Chapter 5. General Tendencies in Modern Religious Thought

p. 82 Over the past half-century the philosophy of religion in Britain and America has, broadly speaking, concentrated on the problem of value.¹ The drift of thought they hold today may be said to be an import of thought that arose in Germany two or three centuries ago. p. 83 If there is anything in modern religious thought today worth our attention, it is no exaggeration to say that most of it rests on the thought of Immanuel Kant, professor at Königsberg.² In particular, as Mr. Pringle-Pattison has pointed out, the basic point of idealist philosophy since the time of Kant³ has been that "real values have become the clue to the ultimate nature of reality" (The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy, Oxford, 1917, p. 38);⁴ and when we see this, we can say all the more that the main current of modern religious thought springs, on the whole, from Kant. Mr. Waterhouse, discussing the Zeitgeist of Schleiermacher's time, went so far as to say that Kant's moral theory put religion into a footnote of a textbook of ethics (Waterhouse, E. S., Modern Theories of Religion, London, 1911, p. 25).⁵ Whatever this harsh judgment may be worth, it can be said that the basic problem of recent British and American philosophy of religion lies in relating our ideals, or values, to the ultimate ground of reality (Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, p. 39).⁶

So modern religious thought has undergone a marked change from the religious thought of the eighteenth century. The influence of Kantianism⁷ on modern religious thought is, broadly, of two kinds. On the negative side, it showed that our pure reason can neither explain the God whom religion worships nor prove that he is real. In other words, the world of religion cannot be understood by the scientific norms of time and space. Because of this, people today are comparatively little troubled by the rationalism or the scientific naturalism of the eighteenth century. Second, on the positive side, Kantianism's contribution to modern religious thought is to have made clear that religion is in essence bound up with our moral p. 84 life. A human being is not a biological machine but a moral real being, with purposes and ideals.⁸ When we see that human beings stand in an organic relation to the universe, the universe has, in the long stages of its evolution, produced human beings, moral real beings. That is, the universe has an essential accord with moral activity and with moral real being. So it has become a principal problem of modern religious thought that God, the ground of the universe, possesses moral attributes and has the greatest concern for human moral activity.

Hegelian speculative philosophy shed a great light on religious thought at the end of the nineteenth century, through Josiah Royce in America and F. H. Bradley in England; and at the start of the twentieth century there were such noted scholars as John Caird and John Watson (Royce, J.; Bradley, F. H.; Caird, J.; Watson, J.).⁹ Bernard Bosanquet, who was much influenced by Bradley, was the midwife of absolutism in its modern form. According to his Gifford Lectures, The Principle of Individuality and Value (Bosanguet[sic], The Principle of Individual[sic] and Value),¹⁰ the highest standard of value is the absolute freedom from contradiction that is reached through comprehensiveness and harmony (pp. 51, 72, 299). The Absolute, in his view, is neither personal nor moral nor aesthetic (p. 537). With Bradley he held that reality must include all the fragments of experience and bring them into harmony (Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 548). But Bosanquet himself feared that an Absolute of this kind, an abstract principle, might be an empty form. An Absolute wholly cut off from the concrete world explains very little. So unless some path of connection is found between the Absolute and finite experience, p. 85 one cannot escape theoretical perplexity. To find a path between the two, the concrete data of life must come to a unity, so that the empty form is realized and the nature of the ultimate whole is positively determined (Pringle Pattison, The Idea of God, p. 231).¹¹ Bosanquet's position is well expressed in his booklet What Religion Is. He says that the cosmic ground and structure of religion lie where the two, power and perfection, are joined (What Religion Is, p. 2).¹² That is, morality is the surest way to know reality and to possess it; but morality does not produce reality (ibid., p. 10). "When a human being, a real being active in the world, gives absolute allegiance to the supremacy of the good, this all-absorbing belief influences that person's action and ideals" (ibid., p. 37). "What a person ought to do is to hold our religious belief faithfully, and so take to heart what is truly required of me" (p. 41). "The religious person does not trust in their own power; and to become perfect apart from the object they trust would, for them, be a sin and a contradiction" (p. 38). "Their wisdom and experience are not empty; they overflow and will be filled with what is true" (p. 39). "They come to see that the highest value is at work, making this world clean, organizing it and setting it in order" (p. 42). "Religion asks only that we leap out of the world of appearance and grasp reality with certainty," he said (p. 40). Royce's thought¹³ broke away from Hegel's panlogism: it called the idea the meaning of the will, and tried to understand the individual as what is living in personal experience. "When embodied will becomes the keynote of the structure of the world, the world is a teleological unity, and within it the several aspects, p. 86 as autonomous selves, when seen as a series, make up one organic whole: the self becomes the object of appreciative valuation, and forms a process of will that must be valued and appreciated in the order of its self-expression, as each stage of the world's life" (Tabuchi Masanori, Philosophy of Religion in Britain and America, Shunjūsha, pp. 71–72).¹⁴ Here the self gains an imperishable character through its relation to God. Because it is a unifying manifestation of the divine purpose, it lives on as an individual even in God. When this finite individual is viewed from within, as purposive, according to the postulate¹⁵ of humanity, there religion is found. "To establish the unique meaning of our own life, we do not leap into the realm of God, of another dimension; rather, we descend into the wilderness of life, the world of ill fortune, and must see truly that human prayers are very many and the favors of answer very few. Yet the self-system of divine life must rest on the nature of God. God is 'the Answerer of the world' and, as the whole of being, 'the all-containing Self.'"¹⁶ In other words, Royce's God is the real being who gives order to thought and concreteness to experience, and brings meaning to the life that their union forms.

