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The Necessity of God: Modern Theology and the Church’s Witness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 August 2023
Abstract
The philosophical positing of the necessity of God implies that there is a responsibility placed upon the Church to remind all humankind of our contingency and to speak of God’s presence especially in times of national and international crisis. Recent experience has exposed a certain silence from the Churches and notably from their leadership – notable examples would be the Covid-19 pandemic and the possible perils of continuing conflicts. How does theology prosper an appropriate sense of development and response to changes in culture – both through individuals and wider movements? How can it be made clear that theology is far from being an obsolete discipline in contemporary culture?
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- Research Article
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- © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 Later, these lectures were published, as were the following three sets of lectures, which also aimed to bring God into public life. Seeing Ourselves: Interpreting Modern Society (ed. Stephen Platten; Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1998); later volumes were: The Retreat of the State (ed. Stephen Platten; Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1998); Ink and Spirit (ed. Stephen Platten; Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2000); Open Government (ed. Stephen Platten; Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2003).
2 For a more detailed analysis of this see Richard Harries and Stephen Platten (eds.), Reinhold Niebuhr and Contemporary Politics: God and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
3 Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Scribner, 1932).
4 Most notably more recently through a later book, Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952, 2008).
5 Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2002).
6 Rowan Williams, Sunday Telegraph, 2 January 2005.
7 Williams, Sunday Telegraph.
8 Markus Bockmuehl and Stephen Platten (eds.), Austin Farrer: Oxford Warden, Scholar, Preacher (London: SCM Press, 2020), p. 3.
9 Bockmuehl and Platten, Austin Farrer, p. 3.
10 See, for example, A.O. Dyson, The Immortality of the Past (London: SCM Press, 1974); J.H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).
11 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981) and later editions.
12 The year 2022, for example, saw the centenary of the foundation of the then embryonic British Broadcasting Corporation.
13 Thomas Hardy, Late Lyrics and Earlier (London: Macmillan,1922), pp. xvi-xvii.
14 Cf., for example, Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy: The Time Torn Man (London: Penguin, 2012).
15 The complexities of Hardy’s religious position are discussed in some detail in Stephen Platten, ‘They Know Earth Secrets: Hardy’s Tortured Vocation’, Religion and Literature, 45.3 (2014), pp. 59-79.
16 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (repr.; Penguin, Hartmondsworth, 1974 [1845]), and also An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Ascent (repr.; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992 [1850]).
17 Alec Vidler explores just this point in his The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 [1934]). See especially Chapter 7.
18 For a broad discussion of the theological themes explored by the Modernists, see Gabriel Daly, Transcendence and Immanence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
19 For a complete life of Tyrrell, see Nicholas Sagovsky, On God’s Side: A Life of George Tyrrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
20 Vidler, The Modernist Movement, p. 149. In his A Variety of Catholic Modernist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 129ff, Vidler points to Tyrrell’s influence on the Anglican Modernist, Alfred.Lilley.
21 George Tyrrell, Christianity at the Crossroads (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1910), p. 44.
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34 Milne, The Hollow on the Hill, p. 153.
35 Milne, The Hollow on the Hill, p. 154.
36 The Church and the Bomb (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982).
37 Pope Francis, Laudati si’, 2015.
38 See n. 8.
39 ‘Bishop of Kensington to Lead New Centre for Cultural Witness’, 16 February 2022, https://churchofengland.org/media-and-news/press-releases/bishop-kensington-lead-new-centre-cultural-witness.