![]() ![]() Thus, to believe in a Redeemer in order to gain attention would be ignoble.The Diogenes Allen (born 1932) is Professor Emeritus and former Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton Theological Seminary. ![]() ![]() Of course, not every need warrants every affirmation but only such as pass the " bizarreness test." The need must be neither ignoble nor irrelevant but properly relevant to the affirmation. This is because the actual ground for faith is the spiritual " nourishment " received from it, aside from any knowledge needs are satisfied and that makes faith reasonable enough. Faith has its rationales, but even challenges that cannot be answered successfully do not in fact destroy the faith of the believer. On the other hand, faith is not just a matter of rational argument. Theology must preserve consistency in religious language and steer clear of contradictions both within the system and with the empirical world. Hence, faith implies a truth-claim and can, in principle, be falsified. It is a matter of concern to the believer that the Redeemer he believes in really exists and is not just a figment of his imagination. g., a consciousness of sin and a desire for a Redeemer. Religion arouses and satisfies needs of its own, e. This is not to say that religion is purely a projection of personal wishes. The necessary and sufficient ground for faith is that it satisfies certain needs in man. In fact, religious questions cannot be a matter of disinterested knowledge, for if there is a God, this fact will affect my life. Christianity is more a medium of salvation than an explanation of the world. Professor Allen prefers to side with John Hick 79fl BOOK REVIEWS in this discussion: theism can at best be a plausible option. Logical positivism raises the more troublesome problem: are ultimate questions worth the asking? Ian Ramsey, Austin Farrar and English Thomists have endeavored to show that Christianity offers the most satisfying world-view or that the world as we know it points of itself to a Creator. Thanks to linguistic analysis we are more careful in our use of religious language. But to these challenges there have been thoughtful responses on the part of believers. For that matter, the very meaningfulness of propositions about God has been called into question. Traditional arguments like those of Aquinas have not recovered from the critiques of Hume and Kant. It is no longer possible to present a rational proof for God's existence. Is affirming the tenets of faith a reasonable act? It is to this problem that Diogenes Allen addresses himself from the context of contemporary British philosophy. ProfessoT of Moral Philosophy College of Business Administration Ohio University, Athens, Ohio 45701 THOMAS A. At least it is more defensible than the situationalism of pure-act-agapism. This strikes me as the more genuine Christian ethic and defensible in the biblical evidence. ![]() It is the person who must resolve this dialectical tension that exists between the two ethics, the ethic of responsibility and the ethic of conviction. The person is the communicating existent who stands at the convergence of a series of relationships arising from his encounter with another person or persons. Conscience in this ethic of tension becomes then a response with evaluational knowledge and freedom of one person to the Person of Christ incarnate in other persons. My own position developed in Christian Ethics For Today (Bruce-Macmillan, 1969) is that we cannot live on just one of these ethics c:onsistently, constantly and uniformally, but we have to live on both in dialectical tension. The first makes its ultimate concern in the determination of rightness or wrongness the presence of agape in the personal empirical verifiable consequences of one's actions the second makes the ultimate concern the principle or the rule with more or less indifference to the consequences. In doing so, Barr is testifying to the prominence that has been given in contemporary culture to the ethic of responsibility over the ethic of conviction. Barr's questioning of the real seriousness of the Church in exercising her own genuine biblical morality is pointed and sharp. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:īOOK REVIEWS 791 political and sociological problems. ![]()
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