Professor Hocking of Harvard, in his great work "The Doctrine of God as It Appears in Human Experience" (Hocking, W. E., God in Human Experience), stressed worship and mysticism and showed scholarly skill in the precise analysis of concrete experience.¹⁷ Mr. Webb opposed Bosanquet's claim about the uniqueness of personality and stressed the rationality and generality of personality; and he held that if the fundamental spirit of religion is not to be lost, God must be believed in as at once the Absolute and a personal being. He acknowledged the moral implications of the infinite self, and opposed the view that the individual self is no more than an apparent being within the Absolute.¹⁸

p. 87 The extreme opposite of this absolutism is the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey. It is a fact that American religious thought is, on the whole, colored by pragmatism. Recently the so-called new humanist movement in religion, centered on the University of Chicago, has won the support of many Unitarians.¹⁹ It is, so to speak, a moralistic theory of religion that tries to understand religion instrumentally. American new humanism is a pragmatist reading of Comte's "social religion." Its religion is a means, aimed at the practical effect of social ethics. Henry Nelson Wieman, a religious realist, says that "religion is keenly understanding the world of possibility not yet achieved, and action that goes with this understanding" (The Wrestle of Religion with Truth, p. 135).²⁰ He says that God, as the whole nature of the universe, furthers the greatest security and welfare when life is fitly adjusted to it (ibid., p. 59). In this Wieman is close to the religious position of Whitehead, who stressed religious intuition of the supporting and pervading character of the universe (Religion in the Making).²¹ Among those who stress the social character of religion are Ames, King, Shailer Mathews and Ellwood (King, I., Development of Religion; Matthews[sic], S., Atonement and Social Process; "The Development of Social Christianity in America," in The Religious Thought in the Last Quarter Century; Ellwood, C. A., The Reconstruction of Religion; Ames, E. S., Religion).²² Professor Ames's The Psychology of Religious Experience and Religion (1930 edition), and Haydon's "The Task of the Ages" (The Quest of the Ages), are the representative writings of American new humanism.²³ Ames defines religion as the consciousness of the highest social values. And he says that the position of anti-religion or non-religion p. 88 only expresses an attitude indifferent or destructive toward the welfare of society. The substance of the idea of God, he says, is a collective name for the social spirit that, through social custom, binds and guides the action and thought of people in general ("The Validity of the Idea of God," in The journal of Religion, 1921, pp. 264–270). He has plainly applied Dewey's instrumentalism to the interpretation of religion. "The search for God, like the possession of knowledge, can to some degree be rationalized and made expedient. Once the idea of God has been formed in this way, it can be used most effectively to satisfy our practical life and our aesthetic contentment," he says (Psychology of Religious Experience, p. 154).²⁴ The historicism of Professor Haydon also reached almost the same conclusion as Ames. God points to the spirit of the populace; God as personified social consciousness does in fact sustain and limit our life and thought. Human religion tries to take cosmically valid²⁵ principles as the ground of life, and this ground, carrying authority, becomes the driving force that builds a new society.

