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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Some classics of pre-war British theology appeared in Nisbet's Library of Constructive Theology. The aim of writers in that series was, in the words of editors W. R. Matthews and H. Wheeler Robinson, ‘to lay stress on the value and validity of religious experience and to develop their theology on the basis of the religious consciousness’. Such an empirical approach ensures for the theological product a high content of the kind of material fundamental to modern Phenomenology of Religion; that is, the description and interpretation of experiences, behaviour, and other phenomena of life taken by the religious believer as manifestations of divine reality and activity. A re-reading from a phenomenological point of view, then, can discover new significance in those writings which, though less than a generation old, are all too easily felt to be obsolescent in the light of more recent theological fashions.
page 402 note 1 (London: Nisbet and Co. Ltd., 1935, The Library of Constructive TheologyGoogle Scholar); references throughout this paper are to the Fontana Library edition (London: Collins, 1963)Google Scholar.
page 402 note 2 Notable critics are Hepburn, R. W., Christianity and Paradox (London: Watts, 1958)Google Scholar, chapters 3 and 4; MacIntyre, A., ‘Visions’, in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, edited by Flew, Antony and MacIntyre, Alasdair (London: S.C.M. Press Ltd., 1955), pp. 254ffGoogle Scholar; C. B. Martin, ‘A Religious Way of Knowing’, ibid., pp. 76ff. See also Flew, Antony, God and Philosophy (London: Hutchinson and Co. Ltd., 1966), pp. 124ff.Google Scholar
page 403 note 1 Thus Flew writes: ‘The mere fact of the occurrence of subjective religious experience does not by itself warrant the conclusion that there are any objective religious truths to be represented.’ Flew, op. cit., p. 127. Similarly MacIntyre: ‘… an experience of a distinctively “mental” kind, a feeling-state or an image cannot of itself yield us any information about anything other than the experience.’ MacIntyre, op. cit., p. 256. And see Martin, op. cit., pp. 78ff.
page 403 note 2 Farmer, op. cit., p. 16.
page 403 note 3 As he writes elsewhere: ‘… we are not suggesting that this element of direct awareness of specifically divine reality is the only element in the establishment of religious conviction which need be considered. It is our thesis that it is only one element, though a quite indispensable one. Its presence, in however compelling a form, establishes no right to dispense with the tests of practical experience and of the acutest reflection we can command.’ Towards Belief in God (London: S.C.M. Press Ltd., 1942), p. 40–41.Google Scholar
page 403 note 4 cf. Temple, William: ‘It is not religious experiences, but religious experience as a whole, that is of chief concern—that is to say, the whole experience of religious persons.’ Nature, Man and God (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1934), P. 334.Google Scholar
page 404 note 1 The World and God, p. 75.
page 404 note 2 Hepburn, op. cit., pp. 28–9 and p. 44 (citing The World and God, p. 149).
page 404 note 3 Flew, op. cit., p. 133.
page 405 note 1 In his introduction Farmer offers the following reasons for taking as axiomatic for orthodox Christian belief the view that God is personal and personally active: First, New Testament language implies that view ‘in every category, phrase, doctrine, movement of thought’. Secondly, other New Testament doctrines (e.g. sin, forgiveness, reconciliation) presuppose it. Op. cit., p. 9. Thirdly, theologies which neglect a personal view of God and accommodate themselves to impersonal and monistic views are ultimately self-defeating. Op. cit., p. 10ff.
page 405 note 2 Hepburn, op. cit., pp. 40ff.
page 405 note 3 ibid., p. 42.
page 406 note 1 Tennant, F. R., ‘Critical Notice’, Mind, vol. XLV, 1936, pp. 241–246, at p. 243.Google Scholar
page 406 note 2 Farmer's phenomenological approach is illustrated well in his Revelation and Religion (London: Nisbet and Co. Ltd., 1954).Google Scholar