[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] Snt,—Mr. Kenneth Ingram has
done a service to religious thought by drawing attention to the urgent need for an ideological basis of Christianity in the light of the existing " type of cultural and intellectual environment." When he asks if Christianity is " committed to certain beliefs which are credible only in a particular type of cultural and intellectual environment," he is exposing a front of Christian apologetics so far undefended against those who hold extreme left views. To those who say that Christian doctrines are merely the wish-. fulfilments of a certain type of culture or have their origin in a particular form of unitary social order, there is so far no answer on the part of Christian scholars, and the only reaction to such a suggestion is a retreat to pure transcendentedsm or an uneasy attempt, through compromise, to make the most of both worlds. So closely interwoven with the existing pattern
of social life are the doctrines of Christianity and the economy of ecclesiasticism that it has become vital to the future historic importance of Christianity to free the essential from the fortuitous elements in its growth and authority. Mr ingram
is himself capable of rescuing the doctrines of the Faith from their " dug-outs " in the underground of an entrenched social order into the open air of human life in its relationship to the Fatherhood of God and the sanctity of personality. It is error that kills religion and not wickedness, and without ceaseless interpretation doctrines which were serviceable to humanity in a certain type of culture assume the appearance of error when the horizons of life and experience widen. " Error is worse than wickedness, for it does not appear to be wicked, and thus do religions die without the appearance of death." Mr. Ingram would awaken the hopes of many sincere but distracted Christians in the advance of the spiritual faculties of humanity if he would persuade scholars within the Anglican Communion at any rate to attempt simple restatements of Christ's conception of God and His relation to man, not in terms of metaphysics but in personal and directly religious
Previous page