We have briefly discussed above the religious thought of two currents, absolutism and subjectivism.²⁶ Both took the relation of reality and value as their problem and strove to find some connection, and their labor was by no means in vain. But besides these, among the currents of modern British and American philosophy of religion, we cannot overlook²⁷ the system that has the most distinctive character and can be gathered under the name of personalism. Among these, a thoroughly ethical and purposive religious thought is McTaggart's personal idealism. So-called pluralistic personalism, following²⁸ the thought of Lotze, Leibniz and James Ward, p. 89 has lately taken up a strong position in America as well. Brightman's Religious Values (Brightman, Religions[sic] Value, Abingdon Press) and Knudson's The Philosophy of Personalism (Knudson, Philosophy of Personalim[sic], Abingdon Press) are the chief of these.²⁹ Knudson's The Philosophy of Personalism bears the subtitle "A Study in the Metaphysics³⁰ of Religion." That Brightman distinguished "human values" from "superhuman values" is a very interesting idea. According to him, "human values" are the moral values that people acknowledge universally in their daily living. That we generally experience value is a fact. Whether God issues³¹ moral commands or such a postulate is unnecessary, we act with a sense of moral duty. This is what is called human value. Second, "superhuman value" refers to the objective manifestation from which human life moves and can draw its value and glory, that is, to the ultimate ground of human values. Here Brightman could not escape a tendency to think of the principle of moral autonomy and the "world-ground" as, to some degree, independent of each other.³² Knudson thought that he had found a closer relation between morality and religion than Brightman had. In his view, religion is the manifestation of the objectivity of values. Religion holds that our knowledge is not limited to sense perception and the logical forms drawn from it. On the other hand, religion, as a deep truth about reality, derives from the practical and dynamic experience that lies behind the moral and spiritual nature of humanity and the pure process of knowledge (ibid., p. 155). Generally speaking, the moral personalists think that the key to grasping the nature of reality p. 90 lies in the conscious harmony and free activity of personality.

Over against McTaggart's atheistic personalism and Howison's ethical personalism, the theistic personalists regard the real as the individual centers of consciousness; they acknowledge nothing real, in the sense of a theory of reality, other than persons; and they hold that religion consists in the finite³³ spirit's entering into a personal relation with God. For them God is one, unique, and absolute in the sense that he is the ground of the universe; and this universe is granted by God an otherness of its own. But this, they say,³⁴ is by the free act of God's creative will, and the universe depends wholly on God.

A moral theory of religion somewhat different in character from those reviewed above is Ritschlianism. Ritschl's thought owed much, from the first, to Kant. His position is conservative in tendency theologically and close to instrumentalism philosophically. Not a few religious leaders in America today have received Ritschl's influence, directly or indirectly. Among them, The Interpretation of Religion by John Baillie, who was at Union, is probably the representative work. He points out again and again that the central task of modern philosophy of religion lies in rightly explaining the relation of reality and value, that is, a theory of reality grounded in value; and he defined religion as "a moral trust in reality."³⁵

As an attempt to set up a positive theory of reality on the question of moral values and God, following the line of thought of Kant and Schelling, we cannot pass over Professor Sorley's Moral Values and the Idea of God.³⁶ He urged that our idea of God must start from moral experience, which may be called the heart of human experience (Sorley, Moral Values p. 91 and the Idea of God, Gifford Lectures, 1914–15, Ist[sic] ed. 1918). The book is neither a systematic account of philosophy nor an attempt to treat every problem of the philosophy of religion. It recognizes that there is a world of persons who discover the fact of value and realize value, and it interprets the structure and environment of life as all existing to reach this highest end (p. 473). In other words, as the laws of nature point to an objective natural world, so the fact of moral values points to an objective moral world. Having shown in this way that value is objectively real, he discussed the relation of value to reality and of reality to God. On the relation of value and reality he says that no philosophy can be called complete if, in treating the reality of the universe, it ignores the real being of moral persons and the idea of value contained in what is personally real. He maintained that moral laws and moral principles are truths of one kind with the reality of the universe, in full accord³⁷ with it, and must be brought into mutual adjustment (p. 188). He distinguished the reality of philosophy from the God of religion, and urged that a positive idea of God can be reached only through the nature of reality as it is made known to us; that the world of nature functions as the means of discovering and creating value; and that the world of persons is the nearest way to the idea of God.