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Two Concepts of God1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Carl G. Vaught
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, The Pennsylvania State University

Extract

Genuine religion always involves the worship of what is genuinely ultimate. Religion, worship, and ultimate reality are thus indissolubly related. The task of reflective thought in this domain is to distinguish what is sound from what is spurious in religion; to characterise the meaning of religious devotion; and to attempt to articulate the nature of the ultimate reality to which men's worship is directed.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1970

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References

page 221 note 2 I have in mind the view of Charles Hartshorne, as developed in The Logic of Perfection (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Co., 1962)Google Scholar, and Anselm's Discovery (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Co., 1965).Google Scholar I must postpone until another occasion the attempt to do full justice to the subtlety of his neo-classical position.

page 221 note 3 Rudolf, Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. by Harvey, J. W., 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950).Google Scholar

page 221 note 4 Paul Tillich speaks of two similar strands in his paper, ‘The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion’, in Theology of Culture, ed. by Kimball, Robert C. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).Google Scholar The present may bears certain positive relations to Tillich's, though it attempts to develop similar themes in more concrete and directly experiential terms.

page 225 note 1 This passage clearly reflects a Tillichian perspective, as developed in Systematic Theology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951), I, 238–41Google Scholar and Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), pp. 4154.Google Scholar

page 225 note 2 For a treatment of some of the problems pertaining to non-objectifying speech, cf. Robinson, James M. and Cobb, John B. Jr,. (eds.), The Later Heidegger and Theology (New York: Harper and Row, 1963).Google Scholar

page 228 note 1 In ‘Being and God’, a forthcoming paper in Essays in Metaphysics (The Pennsylvania State University Press), I have attempted to effect a unification between the mystery and intelligibility of God in terms of a somewhat untraditional interpretation of the meaning of Being. At the same time, the unification in question involves a tensional element. This element comprises the permanent truth in the present interpretation.