“The purpose of religious language”¦is to evoke an attitude…”
You may need to enlarge the page to see it better; I sure did; KSH.
“The purpose of religious language”¦is to evoke an attitude…”
You may need to enlarge the page to see it better; I sure did; KSH.
Looking back it’s hard to believe now how thin and lacking in nourishment was our theological gruel in those days. The sentence quoted above (from Hick) reminds me of a philosopher at Oxford called R. M. Hare that we read at about this same time, who enounced an ethical theory that was (despite his denials) simply a variant of emotivism. The suasive power of an ethical claim, he said, lay not in its truth value but in the power of persuasion behind its advocate. An ethical stance was true in the sense that it persuaded me that it was true and I could urgently convey this to others in such a way that they understood the imperative. That was all. Ethical statements were not about knowledge at all. Desperate. I think that the charismatic movement that began to hit the mainstream churches in the 1970s was a reaction against this anorexic Christianity.