By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
The more I read and study Maurice, the clearer it becomes to me that his thought about God and the world is as determined, finally, as mine is by the distinction between the whole and its parts.
Christensen confirms this by his interpretation of Maurice's understanding of God as "the totality of being, the perfect and almighty life," to which all created things owe their origin and upon which they are also ever dependent (The Divine Order: 28, 31). To be sure, whether this interpretation is really warranted is not as certain as one could hope, because Christensen fails to provide explicit statements from Maurice himself that would confirm it. But there are other aspects of Maurice's thought, amply evidenced by his explicit statements, that would seem to lend support to this interpretation.
Thus, for example, Maurice takes the world, in the New Testament's sense of "this world," to suppose itself "to be a collection of incoherent fragments [sic!] without a centre," whereas the church exists "to tell the world of its true Centre" (254, n. 38).
5 October 1998
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