Randolph Crump Miller

Religious Education In Europe

This part introduces the situation of Religious Education in Europe. Three types can be identified: education into religion, education about religion, learning from religion. Many layers shape each existing approach e.g. religious landscape, role and value of religion, state – church relation, education system, history and politics. Each approach to Religious Education has a biography. Introduction of the religious landscape and of three main models of organisation of Religious Education

THEOLOGY AND THE FUTURE OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 1

1Excerpted from “Continuity and Contrast in the Future of Religious Education,” a chapter in The Religious Education We Need, ed. James Michael Lee (Notre Dame: Religious Education Press, 1977). Alfred McBride, Carl F. H. Henry, John Westerhoff III, Gloria Durka, and James Michael Lee are the other contributors

II WHITEHEAD AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

*This paper was read in a seminar at the National Convention of the Religious Education Association in November 1972; it was published in the St. Lukes Journal of Theology, Spring 1973. See also the chapter on process and religious education in the authors The Language Gap and God (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1970), pp. 141‐56

Is Temple a Realist

I T HE clearest and most philosophical statement of Archbishop Temples position is to be found in the first half of his Gifford Lectures, Nature, Man and God. There he makes a powerful statement of what he chooses to call dialectical realism. In these chapters he seeks to examine the cosmic process, our place in that process, and our apprehension alike of the process and our relation to it. This examination, following somewhat closely the essential structure of Professor Whiteheads cosmology, has led to the conviction that there is within and throughout the cosmic process a Mind which also transcends it. It is the purpose of this paper to show that, while there are realistic elements in Temples thought, his position is essentially idealistic, personalistic, and colored by his Christian presuppositions. Our quarrel is not with a metaphysical Christian idealism; it is with Temples claim to be a realist. Henry Nelson Wieman has classified realism under four headings. Metaphysically, it is the belief that events, things, and forms exist independently of God; they are the materials through which and with which he works. Epistemologically, it is the assumption that objects exist independently of being known by any mind. In the third place, evil is recognized as a definite fact to be considered and overcome. The fourth emphasis of realism is the urgent need for immediate action. Realism is predominantly practical. It is with the first two aspects of realism that we shall deal. Temple establishes his realism on the basis of the dialectical materialism of Marx and Lenin. But finally the materialism

LINGUISTIC PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

* This article is based on excerpts from The Language Gap and God: Religious Language and Christian Education, to be published by The Pilgrim Press in the fall of 1970.

II LINGUISTIC MODELS AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 1

1A paper read to the Professors and Research Section, Division of Christian Education, National Council of Churches, Louisville, Kentucky, Feb. 16, 1966.

Theology in Transition

F IFTEEN years ago the paramount religious question of the day was posed by Gerald Birney Smith in an article published in this Journal: Is Theism Essential to Religion? His answer was that we must redefine theism if we were to defend it successfully. The theology of the future would employ the methods of scientific empiricism and would be based primarily on a great mystical experiment. When Smith wrote this penetrating article, he was professor of Christian theology at the University of Chicago. In his early days he had been a Ritschlian, having studied for a year or more under Wilhelm Herrmann. Later he was impressed by the arguments of positivism, instrumentalism, and naturalistic humanism; and the influence of these positions can be seen throughout his thought. His final point of view was never clearly formulated, but it seems to have been an intermediate position between humanism and theism. While he approved of the method suggested by Douglas Clyde Macintosh in Theology as an Empirical Science, he objected to the metaphysical reconstruction. Is it not religiously as well as scientifically more satisfactory, he asked, to set forth the meaning of religious beliefs in the total organization of our experiences than to try to reinstate realism? It was Macintoshs testing of the standard doctrines which were worked out in the Christianity of past centuries, and were formulated with the aid of a type of metaphysics which modern empirical science repudiates2 which brought forth this objection. It is in 1 V, 356-77. All references to this article may be found in Smiths Current Christian Thinking (Chicago, I928), pp. I46-7I.