Essays in Unitarian Theology by Kenneth Twinn Lindsey - General ...

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ESSAYS IN UNITARIAN THEOLOGY
is the Christian church, which has maintained through
the centuries something of the revelation of Jesus,
although it has also perverted it and has exalted him
to a deity which I cannot accept. Nevertheless I
belong to that church too, because I have been born
and bred in Christendom. I can, however, give my
full allegiance only to that organization which calls
itself Unitarian, because it offers me the freedom in
religious thought and life without which religion is for
me a sham, and yet is committed to the pursuit of
truth, goodness and beauty with all the discipline
without which that pursuit is ineffective, feeble and
vain. It is far from perfect, but its well-being depends
upon me in company with all others who prize its
aims and functions; these I prize so far as have
joined its ministry, but had I not taken that step, I
should be called upon to support it as a whole and in
whatever congregation there might be in the locality in
which I might live.
Conclusion
This is, in brief, what religion means to me. A. N.
Whitehead has summed it up in words which express
the depth and vastness of what is man's supreme
inheritance :
Religion is the vision of something which stands be-
yond, behind and within the passing flux of immediate
things; something which is real and yet waiting to be
realized; something which is a remote possibility and yet
the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning
to all that passes and yet eludes apprehension; something
whose possession is the final good and yet is beyond all
reach; something which is the ultimate ideal and the hope-
less quest.
BELIEF IN GOD
by Arthur J. Long
" THERE can be no surer sign of decrepitude and decay
in faith than a prevalent nervousness about naming and
cornmending reason, an unwillingness to allude to its
existence, except under wrappings of language which
suggest that it is but a necessary evil.'.' Such was the
opinion of an eminent nineteenth-century scholar. *
If he was right, then it is obvious that contemporary
faith is in an advanced state of decay. Nowadays
there is no God but unreason, and Kierkegaard is his
prophet. From the strange, tortured speculations of
this nineteenth-century " gloomy Dane " we have, on
the one hand, the open irrationalism of the Theology
of Crisis (" The object of faith is something which is
absurd to reason. . . . The hall-mark of logical inconsistency
clings to all genuine pronouncements of
faith ") ,t and on the other, the paradoxes and obscurities
of Existentialism. On all sides we see the strain
to base religious faith on something other than rational
argument,. in a pathetic attempt to evade the assaults
of non- theis tic philosophers.
-
There is, of course, nothing new in the repudiation
of reason in religion. In a sense, it goes back to the
Reformation.
* F. J. A. Hort: The Way, the Truth, the Life, p. 176.
t E. Brunner : Philosophy of Religion, p. 55..