

669 215, 218, 266, 337, 347, 491, 523–4, 557 Roman Catholicism, 115 Rome, 14–5, 89, 130–1, 279, 523 ROSS, Edward Alsworth, 112 ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques, 319–21 ROYCE, Josiah, 67, 112, 141, 192–3, 321, 374, 406, 465, 536, 543, 611–2, 617, 631, 653 RUSSELL, Bertrand Arthur William, 259, 440, 448, 536, 650 RYLAARSDAM, John Coert, 363 SABATIER, Paul, 648 SAINT FRANCIS of Assisi, 34, 36, 70, 104, 127, 598 SAMS, Henry, 295 SANKYA, 23 SANTAYANA, George, 20, 25–6, 28– 30, 121, 141, 152, 196, 339, 428, 465, 607, 610, 631, 648 SANTINIKETAN, 264–6, 268, 270, 272–4 SARTRE, Jean-Paul Charles Aymard, 388, 450, 656 SCHELER, Max Ferdinand, 322, 351, 583 SCHELLING, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 191, 234, 321, 324, 326, 336, 351 SCHILPP, Paul A., 653 SCHLEIERMACHER, Friedrich Daniel Ernst, 34, 68, 103, 119, 149, 190–1, 196–7, 234, 236–7, 239, 244, 293, 314–5, 319–21, 324, 328, 351, 353–4, 364, 366–7, 377, 409, 412, 417, 526, 533, 571, 598, 602, 605, 622, 652 SCHLESINGER, Arthur M., 649 SCHWEITZER, Albert, 128, 156, 322, 350, 440, 650 SCOTUS, John Duns, 365 SEAMAN, Harry, 174 Serampore College, 255, 284, 286– 8, 297, 308 SEYMOUR, Louise, 648 SHAKESPEARE, William, 650

670

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SHERWOOD, Robert Emmet, 163 Shinto, 14–5 SIBELIUS, Jean, 136 SIBLEY, Jack, 401, 405 Silent Process, 55 SITTLER, Joseph, 439, 550 SMITH, Gerald Birney, 48–9, 86, 114, 119, 128, 142, 144–7, 149, 221, 369–70, 402, 404, 406, 419– 22, 425, 430, 441, 481–2, 493, 495, 499, 536, 604, 609, 618, 634, 648 SMITH, John, 350 SMITH, Ronald Gregor, 657 SMUTS, Jan Christiaan, 49, 91, 221, 224, 226–8, 325, 372, 402, 594, 604, 606, 623, 651 SÖDERBLOM, Lars Olof Jonathan, 306–7 SOPHOCLES, 133, 140, 650 SPALDING, Walter R., 649 SPALDING, Walter Raymond, 124 SPENCER, Herbert, 195, 230, 322, 387 SPENGLER, Oswald Manuel Arnold Gottfried, 440 SPIEGLER, Gerhard, 312, 341 SPINOZA, Benedict de, 190, 244, 353, 649, 653 SPONHEIM, Paul, 341 ST. AUGUSTINE (of Hippo), 16, 26– 7, 30, 34, 237 STAGG, Amos Alonzo, 119 STARBUCK, George Edwin, 86, 501 static religion, 16 SUMNER, William Graham, 322 Supreme Value, 19, 50, 637, 640, 643 T’HOOFT, Willem Adolph Visser, 173 Tagore, 256, 264, 265, 269–70, 273 Tao, 1 Tao-te-King, 1, 154 TCHAIKOVSKY, Pyotr Ilyich, 100 The Christian Century, 108, 150 The Enlightenment, 351

