- Introduction
- The church and its history
- The essence and identity of Christianity
- The history of Christianity
- The primitive church
- The internal development of the early Christian Church
- Relations between Christianity and the Roman government and the Hellenistic culture
- The early liturgy, the calendar, and the arts
- The alliance between church and empire
- Theological controversies of the 4th and 5th centuries
- Liturgy and the arts after Constantine
- Political relations between East and West
- Literature and art of the “Dark Ages”
- Missions and monasticism
- The Photian schism and the great East–West schism
- From the schism to the Reformation
- Christianity from the 16th to the 20th century
- Contemporary Christianity
- Christian doctrine
- The nature and functions of doctrine
- Scripture and tradition: the apostolic witness
- Evangelism: the first teaching about the God of Jesus Christ
- Catechesis: instructing candidates for baptism
- Liturgy: the school and feast of faith
- Ethics: obeying the truth
- Aversion of heresy: the establishment of orthodoxy
- Apologetics: defending the faith
- Restatement: respecting language and knowledge
- Inculturation: respecting places and peoples
- Dogma: the most authoritative teaching
- Consensus: patterns of agreement
- Theology: loving God with the mind
- Symbolics: creeds and confessions
- Development: the maturation of understanding
- Schism: division over substantial matters
- Controversy: fighting over the faith
- Ecumenism: speaking the truth in love
- God the Father
- God the Son
- God the Holy Spirit
- The Holy Trinity
- Anthropology
- What it is to be human
- The human as a creature
- The human as the image of God
- Human redemption
- The problem of suffering
- The resurrection of the body
- Progressive human perfection
- The “new man”: The human being in the light of Christ
- The “reborn human”
- Human liberation
- Joy in human existence
- The charismatic believer
- Christian perfection
- Fellow humans as the present Christ
- The church
- Church tradition
- Eschatology
- Expectations of the Kingdom of God in early Christianity
- Expectations of the Kingdom of God in the medieval and Reformation periods
- Expectations of the Kingdom of God in the post-Reformation period
- The role of imminent expectation in missions and emigrations
- Eschatological expectations and secularization
- Concepts of life after death
- Aspects of the Christian religion
- Christian philosophy
- Christian mysticism
- Christian myth and legend
- The Christian community and the world
- The relationships of Christianity
- Christian missions
- Ecumenism
- Christianity and world religions
Influence of logical positivism
Perhaps the largest body of work, however, was generated in dialogue with the linguistic turn of philosophy in the English-speaking world, concentrating on the analysis of language in its various uses. The logical positivist movement originated in the 1920s with the Vienna Circle. Although mainly concerned with the philosophy of science, it posed by implication a major challenge to the logical meaningfulness of religious language. The positivist position, in its developed form, was that a statement has factual meaning only if it is capable in principle of being verified or falsified, or at least in some degree confirmed or disconfirmed, within human experience; otherwise it is meaningless, or cognitively vacuous. In the years immediately after World War II this account of factual meaning was applied (e.g., by Antony Flew) to theological statements, raising such questions as: What observable difference does it make whether it is true or false that “God loves us”? Whatever tragedies occur, do not the faithful still maintain their belief, adding perhaps that the divine love is beyond human comprehension? But if it is not possible to conceive of circumstances in which “God loves us” would have to be judged false, is not the statement factually empty, or meaningless?
This challenge evoked three kinds of response. Some Christian philosophers declared it to be a nonchallenge, on the ground that the positivists never succeeded in finding a precise formulation of the verification criterion that was fully satisfactory even to themselves. Others held that this does not block the central thrust of the positivist challenge. Does it really make no difference within actual or possible human experience whether or not God exists and loves us; and if so, is not the significance of the belief thereby fatally damaged? Among those who felt it necessary to face this challenge, one group granted that theological statements lack factual meaning and suggested that their proper use lies elsewhere, as expressing a way of looking at the world (e.g., Richard M. Hare) or a moral point of view and commitment (e.g., R.B. Braithwaite). The other group claimed that theism is ultimately open to experiential confirmation. The theory of eschatological verification (developed by John Hick) holds that the belief in future postmortem experiences will be verified if true (though not falsified if false), and that in a divinely governed universe such experiences will take forms confirming theistic faith. Thus although the believer and the disbeliever do not have different expectations about the course of earthly history, they do expect the total course of the universe to be radically different.
In the late 20th century, under the stimulus of Wittgenstein’s posthumously published works, attention was directed to the multiple legitimate uses of language in the various language games developed within different human activities and forms of life; and it was suggested that religious belief has its own autonomous validity, not subject to verificationist or scientific or other extraneous criteria. Statements about God and eternal life do not make true-or-false factual claims but express, in religious language, a distinctive attitude to life and way of engaging in it. This suggestion formed part of the broader non-realist interpretation of religion, which held that religious beliefs do not refer to putative transcendent realities but are instead expressive of human ideals, desires, hopes, attitudes, and intentions. Such thinking goes back to the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity, 1841) in the 19th century. It was promoted in the early 20th century by George Santayana, John Dewey, and J.H. Randall, Jr., and later by Christian writers such as D.Z. Phillips and Don Cupitt. According to them, true Christianity consists in the inner purity of an unself-centred attitude to life and does not involve belief in the objective reality of God or of a life after death. This view, however, was criticized on the grounds that to deny the transcendent reference of religious language empties it of any substantial meaning.
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