Although predominantly rational aspects of theological understanding have been the subject of the previous two chapters, the primary object of that understanding is not just an abstract idea or actualized ideal of ultimacy and perfection. It also – and crucially for religion – concerns what is held to be encountered in human experience. As Isaac Newton suggested, ‘God is a word expressing a relation, and it refers to servants … for we say my God, your God, the God of Israel’. More recently Martin Buber developed this kind of claim to the point of denying that God can be adequately treated as an object of thought: God is supremely the Thou ‘that may properly only be addressed, not expressed’. If, then, theism regards God as the perfect being who is apprehended in certain types or dimensions of experience, theological understanding is to be seen as partly an attempt to make sense of those forms of human experience and to draw out their implications. R. G. Collingwood, who views theology in this way, thus emphasizes that the concept of God does not refer to ‘a mere abstract unity’ but is also, perhaps in its initial state totally, derived from religious experience.

The apprehension of an experience, however, moulds its content as it finds and applies concepts to it. Even to identify certain experiences as having ‘religious’ significance, let alone to take them to be experiences of the divine, is to place them in a particular structure of interpretation.

According to ‘that Learned and Judicious Divine, Dr Sibs’, we may ‘be comforted in the certainty of our salvation’. This is because it rests on the unfailing ‘grace, and love, and favour’ of God and not on our own qualities. The attributes of God are held by him to have practical significance for human destiny. Just as each malady has its corresponding remedy, so God is to be recognized to be ‘larger in his helps, than we can be in our diseases and distresses’. These remarks are typical of many sermons and much religious apologetic. They remind us that for most believers the basic role of religion is to provide concrete enhancement and security for their lives. So far as its ideas are concerned, they are important for those believers for whom intellectual satisfaction is a basic need; they are of little concern for those others who are not personally worried about matters of thought.

God and religion perceived as salvific

In a sermon on ‘The need of the nineteenth century’, preached in 1885, Edwin Hatch emphasizes the difference between a philosophical faith and a religion. In classical times Greek philosophy and literature provided people with a set of beliefs for which they ‘might be content to die’. Some of ‘the philosophical divines who knew not Christ’ developed majestic intellectual systems. But they were a tremendous failure. Their failure showed that ‘the soul had a thirst which philosophy could not satisfy’. That thirst is ‘the need of God’ as one whom people can love and on whom they can lean in their troubles.