Theology and the Social Consciousness: A Study of the Relations of the Social Consciousness to Theology (2nd ed.)King, Henry Churchill
Religion
Theology and the Social Consciousness: A Study of the Relations of the Social Consciousness to Theology (2nd ed.)
King, Henry Churchill
Christian sociology; Theology, Doctrinal -- History -- 20th century
The justifiable elements in mysticism, then, may be said to include:
the insistence on the legitimate place of feeling in religion as a
real and vital experience; the emphasis on one's own conviction and
faith; the real difficulty of expressing the full meaning of the
religious experience; the demand for a complete ethical surrender to
God; and the faith in the real unity and worth of the world in God.
Now if one tries to bring together these justifiable elements in
mysticism, the truly mystical may all be summed up as simply a protest
in favor of the whole man--the entire personality. It says that men
can experience and live and feel and do much more than they can
logically formulate, define, explain, or even fully express. Living is
more than thinking.
2. _The Protest in Favor of the Whole Man._--The element to which
mysticism has tried most to do justice is feeling, and so it has been
liable to a new and dangerous one-sidedness. But the truly mystical
must be a protest alike against a narrow juiceless intellectualism,
against a narrow moralistic rigorism, and against a blind and
spineless sentimentalism. It is a protest particularly against making
the mathematico-mechanical view of the world the only view; against
making logical consistency the sole test of truth or reality; against
ignoring all data, except those which come through the intellect
alone; that is, against trying to make a part, not the whole, of man
the standard; in other words, against ignoring the data which come
through feeling and will--emotional, æsthetic, ethical, and religious
data, as well as those judgments of worth which underlie reason's
theoretical determinations.
Man stands, in fact, everywhere face to face with an actual world of
great complexity, that seems to him at first what James says the
baby's world is, "one big blooming buzzing confusion;" "and the
universe of all of us is still to a great extent such a confusion,
potentially resolvable, and demanding to be resolved, but not yet
actually resolved, into parts."[39] In one sense, man's whole task is
to think unity and order into this confusion. The problem really
becomes that of thinking the universe through in several kinds of
terms, and then finally bringing all together into one comprehensive
view. All these are alike ideals which the mind sets before itself.
The easiest of these problems is the attempt to think the world
through, in mathematico-mechanical terms. But the attempt to think the
world through in æsthetic or ethical or religious terms is equally
legitimate, though it is more difficult. Not only, then, is the
mathematico-mechanical view not the sole justifiable view, but it
really has its justification in an ideal, and success in this attempt
affords just encouragement for the hope of success in the other more
difficult problems.[40]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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