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Investigating the question ‘can theology, description o...)
Investigating the question ‘can theology, description of the divine reality, be made truly scientific?’, this book addresses logic and human knowledge alongside experimental religion. An important philosophic work by a prolific theologian also known for his later court case regarding conscientious objection, this book describes how it is possible to relate theological theory with religious experience of the divine the way that the sciences relate to human acquaintance with things and people in social experience.
(This book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)
This book was digitized and reprinted from the collections of the University of California Libraries. It was produced from digital images created through the libraries’ mass digitization efforts. The digital images were cleaned and prepared for printing through automated processes. Despite the cleaning process, occasional flaws may still be present that were part of the original work itself, or introduced during digitization. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found online in the HathiTrust Digital Library at www.hathitrust.org.
(This book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)
This book was digitized and reprinted from the collections of the University of California Libraries. It was produced from digital images created through the libraries’ mass digitization efforts. The digital images were cleaned and prepared for printing through automated processes. Despite the cleaning process, occasional flaws may still be present that were part of the original work itself, or introduced during digitization. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found online in the HathiTrust Digital Library at www.hathitrust.org.
Douglas Clyde Macintosh was an American Baptist theologian. He was also a philosopher of religion.
Background
Douglas Clyde Macintosh was born on February 18, 1877, in the Scottish settlement of Breadalbane, Ontario, Canada. He was one of at least five children and the second of three sons of Peter Macintosh, apparently a farmer, and Elizabeth Charlotte (Everett) Macintosh.
His maternal grandfather had emigrated in about 1832 from England to Canada, where he farmed, practiced medicine, and defended with skill a version of Wesleyan Methodism.
Peter Macintosh was the grandson of a Scottish Congregationalist turned Baptist, and was a deacon of the local Baptist church. Douglas was reared in a home where a theologically conservative evangelical piety was practiced.
Profoundly influenced by his mother, he experienced in his tenth year the expected religious awakening and, after a conversion experience at the age of fourteen, joined the church. Vital personal religion remained the center of his interest throughout life.
Education
After graduating from a boarding high school, Macintosh taught in country schools while preparing to enter the ministry. Without any formal preparation, he took charge in 1897 of a mission church in western Ontario and later engaged in evangelical work.
In 1899, he entered McMaster University, Toronto, determined to subject his orthodox beliefs to rigorous intellectual scrutiny. Natural science, including Darwin's Origin of Species, and philosophy were favorite subjects. In an autobiographical statement he later described his pilgrimage from traditionalism through empiricism to absolute idealism, as he sought to confirm the validity and reasonableness of Christianity.
Macintosh took the B. A. degree in 1903, after which he stayed on for a year to teach logic, psychology, and the history of philosophy. Deciding that philosophy rather than pastoral labor was his métier, he began graduate work at the University of Chicago.
Over the next three years, he studied philosophy and logic under Addison Webster Moore and George Herbert Mead, psychology under James Rowland Angell, and theology and philosophy of religion under George Burman Foster; Foster's influence was especially important.
Career
Before returning to Canada to complete his doctoral dissertation, Macintosh was ordained in the Hyde Park Baptist Church in Chicago, despite his frank disavowal of several major points of orthodox doctrine. From 1907 to 1909, he served as professor of biblical and systematic theology at Brandon College, Brandon, Manitoba, where he helped organize a theology department.
Upon receiving the Ph. D. from Chicago in 1909, he was appointed an assistant professor of systematic theology at Yale, where he remained until his death, becoming successively Dwight Professor of Theology (1916 - 1932) and professor of theology and the philosophy of religion (1933 - 1942).
Other facets of Macintosh's career included overseas service in the chaplaincy of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1916 and in the American Y. M. C. A. in 1918. Although he initially endorsed the war aims in terms of Christian sacrifice, he soon reconsidered his position and became a critic.
His application for American citizenship became world news when, after lengthy litigation, it was denied by the United States Supreme Court in 1931 on the basis of his refusal to agree in advance to bear arms in the event of war. A stroke in his later years prevented him from continuing the legal battle, and he remained a Canadian citizen.
Macintosh died on July 6, 1948, at his home in Hamden, Connecticut, of a coronary thrombosis. Cremation followed at Ferncliff Crematory, Ardsley, New York.
