The Quakers developed a strong sense of the inner (or inward) Light of God, a theme also found in Augustine and Andre Louf. But our reception of it is fallible, and needs testing. In Quaker thought and language “God” does not have to be interpreted as the name of a mysterious elusive entity, but as indicating the object and source of our religious experience.
What can be said on either side of the God-relation? Andre Louf provides a vivid account of human repentance and God’s forgiveness and grace. Tillich provides an own account in his own terminology. Both emphasize the reality of God’s love and forgiveness.
Martin Buber presented a poetic account of the I-Thou relation that we can have with other people, though also with some animals or trees or works of art, and in his view with God, the eternal Thou. Buber says we can only speak of God in his personal relationship to humans, but that is paradoxical, for he also says the concept of person cannot encompass the essential being of God.
The later work of Cupitt presents a postmodernist challenge to extra-linguistic reference in all language, not only in religion. But this extreme position overreaches itself and reduces to absurdity. The possibility remains that God-language has its own kind of reference and truth.
Deism believes in a God who created the world in the beginning but does not intervene in it thereafter. It represents an unstable compromise between traditional theism and scientific determinism.
Many biblical and Qur’anic texts represent God as a person, who is incorporeal but present everywhere with consciousness, perception, intelligence, and will. This chapter discusses difficulties in this conception and cites some theologians who flatly deny that God is a person.
Immanuel Kant arrived at a nuanced compromise between the Pietist religion of his youth and the rational philosophy of his academic training. He denied knowledge of God, the soul, and free will, but left room for a morally-qualified kind of faith in these matters. He hoped that religion would become more rationally purified, emphasizing ethics.
Rudolf Otto made an influential study of the non-rational element in religion, arguing that religious awe is a human universal. But he claimed that its higher forms are found in the book of Job and in Christianity, Kierkegaard’s notion of subjective truth is in danger of neglecting the objective content of faith.
The work of D. Z. Phillips, and the book by Gerald Moore examined in this chapter, emphasize that the language and beliefs of Christianity have their sense only in the context of a Christian form of life. Moore often sounds very relativist, but in the end he claims that the Christian way of life involves deeper insight.
Religious language can be used in worship and ritual in an instrumentalist fashion, as an activity that can have beneficial effects in commitment to a loving way of life, but without objective reference or truth. It is not dishonorable to take part in traditional rites in this spirit, but it risks missing an important dimension.
