The Experience of God in Modern Life (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Experience of God in Modern Life
The mo...)
Excerpt from The Experience of God in Modern Life
The modern world is in quest, dumbly and half-consciously, of a religion. That is, it is moving out toward a new adjust ment to reality, human and cosmic, and toward a new appropriation of ideals, which when accomplished will be funda mental, comprehensive, spiritual, and so essentially religious; and of this move ment it is growingly aware. The old atoms of our thought, supposed to be indivisible and unchangeable, are breaking up, but the new ions which shall resolve some of the deadlocks in our thinking have not been surely discovered. The old empirical medicine by which we used to poultice the social order is thoroughly discredited, but the new antisepsis and hygiene which shall secure vigorous social health and growth are only in their beginnings and are regarded in many quarters with superstitious fear.
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Exercises Connected with the Inauguration of the REV. Daniel Johnson Fleming, Professor of Missions; The REV. Harry Frederick Ward, Professor of ... the Philosophy of Religion. at the Opening...
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Theology and Human Problems, a Comparative Study of Absolute Idealism and Pragmatism as Interpreters of Religion
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The God Of The New Age: A Tract For The Times (1918)
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Eugene William Lyman was an American teacher, philosopher of religion, and liberal Protestant spokesman. He was a professor of the philosophy of religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York from 1918 to 1942.
Background
Eugene William Lyman was born on April 4, 1872, in Cummington, Massachusetts, United States. Both of his parents belonged to families long established in that region. Richard Lyman, first of the paternal line in America, had migrated from High Onger, Essex, England, to Charleston, Massachusetts, and then had moved westward as one of the first settlers of Hartford, Connecticut. Eugene's father, Darwin Eugene Lyman, owned the village store in Cummington and for a time served in the Massachusetts legislature; his mother, Julia Sarah (Stevens) Lyman, ran a millinery shop as part of her husband's business. Eugene Lyman, called upon in later life to identify the sources of his liberalism, remembered a home and community atmosphere pervaded by the liberal evangelicalism of the Hartford theologian Horace Bushnell and by the political progressivism of the Springfield Republican. His mother, "a stalwart Christian of conservative feeling and much moral force, " was also "an awakener of intellectual ambition" who introduced Eugene and his younger sister, Laura, to a wide range of imaginative literature. The father was a man of unusually catholic temper whose influence was reinforced by that of a "succession of liberal preachers" in the Congregational church that dominated the town's religious life. In his early teens, Lyman read, and was strongly influenced by, the principal Bushnellian thinkers of the time, Theodore Munger and Washington Gladden.
Education
Lyman had no access to a public high school and no funds to attend a private one. He prepared for college on his own, at the same time teaching school to earn tuition. At Amherst College he studied with the philosopher Charles Edward Garman, whose nondidactic pedagogy and personalistic idealism were important in Lyman's professional development. He then entered Yale Divinity School, from which he earned both the bachelor of divinity degree (1899) and a Hooker fellowship--the latter providing for two years of advanced theological studies at the universities of Halle, Berlin, and Marburg. He was ordained in the Congregational ministry in 1901.
Career
In 1894 Lyman taught Latin for two years, first at Williston Seminary (Easthampton, Massachusetts) and then at the Lawrenceville (New Jersey) School. In 1901 he became professor of philosophy at Carleton College. After leaving Carleton in 1904, he held teaching posts in theology and philosophy at the Congregational Church College of Canada in Montreal (1904 - 1905); at Bangor (Maine) Theological Seminary (1905 - 1913); and at the Oberlin School of Theology (1913 - 1918). In 1918 he was appointed professor of the philosophy of religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
Lyman was also a productive scholar. In 1833 he published his work The Meaning and Truth of Religion. When this work appeared, the New York Times in a lead review praised it as conveying "the working of the modernist mind in its best and latest mood. " Certainly the book, like Lyman's own method and personality, expressed the characteristic liberal or modernist eagerness to effect a synthesis of varying theoretical and doctrinal emphases and also the liberal tendency to make philosophy do most of the work of theology. Meaning and Truth at the same time reflected modernism's "latest" mood by adopting a critical attitude toward several of the leading philosophical tenets of the movement.
Early in his career, Lyman had become dissatisfied both with the abstractness of absolute idealism and with the attempt, among followers of the theologian Albrecht Ritschl, to divorce theoretical and moral knowledge. In a notable article for a Garman festschrift of 1906 and again in his Taylor Lectures of 1910, he announced broad approval of pragmatism as a corrective influence in theology. But, unable fully to conquer his own objections to pragmatism's epistemological relativism, Lyman struggled to find firmer empirical grounding for theology than either idealism or pragmatism could supply. The synthesis that he worked out over the next two decades constituted one prominent expression of what by the 1930's was being called theological realism. In Lyman's rendition, this realism insisted upon the independent reality of natural objects, of intuitively grasped moral values, and of divine revelation--even though each of these areas of experience was thought to "criticize and supplement" the others. Lyman came to define God as "a cosmic creative spirit" whose nature combined purposiveness and open-ended creativity. Lyman's influence, while substantial, was limited by the growing discontent with liberalism in theological circles and also by an unspectacular personal style. The publication of The Meaning and Truth of Religion coincided with that of Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society and with other announcements of theological change that his own work, however critical, could not match as a tract for the times.
In contrast with many of his colleagues on the Union faculty and in the liberal movement, moreover, Lyman was neither a political and ecclesiastical activist nor a favorite on the college-speaking circuit nor a stirring lecturer in the classroom. He did, however, give effective support to liberal, and sometimes radical, causes. James Robinson, a prominent black churchman, remembered Lyman as almost the only person on the Union faculty to whom a black student felt able to turn for unpatronizing support.
Upon Lyman's retirement in 1940, he moved to Sweet Briar College in Virginia. He in his remaining years made himself available and valued as a philosopher-in-residence. Having suffered a stroke in 1946 and almost fully recovered from it, Lyman died suddenly at Sweet Briar two years later, the cause of death being given as heart failure.
Besides The Meaning and Truth of Religion, Lyman wrote Theology and Human Problems (his Taylor Lectures at Yale, 1910) and The Experience of God in Modern Life (1920).
Achievements
Lyman gained renown as an unusually effective and innovative teacher who inspired a generation of teacher-scholars in the field of religious philosophy. He wrote several short books, numerous articles, and The Meaning and Truth of Religion in 1933, his magnum opus. His philosophical theology contributed significantly to the American religious thought.
While disavowing "theoretical pacifism, " Lyman opposed American entry into World War I, joined the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, and inclined toward the noninterventionist side in the disputes over American foreign policy. He was a steady advocate of the Social Gospel, who, particularly after 1920, castigated the "deeply immoral" features of capitalism and generally lent his support to the more activistic social radicals among his colleagues.
Connections
Lyman's first wife was Bertha Burton Thayer, of Cincinnati, Ohio, whom he married on June 1, 1899. They adopted two children, Charles Eugene and Laura Frances. Bertha Lyman died in 1924, and on February 13, 1926, the widower married Mary Redington Ely of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, who had been his student and then colleague at Union. Later Mary Lyman took up the post as dean and professor of religion at Sweet Briar College in Virginia.
