Nature, Man and God [Paperback]

William Temple (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 10, 2003

This work contains the Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of Glasgow in the academic years 1932-1933 and 1933-1934. Mr. Temple's purpose has not been to construct, stage by stage, a philosophic fabric where each conclusion becomes the basis of the next advance. Partial Contents: distinction between natural and revealed religion; tension between philosophy and religion; mathematics, logic and history; world as apprehended; truth and beauty; moral goodness; process, mind and value; freedom and determination; transcendence of the immanent; spiritual authority and religious experience; finitude and evil; divine grace and human freedom; commonwealth of value; meaning of history; moral and religious conditions of eternal life; sacramental universe; hunger of natural religion.

Product Details

• Paperback: 564 pages
• Publisher: Kessinger Publishing, LLC (August 10, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0766174956
• ISBN-13: 978-0766174955
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,976,476 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars A Middle Way from the Past for the Contemporary World, November 28, 2007

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Clyde Glandon (Tulsa, OK USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Nature, Man and God (Paperback)

William Temple, Nature, Man, and God, 1932-34.

William Temple stands in a great line of Archbishops of Canterbury, as remote in time as Anselm and as current at Michael Ramsey and Rowan Williams. All of these men combine brilliant intellects with a living spirituality. Most of their works are not easy reading--nor are the works of Julian of Norwich, Richard Hooker, Charles Gore, and Evelyn Underhill, who also are participants and contributors to this Anglo-Catholic stream of Christian practice. For those who believe the gifts of the human mind may be in fruitful service of the heart of faith, this book of Temple's, the 1932-34 Gifford lectures, is solid grist for the mill.

Temple was the Archbishop of Canterbury for a little more than three years during World War II, before his relatively early death. He was a leader in his era of the ecumenical movement in Christianity, and was known for a remarkable personal facility for winning co-operation, as well as for proactively engaging social and economic issues in relation to Christian values. Among Anglicans and Episcopalians his Readings in John's Gospel has been his most widely read and appreciated work.

These lectures contain a variety of highly creative and independent engagements with the encounter of Christian theism with modernist perspectives. The lectures are in fact exercises in "natural theology," that is, how reason and experience may approach and seek to come to terms with religious revelation. Temple's characteristically Anglican "Via Media" theology may be seen in this book as distinct from the modernist premises which are more typical of Liberal Protestantism and which still are so influential in the split between thought and religious experience which may be found in many contemporary Protestant seminaries, and much contemporary mentality. This is perhaps clearest in his treatment of the philosophy of Kant and Descartes. To use post-modernist terms, Temple offers an incisive deconstruction of Descartes' view that disembodied thought is the genesis of experience and truth. In this Temple participates in 20th century early childhood development theory, and contemporary learning theory, in which cognition is grounded in dynamic relationship and emotion.

In this, Temple is reworking Anselm's own creative engagement with thought and faith. Compare Anselm's statement "He who does not believe, will not experience, and he who has not experienced will not understand" with Temple:

Orthodoxy is constantly refashioned so that its permanent essence may be synthesized with an ever growing range of experience. . . While in the individual, experience very largely depends on belief, and this again on tradition, it is none the less true that in the totality of religious history tradition and belief depend upon experience. . . the growth of religion as a dynamic force comes rather from the side of religious experience.

In Temple and Rowan Williams we can see a suspicion of modernist rationalism which has produced over-ideologized developments in scientism, Marxism, critical theory, some forms of feminism, atheism, and various religious fundamentalisms.

Temple's grounding of thought in the more primary modality of "experience" may be seen in his still-relevant chapters "Spiritual Authority and Experience," "Revelation and it's Mode," and "The Sacramental Universe." The writing on the universe as sacrament is its own presentation of Hebrew, Celtic, and other pre-modern views of the natural environment, as well as a 1930's version of contemporary eco-psychology. Here are samples of Temple's characteristic "way":

Infallible direction for practical action is not to be had either from Bible or Church or Pope or individual communing with God; and this is not through any failure of a wise and loving God to supply it, but because in whatever degree reliance upon such infallible direction come in, spirituality goes out. Intelligent and responsible judgement is the privilege and burden of spirit or personality.

So too sound doctrine assists the psychological organism, which is man, an organism now recognized to be spiritual as well as aesthetic and animate, to achieve satisfactory adjustment toand intercourse with its environment, now known to be divine as well as beautiful and nutritive.

Temple's term the "Spirit of the Whole"--perhaps not always named "God" by many-- provides doorways for human planet-sharers for pilgrimage with each other, whether they be Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims or non-rigid reasoners:

So long as the self retains initiative it can only fix itself upon itself as centre. Its hope of deliverance is to be uprooted from that centre and drawn to find its centre in God, the Spirit of the Whole.

One thinks of the prayer of the Jains: From the unreal, lead us to the real.