theology, 35, 46, 68–9, 72, 86, 91, 113–4, 119, 127, 147, 149, 153, 168–9, 171–3, 175–7, 181–2, 190, 192–9, 202, 212, 214, 216, 221, 233–8, 243–4, 277, 279, 282–4, 307, 312, 314, 322–3, 326–7, 329–32, 335–41, 343–4, 353, 356, 366–73, 375, 377–82, 404–6, 409–10, 412, 415, 420–1, 423, 426–7, 429–30, 432–3, 437, 441–2, 449, 471, 474–5, 477, 485–6, 489, 493, 495–6, 499, 501–2, 504, 511, 535–6, 538, 544, 547, 549, 555–6, 558–60, 565, 569–70, 573–5, 583–7, 589, 594–5, 597–8, 608, 620–2, 624– 7, 630–1, 635–7 THOMAS AQUINAS, Saint, 34, 67, 127 THOMAS, Norman Mattoon, 112 TILLICH, Paul Johannes, 34, 128, 169, 172, 215–6, 233, 238, 240, 259, 322, 326–7, 329, 330, 335– 7, 341, 343–5, 354, 364, 367, 430, 435, 442, 474, 491, 523, 538, 543, 559, 635–7, 647, 651–2 TILLOTSON, John, 321 TINDAL, Mathew, 321 TOLAND, John, 321 TOLSTOY, Lev Nikolayevich, 73–4 TOYNBEE, Arnold Joseph, 348, 456, 533 Treaty of Versailles, 115 TROELTSCH, Ernst, 237, 314, 322, 419, 522 TYLOR, Sir Edward Burnett, 13, 154, 244, 322 UNDSET, Sigrid, 92 University of Chicago, x, 113–4, 142, 148, 258, 262, 334, 363, 368, 370, 399, 403, 410–2, 414– 6, 419, 428–9, 431, 441, 470, 477, 479, 493, 533, 539, 544, 554, 601, 633, 642, 646, 652 University of Marburg, 114–6, 404, 428–9, 433

Index Upanishads, 1, 62, 154 VAN DUSEN, Henry Pitney, 175 VAN GOGH, Vincent Willem, 92, 614 VLASTOS, Gregory, 221, 539, 630 Voice of Tradition, 28 VOLTAIRE (François-Marie Arouet), 304 VON HARNACK, Adolf, 190, 321, 412, 652 WAAL, Joachim, 307 WAGNER, Wilhelm Richard, 163 WALLAS, Graham, 403 WARD, Harry F., 112, 141 WEBER, Maximilian Karl Emil, 322 WEIGEL, Gustave, 215 Weimar Republic, 443 WERFEL, Franz Viktor, 92 WESCOTT, Regina, 656 WHITEHEAD, Alfred North, 16, 19, 25–6, 49, 91, 99, 151, 159, 182, 185, 206, 210, 212, 221–2, 225, 228–30, 234, 238–42, 259, 322, 325, 328, 355–6, 369, 372–8, 380, 383–4, 386, 390, 397–9, 401–3, 406–7, 422, 436, 449, 451, 455–61, 464, 485–6, 489,

671 500, 514, 536–41, 543, 547–9, 552–3, 567, 570, 574, 590, 594, 601–2, 604–6, 617, 620, 623–4, 634–5, 638, 647, 651, 653 WIEMAN, Henry Nelson, 19, 29, 34, 50, 52–4, 84–6, 91, 114, 118–9, 142–7, 149–52, 185, 202, 206–7, 221–2, 224–5, 228–9, 231, 239– 40, 242, 322, 325, 330, 335, 337, 341–2, 344, 370, 372–7, 380, 383, 390, 393–4, 398–9, 402–5, 421–3, 428, 430, 434, 449, 465, 482–5, 488, 495, 538–41, 543, 549, 570, 574, 594, 601–46, 651, 653–7, 659 WILD, John Daniel, 384, 656 WILDER, Raymond Louis, 363 will to believe, 28, 200 WILLIAMS, Daniel Day, 221–2, 325, 330, 378, 427–9, 465, 485, 650 WILLIAMS, Ralph Vaughan, 136 WINDELBAND, Wilhelm, 365 WOLFE, Thomas Clayton, 136 WOOD, Grant DeVolson, 133, 136 World War One, 440, 443 WRIGHT, Frank Lloyd, 92 Yale University, 414