Background
Tennant, Frederick Robert was born on September 1, 1866 in Burslem, Staffordshire.
Tennant, Frederick Robert was born on September 1, 1866 in Burslem, Staffordshire.
Caius College. Cambridge (natural science).
Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1913-1957.
Tennant became a professional philosopher of religion after some years of teaching science at his old school and, after ordination in 1894, two decades as a parish priest. His attitude to religion was unwaveringly intellectualist. Theology for him was a continuation of philosophy. Religious belief requires rational justification which must appeal to ordinary perceptual and, to some extent, moral experience. Religious experience could lend only supplementary support. His rational temper was revealed in his early writing about sin. Defining it, reasonably enough, as wrongdoing accompanied by awareness of its being wrong, he concluded that original sin is impossible. New-born infants are incapable of sinning, although they have instinctive tendencies which may, in due time, lead to it. Nor can sinfulness be inherited, especially not from Adam and Eve, who are mythical. The first, and much longer, volume of his chief work (1928-1930) sets out the philosophical preliminaries to his theology, drawn largely from the philosophical psychology of his teacher James Ward. An examination of the constitutive elements of the mind yields the conclusion that there must be a pure, substantial ego to hold them together. It is not an object of direct acquaintance, but reflection shows that it is active. Valuejudgements involve feeling, but are not on that account subjective. Induction requires faith in the ‘reasonableness of the universe'. Religious experience can be explained without God. Reason alone cannot establish human survival of death. In his second volume he turns to the existence of God and argues that the only good argument for it is the argument from design, which he states very fully, adding to the usual varieties of adaptation in nature the fact of the beauty of nature and the objectivity of morals. Like Hobbes, but more reverently, he takes the attribution of infinity and perfection to God to be merely honorific. Moral evil is a consequence of man’s having freedom of choice; physical evil is required by the lawfulness of nature. Tennant had some influence among thoughtful Christians but did not, like his comparably unorthodox contemporary Rashdall. get embroiled in controversy or come to general public notice. In his unworldly intellectualism he is a fine representative of the honourable kind of abstract lucidity often found in Cambridge, for example in McTaggart and Moore.