Theology and Metaphysics by James Richmond (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 305 Theology and Metaphysics. By JAMES RICHMOND. New York: Schocken Books. 1971. Pp. 156. $6.50. It is a long reach of history from St. Bernard inveighing against Abelard to Barth and Bultmann dismissing any role for reason and history in theology as" works righteousness." Nevertheless the temper of mind is the same, and it continues as the dominant one in contemporary Western Christianity . Newman gave voice to this attitude, at once skeptical and fideistic, in moderate and widely accepted terms as a preference for the wisdom of the heart: " I am far from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a god, but these do not warm me or enlighten me: they do not take away the winter of my desolation, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice" (Apologia pro Vita Sua, pp. ~17-~18). It is precisely this theme, this disinclination for anything resembling a natural theology, that James Richmond sets himself to explore critically in a study whose title he has filched from Albrecht Ritschl (Theologie und Metaphysik, 1881). The work is set out in numbered paragraphs reminiscent of Wittgenstein's two published works, a procedure that emphasizes its overall structure as a carefully reasoned argument in favor of theistic evidences. It is difficult to resist for long the assumption that, without natural theology of some sort, less than full justice can be done to Revelation as a human phenomenon, as an " event " which, though originating with God, occurs only within man's world of meaning. Still, the ventures of contemporary thinkers have, if anything, seemingly resulted in fresh " evidences " for anti-theism. Anthony Flew's complaint is strongly felt that somewhere along the line there occurs an unexplained " leap " from empirical data to non-empirical Reality. The contention towards which Richmond works is that syllogism and fideism are not the sole alternatives: that a middle ground lies available with "reasoned beliefs" (N. B., a not dissimilar attempt has been made by Francis Parker in his published Marquette lecture, Reason and Faith Revisited) . The opening wedge in the new direction the discussion has taken in Anglo-Saxon circles (where the discussion has been most attentive to the demands of logic) was supplied by Wittgenstein's later contention that meaning in religious discourse is determined by use. This at least enabled theists to contend that their God-talk was not devoid of meaning simply because of an impossibility of applying the Positivist principle of verification . To acknowledge then that a statement cannot be verified by empirical observation (granting that it is intended existentially and not as a mere proposition for logical analysis) is not to dismiss it as meaningless-as merely verbal, emotive, or nonsensical. Subsequent thinkers, like John Wisdom, were able at this point to take the all-important next step, suggesting that such usage could only arbitrarily be dismissed as subjective 306 BOOK REVIEWS and could in fact have an objective ground in trans-subjective experience. This was a beginning of restoring to religious discourse not simply meaning but truth value. To this Richmond further appends Wisdom's observation on " the sheer quantity of inescapable, significant human situations which cannot be handled in experimental and observational terms " (p. 54) -a dimension of human existence by and large neglected as a source of understanding and truth. But the problem now is the construction to be put upon such lifeexperience . The difference between seeing such experience as theistic or as atheistic clues-thus the difference as to whether or not god existsis like the difference as to whether or not there is beauty in a thing. It is either there or not, and is either seen or not. Beauty may well be in the eye of the beholder, but this is not to maintain that the beholder bestows upon the object a quality it nowise has of itself. The set of facts is the same for all, the interpretations are quite different. Yet this is due to neither rational deduction from the data nor to purely subjective factors either. Somehow or other, a pattern of meaning emerges from within the data experienced. As a...