Faith and Future, 1970
" ...faith is fundamentally a particular kind of passion, or, more correctly, a kind of love that seizes a man and points the way he must go, even if that way is wearisome." p. 36 Link to context
"...wholeness of man, who fulfills the unity of his being as the interpenetration of spirit and body" p. 11.
"There is the clay, moulded into a man by the hand of God, and then, close upon it, the picture of woman formed out of the side of the sleeping man -- flesh of his flesh and companion to comfort his loneliness. Today we may be learning how to re-appraise this imagery as a profoundly symbolic utterance about human nature, as pictures, the truth of which lies on a plane totally different from that upon which biology and the theory of descent operate. We may now see these pictures as indeed expressing truth, but a truth that is deeper and more concerned with man's essential humanity than are the truths of natural science, exact and important as the latter may be.
This may well be, but in the very next chapter new problems emerge with the story of the Fall. How can one bring this into harmony with the knowledge that -- on the evidence of natural science man starts not from above, but from below, does not fall, but slowly rises, even now having only just accomplished the metamorphosis from animal to human being?
And what of paradise? Long before man existed, pain and death were in the world. Thistles and thorns grew long before any man had set eyes on them. And another thing: the first man was scarcely self-conscious, knew only privation and the wearisome struggle to survive. He was far from possessing the full endowment of reason, which the old doctrine of paradise attributes to him. But once the picture of paradise and the Fall has been broken in pieces, the notion of original sin goes with it, to be followed logically, it would seem, by the notion of redemption as well.
Obviously we might here employ arguments similar to those we have already used concerning the divine potter who infused spirit into the clay of the earth, to create man. Here, too, I say, we make it apparent that the truth about man goes deeper than the conclusions of biology. p.16 link to context
"The curious thing about the time in which we live is this: the moment in which modern thought becomes self-sufficient is the very moment in which its dissatisfaction becomes most apparent, and it inevitably falls a prey to relativism. We will have to consider this point in more detail in chapter three; meantime, however, a brief mention will suffice.
Positivism, which emerged at first as a demand for a particular method to be adopted within the exact sciences, has now very largely taken possession of philosophy -- thanks to the impact made by Wittgenstein. But this means that today both natural science and philosophy no longer seek truth, but only inquire about the correctness of the methods applied, and experiment in logic, chiefly in linguistic analysis, quite independently of the question whether the starting point of this form of thinking corresponds to reality." p.27 link to context
" faith is not a diluted form of natural science, an ancient or medieval preparatory stage that must vanish when the real thing turns up, but is something essentially different.
It is not provisional knowledge, although we do use the word in this sense also when we say, for example, "I believe that is so." In such a case "believing" means "being of the opinion." But when we say, "I believe you," the word acquires quite another meaning. It means the same as, "I trust you," or even as much as, "I rely upon you."
The you, in which I put reliance, provides me with a certainty that is different from but no less than the certainty that comes from calculation and experiment. And it is thus that the word is used in the Christian Credo. The basic form of Christian faith is not: I believe something, but I believe you. Faith is a disclosure of reality that is granted only to him who trusts, loves, and acts as a human being; and as such it is not a derivative of knowledge, but is sui generis, like knowledge, although it is indeed more basic and more central to our authentically human nature than knowledge is." p. 20.21 link to context