Table Of Content

Meaning and Truth in Religion Meaning and Truth in Religion BY WILLIAM A. CHRISTIAN PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 1964 Copyright © 1964 by Princeton University Press ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Library of Congress Catalog Card: 64-12180 Publication of this book has been aided by the Ford Foundation program to support publication, through university presses, of work in the humanities and social sciences Printed in the United States of America by Vail-Ballou Press, Inc., Binghamton, New York ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to Robert Brumbaugh, Malcolm Diamond, Noel Fleming, Julian Hartt, George Lindbeck, Η. H. Price, and Rulon Wells for reading the manuscript at one stage or another and making helpful comments (some spoken, some unspoken), to Yale University for a year's leave spent at Oxford, where the first draft was writ ten, and to the publishers mentioned in footnotes for use of quotations. An arti cle, "Truth-claims in Religion," which embodied some parts of Chapters ι and n, was published in the Journal of Religion in 1962. WILLIAM A. CHRISTIAN Timothy Dwight College Yale University June 1963 Contents page I. INTRODUCTION 1. The character of this study ι 2. Religious discourse 10 II. DISAGREEMENTS AND TRUTH-CLAIMS ι. Religious disagreements 15 2. Basic proposals and basic disagreements 19 3. Truth-claims 24 III. SOME THEORIES OF RELIGION 1. Introduction 35 2. Worship and awe 36 3. Religion as worship of God 37 4. Kant on religion 41 5. Schleiermacher 43 6. A variation on Schleiermacher 50 7. Rudolf Otto and others 54 8. Conclusions 56 IV. ANOTHER THEORY OF RELIGION 1. Religious interests 60 2. A predicate for religious judgments, and some variables in religion 63 3. Patterns of subordination 65 4. Problematical cases 67 5. On not being religious 69 6. Some uses of this theory 71 viii CONTENTS 7. An interpretation of inquiry 73 8. "Is religion important?" 76 V. RELIGIOUS INQUIRY: BASIC QUESTIONS AND SUPPOSITIONS 1. Curiosity and inquiry 78 2. Basic religious questions 81 3. Basic suppositions 84 4. Open commitments 88 5. The beginning of inquiry: a case in point 90 VI. RELIGIOUS INQUIRY: SUGGESTIONS AND EXPLICATION 1. Some examples of suggestions 93 2. Why suggestions are needed 96 3. How suggestions occur 99 4. How suggestions are adopted 103 5. Explication of suggestions 104 6. Wholeheartedness and certainty 109 VII. JUDGMENTS 1. Introduction 113 2. Basic religious proposals again 114 3. Appraisals of injunctions 121 4. Injunctions to believe 124 5. Confessions 133 6. "Noncognitive" theories 135 7. Proposals for belief 143 8. The finality of religious judgments 145 VIII. RELIGIOUS ARGUMENTS 1. Introduction 147 2. Arguments about consistency and coherence 148