Christianity and Ethics: A Handbook of Christian EthicsAlexander, Archibald B. D. (Archibald Browning Drysdale)
Religion
Christianity and Ethics: A Handbook of Christian Ethics
Alexander, Archibald B. D. (Archibald Browning Drysdale)
Christian ethics
Without dwelling further upon the physical elements of man, there are
three constituents or functions of personality prominent in the New
Testament which claim our consideration, reason, conscience and will. It
is just because man possesses, or _is_ mind, conscience and will, that he
is capable of responding to the life which Christ offers, and of sharing
in the divine character which he reveals.
(2) The term _nous_, or reason, is of frequent occurrence in the New
Testament. Christianity highly honours the intellectual powers of man
and accords to the mind an important role in apprehending and entering
into the thoughts and purposes of God. 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God
with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind,' says
Jesus. Many are disposed to think that the exercise of faith, the
immediate organ of spiritual apprehension, is checked by the interference
of reason. But so far from faith and reason being opposed, not only are
they necessary to each other, but in all real faith there is an element
of reason. In all religious feeling, as in morality, art, and other
spheres of human activity, there is the underlying element of reason
which is the characteristic of all the activities of a self-conscious
intelligence. To endeavour to elicit that element, to infuse into the
spontaneous and unsifted conceptions of religious experience the
objective clearness, necessity and organic unity of thought--is the
legitimate aim of science, in religion as in other spheres. It would be
strange if in the highest of all provinces of human experience
intelligence must renounce her claim.[17] The Ritschlian value-judgment
theory in its disparagement of philosophy is practically a dethronement
of reason. And the protest of Pragmatism and the voluntarists {64}
generally against what they term 'Intellectualism'[18] and their distrust
of the logical faculty, are virtually an avowal of despair and a resort
to agnosticism, if not to scepticism. If we are to renounce the quest
for objective truth, and accept 'those ideas only which we can
assimilate, validate, corroborate,'[19] those ideas in short which are
'practically useful in guiding us to desirable issues,' then it would
seem we are committed to a world of subjective caprice and confusion and
must give up the belief in a rational view of the universe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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