The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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In the final analysis, Hartshorne fails to do justice to the first, relatively passive aspect of faith as unreserved trust in God's love. To this extent, then, there may be a point to criticisms that God, in his understanding, is "too passive."

But this failure results, arguably, more from a defective, one-sided understanding of faith or religion than from anything essential either to his general metaphysics or ontology or to his metaphysical theology, i.e., his neoclassical understanding of God. Moreover, there are places where his implied analysis of faith or religion does take account of its first relatively passive aspect as trust as well as its second relatively active aspect as loyalty or love. In this connection, I think especially of "Two Levels of Faith and Reason," where "faith on the human level" is said to be "trust that the nature of things insures the appropriateness of ideals of . . . goodness, truth, and beauty, to such an extent that despite all frustrations and vexations, despite disloyalty or crassness in our fellows, despite death itself, it is really and truly better to live, and to live in accord with these ideals, than to give up the struggle in death or cynicism. Of this human faith," Hartshorne adds, "there are varieties almost beyond telling: the great religious faiths, and the various attempted philosophical substitutes for these."

August 1999

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