John E. Smith

Religion and Morality

E relation of religion to morality is a theme well known to every student of the history of religion. Not only has it been the subject of much discussion within the various religious traditions themselves, but it has been at the center of the philosophical discussion of ethics in Western culture since the age of the Enlightenment. When in ancient times the Old Testament prophets first apprehended the ideal of justice and preached the necessity of righteousness before God, they were at the same time criticizing both directly and indirectly certain popular religious beliefs about God on the basis of their newly acquired standard. From such criticism it was inevitable that there should arise the question concerning the relation between the standard regulating the conduct of life, on the one hand, and traditional belief about Gods nature, on the other. This posed, as will be clear, one aspect of the problem of the relation between religion * Dr. John E. Smith is assistant professor of philosophy and religion in Barnard College, Columbia University. After completing his undergraduate work at Columbia College, he attended Union Theological Seminary, where he received the degree of Bachelor of Divinity in I945. In I948 he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from Columbia University. Dr. Smith was instructor in philosophy and religion in Vassar College before coming to his present post. He has published articles in the Review of Religion, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and other journals. and morality. The same aspect is illustrated again when, at another time and in a vastly different culture, the Greek

Jonathan Edwards: Piety and Practice in the American Character

Every nation has had its crop of representative men-men who in their creative response to the problems of their period have succeeded in disclosing some identifying trait or aspect of the national character from which they spring. They may be men of affairs, revealing the ethos of a people through their deeds and the manner in which they discharge the duties of an office; they may be men of a more reflective bent, novelists, philosophers, poets, theologians, who through their ideas or mode of expression make manifest fundamental convictions shared by large numbers of their countrymen. A truly representative man will help us to discover what is so characteristic and essential that it comes to be seen as the trademark of a people or a historical epoch. Every representative figure exhibits a two-sided nature. On the one hand, he reflects a trait of character or belief that already exists within the culture he represents, and hence we may say that the culture expresses itself in some essential way through him. He serves to give both form and focus to the trait or belief in question. Thus, for example, William James expressed in a vivid and explicit way the voluntarism which by his time had already established itself in the American character, and he celebrated the sense of adventure called forth by a world that has an open end, a world whose future is more important than its past. On the other hand, the representative figure does more than mirror what already exists: he interprets, he responds, he decides and thus gives a new direction to the future. It may be the setting forth of a new theory or of a novel solution to an ancient problem; it may be the insistence on the continued importance of a neglected virtue; it may be the reinterpretation of the nature of God or of man in ways not previously envisaged. Whatever form the response may take, it is novel and, as representative, it becomes characteristic of a people or an era.