“Conditions do not contain the full causal explanation of intellectual phenomena,” said Wilhelm Dilthey. All they do “is to confine the variability of that which originates within certain boundaries.” To say this, however, is still to say quite a lot about the contextuality of a person's thought. It points to the relative importance of knowing the “world” in which a person lived and developed, if one is adequately to understand that thought. Despite Dilthey's reservations, therefore, what Thomas A. Langford says at the beginning of his book on early twentieth-century British theology must be taken with utmost seriousness:

In many ways John Oman matches perfectly the portrait of Victorian attitudes that W. E. Houghton paints in his The Victorian Frame of Mind. He is concerned with duty and earnestness and self-fulfillment; he is critical of power and hypocrisy. But in significant other ways Oman is concerned with particularly twentieth-century issues: with authenticity and freedom, with issues of meaning raised by the Great War, and with commitment and faith in a world which considered skepticism the “mark of intellectual sophistication.”