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Tennant's Struggle with a “Desperate Task”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 August 2011

Graham Frisbee
Affiliation:
Andes, N. Y.

Extract

In his essay, “On God and the Absolute,” F. H. Bradley declares that the “assertor of an imperfect God is, whether he knows it or not, face to face with a desperate task or a forlorn alternative. He must try to show (how I cannot tell) that the entire rest of the Universe, outside his limited God, is known to be still weaker and more limited. Or he must appeal to us to follow our Leader blindly and, for all we know, to a common and overwhelming defeat.” The appeal of the second course, even when it is set forth in the spirited and heroic manner of William James, cannot survive a full realization of what is involved in such a prospect. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that most of the more sober-minded theologians who hold the idea of a limited God attempt to do so in the first form suggested by Bradley. F. R. Tennant belongs to this group. And it is his attempt to accomplish the “desperate task” that we propose to examine.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1942

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References

1 The substance of this article constitutes a part of a dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Yale University in candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

2 Essays on Truth and Reality, p. 430.

3 Philosophical Theology, II, p. 140.

4 Philosophical Theology, 1, p. 150.

5 Philosophical Theology, II, p. 122.

6 Ibid., p. 123.

7 Ibid., p. 129.

8 Ibid., p. 176.

9 Philosophical Theology, II, p. 194.

10 Ibid., p. 196.

11 Ibid., p. 212.

12 Ibid., p. 220.

13 Ibid., II, p. 223.

14 Ibid., p. 239.

15 See Temple, William, Nature, Man, and God, pp. 378 ff.

16 See Philosophical Theology, II, p. 224 f.