The young theologian found himself a partial convert to Albrecht Ritschl's point of view, espoused by Foster, and to Chicago-style pragmatism, but later upheld the necessity for a strong metaphysical grounding to theology, much in the vein of Ernst Troeltsch, whose similar views he later encountered.
The death of his wife and the loss of other close relations only confirmed his belief in "the goodness and sufficiency of God, " and this "profound inner certitude" played an important part in the enunciation of his doctrine of moral optimism.
Religious experience was the foundation on which Macintosh built a radically modernist "empirical theology, " designed to resist the threat of philosophical skepticism and historical uncertainty. His method, as set forth in Theology as an Empirical Science (1919), was to derive laws and theories about God from religious experience in the same way that the natural and social sciences develop hypotheses in the light of sensory and social experience.
His theology had three levels. The first, an organized body of religious data, consisted of those experiences or "revelations" of the divine, viewed as the Real Object or Power which is the source of moral transformation in human life. The second was a body of laws, based on the data of religious experience and derived in the same way as scientific hypotheses, laws which specify the ways in which God can be expected to respond faithfully to persons who make the "right-religious adjustment. "
The third level was a body of more inclusive theories that move from what God does toward what he is. These theories have a high degree of pragmatic probability insofar as they are necessary to account for the facts of the religious life. Closely related to Macintosh's effort to develop an empirical theology was his concern with the theory of knowledge and Christian apologetics.
He devoted two large volumes to epistemology, The Problem of Knowledge (1915) and The Problem of Religious Knowledge (1940). A defender of epistemological realism, he defined his own view as critical monism. He regarded metaphysics as the synthesis of all the empirical sciences, theology included.
A completed theoretical scheme requires that the results of empirical theology be incorporated into a system of metaphysics, while metaphysics depends on empirical theology for some of its most valuable data. At one point or another four factors entered the total theoretical scheme that Macintosh proposed. First, a scientific ingredient is found in the effort to establish theology on a base of empirically verified knowledge.
Second, a pragmatic element enters at the point of postulating in Kantian fashion the reality of freedom, God, and immortality, as permissible presuppositions of theology based on what is practically necessary to justify the moral intuitions of the self.
Third, an appeal to history is made by referring to the life and work of Jesus as exemplifying a normative revelation of God. Fourth, a metaphysical factor appears in the effort to synthesize theology with the results of the other sciences. Macintosh's approach to apologetics embodies these same elements.
In The Reasonableness of Christianity (1925) and The Pilgrimage of Faith in the World of Modern Thought (1931), he developed a "representational pragmatism, " according to which postulates that seem to be reasonable and practical are taken as representations in ideas of what is actually real. His basic assumption is what he calls moral optimism the belief that the world can be made better by human effort directed by goodwill, and that the cosmos supports such striving.
A further dimension of his apologetic concern is found in his attempt to establish a basis for Christian belief that is not vulnerable to the shifting and uncertain results of historical investigation. Macintosh felt keenly the problems being raised by Troeltsch in Germany and by Foster in the United States regarding the finality of Christianity and the relation of the Christian faith to history.
The "history of religions" school and the uncertainties of contemporary New Testament scholarship were raising serious questions about the attempt of much liberal theology to go behind theology and faith to establish a basis of Christian theology in the life of the historical Jesus.
In order to escape this relativism and skepticism, Macintosh sought to show how it is possible to discover and defend the essence of Christianity entirely apart from an appeal to particular facts of history. While the historical Jesus may be psychologically necessary for some people, his actual historicity is not logically required to establish or validate the essentials of Christian belief.
Quotations:
"The method of idealistic epistemology is like that of the quack physician; it first administers a drug which makes the patient's ailment chronic, thus making its own further services seem permanently indispensable. "
Personality
Macintosh was a grave and sometimes blunt person. He was passionately devoted to the truth as he saw it, and his debates with his students who disagreed with his position were often emotionally strained.
Connections
On February 13, 1921, Macintosh married Emily Powell, who died the following year. In 1925, he married Hope Griswold Conklin, a teacher and head of a school for girls. There were no children by either marriage.