An accent on experience is associated with Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Schleiermacher was a child of the Romanticism which dawned as the eighteenth century ended. Romanticism was geared towards feelings, and Schleiermacher based his theology on religious experience. Kant had dismissed revealed truth, and this seemed to leave theologians nothing to rest on or work with. But Schleiermacher maintained that the gap could be filled by the Christian ‘God-consciousness’, the church’s shared sense of dependence on God through the God-filled man Jesus Christ. True theology is God-feelings put into words. Read more
Rationalism here means the belief that unaided reason can reach and judge everything, drawing full metaphysical maps of the whole universe and God too. Reason can judge revelation, if there is such a thing as revelation (and reason can judge that, too). Reason is lord for the Rationalist, and God is what the philosopher declares him to be. Read more
Martin Luther (1483-1546) and his most distinguished admirer, John Calvin (1509-1564), the two chief architects of Reformation theology, were Bible men. Their theology, like the New Testament’s, revolved round the themes of sin and saving grace, Christ and the church. They avoided commitment to any particular system of philosophy; that was not their interest. And they rejected scholasticism, which they knew well, as unbiblical. Their great aim was to let the Bible, the living word of the living God, speak for itself.
From the Bible they proclaimed the God of the church’s faith — transcendent, three-in-one. They set him forth as the holy judge of sin, who graciously gives sinners peace with himself, through faith, on the basis of the death and mediation of Jesus Christ. Read more
Medieval theology was called ’scholasticism’, because it was developed for teaching purposes by professional instructors in monastic schools (scholae) and universities. It flourished between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) was its greatest, most creative and most influential figure. (A pope declared his theology to be eternally valid as recently as 1879!) Read more
Who is God, and what is he like? This question has been answered very differently in different periods of history since New Testament days. The medieval understanding ofGod, for instance, is light-years away from the modern existential understanding. And these different answers have affected us all. Our opinions are shaped, much more than we think, by ideas dominant in previous centuries. This is just as true of our beliefs about God as of any other area of thought. The pictures of God painted by leading thinkers help, for good or ill, to set the tone forsucceeding generations. So we do well to note what these pictures have been. Read more
No analysis of Christian belief in God is complete without one further point. The God of the Bible is great, and his worshippers acknowledge that ‘his greatness is unsearchable’. Christians speak of the mystery of God, using ‘mystery’ to mean, not a puzzle that can be solved, but a reality which surpasses our understanding.
A two-year-old boy whose father has a brain like Einstein’s can know his father in a happy parent-child relationship. This is knowledge of the most important kind. Yet the boy could understand very little of what is in his father’s mind, however much his father tried to put it into words for him. There are limits to what a two-year-old, Read more
People have been trying for thousands of years to prove that God exists. Some of the arguments used can be traced back to Greek philosophy. Over the centuries several types of argument have been put forward:
- The Ontological Argument — from the Greek word on (being) — attempts to prove the being of God by reason alone; first put forward by Anselm (1033-1109). God is defined as something greater than anything else that can be conceived. Such a being must exist, for if he did not, he would not be the greatest conceivable being.
- The argument in its various forms has fascinated philosophers down to the present day. But most philosophers today would regard it as fallacious on the grounds that it is at best a piece of abstract logic. A definition may be logically self- consistent, but does it apply to something that actually exists? Before we can say it does, we need evidence to show that there is something actually corresponding to the definition.
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American GIs join in prayer with a chaplain during a lull in fighting during the Vietnam war.
Times of war have often brought people to question the mays of God. Warfare causes such grief and pain that a reaction can come which says: ‘If life is as evil as this, how can we believe in a God who both has all power and also wants the best for us?’ This perplexity becomes worse when, as in the 1914-18 world war, both sides claim the support of the same God. Read more
