Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T21:06:36.583Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Religion Without Christ

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2024

Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

The period during which the scientific attitude of mind was linked with materialism is past : in every field of study, physics, botany, astronomy, psychology, the foremost experts have reached the conclusion that the neat mechanism of a previous generation is no longer tenable. It takes time, of course, for these conclusions to become known; but the result is that the scientific mind no longer finds religion intolerable. On the contrary, religion is seen as a necessity : as something which is demanded by the very limitations of science itself. This has, of course, been the consistent assertion of the Christian Church ; but it would certainly be wrong to suppose that the change of attitude in an important part of the scientific world means that there is any kind of movement back to traditional religious beliefs. There is, indeed, a movement towards religion; but traditional Christianity is distinguished from other religions by all that is meant by the word ‘supernatural’ and ‘revealed’; and neither of these two words commends itself, it would seem, to the scientist. What actually seems to be taking place is an attempt to get behind religious formulations to something upon which those formulations depend : no need is felt for creeds and dogmas; religion is something individual, an attitude of mind, a response of the personality.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1944 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Meaning and Purpose, by Kenneth Wallrer. (Jonathan Cape; 7s. 6d.).

2 See in this connexion The Christian Sacrifice, by E. Masure, esp. Book I.

3 The Integration of the Personality (London, 1940), p. 234.